Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (9 page)

--Tijuana and Hollywood, 1963

And this is what Robbie Blake learned that day...

On the bus, an old man in an overcoat--so hot for July, that shapeless, whatcolor rag--sat mumbling to himself, next to the window. Occasionally he would rub his palms against stubbled cheeks, a sound like new sandpaper to Robbie's ears.

When the old man got up and left the bus, Robbie Blake saw a small dirty-white card thrust into the window-frame. He moved across the aisle and pulled the card out of its slot in the anodized aluminum frame. It said, very neatly:

Available for Picnics, Clubs

and there was a number, an address. Robbie Blake replaced the card precisely, for even at six years of age, he knew a man has a right to advertise.

Later that day, looking out from behind the billboard at the side of the clothing store, Robbie saw a fat woman with a mustache, carrying a shopping bag at the end of either meaty arm. One of the bags burst as the fat woman passed Robbie's waiting-place, and he watched carefully as she got down on her knees--in stages, like a great beast unhinging itself at a waterhole--puffing, sighing. He watched her as she retrieved the packages of frozen foods, the asparagus, the oranges. There was something very natural about the fat woman. Something essential. Robbie Blake watched, and remembered.

A big truck with EMPIRE HAULING on its side went past, and Robbie dashed out from behind the billboard to catch the truck as it stopped by the corner. He pulled himself up onto the lowered tailgate and grasped the anchor chain firmly in both hands as the truck moved with the changing traffic light. Robbie rode along with the smell of his world whipping past; the smell of the rotting gourds in the sidewalk markets; the smell of oil and grease, rainbow puddles among the bricks; the smell of chemicals from some tiny manufacturing company on a side street. He looked and looked and everywhere people dashed and walked, doing things with paper and leather and words. He smiled at the gray sky that promised rain, and he stuck his tongue out when a policeman made a short move to haul him off the fleeing truck as it whipped through an intersection.

Finally, Robert Blake tired of his truck ride, and slid to the edge of the tailgate. When the truck paused for breath at another traffic light, Robbie bounced down and dogtrotted away, in a new place, with wonderful things to see. He saw a shop with bright and coppery bracelets, and a man in a great wide hat. The window of the shop said MEXICO ARTS and Robbie knew where Mexico was. It was someplace downtown, very far downtown in another country.

What it is, to be six years old, is to need to go to the bathroom frequently. That is part of it.

Robbie Blade needed to go to the bathroom, because he had had three papaya juices at 'Nrico's stand, before he had stood behind the billboard, watching the fat woman who might have been his mother or somebody's mother, maybe. So he looked for a place to go.

He saw a group of people going into, and coming out of, a big restaurant called FELLOWS' RESTAURANT in red and blue neon lights that went on and off in the late afternoon gray. He decided if all those people were going in and coming out, that at least one of them must have had to go to the bathroom sometime or other, and if that was so, then there had to be a bathroom inside. (Never say "I have to go wee-wee"; always say "I have to wash my hands," Moms had said to Robbie.)

Robbie Blake, just like all those other people--well, not quite; shorter, perhaps, but pretty much the same--strode purposefully to the restaurant, and went through the revolving door. It was cool inside, and hard to see very well, but he walked around, and listened to the people eating and talking to each other. He stared over the shoulder of a man cutting a baked apple with a fork, and smiled when the man tried to get a piece too big into his mouth. The man half-turned as Robbie smiled (was it a sound, not a smile?) and gave a snort of annoyance. Robbie moved on.

This was a fine world; a fine, fine place to be a little boy, with people eating and talking and taking too big bites of baked apples.

The bathroom was still very important, but in a world as nice as this, well, such things can wait a few minutes longer. After all, one can always cross one's legs and stand hidden in a corner, waiting.

Robbie knew the words to look for, and when he saw the door that said GENTLEMEN, he recognized MEN and went inside. A man with a bow tie and a blue shirt was washing his hands, and he saw Robbie in the mirror, and he chuckled softly, saying, over his shoulder, "Pop, this one yours?" and Robbie saw another man, wearing a white jacket, with a towel ready to be handed to the man with the bow tie.

The man in the white jacket (oh, didn't he look nice and important dressed up that way) gasped, and laid the towel down on the sink next to the fellow with the bow tie. He came to Robbie very quickly, and took him by the shoulder, and dragged him out of the room that said GENTLEMEN. He pulled him through another door, and Robbie suddenly smelled all the wonderful brown and green and pink smells of food. Food that called to him and said I am meat! I am tossed greens! I am something you don't know, very nice! It was a kitchen, and Robbie wanted to faint with pleasure. Oh, such a grand world.

Then the man in the white jacket was kneeling in front of him, saying, "Boy, watchu doin' here? You crazy or somethin'? You know you can't come in here!"

Robbie did not understand. He smiled nicely at the man in the white jacket. "Hello," he said, politely as Moms had taught him to do.

"Don't be smilin' at me that way, chile! I'm tellin' you it's trouble for you in here. They don't allow it!"

Robbie was confused, but he mustered another, tinier smile, and said to the man in the white jacket, "I hadda use the bathroom."

The man took Robbie to the swinging door that led back into the restaurant, and he pulled it open a crack.

"Look." He pointed. "You see alla them people? They can use the bathroom, but not you. Now you g'wan get outta here befoah we all get hell!"

Robbie knew what was right. He was just like everyone here. He had a right to use the bathroom. He said so.

The man in the white jacket frowned and pulled the swinging door open again. "Now look, boy, I mean really look. You see them? They not the same's you. They white. Now look at you, look at me. Are we white?"'

Robbie looked at his hand. It wasn't white, that was true. He looked at the man in the white jacket. He wasn't white, either. But what did that have to do with the bathroom? Did it mean he wasn't ever allowed to go to the bathroom? It would be very unhappy and painful if that was so.

Then the man in the white jacket--who was very black and almost bald, except for a few curlicues of wispy whiteness that came out of his scalp--was hauling Robbie to the back door of FELLOWS' RESTAURANT, and opening it into the alley, and putting Robbie outside in the growing darkness.

He paused, and bent down, and said, very softly, so the cooks and waiters and busboys rushing would not hear, "Boy, someway you haven't been brought up right; din't yoah parents tell you the way it is? You better learn, boy. You better learn."

And he pushed Robbie gently, out onto a loading dock, and closed the door, the light narrowing to a splinter and then all gone, all gone. Robbie stood in the darkness and waited for something more to happen. But nothing more happened.

Then he turned, ran to the edge of the loading dock, jumped down, and walked very quickly to the end of the alley.

For a very long time Robbie stood in a doorway, nothing but his eyes seeing out, his body, his strange black body hidden. He watched everyone as they went by. He stared very carefully, as he had stared at the policeman, and the fat woman, and Bo Bo the Clown who was available (which seemed a nice thing to be).

After a very, very long time, he felt he understood.

Then he went home.

It had been a full day, a surprising day--and one filled with learning things. Robbie Blake had learned what it meant to know, and what it meant to watch, and what it meant to live. Somehow, his education till then had been love and kindness from Moms, and respect from his sister and his three brothers, and no one had mentioned the Difference. But now he knew.

Robbie Blake had learned many things that day. He had learned which colors were right, and which were wrong; he had learned what color hands must be to open certain doors, and what color thoughts must be employed to exist in the fine, fine nice world. He had learned when to lower his eyes.

And most of all he had learned what it meant to be a nigger.

And most of all he had learned:

It is not enough for a little boy to know his place in the Universe.

He must also know which Universe is his.

And that is what Robbie Blake learned that day.

--New York City, 1962

G.B.K. -- A MANY-FLAVORED BIRD

So garbled was my secretary's mind, that early in the morning, that I had to call Western Union later in the day, and have them read me the telegram again; even then, in the clarity of a monotoned operator's recitation, the message barely made sense. It read:

FORTHCOMING MOVIE "THE LATTER LIFE OF GOD" INTO

INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL GOLD MINE.

I had her read it again, and then asked if they would deliver the telegram itself to my hotel. She said Western Union would be pleased to accommodate, and then she said, "This telegram was sent from here in town, by night letter last night, sir." I asked her if it was signed, and she said, "Yes, it's signed G. Barney Kantor, American Association of Fan Clubs."

More bewilderedly than I had any right to feel, I thanked the operator and racked the receiver. I sat there on the edge of the bed in my hotel room in Cleveland, and I tried to make some sense out of the histrionically phrased nonsense I had just heard.

True, one of my magazine short stories, "The Latter Life of God," had been picked up by an independent outfit for production ... but the script hadn't even been written yet, which was why I was on my way to the Coast, having stopped off in Cleveland merely to see my sister and brother-in-law. Who the hell was G. Barney Kantor, and what the hell was the "American Association of Fan Clubs"?

"Bernice," I yelled into the adjoining room, "do I know a G. Barney Kantor?"

Bernice, secretarialy attired in sheaves of press releases and a pencil behind each ear, emerged from the other room and stood poised in the doorway, cocked onto one hip, thinking. "Not that I know. Is that the business with the telegram this morning?" I nodded. "Dumb sonofabitch whoever he is," she snarled, "waking me up at eight jeezus o'clock! I'd like to get my hands on his throat!" She went back to her room, the extension of her right hand, the telephone, and arrangements for a local interview show I was going to do over Cleveland television.

It wasn't that important, really, because I knew it had to be a gag, but the peculiar manner of phrasing struck a dim note in my mind, and though I had other things to worry about--the local tv appearances, finishing an article long overdue, the final payment of the option money--for some inexplicable reason my thoughts kept worrying the telegram and the name of G. Barney Kantor, like a dog with a rag doll.

And finally, it came back to me, who he was, and how I'd met him, and what image of him I'd relegated to the back part of my of my memories. And despite myself, I was forced to smile. After all this time, that he should remember me; I'd been just a kid when I'd met him, however briefly; I'd been perhaps sixteen, seventeen. Now, ten--no, thirteen--years later, Kantor was back in my life.

If anything had saved me from becoming a real flip, from wasting my life and what little talent I had, after my father died and my mother and I moved to Cleveland, it was the science fiction people. I had bought a pulp magazine whose cover had shown a huge robot firing bolts of flame (or something) from its fingertips, and almost immediately had become an aficionado. In due course I met the other science fiction fans in Cleveland, and we formed a club, the Solarians. Not only were they good people, and kind people, but there was a swirl of wonder about them, an unpredictability of imagination that turned my world of mourning sadness and widow's tears into a golden time and space of hyperspatial rocket ships, alien life-forms and concepts of the universe that I'd never even suspected existed.

Inevitably, one of the Cleveland newspapers came to the club rooms to do a feature on us. It was the usual cheapjack yellow pap, tongue firmly in cheek and ridicule replacing reportage. The article appeared in all the editions of that day's paper, and we were more mortified than flattered. Someone suggested iron filings in the reporter's coffee cake. Saner heads prevailed, scolding me for such an uncharitable thought.

All of this was background, however, for the new magic soon to enter our lives, in the person of G. Barney Kantor.

Al Watson, in whose apartment we held meetings, reported a phone conversation he had had earlier in the day, one meeting night. He seemed enthused and genuinely pleased. "So he said his name was Kantor, with a 'K,' and that he was prepared to, uh, how did he put it, 'Lift us from the realm of mediocrity and anonymity to the heights of public awareness.' "

We all stared at Al, and Al beamed back at us. (We sometimes cocked a quizzical eyebrow at Al; he was a member of the Fortean Society, as well as a practitioner of dianetics.) "Isn't that swell?" he asked. "This guy says he has contacts all over the world, and he's coming over this evening to meet us and find out our potentialities for greatness."

Ben Jason, one of the more lucid minds present, had the intemperate presence to ask, "Our potentialities for what? Is that another of his remarks?" Al nodded.

We stared at one another, prepared to believe the wildest things.

None of this prepared us, as it turned out, for the actual physical presence of G. Barney Kantor.

At nine-thirty the doorbell rang, and we scurried, rearranging ourselves into positions of respectability and sober world-view sanity, as Al went to answer the door. All we could see when the door was opened was Al, standing there with his hand outstretched in greeting, and then a convulsive widening of the eyes, and the tiniest gasp of disbelief and consternation. We heard Al mumble welcoming words, and then he stepped aside, and for the first time I saw G. Barney Kantor.

As a writer I am affronted by the sterility of imagination and talent that forces some authors to describe their characters as "looking exactly like Gregory Peck, with bigger ears." This recourse to mass consumption identity has always struck me as highly suspect and just short of auctorial bankruptcy. Yet I am compelled, in describing G. Barney Kantor, to take the shortest route to toal recognition, by stating simply that G. Barney Kantor looked, looks, will always look, precisely like Groucho Marx.

Kantor entered the room, and for an instant I thought his brothers would follow him. He stalked, not walked, in that indescribable half-crouch Marx has patented for the "Captain Spaulding, the African explorer" number (did someone call him schnorer?); his moustache was a black, rectangular brush, his hair was wild and manelike. He wore glasses. He smoked a thick, obscene-looking black hawser of a cigar. He was midway between massively impressive and downright comical.

After the first shocking moment wore off, it was possible to detect small ways in which G. Barney Kantor was not Groucho Marx, but so studiedly had Kantor sought to mock the Brother's appearance, at no time during the fantastic evening were we free of the impulse to burst into laughter.

(I was later to learn that the RKO Palace Theater in Cleveland occasionally hired Kantor as a sandwich man, strictly on his appearance.)

"A decidedly good evening to you, fellow roamers of the vast, unchartered Universe!"

No bull, no flummery, that is the way G. Barney Kantor talked. Silver fleeting words of sometimes meaning that were here and gone before you could assemble them in precisely their proper order. Flamboyant phrases slapped together to give a general impression of garrulity, pompousness, absolute phoniness. It has always confused me how people could be gullible enough to be taken in by Kantor, for in the first words from his mouth, it has seemed to me, any rational person could detect sham and the quicksilver maneuverings of the born con man.

Stunned as we all were by this brash and obviously hammy individual from out of nowhere, Ben Jason again made his mark by stepping forward, shaking Kantor's hand and introducing himself. Then he led Kantor around the room, introducing him to Honey Steel, Frank Andrasovsky, Earl Simon and after all the others, finally, me.

"This is Walter Innes," Ben said. "Walter, Mr. Kantor." I took his hand. It was the handshake of the man who is testing the flesh of your body to see if you have worked for a living, or are subsisting on gratuities from a wealthy family. A fleeting thought passed me, and I was glad I wasn't wearing any rings. "Walter is the editor of our club magazine,"--Ben beamed at me; Walter, the mascot--"and quite a promising little writer, too."

Kantor's deep blue eyes stared down at me and he deluged me with words. "A remarkable young man, Mr. Jason. Remarkable. I can tell he has an intuitive grasp of matters both cosmical and naturalistic from the glint of supernine awareness in his lustrous eyes. Remarkable! A man to watch, indeed, a man to watch."

Then he passed on, leaving me stunned to the core, and awash in words whose meanings I was only barely able to fathom.

And so it went all that evening. Kantor the monologist, Kantor the financier, Kantor the bon vivant waving his silver-headed walking stick. Amused, bemused, confused and nonplused we sat and listened to his meandering reminiscences of the world in which he had moved, his aspirations, his love of science fiction (and his total unawareness of even the leading writers in the field) ... and we waited for the kicker.

Finally, it came. When we were all wasted and spent by the mere effort of listening to him.

"Fellow Solarians," he blurted, during a three-second lull in what had been entirely his conversation, "and I hope I am of a full-hearted enough nature, borne up with camaraderie and effusion for you good people of the stars and the night, to call myself so ... fellow Solarians, I am prepared to make you well-known, nay, say responsive to the plucked chords of public sentiment, as you have long waited to be! Why should men and women of your ilk, men and women with so much to give to a world pleading for light and guidance, be relegated to positions of obscurity and idle activity? You are the brave new future of this land, and I am prepared--for a small fee--to hoist you by the petards of your own magnificence and--"

We were readers of Startling Stories, where the hell was he getting this saviors of mankind crap from?

Eventually, we told him we would get back in touch with him, watched his exeunt flourishing, and fell back as a group, in absolute exhaustion.

Earl Simon it was, who very simply said it, in a quiet voice, as we all slumped there, drained and confused. "Hey, that guy's a crook."

No one bothered to disagree. We were too exhausted.

And now, thirteen years later, after I had gone my way, the Solarians had gone theirs, and G. Barney Kantor had, presumably, gone his, I was the recipient of a telegram, like a rainbow voice out of the past, like a many-flavored bird of passage that once every thousand years lights and casts its gay gloom over anyone lucky enough to be around.

I put Kantor and his officious, nonsensical 'gram out of my mind till later that night, when we were at one of the local nightclubs, one of the few left in Cleveland's now-ghost-towned downtown. I was with Bernice, my sister Beverly and her husband Jerold, the optician, and we had been joined by the headliner of the show (a well-known male singer who prefers I do not use his name), and three girls out of the go-go chorus.

How Kantor came up, I don't recall now, but I told them of our meeting thirteen years before, when I had been in high school and had not yet written the first book. "And you know, every once in a while," I told them, "when I'd be downtown, I'd see him on the street. He was a sidewalk photographer most of the time. I suppose that's where he made his living."

One of the go-go girls, memory piqued by my comparison of Kantor to Groucho Marx, told me how he had been a sandwich man.

Then my brother-in-law, who is frankly too nice a guy to be married to my sister, added, "You bet your life he remembers you, Walt. When you were in town three years with your book, uh, which one was that--"

"NO MORE FLAMES," I reminded him, always ready to tout my own work.

"Right. NO MORE FLAMES. Well, when you were at that autograph party at Burrows', he found the write-up in the Press, with my name in it, and he came around to the shop, and introduced himself. Said he was a good friend, and really came on with me. I managed to get him out of the store, I had a couple of patients, and he was yelling and making an ass of himself."

I grinned, imagining G. Barney Kantor's capers in mild, good-natured Jerry's optical shop.

"But now every time he sees me on the street," Jerry Rabnick continued, "he follows me for blocks with that damned camera of his, yelling at the top of his lungs, 'HEY, THERE GOES DOCTOR RAB, THE BROTHER-IN-LAW OF AMERICA'S FINEST NOVELIST! HEY, DOCTOR RAB, HOW GOES IT?' "

Jerry's voice had climbed in imitation of Kantor's yowl, and heads were turning toward us in the club. He flushed and fell silent. I found myself laughing, at just the mental picture of that colossal fraud, that monstrous charlatan, G. Barney Kantor.

Then my sister chimed in, "We were having a Temple benefit, and he called me, offering something or other, I don't remember what it was now, but I called the Better Business Bureau to check on him and so help me, when I mentioned his name, the girl groaned and flashed the switchboard and said, 'Refer this call to the Kantor Department.' " I broke up completely, then. The singer--who had been listening carefully--also got his jollies, and we sat there for at least a minute till the tears ran down our face, we were laughing so hard.

"He sounds like a real creep," one of the go-go girls commented. "He musta been in an' outta jail a million times. He sounds like a real crook."

I was reminded of Earl Simon's remark so many years before, and it started the juices flowing. "Perhaps not," I replied. "Perhaps G. Barney Kantor lives in his little world of pretense and tomfoolery, believing he is a press agent extraordinaire. Perhaps he's fooled himself into thinking he's a big man, and these little hangups with the police and people shunning him are just the stupidity of the mass. People who don't recognize his greatness."

I thought that was damned perceptive of me.

Then Bernice shook me by saying, "I think he's pathetic. I feel sorry for him."

"Now what the hell brought that on?" I said, the big-time writer who was on his way to Hollywood. "You're the one who wanted to kill him for waking you in the middle of the night."

"It wasn't the middle of the night, it was the early morning, and I feel sorry for the poor little guy."

I snorted. "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for Christ's sake. Do you take in stray cats and puff adders, too?"