The Essential Ellison Part 9

"Well, uh, what we'd like, what we want, for Marquis, is the same sort of ballz-uh, the same sort of highly emotional writing you put into this."

Sorokin felt his stomach tightening, now that the moment was with him. "What you want me to do, is go back down to Red Hook, to the same place I knew, and write about the way it is now."

Werringer banged a palm on the desk. "Exactly! The kids, what happened to them, where they are now. Did they wind up in the slammer, did they get married, go into the army, the whole story, seventeen years later. And the social conditions. Have the tenements been cleaned up? What about the low-rent housing projects? Has the Police Athletic League been of any use? What about racial tensions down there now, does it make for a different kind of kid gang, different rumbles, you know, the whole scene."

"You want me to go back down there."

Werringer stared. "Yeah, right, that's what we want. 'Kid Gang Revisited.' Something in depth."

The tension that had been growing in Sorokin now abruptly tightened like a fist. Go back down there. Go back to it, seventeen years later. "I was nineteen years old when I joined that gang," Andrew Sorokin said, half to himself. Werringer continued to stare. The man in front of him seemed to be in some sort of shock.

"I'm thirty-six now. I don't know-"

Werringer bit the inside of his lip. "We only want you to write it from the outside this time. You're no kid now, Andy ... Mr. Soro-"

"But you don't want it to be a surface skimming, do you?"

"Well, no-"

"You want it to be guts and b.a.l.l.s, right?"

"Yeah, right, we want-"

"You want it told the way it is, right? With realism, all the hip talk the kids talk?"

"Sure, that's part of-"

"You want me to find out what happened to all those kids I ran with, who didn't know I was studying them like bugs in a bottle. You want me to go down there seventeen years later and say, 'I'm the guy finked on you, remember me?' You want that, in essence that's what you want, isn't it?"

Werringer had the feeling now (sudden s.h.i.+fts with this man) that Sorokin was furious, was frightened, but furious. What the h.e.l.l was going on?

"Well, yes, we want the truth, the inside, the way you did it the first time, but we don't want you to take any chances. We aren't ... h.e.l.l, we aren't Confidential or the Enquirer! We want-"

"You want me to go back in and let them take a whack at me!"

Aggression. Werringer reeled.

"Say, wait a minute we-"

"You expect a h.e.l.luva story, and all the risks, and you want it now, right, Mr. Werringer?"

"What's the matter with you, Sorok-"

"Well, how the h.e.l.l do you expect me to do it unless I go back down there and sink into it again, up to my GUTS, up to my b.a.l.l.s, up to my EYEb.a.l.l.s FOR CHRISSAKES! YOU d.a.m.n DUMB DEADLINE-MEETER, YOU!"

Werringer shoved back from his desk, as though Sorokin might jump across and throttle him. His eyes were wide behind the bifocals, all out of shape and moist.

"It'll be my pleasure, Mr. Werringer," in a tone so soft and warm, relaxed at last. "How soon do you need it? And what length?"

Walter Werringer fumbled for his Danish coffee mug.

Sorokin had his hand on the door, when it opened inward, and two young men came through. The moment he saw them, prim and clean-scrubbed in their almost-identical dark blue suits, he knew they had come from the right families, had learned to dance at the age of six or seven at Miss Blesham's, or one of the other good salons, had been allowed that first quarter-snifter of Napoleon with "Dad," and had most certainly graduated from one of the right schools.

The one on the left, the taller of the two, with the straw-colored hair and polar twinkling blue eyes, entering the room with thumbs hooked into the decorative pockets of his vest, was an Andover man. Had to be.

The other, slightly shorter, perhaps only six feet, with shoes impeccably dulls.h.i.+ned to avoid the vulgar ostentation of gloss, with flat brown hair parted straight back on the left side and brushed toward the rear of the skull in the European manner, whose eyes were of the lizard, he was Choate, surely, definitely, of course.

"Walter," Andover said, as he burst into the office, "we're breaking a little early today. Going over to The Algonquin for a few. Care to come along?"

Then he saw Sorokin, and stumbled to silence, in awe.

Werringer introduced them, with names Sorokin let slip out of his mind the instant they were spoken. He knew their names.

"Where did you go to school?" he asked them.

"Yale," said Andover.

"Yale," said Choate.

"Call me Punky," said Andrew Sorokin.

So they all went to The Algonquin for a few.

Choate scrabbled around in the bottom of the bowl. All the salted peanuts and little Cheerios and pretzels were gone. He gripped the bowl by its edge and banged it on the table. At The Algonquin, that was poor form.

"Succulents!" Choate howled.

The waiter came and took the bowl away from him like a nanny with an obstreperous infant. "Succulents, dammt," he slurred the word, only faintly.

"Andrew P. for Punky Sorokin, by G.o.d what a thrill and a half for overtime," said Andover, staring at Andy for the one billionth time since they had sat down. "A giant, you're a b.l.o.o.d.y giant, a flaming inst.i.toootion! Y'know that? And here we are sitting right with you!"

Werringer had left two hours before. Evening was coming on. The two Yale men named Andover and Choate were just high enough to be playful. Andy was sober. He had tried, G.o.d knew he had tried, but he was still sober.

"Reality, that's what you deal in," said one of them. It didn't matter which was which. They both spoke from the same cultural mouth.

"Truth. Life. You know all there is to know about Life. An' I don't mean that Lucely, heh heh heeheehee ..." he broke himself up completely, rolled around in the booth. Choate (or Andover, depending which had punned) shoved him away, roughly.

"You don't know what the h.e.l.l you're talkin' about, Rob. Tha.s.s the one thing he doesn't know about. Life! The core of it, the heartmeat of it! We, who come from such austere backgrounds, even we know it better more truly than Andrew P. for Punky Sorokin sitting right there."

The other Yale man sat up, angry. "You shut up! This man is a giant. A flaming giant, and he knows, I tell you. He knows about the seamy side of Life."

"He never even touched it."

"He knows! He knows it all!"

"Fraud! Poseur!"

"Step owsside you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I never knew you were such a bigoted crypto-Fascist b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Sorokin listened to them, and the fear he had known earlier that afternoon, when Werringer had sentenced him to going back down to Red Hook, returned. He had condemned himself to it, really, by what series of compulsions he did not want to examine, but here it was again. How did Choate know he was a fraud? How had Choate discovered the secret nubbin of fear in Andrew Sorokin's heart and soul?

"What, uh, what makes you say I'm a fraud?" he asked Choate. Choate's face had grown blotchy with drink, but he aimed a meaty finger at Sorokin and said, "I get spirit messages from the other world."

Andover took it as an affront. He shoved Choate roughly. "Owsside, b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Owsside, crypto-pinko!"

Sorokin wanted to get to the sober heart of it, though. "No, really, what makes you think I don't know reality?"

Choate took on the look of a pedant, and intoned sepulchrally. "Your first book'a short stories, you had a quote from Hemingway, remember it? You said it was your credo. Bushwah! 'There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.' I memorized it. It seemed to be valid. Bushwah!"

"Socialist, right-wing Birch m.u.t.h.e.r-fugger!"

"Yes? So what makes you think I don't know what I'm talking about? That certainly doesn't prove your point."

"Ah!" Choate lifted a finger alongside his nose, like Santa Claus about to zoom up the chimney. Conspiratorial. "Ah! But your fifth book'a short stories, after you'd been out there"-he waved toward California-"you used another quote. You know what it was? Hah, you remember?"

Sorokin paused an instant to get it right, then recited. " 'To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experience is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul.' Oscar Wilde. What has that to do with proving your point?"

Choate was triumphant. "Fear. Cop-out.Your subconscious was squealing like a butchered pig. It knew you were a liar from the first, and were lying all the more in Hollywood. It knew! And so you had to say it to the world, so they could never accuse you of it. You don't know what Life is, what reality is, what truth is, what anyd.a.m.nthing is!"

"I'm gonna push your rotten cruddy Tory face in!"

They wrestled around the other side of the booth, each too hammered to do the other any harm, as Sorokin thought about what Choate had said. Was it possible? Had he been trying to plead silently guilty to an unspoken charge?

When he had been a small child, he had been a petty thief. He had stolen things from the dime store. Not because he could not have bought them, because his family was too poor, but because he wanted them without having to pay for them, a sense of accomplishment, in a child's own strange philosophy. But he had always felt compelled to play with the new, stolen item, directly in front of his parents, that same night. So they could ask him where he got it, and he could risk their finding out he had stolen. If they did not press it, the stolen plaything was truly his; if they pressed it and he blurted he had stolen it, then he had to suffer a punishment he knew he deserved.

Was the inclusion of the Wilde quotation, as Choate suggested, another playing with a stolen toy in front of mommy and daddy, the world, his public?

Was it a manifestation of the fear he now felt? The fear that he had lost it, had always been in the process of losing it, could never regain it?

"Okay, dammit, I'm gonna show you the seamy side of Life! Now what about it, Mr. Punky? You wanna see the seamy side of Life?"

"He knows it, I tell ya!"

"Well, do you? Huh?"

"I'll have to make a phone call first. Cancel a dinner appointment." He sat, not moving, and they stared at one another like walruses contemplating the permanence of the sea.

"Well, do you, huh? If you do, put up or shut up." Choate was on the pinnacle of proving his point.

"Just shuddup, Terry, just shuddup; this man is not going to be chivvied and bullied and chockablock by the likes of a McCarthy neo-Fascist demagogue such as yourself!" Andover was a tot drunker than Choate.

Sorokin was trembling inside. If anyone knew the seamy side of Life, it was Andrew Sorokin. He had run away at age fifteen, had been driving a dynamite truck in North Carolina by sixteen, working on a cat-cracker in West Texas age seventeen, at nineteen the gang, and his first book published at twenty. He had been in every scene imaginable from the sybaritic high life of the international jet set to uncontrolled LSD experimentation with Big Sur hippies. He had always wanted to believe he was with it, contemporary, of the times, in touch with the realities, all the myriad multicolored realities, no matter how strained or weird or demeaning.

And the question now before him: has all this living degenerated into a search for kicks, is it a complex cop-out? He slid out of the booth, and went to call Olaf Burger.

When he had gotten through the switchboard and all the interference, Burger's bushwhacker voice came across the line. "Yeah?"

"Didn't I tell you a million times that's no way to answer a phone? You should say, 'Ma.s.sah Buhgah's awfiss, c'n ah helps yuh, bwana.' "

"Explain to me why I have to have a busy workday interrupted periodically by bigots, rednecks and kook writer sellouts from Smog Junction."

" 'Cause you got such dear little s.h.i.+rley Temple dimples, and you is a big paperback editor, and I burn for your body with a bright blue flame."

"What's on your alleged mind, nitwit?"

"Gotta call off the dinner."

"Janine'll parboil me. She made patlijan moussaka because you were coming. And dicing and braising lamb all day will not put her in a receptive frame of mind. At least give me an excuse."

"Two hotrock Ivy types from Marquis want to show me 'the seamy side of Life.' "

"That's not an excuse, that's a seizure of pet.i.t mal. You've got to be kidding."

There was a moment of serious silence from Sorokin. Then, in a different, slower voice he said, "I've got to do it, Olaf. It's important."

A corresponding moment of reorientation, the dual statement of a musical threnody. "You sound upset, Andy. Something happen? It's been three months since I've seen you, something biting on you again?"

Sorokin clicked his tongue against his teeth, seeking the words, finally deciding in an instant to put it baldly. "I'm trying to find out if I've got b.a.l.l.s. Again."

"For the thousandth time."

"Yeah."

"When do you stop? When you get killed?"

"Give my love to Janine. I'll call you tomorrow. My treat at The Four Seasons, that ought to make up for it."

A pause. "Andy ..."

Another beat of timelessness. "Uh-huh?"

"You're too expensive for the paperback line I edit, but there are a lot of others with a stock in you. Don't screw yourself up."

"Uh-huh."

Burger clicked off, and Andy Sorokin stood staring at the red plush of the phone booth for a long moment. Then he turned, exhaling breath in finality, and went back to a scene from Hogarth.

Andover was tapping the table over and over and over with his index finger, saying over and over and over, "You'll see, you'll see, you'll see ..."

While Choate, who had rubbed carbon black from half a dozen spent matches on his cheeks, was flapping his arms tidily, and croaking over and over and over, "Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore ..."

They took him to every paradise he had already known. All the places he had been when he was younger, all the predictable places. The Lower East Side. The Village. Spanish Harlem. Bedford-Stuyvesant.

And they grew more and more furious. They had sobered; the chill night air, the snow of winter's November, too many stop-offs where the liquor wasn't free; they were sobered. It had become a vendetta with both of the Yale men, not just Choate. Now Andover was with him, and they wanted to show the giant, Sorokin, something he had not seen before.

There were bars, and more bars, and dingy down-the-hole places where people sat murmuring into one another's libidos. And then a party ...

Noise cascaded about him, a Niagara of watery impressions, indistinct conversational images. s.n.a.t.c.hes of flotsam carried down thunderingly past his ears "... I went over to Ted Bates to ask them about those Viceroy residuals, and Marvy told me what the h.e.l.l I'd gotten a trip to the Virgin Islands out of it and why didn't I stop b.i.t.c.hing, and I told him, say, after that d.a.m.ned fruitcake director and his fayguluh crew got done letting me 'save' them from the gay life, I was so raw and miserable double residuals wouldn't of been enough to make up for all that weirdscene swinging, and besides, if they'd taken along some hooker they'd of had to pay her, too, so I should be getting extra consider-"