A Strange Kind of Love

Chapter One

I got off the subway at 86th and Broadway and clawed my way through the usual mob of people, hauling myself up the stairwell to the street. The air smelled good — even the soot and sweat and all the stinks of New York were good all of a sudden.

I felt at home, and I hadn’t felt like that since I left New York.

It’s a funny thing and it’s a thing that never fails. If you start in New York you’ll never have another home, no matter how long you’re away or how many other burgs you hit. The subway was crowded and the air outside was stale and musty, but that didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.

Dan Larkin was home.

There were no brass bands. There was no ticker tape parade with Grover Whelan sitting up there next to me, nothing like that. Dan Larkin was home — and nobody in the world gave a good goddamn.

I shook my head, realizing that I’d been standing on the street corner like a lost sheep for about five minutes. The light turned and I crossed Broadway, then headed south and east again on 85th Street. Walking was easier; walking gave me something to do so I wouldn’t have to bother thinking.

But you can’t shut thoughts out. East of Broadway the neighborhood was a collection of run-down red brick tenements with kids playing stickball in the street and obscene scrawlings on the red brick walls. I started to remember. I saw how far up I had gone and how far down I had come.

I didn’t start on 85th Street, but I started on a street just like it or worse, an ugly little street in East Harlem.

I went up fast and I came down faster.

My suitcase felt heavy and I looked down at it. It was covered with scratches but it was still good leather — the only decent thing I still owned. There was a sort of poetic beauty in it, because when I bought that suitcase I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I bought it the first time I moved out of Harlem and into the Village, and I had cockeyed ideas about impressing my landlady with a decent show of luggage. The clothes I stuffed into the suitcase were pretty bad but the landlady never got much of a look at them.

Later I realized that I made a mistake — the damned landlady figured my rent on the basis of the suitcase. But in those days I was just twenty and on the way up and it was something else to laugh about. Everything was a load of laughs then.

Well, I still had the suitcase.

But the laughs were gone.

It all started in that room in Greenwich Village — the whole uphill climb and the rolling tumble back down the hill. I locked myself in that room for a twelve-hour stretch every day, seven days a week, banging the Great American Novel out on a broken-down Royal portable. By the time I finished it I had run through three reams of typewriter paper and the portable was ready for the junkman. I boxed the book and hauled it uptown to a publisher, and I came back to the Village and had a few beers in a cellar club to celebrate.

The first publisher bounced the book with a form slip. So did the second, and the third, and the fourth. The fifth publisher sent along a nice note saying that the occasional drive and brilliance couldn’t begin to compensate for the length and lack of organization and total absence of commercial appeal. Then there were more form rejections — from a total of twenty publishers.

It’s funny — I can’t remember what the deuce that book was about, but I know it must have been a dog. In those days I thought the book was the greatest thing since Hamlet and the publishers were just a bunch of illiterate jackals. I remained convinced until the twentieth rejection.

After number twenty I lugged the script home and set it down on the floor. I stared at it for almost half an hour. Then I carried it back outside and left it for the garbagemen. I never saw it again.

I walked back up the stairs determined to show everybody. If they wanted garbage I’d write them garbage. I could turn out junk as well as the next guy. I sat down and knocked out a western and mailed it off, waiting for the check to come.

The script came back by return mail with a printed form.

I tried it again, and I tried another western, and then I tore them both up and chucked them in the ashcan.

So I decided to learn. I hocked the suitcase for ten bucks and bought up every pulp magazine I could get my hands on. That was the heyday of the pulps — there were millions of them, and I had enough sense not to buyout the newsstands. I found a back-magazine store on 42nd Street that sold pornography under the counter and could afford to make next to nothing on back-magazines. I bought them by the bushel and read them as if they were classics, and when I finished I carted them back to the store and got half back on them.

Two months later I sat down and wrote a detective story. I mailed it off and a check for $17.50 came back three days later, with a request for more material. I got drunk and picked up a prostitute and spent all the money the first night.

That was the start. I reduced everything to a formula and batted out the words — one, two, three stories a day. I kept the typewriter grinding and I kept on turning out stories. A bum knee kept me out of the war, and during the war anybody who could write English could sell to the pulps. I moved out of my hole and into a three-room place in the West Village.

I kept on typing.

When the war ended the price of paper went sky-high and the pulps folded sickly. All of a sudden I didn’t have a market any more. I had to forget everything I ever learned and I had to learn a dozen new things in-between. I wasn’t the kind of guy who saved money — when it came in I spent it.

One by one the pulps dropped dead and my markets were gone. I kept having the same expenses but I didn’t have the same money any more. I picked up a quick hundred now and then with a book for the pornographers on 42nd Street, but it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t big money, and I was used to big money.

I tried the slicks, but slick writing never turned out to be my meat. There was a kind of polish and phoniness to Saturday Evening Post stories that I never did manage to catch. But I caught on to the paperback book bit and ground out three chapters and an outline. One of them picked it up for an advance of $500 and I was in business again.

I wrote everything. I wrote under a dozen different pen names, all in all, and I was writing for half-a-dozen different paperback publishers. I picked up an agent and he got me more work than I could handle. I picked up a mistress and leased a fancy layout in the East Fifties and the money went out as fast as it came in.

Everything came easy — maybe that was the trouble. From the time I figured out how to start being a writer I never wrote a thing that didn’t sell. It was just a simple formula — I saturated myself in the stuff until I was sick to my stomach, and I figured out just how the writers managed to get the effect they were looking for. And then I sat down at the typewriter and turned out more of the same old thing.

The editors ate it up every time, and so did the readers.

It was the same with women. I had my first piece when I was fifteen. Sex is something you grow up with in East Harlem. Half the girls in school were knocked up before they graduated and the other half never graduated.

I still remember the first girl. Maybe it’s because she was the first — there was a hell of a lot I don’t remember. Her name was Sally and she was two years older than I was. Her hair was the color of copper and her skin was soft and smooth all over.

She copped my cherry on a pile of leaves in the school playground one night in the late spring. Her breasts were firm as melons and her hips worked like twin triphammers and she moaned at the right time.

There were lots more like Sally. I never kept tabs on her any more than I kept tabs on any of the rest of them, but her name popped up in the papers a few years ago. Somebody shot her and she died on the way to the hospital with a bullet in her right lung.

Nobody expects to get murdered. I don’t think Sally expected to get murdered, but then I don’t think that she had expected to wind up whoring for a living that night when I banged her in the playground. But Sally was dead with a bullet in her lung — and I remember wondering how the damned bullet ever managed to get through her breast — and in a sense she was the start of it all.

While I was knocking them out for the paperbacks I used to get drunk regularly with a fellow named Dick Travis who wrote science-fiction. He sold his first yarn when he was still in high school and went straight to the top of the field. One time he told me that anything that comes easy isn’t worth having, that as soon as you get successful at something you have to be careful as all Hell.

He was right.

Dick Travis had everything easy, and nothing ever made any difference to him. He didn’t get a kick out of anything he did. He dropped dead of a heart attack before he was forty, doing that too early just the way he did everything.

I stopped under a lamp-post and rested my suitcase on the sidewalk. The walking was getting me down. Hell, how long was my heart going to last? I was 39 — the drinking certainly hadn’t done me a hell of a lot of good. I was lucky in that I hadn’t put on any weight in the good years to load me down, but I was still burning my way to Hell in a bucket. How long was I going to keep on? And, for that matter, what the hell difference did it make?

The long way up and the long drop back down. Everything had happened so quickly. I had six books on the stands at once and I was between women, and Lou Harris phoned me that he had set me up for a stand in Hollywood. Lou’s a good agent, one of the best. And the deal he got me looked equally good.

Nothing looks quite as good as a stand in Hollywood. Hollywood is the one place in the country where everything that glitters is very probably gold. All the women are beautiful and all the writers make money, and those were the two most important things in the world. Hell, even the carhops in the beaneries were beautiful. Every other girl in the world wants to be in the movies, and they come to Hollywood by the carload. Ninety-nine out of a hundred wind up going home or working at some two-bit job waiting for a break. The scenery is pretty fine.

The money is better. I made two thousand a week writing movie scripts, and that’s pretty big dough. That was the first stretch — then they found out I wasn’t the best movie writer in the world and it dropped to a grand a week.

That was still pretty nice money. That was better than fifty gees a year, and even if I spent every penny of it it was a good life.

I spent every penny of it. And it was a good life.

And then I did a very stupid thing. It was something I had never done before and something I didn’t plan on doing, and something I sure as hell never should have done. It was the dumbest, wrongest, silliest thing I ever did in my life.

I fell in love.

With all the women I padded down with there was never one I fell in love with. Like every other Joe I occasionally made the mistake of confusing love with an erection, but that always ended in short order. But with Allison King the love bit came long before the erection. It came, just like in the goddamn movies, the first time I saw her.

Sure, it doesn’t make sense. I was 35; I should have known better. This was the one woman in the world I could never have and it was the only one I really wanted,wanted enough to get married and settle down, wanted enough to live in the trite little white house with green shutters. Maybe I wanted her because I couldn’t have her. That’s probably the way the psychologists would explain it. But it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference why I wanted her.

I just wanted her.

She was a starlet doing walk-ons and bit parts in B movies when I met her. She’s doing a little better now, and one of these days she’s going to make it big. She’s good.

I’m a little over six feet tall and she’s just tall enough so that her forehead touches my chin and I can smell the fresh smell of her hair when she leans a little against me. Her eyes are a strange color that looks green one moment and gray the next. Her hair is blonde — real blonde, not like most of the phony peroxide playmates that cover Hollywood like yellow measles. Her body is just like every body in the world ought to be — firm and full with large rounded breasts and thighs like a Greek goddess.

She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.

Hell, how do you describe a beautiful woman? All the descriptions sound the same — you can’t convey the special feeling of a beautiful woman with some words written on a piece of paper. Words aren’t enough.

She’s a statue, a painting, a symphony. She’s beauty, pure and perfect.

And, inevitably, I fell in love with her.

I leaned against the lamp-post, aching to sink down to the sidewalk and stay there. I stared at the suitcase and started to think about the flat pint bottle of rye in it. I could taste that rye in my mind. I could imagine the way it would burn its way down my throat and nestle warm and cozy in my stomach. I wanted to open the suitcase and drain the bottle right there in the street. It was the only way to blur the memory of her, and if I didn’t get her off my mind it would be impossible for me to make a comeback. She dragged me down, and I had to forget her or I’d wind up on the Bowery mumbling Allison until cirrhosis of the liver popped me into a wooden box and a grave on Riker’s Island.

You see, she didn’t fall in love with me. She didn’t fall in love with anybody else, either, but she didn’t fall in love with me and that was the big thing. She loved Allison King and nobody else, and nothing in the world could make her open up and love me.

When I first started to date her she was as cold as ice. I tried every trick in the book — and there are plenty of them. I worshipped her one day, I ignored her the next, I took her to the fancy places and to the dives, I went a week without calling her and the next week I kept her line humming twenty-four hours a day.

Kissing her was like pressing your lips against a frozen watermelon. Holding her was like caressing a lump of clay. And wanting her was like wanting a shot of heroin.

Then one night she explained it to me. Allison was the one girl in I-don’t-know-how-many-hundred who simply could not enjoy sex. It was something rooted so deeply in her that it was a part of her own personality. She wasn’t afraid of it — not on the surface, at least. It just left her totally unaffected.

She was no virgin. Five or six men had made love to her with equal and complete failure. I was the sixth or seventh, and my failure was just as complete. The whole thing was less than nothing to her.

I went into a slump — the worst thing that can happen to a writer. When I was supposed to be writing I was either drinking or staring moodily at the typewriter.Most of the time ideas failed to come to me; when I got an idea it either seemed too trivial to work on or I just couldn’t manage to get started. When I got words on paper they looked wrong and the paper wound up in the wastebasket.

I broke up with her a hundred times and started in with her a hundred times more. Then one night I brought her to my apartment and took her clothes off of that beautiful body while she stood motionless on the rug in the middle of the living-room. I stripped and took her into my arms and she came suddenly to life, melting against me like liquid fire. Her mouth pressed against mine and her whole body vibrated against me. I ran my hands over her skin and she seemed to burn bright with passion, all of her alive and hungry and yearning.

I was too shocked to think. I carried her to the studio couch and I made love to her harshly, violently, with her nails raking into my back and my body pressing hers and hurting her. At the climax she let out a little cry deep in the bottom of her throat and it seemed as if everything was as perfect as it could ever possibly be.

We lay there a long time without speaking, holding close to each other. Then suddenly she drew away from me and sat upright on the couch, resting her chin in her hand. There was a deep, far-away look on her face and her eyes were as deep a green as I had ever seen them.

“Hello,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“It happened,” I said. “I told you it would happen if you just let it. I told you—”

I stopped short. She seemed to be in a different world, but at the same time it looked as though my words were hurting her in some way. I waited, and it was very silent in the room for a few long seconds.

When she spoke her voice seemed to be coming through the type of filter they use when they want to make it seem as though a voice is coming over a telephone. She talked very slowly and there was something ghostly and supernatural about the quiet whispery tone of her voice.

“Nothing happened,” she said. “Nothing at all. I wanted it to happen so I acted it out. I acted every bit of it.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just shook my head back and forth like a robot.

“Nothing,” she went on in that same tone of voice. “It was like a part in a movie. My body was doing things and I was somewhere else watching and seeing it and not feeling a damned thing. I—”

She left it at that. I got dressed and made us a pair of drinks, but she didn’t want one and I had them both. She sat there like a statue for a little while longer, finally dressing and walking out of the apartment like a sleepwalker.

I watched her leave. After she was gone I stared at the closed door like a schizo staring at a wall.

Then I reached for the bottle.

I don’t know exactly what happened after that. I have vague memories of stumbling over most of Los Angeles, of spending part of one night with a prostitute who was old enough to be my mother and about as drunk as I was, of slugging somebody and of getting slugged myself a few times. But it’s all a blur. I woke up five days later with my head aching viciously and my money gone, and when I stood up the sidewalk was rocking back and forth crazily.

Then the slide downhill started. It was easier than you can imagine — drinking the money away, not writing a line, getting my option dropped when my contract ran out with the studio, drinking and drinking and borrowing money when the money ran out and drinking and drinking and drinking.

And now I was back in New York and thinking about making a comeback. For a minute there didn’t seem to be any point, any point at all in the whole deal. Why bother? I had managed to find something out, and that something said to chuck it all and hit the skids for keeps.

Because everything comes easy except what matters.

Because when you get something you find out you never really wanted it in the first place.

Because the things you really want are the things you can never get.

I picked up the suitcase and started walking, crossing Amsterdam and heading toward Columbus. It was autumn in New York — like the song — and the air was getting cool. Autumn’s the best time in New York, but this was going to be a miserable autumn.

For a change.