Dangerous Visions (63 page)

"It was within this hallowed dungeon that I discovered the aromatic which incenses all canines," said Clarot. "One whiff and the mildest of lap dogs becomes a raging monster, determined to attack me and tear me to bits."

"Of what earthly use could such an aromatic be?" I cried.

Clarot placed his finger to one side of his nose, sagely.

"It gets me bitten over and over again," he said, smiling crookedly.

"Bitten? Merciful God!"

"You forget the law, my good fellow. I am judicious, of course, and permit my permeated trouser leg within range of only the tiniest of dogs. Nevertheless, some of the little beggars bite like the very devil."

He leaned over and massaged a shinbone thoughtfully.

"But the owners," he resumed, "settle generously at the threat of a lawsuit. At least most of them do. I live quite handsomely on the proceeds as you can see."

"Then the odor on your card?"

"Was
aromatique Clarot
."

"You won't mind if all this appears in
L'Expresse
?" I said, for every good reporter worth his salt wishes to protect his sources.

"Mind?" said Clarot airily. "Why on earth should I? As we chatted here, I liberally doused your trouser legs with my aromatic. When I press the chartreuse button on this wall, it will release my hypertensive bloodhounds, who will proceed to tear you into very tiny bits."

It was a gross blunder on Clarot's part. Soft living had put him terribly out of condition and it took me but a short moment of struggling and kicking to divest him of his trousers and place my own pair on his naked legs. I then pressed the chartreuse button and stepped out of the room, ignoring Clarot's cries for mercy.

As I left the brownstone house I was struck at the base of the skull by a nearsighted
cocotte
, betrayed by Clarot and mistaking me for him because I wore his fawn-colored trousers. Her blow sent me to the curb where I narrowly averted being run over by a blue Funke, a British sports car.

I lay in the charity ward at L'Hopital des Trois Balles, amnesiac for over three months. My memory restored, I tottered over to the office of
L'Expresse
and discovered that Emile Becque had been garroted by the huge Chinese, who had misread his telepathic silence in the face of demands that he pay his delinquent laundry bill.

The new editor, a sullen Breton, listened to my halting explanation with unflagging attention. When I had finished, he escorted me to the door and placed his iron-tipped toe to my rump, enabling me to leave at an extraordinary burst of speed.

I had no choice but to seek out Madame Clarot once more. After a short but impassioned courtship, she joined me at my apartment over the Tavern of the Four Griffins. She no longer sips camomile tea and it is with considerable nostalgia that I look back upon the day when she greeted me with cold sobriety. But then, I owe
that
much to Clarot.

Afterword:

It may be that, unknown to myself, "Auguste Clarot" is riddled with displaced symbolism. Perhaps I can't cope with escalated brotherhood in Vietnam, equal but separate mistreatment for men of color, and bulging clichés mouthed in high and low places. "Auguste Clarot" was a joyful catharsis for me and, I hope, for the reader.

The act of collaboration, between writers as very definitely opposed to the act of collaboration between lovers, is only satisfying when it is ended, never while it is being performed. It has been my annoyance and pleasure to have collaborated with perhaps half a dozen writers in the eleven years I've been a professional. (I have never been a lover of any of them.) With Avram Davidson I wrote a Ring Lardneresque bit of tomfoolery so fraught with personal jokes and literary references that I was compelled to write a 10,000-word article explaining the story, to accompany the 7000-word fiction before it could be sold. Not unexpectedly, the story was called "Up Christopher to Madness" and the article was titled "Scherzo for Schizoids." With Huckleberry Barkin I wrote a
Playboy
story of humorous seduction (which I contend is a contradiction in terms) called "Would You Do It for A Penny?" and with Robert Silverberg a crime story called "Ship-Shape Pay-Off." I even wrote a story with Budrys once.

But collaborating is generally a dismal chore, fraught with such traps as conceptual disagreement, clash of styles, incipient laziness, verbosity, confusion and simple bad writing. How Pratt & De Camp or Nordhoff & Hall did it, I will never fully understand. Yet with two writers I have been able to collaborate easily, and the products have been something more than either of us might have attained singly. The first is Joe L. Hensley, who appears elsewhere in this book, and of whom there is much to say; but in another place. The second is Henry Slesar, of whom there is much to say here. I am delighted at the opportunity to say these things, for they have been in my mind many years, and since they verge on being a poem of love, they are obviously not the kind of thing one can say to a man's face.

(The concept of affection between men has been so emasculated—literally—that to display any sign of joy at the presence or companionship or understanding of another man is taken, by the yahoos, as a sure sign of faggotry. I choose not to dignify the implication, yet will state bluntly that I do not subscribe to the snide theory there is anything between Batman and Robin but big-brotherliness. Some folks just have a one-track gutter.)

I think the operable element in any successful collaboration is friendship. Based on respect and admiration and trust in the other man's morality, sense of craft and sense of fairness. To accept another writer's judgment on the form and direction of a story, one must first respect and admire what the other has done on his own. He must have paid his dues. Then, it must be unconsciously safe for one to go with the other man's instincts as to what the story is saying in larger terms, in terms of ethic and morality. Only then does one feel safe in allowing the unformed creation to be molded by other hands. And finally, by the extensions and implications of friendship, one knows the other man wants a unified whole, a product of
two
minds and individual talents, rather than one story that has been stolen from another man's store of minutiae. Yes, I think friendship must be present if the collaboration is to succeed. Henry Slesar and I have been friends for over ten years.

I first met Henry after a lecture I delivered at New York University in 1956. The presumption of me telling a class on creative writing how to function in the commercial arena, after only one year of professional work, was staggering. But apparently (Henry has told me many times) up till that time the class had been fed gross amounts of the usual literary horse manure, a great deal of theory culled from inept texts, but very little practical advice on how to sell what the class had written. Since I was a selling writer—for however short a time, at that time—I felt justified only in telling them where to get the best buck, and how to keep from being shafted, rather than how to pick up the mantle of Chekhov. (Comment: as demonstrated by the preponderance of writers in this volume
alone
, memorable writers are born, not trained. I believe this firmly. Oh, it's possible to learn how to handle the English language in a competent manner, it is even possible to learn how to plot like a computer. But that is something else: it is the difference between being an author and being a writer. The former get their names on books, the latter write. Of all the writing courses I have known—as class member, guest lecturer, auditor or interested listener—I have encountered only one that seemed to know where it was at. That was the series of classes given by Robert Kirsch at UCLA. He laid it on the line in the first ten minutes that, if they couldn't write already, they'd better sign up for another subject, because he was ready and able to teach them the superficialities, but the spark of creativity had to be there or they'd wind up merely masturbating. Born, not made, despite what the reading-fee agencies tell their poor befuddled victims.)

After the class, Henry and I got together many times. He was at that time creative director for the Robert W. Orr advertising agency. (Henry is the man who created the Life Saver advertisement that was merely a page of candies laid out in rows, with the inked-in words, "Don't lick this page." It was an award winner, and so is Henry.) But aside from Bix Beiderbecke records, Henry's driving urgency was for writing. I have never met a man who so wanted to set words on paper and who, from the very first, had such a sure, talented manner of so doing. Within the first year of his career he sold to
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Playboy
and over a dozen other top markets. We would get together of an evening, either in my tiny apartment on West Eighty-second Street off Amsterdam, or his sprawling residence overlooking West End Avenue, and after the usual few hours of chitchat between us and our wives (I was, at that juncture, married to Disaster Area #1), we would vanish into Henry's office and do a short story. Complete in one evening. Usually science fiction or detective stories: "The Kissing Dead," "Sob Story," "Mad Dog," "RFD #2," "The Man with the Green Nose." We worked well together, though not entirely rationally. Sometimes I would start with a title and a first paragraph, writing something so off-beat and peculiar that there was no place to go plot-wise. Or Henry would open the story and write a thousand words of devious plot threads, leaving off in mid-speech. Once in a while we plotted the whole thing out in advance. But whichever form or direction was used, we always got a salable story from the collaboration. We sold everything we ever wrote together. It was a parlor trick, a party game, a hobby that paid for itself in enjoyment and cigarette money.

Henry Slesar was born in 1927 in Brooklyn. He is the personification of quality and tact and honor in a field singularly spare in such qualities: he is an advertising man. He has been vice-president and creative director of three top New York agencies and is now president and CD of his own: Slesar & Kanzer, Inc., Founded 1965. As a writer he has published over 600 stories, novels, etc., to such markets as
Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Diners Club Magazine
, all of the men's magazines, mystery magazines and most of the science fiction magazines. He has been anthologized fifty-five times, has written three novels including
The Gray Flannel Shroud
(Random House), which won the 1959 Mystery Writers of America Edgar as Best First Mystery Novel. He has had two short-story collections published, both introduced by Alfred Hitchcock, who looks with great favor on our Henry, who has written over sixty television scripts, many of which were for the Hitchcock half-hour and hour series. He has also written for
77 Sunset Strip, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Run for Your Life
and half a dozen of the coveted high-paying pilot film assignments. He has written four motion pictures for Warner Bros.

Henry is married to one of the loveliest women any writer possesses—the O. in his pen name O. H. Leslie—and has one daughter—the Leslie of the pseudonym. They all live together in New York City, which is a pleasant arrangement.

The Henry Slesar story in this anthology is only 1100 words long. About half the length of this introduction, I now realize. There are two comments to be made on this bizarre fact. First, my admiration and friendship for Slesar know no bounds—not even the simple bounds of conversation of verbiage. The second is more important. Henry Slesar is a master of the short-short story. He can kill you with a line. He takes 1100 words to do what lesser writers would milk for 10,000 words. If there is a better short-short writer working in America today, I can't think of his name, and I've got a helluva memory.

There were sixteen hundred Peace Stations erected in the eighth year of the conflict, the contribution of the few remaining civilians on the American continent; sixteen hundred atomproofed shelters where the itinerant fighting man could find food, drink, and rest. Yet Sergeant Tod Halstead, in five dreary months of wandering across the wastelands of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, had relinquished hope of finding even one. In his lead-lined aluminum armor he appeared to be a perfectly packaged war machine, but the flesh within the gleaming housing was weak and unwashed and weary of the lonely, monotonous task of seeking a friend to join or an enemy to kill.

He was a Rocket Carrier, Third Class, the rank signifying that it was his duty to be a human launching pad for the four hydrogen-headed rockets strapped to his back, their fuses to be ignited by a Rocket Carrier, Second Class, upon command and countdown by a Rocket Carrier, First Class. Tod had lost the other two thirds of his unit months before; one of them had giggled and slipped a bayonet in his throat; the other had been shot and killed by a sixty-year-old farm wife who was resisting his desperate, amorous advances.

Then early one morning, after he was certain that the burst of light in the east was the sun and not the enemy's atomic fire, he trudged along a dusty road and saw beyond the shimmering waves of heat a square white building set amid a grove of naked gray trees. He stumbled towards it, and knew it was no mirage of the man-created desert, but a Peace Station. In its doorway a white-haired man with a Father Christmas face beckoned and smiled and helped him inside.

"Thank God," Tod said, falling into a chair. "Thank God. I'd almost given up . . . ."

The jolly old man clapped his hands, and two young boys with hair like eagles' nests came running into the room. Like service station attendants, they set about him busily, removing his helmet, his boots, unhooking his weapons. They fanned him, chafed his wrists, put cool lotion on his forehead; a few minutes later, his eyes closed, and with sleep approaching, he was conscious of a gentle hand on his cheek, and woke to find his months-old beard gone.

"There now," the station manager said, rubbing his hands in satisfaction. "Feel better, soldier?"