Strange Wine (19 page)

T is for TROGLODYTE

They live under the city dump and they can eat almost anything except plastic containers. If it weren’t for the troglodytes, we’d be
tuchis
-deep in garbage. There is a whole lot to be said for returnable glass bottles.

U is for UPHIR

Demon chemist and doctor, well-versed in knowledge of medicinal herbs, responsible for the health of demons, official apothecary and surgeon to the Court of Satan, Uphir recently had a rather unpleasant experience. Semiazas, chief of the fallen angels with Azazel (no need to go into the subject of office politics), came down with a serious charley horse in his tail. Uphir was called in, diagnosed the problem, and applied the traditional incantations and a poultice of mole paws and liverwort. Just to be on the safe side, he gave Semiazas a shot of penicillin. How was he to know the demon was allergic to mole paws. An unlovely reaction, made even worse by the penicillin. Without volition, Semiazas began to make it snow in Hell. Instantly, hundreds of thousands of foolish promises, idle boasts, dire threats, and contracts Satan had made containing the phrase “It’ll be a cold day in Hell” (on which he never thought he’d have to deliver) came true. Uphir was punished by being submerged to his nose in a lake of monkey vomit, while a squad of imps raced motorboats around him, making waves. California is not the only place where it’s difficult to get malpractice insurance.

V is for VORWALAKA

Count Carlo Szipesti, a
vorwalaka
, a vampire, having long since grown weary of stalking alleyways and suffering the vicissitudes of finding meals in the streets, hied himself to a commune in upstate New York where, with his beard, his accent, and his peculiar nocturnal habits, he fit right in with the young people who had joined together for a return to the land. For the Count, it was a guaranteed fountain of good, healthy blood. The young people in the commune were very big on bean sprouts and hulled sunflower seeds. They were all tanned from working in the fields and the blood ran hot and vibrant in their veins. When the Count was found dead, the coroner’s inquest did not reveal that he had been a creature of darkness, one of the dread vampires of the old country; what it
did
reveal was that he had died from infectious hepatitis. As the
Journal of the American Medical Association
has often pointed out, health is inextricably involved with morality.

W is for WAND of JACOB

Alfred Jacobi, seventy-two years old and nearly blind, was accosted at one o’clock in the morning on the Sheridan Square station platform of the IRT subway. His grandchildren, Emily and Foster and Hersch, had been yelling at Alfred for years: “Why do you go out walking in this awful city late at night? Crazy old man, you’ll be mugged, killed. What’s the matter with you?” But Alfred Jacobi had lived in New York for sixty of his seventy-two years, and he believed in the God of his forefathers, and–miraculously it seemed–he had never suffered even a moment’s unpleasantness in the streets. Even though New York had become a prowling ground for the most detestable human predators urban America had ever produced, Alfred Jacobi was able to walk where he wished, even in Central Park at midnight,
kene hora
, tapping his way gently with his specially carved cane, painted white to indicate he could not see. But neither the cane nor his age deterred the gang of young toughs with cans of spray paint who paused in their systematic defacement of white tile walls and poster advertisements to attack the old man. They came at him in a bunch, and he extended his cane, and there was a bright flash of light. And Alfred Jacobi was alone on the platform once more. The Wand of Jacob, the stick which preceded the magic wand, that forces spirits to appear or repulses them as did Moses’ rod, his Wand of Jacob was still fully charged. If one ventures down onto the Sheridan Square platform of the IRT, one can see a most marvelous example of native artwork. It is a frieze, apparently rendered by an unsung urban Michelangelo in spray paint, in many colors, extremely lifelike, of a gang of young men, screaming in horror. It’s a refreshing break from all the obscenities and self-advertisements for CHICO 116 one finds in the New York subway system.

X is for XAPHAN

Demon of the second order. At the time of the rebellion of the angels,
he
proposed that the heavens be set on fire. For his perfidy he has forevermore stoked the furnaces of Hell. It is never good to have dissatisfied help working in one’s company. Xaphan is steadily overloading the boilers. Pay attention to stories about the melting polar ice cap. Xaphan is programming for Armageddon, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Y is for YGGDRASIL

The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes through that empty pasture with a freeway.

Z is for ZOMBIE

Howard Hughes did not die in 1976, no matter
what
they tell you. Howard Hughes died in 1968. It was not a spectacular death, down in flames in the
Spruce Goose
or assassinated by his next-in-command or frightened to death by an insect that found its way into his eyrie. He choked to death on a McDonald’s greaseburger during dinner one night in July of 1968. But wealth has its privileges. Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic and the Walter Reed in Maryland sent their teams. But he was dead. DOA, Las Vegas. And he was buried. Not in 1976, in 1968. And Mama Legba, with whom Hughes had made a deal twenty years earlier in Haiti, came to the grave, and she raised him. The corporate entity is mightier than death. But the end is near: at this very moment, training in the Sierra Maestra, is an attack squad of Fidel Castro’s finest guerrillas. They know where Hughes went when he evacuated Nicaragua one week before the earthquake. (Zombies have precognitive faculties, did you know that?) And they know the 1976 death story is merely misdirection like all the other death rumors throughout the preceding years. They will seek him out and put him to
final
rest by the only means ever discovered for deanimating the walking dead. They will pour sand in his eyes, stuff a dead chicken in his mouth, and sew up the mouth with sailcloth twine. It would take a mission this important to get the fierce Cuban fighters to suffer all the ridicule: bayonet practice with dead chickens is terribly demeaning.

Had this really weird, essentially ugly evening at the University of Rochester (New York) last April. Several persons of a genetically female persuasion had maneuvered the otherwise sane and exemplary U. of Rochester Women’s Caucus into an attempt to ban the film version of my story “A Boy and His Dog” on the grounds that it was violently sexist and antifemale.

I’m not going to go into all that. It was a night that only reaffirmed my conviction that the mass of humans, male and female alike, are what the late Bruce Elliott called “genetic garbage.” Ugly statement. I won’t argue the point. All I wish is that
you
had been there. Kee-
rist!
Madness.

It’s mentioned here solely to keynote the point that for a writer in Our Time, trying to write as honestly and evenhandedly as he or she can, it is impossible to write
anything
that doesn’t infuriate one pressure group or another, large or small. Even if one cares passionately and believes in the validity of some Movement, one can be, at best, only a fellow traveler; and that smacks of sycophancy. So either the writer avoids writing any damned thing that might affront, or gets past a kind of universal knee-jerk Liberalism and cops to the truth that we are all pretty much alike, male and female, black and white, young and old, ugly and lovely. Pretty much alike in our ownership of human emotions, needs, drives, failings. And tries to write about the human heart in conflict with itself as truly as one can.

And if that means stomping on the feet of men or women belonging to this ethnic or cultural group or that…well, I’ve never thought for a moment I was going to die with the reputation of being one of America’s most beloved figures. It ain’t in the cards. I’d rather be honest than chic, anyhow. (He said, looking over his shoulder.)

“The arts serve purposes beyond themselves; the purposes of what they dramatize or represent at that remove from the flux which gives them order and meaning and value; and to deny these purposes is like asserting that the function of a handsaw is to hang above a bench and that to cut wood is to belittle it.”

Richard P. Blackmur,
A Critic’s Job of Work

After the funeral, Mitch went to Dynamite’s. It was a singles’ bar. Vernon, the day-shift bartender, had Mitch’s stool reserved, waiting for him. “I figured you’d be in,” he said, mixing up a Tia Maria Cooler and passing it across the bar. “Sorry about Anne.” Mitch nodded and sipped off the top of the drink. He looked around Dynamite’s; it was too early in the day, even for a Friday; there wasn’t much action. A few dudes getting the best corners at the inlaid-tile and stained-glass bar, couples in the plush back booths stealing a few minutes before going home to their wives and husbands. It was only three o’clock and the secretaries didn’t start coming in till five thirty. Later, Dynamite’s would be pulsing with the chatter and occasional shriek of laughter, the chatting-up and the smell of hot bodies circling each other for the kill. The traditional mating ritual of the singles’ bar scene.

He saw one girl at a tiny deuce, way at the rear, beside the glass-fronted booth where the d.j. played his disco rock all night, every night. But she was swathed in shadow, and he wasn’t up to hustling anybody at the moment, anyhow. But he marked her in his mind for later.

He sipped at the Cooler, just thinking about Anne, until a space salesman from the
Enquirer
, whom he knew by first name but not by last, plopped himself onto the next stool and started laying a commiseration trip on him about Anne. He wanted to turn to the guy and simply say, “Look, fuck off, will you; she was just a Friday night pickup who hung on a little longer than most of them; so stop busting my chops and get lost.” But he didn’t. He listened to the bullshit as long as he could, then he excused himself and took what was left of the Cooler, and a double Cutty-&-water, and trudged back to a booth. He sat there in the semidarkness trying to figure out why Anne had killed herself, and couldn’t get a handle on the question.

He tried to remember
exactly
what she had looked like, but all he could bring into focus was the honey-colored hair and her height. The special smile was gone. The tilt of the head and the hand movement when she was annoyed…gone. The exact timbre of her voice…gone. All of it was gone, and he knew he should be upset about it, but he wasn’t.

He hadn’t loved her; had, in fact, been ready to dump her for that BOAC hostess. But she had left a note pledging her undying love, and he knew he ought to feel some deep responsibility for her death.

But he didn’t.

What it was all about, dammit, was not being lonely. It was all about getting as much as one could, as best as one could, from as many different places as one could, without having to be alone, without having to be unhappy, without having them sink their fangs in too deeply.

That
, dammit, was what it was all about.

He thought about the crap a libber had laid on him in this very bar only a week ago. He had been chatting-up a girl who worked for a surety underwriters firm, letting her bore him with a lot of crap about contract bonds, probate, temporary restraining orders and suchlike nonsense, but never dropping his gaze from those incredible green eyes, when Anne had gotten pissed-off and come over to suggest they leave.

He had been abrupt with her. Rude, if he wanted to be honest with himself, and had told her to go back and sit down till he was ready. The libber on the next stool had laid into him, whipping endless jingoism on him, telling him what a shithead he was.

“Lady, if you don’t like the way the system works, why not go find a good clinic where they’ll graft a dork on you, and then you won’t have to bother people who’re minding their own business.”

The bar had given him a standing ovation.

The Cutty tasted like sawdust. The air in the bar smelled like mildew. His body didn’t fit. He turned this way and that, trying to find a comfortable position. Why the hell did he feel lousy? Anne, that was why. But he wasn’t responsible. She’d known it was frolic, nothing more than frolic. She’d known that from the moment they’d met. She hadn’t been fresh to these bars, she was a swinger, what was all the
sturm und drang
about! But he felt like shit, and that was the bottom line.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the girl said.

Mitch looked up. It seemed to be the girl from the deuce in the rear.

She was incredible. Cheekbones like cut crystal; a full lower lip. Honey hair…again. Tall, willowy, with a good chest and fine legs. “Sure. Sit down.”

She sat and pushed a double Cutty-&-water at him. “The bartender told me what you were drinking.”

Four hours later–and he still hadn’t learned her name–she got around to suggesting they go back to her place. He followed her out of the bar, and she hailed a cab. In the back seat he looked at her, lights flickering on and off in her blue eyes as the street lamps whizzed past, and he said, “It’s nice to meet a girl who doesn’t waste time.”

“I gather you’ve been picked up before,” she replied. “But then, you’re a very nice-looking man.”

“Why, thank you.”

At her apartment in the East Fifties, they had a few more drinks; the usual preparatory ritual. Mitch was starting to feel it, getting a little wobbly. He refused a refill. He wanted to be able to perform. He knew the rules. Get it up or get the hell out.

So they went into the bedroom.