Shatterday

All the Lies That Are My Life

They buried Jimmy Crowstairs today.

My closest, oldest, best friend: the world-famous fantasist, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.

They put him down the rectangular hole this morning, and I was one of the dozen people inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes. Also in there among the select few was an ex-President of the United States, for whom I had not voted; also two actresses, one of whom, though age thirty, keeps being cast as late teens beachbait, despite her excellence as a serious thesp, mostly on the basis of her chubby cheeks and a pair of breasts—if you’ll pardon the pragmatism—only slightly smaller than Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other one I didn’t know, but she made a good impression on me when, as we were walking up the hill to the grave from the limos, she graciously waved off a small knot of ghouls seeking her autograph; Jimmy’s publisher, whose chief claims to fame are his rejection of Jerzy Kosinski’s first novel on the basis that it was morbid and depressing, and his ongoing participation as a panelist on a television game show now into its seventh year of syndication; Jimmy’s sister, eight years his senior, whom he had not spoken to for over twenty years and to whom he referred as SylviaTheCunt, all one word; a great bear of an English novelist, a French film director who wore clothes so elegantly it made everyone else feel like breadline standbys, a plasma physicist from Princeton who’s up for the Nobel this year because of his major breakthrough in magnetic containment fusion; and two married couples Jimmy considered close friends, mostly because they proved to him, as living examples, that it is possible for Man and Woman to cleave together under the same roof, bound by The Paper (as he constantly referred to it), without emotionally disemboweling each other. How many is that? Counting me, that’s thirteen. Well, okay, thirteen, not twelve. Even so, it was a select cadre of mourners.

Set apart by black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes from the vast throng of his fans and idle groupies of the great, the near-great, the celebrated and the hemidemisemicelebrated.

History tells us that when Victor Hugo died on May 22nd, 1885, over two million Parisians followed the pauper’s hearse he had specified from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.

Jimmy’s entourage wasn’t quite that large; but for a contemporary author, in a nation where illiteracy has gone beyond mere totemization, well into deification… it was eminently satisfactory. Maybe two or three thousand. Not bad at all for a guy they steadfastly called a “sci-fi writer.”

You‘ll notice I never use that hideous neologism.

Jimmy spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to get that ugly categorization off his books and out of the biographies they wrote about him. He wrote fantasy, if specific pigeonholes are needed; but he insisted on being called simply a writer. He didn’t even like being referred to as an “author.” He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer.” An author [he said] is what you put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who gets his name on the spine of leatherbound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life… writing.”

Either way, whatever they called him, he managed by sheer dint of hard work and careful manipulation of his public image to become three things, almost always mutually contradictory: a staggeringly wealthy bestselling novelist, a. genius artist who was seriously regarded by all the “serious” critics, and a legend in his own time. A household name like Salk or Babe Ruth or Hemingway—or Nixon or Jack the Ripper or Hitler.

And this morning they lowered him into darkness, and wonderful words were read over him by Rabbi Ashkenazi, Monsignor McCalla, Dr. Ehlen, Carl Sagan and me. Mine were the best.

Naturally: I knew him best. And as Jimmy so often told interviewers, with that abundance of humble largesse that so endeared him to People magazine, The Paris Review and The National Enquirer, “Larry Bedloe is a good solid writer; he’s got a nice little talent working there.”

That popped up in my thoughts as I stood there watching them crank down the gunmetal-blue anodized aluminum casket. Right across from me, on the other side of the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes, was a chubby little woman in basic black and pearls. Her face was all puffy from crying. She was clutching the Literary Guild boxed set of his Radimore trilogy. Chances of her getting it autographed were very slim.

Kerch, as everyone but his ex-wife Leslie and I called him, was already on his way to stardom when I met him. We were both just turning twenty—I scampered ahead only six months older—which meant that for half of each year he could refer to me as “old man” and I could admonish him to speak with respect to his elders—and we had both been science fiction fans.

Every ingroup coterie had its mystiques, its craziness. Masons have secret handshakes; jazz musicians run a special patois incomprehensible to squares; only in the motion picture industry can you get a laugh when you tell the one about the Polish starlet… who fucked the writer; antiquarian bookdealers share arcane rituals of buy&sell that bind them in terms of verso, recto, foxing, gutters and true firsts.

The deranged traditions of science fiction “fandom” are overwhelmingly attractive, particularly to those few boys and girls who are the outcasts of their high school classes because of wonky thought processes, a flair for the bizarre, and physical appearance that denies them the treasures of sorority membership or a position on the football team. For the pimply, the short, the weird and intelligent… for those to whom sex is frightening and to whom come odd dreams in the middle of study hall, the camaraderie of fandom is a gleaming, beckoning Erewhon; an extended family of other wimps, twinks, flakes and oddballs.

We had never met, though we’d corresponded heavily for several years. The nexus of our incipient friendship was the. maelstrom of fannish publishing—”fanzines.” Mimeographed amateur magazines of comment about the writers and the works in the genre, and a smattering of dreary fan fiction. His fanzine was titled, with becoming modesty, The World’s Greatest SF Famine Including Venus; mine was called Visitations.

But it was at the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention (neologized as ChiCon 11), in Chicago, 1952, that we actually met.

I was walking through the lobby of the Hotel Morrison. Being short on funds, I had arranged to stay in a two-room suite with half a dozen other fans from different parts of the country; and I was looking for the one in whose name the rooms were registered, so I could get the key and dump my suitcase.

The lobby was jammed with a horde of fans checking in, renewing acquaintances, screaming across through the potted plants for directions, rolling in dollies with cartons of used books for the huckster room, making arrangements for cheeseburger dinners that night. And in the midst of that cyclical flow of sweaty aficionados who had driven or flown of hitchhiked or crawled in from Minneapolis and Kansas City and Cleveland, Jake Repnich tracked me down.

I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt as I tried to elbow through a knot of kids divvying up suitcases for the trek to the elevators (thereby saving the bellboy’s tip), and I reeled backward as the tension was applied. Then someone clubbed me a shot in the kidney.

I pitched forward, but couldn’t fall down because the back of my shirt was still wrapped in a fist. So my feet went out from under me and I dropped to my knees. I tried to look around behind me; I was in such exquisite pain that my head wouldn’t turn on my neck. Everything seemed to be slipping off the edge. But I could tell from the expressions on the faces of the crowd that something awful was about to happen, and that I was on the visitation end of that unnamed awfulness.

A foot was planted between my shoulder blades and the fist let go of my shirt, and I was booted forward onto my suitcase, which slid a few feet, carrying me as on a raft.

I fell off, rolled over, and tried to sit up.

Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death were staring down at me.

The courageous and loving extended family had moved back to clear a circle in which I could be conveniently stomped to pudding. Erewhon had been invaded.

The nastiest-looking of the Four Horsemen—whom I instantly recognized as Death—leaned forward, providing me with a dandy view of his terminal acne, and (in the pulp magazine vernacular of the period) lipped thinly, “I’m Jake Repnich, you little sonofabitch. You wanna tweak my nose?”

It all became hideously clear what was happening. Six months earlier, among the batches of fanzines I traded for Visitations by mail, I’d received an ineptly hektographed crudzine called Uranium-236. It was “edited,” if one takes semiliteracy, quadruple amputee syntax and sophomoric screeds against any writer with aspirations of writing literature above the level of shootouts in space as editing, by one Jake Repnich. It came out of Secaucus, New Jersey. Need more be said?

As the voice of reason, I had cast caution to the Four Horsemen (without knowing it), and had responded to a particularly stupid article in which Repnich had said H. P. Lovecraft was a better writer than Poe, with the published remarks that good old Jake had about as much literary savvy as a storm drain, and that someone ought to tweak his nose. The point being that merely slapping his pinkies wasn’t due and proper for the intellectual crimes of a pimplebrain like good old Jake, a. k. a. Death.

Now Jake and three of his buddies, who no doubt spent their off-hours chewing broken glass and flogging cripples, had come all the way to Chicago from Secaucus, New Jersey, to more than tweak the nose of Larry Bedloe.

The smell of the Jersey swamps was still on them.

And I hadn’t, at that point, lived enough of a life to have it flash before my eyes.

With three stories out to market, without even having had my shot at immortality, with the National Book Award and Martha Foley’s Best of the Year and intimate conversations with Styron and Mailer and Hemingway and Steinbeck just within my grasp, I was about to become a problem for the carpet cleaners of the Hotel Morrison. Quelle ironie!

At which moment Jake Repnich’s nose spouted blood and he went pinwheeling past me to land in a hideous heap against the check-in counter.

A foot and a half behind the spot he had just occupied stood a wild-eyed, babbling apparition, part vampire bat, part slavering derangement, part avenging Fury. The attaché case he had used to break Death’s nose was dangling from one of his little pixie fists. The other fist was balled and seemed to be waiting for a target of opportunity.

Feet planted far apart, this pint-sized Zorro, no less than Destiny’s Tot, stared at the three remaining teddy boys with eyes that could have triggered an A-bomb. “You want trouble, you pustulent slugs? You want a hassle, huh? You want to come in here where law-abiding science fiction fans are trying to share good times, and start a fracas? Huh, that what you want? Well, we’re ready! Right, everybody?”

He directed the challenge at the extended family, cowering in confusion and naked cowardice around the lobby.

From here and there in the crowd came timorous responses of “Yeah, you tell ‘em,” and “We’re with you, all the way!”

In that instant I understood the dangerous power of Willie Stark, Elmer Gantry, Jean Paul Marat and Aimee Semple McPherson.

Gorgo the Small then instructed Conquest, Slaughter and Famine to gather up the weeping, bleeding carcass of their leader and, with the crowd backing him all the way, in some unfathomable power-pull, he moved the guerrilla band through the lobby, down the steps, across the landing, down some other steps, through the revolving doors, and out onto the street. The potential assassins were held there for a few minutes, I suppose to get explicit directions from the Goliath-slayer how to find their way back to the sewers that emptied out onto the Jersey flats—with detailed warnings of what would happen to them should they try to return to the ChiCon—and then the throng returned.

I was still on the floor.

Peter Pan reached down, pulled me to my feet and said, with a wide, infectious grin,. ‘Hi, you’re Larry Bedloe, right? I’m Kerch Crowstairs, we’re sharing the room upstairs. I just sold my first novel, Crowell’s publishing it in the spring, it’s called Death Dance on Sirius 7. You’re going to love it, I promise you.”

Say hello to Kercher O. J. Crowstairs.

It started raining as the funeral party filed away from Jimmy’s grave. I looked up into the slanting gray downpour.

My parents were Wesleyan Methodists; Straight out of the Book of Discipline: no movies, no books except the Bible and the Book of Hymns, no eating in restaurants that hold a liquor license, church four times a week, tithes, and praying out loud in unison till it all melds into a droning chant. Some of the clearest thinking of the early 1700s. God is love and no intermediary is needed to intercede for his children. Not to mention that I confess Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord and pledge my allegiance to His Kingdom.

From this background I fled Pittsburgh and my family with the cynicism that served as Maginot Line against the rape of my sanity, yet unable to shake the inculcated, subcutaneous certainty that God Is Watching. God, the art director; God, the set designer; God, the stage manager.

Who always makes it rain at the most dramatic moments in the burial ceremonies. Just once, I thought, why doesn’t the Holy Director go against form, against type-casting, against cliché. A hail of frogs, perhaps. Or a celestial chorus, and marching band decked out like a New Orleans jazz funeral, with selections ranging from Muskrat Ramble to Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.

I stood there as everyone else filed away, directed by the attendants. Since I was still inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes they let me remain for a moment.

Almost thirty years. I knew you through most of my life, Jimmy. Friends. I don’t even know what that means. I’m sure you must have done things for me on the basis of friendship, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a single one of them. I remember another time of rain, a night in New York, years ago, when we had dinner together and you left me standing in the wet outside the restaurant, I remember that. You hustled down the sidewalk to your car and popped into the Porsche and drove off uptown, never even thinking to offer me a ride back to my hotel. It took me the better part of an hour to get a cab; I remember that.

But friends. Never occurred to me to question that word as the operative definition of our liaison. But what the hell did that ever mean, functionally speaking? You knew almost everything about me, and I knew quite a lot about you, but then so do all your readers, what with the confessional nature of most of what you wrote.

I was one of your readers. Every word published that I could lay hands on.

Which is more than we can say for the reverse, eh, Kerch?

You read “The Hourglass” ten years ago, chum; and made a point of mentioning how good it was every time we got together. I wrote that short story ten years ago, Jimmy! Ten fucking years ago! Nine books since. But by the mute testimony of your failure to mention even one of them, old friend now gone, you told me that it had all been downhill. Ten years ago, Jimmy. That was it, right? The one high spot and then nothing but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, right? Too controlled, that’s what you used to tell me on the nights when we’d sit across from each other at the kitchen table, after your staff had gone to bed, when we’d sit and drink instant and reminisce. Too controlled, too cautious. There wasn’t enough wildness in what I put on the paper. Right? Right.

You had enough. wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

Jesus, I’m lonely without you. Christ, I’m glad you’re gone.

I’d stamped muddy spots a. round my feet. The tops of my shoes were covered. And I looked across the grave, through the rain that was coming down cold and nasty, and Jimmy’s ex-wife Leslie was staring at me. She’d cried so much her nose had swollen and closed both eyes to slits. She held her head to the side like a little girl who’s seen her dolly run over by a speeding car. I couldn’t hear the short, sharp thistles of her sobs, but those Audrey Hepburn shoulders went up and down, each intake of breath painful.

You had enough wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

I walked around the grave and stepped over the black, plush velvet, upholstered rope and scuffed through the pedicured grass to her. She could barely see me, but she knew who it was. We knew how each of us moved, even in the darkness.

I took her in my arms and she buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her dress was soaked through and she was cold, heaving with sobs but not shivering. The weather report had said nothing about rain.

Every few years I was privileged to hold her like this. Usually she was crying. We fitted together, in this way, like ancient stones.

“Come on, love,” I said, over her head, into the rain. “It’s all done now. We’ve got to go put a lid on it.”

She spoke words I couldn’t understand, sending them into the fabric of my jacket. Then more words, two of which were Jimmy’s name and my name. And I turned her slightly, and started to walk her away from the grave site.

“I can’t go over there, Larry. Do I have to go over there?”

I said yes, she had to go over there, it was her due, it was the payoff for all the good times and all the bad times. I said I’d be there with her, and it would be quick, and then we could both go out somewhere and have a couple of dozen extremely potent drinks, and pretend the past was smoother and kinder than flawless recall permitted us to misremember it.

And the last of the limousines was waiting, and we let the chauffeur hold the door for us, and we got in and went off to Jimmy’s baronial mansion to hear the reading of the will.

And Kerch, left behind in the rain, went with us.

Jimmy had been having simultaneous affairs with four women, anyone of whom would have been sufficiently daunting to scare even Vlad the Impaler into impotence. One was an Olympic gymnast, no more than twenty years old, what is usually referred to as coltish, natural blonde naturally, and much given to scenes in restaurants where the maitre d’ objected to her carrying a coatimundi on her shoulder. Her name was Muriel. One was an authority on machine intelligence, in her early thirties, with what used to be referred to as “bee-stung” lips, a mass of heavy, thick black, lustrous hair the shade of thoughts for which one can be jailed without bail, and an intellect that made virtually everything she said incomprehensible to all but five or six of the finest minds on the planet. Her name was Andrea. One. was a Cuban actress who had fled Batista’s tyranny mere hours before an order for her arrest on grounds of moral turpitude was issued, whose exiled status in America had been guaranteed by the extension of said warrant whose grounds of moral turpitude had been upheld by Castro; not yet thirty, in appearance no more than twenty-five, she claimed to be Chicana, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan or Castilian, depending on what the casting director was seeking, with a pair of legs usually referred to as “terminating just under her chin,” with a voice and range that could have shamed Yma Sumac, and a temper that frequently manifested itself in a splendid right cross. Her name was Edith. One was a consumer advocate for CBS television, a former runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss America contest, thirty years old, rather puckishly committed to a variation on the original Ann-Margret coiffure which, given all proper due, admirably suited her auburn hair, opinionated, contentious beyond belief, and directly responsible for a Xerox price rollback that had cost the firm nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Her name was Mary Louise.

I had been seeing Leslie for three years.

Not until six years after they’d married did Jimmy bother to ask if I’d been troubled by the heat-death of the universe. Simply never occurred to him to worry about it. Not that he was bone-stick-stone insensitive; no indeed: it was that he moved too fast for consideration of the emotional debacles at any given point along the scenic route.

They were living in Connecticut, near Crown Point, in a stately manse brought over from Thomas Hardy country, somewhere near Dorset, brick-by-brick, in the early 1900s by a Dutch robber baron who’d made his boodle in association with Elisha Otis on the development of the gearless traction elevator. It was one. of those fumed oak, parquet-floored, wine-cellared beauties all writers dream about owning; just the right setting when one receives the word that one has been awarded a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or an American Book Award, or a high six-figure purchase offer from Paramount. Two, and almost three, of those came to Jimmy in his stately manse. I was writing a lot of book reviews for The Village Voice and Kirkus.

He called late in the afternoon; the last spear of light permitted entrance by the surrounding buildings, had almost vanished from the airshaft, and I sat in gloomy relaxation trying to decipher the Mayan Codex that Doubleday charmingly called a royalty statement.

“What’re you up to?” he said, without identifying himself.

“I’m locked in nonorgasmic congress with Doubleday’s bookkeepers. It’s the first time I’ve ever been fucked by a mindless octopus.”

“How about dinner?”

“When, tonight?”

“Yeah. I’m in the city. You free?”

“According to my royalty statements that’s exactly what I am.”

“The new book isn’t doing well?”

“How could it? They must have taken the entire printing, loaded it on barges, floated it out the Narrows and deep-sixed it. Weighted down, no doubt, by the excess profits from their latest bestselling cookbook.”

“You don’t sound like the man to cheer me up tonight.”

“Sure I am. You can spend my last exuberant evening with me before I establish residency in the nearest leper colony.”

“That would be the Carrville Leprosarium. In Louisiana. And they don’t call it leprosy any more. Hansen’s Disease.”

“Why aren’t I grateful for that information?”

“I could stop off at Abercrombie & Fitch on my way over, and pick up a nice big bell for you. Or maybe a cassette of Frankie Laine singing ‘Unclean, Unclean. ‘ Do wonders for getting you a seat on the subway during rush hour.”

Badinage. Brightalk. Never a discouraging word, and the deer and the antelope play. The ritual incantations of those who had resonated to Salinger. I still had my red baseball cap in the bottom of a carton of old clothes, at the back of the bedroom closet. Nostalgia somehow cannot survive the smell of mothballs.

“I’m here; come on over whenever you’re free.”

“About an hour. We’ll go have a steak. I’m paying.”

I smiled. Naturally, you’re paying. With a five thousand copy printrun of Laurence Bedloe’s most recent astonishment, The Salamander Enchantment, rapidly being carried by salutary sea-currents toward the Bermuda Triangle, naturally you’re paying for steaks. Now if you’re up for Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch, I’m paying.

“See you when you get here.”

“Take care.”

“So long.”

I listened to the dial tone for about two minutes. Then I sat in the growing darkness, thinking about Arctic tundra. somehow it didn’t make the Carrville Leprosarium seem more attractive.

After a while the doorbell buzzed and I put on some lights and let him in. He had the look of a man who had broken some vows.

“I need a drink,” he said. He fell into the rocker with the leather seat, toed off his loafers, and sank down onto his spine, eyes closed. “By the unspeakable name of the slavering hordes of Yog-Sothoth, though Allah be the wiser… I do fiercely need a drink.”

“Can be done, chum. Give it a speakable name and I’ll put it in your paw in moments.”

He rubbed his closed eyes ferociously. From inside his hands he mumbled, “Any damn thing. Largeish, if you will.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and gave the cognac a pass. This looked like heavy weather drinking. I poured Wild Turkey into a big water glass without benefit of jigger, tossed in a single ice cube, raised the level with a little tap water, and carried the BomDer’s Moon back into the living room.

Jimmy was sitting on the floor, in the darkness near the window. I couldn’t see him that well, but I could hear him sobbing. I think I grabbed for the doorjamb to steady myself. In the fifteen years we’d been friends, I’d never seen him cry. I’d never known him to cry. I’d never heard anyone mention that they’ d seen him cry. It had never occurred to me that he might one day, in my presence, cry. I didn’t even know if he was able to cry.

He didn’t know I was there, staring at him.

Very quietly, I carried the glass over to him, put it down beside his crossed legs, and I went back across the room and sat just outside a pool of lamplight, my face in darkness. I had, no idea what to do, didn’t want to say something wrong, definitely didn’t want whatever I finally said to be banality or homey homily; so I waited. Eventually, it seemed to me, he’d stop, take a drink, and we’d talk.

Eventually he stopped, noticed the glass, reached for it slowly and drank long and deep; and then he looked around for me.

“Here’s a new one for you,” he said.

I spoke softly. “Not so new; I do it all the time.”

A marvelous waiting silence resumed.

Quite a while later he said, “I never asked you: were you pissed off at me for marrying Leslie?”

I thought about the right answer. Not necessarily the kindest answer, or the most polite answer, or the truthful answer, just the right one. “I think we were about done with each other.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s an answer. You want others, I can make up others. But that’s definitely an answer.”

More silence. He finished the drink, I went in and threw a lot of cubes in a mixing bowl, brought the bowl and the bottle, and set them down in front of him. He worked at it slowly. Neither of us would end up alcoholics: we weren’t passionate enough about the juice. Oh hi there, I’m recruiting for Richard the Lion-Hearted; we’re putting together a wonderful follow-up to last year’s big hit, The Children’s Crusade. This year it’s The Wino’s March on Mecca, from the people who brought you the Black Death. You’ll just love it—all the Sterno and Grand Marnier you can osmose. Whaddaya say?

Listen, I’ll talk to you later. You go save Mecca, I’ll have a go at writing the Great American Novel, and we’ll meet right next to the big lions on the steps of the New York Public Library two years from now. You can’t miss me, I’ll be the one without the Holy Grail.

“You know, I’ve always felt like your kid brother,” he said.

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

“Always felt faintly ridiculous around you. Loudmouthed, gauche, coming on too strong even when I was purposely speaking so softly I knew people had to strain to hear me.”

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

“You know I’m a better writer than you, don’t you? Not just sales… better. There’s heat in my stuff; it works, it pulls the plow. Better.

“For Christ’s sake, Larry, there’s nothing but cold dead air blowing through your books. They ought to hand out woolly mittens with every copy of your stuff.”

I thought about Arctic tundra. “Six months, Jimmy; just six months.”

He started crying again. “For Christ’s sake, Larry, help me! You’ve got it all together, you’ve got the answers, you’ve always had the answers. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, I’m falling apart. I feel like I’m being emptied out, like a hot water bottle; it’s all running away from me. I’m going to kill somebody, I swear to God I’m going to run through the streets killing strangers.”

“How about some gin rummy, tenth of a cent a point?”

He got up, went into the bathroom and washed his face.

When he came back he sat down in the rocker, looking bushed. “You ready to talk about it now?” I asked.

He stretched his hands out on the arms of the rocker until the fingertips were just at the edge. Just at the edge. “This open marriage with Leslie is killing me. I can’t stand it.”

It was the first I’d heard of it. When he married her I stopped thinking about anything in that area. I never knew what went on with them in that way. I felt my stomach getting cold. That’s the way I respond to photographs of Dachau.

“So get out of it,” I said.

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

He started yelling. “Give me a break, will you? I’ve got nobody else in the world to talk to. You’re my best friend, maybe the only friend I can really trust. I’m talking to you, I’m asking for help!”

What I wanted to say was: come off it, Jimmy! You’ve got exactly and precisely what you always wanted. You’re rich, you’re well-liked, you’re urbane and charming; you’ve got a beautiful, intelligent wife, a big classy home steeped in authentic antiquity; everywhere you go they know you, your face is on the tube and they don’t hold you for The last fifteen minutes of the Carson Show; you go where you want, do what you want, you’re a workaholic under the weight of the Puritan Work Ethic, so you get off on slaving night and day…

You’re who you made you, Jimmy; so come off it.

Wanted to say that. But didn’t. Sat there and said, “Go ahead, tell me what’s happening.” Remember when you were a kid, how awful it was when you bit down on the tinfoil?

And he went on for about two hours, telling me everything about his life, and Leslie’s life, and my life, and about how dear I was to him because I was his role-model. All of this went in and flowed out again, and I must confess there were even three or four things that disgusted me.

And then we went out to O. Henry’s Steak House and had magisterial chunks of some King of the Beasts, and I put ketchup on mine and KercherOliver James Crowstairs, the best:. selling and critically acclaimed author winced and said, “That’s disgusting, Larry.”

And I said: “Chalk it up to improper toilet training.”

Jimmy’s baronial mansion was not the one in which he’d lived with Leslie. That had been Connecticut. This was Los Angeles. The Crown Point mansion had been brought over stone-by-stone from Dorset. This one looked as if it had been brought over ticky-by-tacky from the back lot at Twentieth.

But it had a “library.” Yes, indeed, it had a library that held the 37,000 books Jimmy had owned at the moment of his death. He read a book a day, summer or winter, bright or cloudy, naked or clothed.

And we gathered there, in the high-arched library, for the reading of the will, the last will and testament of Jimmy, beloved Kerch, American literary treasure.

It was not what I expected. But then, Jimmy never did the expected. There was an evening we spent together at a reception for the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, at the Spanish legation in Washington, during which Jimmy had a meaningful relationship with a gigantic silver Cellini tureen filled with applesauce…

It was not what I expected.

The room had been set up with deep, comfortable chairs all facing an enormous beam-television screen. The projector was hooked up with a Sony Betamax unit. An impish-looking man of middle height, wearing what was clearly a very expensive three-piece suit that had not been properly tailored to the slump of his shoulders, stood before the screen holding a document that was very likely the last hurrah of my friend Jimmy Crowstairs.

Despite the serious manner of the imp in the three-piece suit, intended I suppose to give the occasion the proper portentous ambiance, it was impossible to get away from a festive feeling in that room. Jimmy had been an inveterate collector—of everything. The library was floor-to-ceiling with books, almost all hardcovers, arranged alphabetically by author, from Aeschylus, Aldiss and Algren at the left of the topmost shelf of the first bookcase to the left side of the entranceway… to Zamyatin, Zelazny and Zola at the bottom of the last bookcase all the way around the enormous room at the right side of the entrance. But there were also glass cases spotted across the room, containing pewter figurines, Makundi sculpture from Mozambique, lacquered boxes from Russia, T’ang dynasty glazes, gold scarabs encrusted with lapis lazuli from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, scrimshaw from whaling villages in New England, Amerindian pottery, German kinetic sculptures flickering and strobing, ceramic statues from the Austrian courts, fantasy bronzes by Enzenbacher, Spacher and Rumph; and lucite easels with paintings: Kanemitsu, Stamitz, Pebworth, David Hockney, the Dillons, Wunderlich, Bash, Wyeth, Rothko, Kley, Campanile and Willardson. And in the dead center of the room was a nine foot tall model of the Abominable Snowman that Steve Kirk had designed for the Matterhorn at Disneyland.

No matter how hard the imp in the three-piece suit worked at it, he could not possibly overcome the lunatic frivolity of that yeti.

The five chairs were arranged in a semicircle. At the extreme left, already seated, Jimmy’s sister SylviaTheCunt stared straight ahead, folding and refolding the telegram that had commanded her appearance here. The next chair was empty. And the next chair. In the fourth chair sat Jimmy’s friend Bran Winslow, himself a writer, and probably the gentlest human being I’d ever met. He had not been at the burial ceremony. In the last chair, at the extreme right, sat Missy, which was short for Mississippi, who was—and for the past fifteen years had been—Jimmy’s assistant, good right hand, troubleshooter, basic office staff and Person Friday. She let no one call her a “girl,” even if the word Friday followed it.

Obviously the two empty chairs were for Leslie and me.

We moved toward the chairs and started to sit down, but the imp stopped us, saying, “Mrs. Crowstairs, would you take the third seat please; Mr. Bedloe, Kerch wanted you to sit in the second seat.” We rearranged ourselves. It made good sense:, I separated Leslie and SylviaTheCunt, who looked on each other with the enthusiasm one might evince at the prospect of root canal surgery.

The imp waited till we were settled, then he said, “My name is Kenneth L. Gross; I was the attorney for Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs and remain legal counsel for both his estate and The Kerch Corporation in which Mr. Crowstairs was the principal party of record.”

He showed us the document we had all come to hear.

“This document is Mr. Crowstairs’s last will and testament, as you might have supposed. However, it will not be read here today.”

Why had I suspected Jimmy wasn’t finished with us yet?

He waited a moment for the effect, then went on. “Mr. Crowstairs, as you all know, was a rather remarkable man, with a flair for the original. One day, several years ago, we were discussing the preparation of this document, and I mentioned, almost as a joke, that he ought to videotape the reading of his will. Kerch… Mr. Crowstairs immediately fastened on the idea and instructed me to look into the legal ramifications of such a videotaping.

“At first there were questions of validity, but Mr. Crowstairs financed the appropriate research, and in a decision handed down just eight months ago by the Supreme Court of the State of California, such a procedure was adjudged permissible, contingent on a written document being prepared as it has been historically.

“Many of the smaller grants in this document will be handed directly through my office, but the principal beneficiaries are gathered here, per Mr. Crowstairs’s instructions; and you will now hear your bequests directly from the deceased. This extended element of the basic instrument was videotaped four months ago… before any of us had any idea… we never thought…”

He faltered to silence. I liked him a lot. He bad cared about Jimmy.

Then he went behind us and turned on the television set from the projection module, cut in the Betamax, light appeared on the enormous screen, color-bands of leader ran through, and suddenly we were looking at this room, with Jimmy, the attorney, Missy, a tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize, and Bran Winslow, sitting at Jimmy’s desk. It was obvious that Missy, the black woman and Bran Winslow were the witnesses to the execution of the will, and I now understood how two people as close to Jimmy as Missy and Bran had been, who had been there only a few months before when this document had been merely an act of preparing for the long, far inevitable future, had chosen not to attend the burial service.

They all sat up there, larger than life, on the screen, and I thought with the faintest flutter of trepidation, What a field day the archivists will have with this little chunk of literary gossip.

Roll ‘em, C. B. It’s magic time, I thought. Break a leg, Jimmy.

He once took me along with him on what he called a “dangerous mission of research.”

Because of the confessional nature of much of what he wrote—Jimmy had believed Hemingway when Poppa said, “a writer should never write what he doesn’t know”—Kerch was forever putting himself in crazy situations where raw material for books had to be obtained first-hand, usually at risk of one’s life or sanity; or at very least at risk of one’s complexion.

He had scaled mountains, raced sports cars, worked in a steel foundry, traveled cross-county on a Vincent Black Shadow with Hell’s Angels, marched with Chavez in the Coachella Valley, spent time in Southern jails for civil rights activities, chummed it up with a Mafia capo, managed to con a trio of radical feminist lesbians into a four-way sexual liaison, covered a South American revolution, hired himself out to a firm specializing in industrial espionage, and God knows what all else.

He had no secrets when he wrote. He talked about his feelings when his mother had lingered in her endless midnight coma and he signed the order to kick out the plug on her life-support system; he revealed the most intimate secrets of his love life, with Leslie and others; he told stories on himself that men with more humility and a greater sense of shame would have buried in the vaults of their family secrets. Probably because of that open conversation that went on between Jimmy and his millions of readers, his popularity grew and grew. It was possible to trust a man who told everything, a man who could not be morally or literarily blackmailed. It made it seem reasonable that he would go to the burning core of whatever he wrote, because he was not afraid of sunlight striking the tomb of the vampire.

And once he took me with him.

I was living in Chicago at the time, doing editorial work on a men’s magazine. He called and asked if I was free that night, and if I was free would I like to accompany him on a “dangerous mission of research.”

Evenings spent in Jimmy’s company were many things, but they were seldom dull or uneventful. I said I was stoked for an adventure.

He picked me up in a Hertz rental at the office, and all he would say was that we were going deep into the South Side of the city, the section commonly known as Back of the Yards. Oh yes, he said one more thing: he was going to see a woman who had given him a case of the crabs.

I think I responded with the remark, “Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.”

But when we got there—there being a rundown tenement in a scuzzy section—I found an apartment half-filled with card-carrying criminals. They had the appearance of righteous gypsies, some kind of hyperthyroid Romany rejects. Eleven of them, looking like road company understudies for “The Wolf Man,” starring Madame Maria Ouspenskaya.

Four flights up, in what would have been called a railroad flat, had we been in New York and not Chicago, they sat around the kitchen staring at Jimmy and me with dark, hooded eyes. I felt like a cobra at a mongoose rally.

An extremely attractive young woman had opened the apartment door after Jimmy had knocked in a special cadence: two shorts close together, pause, then three more shorts.

“’Open, Sesame’ isn’t required, eh? How convenient,” I said. He gave me one of his looks.

And the door was opened by this extremely attractive young woman, who threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. I stared beyond them, into the kitchen, and was greeted by the massed nastiness contained in ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes.

He held her away from him and murmured something too quietly for the gypsies to hear. What he said, Jimmy always the romantic, was: “What’re you pushing this time… cancer?”

She grinned and gave him a playful punch in the stomach—playful enough to straighten him out with a whooze of pain. Then she led him into the apartment. I followed, not happily.

Let me cut through all the subsequent hours of weird happenings. The background was this:

Jimmy had been out on the lecture circuit the year before. In Kansas City the usual gaggle of esurient sycophants who cannot differentiate between the Artist and the Art rushed the podium for autographs and cheap thrills such as the pressing of flesh. In the crowd had been an extremely attractive young woman who, when her turn came to thrust a book and a pen under Jimmy’s nose, had thrust neither. She had moved in quickly and thrust herself. Reaching for him, she had put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “Why don’t we go back up to your hotel room and see if you can make me groan.”

Needless to say…

About a week later, Jimmy back home, a phone call on his private line. It was the extremely attractive young woman whom Jimmy had made groan. Her name, she told him, was not Mia, as she had told him. She was not, strictly speaking, a bank teller, as she had told him. She was, in fact, a member of a rather large family that specialized in robbing banks. When they were between jobs, she worked as a bank teller. “Who better?” Jimmy had replied to that one. She was on the dodge, spent most of her time underground with different aliases and different pseudo-lives, and she had had a wonderful time with Jimmy whose books, during those long hours underground, had brought her endless pleasure.

When Jimmy inquired why she was revealing all this to him, she shamefacedly admitted—though he couldn’t see her face—that she had probably given him a cataclysmic dose of the crabs.

Without even bothering to check, Jimmy perceived that he had, at last, an understanding of why he had been scratching furiously for the preceding week. As it was his first exposure to Phthirus pubis, he dropped instantly into panic. “I would rather, “ he said later, “have ten thousand years of tertiary syphilis than ten seconds of the crabs.” He had an urgent Candygram from his autonomic nervous system, directing him in the most stridently hysterical tones, to rush off and set fire to his crotch.

She had gone on—unaware that Jimmy was no longer within ratiocination range—to say she hadn’t known about it herself, that she was sorry as hell, and that she thought it was a crummy thing to do to someone who had given her so many hours of pleasure, both in print and in bed. And that, she told him, was why she was calling him to tell him… and spilling the beans about herself. (Which wasn’t that big a deal, apparently, because she wasn’t in Kansas City any more; and he couldn’t very well find her, or the family, if the FBI, the Federal Reserve System, the Organized Crime Task force, Brink’s and the Pinkertons couldn’t find them.)

Ever the polite chap, Jimmy had thanked her decently for taking the time to call on such a piddling matter when she obviously had bigger problems to worry about. Then he hung up the phone, hyperventilated, and sent Missy to the pharmacy to buy copious quantities of A-200 pyrinate Liquid, Cuprex, Kwell cream and Kwelll otion—and a thermite bomb just to be prepared in the event a scorched-earth policy proved necessary.

Now a year later, the Mia-manque had summoned Jimmy from California to Chicago to act as intermediary in the family’s surrender to the Laws (as she called them, reminiscent of the colorful patois of Bonnie & Clyde).

And this once he had taken me with him.

Pseudo-Mia took him by the hand and started to lead him down the hallway toward the rear of the apartment. “Hey!” I said. The sound made by a ferret caught in a clampjaw trap.

Jimmy turned, still being led by the hand, walked backward and said, “Make yourself at home. Strike up new acquaintances. Establish meaningful relationships. I’ll be back.”

And Not-Mia opened a door to what I presumed was a bedroom off the hall—thereby illuminating her family’s liberal, one might even say cavalier, attitude toward her sexual egalitarianism—and she disappeared inside; followed by Jimmy’s disappearing hand, arm, body, and face, leaving behind only the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

I turned to stare at ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes that were staring at me.

A man in his thirties got up, stood aside, and indicated the empty chair at the kitchen table. I sat down, not happily.

At almost the instant I realized there was a wonderful, dark brown smell of something baking in the apartment, the old woman—an old old woman, shapeless and infinitely corrugated with wrinkles—sitting directly across from me reached behind her, wearing a potholder mitt, opened the door of the oven, pulled out a metal bread pan, and slapped it down on the table between us.

“Langos,” she said. She pronounced it lahng-osh.

It smelled sensational. Some kind of deep-fried bread dough she’d apparently been keeping warm in the oven. I looked at it. The guy who had given me his seat took a bowl full of garlic cloves off the sink and put it down in front of me.

“Bread,” he said. “Rub it with the garlic.”

I reached in, took a piece of langos, burned my fingertips, squeaked, provoked ten smiles, added an eleventh, my own, and rubbed the hot surface with a clove of garlic. It tasted sensational.

Then the old, old woman began rattling off at me. She spoke uninterruptedly for about a minute. In Hungarian. I smiled. I nodded. She stopped and looked at me, waiting for a response. I thought of Arctic tundra.

A man in his fifties, sitting to my left, said, “She asks if you know if Laurie will marry Vic Lamont and if Cookie will go crazy and will Simon Jessup kill Orin Hillyer?”

I stopped chewing. I smiled. I nodded. I looked from one to another of them, hoping someone would take pity on a man lost in the desert.

The old, old woman, hearing what the man in his fifties had said, added a few more words. I looked at the interpreter. He spoke resignedly: “ And will Adam Drake fall in love with Nicole?”

I hoped, with profound desperation, that Mia was neither greedy nor afflicted with the djam karet attendant on ownership of a hooded clitoris.

“I’m sorry,” I said slowly, “but I don’t know what she’s talking about.” I smiled. I nodded.

There was an appreciable drop in temperature around the table. The man in his fifties said something short to the old, old woman. She snorted that special snort translatable in any language as, “Who asked for you, who sent for you; who sent for you, who asked for you?”

And so, every instant anguish, I sat there for the better part of an hour. In Indonesia they have. a name for it: djam karet… the hour that stretches.

Eventually, open covenants having apparently been openly entered into, Other-Than-Mia and Jimmy emerged from the bedroom. It looked like a draw.

I got up at a signal from Jimmy, who drew me aside. I started to whisper my. consternation, but he pressed my bicep for silence. Maybe-Mia took my seat, and began speaking in a low, intense voice. In Hungarian. Or Urdu. Or tongues, maybe. What do I know about glossolalia?

She was about fifteen seconds into the recitation when they all started replying. Eleven gypsies, all going at it like the Russians were invading Evanston. A hailstorm of babble.

Jimmy leaned in and said, “You know the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted?”

I nodded. Not happily.

“They just made it to number one.”

“Terrific. I’ll meet you in the car; say my goodbye& for me.”

“Shut up and listen.

“It’s a hype. It’s a publicity dodge. The Feds never put anyone on that list till a week or two before they’re going to make an arrest. That way, they spread it around about all these dangerous felons at large, and a week or so later the Bureau makes a pinch, making it look as if they’re right on top of things. People they can’t find never even get on the list.”

“You’re telling me Jimmy Stewart’s going to break in here any minute with a Thompson submachine gun, is that it?”

“I’m telling you they want to give themselves up; but they’re afraid they’ll get wiped out if they just wait for the Feds to find them.”

“Why don’t they run? God knows they’re in practice.”

“Shut up and listen.

“They want me to be the go-between. To get the press and some responsible local officials in here before they pull the plug.”

“Listen, Jimmy… they pull the plug and you’re liable to lose the baby with the bathwater. I’m referring to me, baby, in case you had any doubts…”

“Take it easy. I did a docudrama about a Chicago psychiatrist for CBS last year…”

I hadn’t heard the word docudrama before. I was looking at him with confusion. He understood my problem and said, “Fictionalized documentary. Semi-real. Touches truth in at least ten places. Anyhow…”

The babble was growing louder. The old, old woman was now silent, watching and listening. The thirty-year-old guy and the fifty-year-old guy were obviously on opposite sides of the question—whatever the question was—and I could see the crowd was about evenly divided. The older guy was with Mia, whatever she was proposing, and I had the certain feeling that if the thirty-year-old guy’s point of view prevailed, that this baby might go down the drain before Jimmy Stewart made one of his rare personal appearances.

“Are you listening to me?” Kerch demanded, squeezing my arm.

“No,” I whispered, “I’m listening to them. Somehow I get the feeling what they’re saying has more to do with my living to a dignified old age.”

“Just shut up and listen, for Christ’s sake!

“Marvin Ziporyn is his name… the psychiatrist. He’s the top shrink for the state. Works with the Cook County authorities. Concert violinist, big social mover, wrote a couple of books; he’s got access to Kup and the Mayor and everybody else.”

I was staring openly now. Hell, anybody could get to the Mayor; but access to Irv Kupcinet, the columnist; well, that was the Big Time.

“So?”

“So I call Marvin, tell him what I’m into, get him to contact Kup, who’ll love it a lot. They pull in a few of the local squires and top cossacks… and Mia and the crowd remand themselves into proper custody.”

“Before Jimmy Stewart breaks in…”

“Right, right.”

“I’ll meet you at the car. Thank the old lady for the bread.” I started toward the door. The thirty-year-old guy erupted from his seat and if there was anything else in that lousy kitchen but the gigantic. 45 in his hairy paw, I didn’t see it. There is a quality about blue-steel gunmetal that gathers all light in a room; like a black diamond.

He was pointing it at me.

I grinned stupidly, placed both palms against the air and tittered like the village idiot. He seemed somewhat mollified and the barrel of the automatic lowered to the vicinity of my crotch. For a moment there it had been like staring into the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, only bigger.

“Damn it, Larry, stop acting like a schmuck. Let Mia handle it. “.

“Her name isn’t Mia.”

“Whatever her name is; let her handle it.”

So I stood there with him, leaning against the wall, for the better part of an hour while the Sanhedrin decided my fate.

Sometime during that hour I asked him, “Who’s Vic Lamont?”

He said, “Who?”

I said, “Vic Lamont.”

He said, “Never heard of him.”

I said, “Will Laurie marry him?”

He said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I said, “Will Laurie marry Vic Lamont; will Cookie go crazy; will Simon Somebody-or-other kill Orin Hillyer; will Adam Something-or-other fall in love with Nicole?”

He stared at me.

“The old lady seemed miffed I didn’t know the answers,” I whispered.

He thought about it a minute. Then he said, “The Edge of Night. It’s a soap opera.”

I said, “Why me?”

He said. “Because you’re with me, and Mia told them I’m a famous television writer, and that means you’re a famous television writer, and that means you know what happens to all those characters in the soap operas, because they’re not characters, they’re real people, and I suppose when you’re on the lam the only consistency in your life is the surrogate life of people in soap operas. What’d you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about.”

He said, “How’d she take it?”

I said, “Not terrific.”

He nodded, thought about it a minute, then called Mia over. He took her aside, whispered at her for a little while, then sent her back to the table. She bent down over the old, old woman, whispered in her ear for a while longer, and when she straightened up the old, old woman was grinning wide as a death’s head. Her mouth was a classic argument for compulsory remedial orthodontia.

Whatsername sat down and smiled, waiting.

Then the old, old woman said something sharp and hard. In Hungarian. Everybody shut up and stared at her. Then she said something else, not quite as sharp and hard, and the thirty-year-old guy packing the Holland Tunnel bowed his thorny head, nodded in supplication, and murmured words of acquiescence.

The fifty-year-old spoke rapidly to the Ghost of Mia Past, every once in a while pointing at Jimmy or me, or Jimmy and me. Once, damned sure, he was making a threat; and once, damned certain, he was giving warning. She nodded, said okay okay okay every few sentences, added a thought here and there and, finally, it all seemed settled.

She got up, came over to us, and said, “All set. Do your stuff, Kerch.”

He gave her a little kiss and started toward the old black two-handed pedestal telephone on the kitchen counter. I asked the Memory of Mia, “What’s all set?”

She patted me on the cheek and answered, “They’re not going to cut you into small pieces and leave you in garbage cans all over the South Side.” Then she went away, to join my best friend, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs, who had brought me along into the jaws of death on a “dangerous mission of research.”

It was not till a week later, after the gypsy bank robbers had given themselves up with attendant headlines and photos of Jimmy leading them out of the tenement into the waiting arms of Irv Kupcinet, the Mayor of Chicago and the bureau Chief of the Midwest Regional FBI office (not to mention several thousand cops and G-Men armed for the apocalypse), that Kerch bothered to tell me that what had saved our lives was Mia’s imparting to her dear old Granny the information that I was a close family friend of everyone on The Edge of Night and that when (or if) Granny ever got sprung from the federal slam, I would introduce her to Laurie, Vic Lamont, Simon Jessup, Orin Hillyer, Cookie, Nicole and Adam Drake, whoever the hell they were!

“My name is Kercher O. J. Crowstairs,” said the Kercher O. J. Crowstairs three times life-size on the screen before us. The camera pulled back into a medium shot and Jimmy up there whipped open the wallet lying on the desk. He pulled out a sheaf of cards and held the first one up to the camera, which obligingly zoomed in for a closeup. Jimmy’s voice, off-camera, said, “ And this is my driver’s license, issued by the state of California. You’ll notice it has a rather unflattering photograph of me right here in the lower left-hand corner, which will identify me as the one and only K. O. J. Crowstairs, your friendly neighborhood testator.”

The camera had slowly pulled back to include the attorney, Kenneth L. Gross. He was making a small moue at Jimmy’s levity. The moue became a stricture as Jimmy held up one card after another:

“And this is my BankAmericard/Visa card; and this is my Master Charge card; and this is my Diners Club card, but I don’t use it much; and this is my Carte Blanche; and this one will rent me a Hertz, and this one an Avis, and this one will get me a tacky room in any Holiday Inn across the face of the Earth; and this one is for Neiman-Marcus, and this one is for good old Bloomingdale’s, and…”

He must have caught the strangled moan from Gross, because he stopped. He dropped the rest of the thick pack of cards, and looked into the camera.

“Look: we’re doing this videotape so no one, and that means no one will be able to raise the question of my competency after I’ve croaked. By competency they mean was I of sound mind and body, and under no duress, such as being held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army. But if I played it absolutely straight, and didn’t laugh at all this somber bullshit, then anyone who’s known me more than ten minutes would suspect I was out of my skull.

“Nonetheless…” and he said this hurriedly, because Gross was making the kind of strangling noises that, had he uttered them in a good restaurant, would have brought the maitre d’ running to administer the Heimlich Maneuver, “nonetheless, moving right along to the serious stuff, folks, here’s my friend and advisor, the world-famous corporate attorney, Mr. Kenneth L. Gross, who’d like to say a few words. Let’s give him a big funeral day welcome… Kenny Gross!”

The attorney was the color of old toothpaste as he read from a prepared form. “Mr. Crowstairs, you have now established your identity for those who may be seeing this recording at a later date. You have retained this office in connection with estate planning and more specifically to prepare your will. The document I now show you (handing will to client), is the final draft of that will. Would you please take a moment to review it?”

The screen now went to split-frame, the right side being a copy of the will. Jimmy took the document Gross handed him and scanned it. “But this is a laundry list, Kenny.” The attorney damned near fainted. Jimmy laughed and hurriedly corrected himself. “I’m kidding, I’m just kidding; this is my will; honest to God, I swear it is!”

Gross was breathing hard. I felt for the poor devil. “Is this the document that you have, hopefully, previously read?”

“Yes, it is. But you don’t mean hopefully, Kenny. You mean I hope, or it is to be hoped, or one hopes. You see, when you use the word ‘hopefully,’ you’re reporting a subjective state of mind; that is, full of hope. Your error is in attributing your hope to the object, in this case the will… or is the object me? I’m never really sure of parts of speech. In any case, if you were to reverse the word, you’d see how wrong it’s being used: hopelessly I’ve read it. See what I mean? Good grammar, Kenny; always good grammar. Your mother and I have chided you about this on numerous occasions…”

Gross exploded. “Mister Crowstairs! If you will, sir! This is a serious undertaking! Now is this, or is this not the document previously read by yourself?”

“It is, it is! Nag, nag, nag.”

Gross gave it up. He bulled. forward. Not happily. “Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document… no, wait… I’m out of sequence! Damn it, Kerch!”

Jimmy grinned infectiously. He was never happier than when he was stirring up the soup. He laid a placating hand on Gross’s. “Take it easy, Kenny. Don’t fumfuh.”

Gross swallowed; as they say, he looked daggers at his client, pulled a weathered pipe with a large Oom Paul bowl and a bent stem from his vest pocket, puffed it alight with a kitchen match taken from his other vest pocket, harrumphed once, and began again

“All right, then: In my presence, and in the presence of these witnesses, and cognizant of the fact that these proceedings are being videotaped, does this document reflect your exclusive and entire wishes with regard to the disposition of your property?”

Testator responded in the affirmative: “I respond in the affirmative.”

The attorney now turned to the three witnesses. “Each of you has known Mr. Crowstairs for many years. You have been asked to participate in these proceedings for the purpose of further identification. Will you now, each in turn, declare who you are, your relationship to Mr. Crowstairs, and verify that this is, in fact, Mr. Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.”

Camera came into closeup on the first witness as the splitscreen went to solo image.

“My name is Brandon Winslow. I have been a close personal friend, house guest and sometime-collaborator of Kercher Crowstairs for almost fourteen years; and I hereby declare that the man over there with all the credit cards is, in fact and as he’s stated, the Crowstairs he says he is.”

Well, well, I thought, oh my ears and whiskers.

“Sometime-collaborator.” Now there’s one phrase I never thought I’d hear in connection with Jimmy. So Bran had been paying off the loans and the live-in companionship with something more valuable than coin of the realm. He had worked on some of the books. That went a long way toward explaining how Jimmy could turn out his novel and a short story collection every year as regular as the swallows visiting Capistrano, plus finding the time for all the introductions, newspaper columns, background pieces for TV Guide; the lectures, the television talk show appearances, the writing workshops; and the women. He had another laborer in the vineyard. A bond slave.

I cast back through the long list of Crowstairs publications trying to figure out which ones had been co-written—entirely ghost-written?!?!—no, it was unthinkable—but then, collaboration had been unthinkable till Bran had let the black cat cross the path—and I came up with two immediately.

Bakelite Radio Fantasies and Fearsome Noises. They were gentler, more thoughtful than was Jimmy’s wont. There was greater lyricism in them, closer in tone to Bran’s own solo novel—his only novel—Knowledge of Two Kinds. They were a couple of my favorite Crowstairs creations.

And my heart contracted in my chest as I realized that in some way Bran Winslow had sold himself to Jimmy, had denied his own career, to add a few more chapters to the myth of Kercher Crowstairs. I didn’t want to know what Jimmy had had on Bran, that could make him, seemingly willingly, put aside his own work, to become a secret shadow of the public Kerch.

To me, it was unthinkable. The more I thought about it, the more often the word unthinkable burned in the darkness. Unthinkable: Jimmy was many kinds of a man, but blackmailer wasn’t one of them. Unthinkable: Brandon Winslow was as fiercely committed to his art as was I, as was Jimmy…

Unthinkable!

No one has that kind of charisma. I simply wouldn’t go for it. There had to be something deeper, something more potent. It was unthinkable that a writer of Bran Winslow’s sincerity and dedication would simply give over his life to Jimmy; it was unthinkable that Jimmy’s fever could be passed on to another writer—possibly a better writer, a more important writer, an intrinsically more valuable, a worthier writer—to cause him to deny the song of his own Muse. But now that I’d thought it, as unthinkable as it had seemed…

Kercher Crowstairs refused to acknowledge the night.

He had a quote from Thomas Carlyle taped to the molding of the bookcase right over his typewriter:

He refused to cower against the fear of scaled or furry or fanged creatures moving toward him. in the night.

He was a sharpened stick.

He was in motion, no sitting target.

He did not play poker, yet he never sat with his back to the door.

But such a level of energy has to dissipate itself before it can consume another writer. It has to! Sheer force of will, massed totality of personality, unleashed waves of charismatic power… no one has that. No one! Unthinkable goddam you Kerch Jimmy!

What the fuck did you have on Bran Winslow to turn him into your Uncle Tom? Your Stepin Fetchit? Your coolie laborer? Second sax in your brass section? Make-work creative typist?

Oh, Jesus, Jimmy, this is most hateful; and I don’t even know what was behind it.

Poor Bran.

Damn! Stop that! Stop thinking that way. There was a reason, a solid, good reason. There had to be. No writer can do that to another writer who knows how good he is, who has the books in him crying out to be released. No one. No damn you, no one!

My head was swimming. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Can you hold the tape,” I heard myself saying; and then as the film vanished and white screen appeared, I bolted out of my chair and rushed for the toilet.

That dyspeptic old fart Nelson Algren got three out of four. He wrote: “Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat in a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Close. Very close.

But he missed a fourth:

“Never let anyone catch you down on your knees puking into a toilet bowl.”

Especially not a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

I should have locked the door. But the bile was pushing as if it were spring-loaded; I barely had time to get into the can before I felt it coming like the Sunshine Express. Down on my knees, loving the toilet bowl, and then the river of fire.

Leslie was in there, right behind me, trying to hold my forehead, for Christ’s consumptive sake, with me hurling and heaving like a boa constrictor that’s swallowed a Peterbilt. I shoved at her, ineffectually, as she continued to play Lady Bountiful to my bounty.

I flailed my free arm behind me, trying to get her to back off. I think in that moment I realized just how insensitive she is. There’d always been hints… such as her revelation at a group dinner many years before that she had, as a child, thrown a hamster into a window fan… and then, of course, she’d stayed married to Jimmy; that had to indicate more than a soupçon of the obdurate.

But the level of insensitivity it takes to force someone in the most degrading condition known to humanity to think that he’s being watched while he glops up his guts, no matter if it’s misguidedly interpreted as “concern” or “out of love,” is a bestial level whereon one finds only flagstones or spent shell casings. Back off!

After a while I got up, filled the sink with cold water, put my face into it completely, and lay there for quite a length pf time, allowing the spittle and other nastiness to float away on the tide. My eyes were burning. I could not, thank God, see my face in the water.

I emptied the bowl, washed thoroughly, gargled as best I could with icy water, and reached for a towel. Leslie was standing there with one in her outstretched hand.

I took it. “Thank you very much.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dandy. Just dandy.”

“That was awful.”

I looked a surprised look. “Oh, really? It usually brings down the house. The awestruck expressions of the crowd are usually upon me.” Back the fuck off!

“My God,” she said, “you know you’re even starting to talk like him?”

Have you never perceived that before, my love? Have you never caught on that my interior monologues are never in my own voice, never the way I write or speak? They are pure Jimmy. That quick-silver turn of the phrase, all that heat and color; not the plodding, methodical, reasonably reasoned wise uncle with good, solid thinking of Laurence Bedloe, but rather the bold, sure spring of the tiger, and I believe in you. Never caught that, eh? How sad, how sorry: if I were to write up the relationship between the Recently Departed and Larry Bedloe it would be in the assumed voice of Kerch Jimmy. You didn’t pick up on that? You’re simply not paying attention.

“The hamster isn’t the most awful I’ve ever heard,” I said, “although it is in the top tenth of a percentile of the most awful.”

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

“The most awful, I guess, was something Missy told me. She said that when she was a kid Down South they used to take baby ducks and chicks, and they’d bury them up to their no-necks in the dirt, and then they’d run the lawn mower over them. Now that is yucchh.”

Her face was all pulled out of shape. “I’m calling the doctor.”

There was a set of silver-backed military brushes on the counter. I picked them up and started brushing back my wet hair. I looked at her in the mirror and said, “Very good idea. You call the doctor. Make it a voodoo doctor, if you can get Inboard to clear a line to Haiti. Get a specialist in resurrection. Tell him we’re not sure Jimmy is completely all the way dead… that he seems to be clinging ferociously to life… your life, my life, Bran’s life…”

She started to cry. I put the brushes down and turned to her; but I didn’t take her in my arms, usually pro forma. I just stared at her. She had the heels of her hands in her eyes and she was starting to get into it.

“Come on, Leslie! Pack it in, darlin’!”

She fell against me, put her arms around me.

“Then,” I said, “he pushed her away.” And I pushed her away.

She looked at me. She said, “What?”

“He stared back at her,” I said, “and said simply, ‘We don’t walk backward, do we? You’re his wife; you’ll always be his wife, even if you remarry, even if you’re canonized; he owns you. You say no, but five years from now you’ll make a deal with Simon & Schuster and have poor Bran out there ghostwrite your memoirs—I Was Kercher’s Koncubine. ‘ And he shook his head sadly,” I said, “and he walked to the door and walked out.” And then I walked past her to the door and walked out.

Not so hard ghostwriting in the voice of a ghost.

They all looked at me as I reentered the library. I patted the Abominable Snowman on the belly and resumed my appointed seat, ready to let Jimmy have another go at me. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails would have been a happier prospect.

They were still looking at me as Leslie came in. “Something I ate, perhaps. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato. More of gravy than of grave. Do let’s continue with the show.” All but Leslie continued to stare at me, touched by astonishment. Ah, of what good are literary allusions in the Land of Functional Illiterates, close to the borders of the Kingdom of the Blind?

But we continued.

The videotape began playing again, and once” again we were in this library, weeks ago, only a moment after Bran had identified Jimmy as Jimmy and caused me to lose a perfectly lovely breakfast from DuPar’s Farmhouse. The tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize now spoke, as the camera came in on her.

“My name is Eusona Parker, and I have been Mr. Crowstairs’s housekeeper for eighteen, going on nineteen years; and that’s him sitting right there; and don’t nobody try to say he’s not in his sound mind and body ‘cause I have known him all these years and he’ s just as sharp and clean and neat as a pin as he’s ever been. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

No wonder I didn’t recognize her. Eusona Parker had lost about eighty pounds.

Every Wednesday. That was Eusona’s day. I’d only seen her half a dozen times through the years, when I was in Los Angeles and visiting Jimmy. But if anyone knew his state of health, it was Ms. Parker. She had been more of a true mother to Jimmy than his own natural mother. What I remembered best about her was the “hearing aid.”

She had a memory that should have been on display in the Smithsonian. It might be three or four years between our seeing each other; but when I’d come out of the blue guest room searching for coffee early on a Wednesday morning during one of my visits, there would be Eusona, dusting Jimmy’s vast, endless hoard of tchotchkes; and she’d look up and grin as if I’d been there uninterruptedly for years, and she’d say, “Good morning, Larry, sleep good?” And I’d scream at her, “Hello, Eusona, how are you?” And she’d answer, “Doin’ just fine, Larry; water’s still hot.” And I’d scream, “Thanks, Eusona.”

The reason I screamed was that she wore a hearing aid. One of those little button things shoved into her ear, the cord trailing down to disappear into the capacious pocket of her wraparound apron where the shape of the battery pack bulged.

And we went on that way, amiably, until one time she stopped me in the back corridor leading to the greenhouse, took me by the hand like a small boy who’s been caught eating worms in the schoolyard, and she said, “Mr. Bedloe, why do you always scream at me?”

She never called Jimmy “Mr. Crowstairs” unless he was behaving badly or living with a woman who left globs of mascara on the mirror in the bathroom, and she never called me anything but Larry unless I had left my bed unmade. Ms. Parker made it clear she was a housekeeper, not a maid; and if I slept in it, I ought to make it when I got out of it. “Mr. Bedloe” was her way of politely saying pay close attention now, asshole.

“Why, uh, I’m sorry, Eusona,” I said, terribly embarrassed as one can only be embarrassed when one has been caught staring at the empty place between eyes and mouth where a leper’s nose has fallen off. “I was speaking loudly because I wanted you to hear me.”

“Well, I’m not hard of hearin’, dear.”

That dear of hers: butter would not have melted in her mouth. I’ve never understood what that meant, it never made sense to me, butter not melting. Whatever it meant, it’s what that dear was all about. The dear you use when you say, “No, dear, the round hole is for the round peg.”

“You’re not?”

“No, Mr. Bedloe, dear, I’m not hard of hearing.”

Mr. Bedloe and dear.

“But you wear a hearing aid. “

“Mistuh Bedloe, this is not a hearing aid.” And she pulled the earphone of the transistor radio in her apron, out of her ear and, faintly, like fairy trumpets, I heard the tinny sound of Steve Garvey batting the brains out of the Cardinals’ relief pitcher, bottom of the seventh, two out, a man on third.

All that went through my head as Kenneth L. Gross said, “Yes, Miss Parker, that’s all you have to do, is identify Mr. Crowstairs.”

“That’s him. I said it.”

“Thank you, Miss Parker.”

“Neat as a pin, everything right in place; always been like that, eighteen going on nineteen years.”

“Thank you, Miss Parker.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

Then Missy identified him; then Jimmy as testator stated the date and stated that the will being made on that date took precedence over all other wills previously made by him, including any that might be found written in cuneiform on stone tablets by gas station attendants roaming in the Nevada deserts.

Then the roundelay went like this:

Kenny: Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document with a complete satisfaction on your Pal. that it says what you wish it to say, and that you understand it in its entirety?

Jimmy: Affirmative. And it should be noted for the record that the last person to marry a duck lived four hundred years ago.

Kenny: Choke. Are you prepared to execute this document and accordingly state for the record, in my presence and in the presence of witnesses, that in so doing you are not acting under duress, undue influence, or under the influence of any drug or other substance that may impair your mental capacity?

Jimmy: I had a Coca-Cola about half an hour ago, does that count?

Kenny: No sir, it does not. Please!

Jimmy: Are you sure, Kenny? I mean, if you take a piece of raw meat and you put it in a glass of Coke and leave it overnight it comes out looking like something from a James Bond movie. You know, all those little piranha bubbles ill there, they could chew the shit out of your brain cells.

Kenny: It doesn’t count, damn it!

Jimmy: Then how about all the stuff I put up my nose just before we started filming?

Kenny: Aaaargh!

Jimmy: Okay, okay, take it easy. I’m just clowning. I don’t use dope, you know that. Everybody knows it. I couldn’t possibly write the crap I write if I was ripped. Having my nostrils Tefloned was just for a lark, you know that.

The attorney laid his head down on his arms and pounded the tabletop with his fist. It was pathetic what Jimmy was doing to this poor soul. We all looked around in the semidark but Kenneth L. Gross was back there in the shadows, no doubt chewing through the bit of his pipe.

On the screen Jimmy was being upbraided by his three witnesses. They whipped him into a semblance of probity and urged Kenny Gross to resume the proceedings.

The attorney said, “Therefore, in my presence and in the presence of the witnesses, God help us, is it your wish that you now execute the document and that we sign the document as witnesses thereto?”

Client responded in the affirmative.

“I will then ask, Mr. Crowstairs, that you now initial each and every page in the lower right-hand corner…”

“I’m left-handed.”

“Then do it in the lower left-hand corner but for God’s sake initial the damned thing already!” He was shouting; it seemed to quell Jimmy. He started initialing. Gross went on weakly, “Up to but not including the signature page. For your information and for the record, this is being done so that no pages can be substituted in the future into this document.”

He was standing now, over Jimmy’s right shoulder, behind him, turning the pages to verify each one was properly initialed (and possibly to insure that Jimmy didn’t sign Herman Melville or Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg).

It went on that way without hindrance. Jimmy had clearly grown bored with the activity and even bored with the japery that had made the proceedings minimally tolerable. Jimmy reached the signature page and filled in the location of execution of the will, then the date, and then he signed it. Then each of the witnesses signed location, date and name. The latter two added their place of residence. The will was returned to Gross, who asked if Jimmy wanted the will kept in the attorney’s vault and a conformed copy provided to Jimmy, or if the client wanted to keep the original with a conformed copy in Gross’s possession. Jimmy waved a hand negligently. “You keep it; send me a copy.”

Gross said he would do so and, painfully aware that the juice was running out of the presentation, said, “For the record, the witnesses need not be present during any videotaping portion which is about to occur and the only people who will be present will be myself, Mr. Crowstairs, and the two camera persons.”

Yo-ho-ho. Here we go. Up there on the screen Missy, Bran and Eusona Parker rose, walked out of camera range and damned certainly out of the room, and Gross turned to Jimmy and said, “Mr. Crowstairs, if you wish, you may say some words to your beneficiaries or for that matter, to anyone who may have been excluded by you under your last will which we have just executed.”

He placed what was obviously a seating diagram of this room as Jimmy had planned it to be arranged on the desk in front of Jimmy, got up, and backed out of camera range. Now all we had on the screen was Jimmy sitting behind his desk, hands folded demurely, staring out at us, looking right to left as if he really could see us, back there four months ago when he had known for certain that he would live forever.

He looked first at SylviaTheCunt, then at me, then at Leslie, then at Bran who was seeing and hearing this for the first time—which may have been why he hadn’t attended the burial ceremonies—and finally, at my right but Jimmy’s extreme left, Missy. She hadn’t spoken all day.

But I’d make book she knew what was coming.

Jimmy stared at us, and we stared back at him. He kept us waiting. I don’t know what the others wanted—vindication, protestations of love, vast wealth, security for their twilight years, remorse, the slam bang of gin and vermouth, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—but all I wanted was to be turned loose. Tempest-tossed, righteous card-carrying wretched refuse, I merely yearned to breathe free. To sever the bond with Jimmy. I heard a sound. I’ll tell you what that sound sounded like:

On July 28, 1945, a foggy Saturday on the East Coast, Army Air Forces Lt. Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. took off from Bedford, Massachusetts in a B-25 light bomber for La Guardia. Field in New York. A few minutes after 10:00 A. M. Lt. Col. Smith crashed his two-engine bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building at the level of the 78th and 79th floors.

On the 75th floor of the Empire State Building an office worker who had come in to do some extra work over the weekend heard a sound. A terrifying, ominous, hurtling-toward-him sound. He looked out the window to see, emerging from the fog, ten tons of screaming airplane rushing toward him at 225 m.p.h.

I sat staring, waiting for Jimmy to speak to us from beyond the grave. I heard a sound, rushing toward me out of the fog at 225 m.p.h.

This is how Jimmy died.

The story was in all the papers.

It was pried loose, finally, from one of the three culeros they pulled out of the other wreck. All three of them lived; one of them lost his left leg; one of them has no teeth. But that was Jimmy, not the crash.

Appropriately enough it was Halloween. That’s Bradbury’s favorite holiday; and it’s mine, and it was Jimmy’s. It was last week.

Jimmy had spent the evening at a party thrown by one of the two married couples who had been inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes at the burial ceremonies. Huck and Carol Barkin. She’s an architect, he’s a writer. They were very close to Jimmy.

Around midnight Jimmy had left. He’d only had a couple of glasses of wine, perfectly sober and, in fact, had been drinking Perrier since ten o ‘ clock. That figures in the story.

He took a cold quart bottle of Perrier with him when he left, swigging it straight from the mouth to his mouth in the car. Then he realized he was almost out of gas, probably couldn’t make it back to the Valley and the ancestral manse, went looking for an open station on a holiday, near midnight, in Los Angeles where odd-even allocation is taken seriously.

He found a serve-yourself that was open, but they wouldn’t let him fill up because it was an odd-numbered day and he had license plates that ended in an even number. So he pulled off to one side and waited for the clock to run past midnight when it would be the next day and he could get pumped up.

I wasn’t there, no one was there in his head, but I know what he was like, and from the story the culeros told, it had to have happened like this. And even if it didn’t let’s see how well we can get inside the characters, let’s see how fluidly we can carry the action, let’s see if we can plumb the intricate motivations. This is called sensitive, creative writing; full of heat, Jimmy; pulling the plow, Jimmy; getting the powerhouse up to peak efficiency.

What we need is a good opening, a tough literary hook.

Kerch Crowstairs slumped behind the wheel of the Rolls Corniche, listening to the second movement, the Allegro appassionato, of Brahms’s Concerto in B-flat major. In the chopped and channeled Chevy beside him the raucous clatter of the Eagles banged uneasy counterpoint…

No, too esoteric. Not Hammett enough.

How about this:

He was distracted. Thinking about the past, the future, indefinite times and opportunities passing too fast for analysis. Under him the Rolls hummed softly, waiting for the light to change. Beside him three Chicanos in a decked Chevy raced their motor. Drag for pink slips, mister?

No, too diffuse. Not enough oomph.

I can’t do it, Jimmy. I can’t write like you! I can talk and think in your voice, because I can hear you… I’ve always had phonographic recall. But I can’t put it down in your bloodthirsty Visigoth way.

What happened was…

He filled the tank. He drove back out onto the street. He was listening to the classical music on KFAC-FM. He was smoking his pipe. He was sitting at the light, waiting for it to change, simply enjoying the cool night air and the pleasant music and the smoke rising from the pipe. The empty Perrier bottle lay on the passenger seat. A car pulled up beside him in the left lane. Someone spoke in the night. He was caught up in the gentle feel of the music washing over him, the sense of ease and leisure. He was relaxed. For once, he wasn’t on, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t hyper. He was feeling good; and he paid no attention to the voice. But it spoke again, louder, coarser, directed at him. He looked across. Two young men, late teens, maybe early twenties, in the front seat. Another one in the back seat, looked asleep. The kid closest to him yelled again. “Hey! Cabrón! What’re you smokin’ in the pipe?” The’ light changed. He took off. At the next light they raced up, gunned the motor, closer to his lane now. “Hey, man, de dónde? I ast you what the fuck you smokin’ in the pipe?” He stared ahead. He didn’t want any hassles. God, don’t these lights change? “Hey, mamador, you gonna answer me or I’m gonna come over there an ‘ whip your ass?” He lOOked at them. If Rich Garza or Pano Del Rio were here, they’d have just the right words to back these clowns off. But he was alone. “I’m smoking Essence of Asshole,” he said: “I’m smokin’ your mama.” And the light changed, and he hit it. They ran up his tailpipe to the next light. Jesus, how many lights are there before the freeway? As he screeched to a halt the one on the passenger side jumped out and came across to grab him. He dumped it into reverse, backed up three feet, threw open the door and knocked the silly sonofabitch flat on his ass. Then he took off through the just-changing light. Behind him the passenger was climbing back aboard as the driver decked it. They caught him at the next light and he thought about going straight through: the freeway was one street up. But now the adrenalin was pumping. He stopped at the light and grabbed the empty Perrier bottle. When the passenger got to his window he swung the bottle in his left hand with a flat, scythelike movement and busted out the guy’s teeth, emptied his mouth and sent him careening backward into the Chevy. Then he went through the light, turned sharp left, ran down the side street to the freeway entrance, hit the ramp doing sixty and was on the San Diego before the driver could load his buddy back into the trashwagon. ¡Huo de la chingada!

They caught him just beyond the interchange of the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways. He was in the fast lane, the number one next to the divider. He was doing seventy-five. The Chevy came up on the right and the berserk latino swung it over hard; lock to lock, maybe not—but hard. The Rolls took it just behind the door, slewed into the cyclone fence, scraped along throwing sparks back in a fan, then shot ahead as Jimmy floored the Corniche. ¡Puto pendejo!

Doing ninety, he cut out of the number one lane, slanted across the second, third and fourth lanes, and ran away. The Chevy caught up on the grade leading through the saddle of the hills to the Valley. The culeros rear-ended him. Hard; once twice three times. Jimmy braked, speeded up, cut in and out, but the Chevy was hot, it ran him down like a bulldogger. ¡Vatos locos!

Two miles before the Mulholland offramp the cholos said aw, fuck it, and decided to boom him. They came up in the number three, doing ninety-five, went ahead by two car-lengths and slant-drove across his bow. Jimmy stood on the brake but it didn’t count. They impacted at eighty-five, the Corniche went in hard on the right front, ricocheted, spun out and went over the side. The Rolls hit the berm, dropped and began to somersault. The Chevy was horizontal across the three and four lanes, caught a centerpunch from a long-distance moving van, lifted, went tail-over onto its roof, sliding across the shoulder, followed Jimmy over the side two hundred yards beyond him and came to rest against a low hillside.

Behind the latinos the Rolls Corniche took one last roll, hit the crumbling hillside and went off like a can of beer shaken in a centrifuge. It blew apart scattering hot metal and parts of Jimmy allover the Santa Monica Mountains.

Say goodbye to Kercher O. J. Crowstairs.

“I’m not feeling too giddy about all this, now that we’re alone,” Jimmy said from the screen. “You five are the most I’ve got left. Everybody else has been taken care of; okay, they’re okay; I took good care of them, in the ancillary sections of the will. But you five are the big scores, and I wanted you to hear it straight from. me.”

He stopped, wiped his mouth. Jimmy nervous? Come on, give me a break here.

“Missy, you’re first,” he said, looking all the way to his left, directly where Mississippi was slouched in her seat, long legs crossed straight out in front of her. “You get The Kerch Corporation and all its holdings.”

SylviaTheCunt gasped, off to my left. The smell of cardiac arrest was there in the library.

Jimmy went on. “You keep it running. There’s the land up at Lake Isabella, we own it free and clear now, and it’ll be built up pretty big within the next five years, they’re putting in that Kern County International Airport. Keep adding to the art, find a place to show it, something nice and stately like the Norton Simon Museum… you know… something toney and really chi-chi. Set your own salary, keep on as much of the staff as you need, hire more, fire some, do what the hell you want with it. It was just a dodge to keep the tax fuckers off my carcass, anyhow. You make it into something terrific, kiddo. I love you, babe. You watched out for me real good.”

Missy was crying. Toughest woman I ever met, but she—even she—lost it when Jimmy went to work at the top of his form. In Iran there’s a word—zirangī—it means cleverness, or wiliness. The Machiavellian quality. It’s much admired by the Shiites. Jimmy would have been a smash in Islam.

“And for the record,” Jimmy added, “let it be known that never once in all the years you and I worked together, did we once so much as fondle each other’s genitalia. The bantlings will need their gossip, m’love; and they’ll fasten first on she who was my amanuensis. Let the slushfaces herewith take note: you and I worked together for fifteen years plus however many more wash under the bridge from the date of this taping before I bite the big one, mostly on the basis of your being the best goddamned pool-shooter I ever met. I would have fired your tidy ass a million times, kiddo, if it hadn’t been that you shot the most unbelievable three-bank cushions into the hip pockets.”

Missy was dry now. And smiling gently.

Then he turned to Brandon Winslow sitting right beside her.

“Bran, my friend… I’ve done you right, and I’ve done you wrong. But you never once treated me like a hotshot, and for that I cannot thank you enough. Other people were in awe, or they wanted to drink my blood, or they came sharpshooting. But you were my friend and my colleague, and you started out as something like my student but went beyond what I could show you. And you maintained, chum. You make the Hall of Fame for hanging in there. So this house is yours. The house and the grounds and everything in it. Live here, and change it any way you want to make your nest the way I made it my nest. I built the west wing full of separate apartments for other writers who need a place to flop. I never could afford to buy San Simeon from the state of California; I always thought the old Hearst castle would be a dynamite place for a no-obligation writers’ colony where kids who had the real stuff could come and work without worrying about rent or getting fed. So lay in half a dozen real outlaws, Bran. And the only rule ought to be that they can stay and be happy as long as they write. If they turn into leaners, if you catch them sitting around all day watching The Price is Right boot their asses into the street. But if they’re producing, they can live here forever. Alone is okay, but loneliness can kill a good writer… you know that. Give them a community of sharp, witty minds… and three squares a day. You’ll be the only landlord who writes books that chew on the hearts of the literary establishment.

“Do it for me and for you, Bran.”

SylviaTheCunt was making sounds like the Titanic going down.

Then Jimmy looked straight ahead. At Leslie.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared.

Leslie took it for about thirty seconds. Then she got up and walked to the side of the room where she stood with her arms folded, watching the screen, still curious, but—once having freed herself of Jimmy’s power—unwilling to let him manipulate her beyond a certain point of tolerable terror.

Now Jimmy was staring at an empty seat.

She’s insensitive, or maybe desensitized; but she’s tough. Which also explains how she could have stayed married to him as long as she did. High-fashion barbed wire wrapped in Spandex.

“Leslie, you did okay in the settlement. But I suppose you rate more than a standard ‘I’m sorry,’ which doesn’t count for shit…”

“You can say that again,” Leslie murmured from the side of the room.

“… so the Corporation is depositing a million in the Bermuda account for you; I’ve signed over ownership of the magazine to your name; Kenny will transfer the chalet at Villarvolard to you… so you can keep that ski bum of yours on the string a little longer; and Missy’ll find a letter in the safe that transfers a substantial block of non-voting stock in The Kerch Corporation to you. Stay out of the business, take the dividends, and try to remember me fondly.”

“Right,” Leslie said from the side of the room.

Now he looked all the way to his right, directly at SylviaTheCunt, who had to know what was coming. There was still a lot in the till, and from what Jimmy had said of her in years past I knew she’d be bolted to that chair till the final farthing had been accounted for; but, for a wonder, she had to know what was on the way.

“To my beloved sister, Sylvia…

“And that’s the first time in over twenty years I’ve said your name without adding the sobriquet. Seems truncated, but these are formal proceedings and I want to do it without flaw so after I’ve finished talking to you—which you’ll sit through right to the last syllable on just the off-chance that I might act like a brother even though we both know I despise you with a pure, blue flame of loathing, and you might be able to cadge a few bucks—where was I? Fouled in my own syntax. Oh, yeah, I was saying you’ll sit through all this maleficent defoedation—Kenny, if she needs help with that, stop the tape and get her the definitions—you’ll find them in something called Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, in the reference shelf to the left of my typewriter in the office—shit, I lost myself again. Oh, yeah, I remember. You’ll sit through it because you cling to greedy hope like a leech on floating garbage. You figure I can’t be that big a prick after all these years, and so you’ll wait for the last rotten word I’m going to speak to you, sister dearest. And I’m doing this without flaw so that you won’t even have a scintilla of hope that you can contest this will. It’s solid, Sylvia; ironclad, rockribbed, diamond-encrusted solid.

“And the bottom line is that you get zip.

“Not a cent.

“Not a penny.

“Not a farthing.

“Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 13¢ American.)

“Not even a Blue Chip Stamp.

“Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilum! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven’t been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it’s because of what you ran on me when I was a kid.

“Sylvia, I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to tell you how deeply and thoroughly I loathe you. No, that isn’t even correctly put. I loathed you for most of my life, but about twelve years ago I just sort of dropped you out of the universe. You ceased to exist. You were never there.

“I know you can’t doubt that, because you were on the other end of the phone that time when—”

SylviaTheCunt screamed.

“Stop it! Stop him right now!”

Kenny Gross moved in from the shadowy rear of the library and cut off the Betamax. The screen went white. So did SylviaTheCunt. She was on her feet, the veins standing out in her forehead; a dumpy, big-bosomed woman in middle years. Jimmy always said she was one of those pathetic creatures that had been assembled by The Great Engineer in the Sky without a love mechanism in her. It didn’t take a writer to see that. She had the look of old stone walls that had never even been considered for monuments or pyramids or standing circles.

“This is criminal!” she shouted. She clutched her purse to her stomach and kept hitting it with her fist. She wanted to strike out at something more offensive, but that was under dirt now. ‘‘I’ll fight this! I will!”

Missy came around her chair. She towered over SylviaTheCunt and looked down at her, eyes blazing. It may not have been Jimmy reborn, but the spirit had floated out of the grave, off the silent screen, and had entered the body of his most stalwart defender. “You won’t do shit, dolly. You knew what he had for you. You’ve always known. He hasn’t spoken to you for twenty years till now. You’ll fight? It is to laugh, dolly! He left the Corporation to me and I’ll put ten fucking thousand attorneys on it. We’ll block you and tie you up and make you look like the scumbag you are. Wanna fight, dolly? I’m waiting!”

It drained her. Bran came around and took her by the shoulders and took her back to her seat. Missy slumped down, murmuring, “That bitch… she hated him… she never thought he’d make it…” Bran whispered soft things close to her ear and she quieted down.

“For the record I’d suggest you watch the rest of the videotape, no matter how distasteful,” Kenny Gross said to SylviaTheCunt. “In the event you do contemplate any legal action. Or if you prefer, you can wait in the living room and when the tape is finished I can run this section for you alone.”

She stared at him with animosity. She looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes like slag-heaps. Then she went back and resumed her seat.

Jimmy was really putting us through it. It reminded me of the piece he had written after his mother’s funeral, where SylviaTheCunt had stood up right in the middle of the eulogy he had written and was reading, and had started screaming that Jimmy was defiling her mother’s funeral. It had shattered Jimmy. He could almost have forgiven her anything she’d done to him as a kid, as a young man, as an adult: but not that. She was doing it again.

It was posthumous revenge, but it didn’t ennoble Jimmy in the least. And it was hell for the rest of us.

The attorney started the tape again, and for the next twenty minutes Jimmy rang every charge he could on the woman. How she had brutalized him as a child, with specific deeds that he had remembered with that quirky selective memory of his. Affronts and mean tricks that were almost ludicrous but which, if you remembered how susceptible you were as a little kid, were monstrously cruel. How she had fucked over her own kids, Jimmy’s nephew and niece. How she had beaten down her husband, whom Jimmy had liked even though he wouldn’t stand up to her. How she had become a deplorable human being—racist, bigoted, coarse, provincial and, for Jimmy the most inexcusable of all, bone-stick-stone stupid.

For twenty minutes we all averted our eyes as Jimmy got into it like a ‘lude-stoked jazz musician trying to blow Bud Powell back from the Great Beyond. It was a bravura ugly performance, many riffs, a lot of high shrieking runs and a lot of low animal growls. None of us could look. There are beasts that go right in and suck the marrow, clean the bones to a glistening white.

But SylviaTheCunt looked.

With hard, mean eyes; straight up at the screen; locked in eternal combat with the creature for whom she had seldom felt anything but the most destructive kind of sibling rivalry.

Jimmy once told me how he had gotten SylviaTheCunt to stop pulling his hair. He said one time when she grabbed a fistful of his straight, brown hair he had gritted his teeth and started turning his body in her grasp. Around and around until the hair pulled so tight the pain went all the way to the soles of his feet. It was so horrible, so excruciating, that she had been appalled at how painful it must have been… and she let him loose. And whenever she would try it again, he would inflict that pain on himself. Until she was so horrified by it that she stopped. “That’s how I developed a very high threshold for pain,” he had said.

I remember when he got done telling me that… I was gritting my teeth.

But finally, thank God finally, Jimmy had had all of it even he could handle. He had turned and turned till the pain was insupportable, even for him. Even my best friend, Jimmy, with that seemingly limitless capacity for revenge, for not just getting even, but for getting a bit more of the vigorish in shylock interest, even he had had all he could stomach. And not a moment too soon.

“You can stop it now,” SylviaTheCunt said. And she stood up. The screen went white again, lights came on in the library where evening had descended, and Jimmy’s sister looked around at all of us.

“You haven’t heard the last of me,” she said softly, and then she left. You haven’t heard the last of me.

But I had the sure feeling that we had; we had heard the last of her. Jimmy had called in all the debts from his childhood.

We sat down again, the lights went off, the Betamax went on, and Jimmy turned his head slightly to the left, looking straight at me in my chair. He had saved me for last and he said, “Larry, buddy? You out there?”

We were driving from Chicago to New Orleans in an attempt to make Mardi Gras, which we would miss by a full day, arriving on Ash Wednesday, because in the next five miles we would spin out across the snow-covered highway, escape being piledriven by an oncoming truck by inches, plunge off the side of the road, and bury the Corvette headfirst to its rear wheels in snowbanks fifteen feet deep. But we were still five miles away from missing Mardi Gras when he said the thing I remember most clearly from all the years that we knew each other.

He was driving. He said, “You know the one thing about me that I’m terrified anyone will ever find out. The one lie that makes all of my life a lie.”

“I do?”

“Yep. You know it, but you don’t know you know it.”

“That makes no sense. If I knew it, then I’d know it.”

“You know more about me than anyone else, and you have the data; but you don’t know how much I fear it, how frightened I am that it might come out.”

“I’ll never tell.”

“You might. Get pissed off at me sometime in the future; I might screw you; you might let it slip without knowing it.”

“Never. I’ll never tell a living soul; honest to God, you can trust me, Rocco: I’ll take the filthy secret to my grave.”

“No, I’ll take it to my grave. But you might still tell it.”

“If you’re dead there’d be no way you could protect against that, is there?”

He thought about that for a while. This was before he married Leslie. We were good and close friends, whatever that meant. But he thought about it, seriously thought about this terrible thing I knew that he was ashamed of, the one thing in a life like his so filled with things any normal human being might find the cause of sleepless nights, that didn’t bother him in the slightest way. He thought about the knowledge I possessed, this Damoclean sword I held over his life and his career and his work in which he revealed everything. Everything except the one bit of knowledge that made all of his life a lie.

And he said, “I’ll have to figure out a way to keep you quiet after I’m dead.”

“Good luck,” I said, laughing lightly; and then we hit the icy patch and started to spin out.

He looked straight at me, having saved me for last.

“Larry, I herewith make you the executor of my literary estate. You have control of every novel, short story, essay, article, review, anthology and introduction I ever wrote. All those millions of words are in your care, buddy. You’re the one they’ll have to come to if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

I sat stunned. If he had done me the way he’d done SylviaTheCunt, taken this last chance to purge all the swamp animosity of a lifetime… or if he had done me the way he’d done Leslie, tried to clear his conscience of real or fancied harm he’ d visited on her… if he’ d done me as he’ d done Missy and Bran, paid off for loyalty and friendship and domination of their lives… I wouldn’t have been surprised.

But, oh you malicious wonderful sonofabitch! You did the one thing I cannot bear: you tied me to you forever.

Malicious? Probably not. It was just Jimmy insuring his memory. Going for posterity, and dragging me along with him, kicking and screaming every micromillimeter of the way. What a mind, what a fucking sweetly conniving mind. I couldn’t even condemn him; hate him, yes, revile him, yes, rail at what he was doing, yes—against which I had no defense—but he was merely demonstrating as a perfect paradigm for his whole breakneck plunge of a life… the ugliness of simply being human.

I sat stunned. And the voice of the turtle was heard in the library: “Would you mind cutting it for a minute?”

Turtle, the voice was mine; stunned, I sat in the darkness. The sound of very old, rinkytink music played distantly in the empty concert hall of my head.

Jimmy had set me up to be either his servant or his Griswold.

Poe. Jimmy got the idea from Poe.

He saw himself as Edgar Allan, cut off in his prime from the benefits of posterity’s accolades; he saw me as the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, but a Griswold who was walled up himself, not free to blacken Poe’s name, a Griswold never free of the sound of the tell-tale heart, Jimmy’s heart, still beating, his will indomitable, his presence felt until the last moment of my own Griswold-trapped life.

We had talked of this. Poe was one of Jimmy’s idols. He was more than an amusing storyteller to me. But Jimmy even had a puppet made of Edgar Allan, had it hanging in the living room as an ever-present reminder of what heights fantasy could reach.

And we had discussed what Griswold had done to Poe.

He had buried him for a hundred years.

What a poor judge of human nature Poe had been. What an ass. But let the critic Daniel Hoffman (Doubleday, 1972) tell it:

How better to keep me quiet? What insanity! I didn’t even know which of the many seamy facts of Jimmy’s life was the one that so paralyzed him with fear of its disclosure! I wouldn’t have talked about him; I wanted to be free of him. I simply wanted to be able to say, when asked, “Yeah, Kerch Crowstairs and I were close friends for over a quarter of a century; he’ll be missed; his like will never come again”; the usual bullshit. That’s all I wanted.

But the crazy paranoid sonofabitch couldn’t even credit me with decent motivations after he was gone. My God, does fear have a life of its own, to keep feeding on the living after the carrier of the plague has gone down the hole?

“Okay, you can start it again,” I said.

Kenny Gross ran it back and hit the play button. Jimmy was in the middle of what he’d been saying when my heart had begun to slam at me. “—if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

He looked so damned innocent up there.

Just chatting with his best friend; just asking his best chum buddy to take care of his memory.

“Larry, you know I’m not afraid of dying. Not that, and nothing else. Not spiders, snakes, being burned, being crippled, heights, closed-in places, ridicule, rejection… none of them ever got to me. Very high pain threshold, remember? But it’s tomorrow that gets me, Larry. The day after you see this tape. Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves, the Modern Library, matched sets in good bindings? That’s what I’m afraid of, Larry. Posterity. I want a chance to go on after I’m gone. Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe’s, and Dickens’s, and Conrad’s. I don’t want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith. I don’t want bits and pieces of my unfinished stories written by the literary vampires. You’ve got to promise me, Larry: nobody will ever touch one of the fragments in my file. I probably won’t know when I’m going to buy the farm, probably won’t have time to get into the file with a blowtorch and crisp all the false starts and half-attempts. I’ve got them locked up, everything that’s not finished, all in one file drawer in the office. Missy has the only other key. Get all that stuff out of there and burn it for me, buddy.

“Pride isn’t part of it… honest to God it isn’t! You remember when we talked about Poe how I said he had the right idea, that it was the work, it was Art, that held the high road, not religion, or good deeds or friendship or patriotism? None of those. The stories, the books. That’s all you can put a bet on. That continues. And I couldn’t bear to think of some halfassed science fiction hack dredging up a line or two I started and didn’t know how to finish, and writing a whole fucking book off it, the way they’ve done to poor old Robert E. Howard, or ‘Doc’ Smith. They even did it to Poe and Jack London and… oh Christ, Larry, you know what I’m saying. Promise me!”

He waited. He watched that camera and he waited, four months ago. I murmured, “I promise, Jimmy.”

“You take care of me when I’m gone, Larry. You’re the only one I can trust to do it. Keep me alive, Larry.”

And if there was more to that vile videotaped document I don’t remember it. After a while I was sitting there and the lights were on, and everybody else had left the room.

He did it. The clever sonofabitch did it. He figured a way to keep me tied to him. He knew I’d do the job.

I’d make sure there were regular retrospectives of his germinal stories; I’d write the best kind of interesting essays and articles about how significant Kercher O.J. Crowstairs had been in the parade of contemporary American letters; I’d set up seminars at the Modem Language Association conclaves; I’d edit anthologies of his work, putting the stories into fresh and insightful contexts; I’d keep him alive through his seriously considered work.

And in the bargain I’d sublimate my own talent. I’d spend a part of every day living with Jimmy. I’d hear his voice and finally start writing the way he did. And if I ever ever ever figured out what it was I knew about him that made all of his life a he, I’d keep it to myself till the cancer killed me, too.

And at last I know the nature of our friendship.

Say goodbye to Laurence Kercher O.J. Bedloe.