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Irish-on-ice, Knox had Scotch, Harlan had milk. Sometimes between the third
and fourth Irish I managed to burn a hole in Knox s Harris tweed jacket with
my cigarette. That will come out of your royalties, he said, gloomily.
Okay, then, said Harlan rising. We ll get started on the rewrite right
away. Knox. Avram! I snapped to attention.
Watch it!
cried Knox, snatching his jacket away. Be at my place at seven tomorrow
night, and we ll get right to work, Harlan ordered.
Aywah, Tuan Besar, I muttered, making my salaam. A tendency of my right leg
to twitch as if struck by a rubber hammer, I attributed to impurities in the
ice. But at seven the next evening I was there, at Harlan s apartment.
You play skittles, Avram? he inquired.
Promised my mother not to, I said primly. What s the gag, Ellison, or The
Non-British Agent? I asked.
No gag, he said, briskly, and dragging me out to the elevator. You must
have seen the skittles setup outside the Paperbook Gallery.
Oh, is that what it is; I thought it was a gym for waltzing mice.
How microcephalic can you get? you clod, he demanded, affectionately
rhetorical. Skittles are in, and the
Village Voice wants me to do an article for them. Andy Reiss will illustrate.
But the, uh, book, Harlan? The rewrite? For Knox? You said--
Later, later. Right now: skittles.
So we went up Seventh Ave to where the Paperbook Gallery crouched below street
level on its corner. In the tiny area in front was the skittles setup, on a
table. I hung over the railing, watching, like a spectator at a dog-pit, or a
bear-baiting--a simile which, it developed, was not to be too far-out. Along
with Harlan was Andy Reiss, Boy-
Artist Extraordinary, a young lady, and Kenny Sanders--Harlan s
step-son-to-be, aged twelve--all of whom, I neglected to mention, egocentric
observer that I am, had been at Harlan s when I arrived. Two or three
inoffensive young boys from Brooklyn, wearing black sweaters, turned up from
somewhere; and so the game got started.
Like so: You spin these sort of tops, see--and they whirl around like
gyroscopes, and you try to influence them telekinetically to spin through
doors in the wooden maze and so get to the skittles proper--tiny bowling
pins--
and knock them down. My capacity for games and for sports is pitifully
limited; I mean, there was this time in
Sumatra when I yawned, openly, during the ox races, and almost precipitated an
international incident. The tops whirled and caromed and careened and
sometimes got through the doors and knocked down the widdle pins. Oh, well
-spon, sir! I would call from time to time, and slap my handies in a
languidly well-bred sort of way.
Spectators came and. went, pointed, giggled, gawked, exclaimed; Andy Reiss
made sketches. scratched them out, drew new ones. Cars screeched, buses
rattled, trucks roared; You, ya, shmuck, I don t like ya face! I snapped my
head up, startled. Who was that?
It was a kid, age about 16 and he was leaning over the railings which--at a
45-degree angle-joined the railings I was leaning over; and he was addressing
his comments to Harlan, peaceably playing skittles in the pit beneath.
Harlan looked up, said, I ll go home and change it for you, or something
flip of the sort.
And kept on skittling. By now he had attracted a crowd of would-be skittles
aficionados, who were commenting on his skill. The remark infuriated the kid.
I ll come back with a gun!
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he screamed. Dontcha believe me? I ll show ya! And his sidekicks, several in
number, joined in.
This (I said to myself) is crazy. If I were writing this for a story or a
TV show or a movie, no editor would buy it. No motivation, is what he d say.
You haven t shown any motivation.
And he d be correct. In this case, Nature refused to imitate Art. There was no
motivation. Nevertheless--
Ya sonofabitch! the kid screamed. Ya ------! (No use counting dashes; I ve
disguised the invective to protect the innocent.) Ya ---------! We ll
mopulize ya! Ya know what I think ya are?
What? Harlan inquired, smiling, and seeming only mildly puzzled.
Yer a ----------------! He screamed, mentioning one of the less lovable
offenses of which the late Emperor
Nero has, from time to time, been accused. Harlan, still smiling, went on
skittling. Andy Reiss continued to sketch. I
went on leaning over the railings, trying to look like a hay, feed, and grain
dealer in a small way of business, from East
Weewaw, Wisconsin; somebody, in short, who had never heard of Harlan Ellison.
And waited (such was my lack of confidence in the success of the
impersonation) for the moment, inevitable, I was sure, for the kid to turn on
me and offer to pluck out my beard, hair by hair, and feed it to me: an offer
I intended to decline with all the politeness at my command.
Suddenly, they were gone. In a westerly direction. No sun-worshipper ever
looked so wistfully at the east as did I, then. Looks like we re going to be
mixed up in a teenage rumble, Harlan said. Preposterous! I told myself.
Absurd...Things don t happen this way... After all, I had read about the
Crazy Mixed-Up Kids, Turfs (Turves?), Rumbles, Bopping Mobs, etc.
We weren t contesting their territory.
We hadn t made a play for one of their debs. So why? --How come--? And then,
like a bolt of Jumbo Number Ten lightning, came a flash which illuminated a
scene from earlier criminal literature, videlicet and to whiz, the young punk
who wanted to make a rep...
I swallowed a foreign object, as it might be a tesseract, or a cactus, which
had gotten lodged in my throat.
Well, that ends the game, I guess, Harlan said, after a while. I looked
around. No sign of the Junior
Assassins, or the Young Torturers, or whatever their sticky name was. I
breathed the air once more/O-o-of
Freedom/In my own beloved--
How s about we go over to The Caricature, Harlan? I suggested, casually. The
Caricature wasn t much of a place, but it lay to the east.
Harlan considered. And then the young lady, in a small voice, said, My
pockabook.
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