Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  “Arrest that man,” he said in a cold voice. “Dead or alive.”

  It was a narrow squeak, but I got out of the police building by ten P.M. Samson let me go, but insisted the police officer I’d socked on the Santa Ana Freeway should, and would, press an awesome battery of charges against me. Mitigating circumstances, if any, could be presented in court to the judge—but all that was in the future.

  At the present, I was swinging right off the freeway at the turn to Monterey Park, on my way to see Emmanuel Bruno. I had phoned him from the police building, hit a few high points of recent hours—including the fact that police officers had already found in Festus Lemming’s office the “kit” Dave Cassiday had indeed hidden there—and accepted the Doc’s warm invitation to visit him before going home.

  This time Bruno’s trees and shrubs, his “garden,” were illumined by colored spotlights and several paper-covered lanterns hanging from tree limbs. The grounds looked warm, very festive and inviting, but the Doc greeted me outside his door and led me into the house. We got settled in his front room, which was also warm and festive but looked more like a den or library crowded with odd-looking idols, unusual furniture, fearsome masks, and peculiarly compelling paintings on two of the walls. The other two walls were lined with books, some in bright new jackets and others obviously very old. There were also three or four terribly pornographic bits of statuary, which I admired.

  He mixed a bourbon and water for me, poured a glug of brandy into a snifter, listened—with for him unusual restraint—while I explained in more detail the afternoon’s events. Restraint, in that he refrained from getting his mouth into gear and shifting it from low to second to high and higher; but not silence. Because several times toward the end he whooped and shouted such things as “Glorious!” and “Splendid, Sheldon—splendid!” and as I finished my summation, he actually slapped his thigh several times. I found this a most refreshing contrast to Captain Samson’s excessive restraint.

  “Well, that’s pretty much the size of it,” I said.

  “Ah, thank you for telling me, Sheldon. How I wish I could have been there. For all of it, needless to say, but especially when, alone, you confronted the army of Lemmings clad in your shoes, shorts, and sports shirt. The thought of that confrontation is one I shall cherish. It will strengthen me during earthquakes, floods, and the coming Ice Age.”

  He rose to his full six feet, five inches, voice gradually gaining in volume and power like when they turn on those big generators down at the electric light company. “But if only, at such a significant and symbolic moment, you could have gone forth entirely naked to smite the fearful foe—not alone, but borne on the shoulders of your nudist troops—a naked general charging from the church and down the greensward, your ten bare privates bouncing along beneath and behind you.”

  I had a hunch the Doc was pretty well wound up. Of course, I’d never seen him when he wasn’t. I had a hunch, too, that letting me speak so long without interruption must have been a strain on him. Like some of my other hunches, that one was right on the button.

  He slashed an arm through the air as if it were the Singing Sword and continued oracularly, “I can see it now! The brave little band of nuts thundering down into the Valley of Death, shouting four-letter words and scattering Lemmings in a charge the like of which the world has not seen—The Charge at the I’ve-Seen-the-Light Brigade. Ah, what a charge!

  “Canons to the right of them, canons to the left of them—from pulpit and pew they follied and blundered! Stormed at and shot was Shell, but bravely he rode, and, well … tolling the ding-dong bell? Bang-BANG! BOOM-bang—hell, I can’t remember the bloody poem. Haven’t read Tennyson since I was nine years old.”

  “Uh-huh. Didn’t happen that way, though. Too bad. I guess.”

  He took my empty glass and filled it, added brandy to his snifter, and sat in a chair near me. “Where did you say you took the ten lovely ladies?” he asked, all calmed down.

  “I didn’t say. But I left them at a rather isolated cabin owned by a friend of mine. It’s got almost everything, except a means of communication … and clothes.”

  “Then I presume you intend to visit the ladies eventually, inform them of what occurred during your absence.”

  “I had thought about it. Yes, I had. Uh, eventually. Like in half an hour, maybe.”

  “Hmm.” He stood up, left the room, came back with a dark-brown pint bottle and a tablespoon. “You’d better have some of this right away, then, Sheldon.” He paused, while I poured the spoon full, then took back the bottle, saying, “It will—also—replenish some of the elements in your bloodstream assuredly depleted by the ravages of this day. Erovite is immensely rich in the vitamins, minerals, and trace elements necessary for optimum functioning of the human organism. The base is composed of concentrated extracts from liver, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and seaweed, among other things.”

  “Seaweed? Ye Gods, that’s what Dave—”

  “Never fear. Sea water, seaweed, and kelp contain all the minerals and trace elements of our nourishing Earth. All of which are also, though many in microscopic quantities, found in the body. The blood is very similar to sea water, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do.”

  I hadn’t swallowed the stuff yet, was still holding the brimming tablespoon in the air before my chops. Before tossing it down I focused my eyes on it, looked at the thick brownish nondescript gunk with an odd, complex mixture of emotions.

  The spoon was full, more than full, liquid arching well above the spoon’s edges in what was obviously defiance of the law of gravity, if only the law of gravity were considered and all other laws ignored. It certainly did appear that Erovite was breaking the law, though. Definitely criminal stuff. The ceiling light and the glow of a table lamp were reflected in it, glittering like dots of warmth or life or little suns or even bright little bugs. Which for a moment made me imagine a wee Festus Lemming in there, and a church and a cross, a scalpel and a caduceus, and me, and even little girlies. Then I opened my mouth and gobbled it all down.

  “This is quite a moment for me, Doc,” I said. “It really is.” I smacked my lips. “So that’s Erovite, huh? That’s what the whooping and hullabaloo are about? It didn’t hurt a bit—doesn’t taste bad at all.”

  “I find it delicious, myself. It’s a food, really. Erovite, Sheldon, is essentially—about ninety percent—concentrated nutrition. The average American in this rich land is not, despite propaganda to the contrary, well-fed. He is, to a significant degree, starving. Tragically, he fails to realize it. Adding insult to injury, and in support of the status quo and their own imbecility, the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration announce every hour on the hour that Americans are the best-fed people in the world, that no U.S. citizen eating the mythical normal well-balanced diet requires any additional vitamins or minerals or food supplements designed to provide him with the nutrients and nutrition eliminated from his food, and that Peter Pan is alive and well in Argentina. And that it has been revealed to them from the source of all wisdom that Erovite is the product of quackery designed for faddists and must therefore be excommunicated.”

  He got up, walked across the room, and poured himself a bit of brandy, saying, “If a man is to resist with minimal success the countless stresses of modern society, plus the effects of poisons in the earth, in the waters, in the air, and in his mind, then that with which he feeds his body, his cells and nerves and blood and brain, must not add to the poisons and wastes and stresses afflicting him. It must in every possible way feed, strengthen, nourish him. Since it does not, Erovite—or something like it—is not only desirable but essential.”

  “So,” I said. “Erovite is simply steak and potatoes and a vitamin pill. Plus seaweed.”

  “Not—” he grinned at me, satanically, I thought—“exactly. I said it was ninety percent nutritional, Sheldon. There is that other ten percent. While the ninety slowly but
surely feeds the cells, often cells starved for most or all of a lifetime, the ten feeds the spirit and soul—in a way. I have, in a long life, a long and joyous life.…”

  Still standing, he cocked his massive head on one side, as if glancing back over the years, and I asked, sort of automatically, “How long a life, Doc? How old are you, anyway? About sixty? Of course, if you’re older you can tell me it’s none of my—”

  “Why, I’m eighty-four—”

  “You’re what?”

  “Eighty-four. Last month. Didn’t you know?”

  I didn’t say anything because I was speechless. I was sure he had no reason to lie, but.… Suddenly I wasn’t speechless. “If you’re eighty-four, how old is Dru?”

  “She’s thirty-eight. Be thirty-nine in—”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “What’s the matter with you? Did Dru tell you she was younger?”

  “No … she didn’t say anything. And it was a lie.”

  He smiled that Papa Lisa smile, sat down again, and crossed his long legs. “As I was saying, in my lifetime I have discovered, in one case stumbled upon, three substances—or combinations of natural substances, entirely harmless—each of which has a profoundly beneficial effect upon the average individual’s body and state of mind, all three of which are in Erovite. One is a euphoriant, a mood elevator. It brings a chemical ray of light into darkness. The second is an energizer. It acts primarily upon the ductless glands, and to a degree upon neural tissues and fibers. The third is a kind of peniscillin or libido lifter, which acts upon the sexual glands and the systems most directly supporting them. And acts also, it appears, upon a minute sexual center now known to exist in the hypothalamus. This is the notorious aphrodisiac, concerning which there has been a certain amount of discussion.”

  He smiled. “So there, basically, you have it, Sheldon. Steak and potatoes and a vitamin pill. Plus seaweed … and a few other delicacies. And a euphoriant, an energizer, and a sexual stimulant of marvelous potency. Behold: Erovite!”

  He fell silent for a few moments, examining his thumbnail. “Life’s pleasures, Sheldon, are not infinite in their number and variety. And I have come, finally, to believe that man’s primary goal in life is, or should be, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Here, in this life, which we must assume. God, whose gift it is, gave us for our enjoyment. I would hate to think He is a practical joker, who puts firecrackers in birthday cigars.”

  “Well, they say He gives bad people a hotfoot. Hell, not just foot—”

  “Pleasure, remember, can be derived from many things—love, work, success, play, friendship, a book or painting or poem, gazing upon a sunset or the sea—but pain is almost invariably harmful, inhibiting, destructive. Pleasure expands, rewards, builds; pain contracts, punishes, tears down. Pleasure is harmony, pain discord. Pleasure is health, pain is sickness. Almost invariably the misfits, meddlers, and misanthropes who bring most pain to others, as well as themselves, are those already warped and twisted by their own previous experience of pain. For many reasons, Sheldon, I honestly believe that Erovite, to a degree unsuspected even now, can help men, strengthen them, make more possible for them the achievement of that ideal: the joyous pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of crippling pain. Yet millions, including many of those who would benefit most from Erovite, fight or fear it, would forbid its sale, ban it, destroy it.”

  I got out a cigarette—one of life’s less-than-infinite number of little pleasures, especially before it became more carcinogenic than smog, insecticides, and sewage—lit it, and sucked in a deep, sensual drag. “Well, Doc, I’m no philosopher, but I think fun is a lot more fun than.… I’m sure you know what I mean. Whether I do or not. As for Erovite, I gather a whole bunch of people are afraid if enough of the country got turned on there’d be a coast-to-coast orgy—”

  “Orgy! Ha! Aha!”

  “What’d I say? Did I—”

  “Sex—yes, the monster of frightful and frightening mien. Filth! Damnation! I deliberately did not name among man’s pleasures what very likely is—or should be—life’s chief pleasure. Sex! Supersin! Desire! The bang! The orgasm! The release of sexual and even cosmic energies! Copulation! Fornication! FUN!”

  “Well, yeah but … just think how many would hate themselves in the morn—”

  “So, an orgy. Couples coupling from Maine to California and Yonkers to San Diego, groups groping from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the sea. Why not?”

  “Well, yeah, but … besides, they wouldn’t all be legally married—”

  “Such a forbidden and stimulating phenomenon might awaken sex from its hypnotic sleep, rescue fornication from the priests and preachers and politicians, instill The Bang with new life and vigor and—”

  “Sex is asleep?”

  “Not asleep, Sheldon, it is tottering toward the tomb in a coma. It is dying, and its grave is the blushing-bride’s bed.” Bruno couldn’t sit still any longer. He placed his brandy snifter on a table, got to his feet, waved one arm in the air and waggled the other.

  “Can any rational being deny that sex is in grave difficulties? If not verily in the grave, almost totally kaput? Consider: Does not every married couple, without exception, learn and simultaneously deny the knowledge that after one or five or ten or twenty or fifty years, each blessed or burdened with three hundred and sixty-five nights—assuming there ever lived such a pair of prodigies as to continue nightly to consummate the contract which according to local statute was made in Heaven—the seven thousand and thirty-first attempt somehow failed to recapture that first fine careless rapture of the initial extravaganza?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “The tent is still there,” Bruno boomed, waving his arms overhead, “and even the same old pole may still hold it up, but—where has the circus gone? Where the lions and tigers, the acrobats, the girls on trapezes? Where are the bands playing, the oompah—oompah, the roar of the crowd? Why, there is not even a snake charmer, not a peanut vendor, alas! not even a lass selling candied apples. O Misery, have they all fled? Even the clowns—Ah! There! There in the center of the ring, do you see him?”

  Goddamnit, I looked around. The old boy really had me this time. I was there—there in the empty circus tent. It wasn’t only his words, it was the booming, humming, electric-light-company-generator vibrancy and zap of his voice, the conviction behind his words, the arms waving tragically.

  “There—” he boomed on—“alone, is he. Only the clown remains. The solitary clown, salt tears traced on his painted grin, and around and about him the lone and level sawdust stretches far away. He alone remains, and now—there he goes!—he is blowing his brains out!” Bruno stalked to his snifter, polished off the last swallow of his brandy. “Is it not a tragedy?”

  “Boy, I’ll say,” I said. “Well, I guess the only thing to do is play now, go later. Which reminds me, do I have to take a leak, or is it something I drank?”

  “It is Erovite. I have been waiting for you to mention the feeling of warmth, energy, increasing alertness—”

  “You’re sure I don’t have to take a leak?”

  “That is something you will have to determine for yourself, Sheldon. Erovite does not vulcanize the bladder. It—”

  “Excuse me a minute, will you, Doc? Where is—”

  He showed me. Still, there really was—also—the feeling of warmth, of somewhat greater alertness and energy than I’d possessed only minutes ago.

  In Bruno’s front room again I told him that and added, “Well, I’d better leave, Doc. I only came here to use the bathroom. But I dropped a dime in the toilet.”

  “Lord, oh, Lord,” he sighed, staring at the ceiling. “These are the dimes that dry men’s souls.” Then he went with me to the door, stood in it looking benignly after me while I walked to my Cad.

  As I drove toward the freeway, I glanced back once—just as all the lights, except for a soft glow from inside the house, went out. The trees, lamps, shrubs, the small fig
ure of Emmanuel Bruno in the doorway, disappeared, vanished in sudden darkness.

  It gave me an odd feeling, kind of a chill. I don’t know why it did; but it did.

  27

  Well, all that was a year ago. Only a year. But it was, as everybody knows, an unusual and exceptional year.

  It was a great year for me.

  I stayed on Erovite—and when I finally got hold of a bottle with a label on it learned, to my dismay, for by then of course it was too late, that the recommended dose was ten drops after each meal. I saw each and all of the Ten, and even Regina. And spent quite a bit of time with Dru, for several reasons. I had a lot of fun. I guess you could say I worked at Doc Bruno’s “pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain” and did pretty well on both ends.

  Except for the unavoidable pain of being literally forced to combat the miserable myth about me that grew to such ridiculous proportions, and in some dizzy circles is still growing. So let me say again as I have said a hundred or a thousand times before: There were only ten.

  Well.…

  Eleven if you count Regina. But I don’t think it’s fair to count Regina.

  Anyhow, for everyone else it was a year, in the main, either of delight and satisfaction, or trial and tribulation, but for all it was undeniably a year of unprecedented change, because the alterations and upheaval already in progress at the time were vastly accelerated by the death of Emmanuel Bruno.

  Yes, they killed him.

  Of course they killed him—like so many hundreds, even thousands, who had come before him, bearing gifts.

  Within days after his murder, it was learned Bruno had made arrangements, before Erovite first went on sale, to ensure that it would survive him, no matter when and how he died. He had entrusted to the care of three separate attorneys identical sets of several hundred addressed and sealed envelopes which were, in the event of his death, to be immediately mailed. This was done. In consequence, well before the end of that August, members of Congress, every major pharmaceutical company as well as several minor ones, plus miscellaneous physicians, pharmacists, pharmacognosists, biochemists and other researchers, nutritionists, writers, magazine editors, newspapermen, and even some quacks and faddists became possessors of the full and complete formula for Erovite, together with such clear instructions for its preparation that almost any reasonably bright and persistent individual could, if he desired, produce it by the barrel.