Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Hate and love have the same intensity of emotion.

  Hate ain’t nothing but love misspelled.

  But you know that one already.

  You can’t go home again.

  If you were sweethearts after college, and had a thing going, and one or the other of you took off and did your number and it went sour—the marriage dissolved, the career didn’t materialize, discovering yourself turned out to be a drag filled with Tantric Yoga and Kahlil Gibran platitudes—and you fantasize what it would’ve been like if you’d stuck with that Great Love of Your Youth…forget it. He’s changed, she’s changed, you’ve changed, and the best you can have is a quick fuck and a lot of recycled memories. It just doesn’t play.

  Next to telling your lover what turns you on precisely, the best thing to bring to bed is a sense of humor.

  Nothing is more tiresome and capable of creating tension in bed than heavy breathing el serioso. God save us from the men and women who need to hear all the artificial “I love you” jingoism, even when they know it’s bullshit, said at the moment and having substance no longer than it takes to use a Kleenex and dash to the shower. But laughter, taking the hangups and inconveniences and wonky awkwardnesses as sources of mirth…wow, how bright that can make it.

  Please yourself and be selfish about it.

  In love and sex, it’s every man and woman in a one-person life raft. If you don’t go’n’get it, no one’ll stake you to a free ride. Concern for each other goes without saying, and attention to detail; but when it comes right down to it, you’ve got to satisfy yourself. If the guy ain’t doing it right, lady, bite his nose and tell him how to do it. And if you’ve got a premature problem, fella, let her know about it before the fact so arrangements can be made. And don’t clutter up your pleasure by swallowing that outdated nonsense about, “Oh, it seems too clinical that way; it takes all the romance out of it.” Romance is one of those ephemerals they whip on you so you won’t know that sex is supposed to be sweaty!

  And finally: love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled.

  Which is an ironic title. It means people confuse one for the other. They think passion alone makes love. And so the relationship flares while they explore each other’s bodies, and when it’s gone, so is their affection for one another.

  Love is being utterly honest, even when it’s ground-glass painful. Tell the truth all the time! All the truth! Not just that part that you can get away with. Go the limit. And the answer to Hemingway’s riddle is that the leopard lost his way. He took the wrong path. And that’s what so many of us do in love.

  Keep aware, keep wide open, and remember everything that’s ever happened to you, everything that’s ever been said, every motion and change of tone and subtle hint. We’ll read a long, essentially dull book on how to get through probate with our skin intact, or take a correspondence course in electrical wiring just so we don’t have to pay an electrician to do our house, or go to college for four years to acquire the obscure knowledge that will permit us to make a living in one or another proscribed field of endeavor. But about the most mysterious subject of all, love, we bumble and careen and hope for the best; without proper education, without proper tools, without even a goal that can be named. And more often than not it poisons our lives. The wrong men and the wrong women get together and proceed to kill each other piece by piece.

  This is all I know of love: like the leopard we must pick the right path, and we must never confuse what the body needs with what the soul demands. Beyond these idle thoughts, I know no more than you.

  As a troll, as an alien creature, I know that having an affair with me is not the same as having an affair with an orthodontist or a salesman of mobile homes or a guy going for his degree in P.E. That’s my arrogance.

  I hope to god you have yours.

  Final words about this book.

  In the original edition of LOVE AIN’T NOTHING BUT SEX MISSPELLED, published in hardcover in 1968, there were twenty-two stories. For the revised paperback edition in 1976, I dropped nine of those stories. They were (and are) good stories…and some of them I consider among my best. But they are either currently available elsewhere in one or another of the EDGEWORKS series, or in other books of mine currently in print. Twenty years ago, I became highly sensitive to one reader’s random remark about duplications of stories in my collections. And so I have taken extra-special pains to make sure there are no duplications in these new EDGEWORKS editions.

  In ’76 I added three new, then-uncollected pieces to the thirteen from the original version of this book. Usually, a short story collection bulks out at about 60,000 words. LOVE, first time around, came to 165,300 words, almost the equivalent of three books. I’ve deleted 51,900 words of stories and added 21,400 to the remaining 115,400 words’ worth of material from the hardcover. That makes a total of 136,800 words of stories, plus this introduction of approximately 8500 words, for your money’s worth of 145,300. Something well over two ordinary collections’ size. And no room for complaints from those who’ve bought my other books.

  And since there were three minor duplications of items on the 1976 table of contents in this 1997 edition, I bounced them (two are in EDGEWORKS, Volume 3…in THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK) (the third one will be found in GENTLEMAN JUNKIE and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, one of the two titles to appear in EDGEWORKS, Volume 11, scheduled for publication in May of the year 2001; patience, I commend thee to patience!) and I’ve added a previously uncollected story for which I have great fondness—“Passport”—and I’ve even revised it strenuously. Also, I’ve added a new, previously unpublished teleplay based on a short story to appear in EDGEWORKS, Volume 7, in May of 1999. And you thought we were just a flash in the pan!

  Now: to the underlying theme of these wry fictions. There is a theme, pace the title of the book. A few of these tales may seem to you less thematic than others. Oh, cynical you. “Blind Bird, Blind Bird, Go Away from Me!” (for instance) is a war story, and I suppose might easily have gone into another sort of collection. But I intended this book to cover a broad spectrum on the subject of love; and friendship, a sense of duty, love of those who depend on you…that’s love, too. As is the love-turned-to hate demonstrated in one of the new pieces, “Moonlighting,” and “The Universe of Robert Blake” (not the actor, though we’re friends and I probably used the name unconsciously years before we met) and “A Prayer for No One’s Enemy.” These are all stories peripherally concerned with love, and they are included here because this book was, and remains, one of my personal favorites. And each tale to be told reflects another part of my fumbling attempts to understand the mystery of love.

  These stories have helped change my opinion of myself where human knowledge is concerned. They total over 145,000 words of groping in the dark to find the answer.

  For a troll, groping in the dark is second nature.

  Here’s hoping they shed a little light.

  Harlan Ellison / Los Angeles

  12 September 75 and 2 August 97

  INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

  The Introduction to the first edition was dumb, and I’ve dropped it. You wouldn’t have liked it, anyway. Trust me.

  THE RESURGENCE OF MISS ANKLE-STRAP WEDGIE

  (DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF DOROTHY PARKER)

  HANDY

  In Hollywood our past is so transitory we have little hesitation about tearing down our landmarks. The Garden of Allah where Benchley and Scott Fitzgerald lived is gone; it’s been replaced by a savings and loan. Most of the old, sprawling 20th lot has been converted into shopping center and beehive-faceted superhotel. Even historic relics of fairly recent vintage have gone under the cultural knife: the Ziv television studios on Santa Monica, once having been closed down, became the eerie, somehow surrealistic, weed-overgrown and bizarre jungle in which tamed cats that had roamed sound stages became cannibals, eating one another. At night, passing the studio, dark and padlocked, you could hear the poor beasts tearing each other apart.
They had lived off the film industry too long, and unable to survive in the streets, lost and bewildered, they had turned into predators.

  That may be an apocryphal story. It persists in my thoughts when I remember Valerie Lone.

  The point is, we turn the past into the present here in Hollywood even before it’s finished being the future. It’s like throwing a meal into the Disposall before you eat it.

  But we do have one recently erected monument here in the glamour capital of the world.

  It is a twenty-three-foot-high billboard for a film called Subterfuge. It is a lighthearted adventure-romance in the James Bond tradition and the billboard shows the principal leads—Robert Mitchum and Gina Lollobrigida—in high-fashion postures intended to convey, well, adventure and, uh, romance.

  The major credits are listed in smaller print on this billboard: produced by Arthur Crewes, directed by James Kencannon, written by John D.F. Black, music by Lalo Schifrin. The balance of the cast is there, also. At the end of the supplementary credits is a boxed line that reads:

  ALSO FEATURING MISS VALERIE LONE as Angela.

  This line is difficult to read; it has been whited-out.

  The billboard stands on a rise overlooking Sunset Boulevard on the Strip near King’s Road; close by a teenie-bopper discothèque called Spectrum 2000 that once was glamorous Ciro’s. But we tear down our past and convert it to the needs of the moment. The billboard will come down. When the film ends its first run at the Egyptian and opens in neighborhood theaters and drive-ins near you.

  At which point even that monument to Valerie Lone will have been removed, and almost all of us can proceed to forget. Almost all of us, but not all. I’ve got to remember…my name is Fred Handy. I’m responsible for that billboard. Which makes me a singular man, believe me.

  After all, there are so few men who have erected monuments to the objects of their homicide.

  1

  They came out of the darkness that was a tunnel with a highway at the bottom of it. The headlights were animal eyes miles away down the flat roadbed, and slowly slowly the sound of the engine grew across the emptiness on both sides of the concrete. California desert night, heat of the long day sunk just below the surface of the land, and a car, ponderous, plunging, straight out of nowhere along a white centerline. Gophers and rabbits bounded across the deadly open road and were gone forever.

  Inside the limousine men dozed in jump seats and far in the rear two bull-necked cameramen discussed the day’s work. Beside the driver, Fred Handy stared straight ahead at the endless stretch of State Highway 14 out of Mojave. He had been under the influence of road hypnosis for the better part of twenty minutes, and did not know it. The voice from the secondary seats behind him jarred him back to awareness. It was Kencannon.

  “Jim, how long till we hit Lancaster or Palmdale?”

  The driver craned his head back and slightly to the side, awkwardly, like some big bird, keeping his eyes on the road. “Maybe another twenty, twenty-five miles, Mr. K’ncannon. That was Rosamond we passed little while ago.”

  “Let’s stop and eat at the first clean place we see,” the director said, thumbing his eyes to remove the sleep from them. “I’m starving.”

  There was vague movement from the third seats, where Arthur Crewes was folded sidewise, fetuslike, sleeping. A mumbled, “Where are we what time izit?”

  Handy turned around. “It’s about three forty-five, Arthur. Middle of the desert.”

  “Midway between Mojave and Lancaster, Mr. Crewes,” the driver added. Crewes grunted acceptance of it.

  The producer sat up in sections, swinging his legs down heavily, pulling his body erect sluggishly, cracking his shoulders back as he arched forward. With his eyes closed. “Jeezus, remind me next time to do a picture without location shooting. I’m too old for this crap.” There was the murmur of trained laughter from somewhere in the limousine.

  Handy thought of Mitchum, who had returned from the Mojave location earlier that day, riding back in the air-conditioned land cruiser the studio provided. But the thought only reminded him that he was not one of the Immortals, one of the golden people; that he was merely a two-fifty-a-week publicist who was having one helluva time trying to figure out a promotional angle for just another addle-witted spy-romance. Crewes had come to the genre belatedly, after the Bond flicks, after Ipcress, after Arabesque and Masquerade and Kaleidoscope and Flint and Modesty Blaise and they’d all come after The 39 Steps so what the hell did it matter; with Arthur Crewes producing, it would get serious attention and good play dates. If. If Fred Handy could figure out a Joe Levine William Castle Sam Katzman Alfred Hitchcock shtick to pull the suckers in off the streets. He longed for the days back in New York when he had had ulcers working in the agency. He still had them, but the difference was now he couldn’t even pretend to be enjoying life enough to compensate for the aggravation. He longed for the days of his youth writing imbecile poetry in Figaro’s in the Village. He longed for the faintly moist body of Julie, away in the Midwest somewhere doing Hello, Dolly! on the strawhat circuit. He longed for a hot bath to leach all the weariness out of him. He longed for a hot bath to clean all the Mojave dust and grit out of his pores.

  He longed desperately for something to eat.

  “Hey, Jim, how about that over there…?”

  He tapped the driver on the forearm, and pointed down the highway to the neon flickering off and on at the roadside. The sign said SHIVEY’S TRUCK STOP and EAT. There were no trucks parked in front.

  “It must be good food,” Kencannon said from behind him. “I don’t see any trucks there; and you know what kind of food you get at the joints truckers eat at.”

  Handy smiled quickly at the reversal of the old road-runner’s myth. It was that roundabout sense of humor that made Kencannon’s direction so individual.

  “That okay by you, Mr. Crewes?” Jim asked.

  “Fine, Jim,” Arthur Crewes said, wearily.

  The studio limousine turned in at the diner and crunched gravel. The diner was an anachronism. One of the old railroad-car style, seen most frequently on the New Jersey thruways. Aluminum hide leprous with rust. Train windows fogged with dirt. Lucky Strike and El Producto decals on the door. Three steps up to the door atop a concrete stoop. Parking lot surrounding it like a gray pebble lake, cadaverously cold in the intermittent flashing of the pale yellow neon EAT off EAT off EAT…

  The limousine doors opened, all six of them, and ten crumpled men emerged, stretched, trekked toward the diner. They fell into line almost according to the pecking order. Crewes and Kencannon; Fred Handy; the two cameramen; three grips; the effeminate makeup man, Sancher; and Jim, the driver.

  They climbed the stairs, murmuring to themselves, like sluggish animals emerging from a dead sea of sleep. The day had been exhausting. Chase scenes through the rural town of Mojave. And Mitchum in his goddam land cruiser, phoning ahead to have escargots ready at La Rue.

  The diner was bright inside, and the grips, the cameramen and Jim took booths alongside the smoked windows. Sancher went immediately to the toilet, to moisten himself with 5-Day Deodorant Pads. Crewes sat at the counter with Handy and Kencannon on either side of him. The producer looked ancient. He was a dapper man in his middle forties. He clasped his hands in front of him and Handy saw him immediately begin twisting and turning the huge diamond ring on his right hand, playing with it, taking it off and replacing it. I wonder what that means, Handy thought.

  Handy had many thoughts about Arthur Crewes. Some of them were friendly, most were impartial. Crewes was a job for Handy. He had seen the producer step heavily when the need arose: cutting off a young writer when the script wasn’t being written fast enough to make a shooting date; literally threatening an actor with bodily harm if he didn’t cease the senseless wrangling on set that was costing the production money; playing agents against one another to catch a talented client unrepresented between them, available for shaved cost. But he had seen him perform unnecessary kindnesses. Unn
ecessary because they bought nothing, won him nothing, made him no points. Crewes had blown a tire on a freeway one day and a motorist had stopped to help. Crewes had taken his name and sent him a three-thousand-dollar color television-stereo. A starlet ready to put out for a part had been investigated by the detective agency Crewes kept on retainer at all times for assorted odd jobs. They had found out her child was a paraplegic. She had not been required to go the couch route, Crewes had refused her the job on grounds of talent, but had given her a check in the equivalent amount had she gotten the part.

  Arthur Crewes was a very large man indeed in Hollywood. He had not always been immense, however. He had begun his career as a film editor on “B” horror flicks, worked his way up and directed several productions, then been put in charge of a series of low-budget films at the old RKO studio. He had suffered in the vineyards and somehow run the time very fast. He was still a young man, and he was ancient, sitting there turning his ring.

  Sancher came out of the toilet and sat down at the far end of the counter. It seemed to jog Kencannon. “Think I’ll wash off a little Mojave filth,” he said, and rose.

  Crewes got up. “I suddenly realized I haven’t been to the bathroom all day.”

  They walked away, leaving Handy sitting, toying with the sugar shaker.

  He looked up for the first time, abruptly realizing how exhausted he was. There was a waitress shaking a wire basket of french fries, her back to him. The picture was on schedule, no problems, but no hook, no gimmick, no angle, no shtick to sell it; there was a big quarterly payment due on the house in Sherman Oaks; it was all Handy had, no one was going to get it; he had to keep the job. The waitress turned around for the first time and started laying out napkin, water glass, silverware, in front of him. You could work in a town for close to nine years, and still come away with nothing; not even living high, driving a ’65 Impala, that wasn’t ostentatious; but a lousy forty-five-day marriage to a clip artist and it was all in jeopardy; he had to keep the job, just to fight her off, keep her from using California divorce logic to get that house; nine years was not going down the tube; God, he felt weary. The waitress was in the booth, setting up the grips and cameramen. Handy mulled the nine years, wondering what the hell he was doing out here: oh yeah, I was getting divorced, that’s what I was doing. Nine years seemed so long, so ruthlessly long, and so empty suddenly, to be here with Crewes on another of the endless product that got fed into the always-yawning maw of the Great American Moviegoing Public. The waitress returned and stood before him.