Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  We stepped out into one of these eye-of-the-hurricane areas, and started looking for the bar. I saw Roger Gore heading for the kitchen, and I knew immediately where the juice was being dispensed. I turned to Jenny. “See that guy in the gray houndstooth, the one going into the kitchen?”

  She nodded.

  “Stay away from him. There are ten thousand guys at this party who aren’t trouble. That one is. He’s clever and pretty fair-looking, but he’s a lox, and I tell you three times, one two three, stay out of his reach. That’s my only advice for the evening. Now scoot.” I gave her a shove on the rump and she moved out.

  Rooney grinned at me. “Guardian of the morals of the young.”

  “Poof you,” I answered.

  “Not here, surely, sir.” There were times I wanted to chomp on her ears. And that damned grin of hers. Heidi. Rapunzel. Snow White. Mata Hari.

  We went our way, and nodded to Roger Gore in the kitchen, where he was doing something noxious with martinis and sweet gherkins. What a lox!

  About an hour later Rooney was bopping with Willis (that sweet muthuh!) and I was in the corner digging a T-Bone Walker 78 somebody had slipped into the stack. Jenny came up to me: “I’m going out for a drink with Roger. I’ll be back in about half an hour.”

  I didn’t even think it was worth getting angry about. I’d known it was going to happen. Don’t go up in the top shelf of the cabinet and take a bean out of the jar and shove it up your nose, you tell the infant, and when you get back home, there he is, stretched out blue on the linoleum, a bean up his nose. It’s the way children are.

  She mulched out of there on Roger Gore’s arm, and when Rooney was done sweating with Willis, he brought her back and I told her about Jenny’s exeunt simpering.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?” she demanded.

  “Who do I look like: Torquemada?” I got hot. “I’ve got enough trouble governing the habits of you and me without taking on the world at large. Besides, he won’t hurt her, for Chrissakes. They’ll be back.”

  We waited six hours. The party was over, we were really drug with the scene, and finally went back to my place to sack out. About five A.M. the phone rang, I groped for it, somehow got it up to my nose and blew into it. After a minute something fell into place and I knew I had it wrong. I tried my eye and my mouth, and by process of elimination got around to my ear. It was Jenny.

  “Can you come and get me?”

  “Whuhtimezit?”

  “I don’t know, it’s late. Can you come get me?”

  “Whereyooat?”

  “I’m in a phone booth on Sunset, near Highland. Can you come and get me?” And she started crying. I woke up fast.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine, can you come and get me?”

  “Sure. Of course, but what happened to you? We waited till everyone else vanished. What the hell happened to you? Rooney was worried sick.”

  “I’ll tell you later. Can you come get me now?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  She hung up, I slid out without waking Rooney, threw on a pair of chinos and a jacket, and flew the coop. She was standing under a streetlight where she had said she’d be, and I bundled her into the car, where she immediately broke down. I got her back to my house, and bedded her out on the sofabed in the living room, and went back to sleep myself.

  Next morning Rooney cooed over her like Little Orphan Annie. We eventually got the story, and it wasn’t that spectacular. He’d taken her to a little bar nearby, tried to get her lushed (which he didn’t have to bother doing; Jenny was—putting it politely—not smart enough to avoid being a pushover) and finally told her he had to get the car, which was allegedly his roommate’s, back to his house. When he got her there, he proceeded to try The Game, and Jenny swore he hadn’t succeeded. In childish retaliation, Roger had fallen asleep. She’d waited around for three hours, but he snoozed on, and finally she’d tried to waken him. Either he couldn’t or wouldn’t rouse himself, because she finally took to her heels, and an hour and a half later had managed to get to the phone booth.

  “Why didn’t you call from his house?”

  “I was afraid he’d wake up.”

  “But you wanted him up, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So why didn’t you call from there?”

  “I was afraid. I wanted to get out of there.”

  “Afraid? Of what? Of him?”

  “Well…”

  “Jenny, tell me now, tell me true, did he get to you?”

  “No. I swear it. He got very angry when I gave him a hard time. He called me…he called me…”

  “I know what he called you. Forget it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “So remember it. But don’t lie to me, did he get in?”

  She turned her face away. At the time I thought it was because of my choice of words. “No, he didn’t,” she said. So I couldn’t really bring myself to feel possessively angry at Roger Gore. He’d done what any guy would try to do. He’d tried to make her, failed, and gotten disgusted. His chief sin was in not being a gentleman. In falling asleep and letting her fend for herself; but then, I’d known Gore was anything but a gentleman, anyhow, so there really wasn’t provocation enough to go find and pound him. We let the matter drop. I forgot about it, and fortunately, didn’t run into Roger Gore again for some time.

  Now, eight weeks later, I sat smoking a cigarette, while Jenny languished in the bathroom of her apartment, reading McCall’s, and the seed grew in her. I felt responsible. The phone rang. I picked it up reluctantly, and it was Rooney. “She told you?” I mumbled something affirmative. “Have you got a solution?”

  “Three of them,” I answered. “She can have the baby, she can get it aborted, or she can get Roger Gore to marry her. I’d say the first and third are out, the second one the most feasible, and a quick fourth reason altogether possible.”

  “What’s the fourth one?” Rooney asked.

  “She can blow her fucking stupid brains out.”

  All you have to do is get friendly with a couple of jazz musicians, have met a hooker at a party, be on civil terms with a grocer who takes the neighborhood numbers action, occasionally make an after-hours set in the Negro section, and suddenly you are a figure of mystery, a man with “connections” in the underworld; people come to you for unspeakable foulnesses you have never been within spitting distance of. It is a reflex cliché of people who really haven’t the faintest bloody idea of what the Real World is like. Since they themselves never slip over the line, anyone who lives beyond the constrained limits of their socially acceptable scene, has got to be a figure of mystery, a man with—oh well…

  Rooney asked me how soon I could locate an abortionist.

  “A whaaat?”

  She repeated herself, all honey-voiced forthrightness. It was a foregone conclusion. “Spider” Markham, denizen of the murky underworld, familiar of hoods, gunsels and two-bit whores was the man to ask when you needed a butcher.

  “What the hell makes you think I know an abortionist?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “No. Of course not. I take precautions. I’m not an imbecile like Roger Gore. I’ve never knocked anyone up, so ergo I don’t know any abortionists.” I looked at her with unconcealed annoyance, and she stared back blandly. She wasn’t convinced. I was, of course, hiding my connections, for obvious reasons.

  “Say, you don’t believe me, do you?” I was getting highly hacked by this scene. And Jenny just sat there with her face hanging out, and her stomach growing.

  “Well, you can call someone, one of your strange friends, can’t you?”

  I blew higher than the Van Allen radiation belt. “You’ve got to be putting me on, Rooney! Call who? What ‘strange friends’?” My face was so hot I could feel it in my mouth.

  She stared at me accusingly.

  So I called Candy.

  Candy was a muscle for some nameless amalgama
tion of interests I don’t think could be called the Syndicate. Maybe The Group, or The Guys, or Them, but definitely not The Syndicate. To begin with, he was Greek, not Sicilian.

  But Candy was a furtive figure, I must admit. He collected the payoffs for the numbers banks in East L.A. and I have seen his 340 pounds walk into a deli as lightly as a prima ballerina, and within ten seconds cause more of a stir than a thermite bomb. “There was a lotta hits this week, Candy,” the deli proprietor will con him. “The take is tiny. Tiny. I can’t pony it all up. I can give ya ’bout half, though, Candy, and the rest next week sometime.”

  Candy, who is only slightly less prepossessing than Mount Etna, will suck air into his bellows chest, puff up twice again as large as normal, pouter-pigeon fashion, and in a voice soft as strangling babies, will reply: “Angie, you will kindly get it up or I will have to hurt you. Seriously.” They scamper. And from some ratty cache beneath a counter, they produce the held-back portion of Candy’s pickup money.

  So I called Candy, who is maybe the gentlest cat I know.

  “Hi,” I started. It was not a particularly brilliant opening, but it was all I had available at that moment. “Listen, a friend of a friend of mine has got herself in a family way. Do you know anybody who can, uh, take care of her?”

  He was affronted. Practically shrieked at me. What the hell kind of a guy did I think he was? He didn’t screw around with those kinda people. Listen, if that was the kinda guy I thought he was, I would kindly honor him by forgetting his unlisted number. The nerve! The gall! What kind of a creep did I run around with, to need a guy who’d do that and finally Good-bye slam!

  I turned around to Jenny and Rooney. “He hung up on me. Thanks.”

  They seemed shocked, and Rooney made devious remarks about the furtiveness of some shady types. I think I groaned.

  Then I tried Van Jessup, a character actor who seemed to know everyone. He knew no one. Then I tried a tv director I’d played gin with a few times, and he said he’d get back to me. Then I tried a chick who made the Sunset Strip scene, and she asked a couple of guarded questions and said she’d get back to me. Then I called a relative in Pomona and she giggled outrageously, and said I should get back to her. Then I called The Boffer, who is a writer and a singer and a hustler of personal needs, and the conversation went like this:

  “I need a doctor.”

  “So go to one.”

  “Not for me, man, for a chick.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Of course, stupid. You think I’m the Blue Cross or somedamnthing?”

  “Rooney?”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “Who then? And does Rooney know you’ve been playing pattyfingers?”

  “I didn’t do the knocking-up.”

  “A likely story.”

  “Cut it, man. I’m serious. This thing has lost its funny for me. It isn’t my woman, and I didn’t do the job on her, and I need a D&C man. Now can you help me or not?”

  “I suppose so. I’ve had occasion to—”

  “I don’t want to know. Everyone agrees you’re the finest swordsman in these parts. Can you get me a guy…this is a favor I need, Boffer. It’s for a friend.”

  “You know, everybody you call is gonna think it was you.”

  “I know.”

  “Since when did you get such humanitarian instincts?”

  “A recent malady. What’s his name? Is there a number?”

  “You’re a lot more noble and friendly than I’d be. This kinda scam is liable to ruin your reputation.”

  “I haven’t got a reputation. What’s his name? Give!”

  There was a pause, as though The Boffer was seriously considering saying no. He’s peculiar that way. His reasoning is on a very furry plane, taken up by intricacies even he barely understands, and informed by a scurrying rodentlike deviousness that comes from having been on the Hollywood merry-go-round for too many years. “Take this down. You got a pencil? Okay, take this down: S. Jaime Quintano: the number is—”

  He rattled it off twice and I still didn’t get it. So he laid it on me slowly, and I wrote it as accurately as I could.

  “Thanks, Boffer. You’ve got one coming.”

  I gave the information to Jenny, and she stared at it as though it was contaminated.

  “You’ll have to do the calling,” I told her. “Apparently he’s a good man, has his own clinic, works most of the week in the Miguel Aleman Hospital, that’s the big one down there. This friend of mine says he’s taken girls down there a couple of times and this man has been very clean, very good. Three hundred dollars.”

  She continued to stare at the slip of paper.

  “This is the number,” I emphasized. It was like talking to a statue. “D-U-five-three-three-seven-two, that’s in Tijuana, and I think I have his name spelled right. Jenny…?”

  First her shoulders began to heave. Silently. Then her entire body shook, as though possessed. And in a second she was dry-crying, her head sunk down on her chest almost, the top of her head bobbing like a cork in a rough sea. It had started to get through to her: what she had undergone had not been love, it had been something far more indelicate, something simpler, more destructive. She felt contaminated, felt insulted, in the strictest possible sense of the outmoded term, she felt sullied.

  I moved over to her and put my arms around her. She was incapable, at that moment, of even knowing I was there. I held her very tightly for what seemed a long time, and slowly the shaking passed, and her head came up. The front of my shirt was soaked.

  She came out from the burrow of my arms. “What’s the area code to Tijuana?” she said softly.

  “Nine-o-three,” Rooney said, from the other side of the room. I looked at her, startled. “I’ve been there, too.” Her face was very sad, and I realized: no one comes to anyone untouched.

  Everyone goes through fire.

  Jenny picked up the receiver and started to dial.

  By the time the Thursday rolled around, I had six more names. A doctor in Monterey Park who was rumored to charge between three and five hundred, but had apparently been busted some time before, and was very much under wraps now. It would have entailed a drive out to that suburb. Five more in Tijuana. Two brothers with their own Enfermería, who only charged one hundred and fifty, and to whom you had to say, “Nurse Carlotta suggested I call you.” Apparently Nurse Carlotta was a swinger in L.A. that the brothers dug. Another was alleged to keep the patient over for eight hours, and that was too terrifying for consideration. Overnight in that town would be worsethan the operation for Jenny. There was an American doctor down there, Oswald Tremaine, Jr., who was appended with the title “butcher” by my informant, but he only charged one hundred and twenty-five. We decided Quintano was the best bet. His name had come up again, from a very reputable source, so we held to the date of the appointment Jenny had made that night.

  It was tacitly understood that Rooney and I would drive her down. If her parents ever found out, the consequences were too hideous to consider. Jenny never expanded on the remark, but when I suggested that perhaps her parents might be very understanding, if she explained what had happened, she said, “My father has never hit me, but he has a very loud voice, and he wears a belt. My mother would cry.”

  We left it at that, and spent the week between the phone call and that Thursday getting ourselves ready. I was driving an MG Magnette, a pretentious, cheaper copy of the Jaguar touring sedan. It was a lovely sort of thing, though, with glove-leather upholstery, dual carbs, a solid walnut dash panel that could be lifted out, four doors and the traditional MG red-painted engine. I got it lubed and checked out for the ride down. Rooney worked, of course, so her readying was all interior. As for Jenny, all I could tell of her state of mind, her capacity for handling this thing, as her nineteenth year became a nightmare, was that she did not cry again, and her conversation was not introspective.

  When I asked her what had been said on the call to the doctor, she said: “A woman answ
ered. She said, ‘Bueno.’ I told her a friend from Fresno had suggested I call Doctor Quintano about consultation. Then she put me through to him, and I said the same thing, and he asked me consultation about what? I said I was having menstrual difficulties, that was what your friend told me to say, and he said just a minute; he said it very quickly, as though he didn’t want to talk any more. Then the girl came back and asked me what day I wanted to come down, and I told her Thursday, and she said to call from San Diego when we got that far.”

  I had a feeling Jenny was going to be all right. She was getting much sharper, very quickly. Sometimes childhood and adolescence pass away just that fast, like morning mist, burned off by the sun or a rotten experience. Markham, the philosopher. You can’t miss my ruminations: they’re in that purple-bound folio over there.

  Three hundred dollars had been the next point Quintano’s woman had brought up. “Do you know the Doctor’s fee?” she had asked. Jenny said three hundred. Not anymore. That was last year’s price. But what with the high cost of this and that, the going rate for Dilation & Curettage was now four hundred. Jenny said all right, to the woman (whose name was Nancy, and who spoke with a faint trace of Spanish accent) and to me, and to Roger Gore when she called him for the money.

  She said all right.

  But Roger Gore said no.

  He also said she was a whore. He also said she was a harpy and a blackmailer and a tramp and slept with dogs in the streets and if she had as many sticking out of her as she’d probably had sticking in her, she’d look like a porcupine. He concluded his chivalrous polemic with the comment that she could go peddle her ass on First and Main in downtown L.A. and raise the action that way. His parting line was, “Even if you charge what you’re worth, you shouldn’t have to make it with more than two or three hundred guys to raise the money.”