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.