Blood Is Not Enough Page 10

  Eddie Burma was a figure no larger than life, for life itself was large enough, in a world where most of those he met had no individuality, no personality, no reality, no existence of their own.

  But the price he paid was the price of doom. For those who had nothing came to him and, like creatures of darkness, amorally fed off him. They drank from him. They were the succubi, draining his psychic energies. And Eddie Burma always had more to give. Seemingly a bottomless well, the bottom had been reached. Finally. All the people whose woes he handled, all the losers whose lives he tried to organize, all the preying crawlers who slinked in through the ashes of their non-existence to sup at his board, to slake the thirsts of their emptiness… all of them had taken their toll.

  Now Eddie Burma stumbled through the last moments of his reality, with the wellsprings of himself almost totally drained. Waiting for them, for all his social cases, all his problem children, to come and finish him off.

  I live in a hungry world, Eddie Burma now realized.

  “Hey, man! C’mon outta th’crapper!"The booming voice and the pounding on the stall door came as one.

  Eddie trembled to his feet and unbolted the door, expecting it to be one of them. But it was only a dancer from The Cave, wanting to rid himself of cheap wine and cheap beer. Eddie stumbled out of the stall, almost falling into the man’s arms. When the beefy Puerto Rican saw the blood, saw the dead pale look of flesh and eyes, his manner softened.

  “Hey… you okay, man?”

  Eddie smiled at him, thanked him softly, and left the toilet. The nightclub was still high, still screaming, and Eddie suddenly knew he could not let them find this good place, where all these good people were plugged into life and living. Because for them it would be a godsend, and they would drain The Cave as they had drained him.

  He found a rear exit, and emerged into the moonless city night, as alien as a cavern five miles down or the weird curvature of another dimension. This alley, this city, this night, could as easily have been Transylvania or the dark side of the moon or the bottom of the thrashing sea. He stumbled down the alley, thinking …

  They have no lives of their own. Oh, this poisoned world I now see so clearly. They have only the shadowy images of other lives, and not even real other lives—the lives of movie stars, fictional heroes, cultural cliches. So they borrow from me, and never intend to pay back. They borrow, at the highest rate of interest. My life. They lap at me, and break off pieces of me. I’m the mushroom that Alice found with the words EAT ME in blood-red on my id. They’re succubi, draining at me, draining my soul. Sometimes I feel I should go to some mystical well and get poured full of personality again. I’m tired. So tired.

  There are people walking around this city who are running on Eddie Burma’s drained energies, Eddie Burma’s life-force. They’re putt-putting around with smiles just like mine, with thoughts I’ve second-handed like old clothes passed on to poor relatives, with hand-movements and expressions and little cute sayings that were mine, Scotch-taped over their own. I’m a jigsaw puzzle and they keep stealing little pieces. Now I make no scene at all, I’m incomplete, I’m unable to keep the picture coherent, they’ve taken so much already.

  They had come to his party, all of the ones he knew. The ones he called his friends, and the ones who were merely acquaintances, and the ones who were using him as their wizard, as their guru, their psychiatrist, their wailing wall, their father confessor, their repository of personal ills and woes and inadequacies. Alice, who was afraid of men and found in Eddie Burma a last vestige of belief that males were not all beasts. Burt, the box-boy from the supermarket, who stuttered when he spoke, and felt rejected even before the rejection. Linda, from down the hill, who had seen in Eddie Burma an intellectual, one to whom she could relate all her theories of the universe. Sid, who was a failure, at fifty-three. Nancy, whose husband cheated on her. John, who wanted to be a lawyer, but would never make it because he thought too much about his clubfoot. And all the others. And the new ones they always seemed to bring with them. There were always so many new ones he never knew. Particularly the pretty little blonde with the Raggedy Ann shoebutton eyes, who stared at him hungrily.

  And from the first, earlier that night, he had known something was wrong. There were too many of them at the party. More than he could handle … and all listening to him tell a story of something that had happened to him when he had driven to New Orleans in 1960 with Tony in the Corvette and they’d both gotten pleurisy because the top hadn’t been bolted down properly and they’d passed through a snowstorm in Illinois.

  All of them hung to his words, like drying wash on a line, like festoons of ivy. They sucked at each word and every expression like hungry things pulling at the marrow in beef bones. They laughed, and they watched, and their eyes glittered …

  Eddie Burma had slowly felt the strength ebbing from him. He grew weary even as he spoke. It had happened before, at other parties, other gatherings, when he had held the attention of the group, and gone home later, feeling drained. He had never known what it was.

  But tonight the strength did not come back. They kept watching him, seemed to be feeding at him, and it went on and on, till finally he’d said he had to go to sleep, and they should go home. But they had pleaded for one more anecdote, one more joke told with perfect dialect and elaborate gesticulation. Eddie Burma had begun to cry, quietly. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his body felt as though the bones and musculature had been removed, leaving only a soft rubbery coating that might at any moment cave in on itself.

  He had tried to get up; to go and lie down; but they’d gotten more insistent, had demanded, had ordered, had grown nasty. And then the blonde had come at him, and cut him, and the others were only a step behind. Somehow… in the thrashing tangle that had followed, with his friends and acquaintances now tearing at one another to get at him, he had escaped. He had fled, he did not know how, the pain of his knifed side crawling inside him. He had made it into the trees of the little glen where his house was hidden, and through the forest, over the watershed, down to the highway, where he had hailed a cab. Then into the city…

  See me! See me, please! Just don’t always come and take. Don’t bathe in my reality and then go away feeling clean. Stay and let some of the dirt of you rub off on me. I feel like an invisible man, like a drinking trough, like a sideboard dripping with sweetmeats… Oh God, is this a play, and myself unwillingly the star? How the hell do I get off stage? When do they ring down the curtain? Is there, please God, a man with a hook… ?

  I make my rounds, like a faith healer. Each day I spend a little time with each one of them. With Alice and with Burt and with Linda down the hill; and they take from me. They don’t leave anything in exchange, though. It’s not barter, it’s theft. And the worst part of it is I always needed that, I always let them rob me. What sick need was it that gave them entrance to my soul? Even the pack rat leaves some worthless object when it steals a worthless object. I’d take any thing from them: the smallest anecdote, the most used-up thought, the most stagnant concept, the puniest pun, the most obnoxious personal revelation… anything! But all they do is sit there and stare at me, their mouths open, their ears hearing me so completely they empty my words of color and scent… I feel as though they’re crawling into me. I can’t stand any more… really I can’t.

  The mouth of the alley was blocked.

  Shadows moved there.

  Burt, the box-boy. Nancy and Alice and Linda. Sid, the failure. John, who walked with a rolling motion. And the doctor, the jukebox repairman, the pizza cook, the used-car salesman, the swinging couple who swapped partners, the discothéque dancer … all of them.

  They came for him.

  And for the first time he noticed their teeth.

  The moment before they reached him stretched out as silent and timeless as the decay that ate at his world. He had no time for self-pity. It was not merely that Eddie Burma had been cannibalized every day of the year, every hour of the day, every minute
of every hour of every day of every year. The awareness dawned unhappily—in that moment of timeless time—that he had let them do it to him. That he was no better than they, only different. They were the feeders—and he was the food. But no nobility could be attached to one or the other. He needed to have people worship and admire him. He needed the love and attention of the masses, the worship of monkeys. And for Eddie Burma that was a kind of beginning to death. It was the death of his unself-consciousness; the slaughter of his innocence. From that moment forward, he had been aware of the clever things he said and did, on a cellular level below consciousness. He was aware. Aware, aware, aware!

  And awareness brought them to him, where they fed. It led to self-consciousness, petty pretensions, ostentation. And that was a thing devoid of substance, of reality. And if there was anything on which his acolytes could not nourish, it was a posturing, phony, empty human being. They would drain him.

  The moment came to a timeless climax, and they carried him down under their weight, and began to feed.

  When it was over, they left him in the alley. They went to look elsewhere. With the vessel drained, the vampires moved to other pulsing arteries.

  Though I have worked assiduously at living my life by Pasteur’s dictum, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and consider it ludicrous and horrifying that the guy in the White House (as I sit writing this in May of 1988) is so loopy that he consults astrologers—a craziness we associate with utter derangement cases like Hitler, who maintained a staff stargazer—I nonetheless amuse myself with the harmless conceit that each of us possesses different kinds of “luck.”

  (Because I truly believe there is no such thing as “luck,” but cannot deny both synchronicity and serendipity in the insensate universe, this is my childlike way of taking into account sheer randomness of circumstance that redounds to our benefit. And I’m not for a second truly serious about it.)

  There are people who are “lucky” in love and people who are “lucky” in business and people who are “lucky” when they survive accidents. The kinds of “luck” that I possess are far less significant measured against the totality of my life. They are: parking-space luck; restaurant luck; bad-companion luck.

  My friends (and ex-Executive Assistants) Linda Steele and Sarah Wood used to rage at my parking-space luck. It wouldn’t matter if the destination was in the heaviest-traffic section of Westwood or Downtown L.A. As I neared the building in which I needed to transact my business, a parking place would open … usually smack in front of the entrance. There could be entire armadas of parked cars at my place of arrival… and someone would drive away just as we neared the most convenient spot. Linda and Sarah would revile me with splenic fervor, going so far as to bet me a buck it wouldn’t happen this time.

  I made a few dollars off that one.

  Then there’s restaurant luck. Trust me on this, I am systemically incapable of picking a bad eatery. Joints that look as though they’ve been selected for this year’s Cockroach Party Conclave from the outside, invariably become secret dining treasures, to be whispered about only among my closest friends lest the word leak out and they invade the place, making it impossible for me to get a seat when I’m hungry. (We all know who they are: the uptown folks in Gucci loafers, with their rebuilt noses and friends who are big in debentures and real estate. You know the ones. They always need to push two tables together so they can scream at each other more conveniently.) I can be driving down an Interstate in a part of the country I’ve never visited before, and my head will come up and my nose (unrebuilt) will begin to twitch like a setter on point, and I‘ll say to my passengers, “If we take the next exit, turn right and go off in that direction, we’ll find a sensational rib joint."They look at me with proper disbelief. So I do it, and we find a five-stool counter joint run by an ancient black man whose arcane abilities with baby-backs is strictly imperial. Never fails. Ask Silverberg. Ask Len Wein. Trust me on this.

  But the most efficacious luck I command is the luck that keeps me away from deadbeats. Time-wasters, arrivistes, bums and mooches. The mooks of the world.

  Now, I suppose, dealing with this pragmatically, it is only what Hemingway called “a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.” The flawless functioning of the onboard computer that has been programmed with decades of experience and insight and body-language and tonal inflection and the behavior of sociopaths. Sherlock Holmes employed this methodology to scope a visitor to 221B Baker Street within moments of his/her arrival: deductive logic. That’s what this “luck” must be, I’m certain of it.

  Whatever the rationale, it works for me. I’m not about to say I’ve never been flummoxed—there was this lady I once married for 45 days, but that’s another novel, for another time—yet the wool has been pulled very rarely. I can spot a twisto with the first sentence uttered. Lames and leaners and hustlers don’t do very well with me. I seem to be creep-proof.

  And so, almost all of the vast amount of trouble I’ve gotten myself into, has been no one’s fault but my own. I cannot plead that I was “led astray by the wickedness of others.” I am, in the Amerind sense of the phrase, absolutely responsible for my life and all the actions that have gone to construct that life. No accessory after the fact, I am precisely who I made me.

  Yet in 1963–65,1 “went Hollywood” for a while. Not so seriously that you might confuse me with William Holden’s corpse floating in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool, but off-direction enough that I spent more time than I had to fritter away, in the company of people who drifted on the tide like diatoms. Some actors, some blue-sky entrepreneurs, some starlets, some taproots-in-Hell users and manipulators. I knew they were wrong the moment I opened the packages, but I’m no different from you: we all go to the zoo to watch the peculiar animals from faraway lands. Temporary fascination is not self-abuse, as long as one retains a sense of perspective; tip-toeing through the minefield satisfies our need for diversion and danger, as long as one doesn’t lease a burrow and start buying furniture for permanent residency. As sheepish apologia, I offer the only explanation that ever seems acceptable for the peculiar things we do: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  And so, cute as a bug, I waded hip-deep in a social scene that bore as much relation to Living a Proper Life as Narnia bears to Ashtabula, Ohio. Which is to say, not a whole lot.

  I was living in an actual treehouse at that time. A small, charming structure up a steep private road that ended in a parking lot below the house, a flat space surrounded by eucalyptus trees that totally hid the house from casual sight. It cost one hundred and thirty-five bucks a month, and had a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom, a decent-sized living room with a wood-burning fireplace, high beamed ceilings and paneled walls, and a “captain’s cabin” bedroom that was, in truth, only a triangular-shaped walled-off section with old-fashioned bay windows all around. I loved that little place on Bushrod Lane.

  To that eyrie, 1962–66, came an unending stream of odd types and casual liaisons. The house lay in the bosom of Beverly Glen, at that time a rich enclave of artistic and (what used to be called) bohemian intellects. Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall and Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Blake and Lenny Bruce … I knew them all, and a few of them became friends. The parties were intimate, because the house was so small; the fun was constant because it was poor folks fun, pizza and alla that smart chat, unimpaired by dope or booze because I don’t do neither, and had no room for it in my environs.

  In that venue, I stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia boss and two of his pistoleros with a Remington XP-100 pistol-rifle that fires enormous .221 Fireball cartridges, while I was ridiculously attired only in a bath towel around my waist. In that venue, I met and made friends with the dog Ahbhu, who still lives as Blood in “A Boy and His Dog.” In that venue, I managed so fully to fulfill all my adolescent sex-fantasies that I was able to proceed with my life having flensed myself of the dopey dream-hungers that pursue men into middle-age.

  And in that venue I wrot
e “Paingod” and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Lonelyache” and “Soldier” and “Punky and the Yale Men” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and a great many other stories. It was in that venue that I conceived and began editing DANGEROUS VISIONS.

  I partied, and I dissipated, and I screwed like a mad thing, but I always worked. Which is why I can look back on that time with pleasure and a smile. But were it not for having done the writing—the thing that has always saved me from becoming a bum—the years of my having “gone Hollywood” would reside in memory draped with a sense of loss, a coating of wasted time, a terror at how easily we can all be led astray.

  “Try a Dull Knife” came out of that period.

  It was the story that marked the end of my sojourn among the bad companions. What had been going on, had been going on for several years; and during that time I went from one bunch of gargoyles to another, with them mooching and leaning, wasting my nights and borrowing my money (of which there was damned little, despite my working steadily in TV, writing Outer Limits and Burke’s Law and Route 66 and dozens of other shows). I was constantly having to put people up in the tiny treehouse because they were being hunted by even deadlier types. When Bobby Blake needed a place to hide out so his producer couldn’t find him, to force him to do retakes on a segment of The Richard Boone Show that Bobby had starred in, he went to ground in my living room. We shot a lot of pool in those days. A mountain lion leaped off the jungly hill that loomed over the treehouse and damned near ripped off my arm, right in the middle of a late night party.

  And then, like drawing a deep breath, I sat down and wrote “Try a Dull Knife,” and it was all over.

  For me, the work has always been therapy. Writing and taking showers provides the spark of insight that informs my awareness of what the hell I’m doing in the Real World.