Spider Kiss

Nine

“Let’s forget our friendship, Shelly. This is a business meeting. We have a cursed problem on our hands, and someone has got, I say got, to solve it.”

Freeport paced the bedroom anxiously. He went from the breakfast table on wheels—steeped in odors of kippers,

English muffins, oatmeal and shirred eggs—to the window; from the window to the huge bed; from the bed to the chair in which Shelly sat pinned by a glance. And all the time prowling.

“I’ve got a million dollars tied up in this boy, Shelly. He’s been paying off, but the overhead, well, you know what that’s like. I can’t afford to risk it. Something will have to be done to curb his, er, activities.”

Sheldon Morgenstern spread his hands like a pair of diving doves. “What can I tell you, Colonel? I’ve tried to keep the kid straight, but he’s some kind of a nut. He wanders around late at night like the Werewolf of London. After that scene up here I thought he was stacked-away for the night, next thing I knew he was—”

Freeport rattled a newspaper snatched quickly from a stack on the bed. “—he was brawling in a nightclub with a paunchy ex-movie star whose finest examples of histrionic ability have been in pubs and gin mills, the past five years.

You’ve made every column in the city…”

“…well, publicity can’t hurt hi—”

“—hurt him! Shelly, I’m surprised that you would try that fast talk on me. We both know this is the worst sort of press he could get. Look at this.” He folded the paper lengthwise as subway riders do, stabbing at an item circled in red grease pencil with an angry thrust. “They’re calling him ‘Stud Service Preston!’ That is impossible, Shelly, impossible! I won’t tolerate it!”

Shelly felt his head swimming. He was suddenly not only his brother’s keeper, but regulator of public morals, suppressor of secrets and nanny to the hottest toddler in or out of perambulators. He raised his hands in mute forestalling, hoping to ward off the Colonel’s next words.

“Shelly, I’d like to tell you something.

“You may have been wondering at these long distance calls I’ve been getting from Atlanta the past two weeks. Well, they’re from an intermediary who has been trying to move a little land purchase for me. I’m almost in the final stages of negotiation to buy back all the land my family owned in Georgia. I’m going to rebuild a home that was sacked and burned at the time of Atlanta, my boy; it is a dream I’ve held for many years. The estate of Freeport will grow again. Now you own a good piece of Stag Preston yourself, Shelly, and I know you feel very much a part of this project, but if my own plans are put in jeopardy, I’m afraid I’ll have to take steps to remedy matters. There are ways, you know.”

Shelly knew. He felt unhappy. Very unhappy.

“So let me summarize, Shelly. If you can’t do something swift and decisive about curbing this cursed infant’s bad habits … I’ll have to seek out someone who can.

“Is there any area of our conversation that remains muddy?”

Shelly shook his head, mollified, subdued, cowed. The conversation was clear as an unrippled pool. He knew precisely what the Colonel meant. There were men who could be hired who charged by the broken limb. One hundred dollars for an arm. One fifty for an arm and leg combination. Two hundred and fifty for a broken back. With prices on request for special services peculiar to the client.

He stood up. “Colonel, say no more. As of this moment, I am the Jiminy Cricket of the hip set. I will stick so close to Huck Finn that he will have to send through an interoffice memo if he wants to use the bathroom.”

The Colonel winced at the indelicate reference, but smiled immediately thereafter, clapping Shelly on the back, adroitly steering him toward the door. “Good, good, my boy. I knew all it would take was a little close talk on our parts. We’re doing fine, Shelly, just fine.”

And he was outside.

It was the same sort of bum’s rush the Colonel had given outsiders, or people on the staff who were on their way out. The image of Needleman—somewhere out there hustling again—came to him. Was there a power-grab in the offing? Shelly began casting about for ways and means to shore up his position.

Then again, he caught himself, I’m in fairly swinging shape if I can keep the Creature From the Stork Club out of trouble.

It sounded a good deal easier than it was destined to be. As Shelly found out twice within the space of a week and a half.

His first mistake was in taking Stag up to his apartment. His second mistake was leaving the singer with Carlene while he changed out of the charcoal brown business suit into a tux. His third mistake was in not leaving the bedroom door open to overhear their conversation.

They were slated to attend a banquet of pop music publishers, and Stag—who had kept the lamps going all the night before in the watering holes—had not bothered to change out of his Continental tuxedo. He had worn it all the next day, and though he looked rumpled, the animal grace of him canceled the taint of déshabille. But Shelly had to change, and so Stag Preston met Carlene for the first time.

“Listen, Carlene, fix Stag a drink, will you? I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.” It was not that Shelly was unaware of Stag Preston’s proclivities toward new women, nor even that he thought Carlene’s fidelity was a thing of cohesion and permanency.

It was simply that he was rushed, harried and harassed. He went into the bedroom to change.

Stag Preston’s eyes fastened on the long legs and the hidden planes of the face, and for a bright instant the eyes glowed golden.

“Shelly never told me he had a girl,” Stag whispered.

Carlene moved with sinuous caution beneath his glance, stepping around to the small bar, forcing the muscles of her buttocks and legs to strain against the sleek Pantinos. It was the ritual mating dance of the creatures in Jungle York.

“That’s a polite way to put it, Mr. Preston.”

“Put what?”

“May I fix you something, Mr. Preston?” She dodged the obvious answer.

He followed her and nudged in between the bar stools. “Oh, how about a Scotch old fashioned, on the rocks?” He stared pointedly at the baggy folds of her Bohemian overblouse, trying to ascertain the size of her chest.

“J & B all right?” She offered the bottle.

“Swing,” he said negligently, falling into a self-assured groove as he realized she was fencing. There was interest here.

For a quiver he considered the ethics of shafting his buddy Shelly. The quiver passed.

“So you’re Shelly’s girl,” he said, without tie to the rest of the conversation; the point dropped, talked around, and suddenly picked up again, reiteration, throwing the other off-guard through frankness.

“It depends what you mean by ‘Shelly’s girl,’ I suppose.”

“I guess it means you’re on tap when he needs you.”

“A girl might be annoyed to be just ‘on tap.’”

“Hot and cold running tap?”

“That isn’t too funny, Mr. Preston.”

“Hot and cold running Stag.”

“Mr. Preston.”

“Stag! You don’t have to get nasty about it. I’m only being friendly. Extending a little good cheer to my friend’s girl.”

“Hot or cold, Mr. Preston?”

“Depends on the receptacle.”

Her carefully-plucked eyebrows rose. “They’ve taught you big words, too. I thought all you knew were words for your songs; the ones with one syllable.”

Stag’s jaw jumped. He could play the dodge-and-sway game only so long. He was used to getting his way. This one was coming on snappish. He reached across as she offered him the freshly-mixed drink, and fastened to her wrist. The glass dropped from her hand and tipped onto the bar top, spilling. He pulled her half across the counter, till her dark, remote face was up next to his own.

“What’s your story, bitch?”

She stared back at him. She had experienced it all during her peregrinations. This approach was not new. But the boy was. There was money here; more money than Shelly would ever know, because the same things she saw in her mirror each morning, she saw in his face.

“You bore me, Mr. Preston. Please let go of my wrist. Or I’ll have to call Shelly.”

He pulled her further toward him. The bar top cut painfully into her stomach. “You keep chewin’ on me, bitch, I’m gonna climb your frame.”

She sneered. “That seems to be your only interest, Mr. Preston. You’re an animal, you know.”

He reached across with the other hand and wrapped it in her hair. He was standing as tall as he could, pulling her up by wrist and hair, painfully, when Shelly came out of the bedroom, half-dressed, on his way to the bathroom.

Stag did not see him. Carlene saw him out of the corner of her eye. Shelly saw it all.

“Animal, huh? You never saw how much of an animal I can be, bitch. I got an animal’s—”

“You’ve got an animal’s mouth, Stag,” Shelly said coldly, from the doorway. “Get your goddam hands off her before I tear your windpipe out!”

Stag did not loosen his hold, but his head turned, and at first a quip formed on his lips; then he saw the white, corded expression on Shelly’s face. Then he let Carlene drop. She plopped back behind the bar with a gasp.

“Get out of here; go wait in the lobby,” Shelly said, pointing a trembling finger at him.

Stag started to argue, started to mouth inanities about fun & games. “Get out of here, you little bastard, before I crack your skull for you.”

He moved away from the bar, but he wasn’t finished. He was Stag Preston and he didn’t go quietly.

“S’long, bitch,” he said to Carlene, ignoring Shelly. “Don’t forget us animals; we get around to makin’ it sooner than you’d think.”

Shelly moved toward him, threateningly, and Stag paced himself enough to make the door before the shorter man reached him— without actually running.

As Stag opened the door, Carlene said, very gently, “Goodbye, Mr. Preston. Come again.”

He looked at her as the door closed. It was not a look of enmity. The rank, raw glance of the mating beasts smoldered there.

The door closed and Carlene began mixing another drink. Shelly began to feel like Frank Buck.

Three nights later, the Colonel’s talk still painfully reverberating in his memory, Shelly found himself with Stag, two chorus girls out of Carnival! and a half dozen assorted nameless hanger-on nonentities down front at the Bon Soir. Stag had particularly wanted to make the scene that night.

“A zonky-lookin’ com-eed-ee-an,” Stag had said.

When it came to the patois of the Broadway hipsters that Stag had recently adopted, Shelly was of the express opinion that a little vocabulary was a dangerous thing.

The “zonky com-eed-ee-an” turned out to be a nationally-famous cabaret performer, no longer a spring chicken, who was breaking in a new act. Stag sat through the first show, his ears turned off to the mildly-blue (while attempting to be Sahlishly controversial/contemporary/sociological) material, but his eyes corked open on the woman in her stranglingly tight, blue-sequined gown. With every breath, the décolletage dipped and so did Stag’s eyes. Shelly felt, however, that as long as he kept Stag off the bottle, the boy would behave himself. What did itch at his peculiarity center, however, was that Stag made frequent trips to the men’s room.

The first six times, Shelly (ah, glorious naiveté!) assumed it was the debilitating effects of the ginger ales Stag had been swilling. But when the singer returned from his seventh sojourn, wobbling, as it were, through the ranks and files,

Shelly realized the kid had either been nipping from a flask secreted on his person, or from a cache deposited with the black attendant in the washroom.

Stag slumped heavily into his seat, instantly returning his hand to its former position somewhere beneath the skirt of the tender Carnival! showgirl. She made not a sound; or as Shelly put it to himself: not a mumblin’ word.

When the second show began, Stag sat up very straight, twisting at his tux’s bow tie, crookeding, rather than straightening it.

When the comedienne made her entrance in an amber spot, this time in a flame-red velvet gown that flared mambo style at her trim calves, Stag literally began to drool. His palms were wet and red from applauding. She smiled down at him with the phony stage affection packaged and sold to performers in gross lots. Stag flipped.

Halfway through her routine (accompanied as it was by sporadic paradiddles by the drummer in time to the performer’s bumps and punctuating grinds), Stag leaped up, took two steps and three obscene phrases toward her, and encountered a solid right to the cheek.

The slap was heard ’round the room.

“Sit down, tot,” she snarled, “I stopped picking green apples like you when I was thirteen.”

The laughter was heard ’round the room.

Stag, infuriated, went for her and managed to wrap a hand in the dress.

The rip was heard ’round the room.

Shelly, ghost-white and furious, tore Stag away from the stage, pushed and hurled him back out of the club, the comedienne cursing foully from her naked vantage point in the amber spot. The next day the columnists took a swinging shot at Stag Preston.

The shot was heard ’round the world.

“I’m telling you, Colonel, it doesn’t mean a thing. They can say anydamnthing they want in the columns, it only makes for good copy on the kid. Okay, so he’s a problem, but I’m telling you it’s only the success that’s going to his head. He’ll get over it.” Shelly was sweating.

“This is it, Sheldon,” the Colonel said, from his chair. He was deep in the chair. Neptune about to open the waters and engulf those audacious enough to defile his realm.

“Look. Colonel. The kid’s strongest source of publicity is the whispering campaign these teenagers have got. As long as the underground loves him, the hell with what the big-mouth columnists say. I’m telling you it’s worked this way before and it’ll work this way again. The kid is solid, and no little incident like that one last night can hurt him. Now I’m assuring you, Colonel, that blah and blah and blah blah blah…”

Long, and hard, and far into the night.

It finally quelled the savage thrust of Freeport’s anger. The waves broke on the rocks and crags of Sheldon Morgenstern’s quick thinking. The Colonel subsided, but it was the uneasy rest of a dyspeptic giant threatening to break slumber and seven-league stomp the principality.

Which was all prelude and prologue to The Affair of the Road Show Romance.

Lyric and refrain by Stag Preston, last of the red-hot papas.

Stag was practicing dropping putts into a simulated fairway cup in the exact center of his bedroom. He was using a specially-made iron with his name in gold on the shank. One more of the many big-time habits the singer had taken up with his sudden success. He kept his head down, knees locked, and followed-through sharply, sending the red dot on the golf ball rolling over and over.

He missed the shot by a good three feet.

Then he looked up at Shelly.

“I don’t dig, Shelly baby. Why we goin’ outta the Big Apple?”

Shelly perched on the arm of a chair, rolling the cigarette between tongue and lip. “Forget the hip patter, Stag. Talk to me in native English.”

Stag made a placating gesture. Awkwardly, still holding the putting iron. He replaced it in the hand-tooled leather caddy bag and moved over to Shelly. “Gimme a cigarette.”

“Forget it,” Shelly said. “You’ve got only one thing to sell, Tiger, and that’s your voice. Now what’s your problem?”

The boy turned and opened one of the sliding doors to a full-length wardrobe. He considered the sleeves of several sports jackets. “You like this one, Shelly?” he asked, withdrawing a Scotch plaid, Continental cut.

“I’m nuts for it. Now what’s on your mind?”

“Well, I just don’t understand why I have to go on this road tour. Weren’t you supposed to fix up a date for me at The Palace? I mean, I’ve wanted to play there for a long time; I think we’re ready for it.” He let his full lower lip sag petulantly.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Sol Hurok; the Colonel’s running this particular show, and he’s a little perturbed about you slipping and sliding into every gin mill on the Great White Way. He is also, may I point out, bugged by the nickname ‘Stud Service Stag’ which the funny boys over at Lindy’s have handed you. In short, clown, he wants you out of the way for a while, so he can bribe the powers that be into letting your case slide. And it won’t do you any harm to make a little goodwill tour into the provinces. So it’s the road show scene for you.”

Stag considered the publicity man for a long moment. Then—seemingly out of context—he said, “You know somethin’, Shelly, you got to learn to talk to me with respect.”

Shelly’s mouth dropped open. The cigarette clung to his lip. “Whaaat?”

Stag tried to explain, but his self-consciousness showed through. “Well, I mean, I am a star, Shelly, and you talk to me like I was still some snotty kid outta Lou’ville. It doesn’t sound right when anybody’s listenin’.”

In the months that Stag had been away from Louisville, months in which he had sopped up Manhattan customs and glamour, he had steadfastly attempted to lose his Low Southern inflections and vocal mannerisms. For the most part he had succeeded though grammatical errors were still an unnoticed, frequent happening. But when he was being himself, just a little of the old Luther showing, he slipped back and the twang was there, the slur was evident, the rattles, bobbles and roller coaster last syllables protruded. At those times he made a studied, conscious effort to get back to the hip, slick New Yorkese he admired so much, and the effort only made his origins more apparent, embarrassing him. It happened now as he tried to put Shelly in his place.

Shelly pursed his lips around the cigarette in the mock-frustrated facial expression only the Semite can muster properly. Talking to an unseen conversationalist, looking over Stag’s right shoulder as though such a person stood there, he nodded his head softly in further realization of that peculiar expression. “He’s a star, right? He’s a big man in the metropolitan scene, is that right? We bring him up out of the mud and he’s in desperate need of respect. How about that? You hear what he said? He says: Shelly, you talk to me like I was a newcomer and you been around for ages. Did you hear that?” Then, shifting tone and nuance as only exponents of that particular Yiddish mien can, he said to Stag, “Listen, buddy-boy, as long as you keep swilling and wenching, you’re going to get talked to like you were an incompetent. Because, frankly, that’s what the Colonel and myself are beginning to think you are.”

“Aw, now, Shelly…”

“Aw, now, Shelly my ass, tot! That is the reason we are going out of town. We are going to let you cool off a little, let our boy talk to Lyons and Winchell and Marie Torre and the rest and try to get you back in their good graces. That scene with the ha-ha girl the other night was the caper. They want to stuff you and display you on Times Square right alongside the giant wastebasket that says ‘Put Your Dreck Here.’ And in case you haven’t picked it up yet, dreck is an old Irish word for garbage. We kikes stole it along with the Holy Grail, just after we spot-welded J.C. to the cross.

“All this bad press is bound to hurt us unless we can get you out in the grass-roots scene and let the kids see you’re still the same, sweet teen-aged Stag Preston they all know and adore. Do I make my point, Lochinvar?”

Somewhat mollified, Stag turned and walked out of the room, escaping the blunt unkindness of Shelly’s words. When the flak-merchant came out of the bedroom, into the huge living room of the suite, Stag was staring out the window, down into Times Square. The Colonel had had French doors built onto the tall windows, opening onto a small balcony. It was seldom used, save in the summertime when even the air conditioning in the suite was unable to make the inhabitants comfortable. The tiny breeze brought in off the balcony was humid, soot-laden and slow-moving, but its emotional, therapeutic value was limitless.

Now Stag stared out through the French doors, across the little balcony, and down to the cavorting gnats bumping and rushing and strolling in Kandinsky patterns. “I guess you’re right, Shelly.” He said it very softly, and once more Shelly felt that whatever cockeyed compulsions corrupted this boy from time to time, he was, essentially, a pretty good, a highly swinging kid.

“Listen, Stag,” he said, reassuringly, walking to him and winding an arm around his shoulders, “don’t let it bug you. This trip will be fine. You’ll be headlining a bill with some pretty big people, you’ll get to see parts of the country you haven’t played, we’ll make a pile, and there’s bound to be some good-looking tail all along the route. So cool it, howzabout?”

Stag turned and, gradually, the smile over which millions of women had dream-sex fantasies, boyish, clean-cut, God-what-a-doll—broke out. Then they had a drink together.

Later in the day, Stag had half a dozen more. Assorted.

Have you ever tried a Pink Squirrel mixed with a Singapore Sling?

Joe Costanza brought him back to the suite, upside-down, across one of Joe’s big, Sicilian shoulders. He deposited him at Shelly’s feet and said:

“I started pushing a hack in this town when I was sixteen. My old man died on the street, some kind of a kidney thing, I believe they called it nephritis. They called an ambulance and took him to Bellevue. In those days they didn’t have as advanced methods as today. He died on the way, or maybe he was dead when they found him; I don’t know. You ever see Bellevue, Shelly? It’s a big, ugly, depressing red brick thing … looks like it was made for the dead, not for the living. I had to go down and identify him. That was my junior year in high school, my last year, the way it turned out. I had to go lie about my age and get a hack license. I pushed a taxi in New York for fifteen years, summer and winter … hell, I remember back when they only had three doors on cabs, so the driver could carry big trunks up in the front seat; it got cold in the winter. Then I get a break; I get into the promotion racket and my sister can stop teaching school, get married, settle down in Jackson Heights; things start to swing for me; my wife and my kids stop postponing meals, and I got time to take up bowling, learn how to ski … you know I went out to Squaw Valley on my vacation last year? I’m a pretty fair skier. I’ve got loot in the Manufacturer’s Trust on the corner of 43rd and Fifth Avenue, I got a car; my wife has a car; my kids have cars, and I’ve even been known to smile at people who push too hard in the revolving doors of this great New York hotel.”

Shelly stared at him, bewildered.

“Hello,” Joe Costanza said, his big square face hardly crossed by any emotion at all.

Shelly said, slowly, “I know the entire, dull story of your bourgeois life. Why me?”

Joe Costanza pointed at the prostrate form of the great Stag Preston. “I like my life the way it’s built. This kid is going to knock out the pilings from under; unless you open a can of whup-ass on him, Shelly. I hear the road to the poorhouse is paved with bad actors. Did you ever drink a Pink Squirrel mixed with a Singapore Sling?”

Shelly winced at the thought.

Costanza slapped his hat back onto his balding head and turned to go. At the door he paused, smiled benignly, insipidly, helplessly, and said, “Ciao!” Then he was gone.

Shelly put Stag to bed and completed inking the itinerary for the start of the road tour the next day. Later, he thought about it, and decided that his first impression was correct. A Pink Squirrel mixed with a Singapore Sling was mondo hideous.

He shuddered, left a note he had written to the Colonel on the desk, turned off the lights, and went home to Carlene.

She thought it was pretty bad, too.