Ladies' Night Read online

  LADIES' NIGHT

  By Jack Ketchum

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Jack Ketchum

  Copy-Edited and with cover design by David Dodd

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  This one's for Paula White —

  usually a lady but not always.

  And for Richard Christenson,

  who labored well and mightily.

  "I deserve this fate. It's a debt I owe for a wild

  and reckless life. So long, boys!"

  — Bill Longley

  hanged in Giddings, Texas, 1877

  "If I'd the courage I would make my way home.

  Too many antics in the forbidden zone."

  — Adam and the Ants

  "In the war between men and women

  there are no survivors."

  — Norman Mailer

  Introduction

  Truly attentive readers of mine, I mean real out-and-out detail-type-persons, may have noted that between 1981, when I published my first book, Off Season, and 1984, when I published my second — a little one-hundred-ninety-four-page thing called Hide and Seek — there was not a peep out of Jack Ketchum anywhere. No magazine work. No short stories. Nothing. And you might have asked yourself, so what in hell was this guy doing for three years? Sitting back counting his bucks?

  I wish.

  A good part of that time I was writing the novel you now have in hand. And writing it massively.

  Plus privately I was scared as hell. Both during the writing and after.

  ~ * ~

  To explain I have to backtrack some.

  When Ballantine bought Off Season it created a lot of in-house buzz precisely because it was so ferocious. In 1980 nobody had seen a book with quite so many teeth. That this was eventually to be its downfall had not yet occurred to anybody. But practically the whole damn house had read the book. I'd be walking with my editor and people would peer out at me from their cubicles, smiling and shaking their heads. This is the guy who wrote that crazy fucking thing about the cannibals. Marc Jaffe, who'd bought the novel, his first purchase as the new editor-in-chief there, took me aside one day and said, this book is going to make you rich, son.

  Uh-huh.

  I've written about all this before so I'll be brief. What happened in a nutshell was that they decided to mount this whole big campaign, posters and point-of-purchase display stands and an edition of 40,000 copies just for distributors, trying to advance-hype the thing — and the reaction of said distributors almost to a man was, excuse me? This shit is violent pornography and we want no part of it. Are you guys nuts?

  But by the time they weighed in with that bad news I'd already contracted for a second book.

  In January of `81 I signed to do a novel called The Mantis Syndrome. The title will become obvious to you once you've read the book. I changed it only because I liked the double entendre of Ladies' Night and Mantis Syndrome seemed just a little too Michael Crichton to me. I'd slaved over the outline and sample chapters — so much so that I've vowed never to do it again. The outline came to about forty pages. The chapters another forty. And then in writing the book I followed that outline just as slavishly.

  I'll never do that again either.

  Why did I put myself through all this? Because basically I was a little terrified.

  Patti Smith once said something to the effect that they give you twenty-one years to produce your first album and six months to produce your second. She knows whereof she speaks. The idea for Mantis from a publishing standpoint was that the book was to be of the same flesh as Off Season, only bigger. Sort of my 'Salem’s Lot to Off Season’s Carrie. Only Ketchum-style, with all the violence right in your face. This was, remember, months before the shit hit the fan with the distributors.

  The advance was to be $20,000.00. Twice the advance for Off Season and very nice money in those days for a second novel. In fact it's very nice money these days but that's another story. I was still hearing all this buzz about the first book, how it was going to make a huge splash and how they had even bigger hopes for the second, I mean I was gonna be launched, friends. So there was plenty of pressure to top myself with this one.

  And I had Patti's proverbial six months to do so. Literally.

  I brought it in under the deadline, though. I worked long hours and followed the outline scrupulously because that was the outline Ballantine had bought. Scared every minute that I wouldn't pass muster, that I had only a few licks as a writer and that I'd used them all up in Off Season.

  I've later learned this feeling's common. The I-Only-Have-One-Book-In-Me complex. I wish I knew it then.

  But I brought it in and I brought it in big — over four hundred pages. That's right, the book before you once had a very serious case of elephantitis: I had explanatory subplots involving the military and science communities and another about a gay friend of my lead character's and his lover, I had fake newspaper articles and TV reports — I had all kindsa stuff. To date it's still the biggest book I've ever written. I had yet to learn for sure that less is sometimes more though I should have learned that from Off Season.

  My only excuse — and it's a poor one — is that I was scared again. Ballantine wanted big and that's what I needed to deliver. Accent the word needed. Hence my first and only doorstop.

  That wasn't what bothered Ballantine, though. They didn't seem to mind the bloating one bit. Does this surprise you? They're mass-market publishers for godsakes.

  It was the violence, naturally.

  By then the votes were in from the distributors. I could now walk through their 50th Street offices and almost hear the collective whoops. I got a two-page letter from my line-editor Susan Allison making lots of suggestions about how to bloat the book further and the only mention of cutting was, "we agreed that much of the violence must be taken out or held back. The story works very well without the gore." I say piffle. When you finish the book let's see what you think.

  I didn't want to do the revisions. I don't think I was being arrogant about it. I was probably still too worried to be arrogant. It wasn't just cutting the violence either. Among other things they wanted to throw the whole story into the future and despite the science-fictiony premise this was decidedly not science fiction, this was horror, and the notion of imagining New York City ten or a hundred years from now held no appeal whatever. With a few exceptions I'd rarely even read science fiction. So while I dickered with Ballantine my agent at the time, Jack Scovil, quietly auctioned the book to pretty much every paperback company in town.

  Stealth and cunning. It's an agent's job.

  But we got no takers. Everybody was offended by the violence, particular the female editors, who thought I was misogynist in the extreme. One editor who shall remain nameless was kind enough to enclose her reader's report by mistake along with her rejection letter. I kept it. The report said, "I stopped reading every pearly word after the girls who work at the Burger King threw the would be (sic) hold-up man on the grill." Actually it's McDonald's. And the incident
occurs only about a third of the way through so he or she didn't read much. Which is probably all to the good because considering what follows that scene's pretty mild. But the reader went on to conclude, "I hope the person who wrote this confines his aggressions to the page. This is pretty dreadful."

  Words to live by.

  The bottom line is, we never did sell it. Jack argued that I'd delivered an acceptable manuscript, which had followed the outline in every way. An understatement. And since it wasn't the writing — as I'd feared — it was the whole idea that bothered them at this point, I got to hold onto the advance. Ballantine sweetened the pot slightly in a contract for a third novel, the only caveat being that I was to hold down the bloodshed level on this one.

  Jack's a pretty good agent.

  Trouble was, for a long time I couldn't write the book. I was a one-book writer. The failure of Ladies' Night proved it. I was convinced.

  I'd used up all my juice on the first book just as I'd suspected. Neither my agent nor the woman I lived with nor any of my friends who read and liked the book could talk me out of it. I could see myself going back to magazine work or a steady job, a fate too awful to conceive for anyone who has seen The Other Side. It was a crisis of confidence that lasted long and worked its way deep.

  I spent a lot of time staying out late and getting up woozy in the morning. I was becoming Tom in Ladies' Night.

  Then one day I got an idea for a small book, which would be written in the first person. I was re-reading James M. Cain at the time and thought, what if I do something like Cain does, draw characters who are in way over their heads and don't know it — only do it with a bunch of kids, teenagers. In the first person I'd have to break through and find some new licks.

  Hide and Seek emerged. Crisis over.

  ~ * ~

  But I could never really quit on Ladies' Night. Looking back I still liked the damn thing, thought the premise pretty audacious. But I kept it in a drawer and went on to other things until 1988. That year my old friend Richard Christenson — a playwright — and I were sitting in a bar one night and he was bemoaning quite rightly how difficult it was to make a buck in the business of writing drama, almost as tough as it was to make a buck in poetry, hell you might as well have been trying to sell pet roaches in this city and I found myself urging him to try some prose instead. I wasn't getting rich here but I was still afloat, doing what I wanted to do. Maybe so could he. As we talked it became clear he was game. I said here's an idea, why don't you see what you can do to trim some of the fat off Ladies' Night, whip it into shape and make it salable. We'll split the credit and the money fifty-fifty.

  He spent months on the book, adding here, subtracting there, mostly subtracting — again to no avail. He did a partial rewrite of about the first quarter of the book and by the time he was finished I thought it was a wholly viable new take on it so we attached a far less gargantuan outline and Alice Martell, my agent by then, sent it out again.

  All new editors, same responses.

  Too violent. Too nasty toward women.

  Personally I think it's just as nasty toward men. But maybe that's just me.

  Anyway, once more I let it lie for awhile. In 1990 I decided to try a screenplay version. Thinking low-budget horror movie I switched the locale from New York City to the suburbs to make for a far cheaper shoot but kept the mayhem basically the same. That script's still being shopped around now and then and I figure you never know. Especially with this yarn. Its voyage has been a long one.

  Finally a couple of years ago I was between ideas for a new book, lying fallow, collecting this and that notion and waiting patiently for some pattern to emerge and thought, how about taking a slash-and-burn run at Ladies' Night in the meantime? Why not? Might be fun.

  And it was. Trimmed by well over half its pages it closely resembled its sister-book, Off Season. It had the same simulated "real-time" timescale and worked like a well-made play, everything going on within the course of a single grisly night. It had the same theme of ordinary people being pushed to extraordinary acts of violence. Like Off Season its protagonists are not necessarily the nicest of people — Tom's a philanderer and morally something of a coward while Elizabeth's seriously thinking about fucking him, even though his wife's a friend and she babysits his son — the point being that nobody deserves to be pushed to these extremes, not ever.

  Like the first book it steals liberally from the movies I happen to love, particularly — again like its predecessor — from Night of the Living Dead. Though this time the most obvious influence is David Cronenberg's first full-length feature, Shivers, aka They Came From Within.

  I proceeded not from Richard's version but from the original, although many of the cuts I made were cuts he and I agreed were absolutely necessary — and I'm very much indebted to him for his fine eye and ear. Richard's version, I felt, had tried to explain too much of the science and its tone was more measured and serious than necessary for what was essentially just goofy pulp-horror fiction. I didn't want to be distracted by that. I wanted cheap thrills, period.

  Hey, this is basically a story about some guy trying to get home after a really bad night at his local bar.

  We've all had them.

  The fact that it's also jabbing at the un-stuck nuclear family and male/female relationships in general's just gravy. It's there if you want it on your plate and practically unnecessary if you don't.

  So I've kept the pulpy style, all the italics, all the exclamations, even some of my less successful sentence constructions for the sake of being true to the feel of the original and all the gore-hound excesses. In recent years I've tried for some slight measure of subtlety, some nuance of character and language, a few grace notes now and then. This has all the subtlety of a hooker selling blowjobs at the entrance to Lincoln Tunnel but I figure that's the way it should be.

  ~ * ~

  Since I wrote the book times have changed — enough so that, happily for me, there are a few venues now for a story as extreme as this and you're looking at one of them.

  Thanks, John.

  But New York has changed too and probably will have changed again by the time you read this. "People come and go so quickly here," is as true of the Big Apple as it is of Oz. Only it's businesses that disappear overnight here, with new ones flinging themselves all tarted up in the morning. Bars, florists, banks, everything. If you're a native New Yorker and especially if you know the West Side you're going to note discrepancies in the novel as to setting. I've updated the neighborhood wherever I could, replacing a bank with, say, HMV Music if that's what's there today. But in some cases that wasn't possible. The butcher shop on Broadway, for instance, is long gone and long lamented. But I needed a butcher shop so I kept it. Author privilege. To do otherwise would be to write a whole new novel, not polish up and older one.

  ~ * ~

  Hollywood's a funny place. You write a screenplay, you go out there and you spend a whole lot more time pitching it than you did in the writing of it or than anybody will ever spend in the reading. Everyone seems to want you to come up with the gist of the thing in a single pithy line, like a sky-hook from which they can suspend their thoughts about what to do or what not to do about "the project." To buy or not to buy. To amend or not to amend — or rather just what to amend. Casting, money, shooting schedule, everything. It all seems to hang on that hook, depend on that line. So I came up with the hook for Ladies' Night.

  I had to. Ladies' Night was the one that simply would not go away. Think I'll leave you with that hook and then let you get on to the novel. Like the book itself I still kinda like the feel of it.

  "In the war between men and women, the shooting has begun."

  Pow.

  Sweets

  If you could make an arrest for bad temper, thought Lederer, this whole damn city would be on Rikers Island.

  He stepped off the curb into the street. Horns blared behind him. The uniforms had blocked off Riverside from 72nd up to 75th and the diversion onto
Broadway was causing an angry tangle. He'd parked on Columbus and walked over. It was easier.

  The warm wind gusting off the river tugged at his hat.

  The stink was powerful. Sweet. Cloying. He could not say what it reminded him of. But something.

  The tanker lay like a huge cracked egg frying in the middle of the street, its spill a great wide slick of dark thick liquid pooling from the center line out along the western curb.

  He stepped carefully around it.

  A white Buick wagon lay sprawled on its side at the corner of 73rd. There was very little left of its rear compartment. The windshield was shattered on the driver's side and spackled with blood.

  He could pretty much guess what happened. The Buick had turned onto Riverside against the light. The trucker was moving fast and hit his brakes to avoid it. Much too late and much too hard.

  They were tricky, these tankers. Especially if you ran them full and without baffles, the heavy sheets of steel which lay inside the tank, separating the load into compartments so that they took some of the wave-action when you braked. Without the baffles you could still brake fast if you had to. But you'd better not turn the wheel. Because if you did you had maybe 9,500 gallons behind you and all this weight, this huge wave of liquid back there starts to push forward, jackknifing the cab at the fifth wheel and ramming you with every bit of its weight like a battering ram.

  You had to be one hell of a driver to control all that. He guessed this one wasn't.

  There wasn't much left of him.

  Again it was easy to imagine. The tank had jackknifed the cab all the way around to what was probably no more than a ten degree angle. Then the wave effect started. The first wave went forward, the second back, and the third side-to-side — all of it one great heaving surge of motion. It was the side-to-side that killed the driver — toppling the tank off its sub-frame directly onto his cab, squashing it like a cardboard container. The man inside was nothing but a wide smear of red and grey between the crushed roof and the fake-leather seat. A bug against a windshield.