Broken on the Wheel of Sex Read online

  BROKEN ON THE WHEEL OF SEX

  THE JERZY LIVINGSTON YEARS

  by Jack Ketchum

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Dallas Mayr

  Copy-edited by David Dodd

  Cover by Neal McPheeters

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  ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:

  NOVELS:

  Ladies' Night

  Stranglehold

  The Crossings

  The Woman

  COLLECTIONS:

  Sleep Disorder – with Edward Lee

  ESSAYS / BIOGRAPHY:

  Book of Souls

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION:

  THE GOBLIN ON THE DANCE FLOOR

  PART 1: THE HANG-UP

  THE HEAT

  SKIN GAME

  THE BURN ARTIST

  THE RUBDOWN

  NEVER TRUST A SMART CUNT WITH TWO FIRST NAMES

  FISH

  OLD MEN DANCING

  THE LIAR

  THE FRENCH

  THE CHRISTMAS CALLER

  EAST SIDE STORY

  DEAD HEAT

  THE OLD DAYS

  PART 2: BEYOND THE PAIL

  Authors Note

  UGLY GEORGE: CABLE TV'S PRINCE OF PICKUP

  WELCOME TO THE CHATEAU

  'FLASHERS AND FREAKS

  BAD GIRLS, SAD GIRLS IN THE HEART OF DISCO

  PART 3: A HERO RETURNS

  SHEEP MEADOW STORY

  INTRODUCTION: THE GOBLIN ON THE DANCE FLOOR

  I'm sticking my neck out with this one, I know. Way out.

  And I figure it only remains to be seen who amongst you will come bearing the headsman's ax.

  Or axes. Knives and scythes and swords.

  Anything with which to chop or hack.

  I won't exactly blame you.

  Jack Ketch, after all, was British slang for executioner. And the worm doth turn.

  On the other hand some of you might just be perverse enough and forgiving enough to enjoy these early yarns.

  I offer them up in either case.

  Most were written during the years 1976 to 1981 while I was mostly doing other things. Record reviews, shorts and non-fiction of all kinds. Serious to half-serious to ridiculous, selling to every market I could scare up, from The Miniature Collector to Penthouse, from Parade to Creem to Classic Decorating and Home Crafts. I mean, I'd go anywhere. Just pay me and watch that IBM Selectric fly.

  All the fiction, though, sold to low-to-mid-level-paying men's mags, Swank Magazine in particular but also to Genesis, High Society, Cavalier, Stag and Nugget. Many were reprinted several times, mostly by Stag, climbing down the ladder of decency and good taste until at utter nadir one of them actually reached Knave.

  No kidding.

  Am I proud of this? Absolutely. And I thank the editors of all these magazines for giving me the opportunity to learn about writing fiction while paying me in the one-hundred-fifty to three-hundred-fifty dollar range for each of the stories. There are a lot of folks only starting out in writing today who would probably kill for such a trip down that ladder and they'd be absolutely right to feel that way.

  I've called these the Jerzy Livingston years because over half of them were written under that name and the rest under my real one. Somehow Jerzy seems more appropriate for this collection. My adoption of that particular pseudonym was both a joke—a play on words—and a nod to a very good writer, which I hoped someday to be. I had grown up in Livingston, New Jersey, a small suburban town across the Hudson River. My mom still lived there. As a college kid I'd been impressed with Kosinski's BEING THERE and THE PAINTED BIRD.

  Ergo, Jerzy Livingston.

  I was thirty years old at the time I put his name to the manuscript of THE HANG-UP, written at the insistence of my girlfriend that if I was such an all-fired hotshit writer I should get off my high-falutin' artsy ass and prove it and just sell something for chrissake and in fact the story I wrote in response to that dare was to be my first pro-fiction-sale. To a men's magazine. A stroke magazine. Swank Magazine to be exact and I was delighted as hell to have it.

  But not exactly sure how my relatives and my parents' friends were going to react to all that Wide-Open-Beaver.

  So I hid from the town I'd grown up in behind the name of the town I'd grown up in. It struck me as a neat idea so Jerzy became my nom de porn for a while.

  I'd been working like a dog in a sweatshop hell of a literary agency for three long years but I'd quit that finally and set myself free to play again. I had unemployment checks and the occasional magazine money to support me. The places in which I chose to play very often had long rows of bottles of amber liquid to soothe me and alter my concept of what was possible in certain matters of friendship, courtship and seduction.

  Some of these bottles would betray me. Some of these goddamn bottles would depress me or make me stupid. Or even cause me upon occasion to worship at the foot of some cold white god in the open mouth of whom someone had recently shat.

  I understood this and accepted it. Because most of these bottles I felt to be my friends. They held within them the power to loosen the tongue and lighten my load and the loads of others, male and female, they made for companionship, laughter, dancing, for amiable languorous talks till dawn and sometimes, when I got lucky, releasing other, warmer loads into soft wet pockets of mystery.

  I was callow. I was shallow. I was going to hell in a handcart.

  It was A-Okay with me.

  I had plenty of company.

  My friend Nick Tosches had written an article a few years back which, as his agent in the Job From Hell, I'd sold to Penthouse. It was called BROKEN ON THE WHEEL OF SEX and postulated, humorously though in all seriousness, not really screwing around at all when you got right down to it, that the sexual revolution of the sixties was already over.

  And that everybody had lost.

  It was a notion that informed pretty much all my own fiction at the time.

  The year was '76.

  Go back there.

  Disco and Punk, Country Music and soon, dead Elvis.

  Donna Summer has not yet found her way to Jesus. She's still a Bad Girl Sad Girl plying her trade in the throbbing Heart of Disco. Sid Vicious is still Just That. The British have invaded once again and the Ramones and Patti Smith have fired back. There is still a Shah on the throne of Iran. Jim Jones in Ray-Bans and tropical shirt is only a few months away from making Kool-Aid the preferred beverage of the Walking Dead.

  On-Premises Sex-Clubs attract Manhattan celebrities and wife-swapping newlyweds from Mamaroneck. Titty bars. Nude lap dancing. Reflecting globes and polyester three-piece suits. Snorts of coke and legal store-bought poppers. Drinks are still three or four bucks each in the clubs. A two-hour train-and-ferry ride from New York City to Fire Island and it is still possible to climb in the sack with practically anybody, any stranger who looks remotely fuckable, without attracting a certain nasty strain of virus
.

  Which would change all this inevitably and forever.

  Nick was right. It was over and nobody knew.

  In the meantime, we played it.

  In the sixties it was Free Love.

  The accompanying head-music of the time was dope and acid, mescaline and mushrooms.

  In the seventies it was Fucking.

  By then the tune had changed to coke and amys, Quaaludes and speed.

  And all those rows of bottles.

  The demise of worry-free sex began long before AIDS raised its miserable head and started actually killing off the participants. Of course it did, and a lot of us in our heart of hearts knew it even then. To blame AIDS for all that followed is revisionist bullshit. Sex was already in decay, friends. It had gone from sacrament to scorecard all in just a few years. AIDS just corked the genie in the bottle for good.

  Still the period had its charms.

  All truly decadent periods seem to. If you are going to hell in a handcart then somebody is carrying you. Which means you don't have to expend a whole lot of personal effort. You can cruise and float.

  Which we did.

  But it had its dark side too.

  You saw it in the passed-out girls on the dance floor. You saw it in the rush to the john for one more snort of coke. Which usually you could ill afford.

  It was dark all right. And I created my own Dark Hero to dwell there.

  In a decade when Girl Next Door Nude Photo Contests abounded, when books and men's mags and women's mags and even some of the straight mags were promising you the stars, sexually speaking —if that old fat fuck Al Goldstein could get that much nookie, so can I—singing the praises of Recreational Sex and the zipless fuck, giving you instructions on how to hold the perfect swing-party or give the perfect blowjob, I pulled some guy up out of my twisted psyche who scored but almost never did, both at the same time.

  His name was Stroup. No first name, just Stroup.

  That was another play on words. Stroup was Proust sounded out phonetically and scrambled. Arguably the most sensitive writer in history I turned into a schmuck of almost leaden sensibilities. It was Stroup's lot in life to understand practically nobody, least of all himself and certainly not women, yet to pursue both women and his own satisfaction with dogged determination.

  Without having a clue as to what might actually bring him either one.

  A boozer. A loser. A homophobe. A highly questionable friend and unreliable lover. Misogynist as hell and for the most part proud of it.

  That was my guy.

  In the bars back then you met him all the time.

  The true poet of this kind of thing was Charles Bukowski and I confess to aping him shamelessly. But Bukowski's millieu was not my own god knows, neither L.A. nor Post Offices nor dens of serious passed-out alcoholic weirdness and his sheer ferocity was not mine either. Stroup is pretty much a middle-class nobody trying to get over with his own line of bullshit, writing ad copy by day, carousing at night, usually living with a woman whose name is Carla or Shiela and always cheating on her.

  Cheating almost as a code of honor. Always looking for more.

  A quester, a man with a mission.

  An asshole.

  For a while I kinda liked him.

  I wrote seven stories featuring Stroup, some in the first person and some in the third and sold six of them. When I started marketing the seventh my editor at Swank, Ben Pesta, asked to see a story that was not about this jerk, "unless Stroup is some goblin whose exorcism is really vital to your psychic well-being." Direct quote. I still have the letter.

  I didn't know if he was or he wasn't. But unlike Stroup I could take a hint. I shelved him and went on to other stuff. The seventh story is being printed here for the first time and I'll direct you to my comments which follow the piece as to why.

  In the tiny village of Fodele on the island of Crete I wrote three of the others appearing here, wrote them sitting on a terrace eating mezes and drinking retsina, typing on a little toy typewriter I'd rented for an exorbitant price in Heraklion because it was the only one! could find with an English-language keyboard. If they're generally nicer than the Stroup stories that's Greece speaking. But the sexual hustle of the seventies is still in there. All the others are set in New York City. East Side, Westside, All Around the Town.

  Taken together they're a fairly varied group.

  But I can't help thinking that the essence of Stroup keeps cropping up from time to time. Not in all the stories but somewhere in most of them. I think of the revenge-fuck in THE LIAR. All that cynical deadbeat bar conversation in EAST SIDE STORY. Slade Rule patting his brand-new client's ass in DEAD HEAT and his rampant homophobia.

  So that maybe Pesta was right. And I really did have a goblin to exorcise at the time.

  My heroes since have been largely nicer, I think.

  What I do know for sure is that there's a whole lot of anger here lurking beneath what is for the most part dark comedy. Re-reading all this stuff for the first time in years that much was instantly clear. So that I'm thinking now that maybe the goblin was the period itself and how it refracted in me. Remembering that time only a few years before when for some of us Love really was Free and missing that. Whistling in the graveyard of what it had become.

  We aging Hippies I guess have a lot to answer for.

  Guys like Stroup included.

  PART 1

  THE HANG-UP

  It was hard for Stroup to be nice to her.

  When what he really wanted was to kick ass.

  They'd been separated for a weekend, Stroup staying in the city while Shiela'd gone down to Cape May to visit some girlfriends and Shiela'd had a much better time than he had. Simple as that.

  Okay. Not quite that simple. There was also the small fact that she'd gotten laid while she was away. Stroup had gotten laid himself but it was lousy. Then she comes home Queen of the Hop.

  So it was hard to be nice but Stroup had no choice. They had an arrangement. They were living together and if he was going to put it to another woman once in awhile then she was going to give it to another man. That was the line.

  She'd been sucking up this feminist shit like a riverbottom catfish. If he wanted to keep her he'd better keep his trap shut, pretend it was fine, she could give it to a Labrador for all he cared. He had to play the tough guy. No hang-ups.

  The bitch.

  "You want to hear about it?" she said.

  Sure I do, thought Stroup. Like I want to dip my pud in a pound of strawberries. But what he said to her was sure I do.

  "It was exciting. He tied me up."

  "He what?"

  "He tied me up. Actually it was masking tape he used. See, he didn't have any rope. He tied my hands together. Then we made it that way."

  "Jesus. Did he hurt you?"

  "No."

  "He better not."

  "Except he pinched me once real hard. Pinched my nipple. It hurt like hell for a moment. But what was exciting was that he could have hurt me bad if he wanted to. You know, psychological."

  "Did you come?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "You liked it, huh."

  "Oh, yeah."

  Figured.

  It's always the new guy who carries home the trophies, thought Stroup. That was the way with women. Shiela would never have tried that stuff with him. They'd been together too damn long. She'd have said he was crazy even to mention it. But he'd thought about it, plenty of times. Sometimes she'd piss him off and he'd think about her tied head to toe and begging for mercy.

  It was crazy, come right down to it. But hell, sex was crazy. It was crazy to live with a woman, crazy to give a damn. You could get lost thinking about a woman too much. Forget who you were supposed to be. What you were supposed to do with your life. That shit could tie you up too. A guy got angry.

  But what really tore him was that here was this other guy rutting around inside his fantasy. It wasn't fair. This asshole wasn't living with Shiela, he wasn't paying an
y dues. All the same he gets the gravy.

  It wasn't only when he was mad at Shiela that he thought about giving her a little smack now and then. He figured it was natural. Old days, they dragged 'ern by the hair. Sex was always violent to some degree, wasn't it? Or maybe, now that he thought of it, he was always mad at her in one way or another. He didn't know. Hell, he didn't care. It was hard to think about this shit.

  He only knew it wasn't fair. Decided it was high fucking time he took a poke at it.

  He smiled. Disarm her, that's the ticket.

  "You ever think you might want to try it again sometime?"

  "Sure, maybe."

  "You think you might want to try it with me? I mean, might be fun, right? Make a change. I've thought about it sometimes."

  "You have?"

  "Sure. Try anything. Why not? Spirit of scientific inquiry, right?"

  Was that casual enough? She laughed. He guessed so.

  "Okay, Stroup. One of these days."

  "I'll tie you up like a present. What color rope you want?"

  "Pink," she said.

  "You got it."

  The next day after she went to work Stroup finished typing up his goddamn ad copy and went shopping. He bought a box of masonry nails and one hundred forty yards of three-ply craft and rug yarn. Pink. He came home and sunk a nail just above the moulding in the middle of the bedroom doorway. He sunk it deep and tested it, gave it a couple tugs. It was in there good all right. A good wide head on it so the yarn wouldn't slip. Next he went to Shiela's dresser and found a scarf. It would be nice to blindfold her. Or maybe he should gag her instead. A gag and a blindfold would look terrible together. You couldn't have the both together. To Stroup it was a matter of aesthetics. He decided on the blindfold. The blindfold would add suspense. She wouldn't know what the hell was coming next. Finally he pulled off his belt and slipped down his pants and gave himself a whack on the ass.