The Children of Hamelin Read online

  “Dig it man,” she said, “we’re like ants. Dirty little ants crawling around their pantry. Nobody. Nothing. Dirty little ants. Oooh, shit!”

  “Hey, take it easy, baby. Groove on the street. Dig it. Look at the golden garbage cans; isn’t that a gas? Golden garbage cans!”

  “Fucking gold garbage cans!” she shouted—and heads turned to sneer at the freaking hippie. I stroked her shoulder in a cool-it gesture. Softer, she hissed bitterly: “Yeah, those filthy cocksuckers with their gold garbage cans! What do they care? What do they know?”

  Oh Christ, I thought, she’s on some kind of paranoid trip!

  “They just sit there in their office buildings ruling the world and all we are to them is dirty little ants in their cookie jars…”

  Oh wow, a hippie Proletariat workers of the world unite bummer!

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “You’ve got to understand—it’s the Big Game, is all.”

  “Game?”

  “Yeah, it’s all a big groovy game. It’s their trip. They groove behind it, see?”

  “We’re only pawns in their game...”

  “Oh shit! You’re getting paranoid. Nobody’s out to get us.” Why couldn’t she understand?

  “They’re monsters! Playing games with our lives!”

  Jesus, where did she pick up all this pseudo-Marxist shit? The Wolves of Wall Street, the Fagins of Fifth Avenue!

  “Oh man, you don’t understand, they control us all with wires in our heads and all they have to do is press a button and we jump and twitch and squirm—”

  Goddamn, there was no way to talk her out of it! She was freaking out and I had to do something, had to put her head in another place... yeah... Yeah!

  I pulled her to the curb, waved my hand for a minute or so, finally got a cab (no real sweat on Fifth Avenue!), said “Magic carpet time, baby,” and stuffed her into the back seat ahead of me.

  The cab ride downtown started bringing me down like a slow dissolve. The more Robin gibbered about Them and how They controlled the world and how we were Dirty Little Ants, the more aware I became of the fact that she was having an acid bummer, which reminded me of the fact that she was on acid which reminded me that I was on acid which reminded me that the big light show that was going on outside the cab was an acid distortion which kind of put me in the position of still being high but now seeing myself as high and so I could see myself beginning to slowly and majestically sink back into the sea of reality. Whatever that was.

  By the time the cab had dropped us off on Avenue D, outside the housing project near where the trip had started, Robin was quieting down, and I felt that I was half in one reality and half in another, and not quite knowing which one was really real, or even if there was such a thing as real.

  “Hey man, where are we going?” Robin said in a pathetic scared little voice as I started to lead her through the admittedly-ominous giant red-brick buildings of the darkening, glowering project towards the pedestrian bridge over the East River Drive that led to the strip of park along the river. “Those big buildings with metal spiders in them... we’re like ants... dirty little ants...”

  Some esthetic, some strange sense of symmetry, had given me the idea of taking her back to the same place we had gone up in. It had been peaceful and groovy there, and it seemed like the logical antidote to her bummer.

  “Somewhere groovy,” I told her as we puffed up the metal stairs of the pedestrian bridge. As we reached the arching span of the bridge over the snarling traffic of the East River Drive, I glanced down, winced as I imagined what it would do to her head now to see the cars shooting below us like crazed metal monsters.

  “Dig,” I told her, “close your eyes and hold tight to my hand, and when I tell you to open your eyes again, I promise everything will be groovy.”

  She looked at me with sick puppy-dog eyes, squeezed my hand, said: “I’m afraid... afraid of the dark inside my head...”

  I put my arm around her waist, kissed her softly on the cheek. “Trust me,” I said.

  She nodded, screwed up her face, closed her eyes, and I led her across the bridge, haltingly down the stairs on the other side, through the width of the narrow empty park, and sat her down on a bench facing the river.

  I tried to see the view through her eyes: the lights of Brooklyn sparkling smokily in the dusk across the black sheen of water, the sky deepening to navy; the red-and-green jewels of an airplane’s running lights moving across the as-yet-starless sky.

  I sat down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, cradled her against me, said, “Open your eyes.”

  Her body shuddered once against me; she opened her eyes. Sighed. Didn’t move for at least a minute that seemed to hang frozen in the air that was getting cold and dank.

  Then she turned to me. She was smiling; her eyes were big and soft and calm. She kissed me gently on the mouth with soft-but-closed lips, held it for a long moment, then pulled away and lay her head on my shoulder, her cheek cool against mine.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Full circle, baby. It was a beautiful place to go up in, so I figured....”

  “You’re just a beautiful, groovy cat,” she said. “I mean knowing how to bring me out of a bummer like that and you on your first acid trip... wow...”

  “You’re okay now?”

  “Oh sure man,” she said casually. “It was just a bad flash. It happens every once in a while. You get used to it.”

  A long moment of silence during which I wondered if a freakout like that was something I’d ever want to be able to get used to. Quite suddenly, I realized that I hadn’t felt very high for... how long?

  “I think we’re coming down,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’ll taper off for a few more hours maybe, but I don’t feel very high anymore either. Not exactly the strongest acid I’ve ever had.” She paused. “Ah... you don’t know what time it is, do you?”

  “Maybe five or six, I guess—”

  “Uh... look, would it uptight you if I split now?” she said. “I mean, I’ll stay if you want, but I’ve got this thing I gotta do.”

  “How about if I came along?” I said, not really meaning it.

  “Might bummer you.”

  Somehow, I didn’t mind. It seemed fitting. I felt tired as hell, and maybe I had a thing to do too: collect the fragments of the trip and try to paste them in the scrapbook of memory.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I could do with some aloneness now, I think.”

  She smiled, kissed me gently, go up. “You’re a groovy cat,” she said. “No goodbyes, okay? Just... later.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  She laughed. “When you most want to and least expect to,” she said. She started walking down the path, paused, blew me a kiss, and then was off like a wraith into the falling night.

  I sat on the bench for a few minutes just staring into the water and thinking no-thoughts. My next real thought was that I was starting to get really cold and I was exhausted and thoroughly spaced-out.

  So I got up and started walking home, looking forward to sleeping for about a thousand years, digesting the day’s enormities like a torpid python ruminating on his weekly meal.

  Acid was as heavy a trip as smack—heavier.

  But I knew for dead-certain that I could never get really hooked on this.

  5 - The Big Game

  In the hall on the tenth floor outside the agency, Dickie Lee said: “And what kind of weekend did you have, Tom old man?” And smiled that thick-lipped pleasantly shit-eating smile of his, raised his bushy black brows, rolled what he referred to as “my sensual brown eyes,” did everything but drool. Good old Dickie.

  “Kinda dull, Dickie,” I told him. “Went to a party in a loony-bin, met the Devil, didn’t like him, got picked up by a naked chick in a peacoat, balled her, she dropped LSD in my breakfast coffee, took me on a magic carpet ride, and I spent Sunday recuperating with the funnies. An off-week.”

  Dickie ts
k-tsked. “I feel for you, m’boy,” he said. “You lead such a mundane existence.”

  Dickie and I had a strange thing going: we pretended to believe each other’s most outrageous bullshit while really not taking seriously a word the other said. Thus, I could tell Dickie the absolute truth about my lost weekend secure in the knowledge that he would accept it without blinking an eye as the usual Monday morning cock-and-bull story in our endless game of rank-counter-rank.

  “I, on the other hand,” Dickie said, opening the walnut-veneered door with Dirk Robinson Literary Agency, Inc. lettered in fading gilt on the upper toilet-door glass panel, “met an exiled Yugoslavian countess unfortunately afflicted with nymphomania and spent two solid days polluting my vital bodily fluids in a Park Avenue penthouse. I’ve got a charleyhorse in my dick.”

  Into the entrance foyer, paneled in walnut plywood, carpeted in black synthetic, lit by an atrocious monster of a chandelier, the walls festooned with a display of books the agency had had a hand (or even a pinky) in, and barricaded at the far end by an enormous desk behind which Maxine the receptionist-telephone-answerer-fee-writer-intimidator with the enormous tits should’ve been sitting in the usual tight blouse if she hadn’t, as usual, been late.

  “La vida es suena,” I commiserated with Dickie as he outflanked the desk and opened the door to the office itself by yanking on the giant brass doorknob.

  “Verdad,” he said, as I followed him into the boiler room. The boiler room was another of Dirk Robinson’s exercises in cut-rate image-mongering. From the entrance, you did not really notice that the room was painted a high-school-corridor gray and floored with the cheapest of beige plastic tiles because your vision was immediately channeled along the black strip of carpeting that ran from the door between two pairs of walnut desks that faced each other across it like an honor-guard before the big door in the walnut-paneled rear wall that bore a heavy bronze plaque proclaiming Dirk Robinson, President. The entrance foyer had been built along the right wall of the boiler room and if you looked to the left, you saw a smaller door in the rear wall that had Richard Lee, Vice President lettered directly on the wood in gold paint and backing the left-hand pair of pro desks, a businesslike line of filing cabinets covering the entire left-hand wall. This was what the rare fee-writer who managed to penetrate the outer defenses saw.

  But as Dickie trotted past the pro desks, where Phil and Bob, two of the three guys who handled the bona fide professional writers, had already arrived, I made a hard left turn, opened the gate in the waist-high railing and was in the sweat-shop area, hidden from the glance of the casual visitor by the inner wall of the entrance foyer partition: two parallel ranks of three-desk gray metal consoles facing the railing out of light-of-sight of the entrance. And don’t think Dirk Robinson didn’t plan it that way.

  The front rank of desks belonged to Arlene, the bookkeeper and general top-level flunky who was already busy on her phone; Nancy, the bouncy little filing clerk who was busily sorting the Monday morning overload of manuscripts; and the probationary fee-reader of the moment, a nameless pimply youth who wasn’t there and odds-on had been fired by Dickie on orders from Dirk last Friday.

  I sat behind the middle desk in the back row, flanked on my left by Mannie Berkowitz, an aging, balding, promising young writer who was already moaning softly over a manuscript, and on my right by Bruce Day, a crypto-hippy in perfunctory Madison Avenue disguise (whom I copped some grass from now and then), and who was just sitting down as I planted my ass behind the old Royal electric typewriter.

  “Another day, another ten points, another twenty dollars,” Bruce said, putting on his steel-rimmed glasses. (A subtle note of defiance he had adopted when the Man, through Dickie, had decreed that his beard had to go.) What Bruce was referring to was the Dirk Robinson fee-reader point-count system, otherwise referred to as the Track Record. Each incoming manuscript was assigned a point-value by Nancy according to its length: one point for short story, five points for the average novel, eight points for a long novel, ten points for some cretin’s million-word life-work, and various intermediary point-counts for odd lengths. Each fee-reader had a weekly quota of fifty points and a base pay of $100. Therefore, each point was worth $2 to us. A real Stakhanovite could tear off as many as a hundred points in a week, especially if he had plenty of novels, and when one of us was hard up for bread, the general agreement was that he would get the bulk of that week’s juicy five-and-eight pointers. What, one might ask, was each point worth to Dirk Robinson, Inc.? Well, the agency charged $10 for a one-pointer, $35 for a five-pointer, $55 for an eight-pointer and like that, so we figured (figuring in Nancy’s salary, postage, stationery and etc.) that the Man made about $400 off an average week’s mixed bag that netted one of us peons $100. Or something like $1,200 a week total, $5,000 a month, maybe $60,000 a year. Not bad at all.

  Berkowitz moaned again, and dropped the manuscript he had been reading back on the untidy pile next to his typewriter. He fitted a letter-head sheet, a carbon, and an onion-skin second sheet (the Man did not miss a chance at saving a penny on the cheapest possible second sheets) into his typewriter and said: “The Mad Dentist promises us a novel by next week. I can’t take him anymore. A nice easy five points, maybe eight. Do I have a taker?”

  Berkowitz must be cracking up, I thought. The Mad Dentist was a long-time fee-writer whose thesis was that fluoridated drinking water was a Communist plot to destroy the American economy by ruining the dental industry. He had exposed this hideous plot in about a dozen articles, half a dozen short stories, a nonfiction book and a science fiction novel. All of which we had of course rejected as “showing considerable talent but not quite meeting the current demands of the marketplace.” I could tell what the new Dr. Owen F. Mannigan opus would be like without reading it; therefore it was an easy five-pointer; therefore Berkowitz had to be crazy for opting out.

  “I volunteer,” I therefore said.

  “Sold to Thomas Hollander and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!” Berkowitz said with a sigh of ill-concealed relief that I did not like one little bit.

  “All right, Mannie,” I said, “what’s the kicker?”

  Berkowitz’s dark, perpetually-sour face lit up with a sadistic grin. “I quote from the latest letter from our beloved Mad Dentist,” he said. He took a yellow sheet of legal stationery from his “In” and began reading:

  ... since apparently the Bolshevik conspiracy to bankrupt the American dental industry has subverted the publishing industry as well, I have stolen a tactic from the handbook of the Communist Fluoridators and have cleverly disguised my latest expose of the Marxist-Leninist plot, titled, SUCK IT TO ‘EM!, as what I believe is referred to in the publishing trade as a novel of sexual passion—

  “Stop! Stop!” I screamed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bruce said, “a sex novel!”

  Shit! That bastard Berkowitz!

  “Berkowitz,” I said, “this is an atrocity. You have violated the Geneva Convention. I shall complain to the Red Cross.”

  But before I could get any further in what I knew was a lost cause, Nancy dropped the doubled-sized Monday load of muck on our collective desk and we fell to squabbling over the spoils.

  Dear Mrs. Clinestadt:

  Thank you very much for your most interesting short story, A Mother’s Love. It is always a pleasure to encounter for the first time the work of a new writer with as much obvious talent as this piece clearly shows...

  Ah yes, you old douche-bag, you clearly have an obvious talent for writing $10 checks. Stick with Dirk Robinson, baby, and we’ll have you turning out five-pointers in no time.

  ... and I especially admired your prose-style, which combines a sure sense of sentence structure with a wholly feminine ambience entirely appropriate to this touching tale of a mother’s unsuccessful efforts to save her son from the wiles of a wicked woman...

  The technique of writing a Dirk Robinson fee letter is such a simple exercise in abnormal psychology that I just don�
�t understand why so many fee readers bomb out after a few days. I suppose they just can’t type fast enough or maybe they’re stupid enough to read everything in the old compost-heap word for word.

  ... however I’m afraid that you, like so many other Dirk Robinson clients who later have gone on to fame and fortune in the literary arena, are not yet familiar with the elements that make a story salable on today’s highly-competitive market...

  Just follow the rules. Rule one: each short story gets a two-page (single-spaced) letter of criticism, four pages for a five-pointer, six for an eight-pointer, eight for a ten-pointer. (Which is why the five, eight, and ten pointers are valuable—less paper to cover with babble per point.) Therefore, write as inflated a prose as you can and use short paragraphs. (The double-space between paragraphs equals about fifteen words of letter.) Rule two: every writer is “talented”; bums we don’t get at Dirk Robinson, Inc. Never criticize prose-style, that’s sure to hurt the blown-up egos of the fee creeps, and a deflated ego means no more submissions and that makes the Man unhappy.

  ... therefore, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to return this story to you as unsuitable for the current literary marketplace. However, I feel certain that your undeniable talent, combined with diligence and regular production will soon place you within the ranks of our selling authors...

  Rule three: hit them with the rejection quickly, cleanly, and before the end of page one and follow it immediately with praise for the old talent. Never tell them the story is a dog (remember, they’re Great Writers); tell them it just happens to be unmarketable. And follow that with a sales pitch for more submissions.

  ... this is not to say that a salable story of this nature cannot be written, but due to the current state of the market, only a most unusually strong piece in this vein has a fighting chance...