The Essential Ellison Part 120

The child' s eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rus.h.i.+ng.

To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rus.h.i.+ng toward her on the wind.

Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!

The mother' s face a.s.sumes the ages-old expression of hara.s.sed parenthood. Hands on hips, she turns to the door, you' re always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will- Mommy! Open the door!

You' ll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!

Mommy! Mom- Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a mist of flour explodes through the cracks, sifts into the room. The mother' s eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.

Madness crawls up behind our eyes, the mother' s eyes, and we sink into a pit of blind emptiness...

...from which we emerge to examine the nature of terror in the motion picture. Fear as the masters of the film form have showed it to us, and fear as the screen has recently depicted it, with explicit, vomitous detail, with perverted murder escalated from awfulness to awfulness. Having seen the deaths of dozens, one is spiraled upward to accept the closeup deaths of hundreds. Knives are not enough, they' re old hat. Razors are not enough, that' s been done. To death. Meathooks are not enough, that' s a cliche. Has anyone squeezed that bag of blood called the human body in a car crusher? Yeah, well, we can' t use that. How about a paper pulping machine, a blast furnace, a rubber stamper, a meatgrinder, a Cuisinart? What' s more ghastly than the last piece of s.h.i.+t? Acid? Rat poison? If we use acid or rat poison, we have to show the victim writhing, vomiting, tearing her throat out, the burns, the drool. Hey, is there something that' ll explode the eyeb.a.l.l.s right out of their sockets? Then we can show the raw red pulpy brain behind the empty holes. Now that' s fresh, new, inventive, state of the art. Maybe we can call it Scanners.

Or Outland.

The scene just described, a scene shot for the small theater screen, in black and white, with a minimum of production values, with unknown actors, shot with misdirection (in the sense of that word as magicians use it) and subtlety is from a little-remembered 1943 RKO Radio Picture, The Leopard Man, based on a brilliant Cornell Woolrich thriller, BLACK ALIBI (1942). I offer it as a fine example of cinema terror in its most natural, unsullied incarnation, from the oeuvre of Val Lewton. To students of terror in films, the name Val Lewton will be familiar. Had I wanted to be less precise but more chic, I' d have cited the early Da.s.sin or Hitchc.o.c.k.

But as a more reliable barometer of the centigrades to which artful horror can chill a filmgoer, I find no equal to what Lewton produced in merely eight films between 1942 and 1946, with budgets so ludicrous, achievements so startling, and studio intentions so base, that they stand as some sort of landmark for anyone venturing into the genre, whether a John Carpenter or a Brian De Palma.

Using the foregoing as yardstick, and comparing the knife-kill flicks against them, I submit that what we' re getting these days are not films of terror or suspense or even horror. They are (and here' s my theory) blatant reactionary responses to the feminist movement in America.

Surely there are no great truths being propounded in these films, no subtext that enriches us with apocryphal insight, no subtle characterizations that illuminate the dark night of the soul, no messages for our times...unless the message is that every other person you pa.s.s is a deranged killer waiting for you to turn your back so he or she can cut your throat.

No, I' ve convinced myself, even if you might have trouble with the theory, that this seemingly endless spate of films in which women are slaughtered en ma.s.se, in the most disgusting, wrenching ways a diseased mind can conceive them, is a pandering to the fear in most men that women are " out to get them:'

In a nation where John Wayne remains the symbol of what a man is, the idea of strong women having intellectual and s.e.xual lives more vigorous than their own is anathema. I submit that the men who go to see these films enjoy the idea of women being eviscerated and dismembered in this way. They get off on it. In their nasty little secret heart-of-hearts they' re saying, " That' ll serve the b.i.t.c.h right!"

The audiences that go to these films, that queue up to wait an hour for their dollop of deadly mayhem, are sociopaths who don' t know it. Beyond that, and I have no way to prove it, I think these films serve no purgative, cathartic end. They merely boil the blood in the potential rapist, the potential stomper, the potential knife-killer.

The L.A. Weekly editorial, January 15-21 1982 issue, proffering clinical substantiation of the theory that splatter movies, knife-kill flicks, raise the tolerance level of men for violence against women, merely adds to the already existing body of such evidence that self-interested filmmakers and tunnel-visioned knee-jerk liberals like me have refused to acknowledge. They are the twisted dreams from the darkest pit in each of us, the stuff against which we fight to maintain ourselves as decent human beings.

I leave it at that. For the moment.

But next I want to relate what happened when a few responsible people tried to do something about these films. It was an adventure among airheads. Knees jerked, hot air filled the land, writers who' ve spent their whole lives fighting against censors.h.i.+p were pilloried as being self- appointed censors...oh, it was spiffy.

And it encapsulates more than we wish to know about the nature of self-blinding fear that produces a moral vacuum, masquerading as courage. Now I stop being polite.

There is an ancient j.a.panese aphorism, " The nail that stands too high will be hammered down."

Only a short time after I' d started this essay [in 1981], shortly after I' d come to the personal position that the use of irresponsible state-of-the-art-special-effects gratuitous violence in exploitation films was a growing trend that would permit the wimps of the Moral Majority to impose unbearable restrictions on the motion picture industry, I had occasion to experience at first hand the way in which a nail can be hammered down by those whose floating ethics and lack of personal courage moves them only to silence for fear of invoking the wrath of the groundlings.

My adventure through the land of the airheads began at a screening of Brian De Palma' s film Blow Out. It was a film booked by the Writers Guild Film Society for its members. Now, the WGA Film Society is a private members.h.i.+p operation in which 1885 members of the Guild subscribe to a series of 42 films a year at $1.25 per couple. The films are booked into the available slots by a complicated process I' ll codify later. They are selected from approximately 300 offered to the Guild by the major studios, by a Film Society Committee comprising (among others) critic Arthur Knight, Ray Bradbury (one of the founders of the Society, twenty-two years ago), scenarists and teachers Arnold Peyser and William Froug, and me widdle self. More on the Committee itself later.

Let me now reprint a letter I wrote the WGA Newsletter following the events pursuant to the screening of Blow Out. It will encapsulate the history of this contretemps and will lead into our next thrilling section in which your intrepid pain in the a.s.s finds himself facing the direct lineal descendants of those who stood by and watched Dreyfus get sent to Devil' s Island. Oh, how I do love to dramatize these encounters.

APOLOGIZES TO FILM SOCIETY.

Unaccustomed as I am to apologizing publicly for my occasional erratic behavior, I must perforce extend just such an apology to most of the audience of the Film Society screening of Blow Out at 2:00 on Sat. Aug. 1.

What I despise in unruly audiences, what I have inveighed against more than once in these pages and in our theater...I was guilty of myself.

Three-quarters of the way through that Brian De Palma film, without even realizing I was doing it, I leaped up and began shouting and- at the top of my voice- stalked out of the theater. It was reprehensible behavior, and I am heartily ashamed of myself for it. That I was totally unaware of what I was doing, that I was impelled by my loathing of the brutalization of women that film contains, is no excuse. It was a visceral reaction and I lost control completely. Not until I' d driven home, still trembling with disgust and anger, was my friend Jane able to tell me what I' d been screaming.

I had no recollection of the words. But Jane tells me this is what I shouted:" Jesus Christ! Another sick De Palma film...I should' ve known!" (At that point I hit the aisle.)" The man is sick, the man is twisted." (At that point the audience was laughing.) " Next come the mindless eviscerations and anatomy lessons!" (By that time I was out the door.) Don Segall (the writer, not the director) followed me out and was justifiably annoyed at my behavior. He upbraided me, saying, " If you don' t like the films you ought to resign from the Film Society," to which I responded in a blind fury, " Resign from the Society, fer chrissakes, I' m one of the ones who picks these G.o.ddam films!"

John Considine and his lady, and a few others, followed my example and came out also. They did it quietly. I' m told that of the several thousand attendees of the various screenings, only 16 walkouts were logged. I guess that distresses me almost as much as my own uncontrolled actions.

My revulsion at Blow Out stemmed, in large part, from a carryover abhorrence of De Palma' s previous exercise in woman-hatred, Dressed to Kill, which we also screened at the Film Society; and from my growing awareness that these movies are more elegantly mounted examples of what has come to be known as the genre of " knife-kill flicks."

My gorge grew more buoyant as Blow Out progressed, pressured by a column I had written just a few days earlier on the knife-kill phenomenon.

As a member of the Film Society Committee (and I hope a responsible member), I have brought the matter of these films to the attention of my fellow committeemen. It is my feeling that we must reappraise the manner in which we select films for the members to see. I am dead against censors.h.i.+p of any kind. Nonetheless, we do select the films for the Society, from those available to us with considerations of play-dates and the other strictures put on us by the studios; and as we would opt not to show a film we knew in advance was a dog, it seems to me well within the bounds of our selection process that we should pay some attention to the advisability of showing films that pander to less than n.o.ble instincts in an audience.

Ostensibly, it is the main purpose of the Society to offer to the members those films that will be of benefit in the pursuance of our craft. Even stinko films can serve that end, if only to proffer warning. But as we would not screen a film we knew to be a certified, card carrying disaster...so, I feel, we should demonstrate restraint in showing films that consciously, gratuitously debase the human spirit.

If members of the Society wish to go to commercial theaters and pay their money to see films of this nature, all well and good. But we ought to have higher standards.

As a craftsman who works seriously at the holy ch.o.r.e of screen writing, I think it' s time we examined more responsibly the nature of the cheapjack predators prowling through our industry, for whom we have to bear the brunt of censure from the New Puritans, the Moral Majority nuts and the self-styled viewers-with-alarm who want to pre-censor what we write.

All of us get tarred by the brush, every time another woman gets an icepick in her eye in the course of one of these films.

- Harlan Ellison The first part of this essay on knife-kill splatter movies was published. Then came the Sat.u.r.day my gut laid it on the line in terms of doing something about such films, not just writing about them from a safe distance. The moment when one had to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. I stormed out of a Writers Guild Film Society screening of De Palma' s hideous Blow Out. Screaming, having totally lost control, I realized that I had been one of the members of the Film Society Committee who had booked the d.a.m.ned film...without having seen it. A repeat of the error we on the Committee- Ray Bradbury, Arthur Knight, Allen Rivkin, William Froug, and Arnold Peyser- had committed when we' d screened De Pa1ma' s previous exercise in woman-slaughter, Dressed to Kill.

Then here' s what happened, very fast. I wrote a letter to the Guild Newsletter apologizing for having disrupted the show, pleading temporary nutso. Then I requested a special meeting of the Film Society Committee to discuss our responsibility in terms of showing films whose chief appeal was a floodtide of gore. Not violence, per se: gratuitous, stomach-turning, special-effects slaughter. What I said to the other members of the Committee was that after 12 years of sitting with them selecting films, I had come to a moral position for myself only, that if we were to continue booking that kind of stuff, I' d have to motor. To my delight and resuscitation of faith in the Human Race, everyone else felt the same, and it was unanimously decided that we would exercise greater discretion when booking the films for the Society.

We felt so good about having thus taken a stand for life over death, that critic Arthur Knight outlined all the foregoing in his August 21, 1981, " Knight at the Movies" column in The Hollywood Reporter. The first responses were gratifying. Dozens of people called and wrote to say, " Good for you!" On KNX NewsRadio, August 31, George Nicholaw, v.p. and general manager of the CBS outlet here in Los Angeles, presented an editorial in which he called the action of the Committee " leaders.h.i.+p by example" and praised the move as an act of selectivity and not censors.h.i.+p.

On the 22nd, Rip Rense in the Page 12 section of the Herald Examiner ran a brief piece about the Committee' s action and in a day or so it was picked up: by the AP wire. We all felt terrific.

Then a staff writer for the Times got hold of it and on September 2nd he wrote a " Film Clips" piece that was sufficiently muzzy in tone, lacking sufficient background about how the Film Society Committee worked, to make it appear that Bradbury and Knight and Ellison and Peyser and Froug were setting themselves up as censors. Sure. Believe that, and I' ve got some swell pterodactyl steaks I' ll sell you cheap. In case no one remembers, Bradbury' s most famous work is FAHRENHEIT 451, one of the most potent stretches of fiction ever written against censors.h.i.+p; and n.o.body who writes the stuff I write would be stupid enough to believe in even the slightest infringement on the First Amendment.

Nonetheless. Before the day was out, the s.h.i.+train had begun to fall. Typified by the following extract from the Times article: One veteran screenwriter, who asked that his name not be used, said the Committee' s action reminded him of the old Hays Office, established by the movie industry in the 1920s to guard against indecency. " I remember the Hays Office and all the other crazy offices that the motion picture industry has put up," he said. " A lot of these young people haven' t gone through that. I don' t believe in not showing anything to anybody. If our people don' t want to see something, they should stay at home."

There was a lot more. Nasty phone calls threatening war to the death, snide remarks from pa.s.sersby at the next week' s screening (which happened to be Wolfen, a violent film we booked without moral qualms because it was a good movie about something other than t.i.tillating bloodletting), and what was for me the most hilarious incident of all: As I approached the Writers Guild Theater the next weekend, I saw a guy with a clipboard, soliciting signatures on a pet.i.tion. I walked over, hoping it was another sign-up against James Watt, and saw it was a pet.i.tion against censors.h.i.+p. " Hey, that' s terrific," I said. " Lemme sign." The guy handed me the clipboard and a pen, and I signed right on the line, adding my name in printed form, and my address. He smiled and said thanks, looked down, saw my name, and started to get crazy with me. " But this is a pet.i.tion against you!" I grinned right back and said, " No it ain' t, chum. It' s against censors.h.i.+p and I' m for that one hundred percent, which, if you weren' t an airhead, you' d know." So he started trying to tear off the page and I said, " Ah, ah, ah. If you do that, you invalidate the pet.i.tion." Then I went into the movie.

But not until a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Guild, and a vote of confidence for the Committee' s procedures, did the abuse slack off. Letters continued coming in to the Writers Guild Newsletter (edited, ironically, by the very same Allen Rivkin who sits on the Committee) where each one, no matter how off-the-point or lamebrained, was duly published. I guess we just don' t have this censors.h.i.+p system down pat yet.

Okay, so now we' re coming into the homestretch on this subject. Why, you ask with good sense, why isn' t what the Committee did an example of censors.h.i.+p? And what the h.e.l.l does all this mean beyond the tempest in the teapot?

Look: the Film Society is, first of all, a private group, open only to members of the Writers Guild of America and their families. Four or five times a year, the Committee gets together and, under very difficult rules, manages to select 42 films. That' s all the open slots we have. Forty-two. We have to select 42 films from the maybe 300 available to us. Most foreign films we can' t get, because the Laemmle chain of theaters controls them and they figure, quite correctly I think, that the audience for " art" films is small already, why should they cut out a couple of thousand potential ticket-buyers just to give away films free to a Film Society? So we are limited in that way. Then there' s the problem of the play-dates allowed to us. We can' t show films prior to release, and can only book them for showing up to a month or so after they' ve opened. And since we have to book well in advance, what happens is that we' re selecting films that usually aren' t even in final editing when we sit down for our meetings.

We' re operating semi-blind. But because of the makeup of the Committee, we have access to rough cuts, films in progress, studio scuttleb.u.t.t. So we avoided The Postman Always Rings Twice even though it seemed to have everything going for it in pre-release hoopla- remake in unexpurgated form of a cla.s.sic James M. Cain novel, excellent director, top stars, supposedly tough script- because word leaked out that somehow this one was going into the tank, and we picked up on a film that hadn' t been sold so heavily before-the-fact because Knight had seen clips from it and thought it was going to be a comedy smash. The film was Arthur.

We go on gut instinct and our sources throughout the industry. That' s why the members of the Committee have been appointed. Anybody in the Guild can serve on the Committee, but with the exception of those who' ve served for years, most of the summer soldiers who sit with us have no access to films, have no way of cajoling studios into parting with their precious product, and don' t like the long hours of hard work and phone calls. So the Film Committee functions in the same way as the editorial board of The Book-of-the-Month Club.

BOMC gets offered several thousand books a year as possible selections. They pick a couple of hundred. Are they censors because they choose to offer this book and not that book? No, they are making informed selections. That' s what the Committee has been doing for 22 years.

And here' s the airhead part. For 22 years the people who were namecalling have gone to the Guild Theater, and there' s always been a film waiting for them. How the h.e.l.l did they think that film got there? The stork? Santa Claus? Didn' t they ever wonder why, on a given Sat.u.r.day, they wound up watching Tess, rather than, say, Maniac or Debbie Does Dallas?

How did they figure a film booked four months earlier got to the projection booth at the appointed time?

None of that really matters. The system the Film Society uses is, by years of painful trial and error, the only one that can guarantee a steady flow of decent films for the members of the Guild. That' s beside the point. What matters is the question of alleged censors.h.i.+p, and the response of uninformed, otherwise intelligent and concerned people to the unsupported suggestion of censors.h.i.+p.

The airheads seem to me to be not only doltish in this matter, but cowardly. If they really gave a d.a.m.n about someone telling them what they can see and what they can' t, why aren' t they out in front of the offices of the Motion Picture Producers a.s.sociation, picketing against the code that rates films G or PG or R or X? Why aren' t they lobbying against outfits like Wildmon and his religious zealots, or Falwell and his vast Moron Majority? Cowards because they accept the rules and regs set down by the television networks that emasculate everything they write for the tube. Cowards because they let movies and books get banned allover the country and never offer their services in an amicus way to stop such depredations. Cowards because they are so terrified by the threat of a Moral Majority that they abrogate their responsibility to moral and ethical behavior for fear of looking like the enemy.

My big RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE tells me that a censor is " any person who supervises the manners or morality of others." In flat-out terms that means keeping someone from seeing or doing something they want to do. But if the films the Committee chooses not to select for screening- remember only 42 out of 300+ can be shown each year- are available to the public in a couple of hundred theaters all over Los Angeles...where the h.e.l.l does the censoring come in?

Now that makes simple sense. The kind of sense that becomes obvious when one takes the time to examine the question, not just rely on the word of someone shooting off his bazoo, who" asked that his name not be used."

But the foofaraw happened. Men who have spent most of their adult lives fighting censors.h.i.+p, who chose to exercise a sense of responsibility, who tried to say there are better films than these dark, ugly charnel house films, got the screaming pack of airheads on their case. Vicious f.u.c.ker that I am, I suggested to the Committee that we let the airheads have their way. Instead of booking The French Lieutenant' s Woman and Absence of Malice, that we give them six straight weeks of splatter films. Friday the Thirteenth, Part II (in which a spear goes through the back of a woman, through the man she' s s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, and impales another guy under the bed), Night School (in which decapitated heads wind up in sinks, fish tanks, toilets and a kettle of soup in a restaurant), Don' t Go In The House (in which women are tied to walls and then cremated by a guy with a flame thrower), Halloween, Part II (in which kids bite into apples filled with razor blades), and Maniac (in which a man knifes a woman to death, scalps her, puts her scalp on a dummy and then makes love to the dummy).

Gee, I don' t know why the Committee looked on that suggestion with horror and revulsion. Can' t understand, simply cannot understand why Ray Bradbury and gentle Arnold Peyser looked sick. Don' t know no way to figure why Arthur Knight and Bill Froug got green. Why Rivkin withdrew a dinner invitation.

What the h.e.l.l' s the matter with them?

Are they censors?

The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge William Weisel p.r.o.nounced his name why-zell. but many of the unfortunates for whom he had done remodeling and construction p.r.o.nounced it weasel.

He had designed and built a new guest bathroom for Fred Tolliver, a man in his early sixties who had retired from the active life of a studio musician with the foolish belief that his fifteen-thousand-dollar-per-year annuity would sustain him in comfort. Weisel had snubbed the original specs on the job, had subst.i.tuted inferior materials for those required by the codes, had used cheap j.a.panese pipe instead of galvanized or stressed plastic, had eschewed lath and plaster for wallboard that left lumpy seams, had skirted union wages by ferrying in green card workers from Tijuana every morning by dawn light, had- in short- done a spectacularly crummy job on Fred Tolliver's guest bathroom. That was the first mistake.

And for all of this ghastly workmans.h.i.+p, Weisel had overcharged Fred Tolliver by nine thousand dollars. That was the second mistake.

Fred Tolliver called William Weisel. His tone was soft and almost apologetic. Fred Tolliver was a gentle man, not given to fits of pique or demonstrations of anger. He politely asked Weisel to return and set matters to rights. William Weisel laughed at Fred Tolliver and told him that he had lived up to the letter of the original contract, that he would do nothing. That was the third mistake.

Putatively, what Weisel said was true. Building inspectors had been greased and the job had been signed off: legal according to the building codes. Legally, William Weisel was in the clear; no suit could be brought. Ethically it was a different matter. But even threats of revocation of license could not touch him.

Nonetheless, Fred Tolliver had a rotten guest bathroom, filled with leaks and seamed walls that were already cracking and bubbles in the vinyl flooring from what was certainly a break in the hot water line and pipes that clanked when the faucets were turned on, if they could be turned on.

Fred Tolliver asked for repairs more than once.

After a while, William Weisel's wife, Belle, who often acted as his secretary, to save a few bucks when they didn' t want to hire a Kelly Girl, would not put through the calls.

Fred Tolliver told her, softly and politely, " Please convey to Mr. Weisel- " and he p.r.o.nounced it why-zell, " - my feelings of annoyance. Please advise him that I won' t stand for it. This is an awful thing he's done to me. It's not fair, it's not right."

She was chewing gum. She examined her nails. She had heard this all before: married to Weisel for eleven years: all of this, many times. " Lissen, Mistuh Tollivuh, whaddaya want me to do about it. I can't do nothing about it, y'know. I only work here. I c'n tell 'im, that's all I c' n do, is tell 'im you called again."

" But you' re his wife! You can see how he' s robbed me!"

" Lissen, Mistuh Tollivuh, I don' t haveta lissen to this!"

It was the cavalier tone, the utterly uncaring tone: impertinent, rude, dismissing him as if he were a crank, a weirdo, as if he weren' t asking only for what was due him. It was like a goad to an already maddened bull.

" This isn' t fair!"

" I' ll tell 'im, I' ll tell 'im. Jeezus, I' m hanging up now."

''I' ll get even! I will! There has to be justice- "

She dropped the receiver into its rest heavily, cracking her gum with annoyance, looking ceilingward like one ma.s.sively put upon. She didn' t even bother to convey the message to her husband.

And that was the biggest mistake of all.

The electrons dance. The emotions sing. Four billion, resonating like insects. The hive mind of the ma.s.ses. The emotional gestalt. The charge builds and builds, surging down the line seeking a focus. The weakest link through which to discharge itself. Why this focus and not that? Chance, proximity, the tiniest fracture for leakage. You, I, him, her. Everyman, Anyman; the c.r.a.p shoot selection is whatever man or woman born of man and woman whose rage at that moment is that potent.

Everyman: Fred Tolliver. Unknowing confluence.

He pulled up at the pump that dispensed supreme, and let the Rolls idle for a moment before shutting it off. When the attendant leaned in at the window, Weisel smiled around his pipe and said, " Morning, Gene. Fill it up with extra."

" Sorry, Mr. Weisel," Gene said, looking a little sad, " but I can' t sell you any gas."

" Why the h.e.l.l not? You out?"

" No, sir; just got our tanks topped off last night. Still can' t sell you any."

" Why the h.e.l.l not? /"

" Fred Tolliver doesn' t want me to."

Weisel stared for a long moment. He couldn' t have heard correctly. He' d been ga.s.sing up at this station for eleven years. He didn' t even know they knew that creep Tolliver. " Don' t be an a.s.shole, Gene. Fill the d.a.m.ned tank!"

" I' m sorry, sir. No gas for you."

" What the h.e.l.l is Tolliver to you? A relative or something?"

" No, sir. I never met him. Wouldn' t know him if he drove in right now."

" Then what... what the h.e.l.l... I- I- "

But nothing he could say would get Gene to pump one liter of gas into the Rolls.

Nor would the attendants at the next six stations down the avenue. When the Rolls ran out, a mile from his office, Weisel almost had time to pull to the curb. Not quite. He ran dry in the middle of Ventura Boulevard and tried to turn toward the curb, but though traffic had been light around him just a moment before, somehow it was now packing itself b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper. He turned his head wildly this way and that, dumbfounded at how many cars had suddenly pulled onto the boulevard around him. He could not get out of the crunch. It wouldn' t have mattered. Improbably, for this non-business area, for the first time in his memory, there were no empty parking s.p.a.ces at the curb.

Cursing foully, he put it in neutral, rolled down the window so he could hold the steering wheel from outside, and got out of the silent Rolls. He slammed the door, cursing Fred Tolliver's every breath, and stepped away from the car. He heard the hideous rending of irreplaceable fabric. His five hundred dollar cashmere suit jacket had been caught in the jamb.

A large piece of lovely fabric, soft as a doe's eye, wondrously ecru-closer-to-beige-than-fawn-colored, tailor-made for him in Paris, his most favorite jacket hung like slaughtered meat from the door. He whimpered; an involuntary sob of pain.

Then: " What the h.e.l.l is going on!" he snarled, loud enough for pedestrians to hear. It was not a question, it was an imprecation. There was no answer; none was required; but there was the sound of thunder far off across the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was in the grip of a two-year drought, but there was a menacing buildup of soot-gray clouds over the San Bernardinos.

He reached in through the window, tried to turn the wheel toward the curb, but with the engine off the power steering prevented easy movement. But he strained and strained... and something went snap! in his groin. Incredible pain shot down both legs and he bent double, clutching himself. Flashbulbs went off behind his eyes. He stumbled around in small circles, holding himself awkwardly. Many groans. Much anguish. He leaned against the Rolls, and the pain began to subside; but he had broken something down there. After a few minutes he was able to stand semierect. His s.h.i.+rt was drenched with sweat. His deodorant was wearing off. Cars were swerving around the Rolls, honking incessantly, drivers swearing at him. He had to get the Rolls out of the middle of the street.

Still clutching his crotch with one hand, jacket hanging from him in tatters, beginning to smell very bad, William Weisel put his shoulder to the car, grabbed the steering wheel and strained once again; the wheel went around slowly. He readjusted himself, excruciating pain pulsing through his pelvis, put his shoulder against the window post and tried to push the behemoth. He thought of compacts and tiny sports cars. The Rolls moved a fraction of an inch, then slid back.

Sweat trickled into his eyes, making them sting. He huffed and lunged and applied as much pressure as the pain would permit. The car would not move.