THEY WERE all there: the rich and the famous, the powerful and the semiliterate. The big room at the St. Regis teemed with “interesting people”—the scenemakers making the scene—laughing, drinking, eating, and being relentlessly sophisticated. Beneath the enormous chandelier that threw down its light on them their voices swelled like a symphony, cigarette smoke haloed their heads, and everywhere could be seen the sparkle of raised glasses and the flash of pinky rings.
Shmeer was giving The Broadbelters its coming-out party, and no debutante could have asked for a finer bash: free flowing liquor, filet mignon, and music by the Militant Prune Juice. There were over four hundred guests, the women dressed in feathers, fur, and shimmering minis, and the men in anything from velvet cutaways to 1890 French field marshals’ uniforms. Shmeer had overlooked no one—critics, columnists, show people, producers, artists, writers, agents, jet-setters. And most important of all, there were the booksellers, Shmeer’s “chosen people.” While the others preened and traded conversational gambits and absorbed each others gloss, it was the booksellers, drab and colorless as they were, to whom Shmeer had given the ringside tables and on whom he kept his most watchful eye. For he knew, in his homely wisdom, that the stars only glitter, but the booksellers order books. And so he kept his vigil and waited, looking for the right moment to unleash the big guns and fire the opening shots of The Broadbelters’ campaign.
As he threaded his way through the crowd, pausing now and again, particles of the swirling conversation clung to Shmeer like lint.
“What on earth is he doing with that riding crop in his hand?” he heard a young man ask a female companion as he brushed past their table. “He looks like a jockey in search of a horse.”
The girl, whom Shmeer recognized out of the corner of his eye as an assistant buyer at Brentano’s, giggled coquettishly. “That’s Shmeer’s ‘wailing whip.’ You mean you haven’t heard about it?” She sounded mildly reproachful. “It’s a teaser he sent out to promote the book. It’s like a talking toy. When you crack it, a woman’s voice starts to moan and sob.”
“Good Lord. You’re not serious, are you?”
“Oh, yes. He’s got a fabulous promotion department. They do such clever things!” Her voice bubbled with admiration. “They sent press releases out on paper smeared with mud and they said, ‘If you think this paper is dirty—wait until you read the book!’ Then they put out a paperback version of the first chapter and enclosed a free package of birth control pills with the announcement: ‘AFTER READING THIS ONE CHAPTER OF THE BROADBELTERS YOU’LL WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO SOMEBODY—BE OUR GUEST.’ Then they …”
“Please, please. No more. Not while I’m eating.”
Shmeer, smiling inwardly, moved on. Standing near the bar he spied Durston Flatus, the essayist, engaged in a heated discussion with a friend.
“Yes, but the Partisan Review,” Flatus was saying, “blasted Larry’s book to pieces. They said it was full of ‘phony obscurantism,’ ‘metaphysical pretensions,’ and ‘bogus existential profundities.’ ”
“Well, the review in Commentary put it down, too,” his friend answered, “but they praised the writing as ‘occasionally brilliant.’ ”
“Really? The New York Review of Books said it was written in ‘moth-eaten pseudo-Joycean rhetoric,’ and the Times Book Review called the prose style ‘absurdly anemic.’ ”
“Have you read the book at all?”
Flatus grunted disdainfully. “With those reviews—are you kidding?”
Shmeer turned away, and long-haired, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Roundheel, the British girl-novelist, caught his eye. Piquant in a transparent vinyl dress, she was chattering antimatedly to a TV talk show producer.
“Yes, it’s true I had a book of poetry published when I was eleven,” she was telling him, “but A Worm in the Ivy is my first novel and I’m terribly excited about it.”
“I can imagine,” the producer said. “What’s it about?”
“Oh, it’s a rather gay, frothy story about two wayward girls in a convent school and the things they take up—you know, masturbation, Lesbianism, buggery, and all that.”
“Sounds interesting. Would you like to come on our show and discuss it?”
“Sooper!” she cried. “I love your American telly. It’s so mad and crazy, and I just adore mad, crazy things.”
“Do you like New York?”
“Oh, it’s smashing! Your discotheques are wild.” She giggled. “I haven’t seen much else, but the rest can wait. I’ve simply got to do the mad, crazy things now, while I’m still young.”
“Do you have any plans for the future?”
“Yes. I’m terribly ambitious. I’m going to work at being a teen-aged wonder for the next few years. Then I guess I’ll have to retire when I’m nineteen or twenty and be a lady novelist or something.”
“I see. Does anyone else in your family write?”
“Oh, we all do. My sister Regina—she’s twelve—does these marvelously bleak short stories for the better magazines. And Cecil, my seventeen-year-old brother, is a screen writer in Hollywood and lives in a tree house in Big Sur. And Archibald, that’s my …”
A loud noise diverted Shmeer’s attention and he turned around to find Daddio Brashbattle, the famous middle-aged author of fashionably avant-garde novels, crouching in a fighter’s stance and growling ferociously at a bearded literary critic.
“Grr … grr …” said Brashbattle, feinting sharply with his left hand while his right held firmly to a triple shot of Scotch.
The critic, looking badly frightened, tried to back away, but Brashbattle closed in doggedly as the onlookers formed a startled ring around them.
“I’ll get you, you mother, for that biased bad-ass review,” Brashbattle snarled, dodging and jabbing wildly at the critic’s midsection. His words poured out in a bibulous stream of semiconsciousness that held the crowd mesmerized. “What you don’t know is I’m a Spook writing like a Kook, which is to say, a red hot cock. For the Spook is the spark of the white man’s cock, and when we die the big death we send our semen, see men sprouting in the genes, seamen bulging in blue jeans, sailing aboard the big stick Nigger prick into the wide open cunt of white immortality. That’s right,” Brashbattle said, ignoring the shocked gasps of the people staring at him, “what if I’m not the white Abraham, Isaac, Jacob middle-class son of Brooklyn, New York, and Hear ? Israel shit but am instead black as a tarry stool in a pool of blood, yes Lord, black as the entrance to the Harlem tunnel, ever see a colored boy glued, arms out, to the side of a building while some chill-grey-iron cop feels him up and down? Dig this!” Brashbattle cried, wagging his finger at the cowering critic. “Reason is the technique of the alienated to discover truth under sterile conditions, just as emotion is the technique of the involved to discover truth under instantaneous but mythic, penetrating, pervasive conditions of fertility.” Brashbattle smiled grandly. “That’s where it’s at, professor, for if implosion comes can the message be far behind?—and now Daddio is off to piss in the john, son, piss on Johnson’s peace, for Daddio is, mean to say, has got to go. Keep the fart, baby.”
And with that, Brashbattle poured his glass of whisky down his throat and lurched off to find the Men’s Room. The stunned silence he left behind him gradually dissipated as the people resumed their conversations. Shmeer, convinced more than ever that serious authors were all hopeless psychotics, began inching toward the bar for a drink. As he maneuvered through the mob he though he heard a familiar voice at his elbow. Glancing around, he found Manny, a look of not-quite-pain on his face, being mercilessly harangued by Augustus Bleak, president of the prestigious Bleak House and a pompous old windbag who attended every publishing party whether he was invited or not.
“… because, unlike other publishers,” Bleak was saying, his lips puckered into a malicious little smile, “we have steadfastly refused to traffic in pornographic trash. We have bravely resisted the temptation to give the public what it wants.” He thrust out an armored vest of honor society keys, dangling them under Manny’s nose. “Instead, we have courageously taken the high road of shaping and elevating public taste with such outstanding works as Akim Zygote’s Reflections on a Yapok.”
“That was a big one,” Manny said.
“It’s not out yet,” Bleak snapped. “We’re releasing it next month.” He chuckled. “Akim’s a bit disappointed the book hasn’t had any advance sale, but I keep telling him that’s not important. Staughton Slunj, editor of the Nahuatian Quarterly, hailed it as a ‘nonwork of surprising unintelligibility.’ ”
“No foolin’.”
“Oh, yes,” Bleak replied. “Believe me, my good fellow, I’ve been a guiding force in the career of many a prominent writer. Take Jeffry Jordan, for instance.”
Manny’s eyebrows shot up. Jordon, the first recognizable name Bleak had spoken, was a world famous novelist.
“Jeffry came to me,” Bleak explained, “when he was still a complete unknown, a budding young author with a manuscript he was desperate to get published. It was a piece of rubbish—a lurid, action-paced sex story that thoroughly offended my editors. You have no idea how shocked they were by that manuscript! It seems incredible, but they couldn’t put it down even for a moment, and one of them went so far as to carry it out with him on his lunch hour.
“But I ignored their reaction,” Bleak went on, “because I was determined to help the struggling young writer. I promised him we would consider the manuscript if he would only eliminate all the explicitly detailed bedroom scenes and replace the glamorous characters and setting with something more commonplace.” Bleak laughed ruefully. “Anyone else would have leaped at such an opportunity, but Jeffry was a pig-headed young rascal. He stubbornly refused to cooperate, leaving me no other alternative than to reject him. And it was my rejection that forced Jeffry to bring his material to another, less discriminating publisher, who hastily snapped it up. The book, Time in the Sack, established Jeffry Jordon as the most popular big-name author in the country and broke all records as a money winner. It sold over two million copies in hardcover, twelve million in paperback, was reprinted in forty-three languages including minor dialects, and was bought by MGM for nine hundred thousand dollars.”
Manny was overwhelmed. “There’s no question about it,” he said. “You sure done Jordon a big favor.”
“Yes,” Bleak agreed. “But the truth is, if Jeffry had taken my original advice, he’d be infinitely better off today. Don’t laugh, my good man. It’s true. Just think how empty and meaningless his life is—a vulgar marriage to an international sex symbol and a life of spoiled luxury on Capri, which he leases yearly from the Italian government as a summer place. What satisfaction can he have blindly churning out his trashy billion dollar novels year after year when he knows that none of them will ever win the Esoterica J. Younes Award or the Ulfelder R. Crock Prize? I ask you, deep down inside himself, in his innermost soul, do you think he’s really happy?”
“I don’t see how he could miss,” Manny said. Then he blurted impatiently, “All this highfalutin crap aside, do your books make any money?”
Bleak recoiled as if struck by a rattlesnake. “Making money is something we leave to the crass commercialists,” he said icily. “We’re more interested in quality. If a book is good we’ll publish it even if we know it won’t sell three copies.”
“But how can you afford to?”
“A matter of simple economics,” Bleak said. “We make the author guarantee us against loss.”
“What if he can’t?”
Bleak looked uncomfortable. “Well, then we have to reject him. But of course,” he went on quickly, “most of our authors are very cooperative. They usually buy out the first edition as gifts anyway.”
“That lets you off the hook,” Manny said, “but what about your authors? How do they live?”
“Oh, if their work is obscure and experimental enough, they might be awarded a literary prize. Or they could pick up a grant or a fellowship, maybe even a foundation year abroad or a writer-in-residenceship at a university, if they’re lucky.”
“And the unlucky ones?”
“They starve.”
Just then they were accosted by a pale, shaggily bearded young man in a threadbare suit who knelt before Bleak and dutifully kissed the keys on his vest chain. “Excuse me, Mr. Bleak,” he said reverently, “but I’ve just returned from a fellowship in Rome and I’ve brought you some portions of my new novel-in-progress.”
“My dear boy…” Bleak began expansively.
Manny seized his opportunity for a getaway and swam off through the crowd with salmonoid frenzy. At the bar he met up with Shmeer, falling over him happily. “Dave! Oh, Christ, am I glad to see you!” he cried. “Some old cocker got ahold of me and damn near bent my ear off.”
Shmeer laughed. “I know—I saw you back there with him. I didn’t think he’d ever let up.”
“Neither did I.” Manny took his drink from the bartender and swallowed half of it down in a big gulp. “Whew! That’s better. I’m startin’ to feel like myself again.”
“Good,” Shmeer said. He took Manny by the elbow and began propelling him away from the bar. “Come on. It’s no good standing still too long at these things. You’re an open target for all the bullshitters.”
“I know what you mean,” Manny said, falling into Shmeer’s brisk stride. “Where are we going?”
“Let’s get back to the table. I want to talk to Bonnie for a minute.”
On the way back they passed Nicky Acrylik, the well-known pop artist, making a spectacle of himself as he sat at a table, trying to cross his legs in a transparent miniskirt.
“Jesus,” Manny said, staring at Acrylik. “How can that jerk wear that thing without a jock strap?”
Shmeer, on the other hand, was more intrigued by the conversation of a theatrical producer discussing his latest Broadway venture with a prospective backer.
“We’re following the proven formula,” the producer was saying, “of taking a time-tested classic property and updating it with a message of social protest.”
“I see,” the prospect said. “And what property are you using?”
“We’re doing a modern version of Snow White with Sammy Davis as the lead.”
“You mean he’s going to play the Prince?”
“No, no. Sammy’s cast for Snow White.” The producer hurried on enthusiastically, “You see, we had to change the love interest a bit to give the story intellectual significance, to make it relate to the moral issues of today. So we replaced the old-fashioned girl-boy romance with a hip black-white, he-he-she triangle. In the play, Snow White is a militant Black Power advocate with a homosexual problem and the seven Dwarfs are moderate Negro leaders. As I told you, we’ve signed Sammy Davis for the lead. Then we have Rex Harrison as the Queen, and we …”
By this time Manny and Shmeer had reached their table. They found Bonnie seated beside the press agent Shmeer had assigned her, Milton Flugelhorn, an intense ferret-faced man who perspired a lot and whose sincerity of manner bordered on chronic anxiety. He was frantically fielding the questions of a clutch of newspapermen while Bonnie smiled affably and nodded in agreement with everything he said. She glanced up as Manny and Shmeer approached and she rose to greet them, looking radiant as the sunrise in a white sequined dress boldly slashed to the navel. “I was wondering when you’d get back,” she said. “You’ve been missing all the fun.”
Shmeer chucked her under the chin. “As long as you’re enjoying it, sweetheart, that’s what counts.”
“Oh, I am!” She smiled ebulliently. “Believe me, Mr. Shmeer, I’ve been waiting for this party a long time. I hope it never ends.”
“I’ll remember that six months from now,” Shmeer laughed. “You’ll be so tired of parties like this in so many cities, you’ll hate the thought of one.”
“That’ll be the day.” Bonnie felt a light tap on her shoulder and whirled around to find Hack smiling at her, taller than she remembered him and boyishly handsome in a well-tailored dinner jacket. “Percy!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
He accepted her embrace and then stood back from her, looking mildly embarrassed. His face glowed with his old chagrined blush as he turned to the girl beside him. “Bonnie, this is Brunhild, my fiancée.”
“Oh, how nice to meet you,” Bonnie said. “Percy’s told me so much about you.” She programmed a big smile at Brunhild while her eyes scrutinized the girl carefully. She was big-boned, big-featured, and nearly as tall as Hack—the type of unpretty girl who would later be called handsome. A cold-hearted horse, Bonnie decided. She’d drive him up the wall in no time. What the hell did he ever see in her?
“I’m delighted to meet you, Mrs. Ehrlich, and I want to congratulate you on the book.” Brunhild smiled pleasantly enough but her voice had a bitchy, overeducated quality that made everything, even a compliment, sound like a dig. “I’ve heard quite a bit about you, too,” she added.
“You have?” A tiny frown peeked through Bonnie’s smile. “Well, I hope it was flattering.”
Shmeer broke in, quelling the bad vibrations. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said as he grasped Hack’s hand. “I’m Dave Shmeer, Mrs. Ehrlich’s publisher. Aren’t you the young man who helped her with the book?”
Hack nodded so vigorously that his neck seemed to have acquired springs. “Yes, sir. I’m Percy Hack. This is a real honor, Mr. Shmeer.”
“My pleasure, Hack. I want you to know what a fine job you did on The Broadbelters. You’re a writer of real promise.” Shmeer beamed at him. “You know how to follow instructions.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Shmeer. You’re most kind.”
“Not at all. I’m always on the lookout for fresh new talent.” Shmeer threw an arm around Hack and drew him aside. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about a project I have in mind that might interest you, Hack. Now listen carefully. How would you like to do a book for me all by yourself, with your name on the cover? Same format as Mrs. Ehrlich’s but a different theme, naturally.” He smiled. “Matter of fact, something in The Broadbelters suggested the theme to me. I’d like to do a book about prominent men in business and government who are secretly all transvestites. We could call it TV Is a Person, and we could build the plot around four main characters—patterned after real ones, of course—you know, Monica, the labor leader; Giselle, the Senator; Delores, the steel executive; Olivia, the Pentagon official. Well, what do you say?”
Hack fumbled and sputtered in a spasm of confusion. “Gosh, Mr. Shmeer, I don’t know what to say. You’ve hit me with this so unexpectedly. I … naturally I’m terribly grateful, but … well, perhaps I ought to straighten something out before we go any further.” He licked his lips nervously. “You see, I only took on Mrs. Ehrlich’s assignment because I needed the money. I never intended to make this kind of writing my career. I’m a poet actually. I’d hate to be judged on the wrong basis.” He looked around desperately, hoping to be rescued, and then went on, “What I mean is, Mr. Shmeer, I don’t know that I’d want to be personally responsible for a book like this, to lay my literary reputation on the line for it. I mean, it’s one thing to write a book for somebody else, but to put your own name on it, well …”
“I understand how you feel,” Shmeer interrupted, nodding sympathetically. “That’s a perfectly normal reaction for somebody with your high esthetic standards. But I assure you”—he gave Hack a heartening smile—“you won’t have to be ashamed of this book. We can handle it in such a way as to overcome all your misgivings.”
Hack stared at him, hope flooding into his eyes. Shmeer was a man of sensitivity, after all. “You can, sir? How?”
“We’ll have you write it under a pseudonym.”
“Oh.” Hack’s face collapsed.
“What’s the matter?” Shmeer asked. “Don’t you know what a great little gimmick that is for selling books?” He began to cackle. “All you have to do is leak it out to the public that the author is using an assumed name. That starts a whole big guessing game as to the author’s real identity, and the first thing you know, everyone is buying the book to see if they can figure out who wrote it. Pretty clever, eh?”
“Yes, it’s quite clever, I suppose. But what happens when they find out who the author really is?”
“What can happen?” Shmeer retorted. He patted Hack’s shoulder encouragingly. “Take my word for it, no one’ll think any worse of you when they know you wrote it. They can only admire you for trying to hide your identity.”
Hack chewed his lip. “But how will I ever achieve critical acclaim …”
“Oh, come on,” Shmeer pooh-poohed. He glanced pointedly at Brunhild making uneasy Smalltalk with Bonnie and Manny. “We all know that critical acclaim doesn’t pay the bills. Why should you starve for the sake of artistic integrity while the public sits in front of a color TV set watching Peyton Place twice a week? You have plenty of time to turn out highly praised books that no one reads after you’ve made your first million.”
“Million?” Hack stared at Shmeer’s unsmiling face and he began to laugh giddily.
“What’s so funny?” Shmeer asked. “I’m speaking literally. You can’t make less than a million if the book is a smash—$300,000 if it flops.”
Hack’s knees sagged and he would have fallen if Shmeer hadn’t held him up. “You mean to say, at the very worst this book will earn me”—he took a big breath—“three hundred thousand dollars?”
“That’s if it’s a bomb. But it won’t be,” Shmeer added quickly. “You’ve got a real way with the blockbuster formula. You’re a ‘natural’ at it.”
Hack grimaced. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he sighed. Lost in thought, he looked away for a moment and caught sight of Brunhild signalling wildly to him over the top of Bonnie’s head, her lips moving in silent exhortation. “Say yes,” she was pleading, “say yes.” He stared at her, amazed at her perception. Here she was, almost beyond earshot, thoroughly absorbed in a conversation of her own and she hadn’t missed a word of his.
The insistence in Brunhild’s eyes, painful in its intensity, found its mark in Hack as an arrow cleaves a bull’s eye. He turned back to Shmeer with a small ironic smile on his face. “Well, when do you want the first twenty pages?”
“Good boy!” Shmeer cried. “I knew you’d see things my way. Drop by the office Monday and we’ll work out all the details.” He flashed a high wattage grin at Hack and gave him a helpful shove toward Brunhild. “Now go tell your girl friend the good news,”
Hack stumbled off just as Milton Flugelhorn, looking more harassed than ever and in an obvious state of anguish, bustled up to Shmeer. “Those newspaper guys are murder,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to sell Mrs. Ehrlich to them, but all they want to do is discuss the reviews.” He waved a bunch of papers at Shmeer. “And look at theml They’re all ruinous. There’s not a good one in the bunch.”
“Let me have those,” Shmeer said. He dropped the riding crop he was still holding, which fell to the floor with a faint, girlish whimper, and took the papers from Flugelhorn. Then he reached inside his breastpocket for another set of clippings and handed them to the press agent. “Here, you take these. They’re the pre-pub notices. We knew we’d get lousy reviews so we piled up a whole slew of rave quotes in advance. Take a look at that one from the Swinging Nun. It’s a beaut.”
Flugelhorn’s face brightened as he read, “The Broadbelters raises physical suffering to the level of the tragic sublime, its erotic elements stimulating the reader to a breathtaking, rapturous, transcendental experience.” He looked up at Shmeer. “Now that’s more like it. This is the kind of stuff I can work with.” He hoisted the clippings like a flag as he hurried away. “Just let anyone mention reviews and I’ll show ’em these.”
“That’s the spirit,” Shmeer said, waving him off. He frowned at the reviews in his hand and started to tear them up. Then he changed his mind. He remembered a saying he’d heard somewhere—probably one he’d made up himself, it was such good advice—“If someone hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” Smiling cagily, he tucked the reviews into his breastpocket and glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock already. Time to get the show on the road.
He picked his riding crop up from the floor and strode resolutely past the tables and up onto the stage. He nodded at the leader of the Militant Prune Juice and the music suddenly stopped. The bandleader, wearing a ponytail, hot pink bell-bottom trousers, and strands of multicolored love beads on his bare wire-haired chest, stepped to the microphone. “Will everyone please be seated,” he cried. “Please take your seats, folks. Your host, Mr. Shmeer, would like to say a few words.”
Shmeer waited patiently while the noise and motion gradually subsided and the guests settled into an expectant silence. When he finally spoke, his voice was firm and strong, and it throbbed with the nightclub m.c.’s overtones of intimate excitement.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you here tonight on the occasion of this important publishing event: the release of the sensational new novel certain to become the nation’s number one bestseller—The Broadbelters by Bonnie Ehrlich. I know you’re all anxious to meet Mrs. Ehrlich, our lovely, talented, and charming author, and I’ll present her to you in a little while.
“But first, I have a wonderful surprise in store for you that I’m sure you’ll find most entertaining.” He paused significantly, waiting just the right length of time. Then he suddenly raised his riding crop high in the air and brought it down on the ground with a resounding crack. There were murmurs of surprise in the audience followed by startled, embarrassed giggles as the sound of feminine moaning filled the air. When it was quiet again, Shmeer continued. “What you have just seen me demonstrate, as many of you know, is the symbol of The Broadbelters’ underlying theme. To bring this theme vividly to life for you tonight, on an advanced artistic level of total involvement, we are fortunate in having with us a thrilling and boldly original new ‘psychodramatic dance troupe’—The Marat-Sades.”
Like an eclipse, the lights slowly dimmed until the room was completely black. A long moment of silence followed, and the audience waited it out, their curiosity stiffening into tension. The silence persisted, coiled and mysterious, deep and still as a well. Then the beat of a drum began to throb in the darkness, pounding out a pulsing, tribal rhythm. A spotlight struck the center of the stage, revealing six male dancers, stripped to their shorts, whips at the ready. Lying at the feet of each was a seminude woman with a flaming candle rising out of her navel. Behind the couples loomed a distorted movie screen across which shadowy filmed images shifted and wriggled as they depicted erotic scenes from The Broadbelters.
While the crowd watched in fascination, the whole room suddenly erupted into a wild, tumultuous uproar of sight and sound. Strobe lights splashed flickering colors across the stage, spotlights strafed the audience, the Militant Prune Juice shrieked and screamed electronically like a flock of hi-fi loons. And through it all, the dancers ran, leaped, whirled, writhed, and flung themselves at each other in an explicit, savagely uninhibited portrayal of sexual sado-masochism. The men sailed into the air and cut spectacular curlicues as they flogged the women’s buttocks, while the women evoked libidinous passion by gyrating shamelessly on the floor or blending their bodies with the men’s in sensuous arabesques.
At the climax of the production the whirlwind of noise and light abruptly ceased. Once again the room plunged into darkness, and no sound could be heard save the tireless beat of the drum. In the stark glare of the solitary spotlight the stage seemed strangely bare. The movie screen was empty now, and the lighted candles in the women’s navels had burned down. In a mood of gathering menace the male dancers, still brandishing their whips, slowly began to circle the cowering women. Suddenly the six coiled whips lashed out as one, catching the women’s flesh-colored bikini panties and ripping them to shreds. Naked, the women writhed convulsively in time to the quickening drumbeat while the men danced around them, flailing them with the whips and lashing themselves into a frenzy. Finally, in an ecstatic swoon the dancers sank to the floor, the bodies piling up in a babel of orgiastic abandonment that represented every conceivable variety, natural and perverse, of sexual congress. Uttering violent cries and moans, arching in passion, bouncing in the act of love, the troupe capped their performance with a rousing finale that ended, not a moment too soon, in an opportune blackout.
When the lights came on again, the room was strangely quiet. It was a sober, drained silence unbroken by any clapping, as though the audience had just witnessed some powerful religious rite—a ritual of purification, perhaps—and to applaud it would be a desecration.
Even Manny was profoundly moved. He turned to Bonnie and whispered, “That Shmeer is something, ain’t he? When he puts on a smoker, it has class.” He looked around the room at the rapt audience. “You see that? All these big artlovers are sitting here like they just seen Shakespeare.”
Bonnie hushed him up nervously. “Shhh. Be quiet. Shmeer’s getting ready to announce me.”
Back in the center of the stage, Shmeer rocked smugly on his heels as he surveyed the audience, savoring their awed reaction. He glanced at the booksellers rooted to their ringside seats, and his pleasure deepened. He could tell by the slavering expression on their faces that he had them in the palm of his hand.
He cleared his throat. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. It is with the deepest pleasure that I present this evening’s guest of honor, and the next leading lady novelist in the country, Bonnie Ehrlich.”
While the band played “Cover Me With Kisses,” a song from The Broadbelters that a top male vocalist had already recorded in a deal set up by Shmeer’s indefatigable p.r. department, Manny slowly escorted Bonnie to the stage. Flashing a winsome smile and impressive cleavage, she stood at Shmeer’s side and graciously accepted the applause.
“Isn’t she lovely?” Shmeer asked, beaming at Bonnie proudly. “And she’s a great little writer, too. I’d like to read you, if I may, what some of the critics have to say about her.”
Bonnie shuddered imperceptibly. She watched Shmeer reach inside his breastpocket, and her smile turned to wax as she saw him take out the packet of reviews. Oh, no, she thought, no, no, no. How could he do this to her? Didn’t he know what was in those goddam things? She looked toward Flugelhorn, hoping for a reassuring sign from him, but he had sunk down so low in his chair he seemed to be sitting in quicksand. He, too, had obviously been taken by surprise.
The hell with it, Bonnie decided. Everyone knew reviews were something to wipe your ass with. Let him read them if he wanted. She was tough. She could take it. She’d had plenty of experience. Gamely, she tilted her chin skyward and riveted her smile into place as she listened to Shmeer read from The Critics.
“According to Amos Vitriol of the San Francisco Examiner, The Broadbelters is, and I quote, ‘a smorgasbord of pornographic filth with a juicy tidbit for everyone. The fare ranges from exotic delicacies like incest to the meaty old staple of fornication.’ Unquote.” Shmeer grinned. “How about that, folks. Isn’t that something?
“And here’s another one from Lisa Hatchet of the Miami Herald: ‘The sick sensationalism and sewer-level obscenity of this tawdry novel will appeal to voyeuristic perverts everywhere.’
“And here’s something from the Cleveland Plain Dealer,” Shmeer went on, blithely ignoring the snickers spreading through the audience like a measles rash—‘A trashy tale of three show-biz stereotypes hooked on drugs, alcohol, and masochism, that makes Valley of the Dolls look like a Girl Scout manual.’ ”
The snickers grew louder, and Bonnie felt herself losing control, her granitic aplomb threatening to crack with each succeeding insult.
But as Shmeer read on, she was distracted from her pain by an undercurrent of puzzled murmuring in the audience. Scanning the room, she suddenly discovered the cause: a number of uniformed men, frighteningly armed with guns, had begun to file in and station themselves against the walls. My God, she thought, it’s a raid! Her heart thumped and boomed, knocking crazily against her ribs for a moment. Then she realized, as she stared at the uniform of the man nearest her, that he was not an ordinary policeman at all but a security guard.
Shmeer, seemingly oblivious of everything except the endless diatribes of the critics, was still reading away with obvious relish. “… funky, melodramatic soap opera badly in need of a detergent.’
“And finally, this last statement from Publishers’ Weekly that pretty well sums it up: ‘The Broadbelters, a below-the-belt peek at the cruelly travestied but still identifiable lives of a trio of Hollywood stars, remains, from first page to last, a tawdry, scabrous “sexpolitation” novel.’ ”
Smiling broadly, Shmeer stuffed the reviews back into his jacket. He stood silently before his restless audience and coolly assessed them. Over sixty armed guards had infiltrated by now, and the tension was sizzling like a fuse. He waited, forcing the anticipation still higher. Then he leaned into the mike and began to speak in a sober, low-key tone. “You’ve heard the reviews now, ladies and gentlemen—every last one of them—and let me tell you this. When the critics uniformly label a book tawdry, trashy, scabrous, pornographic, and obscene; when they accuse it of ‘sexploitation,’ sick sensationalism, and melodramatic soap opera; when they deplore its cruel travesties of the lives of famous real people; when that happens, you can be sure of one thing.” He pointed his finger at them and escalated his voice to a roar. “YOU CAN BE SURE THAT BOOK WILL BE THE MAJOR HIT OF THE YEAR!”
As he delivered this last line, a bandwagon emblazoned with the words “The Broadbelters” rolled out of the wings onto the center of the stage. There were guards riding in the bandwagon, and when they jumped off and stood at attention, the people gasped in amazement at what they saw. The entire inside of the wagon was heaped with great, towering chimney stacks of dollar bills.
Shmeer’s voice rumbled through the mike again. “Everyone knows what a major hit means. It means money. Lots and lots of money.” He detached the mike and walked over to the bandwagon, dipping his hand into the mountainous agglomeration of bills. “Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what this is? This is fifty million dollars.” He listened to the fresh wave of gasps that came up to him. Then he fixed his eye on the booksellers, punching his words out at them like blows. “We expect The Broadbelters to gross every cent of this—fifty million dollars—and some of it could be yours.”
Suddenly Shmeer leaped onto the bandwagon. Still clutching the microphone, he flung his arm out to the audience and cried, “Now I ask all of you here tonight to climb on The Broadbelters’ bandwagon and ride with me to success!”
The crowd went wild. Caught up by Shmeer’s theatrics and by some deep inner pull, they jumped up from their tables, pent-up emotions spilling over, chairs clattering to the floor, in the delirium. While the band blasted them onward with “Happy Days Are Here Again” in a thumping Boogaloo beat, they began a laughing, shouting, pushing, scrambling stampede toward the stage, the booksellers out in front, leading the herd.
Before the mob could reach her, Bonnie ran to the bandwagon and climbed up next to Shmeer. She threw her arms around him, shouting at him over the din. “You did it, Mr. Shmeer! You really grabbed them!”
He grinned in sheer delight and pointed happily toward the barrage of flashbulbs popping off in front of the stage. “Look at that publicity, will you? We’ll make every wire service, newspaper, radio and TV station in the country. You couldn’t buy that for a million!”
One of the reporters called out to him. “Any plans for a second printing, Mr. Shmeer?”
“Not yet,” he answered. “But there will be after tonight.”
“Where did you get all the money for your bandwagon?” another shouted.
“Rented it from the banks,” Shmeer answered.
The rest of the questions were lost in the noise and commotion as the people began swarming across the stage, dancing excitedly around the bandwagon. A cordon of guards held them off at arm’s length, but that didn’t curb their exhilaration. The very nearness of all that money was enough for them; they were intoxicated with the scent of success.
And so was Bonnie. “Oh, Mr. Shmeer!” she cried. “This is so exciting!” Her hands swept over the walls of cash that surrounded them. “So much money! I can’t believe it’s real.”
A strange smirk stole over Shmeer’s face. Her remark seemed to have triggered off a private joke.
Bonnie stared at him—at the odd little pussycat smile—and suddenly she surmised the truth. She began to giggle. “You mean …”
He nodded.
“Oh, that’s too funny! Oh, Shmeer, you’re unbelievable!” She threw back her head and howled with laughter at the thought of Shmeer’s chicanery. The old bastard hadn’t rented the money from any banks. No, that would have been too expensive. Instead, he must have found an old ex-con somewhere who printed the stuff up in his basement. The whole fifty million was counterfeit. Phony as a three dollar bill. And sixty guards with rifles were standing there to protect it.
The bandwagon began to roll across the stage, the exuberant crowd laughing and cavorting as they trailed after it. Bonnie leaned back against her cushion of bogus bills and smiled with happiness. She looked at Shmeer, and a glorious feeling of confidence sang inside her. She was in good hands. The man was like P. T. Bamum, Mike Todd, and Billy Rose rolled into one. He could play the public like a piano. He could sell them anything—even nothing.
With such a captain at the helm, how could she fail to reach the beckoning shores of fame?