Since the June 1st edition of the Freep, wherein I told the first part of the story of how I was a hired gun for Al Wilson, back in 1951 when I was seventeen…many strange and wearying things have happened to me. My sf tv series, The Starlost, goes on NBC in September, and I’ve been commuting between L.A., N.Y. and Toronto, writing scripts and working with Canadian writers who’ll write other scripts; I’ve written half a new novel that Pinnacle Books will release in October, the first of The Dark Forces series featuring my sorcerer Kraiter and based on yet another tv series I’ve sold (in collaboration with Larry Brody); there was a writers’ conference in the wilds of the Michigan woods; there was the news of my Mother’s near-death in Miami Beach (and I’m still sweating that one out); I’ve been brought up on strike-breaking charges by my own union, the Writers Guild—and I’d as lief not go into that one, friends…it makes me too angry to articulate…but it’ll work out, never fear—I am secure in my own ethical behavior—and I wrote two new stories, one 15,000 words long and the other 5,000. The former is in response to an assignment to write the “ultimate futuristic sex story.” It’s called “Catman” and you’ll find it in a forthcoming anthology titled FINAL STAGE. So. All of that is the reason I haven’t been able to tell you what happened with Al Wilson and my being a hired gun.
But I’m back now, and here we go again.
If you recall, last time I told about how I’d been hired by Al, a wealthy neurotic, to pack a Beretta for him, be his errand boy and general all-around companion. Al was a tot weird, if you recall, and when he fell in love with a girl who worked the same shift at Fisher Body in Cleveland, he decided I would be his John Alden to the swing-shift Priscilla Mullins. His “love gift” was a huge slab of meat on a wooden platter. I’d been following her for days, to find out where she lived, and to give you an indication of how suave a secret agent/shadower I was, when I rang the doorbell and she answered, she said, “I was wondering how long it would take you to say hello. I’ve been watching you follow me home for a week.”
Then she invited me in. She introduced me to her Mother. “Oh, you’re the one,” her Mother said. “We were going to call the police about you.” I guess I giggled nervously.
“What’s with the steak?” the girl said.
“Ah-hmm. I am a messenger for Mr. Al Wilson, who works with you at the plant. Mr. Wilson, who is a very shy man, but a very nice man, would like to come calling. He has sent me and this small token of his respect and admiration as a calling card.”
They looked at the steak, then they looked at me, then they looked at each other.
“I think we should call the cops,” her Mother said.
“No, no!” I said, my voice rising. “This is strictly legit. Al is just, well, you know, really quiet and bashful about women, and he’s seen you every day at the plant and he didn’t know how to strike up an acquaintance.”
“You related to him?” the girl asked.
“I work for him.”
“Doing what?”
How the hell do you tell two total strangers that you are a hired gun. I mean, for chrissakes, I had zits…I didn’t look a thing like Dick Powell or Bogart or even, god help me, Audie Murphy. I was just a kid with a dumb steak in my hands.
“I run errands for him. He has money.”
That seemed to brighten both of them. “We’ll cook it for dinner,” the Mother said. “Why don’t you stay?” said the girl. So I stayed. The night.
We talked through most of the night, the girl and I. It is not by chance that I keep calling her “the girl.” After twenty-some years, I can’t recall her name. What I do recall is that she tried to get me to take her to bed, and I was a virgin, a scared virgin, and most of that night was spent in consummate horror of being deflowered. You must grasp that I was seventeen, had never even kissed a girl, and the idea of that lush creature and myself in a bed filled me with nameless terrors H. P. Lovecraft never imagined.
I fled the next day, in company with the girl, with whom I rode the bus back into Cleveland. When she got off at Fisher Body, I kept going and would gladly have motored right out of the state if it hadn’t been for having to report back to Al.
He wasn’t home when I got there, so I guess I went off to school. But at the end of the academic day I took the streetcar out to his apartment on St. Clair Avenue, and waited for him. When he showed, I thought the first thing he’d ask me was what had happened on his love mission. But he didn’t. He told me he had a vital errand for me to run, that he’d been out getting me plane tickets, and I was going to Cincinnati.
“Don’t you want to know what happened with the girl and the steak?”
“Oh, sure. What happened…but be brief.”
So I told him she seemed like a nice girl (I didn’t mention that she wasn’t terribly bright, as far as I could tell) and that she seemed responsive to his overtures (I didn’t mention that she had spent the better part of the night trying to reap the dubious benefits of my post-puberty tumescence) and that he should call her.
I wish I could tell you they got married and had nine kids, or that she had spurned him in a flamboyant scene, or that he had killed her, or she killed him…but the truth of the matter is that I never heard another word from Al about The Great Love Affair of the Century.
Instead, I readied myself to go to Cincinnati.
(An Author’s Note: after the first section of this reminiscence was published, I received a call from an old friend of twenty years’ standing, Roy Lavender, formerly of Ohio, now living in Long Beach. Roy remembered Al, remembered the period I had been working for Al, remembered, in fact, things I’d forgotten. You can perceive with what joy I took that call after the long preamble I had written about people thinking the weird things that happen to me are fever dreams made up on the moment. Roy is a living verification of what I’ve set down here, and he gave me some facts about Al I never knew. He also pointed out that the contents of the container Al threw into Euclid Creek—as reported last installment—was not fulminate of mercury but, rather, metallic sodium. Hence, the explosions. Roy also reminded me of the time Al was beset by a group of juvies from the area, who came up over the grocery awning to rip him off and beat him up in the apartment, and how Al beat the shit out of them, at one point using the handle from the Multilith press to slam a kid so hard it lifted him off through the window into the street below. Stay healthy and live long, Roy Lavender: you are my last touch with proof in this important life-experience.)
Anyhow. Al handcuffed an attaché case to my wrist, gave me a hundred bucks, and sent me off to the airport. I made a mistake, however. It was a school day, and I stopped off at the optometry shop of my brother-in-law, Jerry, at East 9th Street and Prospect in Cleveland, to tell him I was going out of town and would be back the next day. Now, my family has always considered me something of an irresponsible, not to mention a dreamer who might as easily come home for dinner as show up ten hours later with a story that I’d been kidnapped by puce-colored aliens from Proxima Centauri who had kidnapped me and taken me for a ride in their motorized garbanzo bean through the reaches of deepest space. So when Jerry saw the attaché case handcuffed to my wrist, he thought I was into another big lie, and he instantly called my Mother, to tell her to stop me at the airport.
Thus, when I got there, I was greeted by cops and airport fuzz who yanked me off the flight, searched me—they couldn’t search the case, they didn’t have a key—and finally had to release me, because I was legitimately ticketed.
I went to Cincinnati, really pissed at my Mother, and ambivalent as hell about my role in life. Was I, in fact, Ashenden the secret agent, or was I a punk kid who needed his Mommy’s approval before he could have an adventure? Not in the least ameliorating my feelings was the memory of Al’s words as he’d handcuffed the case to my wrist:
“Be careful. There are people who will try to take this away from you.” At that moment I’d decided to leave the Beretta with Al. Good thing I did: can you imagine the looks of lively interest on the faces of the airport cossacks?
When I got to Cincinnati, I took a cab to the address Al had given me, where I met Don Ford, a science fiction fan (now, sadly, deceased) I knew casually, but whom I knew to be a friend of Al’s. He unlocked the cuffs, took the case into the next room, and came back to offer me the hospitality of his home for the rest of the day and that night. I had no idea what was in the case, but Roy Lavender advises that Al Wilson, for all his weirdness, was a man who had invented a method for producing steel directly from iron ore without going through the pig iron stage. He had contacts in South America and in Newfoundland, and apparently there were big business interests that were willing to stop at very little to get the secret.
None of this did I know.
But when, the next day, I went to board the plane back to Cleveland, someone took a shot at me.
Okay, okay. I’m dreaming. Have it your way. All I know is that as I crossed the tarmac to board the plane—in the days before those access tunnels that take you from the plane’s passenger cab straight into the terminal—I heard what sounded like a gunshot, and a hole appeared in the fuselage of the plane. I may be making that up. I didn’t wait around to ponder the equation. I bolted past everyone else, shoved me widdle way up the gangway and was inside that liner before that pre-Sirhan Sirhan could get off another.
When I got back to Cleveland, I tendered my resignation.
It had been a brief but fascinating sojourn in company with the mysterious Martian, Al Wilson, but I suddenly realized I had a deep-seated aversion to bullet holes in my as-then-sexually-unexplored cuteness.
Al reluctantly let me off the hook, said he would miss me, and we went our separate ways.
There is a memorably resonant afternote, however.
I never saw Al Wilson again, save once.
I was in Philadelphia in 1953, there for a sf convention, and on a dead Sunday morning, while everyone else slept off the effects of having drunk themselves into stupors the night before, I went looking for an open breakfast nook. You may have heard how dead Philly is on a Sunday morning. The reports are hardly exaggerated.
But as I walked the street seeking a breakfast counter, I saw a man walking toward me. As we neared each other, I recognized him as Al Wilson. I stopped. He came straight up to me, as though he’d known I would be there and had hurried to meet me. There was no preamble, no greetings between two people who hadn’t seen each other in years. He merely came in close, looked straight at me with those faintly protuberant eyes, and said in an undertone, “When you see Stan Skirvin, tell him to examine pages 476 to 495 in T. E. Lawrence’s THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.”
Then he walked past me and was gone.
I have read those pages in every hardcover and paperback edition of Lawrence of Arabia’s book ever printed: I have never found the slightest clue to what mystery may be therein hidden.
But I’ll tell you this: Al Wilson walked out of a chill Philadelphia morning in 1953 to tell me that, and I’ll be damned if I don’t believe that if I can ever unravel what he meant, I’ll be rich, Willy Loman, rich as Croesus!
And that’s the story of how I was a hired gun.
Honest.