Spider Kiss Read Free Page A

the English language so demonically, we were sunk to our knees in awe.
    It got to be a matter of pride with us, to see if we could anticipate his thinking, cobble up a title so redolent of decay and corruption that Scotty wouldn't change it. He would sit there and read one of these monstrous fables, a small pear-shaped man who affected a green celluloid eyeshade like a faro dealer, and when he had finished reading, he would titter briefly, look up sweetly from under the eyeshade, and say, "That's a nice little story." Rape, pillage, murder, arson, corruption, disfigurement, chicanery, loathsomeness…they were "nice little stories" to the amazing Bill Scott. But no matter how good the title was, he would line it out with his red pencil and scribble in something as deranged as a fruit-bat.
    I thought I'd finally hit the mother lode of this titling lunacy when I wrote a story I called "Thrill Kill!" Now, tell me: can you think of any thing more perfect than that? I was in heaven. Silverberg gave me a high-five. I'd finally beaten W.W. Scott at his own caper. I submitted the story, and he bought it on the spot. "Sweet little story," he said.
    And he published it as "Homicidal Maniac."
     
    I gave up. There are Masters; and there are those who will always be Salieri.
    Elvis Presley's management people once took an option on SPIDER KISS. Either they wanted to style it as a vehicle for him, or they wanted to make sure no one else made the movie. Because, for a long time, a lot of people thought the model for Stag Preston was Elvis. Even Greil Marcus, and Ken Tucker of The Philadelphia Inquirer —canny rock critics, both of them—who praised SPIDER KISS inordinately, both of them thought Stag was a roman à clef for Elvis. Wrong. I modeled Stag after the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis.
    I wrote this story first as a short, for W.W. Scott. I called it "Matinee Idyll" and Scotty ran it in the December 1958 issue of Trapped (and featured it on the cover) as "Rock and Roll—And Murder." It was 4700 words, and it was about this sleaze of a rock star who, during the course of a rape attempt of a fan, causes the girl to fall out a window. It was a one-punch story, purely in Trapped style à la Manhunt; and I wrote it sitting at an oilcloth-covered kitchen table in Morganfield, Kentucky in mid-'58, where I was on detached duty from my job at the U.S. Army Armor Center, Fort Knox.
    I was unhappily married to my first wife at that time. Her name was Charlotte. She was still back in New York, on West 82nd Street. The forty-two fifty a month I was making as a PFC didn't go very far, so I was supplementing my support of Charlotte, back in The City, by soldiering all day and writing all night.
    The check for $64.50 (after agent's commission) went straight to Charlotte, I never saw it. And I promptly forgot the story. Just another fast fable for a farthing.
    I'd gotten the idea for the story from a rock singer named Buddy Knox (his big hit was "Hula Love" in 1957) who, like Elvis and me, had been drafted. He was in my barracks for a while, and one night we sat shooting the shit, and he told me about an incident in which a popular singer had tossed a young fan out of an open window, about thirty floors to the sidewalk from a Detroit hotel room. I filed the story away, with a shudder, and dredged it up when I needed a plot for "Matinee Idyll."
    But it was not until 1960, when I'd been mustered out and was living in Evanston, Illinois, that I went back to that story. It was a rotten time of life for me; I'd divorced Charlotte; I was working for a publisher I despised; and I was hanging out with a lot of collegiate mooches from Northwestern. And I hadn't written a book in a while.
    Frank M. Robinson—a superlative novelist, a great editor, and a lifelong friend—was also working for the guy I hated, and he saw that I was going down the toilet. And one night, in the middle of a party at my home on Dempster Street, filled with freeloaders and adolescents