EVERYBODY LOVES IRVING BOMMER

Irving Bommer had been wistfully following a girl in a green frock when the absolutely fantastic thing happened to him.

A compliment.

The gypsy woman, who sat on and overflowed the stone step in front of her soiled little shop, leaned forward and called: "'Ey, Mistair!" Then, as he broke his plodding stride to consider her and the window full of dream-books and numerology texts, she cleared her throat with the sound of lumpy oatmeal being stirred.

"'Ey, Mistair! You, the 'ansome wan!"

Irving rocked on one foot, came to a dead stop and watched the girl maneuver the green frock around the corner and out of his life.

For the moment, he was paralyzed. He could not leave the neighborhood of that delectable compliment even--even if Humphries himself, the housewares buyer of Gregworth's, had materialized from behind an invisible counter and snapped his fingers.

But then, of course. Some people thought it was funny. Some people, especially women... His pale cheeks slowly ripened as he cudgeled his slow brain to find a retort both clever and devastating. "A-a-ah!" he began extemporaneously.

"Come 'ere, 'ansome mistair," she commanded, with no trace of mockery. "Inside, you gat what you wan' so badly. I 'ave it."

What he wanted badly? How did she know? Even he, Irving Bommer, had only the vaguest conception. Yet, he found himself following her wide, swinging body through the doorway into a store drearily furnished with three folding chairs and a bridge table on which rested a cracked crystal ball. Five children of astonishingly overlapping ages played in front of a torn bedsheet which curtained off the back room. At a peremptory bawl from the woman, they tumbled out of sight through the sheet.

As he settled into a folding chair that immediately leaned into a forty-five-degree angle with the floor, Irving Bommer wondered hazily what he was doing there. He remembered that Mrs. Nagenbeck had told him when he first rented a room from her: "Never keep no supper for no boarder at no time" and, since today had been monthly inventory in the housewares department, he was both late and hungry. Still...

You never knew what these gypsies might come up with. They were certainly a discerning bunch. They had standards of beauty that weren't poured out of the Hollywood mold; they came of a race that had been cosmopolitan since Pilate; they could recognize things like nobility of soul and--well, perhaps even handsomeness--worldly, mature handsomeness, you could call it.

"Well, uh," he essayed a chuckle. "What do you have that I--that I--uh--want so badly? A dream book to clean up on the races? Never play the races. And I never have my fortune told, either."

She stood before him in multifidious flesh and multitudinous colorful clothing, examining him gravely out of tiny, tired black eyes. "No," she said at last. "For you no fortune I tal. I geeve this."

There was a medicine bottle in her outstretched hand, a bottle filled with a bubbly purple liquid which changed to a rich red and then a somber blue under the shadow-thick twilight pressing in from the shop window.

"What--what is it?" he asked, though he knew suddenly there was but one thing he could be offered.

"Belong my 'osban. Many years he take to make eet. He 'ave this, he die. Bot you, ees deeferen. You entitle. Eet geeve you woman."

Irving Bommer started at the insult. He tried to laugh, but gasped his belief, his desire, instead. Woman!

"You mean it's a potion--a love philter?" His voice cracked between the conflict of ridicule and acceptance.

"Pheeltair. Wan I see you, I know you need. You 'ave moch onhoppiness. Vairy leetle hoppy. Bot remembair, use only to take bock what 'as been taken. Your blood on drop from pheeltair makes drop from pheeltair yours. Wan drop at time. Ten dollars, please."

That did it. Ten dollars! For some colored water she'd mixed up in the back room. Just because he'd been gullible enough to walk inside. Not for Irving Bommer. He was nobody's fool.

"I'm nobody's fool," he told her, finding the thought good enough to articulate. He stood up and shook himself.

"Leesen!" The gypsy woman's voice was hoarse and commanding. "You being fool now. You need. I could osk feefty, I could osk a tousand. I osk ten because thot is price, because you 'ave ten, because you need. And I--I don' need now. Don' be fool. Take eet. You be--you be really 'ansome."

Irving found the sneer wouldn't stay put, that the door was too far away. Very slowly, he counted out ten dollars, leaving himself only two until payday. Even the recollection of the fantastically expensive bottle of aftershave lotion he had been persuaded to purchase last week didn't inhibit him. He--just had to...

"Wan drop of blood wan you use," the woman called after him as he hurried out of the shop. "Good luck, mistair."

By the time he had walked the two long blocks to his boarding house, the wildly hopeful elation had subsided into the usual abiding humiliation.

"What a sucker, what a sucker!" he raged as he slipped into the back entrance of Mrs. Nagenbeck's boarding house and climbed the stairs. Irving Bommer, the all-time champ of suckers! Show him anything and he bought it. Love philters!

But when he had slammed the door of his thin little room behind him, when he had tossed the small bottle viciously to the bed, he bit his lips and drooled two huge tears out of his near-sighted eyes.

"If only I had a face instead of a comic drawing," he bawled. "If only--oh, dammit!"

Then his mind, being relatively sane, refused to deal any longer in these terms. Let us daydream, said his mind to his reeling subconscious; let us daydream and imagine how pleasant it could be.

--|--

So he sat on the bed, his chin nursing blissfully on one drawn-up knee, and dreamed of a correctly created world where women schemed for his attention and fought for his person; where, unable to win him privately, they shared him willy-nilly with equally determined sisters. Through this glorious place, he wandered familiarly, pleased as always by the way the rules kept changing in his favor.

Sometimes he was the only male left alive after an atomic catastrophe; and sometimes he reclined on purple cushions, puffing on his hookah while a harem full of breath-taking houri waited adoringly; and yet other times, dozens of men--all their faces curiously reminiscent of Humphries, the housewares buyer--watched in stolid despair as Bommer the rich, Bommer the successful, Bommer the incredibly couth, escorted their wives, fiancees, and special girlfriends out of rather roomy limousines into a bachelor's apartment so multiplex as to occupy the whole of a Park Avenue building.

Now and then, there might be a sequence--a painless one!--with a plastic surgeon, which talented gentleman, having committed his masterpiece, would die of satisfaction before he could mar his work by duplicating it. Frequently, Irving Bommer would postpone the difficult choice between a statuesque, glowing blonde and a pert little redhead long enough to ponder upon such events as his having grown past six feet two inches with no noticeable tremors, as his shoulders having broadened, his feet unflattened, his nose diminished, and straightened. While he enjoyed the new resonance of his voice and the catchy heartiness of his laughter, while he was proud of his perfect, ever-poised wit and his exact, all-purpose education, it was to his splendid physical attributes that he found himself continually returning. That head of hair which spilled carelessly over his bald spot, that third set of teeth miraculously growing past the ruins of yellowed enamel and cheap bridgework, that stomach, no longer catching the eye through a bubbly paunch, but decently hidden behind a wall of muscle. That stomach! In it were now to be found only the finest vintage wines, the tastiest dishes prepared by the most expert chefs, the most succulent, the most delicious...

With an abrupt gulp, Irving Bommer swallowed the saliva which had collected in his mouth and realized he was violently hungry.

According to his watch, the kitchen would be dark and empty; it was accessible by way of the back staircase which passed his room in its creaking descent.

Mrs. Nagenbeck, however, when aroused by an unauthorized raid on her larder, tended to combine the most significant characteristics of each of the Three Furies in one harmonious whole. Why, Irving Bommer quivered, if she caught him--

Well, friend, that's a chance we'll just have to take, his stomach interposed harshly.

Sighing with trepidation, he went noisily downstairs on the top-most tips of his toes.

Feeling around in the darkness, he touched the refrigerator padlock. He frowned hungrily. A careful search of the kitchen and some emphatic shin-barking, however, netted him three-fourths of a salami, half a loaf of rye bread, and a heavy triangular-bladed knife of the type which is indispensable when boarding a Spanish galleon from a British privateer.

Oke, said his stomach, licking its duodenum. Let's start!

A light clicked on in the room behind the kitchen. Irving stopped in mid-slice, his body absolutely still, but his heart and still-talkative stomach somersaulting against each other like a pair of acrobats in a rousing vaudeville finale. As whenever he was frightened, he began to perspire so profusely that his feet slid around in their tight shoes.

"Who's there?" Mrs. Nagenbeck called. "Anyone in the kitchen?"

Declining to answer her, even in the negative, Irving Bommer fled upstairs damply, with his food, knife, and now thoroughly confused internal anatomy.

Back in his room, fingers on the light switch, he gasped for a moment, listened for a moment, then smiled. He had left no traces.

He sauntered leisurely to the bed, eating a slice of salami off the knife with wonderfully unselfconscious courage. The purple medicine lay where he had thrown it. It looked red; it also looked slightly blue; then again, sometimes...

He sat down and started to unscrew the bottle cap with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and slowly raised two sloppy eyebrows at the difficulty. So, he thought, we shift the knife to the right hand, sort of holding the blade under our armpit, get a good grip on the bottle with our left hand, and strenuously twist the cap. Meanwhile, we continue to munch. Under our armpit, the knife blade squirms anxiously, trying to get a good sight on a valuable organ.

The cap was stuck fast. Maybe you weren't supposed to open it. Maybe you smashed the bottle and used it all at once. He could worry about it later, in any case. At the moment, he had salami, he had rye bread. And two dollars instead of twelve.

He started to put the bottle down, giving it an irritated half-twist back and forth to show that he wasn't through with it. The cap loosened. Bommer unscrewed it all the way, more than a little startled. He'd never known they made medicine bottles with left-hand threads.

--|--

Odd smell. Like--like a soaped, scrubbed, and freshly diapered infant who had abruptly decided that a full bladder was not half so pleasant as an empty one; and the liquid in the bottle was blue. He smelled again. No, more like a very hairy man who'd spent a busy afternoon with pick and shovel and couldn't see any sense in taking a bath today and smashing one of his most cherished personal traditions. Yet as Irving Bommer meditated at the glass vial now, it shone with a flashing scarlet. As he brought it under his nose for one last sniff, he marveled at how he had misjudged the odor: unpleasant it was, very much so, but you could identify it easily. It was... not exactly stale tobacco smoke... no, nor a recently manured field--

He spilled a little on his left palm. Purple.

A fist clump-clump-clumped on his door. "Hey, there!" Mrs. Nagenbeck yelled. "You, Mr. Bommer! Open this door! I know what you got in there. You got my food in there. Open that door!"

At Irving Bommer's convulsion, the knife under his armpit made a wild leap for freedom and glory. It aimed at a wrist where, with any luck, the whole left hand might be severed (and wouldn't that accomplishment put a certain haughty meat-cleaver in its place!). Unfortunately, the hand had jerked down instinctively to shove the salami and rye bread under the pillow. The knife clattered to the floor, content--but not happy--with a tip of the fourth finger and a sliver of pinky.

"If you don't open this door right now, this instant, this second," Mrs. Nagenbeck announced through the keyhole which she had pressed into service as a megaphone, "I will kick it down, I will break it down." Having achieved Ossa, she cast about for Pelion. "I will smash it and charge you for a door, two hinges and whatever woodwork is damaged. Not to mention the food you got in there and you're making unhygienic by touching. Open the door, you Mr. Bommer!"

He shoved the knife under the pillow after the food and jerked a blanket over them all. Then, recapping the medicine bottle, he walked toward the door sucking his bleeding fingers and perspiring insanely.

"Juzza second," he begged, the words clotting in his mouth.

"Then there's the lock," Mrs. Nagenbeck brooded. "A good lock today costs four, five, six dollars. And where's the labor costs I pay to the carpenter for his work in putting it on? If I have to break this door, if I have to crash my own..."

Her voice died into a curious mumble. Irving Bommer heard two sounds like the anticipatory wheezes of a locomotive before he managed to unlock the door.

Mrs. Nagenbeck stood there in her lavender dressing gown, her brows knit and her papery nostrils flared.

The salami! With her boarding-house experience, she could probably track it to the correct corner of the pillow by aroma alone.

"What a funny..." Mrs. Nagenbeck began uncertainly, hostile lines leaving her face with much regret. "What a strange smell! Such an unusual odor--so peculiar, so--Oh, you poor boy, Mr. Bommer--you hurt?"

He shook his head, bewildered by the completely alien expression on her face. It wasn't anger, yet it certainly looked dangerous. He retreated into the room. Mrs. Nagenbeck followed him, her voice experimenting with various sounds and winding up with something mighty like a coo.

"Let me see the hurt fingers, the ripped part, the scratch, the bruise," she said shyly, pulling his left hand from his mouth with sufficient force to loosen five teeth. "Ooooh, does it hurt? You got iodine antiseptic or mercurochrome peroxide antiseptic? And a styptic pencil antiseptic? And gauze bandages for wrapping and dressing?"

Overcome by her startling shift of mood, Irving Bommer indicated the medicine chest with his nose.

She continued to make the strange, embarrassing noises as she dressed the wound, for all the world like a saber-tooth purring. Every once in a while, when her lifted eyes met Irving Bommer's, she smiled with a quick exhalation. But when, holding his hand up for a last inspection, she suddenly planted a lingering, groaning kiss in the palm, he became frightened.

He strode to the door, pulling Mrs. Nagenbeck by the precious hand. "Thanks a lot," he told her. "But it's late. I have to be getting to bed."

Mrs. Nagenbeck let go. "You want me to leave," she stated reproachfully.

At his nod, she swallowed, smiled bravely and walked out sideways, practically scraping the buttons off his vest.

"Don't work too hard," her sad face was saying as he closed the door upon it. "Someone like you shouldn't have to kill themselves to death working at a job. Good night, Mr. Bommer."

--|--

The lush purple of the little vial winked at him from the bed. The love potion! He had spilled a drop in his palm and, after his fingers were cut, had involuntarily clenched his hand. The gypsy woman had said that a drop of his blood mixed with a drop of the potion would make that drop his very own. Evidently that had happened: Mrs. Nagenbeck was aflame. He shuddered. Mrs. Nagenbeck. What kind of a love philter--

But what was sauce for Mrs. Nagenbeck undoubtedly would be sauce for other, younger, more desirable females. Like that lazy-eyed girl behind the cutlery counter, or the sparkling minx in salad bowls and baking dishes.

A knock on the door.

"It's only me, Hilda Nagenbeck. Look, Mr. Bommer, I got to thinking, salami and rye bread are pretty dry. Besides, they make you thirsty for something to drink. So I brought up two cans of beer."

He smiled as he opened the door and took the two cans. Time had not stood still with Mrs. Nagenbeck. What had been a-budding in her eyes before was now in glorious bloom. Her soul stood on her lashes and waved at him.

"Thank you, Mrs. Nagenbeck. Now, go right to bed. Go ahead."

She nodded quickly, obediently, and plumped down the passage, casting a yearning glance backward with every step.

It was with straighter, prouder shoulders that Irving Bommer applied the requisite opening pressure to a can of beer. Mrs. Nagenbeck was not much, certainly; but she pointed the way to a more interesting future.

He was handsome now--to any woman with a mildly sensitive nose.

Only trouble, there was so little of the stuff; the bottle was terribly small. Who knew how long the effect lasted? And he had so much to catch up with.

As he finished the second can of beer, much, much pleased with himself, he suddenly hit on the solution. Beautiful! And so simple.

First, he poured the contents of the medicine bottle into the empty can. Then, stripping off the bandages, he inserted his two injured fingers into the triangular bottle and scraped the newly formed scar tissue off against the raw metal. In a moment, there was a satisfactory flow of blood into the can, a flow which he stimulated by repeated scrapings.

When he felt he had the mixture as before, he shook the can a few times, dressed his now messy fingers and poured the whole noisome collation into the large, economy-size bottle of aftershave lotion he had purchased a week before. The bottle was fitted with an atomizer.

"Now," he said, as he tossed the knife and rye bread to the bureau, turned out the lights, crawled into bed and began munching on the salami, "now, let them watch out for Irving Bommer!"

--|--

He forgot to set the alarm and was awakened only by the ablutionary matins of the man in the room next door. "Twenty minutes to dress and get to work," he muttered as he threw the sheets apart and leaped to the wash basin. "No breakfast!"

But Mrs. Nagenbeck met him downstairs with an arch smile and a tray. Disregarding his protestations, she insisted he have "at least a bite to chew on in his mouth."

As he frantically forked the scrambled eggs from the soup bowl to his face, jerking his head to avoid Mrs. Nagenbeck's furtive kisses like the human target in a baseball-throwing sideshow, he wondered what had happened to his prim, forbidding landlady since the last time he'd seen her.

The last time he'd seen her...

Seizing the opportunity of Mrs. Nagenbeck's departure for a jar of caviar ("so you can have a spread on your bread with your coffee"), he pounded back upstairs to his room.

He ripped off his shirt and tie and, after thinking a bit, his undershirt. He pointed the nozzle of the atomizer at himself and squeezed the rubber bulb. He sprayed his face, his hair, his ears, his neck, his chest, his back, his arms, his navel. He even pushed the nozzle under his belt and sprayed around in a complete circle. When his hand began to knot with the unaccustomed exercise, he desisted at last and began to dress. The odor almost sickened him, yet he felt amazingly light-hearted.

Before he left the room, he shook the huge bottle. Still at least nine-tenths full. So there was another bargain he was making pay off. Before he was through, a lot of things and a lot of people were going to pay off!

The gypsy woman was standing in front of her bedraggled shop when he passed. She started to smile, stopped abruptly, and shouted a slippery phrase at her children, who ran inside. Backing into the store, she held her nose and wailed at him lugubriously: "You use too moch! You not suppose use all at wance!"

He tipped her a careless salute as he hurried on. "I didn't. There's lots more where this came from!"

His train was crowded, but he saw a vacant seat from the subway platform. He hit the knot of people clustered about the opening doors and literally untied them. Dodging recklessly into the train, almost singing with self-confidence and happiness, he squeezed past two fairly determined women, expertly kicked a brisk, old fellow in the shins to distract him, and was sliding into the seat when the train started. The lurch threw him off balance and enabled a porcelain-faced young lady of twenty or twenty-five--a rank outsider--to slip in under his probing posterior. By the time he had straightened and turned around, she was grinning at him smugly with a tiny but extremely red mouth.

If there is one thing an habitual subway rider learns, it is that Kismet underground is forever inscrutable, seating some and placing others always among the standees. Irving Bommer reached for the overhead bar, adjusting himself to the hard subway law of supply and demand.

The girl's face was twisted as if she were about to cry. She shook her head in spasms, staring up at him and biting her lips. She was breathing very loudly.

She stood up suddenly and indicated the seat with a courtly gesture. "Won't you take it, please?" she asked with a voice positively awash in milk and honey. "You look tired."

Irving Bommer sat down, acutely conscious of the heads turning in their direction. His neighbor, a somewhat plump nineteen, began sniffing and slowly, incredulously, moved her shining eyes from her historical novel to his face.

The girl who had given him her seat swung in close, though all the other standing passengers were leaning the other way just then. "I'm positive I met you somewhere before," she began with some uncertainty, then more and more rapidly as if she were remembering the words: "My name is Iphigenia Smith and, if you tell me yours, I just know I'll be able to recall exactly where we were introduced."

Irving Bommer sighed deep in his inmost psyche and leaned back. Biology and he had at last developed a rendezvous.

He led a small parade to the employees' entrance of Gregworth's Department Store. Rendered inconsolable by the refusal of the elevator operator to admit customers into the rickety elevator intended solely for personnel, they clustered about the shaft and watched him ascend as if he were Adonis and the winter solstice were approaching.

Humphries caught him scribbling his name on the sign-in pad. "Seven minutes late. Not too good, Bommer, not too good. We want to make an effort to get in on time, don't we? We want to make a real effort."

"Forgot to set the alarm," Irving Bommer mumbled.

"We aren't going to use that one, are we? Let's be adults in Gregworth's; let's face up to our mistakes and try to do better." The buyer pulled his perfectly knotted tie just a fraction tighter and frowned. "What in the world is that smell? Bommer, don't you bathe?"

"A woman spilled something on me in the subway. It'll wear off."

Having made good his escape, he wended his way past pots, pans, and pressure cookers to dicers, graters, and peelers, where he took up his regular station. He had just begun to set the counter up for the day's business when the gong announced that the outside world was now able to enter and secure Gregworth's Greater Bargains.

A hand sliding tremulously across his lapels distracted him. Doris, the blonde, beautiful salad bowls and baking dishes, was leaning across his counter and caressing him. Doris! She who usually made loud, unpleasant sounds whenever he aimed a bright cliche at her!

He grabbed her chin. "Doris," he said sternly, "do you love me?"

"Yes," she breathed. "Yes, darling, yes. More than any--"

He kissed her twice, first quickly, then with more savor as he observed she didn't leap away, but moaned deliriously instead and writhed a whole row of projecting nickel-plated graters out of position.

Fingers snapping loudly made him jerk back and push her away.

"Now, now, now, now," said Humphries, glaring at Irving Bommer with a slight uncertainty. "We have a time and a place for everything, don't we? Let's be businesslike; we have customers to wait on. Let's attend to private matters after closing time."

The girl shot the buyer a look of purest hatred, but at Irving's dismissing wave and Humphries's further finger-snaps, she turned away slowly, saying in a low, insistent tone: "I'll wait for you after work, Irving darling. I'll go home with you. Everywhere, forever..."

"Don't know what happened to that clerk," Humphries mused. "Used to be the steadiest salad bowls and baking dishes." He turned back to Irving Bommer, seemed to struggle with himself, then began mildly: "In any case, Bommer, let us not go off the deep end. Customers are coming up; let's start pushing graters, let's move our slicers." He picked up a bone handle attached to a long, twisted blade and flourished it at an early group of women shoppers congregated around Irving's counter. "The latest way to cut grapefruit, oranges, and melons, ladies. The only way. Why have old-fashioned straight and severe lines around your servings?" His voice, which had been contemptuous, soared away to contemplate the lotus: "With the new Hollywood Dream Slicer you cut your grapefruit, oranges, and melons easily and efficiently. No more losing valuable, vitamin-filled juices; no more melon stains on delicate lace tablecloths. And above all, you have attractive scalloped edges. Children love to eat interestingly cut grapefruit, oranges--"

"Is that what he's selling?" asked a huge woman with a musclebound jaw. Humphries nodded.

"Then I'll take one. If he gives it to me."

"I'll take two. Will he give me two?"

"Five! I want five. I asked first and you didn't hear me."

"Now, ladies," Humphries beamed. "Let's not push, let's not squabble. There are more than enough Hollywood Dream Slicers to go around. See, Bommer, see," he hissed, "what a little sales talk can do for us? Let's not miss one of these sales; let's hustle."

He walked away happily, snapping his fingers at surrounding counters whose female custodians were all leaning disturbingly in the same Bommertropism. "Let's straighten up, girls; let's be brisk and meet the Business Day. And, at that," he mused, as he toddled back to his office to insult the first batch of manufacturers' representatives, "at that, it looks like a banner day in dicers, graters, and peelers."

How right he was, he did not begin to suspect until shortly before lunch hour, when the chief stock clerk burst in on him and screamed, "You gotta put more men on, Humphries. The stock department can't carry the load!"

"Load? Which load?"

"The load to and from Bommer's counter, that's which load!" The chief stock clerk threw away a handful of hair and danced around the desk. "I have all my men assigned to that one counter, not a man on inventory, not a man receiving, and as fast as we get the stuff to him, he sells it. Why didn't you tell me you were going to have a giveaway sale on dicers, graters, and peelers? I'd've ordered more stuff from the warehouse instead of having to yip at them every half-hour. I'd've asked Cohen in modernistic furniture or Blake in children's sport clothes to lend me a coupla men!"

Humphries shook his head, "There's no sale in dicers, graters, and peelers, not a giveaway sale, nor a seasonal sale nor even a plain bargain sale. Get a grip on yourself, man; let's not fall apart under unexpected pressure. Let's take a look and find out what is what."

He opened the door of his office and immediately exhibited the formal technique of standing aghast. Housewares was jammed with a gasping, surging mass of females, aimed at the dicers, graters, and peelers counter. Irving Bommer was completely hidden behind a flood of permanent waves and crazily perched hats but, from time to time, an empty carton would sail out of what Humphries approximated as his geographic position and a thin, cracked voice could be heard calling: "Get me more dicers, Stock, get me more! I'm running out. They're getting restless!" Every other counter on the floor was deserted--by clerks as well as customers.

Bellowing, "Hold them, Bommer; hold them, boy!" the buyer shot his cuffs and charged in. As he worked his way past women clasping whole cartons of potato peelers to their laboring breasts, he observed that the peculiar odor emanating from Bommer was now noticeable even at a distance. And it had grown stronger, more pungent...

--|--

Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil. His collar was open, his tie flapped over one shoulder, his glasses hung from the opposite ear, his eyes were streaked madly with red, and sweat bubbled from him so furiously that his clothes appeared to have been recently withdrawn from an enthusiastic washing machine.

He was very badly frightened. While he had wares with which to distract them, the adoration was relatively passive. But as soon as his stock ran low, the women began to concentrate on his person again. There was no obvious rivalry among them; they merely pushed against each other to get a better view. In the beginning, he had told a few to go home and they had obeyed; now, though they seemed willing to do as he told them in every other respect, they absolutely refused to leave his presence. The affection they displayed had become more insistent, more determined--and more united. Dimly, he realized that this was due to his prodigious rate of perspiration--the sweat mixed with the love potion and diluted it still more, spread his odor still further abroad.

And the caresses! He had never known how painful a feminine touch could be. Every time he reeled down the counter to fill an order, hands--dozens of them--would reach out and stroke his arms, his chest, any part of his body that was accessible. Multiplied by the three hours it had been going on, the gentle touches had begun to feel like so many roundhouse punches.

He almost wept when Humphries slid into the counter by his side. "You got to get me more stock, Mr. Humphries," he babbled. "All I got left are eggplant graters and a few cabbage dicers. When they go, I go."

"Steady, boy, steady there," the buyer told him. "This is our test; let's meet it like a man. Are we going to be an effective, dependable clerk, or a reed that no large retailer dares lean upon? Where are those salesgirls? They should be behind the counter, helping you. Well, it'll be a while before we get another shipment. Let's take a break; let's try to interest them in towel racks and toiletware."

"Hey," an arm encased in mouton reached across the counter and tapped Humphries on the shoulder. "Move, I can't see him."

"One moment, madam, let's not get impatient," Humphries began brightly, then stopped before the murderous look in the woman's eyes. She--and the others around her, he noticed--looked quite capable of shoving a Hollywood Dream Slicer into his heart without tremor. He gulped and tried to shoot his cuffs.

"Look, Mr. Humphries, can I go home?" Irving asked him tearfully. "I don't feel at all well. And now that the stock is gone, there's not much point in my sticking around."

"Well," the buyer considered, "we can't say that we haven't had a busy day, can we now? And if we don't feel well, we don't feel well. Of course, we can't expect pay for the afternoon, but we can go home."

Irving said, "Gee, thanks." He started for the counter exit, but Humphries caught him by the elbow.

He coughed. "Just thought I'd tell you, Bommer, that that odor isn't offensive at all. Quite pleasant, in fact. Hope I didn't offend you by my thoughtless remark about your bathing."

"No, that's all right. You didn't offend me."

"I'm glad. I shouldn't like to offend you. I want you to like me, Bommer, I want you to feel that I'm your friend. Really, I--"

--|--

Irving Bommer fled. He dodged through the female multitude, and everywhere they moved back to make way for him, everywhere they reached out and touched--just touched!--some part of his pain-flooded anatomy.

He broke free long enough to get into the service elevator and shivered at the hungry, despairing moan that went up when the elevator doors closed in the earnest faces of the advance guard. As he descended, he heard a girlish voice sing out: "I know where he lives, everybody! I'll take you to his home!"

They were so damned cooperative, he groaned. He'd always dreamed of being a male god, but he'd never anticipated that one of a god's characteristics is that he is worshipped unselfishly.

He ran out of the elevator on the ground floor and hailed a taxi, observing that the girl operator had followed him out unswervingly and was also getting one. As he gave frenzied directions to the driver, he saw that all over the street women were climbing into cabs and commandeering buses.

"Hurry, hurry," he chattered at the driver. "Fast, fast, fast."

"I'm doing the best I can, fella," the man told him over his shoulder. "I observe traffic regulations. Which is more than I can say for those dumb dames back there."

Peeping despairingly through the rear window, Irving Bommer saw a complete disregard of red lights, arm-flailing policemen, and intersecting traffic as the cars behind him charged on. Every time his driver stopped, they picked up more motorized femininity.

And yet the sweat poured out of him more luxuriantly than ever as his fear increased, and yet the effluvium of Irving Bommer spread more widely through the streets.

He'd take a bath when he got home--that's what he'd do--he'd take a shower with some strong soap and wash the awful stuff off. But he'd have to hurry.

The taxi's brakes shrieked with the effort of gripping the wheels. "There you are, mister. This is as far as I can go. Some sort of riot going on."

As he paid the driver, Irving Bommer looked ahead and winced. The street was black with women.

The bottle of aftershave lotion--that's what it was. There was an open nozzle on it, and some of the odor had seeped out. The bottle was nearly full, so it must have been quite powerful. Still, if just leakage could do this...

The women stood about in the street, in the yard, in the alleyway, their faces turned up to his room like dogs who had treed a possum. They were very patient, very quiet, but every once in a while a sigh would start up and swell to the volume of shell-fire.

"Listen," he told the driver. "Wait for me. I may be back."

"That I can't promise. Don't like the looks of the mob."

Irving Bommer pulled his jacket over his head and ran for the entrance of his boarding-house. Faces--startled, happy faces--began turning in his direction.

"That's him!" he heard Mrs. Nagenbeck's hoarse voice. "That's our wonderful Irving Bommer!"

"Heem! Heem!" That was the gypsy woman. "The 'ansome wan!"

"Make way there," he yelled roughly. "Get out of my way." Reluctantly, adoringly, the mob moved back and made a path for him. He pushed the front door open just as the first of the pursuing vehicles roared around the corner.

There were women in the hall, there were women in the parlor and the dining room, there were women all the way up the stairs to his room. He pushed past them, past their swimming eyes and agonizing caresses, and unlocked the door of his room. He slammed it shut.

"Got to think, think," he patted his wobbling head with a feverish hand. A bath wouldn't be enough, not while the huge bottle of aftershave lotion remained to disseminate its fearful contents. Pour it down the drain? It would mix with water, dilute still further. Besides, he might get female sewer rats charging at him next. No, the potion had to be destroyed. How? How?

The furnace in the cellar. There was alcohol in the aftershave lotion, and alcohol burned. Burn the stuff, then take a shower fast, not using puerile soap but something truly effective like lye--or sulphuric acid. The furnace in the cellar!

He plumped the bottle under his arm like a football. Outside, he could hear a hundred automobile horns honking, a thousand female voices sighing and muttering of their love. In the distance, very faintly, was the sound of police sirens and the disgusted, amazed voice of the law, trying to move that which was thoroughly determined to be immovable.

The moment he unlocked the door, he felt he had made a mistake. Women poured in as if the combination of the potion, his perspiration and the seeping bottle were absolutely irresistible.

"Back," he roared. "Get back! I'm coming through!"

More slowly than before, more reluctantly, they let him out. He fought his way to the head of the stairs, his body twisting and writhing every time a soft hand wavered in his direction. "Clear the stairs, dammit, clear the stairs!"

Some retreated, others didn't. But he could go down. Holding the bottle tightly, he started forward. A young, barely nubile girl extended her arms lovingly. He threw his body to one side. Unfortunately, his right foot had started down on the first step. He teetered on his left. His body moved forward; he squirmed for balance. A gray-haired matron started to caress his back and he arched it out.

Too far. He fell, the bottle shooting out of his sweaty grasp before him.

He hit a couple of steps on the way and finally piled painfully on the ruins of the bottle. He realized his chest was very wet.

He looked up and managed to scream just once as the torrent of yearning, of adoring, of beseeching faces closed over him.

That's why they have a hunk of blood-stained linoleum buried in White Willow Cemetery. And that immense monument above it was raised by enthusiastic public subscription in a single hour.

AFTERWORD

Why do writers go through dry periods--"slumps"? Obviously there may be as many answers to this as there are writers, but creative depletion and the need for recharging must relate to most. Several years after I became a professional, I had an agent who persuaded me to write money-making but utterly unchallenging fiction. (You'll find the whole story elsewhere in these Afterwords.) It was the only time in my life when I really tried to become a hack writer. I didn't realize then that I utterly lacked the necessary talent. Well, I made a good income for a while, then stopped writing completely.

I mean completely. I found that when I sat at the typewriter, nothing at all would come out--not even a business letter, not a list of Things To Be Done. My psyche was simply opposed to anything that had to do with literary expression. This went on for two years, and I found myself working at miscellaneous nonwriting jobs in order to pay the rent.

(All right, as slumps go, this would hardly compete with Lester del Rey's. Lester claimed here, as elsewhere, to have outdone every other writer: a slump seven-and-a-half years long made my two-year one look puny. But, as I told Lester, you could still starve to death on puny.)

I had almost given up thinking of myself as a writer, and was working as a waiter--in a place called Meyer's Goodie Shoppe!--when one night, as we were sweeping up, a title occurred to me. "Everybody Loves Irving Bommer"? I couldn't wait to get home to start writing it, to find out what such a story would be about.

I wrote it in a seven-hour stretch, before I went to bed. And it ended the slump--that slump, anyway.

But that's only a very small part of the story about the story. I eventually wrote many other stories, many other articles; I completed a novel and became a professor at Penn State; and I retired from Penn State. Ten years after I retired, I turned on the television one night.

And there was Irving Bommer. As a movie. On screen.

The title was different, yes, and the protagonist was not the ugliest man in town, yes, and yes, yes, there were other differences--but the Gypsy woman was still there offering a potion that was irresistible to a womanless man, and the protagonist used the potion as a spray, and yes, yes, there were other remarkable similarities to my story. The basic plot gimmicks of the fantasy seemed to be all mine.

I was angry. Through my nephew, David Klass, who is a well-established screenwriter, I got the name of a Hollywood lawyer. I called the lawyer.

He told me I didn't have a chance; there was no satisfaction to be had. Assuming I was right in all the similarities I had noted, there was still the matter of California law as it related to the statute of limitations.

In California, the Hollywood moguls had wisely seen to it that you had three years to raise any issue that might have to do with plagiarism. Three years and absolutely no more.

I now was well beyond that three-year limitation. The movie I was seeing on television was a rerun, a possibly nineteenth or twentieth or thirty-fifth rerun. I should have seen more movies, the lawyer suggested: I should have seen this movie the week it was released. There was absolutely nothing, the lawyer told me, I could do.

But I could burn. And burn. And burn.

I tell you, it was enough to put a writer in a slump.