Continued from…

Dr. Wagner began his psychiatric residency (he managed to skip internship) at a mental hospital near Chapel Hill, where he once again found himself at odds with the medical establishment. After a period of bad press, shock treatments were enjoying renewed currency and were a good revenue enhancer for hospitals. Wagner refused to prescribe a one, despite pressure from the board of directors. He said there was no more empirical evidence for electroconvulsive therapy's salubrious effects on brain structures than there was of chiropracty's nerve-impinging subluxations. ECT was the result, he told me, of a psychiatrist exercising his God-like powers over one of his patients, pretty much on a whim. "Let's just plug 'er into the wall and see what happens!" Prevailing theories as to how ECT might work were of two camps. One maintained that shock treatments burned away the parts of the brain where all the bad memories were stored that had caused the mental problems in the first place. The other hypothesis was that shock treatments were so unpleasant that the patient felt that he had atoned for any wrong he might have done and was thus purged of the guilt that had tormented him.

Fortunately for Karl he was assigned to the men's ward. Shock treatments are used primarily to treat depression, and where women become depressed men become psychotic. But at the end of the first year he was reassigned to the women's ward. He saw the writing on the wall and resigned, never to practice medicine again.

Medicine had always been for him a fail-safe anyway, in case he didn't make it as a writer. But now he was making it. He sold several novels, most concerning his hero-villain Kane. Kane was essentially the Biblical Cain, but the tales told the other side of the story. Kane was the first rebel, cursed by an egomaniacal and repressive God to die by the violence Kane had introduced to the world. But, since Kane has been doing violence longer than anybody else, he was better at it than anybody else. So he lived on… and on.

Karl enjoyed demolishing "sword and sorcery" clichés: female warriors wear full armor instead of chain-mail bikinis, prophecies don't come true, characters' speech is translated into modern slang equivalents instead of the Elizabethan "thees" and "thous" of fantasy hacks, well-intentioned crusaders bring more grief than do amoral fortune hunters, and stories often don't have happy endings.

Kane himself is the most conspicuous departure from standard heroic fantasy. For one thing, he is not heroic. He is a hero-villain like Melmoth. Kane is insane, of course. The weight of aeons has done that to him–aeons of contending with the gods, ducking and weaving, thrusting and parrying, sidestepping through the centuries. Imagine knowing for a fact that God is out to get you.

This insanity, surfacing sporadically, prevents his always acting in his own best interests. Often his cold-blooded schemes are swept aside by berserker rage and he wades into battle, slaughtering the normal humans he hates and envies, and shortening their brief lives by a few inconsequential years. In so doing, he risks the violent death he has been promised by an angry god, a death he fears and, perhaps, longs for. Fortunately for him he recognizes, along with his more esoteric studies, the survival value of keeping fit and battle-ready.

His build is not that of the lithe, wasp-waisted swashbuckler; he is a power-lifter rather than a bodybuilder, more Sandow than Stallone. Some critics have protested that with 300 pounds of muscle on a six-foot frame, Kane would be so muscle-bound he would scarce be able to move. This is a groundless myth propagated by flabby, pasty-faced city dwellers with sinews like rotted cloth to excuse their own lethargy. Studies have shown weightlifters to have quicker than average reflexes. Paul Anderson, once touted as World's Strongest Man (not to be confused with Poul Anderson, the writer) once sprinted against the world champion in the 220-yard dash and gave a good account of himself.

A friend, Bob Simpson originally of Knoxville, settled the matter as far as Karl and I were concerned. A power-lifter at 5’ 7" and 235 pounds, his proportions were similar to Kane's. In his prime he could lift well over 500 pounds overhead. He held black belts in both Isshynryu karate and Bando (a Burmese style). Karl and I once watched him perform weapons forms. His movements were a blur.

But, again, Kane differs from the typical barbarian hero in that he does not rely solely upon his strength. And he is no barbarian. One story, "The Dark Muse," begins with his discussing the nature of poetry with the poet Opyros (whose work is often quoted in stories set in later ages). Kane has a powerful and cunning mind, and uses it to plot his grandiose schemes and to extricate himself from trouble. Other fantasy heroes muscle their way out of one sorcererous predicament after another. Kane knows a good thing when he sees it and studies sorcery himself. He has as much in common with Fu Manchu as with Conan, but he lacks Fu Manchu's noble motives. Yet there is something noble in Kane, in his refusal to surrender to cosmic forces beyond human comprehension.

Fans, naturally, came to identify Wagner strongly with Kane. One night he had a strange dream. He was back in the big, old house on Cedar Lane where he'd grown up. Upstairs in his boyhood bedroom he found a tall, raw-boned man staring out one of the dormer windows. "What the hell are you doing here?" he demanded. The figure turned to face him. He had coarse features and red hair. "I'm sure I never met you," Wagner said, "yet somehow you look very familiar."

"I should think you would know me," the red-haired stranger replied. "I'm Able."

* * *

After the first Conan movies, Wagner's agent Kirby McCauley got a few nibbles from producers who were considering doing a Kane movie, but nothing came of it. Wagner was commissioned, however, to write the script for the third Conan movie for Dino De Laurentiis. Kirby said his friend Oliver Stone was very impressed with it, but it was never produced. Wagner also wrote one of the scripts for Delta Force and, his only movie to make the screen, a script for the Japanese animated film Monkey, an oriental myth. Even the unproduced scripts brought Wagner handsome sums.

He no longer sent out unsolicited manuscripts; editors were actually soliciting his work. But with success came a new problem: deadlines. And he no longer had the luxury of crafting a single story at a time. He had to accept offers as they came in and juggle them as best he could. He began to relive the all-nighters of his college days. When he finally managed to grab some shut-eye, Jack Daniels helped him wind down.

With his stories more widely published, Wagner became more famous. He was an honored guest at sci-fi/fantasy conventions all over the country. I and a few of his Knoxville friends attended some of the cons, basking in his reflected glory. He was the cynosure of our circle, the one who'd made good, and his friendship validated our own intellects. One of my fondest memories is of the first World Fantasy Convention, sitting with Manly Wellman on one side of me and Robert Bloch (author of Psycho as the blurbs on his 99 other books always read) talking past me about old times. Because I was a friend of Karl's I was accepted by the authors whose tales had frightened me as a child, people I'd thought of as Demiurges handing down stories from some dark Olympus.

Wagner would entertain fans–who often knew his work better than he did–all night long with discourse and drink. He was a splendid raconteur, but he could make everyone else in the room feel a bit superfluous. In the morning he would come around to my room and press still more alcohol upon me.

"There's two ways to deal with a hangover, Mayer. You can treat it with aspirin, anti-nausea drugs and other nostrums… or you can postpone it indefinitely." And he'd pour himself another tumbler-full. Straight. One time, while on a panel answering questions from the audience, he passed out clutching the microphone. The other panel members shuffled their chairs uncertainly for a while. Finally, Michael Moorcock pried the mic from his fingers and they went on with the program.

At one convention, we encountered Frank Belknap Long, the last surviving member of the original circle of Cthulhu mythos authors and a personal friend of H. P. Lovecraft. He was in his eighties but still fairly spry. He was trying to locate a publishers' party in the hotel, and was quite angry with Kirby McCauley for not having seen that he got there. "Kirby's supposed to be my agent," he sputtered. "This party could be very important to my career!" The creative life is a hard life.

Once there was a wreck in front of the hotel where the convention was being held and Wagner, dressed in his usual regalia, hurried out to examine the victim and to keep the cops from moving him or elevating his feet. "He's suffered some head trauma," he told the EMT's when they arrived, "but he seems to be stabilized. I checked his vitals and for dilation and cyanosis; there doesn't seem to be any internal bleeding. Wouldn't hurt to use an oropharyngeal tube. If he comes to he'll be thirsty, but don't give him anything. You'll want to use oxygen, of course, but you won't need to hyperventilate."

As he returned to the hotel, an onlooker was heard to remark, "I never saw a biker doctor before."

The second World Fantasy Convention in New York was far less pleasant than the first. The wallpaper in the Hilton was peeling, the staff was unfriendly, and the food would have shamed the cooks at Old Central's cafeteria. And then, there was the city of New York. One night a few of us left the hotel and went a few blocks to a Chinese carry out. Sci-fi fans often dress in colorful costumes at conventions and one of the young ladies with was attired as, near as I could figure, a prostitute elf. Wagner was in his usual biker garb. I was probably wearing my Edwardian sharkskin suit (I chose it out of a catalog at John H. Daniels, probably not realizing it was out of style), with ascot and a bit of lace at collar and cuff. A couple of NYPD cops were scrutinizing us for offenses that might be illegal even in New York.

Now, as sophisticated as New Yorkers profess to be, you'd think they wouldn't give a prostitute elf a second glance. That's where you'd be wrong. I was the last to get my food and, as I headed back, I saw the young lady being detained by a big, young street tough. Ken Amos, the bookish and slightly built publisher of the magazine Nightshade had come to her defense, but the fellow outweighed the two of them together. As I caught up I stepped between them, punched the man in the belly, and the three of us continued across the street toward the Hilton. The native began to shout threats at me, and, stupidly, I turned to bandy words with him. As he started across the street toward me I realized, for the first time, that he was not alone. Other young men began to converge on us–I think some concert had just ended at Madison Square Garden–and I began to realize that these were not just onlookers. And their numbers kept growing. I thought of New York's Irish Ducky Boys gangs in the book The Wanderers. The cops seemed to have disappeared.

Though they were far ahead and could have abandoned me to my fate, pretending not to have noticed the hubbub, Wagner, Barbara and Ken returned to stand beside me and face down this throng. This confused our adversaries for a moment, but they resumed the offensive edging toward us, circling around, while we prepared to defend ourselves. Barbara, standing to one side, opened her purse and pulled a mother-huge pistol about halfway out and asked the punks nearest her, in the same voice with which she might invite them up for milk and cookies, "Do you want to eat some lead?" The ones who'd seen the piece began to drag their puzzled comrades away.

Next: Written in Bloodstone

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