Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,3

I saw Karl and Barbara once or twice a year in the heightened, swirling atmosphere of the party suites and bars in the hotels where World Fantasy and World Horror Conventions were held. The Wagners, especially Karl, were one of the reasons I went to conventions—like Bob Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Charles Grant, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jim French, Steve Jones, Dennis Etchison and a number of others, the Wagners were people of whom I was extremely fond and thought of as friends but saw only at these massive gatherings. I met them, I think, in all of these cities: Providence (twice), Nashville, Knoxville, Baltimore, Chicago, New York (twice), New Haven, Berkeley, Ottawa and Seattle. I often fantasized about visiting Karl in Chapel Hill, but we never managed to arrange it. What we managed to arrange instead was some time for private conversation at each of the conventions we both attended, itself no easy feat. Almost all of these deeply enjoyable conversations tookplaceinbars.

We almost always had drinks in our hands, and another one was almost always in the offing. I know something like sixty or seventy writers of one kind or another, and only three of them do not drink alcohol. Some of them drink too much for their own good, but very few of them seem at all impaired. In the mid-1980s, many of the people I knew took drugs of one kind or another, and only a few of them experienced serious difficulties. By 1990, nearly everyone had stopped using drugs, and almost everyone had cut back on their drinking, Karl invariably seemed in command of himself, at least to me, his colleague at the bar. He did not slur his words, forget what he was talking about in midsentence, tell stupid jokes, get glassy-eyed, become incoherent, fall off the stool or lurch when he walked. I assumed that he had once used some kind of drug or drugs, or maybe still did now and again, because he occasionally talked about them and, anyhow, they were hardly uncommon in our shared world. (Two people came up to me separately at the same horror-related party in 1988 to ask if I had any coke. When I said no, they both glared at me in disbelief because they thought I was holding out on them. I suppose that after me they tried the bathrooms, where from behind the locked doors of the stalls you could hear what sounded like the snorting of horses.) In any case, a lot of Karl’s drug conversation had to do with what he and his fellow MDs had obtained from medical laboratories, and therefore had a retrospective cast. He struck me as far too purposeful and aware to get into trouble with substance abuse.

The picture darkened in 1989, when within fifteen minutes of my arrival at a convention in Seattle someone told me that the Wagners had separated and Karl was taking it badly. Only a few minutes after that, Barbara appeared before me, in radiant bloom as ever, and with her new lover in tow. I don’t remember anything about the man except that he was well-dressed (Karl made the idea of being well-dressed seem like a joke, no matter what he was wearing), dark-haired and slender (no comment is necessary), and rather good-looking (as impressive as his appearance was, Karl rendered the concept of “good looks” as irrelevant as he did “well-dressed”). They lived on the beach in Venice, California, which seemed entirely appropriate to Barbara, and she was in fine good humor, as happy as I’d ever seen her. Karl, she said, was fine—I’d run into him sooner or later, I’d see.

Not fine, Karl loomed into view moments after Barbara left me. He seemed thoroughly depressed. He looked wounded. His eyes sagged, and his face was puffier than I remembered it. He immediately began talking about Barbara. Although he was angry, there was little rancor in what he said. He was still reeling from his loss. He loved her, and he wished that she would come back to him. It must have been extraordinarily painful for him to see her there, and I still wonder why he put himself in such an agonizing trap. He must have wanted to demonstrate that he was still a functioning presence, and he probably also wanted to see his friends. The second goal was successful, but the first one completely failed. Karl met a great many friends who one and all thought he was falling apart. Nearly all