Ed Wood's ANGORA FEVER: "A Taste for Blood" (1972)

Blood, booze, and naked gals: The Ed Wood holy trinity.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Angora Fever: The Collected Short Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (BearManor Bare, 2019).

The story: "A Taste for Blood," originally published in Orgy, vol. 5,  no. 1, January/February 1972.

Synopsis: Mobster Tom Duke is in bed with high-priced call girl Shirley after several rounds of intense lovemaking. Tom wants to bring Shirley into the organization, making her a private girl for the syndicate. She's interested, both because of the money and because she has a "taste for blood." Being in the mob gets her one step closer to professional killing. Tom starts to have reservations about Shirley, thinking she might be too dangerous, and his worst fears about her are soon confirmed.

Wood trademarks: The name Tom Duke (a seeming nod to Ed's repertory players Tom Keene and Duke Moore from Plan 9 from Outer Space); prostitution (cf. "Private Girl"); post-coital murder (cf. "The Hazards of the Game"); a whole assortment of alcohol, including scotch, gin, and whiskey (Ed was a raging alcoholic and referenced booze in most of his stories); tough, violent women (cf. Devil Girls); "mounds" as slang for breasts (cf. "Taking Off"); character named Shirley (cf. "The Hooker').

Excerpt: “You make a lot of money, but it isn’t enough to keep me in perfume and perfumed soap. I take three baths a day… and in very expensive perfume.”

An influence on Ed?: Damon Runyon

Reflections: I've written before about the influence of Jack Webb on Edward D. Wood, Jr., but I've not yet pointed out the effect that Damon Runyon must have had on Eddie's writing as well. A Kansas native with a convoluted backstory, Runyon (1880-1946) was a newspaper reporter and short story writer famed for his colorful, highly stylized portrayal of New York's underworld characters, including mobsters, gun molls, and racetrack touts. Runyon's stories inspired the long-running 1950 stage musical Guys and Dolls. A heavy drinker like Ed, Runyon was six years dead before that show premiered on Broadway. Not insignificantly, one of Ed's working titles for Orgy of the Dead (1965) was Ghouls and Dolls.

Ed Wood's short stories and novels are often set in the criminal underworld, as are a few of his movies (Jail Bait, The Sinister Urge), but his slang-slinging gangster and prostitute characters seem to have beamed in directly from Runyonland rather than the actual crime world. In fact, I'd say that what Ed Wood has done in these stories is to take what Damon Runyon was doing in his short stories in the 1930s and '40s and add explicit sex and violence to the mix. Imagine if Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson talked about their "stiffening members." That's basically the tone of an Ed Wood story.

In his 54 tumultuous years on this earth, Eddie was never arrested for any crimes that I know of, nor did he ever stand trial. His only officially documented troubles along these lines occurred during his stint in the Marines. According to James Pontolillo's invaluable The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr. 1942-1946,  Ed Wood "underwent a summary court-martial for being AWOL" in January 1943. He served 15 days imprisonment and paid $20 in fines. Hardly a criminal mastermind.

Meanwhile, Eddie's frequent employer, Pendulum Publishing, had serious business ties to real-life gangster Michael Thevis, but I'm not sure how much personal contact -- if any -- Ed Wood ever had to the mob. A story like "A Taste for Blood" reads like it was written by someone who grew up playing "cops and robbers" in the backyard.

My colleague Greg Dziawer has spent a great deal of time studying the seedier aspects of Ed Wood's bizarre life, and he has an opposing view on the subject:

Ed was not a good guy. An abusive alcoholic. He was, though, very social, a real character around the North and West Hollywood scene for decades, when it was crawling with unsavory, sleazy characters. I doubt Kathy would have cared, even if she knew, what Ed was up to or where he went, as long as the next drink was available. I don't think it all caught up with him until about '76 or '77. Prior to that, he was still out and about and involved in making porn beyond just writing, in some form or fashion. 

And I have to think he got busted, though unrecorded or lost in time, for dressing in drag in public, and certainly public drunkenness and related. Remember the dangerous world of Glen or Glenda [in which cross dressers are routinely arrested]. This persisted, no doubt (and ironically) in [Mayor Sam] Yorty's L.A., despite how progressive history claims the place to be during that era. As for the drinking: how could [Ed] not have spent his fair share of nights in the proverbial drunk tank?

And Eddie was more intimately familiar with actual mobsters than we know. Noel Bloom was partners with Mickey Zaffarano, who was the KINGPIN of porn distribution in the US in the '70s.

Though he's keeping the details to himself for now, Greg opines that he's heard "some wild stories" about Eddie that put his crime fiction into context:

[These anecdotes] paint a portrait of an insane world that Ed HAD to be well and intimately aware of. The stone-cold psycho characters in his stories are [therefore] not all that unrealistic.

Fascinating stuff.

Next: "The Last Void" (1971)