"The Jam" (1958)

[spoilers] Henry Slesar was a native of Brooklyn born in 1927 and a Madison Avenue ad man who started writing copy at 17—legend has it he invented the term "coffee break." But his real love was writing short (usually very short) genre tales with hard twists. "The Jam," with its heavy-handed modern details like heroin addiction and bad freeway traffic, feels pro forma in many ways: setup, misdirection, twist. Over and out. It could be an inflection point itself from one phase of horror into another, from the grandiloquent literary huffing of H.P. Lovecraft and his crowd to the zip and punch of TV consumed between commercial breaks, where Slesar eventually made a career contributing scripts regularly to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, while writing literally hundreds of stories. This little 5-pager, which appeared originally in Playboy, takes place in a car traveling one of the tunnels from New York to New Jersey. Our driver and his passenger are at the end of a long wild weekend and the passenger is starting to go into withdrawal. He needs a fix. They're in a big hurry. The premise actually surprised me more than the twist ending. I don't entirely believe this premise. It feels based more in drug lore—Allen Ginsberg's "starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" comes to mind—but it's garish and daring for 1958 and the story is very short. It's not that hard to suspend disbelief. Brevity saves the day again. The premise is there for the shock value, but it's also shocking. The driver is a madman, switching lanes, riding the white lines between cars, scraping paint from the sides of them. These miscreants emerge from the tunnel into a massive traffic jam, the kind where your progress is measured in yards per hour, and engines are overheating all over the place. Perhaps obviously—it certainly seems like an obvious twist now but maybe it was a good one then—they are dead, having died in an accident in the tunnel. There's some nice misdirection here, we see the accident but don't recognize it for what it is in the chaos of the crazy drive. Dead, yes, and in the hell that heroin addicts and bad drivers deserve, as we can all certainly agree, right? The drugs are a little on the nose even for 1958, though it probably seemed pretty hip then with Howl still so relatively recent. But the traffic jam—Slesar was clearly familiar with the look and feel of a hell commute, which sadly for us and our life on this planet we still know too well all these many years later. For the mere paragraphs it goes on, "The Jam" captures all the soul-consuming claustrophobia, frustration, and death wish of bad traffic endured 10 times weekly. Slesar's details are just right, such as the eager gobbling up of a few feet when the car ahead of you finally moves, or the sight of a snaking parking lot that goes as far as you can see: "hopping out of the car to stare at the sight again, at the ribbon of automobiles vanishing into a horizon 10, 15 miles away." If you've ever had a hell commute, this story will bring it all rushing back. It's a good thing the story is so short because I think that might make it just a little bit easier to shake off. On the other hand, I'm still thinking about it.

Masters of Horror and the Supernatural: The Great Tales, ed. Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.