Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  I do not think it coincidence that Mark David Chapman was into flying saucers, acid, Jesus worship, pistol-firing tests, and cultism. The moment the news flash broke in on the radio, the night Lennon was shot, I said to Jane, “You watch: he’ll turn out to be a Christer.” And sure enough.

  Because that’s all the same game.

  It’s removal from reality. And only a step or two from “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” to seeing oneself as the instrument of that vengeance. Who knows what leper’s soup steams in Chapman’s cauldron of a brain? And who cares? If he hadn’t been able to get a gun in Hawaii so easily, he might not have been able to get Lennon so simply. Yeah, I know: he could have knifed him, garrotted him, hit him with a 2×4. But not from five feet away. Yeah, people kill people…with guns.

  I have no tears in me for John Lennon. I’ve used them all up on King and Kennedy and a woman I once loved who was raped and then murdered—with a handgun—in the parking lot of a bowling alley in the San Fernando Valley.

  So you can dry your public show of misery, li’l heavymetal babies. When it’s fashion time for roller disco or cowboy boots or electronic wargaming or freebasing or whatever the panhandlers have in store to separate you from your bucks next season, you’ll forget. And you’ll renew membership in the big conspiracy.

  Let me leave you with these words from the Polish poet Edward Yashinsky, who survived a Nazi prison camp only to die in a Russian one. “Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.”

  And don’t write me no shitty letters telling me how concerned you are and how dare I defame all the good li’l heavymetal babies out there with Teflon’d nostrils who simply abhor violence. Send some money to Handgun Control in Washington, punk.

  Or cop to being one of the indifferent members of the big conspiracy that killed John Lennon. Goo goo goo joob.

  Or, as John once wrote: Happiness is a warm gun.

  FACE-DOWN IN GLORIA SWANSON’S SWIMMING POOL

  Los Angeles has been profoundly important to Harlan and he has a great deal of affection for the city. This paean of praise appeared in Los Angeles magazine in August 1978, and Harlan seems to remember having approached them about writing it. This is just one of many pieces about Los Angeles which he has published in that magazine over the years.

  By the eleventh day of the Ohio lecture tour I was drawing big, sprawling crowds of students. The auditorium of Wittenburg College in Springfield was jammed, right up to the balcony. (Where, later in the evening’s festivities, a Jesus Freak would leap up, scream that I was “the Antichrist, doing the Devil’s Work,” flick her Bic, set fire to her Little Orphan Annie hair, and rush out of the auditorium with her friends beating at her head.) It was Wednesday, October 3rd, 1973 and I had been a resident of Los Angeles for eleven years.

  There I stood on the platform in Springfield, Ohio—dead in the center, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, of the geographic belt of greatest density of air pollution in the United States—and this kid with rheumy eyes, sallow skin, pustules and running sores yells up from the audience, “How can you live in Los Angeles with all that pollution?”

  And I look down at him, and I hear myself saying, “Are you kidding, running that kinda okeydoke past me? You live in the same state with Dayton, top of the Clean Air Commission’s Pure Death Locale chart. How can I live in Elay? It’s easy, brother! I look out my living room window through the saddle of the Santa Monica Mountains, fifteen miles straight across the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel range, and three hundred out of every three hundred and sixty-five days of the year I can see those mountains…sometimes as clear as if they were in my backyard, sometimes fuzzily…but I see ’em! I was in downtown Springfield today, and I couldn’t see the bank building on the corner of the next block!

  “In Los Angeles, in the space of a week, I can talk to Randy Newman, Ray Bradbury, Howard Fast, Carol Connors, Bucky Fuller, Gunther Schiff, Ralph Bakshi, Dorothy Fontana, Louise Farr, Richard Dreyfuss, Richard Matheson, Christopher Knopf, Richard Brooks and Michael Crichton. I’d have talked to people here in Springfield today, but I couldn’t pry them loose from their television sets!

  “In Los Angeles I can eat lomito saltado at Macchu Picchu, moussaka vegetarian at Mischa’s, sizzling rice three-flavor soup at Golden China, beef mole at Antonio’s, zucchini florentine at Musso & Frank’s, besuga al horno at La Masia, steamed clams and abalone steak at Mel’s Landing, the best barbeque this side of the House of Blue Lights at Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas Pit BBQ, the Poliakov Special at Chez Puce, Mont Blanc at the Paprika and a terrific noodle kuchel at Hamburger Hamlet. I went out for a bite to eat here in Springfield and had to arm-wrestle the waitress at the Toddle House best two-out-of-three to get my cheeseburger well-done without any mayonnaise on it!

  “In Los Angeles I’ve got my choice of a thousand different bookstores from A Change of Hobbit where they stock every science fiction book since Lucian of Samosata to Boulevard Books and The Scene of the Crime where I can find Cornell Woolrich and Richard Stark and Anthony Boucher if I feel like a little mayhem. Needham Bookfinders and Barry Levin and Pickwick and World Book & News on Cahuenga are regular watering-holes for me. I have 37,000 books in my house and I need a ten-book-a-day fix just to keep me going. Here in Springfield, if I need something to pass the interminable evenings, the best I can do is inspirational literature left in the motel desk or go to the A&P for one of those ‘Love’s Tender Fury’ abominations.

  “In Los Angeles…”

  And I stopped.

  The implausability of it hit me like an 18-wheeler on the Grapevine. Here I was, a refugee from (ironically) Ohio, dragged by the nose to Los Angeles eleven years earlier, hating the mere thought of living in the town that had killed Scott Fitzgerald, swearing I’d be back in New York inside a month…more than a decade later standing on a lecture platform in (ironically) Ohio, running a Chamber of Commerce panegyric to the wonders and deliciousness of the City of Angels.

  What hath God wrought? I thought. Without even noticing, I’ve become an Angeleno!

  When my New York literary agent, Bob Mills, said to me in 1961, “You’ve got to go to California. You’ll never be able to live the way you want to live, and be free to write what you want to write, unless you crack films and make enough during the year to buy free time for writing the books,” when he said that to me, the first image that flooded into my head was William Holden, lying face-down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard.

  And washing right along behind that vision were all the ghastly scenes from Day of the Locust, The Loved One, What Makes Sammy Run, The Slide Area, The Big Knife, The Last Tycoon and Flash and Filigree. I conjured up rampaging nightmares of good writers clubbed to their knees—as I had always believed—by Hollywood: Horace McCoy, Dashiell Hammett, Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker. And I shivered with fear.

  “No, no,” I pleaded, “don’t make me go to Los Angeles! I’ll turn into a pillar of Waldo Salt! My hair’s too fine to take a blond rinse, and I can’t even ice skate, how the hell you think I’m gonna learn to surf?”

  And always, Bill Holden as that indigent Hollywood screenwriter, Joe Gillis, spreadeagled and waterlogged in Norma Desmond’s befouled swimming pool. What a horrendous metaphor!

  But I was chivvied into coming. And eleven years later I stood on a platform in Ohio and said, “And even if all that good stuff weren’t true of only Los Angeles, even if you had it all here…I’d still be in L.A., man, and you’d still be in Springfield!”

  And now it is sixteen years since I motored into Hollywood with ten cents in my pocket, driving a ’51 Ford that was gasping its last, and I am here to tell you: this is a dynamite town.

  I’ve lived all over the place. Painesville, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New York; Chicago; New Orleans; Shelby, North Carolina; Par
is and London. And while London is a fast second-place to this burg, if I were to rummage around in the stock of America’s leading Art Deco dealer, H. Frank Jones (who just happens to be right here in Los Angeles), and came up with an original Lalique magic lamp, and rubbed it to bring up the patina, and out came this dyspeptic genie who’d grant me any wish I desired, I wouldn’t ask him to let me live anywhere but here!

  Los Angeles is the cutting edge of the culture, despite the claims and pretensions of San Francisco and New York and Boston and Washington. It has all the verve and dynamism that I found in New York when I went there in 1950. Verve and dynamism that New York has lost, that Chicago wanted and for which substituted brutality and angst, that New Orleans is afraid to let loose. For me, L.A. is like a big, gauche baby with a shotgun in its mouth. It’ll do anything. And with more style, with more fire, with more Errol Flynn go-to-hell vivacity than any other city I’ve ever experienced.

  As for what L.A. does to an artist, it’s all bullshit about the death of creativity, out here in the vanilla sunshine. In sixteen years I’ve written nineteen books, a dozen movies and more television than I care to think about, even now that I’ve renounced that lousy medium. Everything that’s made a reputation for me…I wrote while living here…or on the way back to here. If Fitzgerald bought the plot while out here, it was because he did it to himself. Oh, it’s easy enough to go for the sparkle and the dazzle (hell, I even worked for Aaron Spelling for a little while), but anyone who wants to work out here can find the most salutary environment in the world.

  Is it slower than New York? That’s what a few visitors from the Apple tell me. As I dance circles around them, watching them sneer and badmouth in slow-motion. The hours are longer here, the moments fuller, and no one would tolerate for a moment out here the kind of three-hour business lunches they take in Manhattan. This is a working town. Ask Betsy Pryor or Phil Mishkin or Larry Niven.

  And when they talk about whacko, back East, and they say L.A. is Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, I smile. Because all that weirdness is upstate in San Francisco. Sure, we get our occasional dingbats like Charlie Manson and the Hillside Strangler, but have you noticed, they’re always schmucks who’ve come here from somewhere else and never really integrated? Is L.A. all plastic, without soul? Sure, if you come to visit and stay in Garden Grove or go to Anaheim. But if you want soul, just drive down to Watts and look at that testament to one human being’s indomitability and creative purpose, the Towers of Simon Rodia. Soul? I’ll give you soul: Pink’s hot dogs, better than Nathan’s; the Century City riot against the War in Vietnam; Prop 13 and that incredible old curmudgeon Howard Jarvis; Kent Bash’s paintings; Jeremy Tarcher’s regional success as a publisher against all the odds; Gypsy Boots; Art Kunkin and Brian Kirby’s days at the Free Press; the best rye bread and cocoanut rum bars in the world at Brown’s Victory Bakery; Auracle playing at Dante’s; living in Laurel Canyon; kids streaming down from Pepperdine to help Burgess Meredith save his house at Malibu when the Pacific opened its maw; the Beverly Glen art fair every year.

  Sixteen years, and every time I get off a plane at LAX, having been out there somewhere else, I find myself grinning and saying, “Thank God I’m home.” An Angeleno. How ’bout that.

  And I even met Gloria Swanson once. She was charming and warm and thoroughly magnificent. But, uh, old fears die hard; and I somehow didn’t follow up on her invitation to come and visit at her home. I don’t even know if she’s got a swimming pool.

  FROM ALABAMY, WITH HATE: ANOTHER MEMO FROM PURGATORY

  This account of Harlan’s participation in the famous March on Montgomery appeared in the September 1965 issue of Knight magazine. It exemplifies his longstanding willingness to put his body on the line in order to get a story. As Harlan remarked recently, sometimes even he doesn’t know which comes first—the desire to write authentically, or his personal love of action—and at this point he doesn’t much care.

  Thursday, March 25th, 1965. A walk through the country of the blind. Montgomery, Alabama—stinking in the heat of its own decay; sweltering in the viciousness of two hundred years of murder and bigotry and moral wretchedness; poised with the invisible artifacts of its hooded aristocracy: the hemp lynch rope, the 12-gauge shotgun, the befouled “separate but equal” toilet, the electric cattle prod, the killer caravans by night and the final paycheck by day.

  Poised, waiting for the outsiders to come.

  The 25th of March. Fifty thousand people walking the red-mud roads of Alabama, singing; the outsiders, come to tell a crazed bigot that the Civil War was long dead, that a house divided was soon to topple, that the stain of evil that Alabama had become would no longer be tolerated in a United States.

  The Freedom March on Montgomery, Alabama.

  A biased report.

  There must have been noble motives in there, somewhere. I simply couldn’t think of any. Plainly, it was time to go. It was time to stop all the parlor liberalism, to stop all the highflown clucking about heinous crimes and rotten living conditions; it was time to act. Time to pay some dues. It was mea culpa time, and everyone was guilty. So I went. Along with thousands from all over the country, all over the world. Every state was there, New Mexico, Indiana, New York, Florida, Ohio. Decent men and women from Hawaii, France, London, Alaska. A blind man who had walked from Georgia. A wealthy matron in furs from Beverly Hills. A one-legged hero, who walked with the Original Three Hundred, all the way from Selma where men had died just days before, to Montgomery, where a despicable racist flew the Confederate flag as a gesture of defiance, and hid behind locked doors.

  This time we weren’t alone. This time the Great White Father in the Great White House had spoken. He’d called together a joint session of Congress—usually reserved for State of the Union addresses and national emergencies—and he had said it for all of us. A little late, a little slow, but he’d finally said it, he’d called Wallace’s bluff:

  “The time of justice has now come,” Lyndon B. Johnson said. “No force can hold it back.” At last, for every thick red neck in the state of Alabama to hear and believe, the tide of history was being acknowledged. In a matter of hours it would begin to wash over the face of Alabama as the 50-mile trek from Selma to Montgomery was begun, and Johnson told them why: “Should we defeat every enemy, double our wealth, conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.”

  He spoke for forty-five minutes, and he was interrupted by standing ovations thirty-nine times. “We shall overcome,” he told them. But those were just words. Words had lifted on the air many times before. And still, the Reverend James J. Reeb had died under the clubs of thugs called police. Words had flown and yet three civil rights workers were found buried twenty-one feet beneath a Mississippi damn (sic.). Like doves, the words had lifted on the breeze, and in Birmingham little children were bombed in Sunday School. Even since the march, even after all the words words words, a Detroit woman was senselessly gunned down on that same road between Selma and Montgomery. Viola Liuzzo was another numbered corpse.

  Damn them! Damn their twisted, stunted, warped minds, their rotten and corrupted beliefs, the frenzied and hideous doppelgangers of Hitler’s storm troopers. Even after they saw fifty thousand men and women flock to their sinkhole of a state to plead with their bodies and their time to let those people go, even so, still, with all the words, they killed again. And again. And it seems it will never stop till time has closed over the head of Man and he is no more, sunk in the ocean of forgetfulness, when there is no black, there is no white, there is no Man at all!

  All this talk of Man, and on that march, so much talk of God. But where was God for the little church girls of Birmingham? Where was God for Reverend Reeb? For Mrs. Liuzzo? For all the nameless and never-known black men whose bodies have been burned and strung from ropes and violated by razor and knife and gun? Where is this God who allows hate to rule a land? I can’t talk of God, I can only talk of Man.

  For all I saw
on that Montgomery march was man, at his most noble, at his most degraded. If you want specifics, if you need background, if you need history, it’s all been recorded. This, damn them, is a personal record.

  The planes left from Burbank. Three planes from the Lockheed Airport where Bogart said farewell to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Three hundred clerics, students, actors, housewives, ribbon clerks, writers, truck drivers and poets. They had at first thought one plane would be sufficient, but two days before we were to leave, they had to lay on a second, and earlier that Thursday, a third. And still they were turning them away. The waiting room was a madhouse, people cramming against the check-in desk, don’t leave me behind! Why were they fighting so hard to go? Why were they not taking this handy cop-out to avoid possible danger? Men and women who, if they had had their druthers, would gladly have gone home to bed, or to a discotheque. They fought and shoved to give their money for the flight. I was in the midst of them. I cannot answer the question.

  Yet, on the plane, jammed together with total strangers, even though we were of one united cause, I felt an alienation: I was suddenly assailed by a strange and terrible thought. All these people, on this flight, flying toward brotherhood—

  What if we crashed, or were marooned somewhere, and there was no food save what we had brought in our knapsacks? Wouldn’t we start pummelling that dapper Negro gentleman up front there, the one with the bag of fruit? Where would be all our brotherhood then?