Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

And one, as I passed, trying to get to the gas station, stepped out with rifle at port arms. “Where you from, boy?” he demanded. I stared at him coldly. “I’m from New York, and I’m a Colonel in the United States Army Reserve, boy, and if you don’t want me to call your C.O. over and have him put you on charges for speaking to me, you’d better get your ass back in formation, trooper! Jump!” And he got back, and muttered surlily, “Y’gotta go around.”

  We walked down to the corner. I had to use the toilet. The white ones were full, both men and women. So I used the “separate but equal” facilities maintained for COLORED. I was white. That’s a color.

  The station owner had a thrombosis. We bought our Cokes and started back. They had closed off the street. You have to go around. Three blocks North, three blocks West, three blocks South. Now I was scared.

  There were five of us. We started back toward the empty lot by that circuitous route, which had been predicated for no discernible reason. The others scampered. I was damned if I’d let those muthuhs rassle me around. I sauntered. “Why hurry?” I asked the Negro member of the group. “’Cause I can’t spend the night in the Jeff Davis Hotel,” he said. A telling point. I scampered.

  Cars and panel trucks slithered by, with obscenities hurled out at us. “We gonna get you tonight you buncha—” We got back to the lot, shaken.

  The buses had not arrived. And then the troops were pulled out. “Protection till everyone is out of Montgomery,” the government had assured us. But there we were, with night falling, and a disorganized mob, trapped in an empty lot, milling about. And the cars with the rednecks, circling, circling…

  (Chance? Coincidence? Paranoia?

  (Here’s what we did not know: the bus drivers had walked out on the job. They would not drive us. A bus had warped in to the curb as a young Presbyterian minister walked up the street, a block away. The door had sighed open, and the Alabama hero had leaned out. “We gonna beat the shit outta alla you mother-wording, sonofaword, wordwordword word bastards tonight, y’all see we don’t!” and the bus had whipped away.

  (And, inexplicably, the troopers had been withdrawn.

  (Chance? Coincidence? Paranoia? Maybe.)

  They got three buses into service. Supplementary drivers were offered more money. The buses arrived. I dashed for one. Heroism doesn’t go very far when the smell of tar is in the air.

  On the ride back to the airport, jammed together, thank God, a small white-and-black dog ran out into the road. The driver could have avoided it without shaking up his passengers. He held steady. The dog was ground under the left front tire, was whipped back and bumpedbumpedbumped all the way to the rear. The driver never batted an eye. He merely glanced at his wristwatch to record the time for the report to the bus company. It was 6:06 p.m.

  There was more, much more. They wouldn’t give us a loading ramp to get into the plane. We waited four hours. They found a bomb on the plane. It was a nine-hour flight back. Viola Liuzzo. She was killed hurrying back from Selma to Montgomery, to ferry out people left stranded in an empty lot.

  It was a lot closer than I care to admit.

  And now it’s over. I did one day down there, that’s all. No big deal, no special feat, no extra blue ribbon. One day, in a land where one Negro college boy summed it up:

  “We live in a state of perpetual caution. Even on the best day, the most ordinary day, you never know when you leave your house in the morning what will happen, what little thing, some redneck on the prod, something small, that will keep you from ever coming home that night.”

  I was coming home, and all I could think was: “Please, please, dear God, let me the hell out of this stinking place!”

  And still it happens down there. Viola Liuzzo was a white woman, and it made headlines. But the red mud of Alabama covers the corpses of hundreds of nameless black folk, who never made headlines. They never even got their names on tombstones.

  Time to pay dues? Yeah, that’s what it is, friends. Mea Culpa time in the country of the blind, our country, and we’ve been so blind, so long, it may be too late to see the light.

  It ain’t enough to say oh them poor poor people down there. It ain’t enough to say well, hell, they have killings in Chicago and on the New York subways, too. It ain’t enough to send a buck to SNCC or CORE. It ain’t enough when you start matching up all the parlor liberalism against the body blood soaking into that Alabama countryside. It ain’t enough.

  The tide of history is washing higher and higher. It cannot long be held back by hooded murderers too cowardly to come out in daylight. It’s coming, thank the Lord, and if you listen, you can hear the sound of it beating against the rock and crumbling walls of racism and evil…

  Hear it? Listen closely, hear it?

  Hoop-de-hoop. Hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.

  LEIBER: A FEW TOO FEW WORDS

  This essay originally appeared in the program book for the 1979 World Science Fiction Convention, at which Fritz Leiber was the guest of honor. Harlan feels that raving year after year about one’s friends eventually becomes suspect, and here he talks about why he won’t do it anymore. He also reinforces the reasoning behind his insistence that he not be categorized as a science fiction writer, which was explored earlier in this collection in “You Don’t Know Me, I Don’t Know You.”

  On the night wind the request comes in. Like clockwork. Say a few words in praise of Fritz Leiber. Would you mind? We know you’re busy, but would you mind? We know you’ve done this a dozen times already, but would you mind?

  Yes, at long last, yes, I mind very much.

  This is foolishness. In the last three years I have sat down behind the typewriter on eight different occasions to “say a few words about Fritz Leiber.”

  I have said that he is one of the perhaps dozen writers in the history of literature whose command of the language, whose inventiveness, whose shining genius intimidates me. I have said that I have no hesitation in ranking him with Poe and Kafka and Borges and Collier and Blackwood and Machen and Shirley Jackson and Gerald Kersh and Rampo and Stanley Ellin; than whom there are no greater. I have said that none of us working in the genre of the fantastic today are free of the lessons taught by Leiber. I have said that he sets a high water mark for all of us struggling to be perfect, that simply cannot be reached. I have said that he is an original and when—dark the day—he leaves us, we will never see his like again. I have said all this, and it’s foolishness.

  If, after forty years, anyone is foolish or ignorant enough to need words from punks like me about Fritz Leiber, it is a sorry pass indeed.

  Honoring him at science fiction conventions is amusing time-waste and perhaps even a touch heartwarming after all this time, but the truth of the matter is that if Fritz Leiber had not devoted his life and his life’s work to the insular community of category fantasy, Seacon ’79 might well be honoring a Nobel Laureate in literature. But since he did, and since the Nobel juries seem utterly unaware of the laborers in this hideously insular community, he comes to this year and this moment as the totem of fans, rather than as a major entry in every important study of literary forces in the Twentieth Century. I find that tragic and disgraceful.

  To be blunt, and make no friends doing it, Fritz Leiber is—and has always been—too good for his audience. His talent was always too big for the category, his dreams too rich, his goals too noble for us. He deserves far better, much more, than merely being feted at science fiction conventions.

  And so I will say no more for such tiny tributes.

  He does not need these words from me, or from any of us. He is better than we can ever hope to be; he is grander, finer, deeper, and worthier than any words can say.

  After forty years he commands all our love and all our admiration; and what we have to give him now is inadequate.

  The words that need to be said about the man and the work called Fritz Leiber are the words spoken by time and posterity. When lesser names like Lovecraft and Merritt and Burroughs are consigned to the acade
mic’s shelf of curiosities, the stories written by Fritz Leiber will continue to burn with their own hellishly beautiful blue glow, and the books will continue to be passed down from generation to generation for lesser writers to study and emulate; the stories that make dilettantes wither and poseurs ashamed. Time will say what must be said about Fritz Leiber.

  So don’t ask me again. I have said all I can say about him. He beggars description, and his words outshine the best of ours. Honor him if you will, but it’s only gilding your own lily. He doesn’t need it, he needs and deserves far more; that which we crawlers cannot provide.

  For what he has given us, over forty years, no amount of cheap, self-congratulatory accolades, intended to make us look important by our merest association with him, count for the smallest tribute.

  Time and posterity will say what has to be said for Fritz Leiber. And even they will never speak eloquently enough.

  SERITA ROSENTHAL ELLISON: A EULOGY

  The following probably would not be available to any of us were it not for the recommendation of Arthur Byron Cover, who told me that Harlan had written a piece on the death of his mother in 1976 which had appeared in “some obscure literary journal.” Harlan pulled a copy of the Saint Louis Literary Supplement from his archives and handed it to me with one sentence: “Read it and weep.” Crying isn’t my style, but I think you will find, as I did, that the following is difficult to read without at least a lump in one’s throat.

  On Sunday the 10th of October, I committed the final outrage against my family. I spoke the eulogy at my mother’s funeral. The family will never speak to me again. I can handle that.

  When I say “my family,” I mean, mostly, my mother’s side. The Rosenthals. Who resemble in more ways than the mind can readily support, the brutalizing members of the Sproul clan in Jerrold Mundis’s current and brilliant novel, Gerhardt’s Children. They remind me of the first line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  And prime among that unhappy family’s myths was the one that Harlan, Serita and Doc’s kid, Beverly’s brother, would wind up either dead or in an alley somewhere, having come to a useless end…or rotting away his old age in a Federal penitentiary. That I became a writer of some repute and became the first member of either the Rosenthal or the Ellison family to get listed in Who’s Who in America confounds them to this day. To them, I am like the snail known as the Chambered Nautilus, that has a shell with rooms in it. As the Nautilus lives its brief life it moves from room to room in its shell and finally emerges and dies; thus, it literally carries its past on its back. To the family, I am still a nine-year-old hellion who took a hammer to Uncle Morrie’s piano. (The fact that this never happened, that Morrie never owned a piano, does not in any way invalidate for them the apocryphal truth of the legend.)

  It is probably no different for anyone reading these words. All families form their opinions of the children early, and so we spend the rest of our lives in large part paying obeisance to shadows who neither care nor in fact have any power over our reality. It is thus for all of us, no matter how sophisticated and cut-loose we may be from the familial spiderweb.

  To them, I am a nine-year-old Chambered Nautilus; even though I ran away from home at the age of thirteen, grew up, and have barely spoken a dozen words to my sister in the past ten years.

  But there was still my mother, whom I supported in large part during the last years of her life, picking up the burden when I was financially able, from my Uncle Lew and my Uncle Morrie and from Beverly’s husband, Jerold.

  My mother had been terribly ill for many years. To my way of thinking, she wanted to die on May 1st, 1949, when my father had his coronary thrombosis and died in front of both of us. He was her life, her happier aspect, and she became—in any sensible not even exquisite sense—almost somnambulistic.

  In August she had the latest of an uncountable number of strokes, followed it with a full-sized heart attack, and was taken into the Miami Heart Institute. She knew the end was on her and she let me know that was the sum of it when we talked long distance.

  She lay there getting worse and worse; finally, forty-five days before the green blips went to a flat line on the monitor, she was down from one hundred and twenty pounds to forty-one pounds, her lungs were filled with fluid, her brain had swollen so her face was terribly twisted, her leg was filled with blood clots, her blood sugar had risen to an impossible level, she ran a temperature in excess of 102 degrees constantly, she was blind, paralyzed, and no oxygen was going to the brain.

  Blessedly, she was in deep coma.

  She never recovered consciousness. They kept her on the IV and the monitoring for a month and a half. She was a vegetable and had she ever come out of it would have been an empty shell. I begged them to pull the plug, but they wouldn’t.

  The greatest fear my mother ever had was that some day she would wind up in a nursing home. She thought of them as hellholes, as repositories for discarded loved ones, as the very apotheosis of rejection. She begged us never to put her there.

  Shortly before she died, the Miami Heart Institute held one of their “status meetings” and decided she was “stable,” that is, she needed custodial care. And so they wanted her out. They suggested we get her booked into an old folks’ home. They used another phrase. They always do. But it was a hellhole, an old folks’ home.

  Beverly, my sister, who had gone through the anguish of the last six weeks down there, was forced reluctantly to find such a place. On Friday, October 8th, 1976, the day my mother was to be removed from Miami Heart and carted by ambulance to the hellhole, though she was in deep coma and could not possibly have known what was intended for her dead but still-breathing husk, she chose to expire at 5:15 a.m.

  In some arcane way, I’m sure she knew.

  When my brother-in-law Jerold called to tell me Beverly had just advised him of Mom’s death, he asked if there were any arrangements I particularly wanted. “Only two,” I said. “Closed casket; and I want to read the eulogy.”

  From that moment till Sunday at the funeral services, my family trembled in fear of what I would say. They knew I was no great lover of the clan, and they were terrified I would make a scene, depart from protocol in a way that would humiliate them in front of friends and relatives. They gave very little thought to my feelings about my mother. But that’s the way it always is, I’m sure, with all families, with all deaths.

  I flew all night Saturday and got into Cleveland (where my mother’s body had been taken, so she could be buried beside my father) at 6:30 in the morning. I drove to Beverly and Jerold’s house and when Jerold asked to see the eulogy I’d written, which was almost the first thing he said to me, thus indicating the obsessiveness of their concern about “crazy” Harlan and what he might do, I lied and said I hadn’t written anything, that it was to be extemporaneous, from the heart.

  The relatives began arriving, and with the exception of my Uncle Lew, who has always been the coolest and the most understanding of the clan, they all circled me warily as if I were a jackal that might at any moment leap for their throats.

  At the funeral home, Rabbi Rosenthal seemed equally uneasy about my participation in the ceremonies. It was Succoth, the Jewish harvest holiday, and just a week after Yom Kippur, the holiest of the holies. Thus, certain prayers that are usually spoken at funeral services could not be spoken; alternate words were permissible, but few, so very few.

  Rabbi Rosenthal is no relation to my family. His name and my mother’s name being Rosenthal is just coincidence. Like Smith. Or Jones. Or Hayakawa. Or Goetz. Or Piazza. He’s a fine man, the Rabbi Emeritus of Cleveland Jewry, a strong and familiar voice in Cleveland Heights and environs. He has been for many years. But he didn’t know my mother.

  My family felt themselves honored to have pulled off the coup of Rabbi Rosenthal attending to the services. My family thinks in those terms: what looks good…social coups…fine form and attention to proto
col. As you may have gathered, I am not concerned with shadow, merely reality.

  Nonetheless, he advised me he would speak the opening words and then would call on me.

  Before the main room with the pink anodized aluminum casket was opened to the attendees, the immediate family mourners and their spouses and children and grandchildren were taken to a family sitting room to the right of the main chamber. Jane Bubis, Beverly’s best friend, bustled around. Morrie met old chums from Cleveland. My nephew Loren and I insisted on seeing Mom. Everyone told us not to look, that she had withered terribly, that we should “remember her as she had been.” They always tell you to “remember” someone as “they were.” Bear that phrase in mind. The nature of the outrage I committed against my family is contained in my pursuit of that admonition.

  Loren and I insisted.

  It didn’t look like my mother. It was a cleverly constructed mannequin intended for some minor wax museum in an amusement park. The embalmers and cosmeticians had done as good a job as could be done, I’m sure; but it wasn’t my Mom. She was already gone. This was a stranger. But I cried. Pain that clotted my chest and made me gasp for breath. But it wasn’t my Mom.

  The service began, and when Rabbi Rosenthal called on me, I walked up to the lectern foolishly trailing my hand across the casket to establish some last rapport with her.

  I pulled the pages I’d written from my inside jacket pocket and though there was no appreciable movement in the people sitting in front of me in the main chamber, the agitation I caught with peripheral vision, from the family seated in the side viewing room, was considerable: the frenzied trembling of small fish perceiving a predator in their pool.

  Understand something: my sister and I have never been friends. Eight years older than I, she was always distressed at who I was, what I was, what I did. (I have long harbored the fantasy that I was actually a gypsy baby, stolen from the Romany caravan by an attacking horde of Jewish ladies with shopping bags.) Beverly is no doubt an estimable human being, filled to the brimming with love and charity and compassion. I have never been able to discern these qualities in her, but she has many loyal friends and if an election were to be held among the relatives, as to which of us could safely be taken into polite society of an evening without worry about a “scene,” my sister Beverly would win in a walk. Though they take a (to me) somewhat hypocritical pride in my achievements and the low level of fame I’ve achieved for the Ellison family, it is a public pride, not to be confused with actually having to get near me. I can handle that, too.