Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  “We’ll start over tomorrow. Let’s go back to the hotel and get a good night’s sleep.”

  No risks? Like hell, no risks! It takes a special sort of man to risk a view inside himself piercing enough to know that he has to be cool.

  I began to understand where McQueen was at. I began to know what it takes for a man to walk through the graveyard and desolation of Hollywood, with this kind of life-turning-point every few steps, and know which way to go. The admiration he had for Sullivan’s hanging in there was abruptly matched by my own for his.

  McQueen would hear of nothing but my coming back to his home in Palm Springs, to take a swim in the pool, to let his housekeeper fix a good meal, to unlax from the horrors and futility of the day. Even at ease, even unbending, he was hanging in there.

  Kiley and Siegel and I were joined by the mechanics and engineers of Solar Plastics & Engineering, along with Lew Jordan, McQueen’s jovial plant manager. Kiley and Siegel and I sat around and talked about what had happened that day, and sometime later, I realized McQueen was gone.

  I went looking, and found him sitting out in the front yard with his dune buggy compatriots, discussing suspension geometry. I hung back where they couldn’t see me, and listened. As wary and precise in his speech as he had been around me, around other “arty” types, that was how free and loose he was talking to the cycle and buggy group. He was in his element. They understood and respected each other. There was none of the mysterioso of the word-wielders here; it was the same ease with which McQueen grooved behind talking to athletes, to men who made their livings in the blood sports of bike riding and sports car racing, to men who practiced the martial arts of Oriental body sports. It was the cult of the men who do it all themselves, who hang in there and let it all hang out. There is no shucking possible on a football field or on a dirt track or in a fight ring. The credentials are all right there, in the open. Even as McQueen’s credentials are right there, in the open.

  He said to me, “I live for myself, and I answer to nobody and I’m not trying to sound pompous or anything like that, but I live for myself and I feel that I have no obligation to answer to anybody for anything.”

  The answer of course, to the question where is McQueen at, lies in that statement. He is precisely what he seems to be.

  Steve McQueen is most what he seems to be in Bullitt. It may very well be his best film work to date. It is a cop story, takes place in San Francisco. It is one of the gutsiest films I’ve seen in a long while. As mentioned, it features a 100 mph car chase through the streets of San Francisco, and McQueen did his own driving. It figures. Of course he’d do it himself. He does everything himself.

  He has made his life for himself, he is his own man, and where he’s at today is a product of knowing which way to go when the pressure is on.

  I asked him, do you believe in God? He answered, “I believe in me. God’ll be #1 as long as I’m #1.” I asked him what he thought of the world. He answered, “The world is as good as you are. You’ve got to learn to like yourself first. I’m a little screwed-up, but I’m beautiful.” I asked him what he had to say to the young people who admired him, and he answered with such intensity I didn’t need to write it down to get it just the way he said it:

  “They’d better protect what they’ve got.”

  From who?

  “From the bad guys.

  “They don’t need me for a voice…they don’t need anybody,” he said. “They know the robot machine of politics is drowning in its own spit and compromise. They know, and they won’t put up with it for much longer.” And then he added, drawing a line from the beautiful kids to God, “They’re not afraid to get nailed for what they believe in. And when you can get nailed is when you find out where God is.”

  We talked a lot that night, at his home in Palm Springs. We talked about bikes and about people. And he dealt with the one as straight as he dealt with the other.

  Because of Bullitt, and because of some things he had said about cops, we talked about The Law. “You know,” he said, “I had some run-ins with police when I was a kid, and I never really had much use for them. I thought like a kid. But now because I am where I am, I guess I’m a kind of figure to some people, so I have a responsibility, and I think like a man. I know there are bad cops. I don’t like them any more than the good cops like them. But you never realize how necessary cops are till you pull some trouble, then you’re damned glad they’re around. I think it’s a shame that cops have gotten such an ugly name because of the bad ones. You never think about the bike officer who used to show the neighborhood kids how his motorcycle worked, because that kind of cop doesn’t exist much any more. But working on Bullitt I had a lot to do with cops, and what they’ve got to do to protect us isn’t easy. Maybe all this noise about cops will do some good—help to get the bums out and let the good cops do their job the way they should.”

  If I had heard that from a right-winger, I’d have dismissed it as hypocritical, as meaning use the Mace and get it on. But hearing it from McQueen, and knowing where his head was, it sounded straight, sounded right. His philosophy was deep heartland America, maybe cornball and rinky-tink to those who choose to over-intellectualize the simplest problems, but it told me not only where Steve McQueen was at, but where he’d come from, and most important, where he was going.

  He came out of the streets and the roads. He paid his dues, and he knew that the salvation was people. The way he said it ON THE TAPE:

  “I’m out of the Midwest. It was a good place to come from. It gives you a sense of right or wrong and fairness, which I think is very lacking in our society. We’re getting very hippy-dippy now and it seems that strength and integrity are often talked about, but very rarely used. Integrity is going down a dark street.”

  Where is Steve McQueen at?

  He’s somewhere down that dark street. Centerpunching.

  Ed. note: Steve McQueen died November 7, 1980, not of recklessness, but of cancer. Harlan was so overcome with rage and grief that he secluded himself and was not seen for a day.

  VOE DOE DEE OH DOE

  (A SILVERBERG MEDLEY) RECORDED BY THE L.A. SYNTOPICON SYNCOPATERS (Harlan Ellison & HIS ORCHESTRA) VICTOR 22600

  The following appreciation of Harlan’s long-time friend, Bob Silverberg, was written in 1977 for the program book of the World Science Fiction Convention. It is one of my personal favorites of the essays in this book and would have been included even if I had never come to know and adore Bob. But, watching the two of them in action together over time, I’ve had the opportunity to appreciate the deeper statement about friendship which Harlan delivers in this profile.

  He introduced me to Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Buxtehude and hot pizza. I traded him; for Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, the MJQ, Django Reinhardt and Nik-Nik shirts made in Italy. Oh, how I love him.

  It cost me over eighty thousand dollars, but I can sit here in my new office wing, built on my house in Los Angeles, and gaze off across my roof not at exposed water pipes and the sternwheeler spatterings of crazed hummingbirds, but a sumptuous expanse of flowering succulents and cacti. Pseudolobivia Kermesina gifted me with an enormous pink and scarlet flower just this morning. This evening it was ash-dead. Silverberg built me a roof garden. How I admire and enjoy his books, particularly the sad ones.

  I think we’d met before that, but I remember him first as sitting in an easy chair in a convention hotel in Philadelphia in the early Fifties. He wore white bucks. He drank beer from quart bottles. Jesus, I thought he was urbane. Christ, did he have me fooled. He was cool, not urbane. I’m urbane. Now I am, not then I wasn’t. I wasn’t cool, either. He could fake urbane and be cool, back then; today I can fake cool and be urbane. It’s worked out.

  Everything (almost) has worked out for Bob and me.

  We are luckier than all the rest of you turkeys. That is because we are better than the rest of you turkeys. Voe doe dee oh doe.

  He’s coming down from Oakland for dinner with me on Sund
ay, so we talked today. We talk a couple or three times a week. If God hadn’t wanted us to keep in such close touch, God wouldn’t have given us the money to use long distance telephony so frequently. So we’re talking. And I says to him, I says, “Yeah, I’ve got my reservations about Star Wars, too, old chum, but I ain’t so dumb: I bought Fox stock when it was at 8; it closed today at 22 1/2.”

  So Bob says to me, he says, “Sell.”

  “Nah, not just yet,” I say, casually. “There are still lots of terminal acne ‘Star Trek’ whackos who haven’t had their epiphany-conversion to Star Wars yet. I’ll dump it when it hits 32.”

  Now Bob knows I don’t know shit about stocks—unlike Himself who has a portfolio that would make the shade of J. Paul Getty envious—and he giggles at my punctiliousness. “Next, I buy TransAmerica,” I say, “because they own United Artists, and when Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now comes out, it’ll go through the roof. In fact,” I say, “buy some for me through your broker.” He knows I’m such a yotz about stocks I don’t have a broker, Shearson Hammill having washed their hands of me after that hedge fund debacle. “What’s it going for now?”

  “About 28,” he says. “When I come down Sunday have twenty-eight hundred for me and I’ll buy you two hundred shares.”

  “Okay,” I say…and there’s a moment of silence.

  Then we’re both laughing, righteously bugfuck, falling down.

  “Hey, Bob,” I gasp in a breathless voice, “guess what? I got 2 cents a word from Ziff-Davis today!” And we roar with laughter. Ain’t we ludicrous. Ain’t we silly. Ain’t we beautiful. Just about twenty years ago the both of us were writing our asses off for pennies and hoping to make the rent. Here we sit today in our palaces, talking 200 shares of this and 200 shares of that.

  He lived in a magnificent house in New York. Way up in Riverdale, a section of the Bronx that sounds as if it’s one of the mythical areas of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, but it isn’t. It’s New York. Some kind of terrific stately manse. It originally belonged to Fiorello La Guardia, “The Little Flower.” But there was a bad fire and water damage and Bob had to write a lot of books to rebuild. Then he moved to California. Now he drives a car and raises cacti and he doesn’t write any more.

  That last part: that’s your fault, in large part. I don’t want to talk about that. Leave him alone. He’s paid his dues.

  For a long time, as well as we knew each other, I felt like his idiot kid brother, even though I’m six months older than Himself. He had it all together, had his life ordered, knew the magic vectors and the precise point where the winds of the universe merged. Then one evening he sat on the floor of my old office here at the Los Angeles house, and he cried. If it hadn’t been his right to cry, I’d have hugged him and rocked him and said, “It’s okay, kiddo, the pain is okay.”

  And we’re closer now. He’s been through it with me a few times, and though I’m not much help—just keep telling him to bite the bullet—I’m going through it with him. Did you know he’s been my best man at two of my marriages? Or has it been three? No, two; I’m sure it’s only two.

  I don’t think we’ve ever gone to a movie together in all these years. Lots of dinners, but never a movie. Or roller skating.

  There was one night, in Seattle I think, or maybe it was Pittsburgh, when I’d arranged for a “professional courtesy” dinner at a posh restaurant high up on a hill. We did that a lot in the days when we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a science fiction convention and, while most fans were slugging down cheeseburgers and soggy fries at the hotel coffee shop, we’d be dining in gourmet splendor at this fabulous dinery or that elegant boite. It wasn’t a ripoff, I actually did write a review of every restaurant that ever extended us a free meal. For Rogue, or Topper, or the Los Angeles Free Press or some other magazine. But this one night I’m remembering, there was a mix-up. I think there were six of us. I always passed Bob off as my wine expert, my sommelier. I had a date, Bob and Barbara, and two other people, maybe Charlie and Dena Brown. And there was a mix-up. They sent over an expensive bottle of wine with the compliments of the management, and Bob started getting twitchy, asking me, “Are you sure they understand this is on the cuff?” And I kept saying it’s cool, leave it to me.

  But when the check came, and it came to an empty table, and we were already out in the street, walking down to the car, and the manager came running after us, waving that goddamn check and screaming fraud fraud fraud…I went back to explain the way of the world to him…and that miserable fink Silverberg ran like a thief. Leaving me to face the wrath of the management. Doo dah.

  He wears leather thong sandals. No socks. He has gone California native. I’ve lived out here for fifteen years and still wear socks and real shoes that cover my toes. I’ve never heard him sing or whistle; I’m not sure he can do either; isn’t that peculiar. He knows the one thing about me I’m afraid to have revealed. I suppose I can trust him with it. He’s never yet spilled the beans. Maybe he doesn’t know he knows it.

  There are scenes in Nightwings that can choke your heart. Don’t anybody tell me he can’t write emotionally. And Thorns is one of my favorite books. But he likes a lot less of my work than I like of his. That’s okay, we’re friends.

  On my wall I have some framed pictures that remind me of stages of my career, or moments of pleasure. A photo with Steve McQueen and a dune buggy on a 114 degree day in the low desert out near Thousand Palms.† A shot on the set of Cimmaron Strip with Stuart Whitman. A photo of me with Isaac and Janet† at some dinner party where I wore my fabulous $400 chocolate brown velvet tuxedo. And one of Bob and me holding the Hugos we won on the same night. It was his first. He deserved it, but I conned him into believing I had logrolled to sway the vote. I didn’t, of course, but it induced him to pay for dinner the next night. Let’s see: I paid at Antonio’s, he paid at Au Petite Cafe, I paid at Dar Maghreb, he paid at The Rangoon Racquet Club. Hmmm. Hey, Bob, you know your Hugo nomination this year, for Shadrach in the Furnace? Well, what’s it worth to you if I, uh, er…

  Here are some things you may not know about Robert Silberverg.

  •As second President of Science Fiction Writers of America he was the man who got Sol Cohen of Amazing Stories to agree to pay writers for reprints of stories. Until that time, Sol was just filling up magazine after magazine with file stories most of us had gotten a penny-a-word for ten, twenty, thirty years before. Bob made money for many of us. Not much money, but found gold nonetheless.

  •There has only been once in all the time he’s been eating spicy food that it was too hot even for him. At a restaurant called Hunan Taste where we took Leslie Swigart and Stephanie Bernstein, and we asked the wizened Oriental gentleman to “make it as hot as he would for himself” and there we sat, eating, enjoying it enormously, tears of pain rolling down our cheeks.

  •He has written about three times as many books as Asimov. Most of them are under other names, but Bob can still sit back with a gentle smile as Ike’s publishers, madly driven to the last full decibel, trumpet Isaac’s rapid closing on a 200th publication. And while Silgerverb novels have ceased their pullulation, even Creasey or Simenon would welcome him into the fratority of the prolific.

  •He does not drink coffee or tea. He does not smoke, and never has. He doesn’t like it when you do it around him.

  •During the summers of the period 1951-54, he was a camp counsellor in West Cupcake, New York and, though it was a coeducational camp, he got laid infrequently.

  •He is right-handed. I am left-handed. We are both Jewish.

  •This will be the 25th consecutive Worldcon he has attended.

  •He has only one discernible scar: on the back of his left hand. He got it in West Cupcake during a water fight when he did a smart thing in a stupid way. It used to be a bright red slash when he lived in New York, but since moving to the more salubrious California climate, it has become very faint.

  •And here’s one that’s bound to get some stupid fan bent on in
sult into trouble: he does not like to be called “Robert,” save by one or two people he’s known for years who speak the word with overexaggerated officiousness.

  None of these obscure facts are particularly interesting. The really good ones I’m keeping for his epitaph, on the theory if you can’t speak ill of the dead, don’t speak at all.

  Bob’s writing style is deceptively simple. It is very much his own voice, yet it has reverberations of the classic writers to whom we return for the pleasures of simply reading a good story: Hugo, Dickens, the best of James, Maugham, Dumas, Guy de Maupassant. It is Art; and because it is Art that functions at a level of expertise and craft perfected over several decades, it seems effortless, oversimplified, like Fred Astaire’s dancing or Picasso’s pen-and-ink sketches or John Lennon’s compositions. It looks as though anyone could do it, that’s how simple and easy it is…until the attempt is made and the novice falls on his ass.

  Because of his parsimoniousness with the language, because of the calculated regimentation of plotting, because of the dispassion with which Bob often unreeled his stories, the casual reader—whose taste has been brutalized too often by cheap pyrotechnics and disingenuous emotionalism—for many years thought of the work of Silverberg as pedestrian. Then, in the Sixties, he eschewed all that, and began writing novels that were awash with poignancy and darkness. Replacing charm, logic. In place of explosiveness, a rational progression of events leading to the emergence of a kind of voracious inevitability. Not cheap gag humor, but wit. Much pain and examination of the subtler aspects of the human condition.

  Readers fled in horror.