Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Naturally, public service and a dedication to the tenets of foursquare honest journalism swayed me. Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “Each day I journey to the market place where lies are bought; hopefully, I take my place among the sellers.”

  And so, dear friends, once more into the breach, if you can keep your minds out of the gutter, thank you.

  First I filled out the member profile. Reproduced on pages 181–182 is the actual form.

  Then Jeff Ullman took me into the “interview room.” Very chummy, very comfortable, very put-you-at-your-ease even though everyone looks ten pounds heavier on videotape. The camera is hidden. The setting is a book-lined room (crummy selection of book club editions, random studies of the sewer system of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few Harold Robbins potboilers with obscene remarks scrawled functional-illiterately in the margins; a selection distinguished solely by the presence of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish). A pair of comfortable leather and wood chairs, knockoff imitations of a Saarinen design. Plants. Soft light. An okay room.

  Jeff scrawls “Harlan” on a square of paper in block letters and pins it to the wall behind my head as I sit in the interviewee chair. It will be omnipresent on the tape so any woman running my cassette will remember and know to ask for me by my trade name. I can understand that: Redford and I are so often mistook for one another.

  Then he interviews me. I don’t even hear the tape begin to run. All very easy and comfortable.

  The questions are humorous and searching and quite intelligent. None of this, “What’s your favorite food” or “Do you like to do it with whips and chains, wet towels and coat hangers” kind of interrogation. Not even “What’s your sign?” Jeff asks me what I want to be when I grow up. I say William Randolph Hearst. Jeff asks me what my secret dream is. I tell him owning San Simeon. Jeff asks me why I’ve been married and divorced four times. I fwow up.

  No, really.

  Ullman is good. He could always put in a few years of lay analyst training and become a creditable therapist, in the event the Federal Trade Commission runs him out of business. He is gentle and easygoing, no stress and no feeling you’re being grilled by Kojak. But he probes and works instinctively with body language, reticences and facial illumination revealed by the subject being questioned. And as I’ve seen from evidence of many interviews in the cassette files, he gets men and women to come out of hiding naturally. Jeff’s mother also does interviews, and while there is a somewhat noticeable tendency on the part of interviewees to respond to Estelle as one would to a kindly aunt or to the supervisor of the complaint department at the May Co., she has the touch, too.

  I had decided that I would set up some ground rules for myself in this matter. First, I would be utterly candid and open when cutting the tape. No “putting on my party manners.” I would expose myself as the arrogant elitist swine I truly am. Second, I would not request women for dates because that would merely be to reflect my tastes and inclinations. Third, I would accept any and all dates for which I had been chosen, God willing. Fourth, I would advise any woman requesting me that I was doing this article, so they’d know it upfront and wouldn’t feel as if they had been duped to the ends of journalism under the guise of romance.

  But even though I cut a very blunt and arrogant tape, Jeff Ullman was able to bring out the jellylike core of my being. All unknowing, I revealed the soft, sweet pussycat that slumbers beneath this wretched, obnoxious, contentious anthracite facade. It wasn’t a bad tape. I’d have dated me if I’d been an extremely intelligent woman. With a death wish.

  The taped interview took about seven to ten minutes. I’ve never timed it, but the Great Expectations flyer says the actual length of a taped interview is from three to five minutes. If that’s accurate, and if mine was no longer than the average, then Ullman is even better at this little prying game than I thought: my tape seems to be much longer than that. But then, how time drags when you’re in the company of a bore.

  And when it was done, Jeff ran it for me, so I could see what it looked like. One take. No reshooting. I’m a quick study; but then, I’ve got being me down pat. Type casting. For good or bad, I said, “Put it on the line.”

  (It should be noted that a member can, in fact, retape if dissatisfied with the initial result. During the first week of membership the tape can be viewed an unlimited number of times by the subject him/herself…and friends and relatives can be brought in to assay the effectiveness…random polls among people on the street can be taken…one can satisfy one’s paranoid needs ceaselessly for the first week, and the tape can be re-cut free. It can be re-cut at the member’s option any time thereafter, but Ullman charges a fifteen dollar time and nuisance charge; which seems reasonable when one considers how many people want to cut new tapes after having their hair or nose bobbed, their mustache shaved off, their consciousness raised by some good dope on the weekend or have reached a state of cosmic wonderfulness through est or Scientology or by sitting naked in -37 degree F., crosslegged, doing Indian chants and breathing deeply. At the member’s option…new tape. That’ll be $15, please.)

  My member profile went into the book containing men whose first names began with “H,” my tape went back into the cassette cabinet, and I was assigned the member number “666.”

  “Uh, Jeff,” I said, huckleberrily, trying to seem frivolous and not a pain in the ass, “did you know, just as a matter of incidental intelligence, heh heh, that the biblical symbol for the Antichrist is six sixty-six? I mean, ha ha, the number of the beast is 666…did you know that? Just thought I’d mention it; nothing serious you know; just heh heh ha ha…did you know that?”

  The pudding laughter congealed in my throat. Ullman wasn’t laughing. “Yeah,” he said offhandedly, printing “666” on my member profile, “I’ve heard that. Fascinating coincidence, isn’t it?” And I was a member of Great Expectations, just like that. Fascinating coincidence. In the light of subsequent events, did Jeff Ullman—numerically speaking—know something I didn’t?

  Let us pause for a moment and speak of love. Not even True Love. Just plain old grass roots common variety love. Theodore Sturgeon once ventured the opinion, “There’s no absence of love in the world; only worthy places to put it.” Since each of us is a place to put it, and since each of us from time to time is less than 100% worthy, I guess Ted had it down right.

  Some day soon I’m going to write a fantasy about the search for True Love. About this guy who knows such a thing exists. Not the idealized, gothic novel gobbledy-bibble idea of it, but an actual, literal, real-life thing that is True Love. And he searches all over the world, goes to the top of Mt. Everest to consult the mysterious guru, dabbles in the black arts, consults ancient texts, and finally gets on to a trail that promises to lead to True Love. And when he finally finds it, what it turns out to be is a big bowling trophy, a huge, tacky loving cup thing with T*R*U*EL*O*V*E*! engraved on it in florid, incredibly gauche lettering, all caps and curlicues and exclamation points.

  I just haven’t figured out what he does with it.†

  And that’s the problem with love. Once you have it, and you know you have it…what the hell do you do with it?

  It seems to me (he said, stroking his Solomonic beard) that all but a fraction of the time we spend concerned with love is dissipated in the search; and very little thought is expended in consideration of how to use it, or let it use us, once we’ve got it. Thus, the search becomes easier and more involving. Idealized candy is infinitely sweeter than actual candy eaten. Diabetes, tooth decay, the mid-gut carbohydrate spread…actualized love can do it to you.

  And so, while I don’t really think it’s easier to find love in, say, Samoa or Lapland than it is in Los Angeles, we do have the reputation here for chasing the Holy Grail more frenetically than they do in the provinces.

  If this is so, then I don’t think it merely a fascinating coincidence that Great Expectations has flowered here in what a bad musician has cheaply dubbed “The City of the One Night Stands.” I thin
k L.A. is the cutting edge of American social mores, and I think that Great Expectations is a solid manifestation of our need to find a new way to cut through the fetid jungle growth of Calvinist barriers that has always impeded us in the search for love. I found, to my pleasure—and in contradiction of my basically cynical, misanthropic view of the human race—that Great Expectations and what it says about the bold spirit of Los Angeles is a very positive and humanistic enterprise.

  I continue to hold that belief, despite what happened to me when the job-lot called Harlan Ellison went on the market at Great Expectations. Call me hopeful; call me naive; call me Pollyanna; call me a poor benighted sailor on the seas of romance, tossed by the turbulent tides of lust and human frailty. Call me verbose and let’s get on with it.

  In the mail, less than a week later, were three postcards.

  Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by G.

  Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by K.

  Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by D.

  That isn’t quite the way the cards read, but it’s close enough. Initials weren’t used; the cards had first names on them. I won’t even tell you the first names. Look: no matter how flippant I may seem here, these were all nice women who took a chance with me; and while some or all or none of them were right for me, or I for them, they made their move toward liaison with open hands and honest intentions. And while I’ll play for chuckles in these anecdotes, I’ll not gossip or hold them up to public ridicule. We are all weird, every one of us, in small and usually harmless ways. But in a court of law there isn’t one of us whose minor quirks wouldn’t seem sly and kinky and possibly perverse. So when you’re ready to reveal that secret thing you have hidden in the back of your underwear drawer, back there under the rolled socks or the pantyhose, that secret thing you’d rather burn in hell forever than let anyone know is there, when you’re ready to have it published with a big picture on the front page of the Times, at that time I’ll tell you who the women were, the women I’ll refer to only by bogus initials. If you want cheap thrills go stick your thumb in a light socket.

  Where was I?

  So I went in to view the tapes of the women who had requested me. On a sunny afternoon I drove down to Westwood and climbed the stairs to the cheery offices of Great Expectations. Estelle was there, and as I walked in I was greeted by a look on her face I’ve come to know very well. It’s Estelle’s “Have I got a girl for you!” look. I have come to know and fear that look.

  She sat me down in one of the armchairs, plonked one of the fat notebooks containing female member’s profiles on my lap and said, “G. is at the back of the book. She’s only been a member for a month. Very intelligent.”

  How she knew which one I’d check out first, and more improbably, how she was able to remember who had asked for a date with me, among the hundreds of selections passing over her desk in a week, is something I’ve never fathomed. But the clue to how Estelle can do it—and she’s done it many times, I’ve seen her—and why she does it, lies in the response I give to people who ask me, “How can you be so high on such a dehumanized, mechanical way of meeting people?” That reply, and that clue, a little further on. Right now I want to maintain the narrative flow.

  I flipped through the loose-leaf pages. Rachel S-64, Denise S-117, Betty S-286. Past woman after woman; younger women, older women; stouter women, thinner women; innocent looking women, bold looking women; chic women, reserved women. And I understood that much as we feel compelled to play the “person in his/her own right” lip-service game, in the first burning instants that we meet someone who is a potential vessel of True Love, we are as one with the naked ape. It is always, in those first trembling moments, the aesthetic of line and curve and hollow and solid flesh that widens our eyes and raises our temperature. The subliminal message of certain body-heats, the flush of health, the movement of a slim hand through certain-colored hair, the horizon line of a smile that speaks of far lands ready for exploration. What culturally-hip hypocrites we are: talking of wit and wisdom, of good deeds and similar interests, when our chimes ring first and loudest for the high cheekbone, the tight little ass, the strong chin or the quick flash of crossed leg. It’s nice to delude ourselves that we move in the stately pavane of the social contract, but if we listen carefully we can hear the murmurs of the veldt and the jungle near at hand.

  I am no nobler than you: G. was an attractive woman. I looked at her photo on the back of the sheet before I turned it over and read the member profile.

  She liked books, wasn’t too interested in sports, enjoyed far traveling; there were oblique references to a delight in word-play and hard work; she was in her middle thirties; she was divorced with children. Intimations of strong character and a pragmatic view of the world. The portents were good.

  I ran her tape.

  Attractive, a trifle hyper in a nervous way (but that might be attributed to the setting, the interview), easy to smile, charmingly cynical sometimes; and the body language and facial giveaways spoke to a promising sensuality.

  All this, from the profile and a seven minute tape. Not an unlikely weight of evidence if one spends any part of one’s life watching people, checking out the somatotypes, cataloguing the secret messages our bodies send.

  I read the other two member profiles; the one for K. and the one for D. I studied the photographs.

  In the course of preparing to write the article, I had scanned many hours of taped interviews, both men’s and women’s. Not just women I found personally attractive by those undefined and secret jungle messages; but older women who were widowed or divorced, who were clearly seeking older men for companionship; younger women whom I knew would be outside my range of interests because of their youth; black women who probably wouldn’t want a honk; overweight women and women whom I didn’t respond to at all physically. And a lot of men’s tapes, to get a sense of balance, to find out whether the myth that only losers signed up for dating services had any substance. My finding: if there were losers in that group I viewed, they certainly didn’t reveal it on tape. I saw women who were poised and charming, vivacious and coquettish, intelligent and witty. And though I prefer the company of women, the men I viewed were equally as interesting. There were weaker and stronger men, of course; men I suppose women would find handsome and men whose characters were more attractive than their faces; but very very few of them had that gray Kirlian Aura of desperation and doom.

  My finding: it was probably as statistically average a group of winners and losers as one would get if one scooped a hundred men and women off any Los Angeles suburb’s streets.

  The three women whose tapes and profiles I scrutinized, were no more nor less than the others. They seemed rational and together. The only thing that made me suspect they might be odd in the head was their selection of the man who had cut that arrogant, off-putting tape.

  So now I had come down to the crunch point.

  Here was where all the objectivity of my research into Great Expectations could go wrong. Understand: I am like the pessimistic kid in the old story, the one they put in a room filled with toys, who is observed an hour later, crying like crazy because he’s sure someone will come and take them away; while in the next room the optimistic kid, who was put in with a giant mound of horse puckey, is burrowing through the shit laughing and yelling, “There has to be a pony!” I do not really believe in True Love. I am a cynic. And you can take me at my word when I say that I extrapolated in every possible direction to find a negative aspect of videotape dating.

  I could find none.

  Therefore, if things went less than sensationally, the fault had to lie in me, or in people who would be attracted to someone like me. Which, of course, was the case.

  So as I launch into the denouement of this escapade, understand that what you get from this point on is highly subjective Ellisonian vision. Caveat emptor.

  I ran K.’s tape. She was a set designer at one of the major
studios. I was not drawn to her physically, but her manner was so gracious, and her responses to the questions the interviewer put to her, that I felt I would very much like to meet her, to get to know her as a friend.

  I ran D.’s tape. An absolutely stunning young woman. I was smitten with her looks. But as her tape rolled, I realized she was all wrong for me. She was too nice.

  Do I detect the raised eyebrow? Do I perceive the hum of confusion? Let me explain.

  D. was a sweet woman. Not simpy, saccharine sweet, with that cloying, phony manner that conceals another personality altogether, but nice, a good person who, because of her innocence (not naivete, innocence, something quite different) was terribly vulnerable. It has been truly said of me that anything that gets in my way gets a Harlan-sized hole through it. It’s happened in personal relationships. I suppose it could be called strength; it can also justly be called insensitivity or ruthlessness or unbridled self-interest.

  Whatever it’s called, I’m aware of it, I despise it in myself, and I try to be responsible as best I can force myself to be, by not getting mixed up with people whom I’m going to clobber.

  By the time the tape ended, I knew that if I were to get involved with D., in short order I would chew her up and cause her grief. So I decided, no matter what I’d set as the ground rules, I was not going to see this woman whose decency and kindness radiated from the videotape playback machine.

  I said okay to K. and G., got their home and work numbers from Estelle and then, as I was turning away, having said, “Advise D. I’m unavailable,” I said, “Let me have D.’s number and I’ll call her and thank her, tell her I’m doing an article, and let her know my not accepting a date with her has nothing to do with her.”

  Estelle smiled that knowing smile, and I went in the other room and called G. and made a date. K. did not answer her home phone, and locating her at the studio was difficult. I put her numbers away for later. Then I called D.