The Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Crestfallen, amazed that my charisma had not whelmed, if not overwhelmed her, I went and sat down next to a guy in a shapeless wine-colored corduroy sport jacket whose hairy white ankles were showing above his white sweat socks. He was busy gnawing on a hangnail. Things weren’t quite as glamorous as I’d expected.

  Finally, we were called by name, taken to a ready room (separating men from women, naturally), and there we filled out nineteen different kinds of forms. After which we were divided up into smaller groups, and in company with four other guys I was hustled into a tiny room where a girl sat behind a small table covered with note pads and suchlike paraphernalia. Behind a screen—but still visible—was a rather plain but happy-looking young girl who was reading a mimeographed sheet.

  Now bear in mind, this was all before The Dating Game aired, so I didn’t know what the hell was going on. All I knew for sure was that there was a good chance to meet some heavy females and, all shuck aside, friends, I had not at that stage of existence achieved the satori of truth and beauty and wisdom I display so casually today. But, onward…

  The interviewer behind the table briefed us on the format: scripted “questions” to be asked by the girl behind the screen, and a “choice” made by her from the men’s answers, as to which of us she would want to take her on a date. This was a village idiot format that seemed a trifle brutalizing, but, well, not blasphemically so. At that point.

  So the questions were asked of the five of us, and they were mildly amusing questions to which I gave mildly amusing answers. Now understand that at no time during this preliminary “weeding out” run-through was I anywhere near scintillant in my humor. I was just being Paul Pleasant, and Charles Charming and Sidney Sex-Starved. But compared to the dullards with whom I’d been grouped, my responses were positively Benchleyesque.

  Upshot: the girl picked me.

  Hurray! I was through the prelims and was asked to appear on such-and-such a date for an actual taping as one of the three male contestants. I was told the girl behind the screen had not made it, and that I’d be vying for the attentions of another, much more memorable young lady.

  So, came the day of the taping, late in the afternoon, and I went down to the ABC studios. Here the story thickens.

  The cavalier treatment that had been mild and barely acceptable in Barris’ offices, was magnified a thousandfold. We were treated like cheap foreign labor turned out to repair ten miles of bad road. Pushed here, ordered there, chivied and demeaned from the moment I (and the other two guys who were to appear with me) entered the studio.

  And they made a small error. Probably because it was one of their first tapings and they hadn’t gotten the system down pat yet. I saw, actually saw the girl I was to try and coerce into going out with me.

  Oh, Jesus!

  Bear in mind, friends, that at that time in my life, I was a shallow, superficial, callow youth who judged women not by the enlightened standards of integrity, intelligence, and humanity inculcated in me by Mary Reinholz and Anne De Wolfe and other females of the Women’s Liberation Movement, but by wholly shameful considerations of physical beauty. Turn of ankle, height of bust, fairness of face, luster of hair, absence of moustache…these (oh, shame, shame) were my yardsticks. And by such judgments, in those days I would have decided the girl was considerably less than desirable.

  Today, I’d simply call her a waste of time.

  Anyhow, we were being hectored from one small waiting room to another, and we passed this peach of perfection in the corridor. My eyes widened in horror as might those of a Transylvanian peasant meeting Lawrence Talbot, The Wolf Man, in a foggy forest.

  We were quickly hurtled from sight of her. But my knees had begun to shake.

  Finally, we were brought out onstage, seated on high stools, and—the warm-up having been done—the show got under way.

  I’ll cut to the payoff.

  Here we are, these two other guys and myself, behind a modernistic backset, with pseudo-Herb Alpert music rattling, and they introduced the charmer I’d seen in the hall.

  She sits down and asks the first question: “Number One, describe the worst of your bad habits.” So Number One, who looked like an out-of-work Via Veneto pimp, replied, “I snore. But you won’t have to worry about that because I know I’ll stay awake with you.” He thought that was really dynamite repartee. Then Number Two—a collegiate football hero if ever there lived one—denigrated himself with his bad habit of drinking beer and watching sports on tv every Saturday and Sunday. But he assured her that in the light of her wonderfulness, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was nowhere. Then she got to me, Number Three. “Number Three,” she said, “do you have any bad habits?”

  “Well, frankly, no,” I said, smiling a Huckleberry Finn smile she was the poorer for not being able to see. “My friends say I’m without flaw, if you ignore the fact that I’m an ax murderer and rapist.

  “But everybody has a few minor character flaws,” I added.

  There was a hushed silence from the other side of the set. Then she recovered and went on to her second question.

  “Number One, describe what we’d do if you took me out, what kind of an evening you’d consider a big date.”

  The Via Veneto pimp did a fast ramadoola about how she was the kind of girl who should be treated to a fancy dinner, the theater, and dancing thereafter. One could almost mentally envision this lad squiring the lady to a series of (what he thought were) high-class places like Frascatti’s, the Victory Drive-In and the then-extant Cinnamon Cinder.

  Number Two opined the lady was a “down-to-earth kinda girl who’s more interested in simple things,” and he conjured up a dream date consisting of hamburgers at McDonald’s, bowling, and making out in his car at Malibu.

  It wasn’t hard to beat those two efforts.

  “Well,” I said, adopting a Ronald Colman voice, “for you I would plan a formal evening with you in Pucci gown and me in tuxedo. I would have the chef at Scandia prepare for us a picnic dinner of breast of guinea hen under glass and jeroboams of champagne—Taittinger’s Blanc de Blanc ’45 possibly—and then I would have us, with our dinner, chauffeured out to the city dump where, with ivory-handled .45s, we would sip bubbly and amuse ourselves by shooting rats.”

  “Shooting rats?!?!” The shriek from the muffin on the other side of the set was a ghastly thing to hear.

  Again, silence.

  The recovery was much longer this time.

  But recover she did. And proceeded through the rest of the questions concentrating on #’s 1 and 2. Number Three was conspicuous by his silence and his satisfied smirk.

  As you may have gathered, by this time I was thoroughly nauseated by the whole thing. It was demeaning, it was vapid, it was like a hiring hall for dock wallopers. It removed from male and female alike any pride in self, any sense of self as worthy, any depth or loveliness. I wanted out of there.

  Finally, because it became apparent that she was ignoring me, I suppose, my potential ladylove decided to include me in a final question. It was a beauty.

  “Tell me, Number One,” she began, “how you would go about convincing me I should go out with you.”

  I could not believe my ears. She didn’t really ask that, did she?

  But she had, and he did, and I wanted to puke. Number One did a seedy Continental number unctuous with double-entendre. Then Number Two all but fell to his baggy knees pleading with this brainless excuse for a woman to go out with him. Then she got to Number Three: “Convince me, Number Three,” she said.

  “Convince you, you idiot!” I snarled. “I wouldn’t go out with a nit like you if they offered me the governorship of Hawaii as inducement. You, and this whole dumb show can go take a sunbath in a cyclotron!”

  And I got up and walked off.

  There were screams from the stage. The director and the tape editor and the cameramen and the producer and the emcee and the advertising men and the grips and maybe even that nifty little guy, Chuck Barris, started screaming. “Burn t
hat goddamn tape!” I heard someone shriek from back out there.

  “Cut! Cut! Cut!” the floor director was shouting. It was bedlam. People were running everywhichway. I couldn’t see her, but the female contestant was hawking in a dry-heave sort of way over her chest mike. The other two guys were still sitting on their stools, dumbfounded.

  I saw a horde of people advancing on me from backstage, and I ran like a thief. Got away with barely my skin intact.

  The show was never aired, of course. And I got word through friends (and a secretary at Barris Productions I dated occasionally) that my name was high on the list of war criminals, on a par with nonbiodegradables, lung cancer, Minnie Pearl chicken, and Hermann Goering.

  Every once in a while, even today, some new recruiter for the show, not knowing my past history with the show, will turn up my name, or see me on a talk show, or read some article I’ve written, and call me, asking if I want to go on the program. I always, very conscientiously, explain to her what happened, and then suggest she go and ask the producer of the show specifically, then get back to me if they want me on again.

  To date, those calls have never been returned.

  73: 31 JULY 70

  You’re not going to believe this, but after having spent three full weeks out in the Great American Heartland, spreading the warmth and loving-kindness of my own true self at Clarion College in Pennsylvania, in the darker corners of Pittsburgh, and in the literary jungle of New York City (you’ll be overjoyed, I know, to learn there’ll be a second volume of The Glass Teat early next year; Ace Books is contracting for same; seems they are selling the dumb book like mad; a clear case of hyping sandboxes to bedouins), and after writing this column for several weeks in advance, just so none of you would retch yourselves into withdrawal, when I sit down and sweat my ass off writing this week’s installment, a column of such incredible scintillance the mind cannot contain the wonder of it, and it comes out at 3300 words of tightly constructed prose, and I bring it in and lay it on Brian Kirby and his troll staff, they have the temerity, the audacity to tell me I’m only five days past my deadline and I can take my column, roll it into a tight little funnel, and insert it carefully in a place that was never intended by god or proctologists as a repository for verbiage; and such a column, as my tanta Bernice would say; such a thing about Vincent Edwards and Universal’s new Matt Lincoln series from the ABC movie Dial Hot Line; such a column fraught with significance that they’re gonna run it next week and here I have to sit down in the dumb offices of the Freep and tap out 19½ inches of a new column as filler and I’m so pissed off at the vagaries of newspaper deadlines that I’ve decided to write this replacement shtick as one long sentence and if you can follow the convoluted and prolix track of this, my literary revenge, you will see a feat of superhuman stupidity…but anyhow, the only thing I have to write about at such abbreviated length is the Channel 11 Creature Feature horror flicks they’ve been running Sunday nights over KTTV, which come to notice only because I received a letter from a two-man group calling itself “Quasimodo” (thereby once again proving what flippos old horror movie buffs are, you’ll pardon my sacrilegiousness) which is actually two dudes named Reaves and Bertges from San Bernardino who complain—quite rightly, may I add—that the licensed taxidermists at KTTV, inured to the values of artistic truth and the eternal verities inherent in all great creations from the Pietà to the manhole cover, have been using pinking shears on the great horror classics of the Thirties in order to run two features in a two-hour time slot (thereby leaving Dracula with only one fang, what a stupid thing, a one-hole neck puncture) instead of letting the films run their natural (or unnatural, depending on how you feel about guys who turn into wolves and other hippie pastimes) courses which, because of the six-thumbed ineptitude of the KTTV butchers, reduces Frankenstein and his monster to something resembling Frick & Frack in the Transylvanian Highlands and the famous Karloff opus, The Black Cat, to babbling incoherency; well, sir, they are rightly pissed off, and in an effort to function as the Avenging Sword of all just causes (can you dig how lightweight this column must be, when I don’t rant about EVIL and REPRESSION and WAR and allathat good stuff, and I have to put significance on a bunch of guys who can’t find anything more constructive to do with their Sunday nights than watching old creepies when they should be out trashing the nearest VFW hall or sending in bogus solicitations of George Murphy’s name to the Famous Tracheotomists School) I checked over the Xerox of the letter they’d received in answer to their beef to KTTV, and I got on the horn and called the executive producer of Creature Features (knowing in front the guy has got to be a bitter sonofabitch: I mean, a grown man, and the best job he can get is executive producer for a bunch of things that slither and go boomp on the tube) and he turns out to be Jon Ross, with whom I played the Synanon game in the halcyon days when I was in need of tender psyches against which to vent my groupistically therapeutic rage, and here he is, good old Jawn, giggling and simpering until I tell him to shut up and explain why it is he’s doing these wretched shitty things to perfectly good fillums, and Jon stammers a little bit, because he knows if he doesn’t give me a straight answer I’ll spill in this column all the ugly, twisted, demented, and perverted things about him I learned in those Synanon snake pit sessions; so he comes clean that there’ve been nine hundred thousand catcalls and complaints on the emasculation process where these old horror flicks are concerned, and he says he doesn’t know what to do about it, and I decide in the name of Quasimodo and all those other unfortunate loons who’ll suck their thumbs if I don’t get them their monster movies to direct and advise poor befuddled Jon Ross, so I says to him, I says, “Jon, buhbie sweetie chickie pal, what I want you should do is stop ripping out whole sections of Dracula just so you can show an hour of Soul of a Monster, which is a piece of unmitigated shit anyhow, and let the films run full length. Otherwise, Jon…” and I leave it like a lynched longhair in La Habra, hanging there with its eyes bugged and its tongue lolling, and he gets the ugly tone of my message at once and he begins to whimper, “But we have it all scheduled out through the month of August, and uh, er, eh, we, uh…” so I take pity on the poor sot, and I tell him I’ll let him continue his rotten and rapacious methods for the month of August, but that by September, by jiminy, he’d better run only one feature, uncut, and he practically slobbers his thanks and gratitude…so that’s why, Quasimodo, and all you other flips, you can count on a complete change of face by KTTV and its band of Quantrill Scissors Wielders a month from now, so don’t say there isn’t a god, or even a Zorro, because I always wanted to be a force for good in my time, and here I’ve actually gone and done it, and just because Kirby that egg-sucker stuck his head in the door and said he found another two inches of dead space and I should write to fill, I’ve had my fill of this sentence, and this column, as have you, probably, and so I’ll tag out by reminding you that Ace Books has published a full year of my demented ravings; and if your local newsie doesn’t have it and won’t order it, pour salt on his fields, rape his oxen, badmouth his wife, give his kids the crabs, and getahold of a copy for the betterment and upliftment of your mingy souls, which brings this sentence, this column, and, hopefully, Brian Kirby to a blessful end. Blues.

  74: 7 AUGUST 70

  If there’s anything I hate, it’s a veiled threat. (“Blackmail is an ugly word, Fawkes.”) So I’ll just rip off the veil. Matt Lincoln, we got our eyes on you, baby!

  If you detect a strong resemblance between Matt Lincoln, M.D., community psychiatrist, hot-line director, surly problem-solver and all-around, granite-hewed hero and Ben Casey, M.D., brain surgeon, head resident, surly problem-solver and all-around what I said before…the resemblance is more than superficial. A rose is a rose is a rose is a Matt Lincoln is a Ben Casey is a Vince Edwards. And we have been called upon, gentle readers, once again to police the channel waves.

  How it goes is this: Universal made a two-hour film for television called Dial Hot Line with Vincent Edwards as the Mr.�
��not Dr., as he continually pointed out—whose uncommon rudeness somewhichway magically bound together a group of concerned lay-social-worker types into a gestalt that tended a hot-line switchboard, bringing succor and straight talk to the troubled masses.

  After the show was run on ABC, it was announced that (surprise!) this sterling 120 minutes of taut, contemporary drayma would be the pilot for a new series debuting this fall on ABC, a series that would utilize the hot-line concept as a jumping-off springboard for stories of raw emotional content and searching, probing honesty about the frustrations and terrors of the young and old in our tottering society. In the pilot, Edwards was known as David Leopold, a name that rings with reality; in the series, he will be called Matt Lincoln. There is a clue to something in the change of name, something that smacks of alteration of persona, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe by the end of the column I’ll have worked it out. (Inquiring of the Matt Lincoln series’ producer, Mr. Irving Elman [whose screen credits include the script of The Challenge, the excellent Darren McGavin vehicle in which America and an unnamed Oriental power solve a confrontation with personal combat, each pitting its top dirty guerrilla fighter against his opposite number on a nomansland Pacific island], as to why the name change, I was informed there had been a number of jokes about the name Leopold at Universal. Leopold and Loeb seem to have been the peculiar nomenclatural hookup that prompted the dropping of a real name for a patently phony one. Fearing, apparently, that if there were jokes about Leopold and Loeb around Universal—thereby accurately pinning the level of humor one finds at that singularly humorless studio—the jokes might occur nationwide. Putting aside the sheer bullshit reasoning of this, it indicates once again the lack of perceptivity of tv programmers about the condition of the country today. A few weeks ago I had a date with a fairly literate college lady, who was born in 1951, and when I mentioned, at different times in the evening, Kiska and Attu, Wendell Willkie, friend and companion Margo Lane—the only one who knows to whom the voice of the invisible Shadow belongs—and G. David Schine, I was greeted with a size-seven blank stare. Now I am by no means denigrating the intelligence of America’s Burgeoning Young Folk, but it is patently obvious to all but dunderheads that kids today have eschewed roots and historical antecedents in favor of a zippier “now”’ orientation, which only time will advise us is a good or bad thing. What I’m trying to point out—in a painfully complex digression—is that if we are to take Mr. Elman’s explanation of the name change at face value, if he wasn’t putting me on—which is not difficult to do—then we have another example of arteriosclerotic thinking. If kids today consider anything prior to Buddy Holly and the Crickets as prehistory, then they sure as hell aren’t going to make any mental linkup between the name David Leopold and that of one of the kidnap/killers of Bobby Franks in 1924. Which allows the question to ask itself unbidden: with all this talk about “youthizing” the network schedules to hook the 18–36-year-old audience that does most of the consumer product purchasing, aren’t the tv moguls masturbating when they ask the same old men to think fresh and young?)