The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  In rapid succession came the BankAmericard reports of huge purchases of toilet articles, men’s clothing, women’s sportswear, hair dryers, and other goodies. Of course, I knew what had happened. At this point, pause with me, and join in a Handel chorus of O What a Schmuck Is Thee!

  Care to relive with me the last time you were fucked over? The feeling that your stomach is an elevator, and the bottom is coming up on you fast. That peculiar chill all over, approximated only by the morning after you’ve stayed up all night on No-Doz and hot, black coffee. The grainy feeling in the eyes, the uncontrollable clenching of the hands, the utter frustration, the wanting to board a plane to…where?…to there!…to the place where something that can be hit exists. It’s one thing to be robbed, it’s quite another to be taken. Okay, no argument, it’s all ego and crippled masculine pride, but God it burns!

  I pulled my shit together and dropped back into my Sam Spade, private eye, mode. First I called the Sacramento Medical Center and checked if there was a Valerie B. checked in. There wasn’t. Then I asked for a Mrs. Ellison Harlan. There wasn’t. Then I asked for Mrs. Harlan Ellison.

  There was.

  Then I called the Security station of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, there at the Medical Center. I spoke to the officer in charge, laid the entire story on him, and asked him to coordinate with Officer Karalekis of the West L.A. Detective Division, as well as Dennis Tedder at the BankAmericard Center in Pasadena. I advised him—and subsequently advised the Administrative Secretary of the Center—that there was a fraud in progress, and that I would not be held responsible for any debts incurred by the imposter posing as “Ellison Harlan,” “Harlan Ellison,” or “Mrs. Harlan Ellison.” Both of these worthies said they’d get on it at once.

  Then I called Valerie. She was in the orthopedic section. They got her to the phone. Of course, she answered: the only one (as far as she knew) who had any idea she was there was the man who had purchased the flowers.

  Is the backstory taking shape finally, friends? Yeah, it took me a while, too. And I’m dumber than you.

  That was May 23rd, ten days after the ambulance had removed her from the Holiday Inn and she’d been admitted to the Center.

  “Hello?”

  “Valerie?”

  Pause. Hesitant. Computer running on overload.

  “Yes.”

  “Harlan.”

  Silence.

  “How’s San Francisco?”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I get spirit messages. All you need to know is I found you, and I’ll find you wherever you go.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The cards, and the hundred bucks you conned off Jim Sutherland.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “Which?”

  “Any of it.”

  “Your boy friend has the cards.”

  “He split on me. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Climb down off it, Princess. If I’m a patsy once, that makes me a philosopher. Twice and I’m a pervert.”

  “I’m hanging up. I’m sick.”

  “You’ll be sicker when the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department there in the hospital visits you in a few minutes.”

  No hangup. Silence.

  “What do you want?”

  “I said what I wanted. And I want it quick. Jim’s too poor to sustain a hundred buck ripoff. I can handle the rest, but I want it all returned now.”

  “I can’t do anything while I’m in here.”

  “Well, you’re on a police hold as of ten minutes ago, so figure a way to do it, operator.”

  “God, you’re a chill sonofabitch! How can you do this to me?”

  There is a moment when one watches something beloved sink beneath the waves, and resigns oneself. There is a moment when one decides to cut the devil loose, to let the fire consume the holy icons and the fucking temple itself.

  “I’m the only one who can press charges against you, Valerie. Try and wriggle and I’ll chew on your eyes, so help me God.”

  There was silence at the other end.

  And silence, I now realize, till next week, when—because I’ve run over again—I’ll conclude VALERIE, COME HOME.

  INSTALLMENT 4 | 23 NOVEMBER 72

  VALERIE, PART THREE

  Sorry about missing my deadline last week, avid readers. Hope none of you succumbed to withdrawal. I was pressed on a deadline with my partner Larry Brody on the pilot script for the occult/fantasy series we sold to Screen Gems/NBC, The Dark Forces; and though I hates to keep y’all waiting, it was a matter of something like ten grand and, well, you understand. In point of fact, I called Chris Van Ness at the Freep and asked him to insert a block with the column art by Gahan Wilson, and an explanation that I’d died of cancer of the lymph glands, or somesuch, and would return next week (if they rolled aside the rock in time), but for some inexplicable reason Chris Van Ness didn’t do what he’d said he’d do, so please address all letter bombs to the culpable party. In any case, here we all are, gathered together around the campfire once again, and I’m prepared to finish off this last of three parts about Valerie the Vamp and how she ripped me off. When last we saw Harlan the Dumb…

  Valerie was ensconced in the Sacramento Medical Center, orthopedic section. As best I could piece together the off-camera action, she had either met up with her boy friend at the Burbank Airport—a guy described in the police report from his purchase of the flowers sent to Valerie as “Mrs. Ellison” in the hospital as a “dark, swarthy guy,” a description that tallied with Valerie’s mother’s recollection of him as “a Latin of some kind, maybe Cuban”—or had had him fly to Sacramento from San Francisco. They had shacked up at the Holiday Inn and something had happened to Valerie. Something serious enough for her to have to be rushed by ambulance to the Medical Center, at which point the boy friend had checked out on her, with my credit cards.

  Now I had her on (I thought) a police hold. I’d contacted the Sacramento Sheriff’s station at the hospital, and they said they’d check her out and keep her there for the action of either the Sacramento or Los Angeles police. I’d gotten her on the phone and told her I wanted the $100 she’d mooched off Jim Sutherland returned, and the cards as well.

  “I can’t do anything while I’m in here,” she said, finally.

  “You’re not getting out.” I was firm about that.

  “Then I can’t get the money.”

  “Then you’ll go to jail. I’ll press charges.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m just a rotten sonofabitch, that’s why.”

  A few more words were exchanged, then she rang off. I turned to Jim Sutherland and said, “I may have to fly up to Sacramento. It looks resolved, but I’ve got bad feelings about the sloppy way the BankAmericard people and the cops are going at this thing. Besides…I want to look at her face.”

  What I was saying was that I wanted to see if I could detect the stain of duplicity in her expression. What I was saying was I’d become a man with an ingrown hair that needed digging and tweezing; like all self-abuse, I needed to put myself in the line of pain, to relive the impact, to see what it was that had made me go for the okeydoke, what had made me such a willing sucker, so late in my life of relationships, making a mistake of placing such heavy emotions in such an unworthy receptacle. I was consumed with the need to understand, not merely to stumble on through life thinking my perceptions about people were so line-resolution perfect that I could never be flummoxed. She had taken me, and with such perfection that even after I had spoken to her in the hospital, even after I knew I’d been had, some small part of my brain kept telling me her expressed affection and attention could not all have been feigned.

  Thus do we perpetuate our folly.

  Fifteen minutes later, she called back, collect.

  “What did you tell them?” she demanded.

  “Tell who?”

  “The cops. A cop just came up to talk to me.”r />
  “I told you what I told them. That you were a thief and you were registered under an alias and I wasn’t going to be responsible for any bills you ran up and they’d better hold onto your pretty little ass till the laws had decided what to do with you.”

  “Are you going to press charges?”

  “Give me reasons not to.”

  “I’ll get the money back for Jim.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “I can’t do anything else.”

  “The cards.”

  “I don’t have them.” And she named her boy friend, who she said had kited off with them. That didn’t bother me; I’d already had the cards stopped. Larry Lopes (pronounced LO-pez) was his name. It comes back to me now.

  “Okay. You get the hundred back to Jim and as far as I’m concerned you can move on to greener pastures.”

  She rang off, and I sat in the dwindling light of the sunset coming over the Valley to my hilltop, thinking furiously. Getting no answers.

  I heard nothing further for several days, and when I checked with Dennis Tedder at the BankAmericard Center in Pasadena, I was informed Valerie was no longer at the Sacramento Medical Center.

  They’d let her skip on the 23rd of May.

  She was gone, leaving behind a bill, in my name, for over a thousand dollars’ worth of treatments.

  My feelings toward Mr. Tedder, Officer Karalekis of the West L.A. porker patrol, and the nameless Sacramento Sheriff who had not only spoken to me, but had confronted Valerie and gotten an admission of guilt…were not particularly warm. Kindly note, I have just made an understatement.

  Things progressed from miserable to ghastly. The Superior Ambulance Service in Sacramento, despite several long letters explaining what had happened, and backing it up with Xerox documentation of the fraud, continued to dun me for the forty-three bucks Valerie’s passage from the Holiday Inn to the hospital had incurred. They finally turned it over to the Capital Credit and Adjustment Bureau. My attorney, the Demon Barrister Barry Bernstein, sent them a harsh note, and they finally cleared the books of my name. But the time spent, the aggravation when the nasty little pink notes came in the mail…

  And the hospital bill. It kept getting run through the computer and kept bouncing back to me. Finally, I called the head of the business office at the hospital and laid it all out (again) in detail. As of this writing, that goodie is struck.

  And Valerie was gone.

  In speaking to Tedder at BankAmericard, I discovered, to the horror of my sense of universal balance, that Bank of America really didn’t care about bringing her and Mr. Lopes to book. They apparently don’t expend any effort on cases under five hundred dollars. BofA can sustain innumerable ripoffs at that level without feeling it. (This I offer as incidental intelligence on two counts: first, to permit those of you who are planning scams against BofA to understand better the limits of revenge of that peculiar institution, a limit that scares me when I think of how much they must gross to permit such a cavalier attitude; and second, to slap BofA’s pinkies for their corporate posture on such matters; at once similar to that of the great insurance conglomerates that permit ripoffs, thereby upping premiums, a posture that encourages dishonesty and chicanery. A posture that has aided in the decay of our national character. It occurs to me, when I say things like that—though I genuinely believe them—that they sound hideously messianic, and I blush. So ignore it, if you choose.)

  Valerie was gone, as I said. When I called her mother, to inform her of the current status, she sounded very upset and offered to give Jim back his hundred dollars. I thought that was a helluva nice gesture. Yet when the check arrived, it was only for fifty. Poor Jim. I would have made good the other fifty, on the grounds that he’d laid the money on her because he thought we were a scene, but it never came to that.

  Two or three months later, Valerie called again.

  I had tracked her through my own nefarious contacts, to Pacifica, a community near San Francisco. She had been hanging out with a ratpack of losers and unsavory types, and I knew where she was virtually all the time. But I’d told her mother if the money came back to Jim and the cards weren’t used again, I would have no further interest in seeing her cornered, and I held to that.

  Then she called. Out of the blue, to snag a fresh phrase. “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Valerie.”

  Terrific. What’re you selling this week, cancer?

  “Are you there?”

  “I’m here. What do you want?”

  “I want my stuff. My clothes and electric curlers and stuff.” They were all packed in the bottom of Jim’s closet…waiting. For what, we’d never stopped to consider. Maybe the Apocalypse.

  “Sure, you can have your stuff,” I said.

  “How do I get it? Will you drive it out to my Mom’s in Pasadena, she doesn’t have a car.”

  I have heard of chutzpah, I have witnessed incredible gall and temerity, but for sheer bravado, Valerie had a corner on the product.

  “I’ll tell you how you get it,” I said. “We’re like a good pawn shop here. You come up with the fifty bucks for Jim, the fifty you still owe him, and we release your goods. Just redeem your pawn ticket, baby.”

  “I don’t have fifty.”

  “Ask Larry Lopes for it.”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Ah, but I know where you is. Have your friends boost somebody’s hubcaps and get the fifty.”

  “Go to hell!” And she hung up.

  I shrugged. Ain’t life teejus, mah baby.

  Later that day, Valerie’s mother called and offered to unhock Valerie’s goods for the fifty remaining. She made it clear she had no idea where Valerie was on the lam, but I don’t think anyone will consider me cynical for believing that may not have been the strict truth.

  So Jim took the clothes out to Pasadena, picked up the fifty, and the Sacramento Medical Center canceled the bill as unrecoverable, and that’s as much as I know, to this point.

  Well…not quite.

  I know one more thing. And it’s this:

  In every human being there is only so large a supply of love. It’s like the limbs of a starfish, to some extent: if you chew off a chunk, it will grow back. But if you chew off too much, the starfish dies. Valerie B. chewed off a chunk of love from my dwindling reserve…a reserve already nibbled by Charlotte and Lory and Sherri and Cindy and others down through the years. There’s still enough there to make the saleable appearance of a whole creature, but nobody gets gnawed on that way without becoming a little dead. So, if Cupid (that perverted little motherfucker) decides his lightning ought to strike this gnarly tree trunk again, whoever or whatever gets me, is going to get a handy second, damaged goods, something a little dead and a little crippled.

  Having learned that, all I can advise is an impossible stance for all of you: utter openness and reasonable caution. Don’t close yourself off, but jeezus, be careful of monsters with teeth. And just so you know what they look like when they come clanking after you, here is a photo of one. The package is so pretty, one can only urge you to remember Pandora. Be careful which boxes you open, troops.

  INSTALLMENT 5 |

  Interim Memo

  Rather than writing an expansive general introduction to the Hornbook, and missing this or that sidebar anecdote, I’ve opted for this device, the Interim Memo. From place to place in these pages, when some updating information is needed, I’ll drop in on you and do one of those numbers like the pre-end credit explanations in a movie, telling you what happened to the principal characters, or passing along whatever dubious wisdom I’ve accrued in the twenty years between.

  Take for instance this column.

  I was thirty-eight years old. I was dating a marvelous young woman named Lynda who went on to get her degree and Master’s in psychiatric medicine. Last I heard, she had married one of her professors at UC-Berkeley, and was in practice. I may have some of this wrong, she may be a psychologist and n
ot a psychiatrist, but I seem to recall she went to medical school as well, so probably the latter. Haven’t heard from her in years, and that makes me mildly sad. We were good friends, she was a fine person, and now, at age fifty-five, I recall those kids and pets, men and women, friends and lovers, who have gone past and don’t keep in touch.

  But when I do cast back in reflection on the women I knew, one thing comes sharply into focus: they were all a kind of getting-ready for meeting and marrying Susan. And I lament the thirty-five years I spent without her.

  INSTALLMENT 5 | 30 NOVEMBER 72

  GETTING STIFFED

  Turned around—widdershins—the other day, and realized I’d been writing professionally for seventeen years. Holy shit! When I sold my first novel, I was barely twenty-one, and for the last decade and a half I’ve gotten used to being called “brilliant young writer” or “enfant terrible” or other useless appellations guaranteed to lull an egomaniac into believing he can eternally bear a banner emblazoned NEW! NEW! NEW! like some detestable margarine advertisement. But I’m not new no more, and the next sound you hear will be the Whey-Faced Child Author heaving an adult sigh of relief. (Permitted on the grounds that Lynda, who is eighteen and incredibly lovely, realized that she had read my first novel when she was in grade school. And if you don’t have the sense to realize the woman on the other side of your bed was one year old when you started selling stories, and that time passes, and growing up is a delight, and getting older is a joy, then you ought to go over to Baskin-Robbins and have them scoop out your head for the flavor of the month, Adolescent Brainpan Ripple.)

  So I’m thirty-eight, thank god, and at least chronologically no longer a tot, thank god, and enjoying the hell out of playing at being an adult, thank god, and looking forward to gray hair, I wish already, and from that lofty pinnacle of advanced wisdom I am now permitted, after seventeen years as a professional writer, to give advice to younger writers.