The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  For those who ask, why did you put up with it, I can only suggest that I was in a state of shock that he had even done such a thing, was rewarding my friendship with such a blatantly anarchistic maneuver, that I was being fucked over by someone I’d treasured and loved as a man of high ethic and purpose. Add to it that I was in a personal quandary about my wife and the other woman, and there was much of the somnambulist about me. Also, much of the weak and cowardly. It isn’t always possible to look good when retelling the pivotal incidents of one’s life.

  I took it for less than a week, and quit.

  Because of not having the money I needed, four years of bitter struggling and poverty lay ahead for me, and for Billie. I arrived in Los Angeles with her and her son, with ten cents in my pocket. It was a period of pain and scuttling like an animal to keep her in decent surroundings (we had separated and I had to come up with the rent on two separate apartments), while trying to break into films and television.

  Everyone survives. Somehow, even if they suicide, everyone survives. I came through it and made a career for myself in the visual media, Billie remarried, to a fine man who has made her happy, and Scarff went on from Regency Books to a job at Playboy and then on into public relations work. He still lives in Chicago, with his family.

  There’s a punch line, however. It keynotes what happens when a god turns to a monster for one who stupidly worships.

  Many years later, when editing an anthology, I contacted Scarff for a story. Though I despised him, I had lost no respect for his work as a writer. (Again, I reiterate, one should never confuse the artist with the artist’s work.) He promised to do a story for the book, said he needed some money, and if I’d send him an advance of $100 he’d write the piece in the next few weeks and I could send the balance of the payment when I accepted the story. It had been so long since Scarff had written anything except PR puff for a pickle manufacturer, I sent the $100 immediately.

  He never wrote the story.

  The book went to press and he never returned the $100, money that was taken from the pockets of other writers who could have realized greater advances on the work they had produced for the book. Again, I was bitterly disappointed, and again I felt like a patsy.

  I never worked very hard at trying to get the hundred back. I confess to a sickness of soul that made me turn away from all thoughts of Scarff, who now loomed as large in my world as a detestable example of a man who would sell out his friends for security as he had loomed in godlike adoration.

  I did hold back some small royalties on a story we had written together, many many years before, a story published in a book of collaborations I’d done with fourteen other writers, but it was pennies and would never total the hundred he’d taken. And besides, it was too late to use the money for the other writers in the anthology.

  That was the way it stood till several weeks ago.

  A writer of my acquaintance contacted me for Scarff’s address. Said he wanted to buy one of Scarff’s earlier novels for a possible movie deal. I told him to hold off for a few days, that I’d get the address to him but I had an old score to settle and wanted to use the deal as a lever.

  Then I called Scarff and told him about the movie deal, about the potential money involved, and told him if he wanted me to make the connection he had to write the story he’d promised me years before, to be included in the final volume of the anthology, that had grown out of proportion into three big books.

  He said I was blackmailing him. I said he was correct.

  There was a protracted silence on the line between Los Angeles and Evanston. And then that familiar bemused snicker I knew so well.

  “This is really ugly,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” I said.

  “I really can’t believe you’d do this,” he said.

  “I learned from the master,” I said.

  Then he began talking about the first fifteen pages (or some lie like that) of the story he’d started for me, years before. He said he’d go down into his basement office and dip the dust off them, and try to finish it for me. I was very polite, I think. I said that was swell, and I’d be happy, on seeing and accepting the story, to pay him at a handsome rate, any amount beyond the initial hundred he’d already gotten, so he’d make the full advance payment.

  “Why don’t I just send you the hundred back?”

  “Because I don’t want the hundred, Scarff. Money isn’t what’s between us and you know it. I want you to have to anguish to write that story.”

  (Now I wonder if I wasn’t still trying to save him from pickle publicity…but that’s a nobler instinct than I care to ascribe to what I was doing. I wanted revenge, and I wanted him in pain.)

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and hung up.

  I was both sickened and joyous. It was one of the ugliest things I’d ever done.

  Several hours later he called back.

  “I don’t want any part of this; it stinks,” he said.

  “That’s right, it does.”

  “I’d rather pass on the movie deal…if he wants the book badly enough he’ll find me,” he said. “I’m sending you a check for a hundred dollars.”

  “Very noble,” I said. “Floating ethics serve you well.”

  I hung up.

  The check came in last week. I’ll cash it and put it to work on the anthology Scarff would have appeared in. It’ll pay some other writers who can write. I don’t take Scarff’s revulsion at the blackmail proposition as an act of purity on his part. I take it as a reluctance on his part to assume responsibility for the monster he created in me that would permit such a ghastliness even to be considered.

  But the lessons I’ve learned—that I hope this story teaches you—are many. And valuable. Incredibly valuable. They’ve made me, in some ways, a tougher and less likeable fellow. They’ve made me become very realistic about what it takes to buy someone’s soul. They’ve strengthened my resolve never to sell out a friend, no matter what the price.

  And the sad part about it is that Scarff still doesn’t know what kind of a human being he was dealing with. I never would have kept him from that deal. I never intended to, not for a moment. But I knew he would think I would. Because that’s where his gut is at.

  The writer who wants to buy your book is Stephen Kandel, Scarff. He can be reached either through my agent, Martin Shapiro of the Shapiro-Lichtman Agency in Los Angeles, or through the Writers Guild of America, West, in L.A. I gave him your address after I spoke to you the first time.

  Good luck, little godling; because god knows you’ll need it. I’m going to take a shower.

  INSTALLMENT 25 |

  Interim Memo

  There was an even better story that came out of my trip to Billings, Montana—where this installment was written. Exactly the kind of berserk life-experience about which I speak in this piece. But it hadn’t happened as I sat in a Holiday Inn (or whatever it was) writing this column. It happened later that night, and when I tell people about it they get the special look I describe herein, that look of This guy is lying in his teeth.

  You see, the night of the day I wrote this, I gave an evening lecture at Eastern Montana University, and someone in the audience took a shot at me. It’s a long story, and one I’ll save for another book, some other time. But I’ve recounted it hundreds of times since it happened; and every time I tell it, someone gives me a hoot for making up bullshit.

  Now, when I married Susan, and she commenced traveling with me to my lectures, and she began hearing these seemingly berserk episodes from my past, her eyebrows went up. She loves me, so she never once said, Oh, c’mon, gimme a break! but I could tell that I was stretching her credulity.

  Until—and this happened again and again—I’d tell some wild experience, and unbidden, someone would jump up in the audience just as I described it in the essay and yell, “He’s not lying! I was there when The Hole In The Wall Gang, all one hundred of them, came charging at him with six-guns blazing!”

&nbs
p; And Susan came to understand that yes, this lunatic stuff had, in fact, honest-to-spinach, happened. But the one story she found a little dicey was the Billings, Montana, episode where someone got off a shot at me while I was in the middle of my lecture, right there in an auditorium jammed to the walls with Montanans.

  Until we made a pit stop at the International Superman Exposition in Cleveland, last year, 1988. I was standing with Susan in the hall of the Cleveland Convention Center, middle of June, talking to Tony Isabella and Bob Ingersoll, and up walked a woman I didn’t recognize at first, and she smiled and said, “Hi, Harlan, remember me? Sue Hart, I brought you to Billings for a lecture and they took a shot at you on the stage. Remember?”

  And my wife, Susan (not the Sue who’d walked up to us), gave a hoot-hoot-hoot of eureka! and squealed, “Ohmigod, it did happen!”

  I rest my case as to veracity. For the record.

  INSTALLMENT 25 | 11 MAY 73

  WHERE SHADOW COLLIDES WITH REALITY: A PREAMBLE

  For the record. One of the dumb expressions. For whose record? Who the hell is keeping track? What a paranoid phrase: as if one day we’d be called on to make an accounting. Shades of Joseph McCarthy and Reagan’s subversive list (whereon your gentle correspondent’s name appears). Also a grotesque manifestation of ego run mad. As if anyone gave a damn where someone stood on the smallest issue. God (or whoever’s in charge) knows we ignore the “record” most of the time; we continue to elect thieves and reprobates and moral salamanders; truth to tell, most of the nits who use the phrase “for the record” a hundred times a month would re-elect Nixon tomorrow, in defiance of the “record.” So. It’s a stupid phrase, and I hereby move we stop using it in our daily speech as though it had some significance, and further, that we cease to allow politicians and other mainliners to use it. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…

  For the record, I’m writing this in Billings, Montana. I’m on my way home from the lecture tour, and by the time your beady little marmoset eyes read this in the Freep, I’ll have been home for a day or two, recuperating, and thanks a lot I had a nice time, but don’t bother to call, I’ve got work to catch up on.

  Perhaps one day soon I’ll do a column or two on what it’s like being on the road for a month, lecturing at colleges, hustling business at publishing houses in New York, riding the Amtrak Metroliner between N.Y. and Philly, the joys of Dartmouth, the anguishes of science fiction conventions, the pains of knowing you lost not one but two Nebula awards a priori and then having to be a cheerful and witty toastmaster at the banquet where others get the goodies, the rain in Wisconsin which is seldom on the plain; I’ll write about Max and Karen and Bettina and the Countess Von Sternberg from Brooklyn and Susan and Denny and Ann and Stephanie and Andrea and Dana and Doxtater and the loons at Dartmouth who had a “Harlan Ellison Look-Alike Contest” and a “Nubile Co-Ed Availability for Dinner with Ellison Contest” before I ever got there, thereby making it a foregone conclusion that I was a sexist swine and effectively putting me beyond the pale of any human relationships. Perhaps I’ll write about that, one day. Perhaps not. I wouldn’t want to bore you.

  And besides (and here we come to the nubbin of this week’s ruminations on the state of the universe), when I rather matter-of-factly relate the weird and fascinating experiences that seem to happen to me in carload lots, I keep being accused of making up stories out of whole cloth to perpetuate some deranged charisma myth about my loveable self. And it’s that I want to talk about today: shadow and reality, witnesses, and all the lies that are my life.

  Look: I lead this really dynamite, interesting life. I tell you that not merely to make you miserable in your own wretched existences, but to set forth what I’ve come to believe is the mark of success in life:

  You’re a success if you live a life that brings you as close as possible to the dreams you had when you were a kid. Whether it’s to be a cowboy or a movie star or the best goddam milkman in the world, if it’s what you dreamed of being when you were a tot, and you’re doing it now…you’ve made it.

  I always wanted to be a world-famous writer. Well, I’m a world-famous writer, and I love it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll dig my toe in the dirt and do an aw shucks number. Or, as Zero Mostel said in The Producers, “When you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!”

  And because I’m living the best possible kind of life I can lead, I have adventures. Now maybe my adventures aren’t as wild as Cousteau’s or Lawrence of Arabia’s, or even Mailer’s, but because I’m a good storyteller, I can see the plot-line in the daily occurrences of my life, and when I retell them, I try and put a punch line to them, to tie them up dramatically the way I would a story. Now I’ll grant you that this kind of minor rearrangement of the time-sequences, emphases and insights is akin to lying, but that’s what I get paid to do: lie professionally. And it sure beats the bejeezus out of the dull, random manner in which life feeds us our experiences. So, in a very special way, everything I ever relate about how I live my life is a lie. Or maybe “lie” is too harsh a word. “Fib” is closer, but I suspect Vonnegut’s “foma”—harmless untruths—is the best. I never change the facts, just the way they are colored or arranged. I’ll never tell you I won if I lost, I’ll never tell you I was a good guy if I was bad. But there’s a bit of the imp in me, and if I add a flying fish or troll to an otherwise ordinary tale, it’s only to make you a little sunnier and happier as you move toward the grave. How can you condemn a man for such a noble and humanitarian activity?

  On the other hand, there are times when truly amazing adventures befall me, solely due to my fearless wonderfulness and the core truth that I have more charisma than even the Pillsbury Dough Boy. And when I later go back and recount such exploits, there are bound to be those who say, “That crazed fucker is lying in his teeth.”

  At which point I say, “Just ask Avram Davidson. He was there when I stood off an entire Italian street gang in Greenwich Village.” Or I say, “Just ask Bob Silverberg. He was there when the drunken Puerto Rican came at me with a busted Rheingold beer bottle, quart size.” Or I say, “Just ask Mariana Hernández—she’s my secretary—because she was there the morning I fell face-first into my bowl of chocolate Malt-O-Meal.”

  And it’s those witnesses whom I adore, because they rig the line between my fantasies and my reality. Truth to tell, friends, I’ve long since given up trying to differentiate between the two. My fantasies seem so much a part of my world, I can’t tell where the shadow leaves off and the substance begins.

  And since I intend to launch off on a series of these tales, I wanted to lay the ground rules this week, so you’d know what to expect. And to offer witnesses who can be contacted to prove that what I say is pretty much the truth.

  I do this not so much because I really give a shit, but because Chris Van Ness at the Freep tells me he’s had a few complaints about the column. People writing or calling in saying, “Who the hell cares about this Ellison schmuck and whether or not he was a pimp in Kansas City?” Well, to begin with, I was never a pimp in K.C. Or anywhere else for that matter. But I was a hired gun for a wealthy neurotic in Cleveland, when I was a teenager, and it’s a pretty good story, which I’m going to tell you next week, and I simply feel the time is ripe for us to understand what this column is all about, and what it’s not all about.

  Maybe I should have done this twenty-four weeks ago when the Hornbook started, but it never occurred to me that there would be people who objected to being entertained.

  That’s what this column is all about. Entertainment. I’m not a political columnist, nor a literary critic, nor a historical analyst. I’m simply a writer, a storyteller; if you read this column expecting to learn great lessons about Life, or expect me to explain the Natural Order of the Universe, forget it. Jack Margolis, poor Jack who’s getting his ass kicked by various and sundry because he’s a sexist, that poor Jack who never copped to being anything but a sexist so how can you revile him, friends, well, he’s into saying meaningful thi
ngs from time to time…but I try not to. It’s long been my feeling that a writer who sits down to write The Great American Novel usually winds up writing The Great American Shitpile. Too self-conscious. You can read great pronouncements about the condition of life in our times by Reagan and Unruh and all sorts of others from Ann Landers to Billy Graham, and maybe that’s what you need to enrich you; but as for me, all I want to do in these little journals is entertain. Make you laugh, make you cry, make you wait. As the English novelist Charles Reade said.

  If that isn’t good enough for you, why, simply turn to another page of the Freep and get uplifted or informed. But I’m confounded by readers who can’t be amused by foma, who want every stick of type in this paper to be heavy, redolent, festooned with import. It’s like a female editor I met in New York, whom I referred to as an “Editrix,” for a gag. It was to giggle, but a feminist in the crowd hissed and made a nasty to-do about it. Well, shit, friends, anything that can’t be made fun of, anything, anydamnthing, is doomed to sink of its own humorless weight. You’ve got to laugh, dammit! You’ve got to find giggles throughout the day or simply fucking die! Why the hell do you think so many deep-thinking intellectuals watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island on the sly? Because they’ve got to lighten up.

  Well, that’s what this column is. A lighten up.

  And if you find that an ugly, or a waste of space, well, just consider that the space might be used for rectal suppository ads or as promo for The Clint Eastwood To Replace John Wayne As Reactionary Sex Image American Patriot Hero Figure Committee. On the other hand, it might be used to run something worthwhile, so that argument doesn’t hold.

  All of which brings me with very little linear sense to the end. This week. Oh, I’ll be back all right. Until the shrieks outnumber the sighs of joy. But as long as Kunkin & Co. permit me to journal out my days in small parcels, the Hornbook will continue to try to outrage, tickle and lie to you.