The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  But next week I’ll tell you about how I packed this .25 Beretta for Al Wilson when I was seventeen years old, and if you don’t want to laugh, then you can either go fuck yourself or read Chris’s record reviews.

  And if you need a witness, call Ben Jason in Cleveland. He was there. So was I. And next week, so will you.

  INSTALLMENT 26 | 25 MAY 73

  WHEN I WAS A HIRED GUN, PART ONE

  To be read in the style of a Dashiell Hammett story, featuring Sam Spade, “the hardest-boiled private eye of them all.” Move it.

  I was once a hired gun.

  Restrain mirth, and zipper your pudding-trough, and I’ll lay it on you how it came to pass that a seventeen-year-old kid wound up packing a .25 Beretta for a pseudo-wealthy neurotic paranoid. (Yeah, that’s right, it’s the same model Beretta that Bond packed in the early Fleming books, till armaments experts pinned him to the wall with the skinny that that particular model automatic is a “ladies’ gun” about as effective in stopping a determined thug as a hatpin, which I didn’t know at the time, or I’d have crapped with terror.)

  It was 1951, Cleveland. I was going to East High School, a pretty tough school even for those Blackboard Jungle days, and I was into science fiction. I was a charter member of the Cleveland Science Fiction Society, calling ourselves The Terrans. We’d gone from one member’s house to another with our meetings, until one week an outré dude named Al Wilson showed, and offered us his pad for a regular meeting place.

  It was a converted dentist’s office over a supermarket, on the second floor of a building somewhere around East 125th Street and St. Clair Avenue. Some of the facts blur, it’s over twenty years ago; but the substance is precise.

  Wilson looked like a Martian to me. At least, what I had always seen represented in sf magazines as a Martian: skinny, large head, receding hairline, big eyes. He was, to me, a weird and fascinating man. He was into the Fortean Society and all its unexplained phenomena, Korzybskian General Semantics, heavyweight physical sciences, occultism, and he filed his socks under “S” in the filing cabinet. His place was a rabbit hole for me, and I fell down that hole willingly because my Dad was recently dead, I was lost and miserable, doing rotten in school, relating only to science fiction and the emerging world of sf fandom. So Al Wilson came around at just the right time. He wasn’t close enough physically or emotionally to be a father image for me, but he was the guru I needed at just that time.

  So I started hanging around Al’s place all the time. He had a Multilith machine right in the middle of the floor, a Varityper for typing up issues of the club newsletter, and stacks of erudite and obscure books, like Tiffany Thayer’s novels, Fort’s studies of “excluded facts,” what they called “a procession of the damned,” James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft, Lincoln Barnett…that whole crowd. There was a cot in the middle of the “apartment.” No sheets. Al slept whenever he felt like it, ate whenever he felt like it, operated off no known clock.

  One day, after I’d been playing Roo to his Kanga for some months, Al sat me down and asked me if I wanted a job.

  I was seventeen, my Dad had died leaving my Mother and myself not too well off, we were living in a resident hotel on East 105th Street, The Sovereign (where Joel Grey also lived when he was Joel Katz), and the best job I’d been able to get was in a bookstore. “How much and what do I have to do?”

  “Two hundred a month and you’ll be sort of a bodyguard for me. Run errands. Be around when I need you.”

  I looked at him. Weird eyes looked back.

  Al Wilson worked on the assembly line at Thompson Products—or maybe it was Fisher Body in East Cleveland, I don’t remember exactly—and I knew he made a good wage, but two hundred a month for a gopher?

  I said okay, and went to work for Al Wilson.

  I didn’t tell my Mother. She was always a little leery about those oddball sf people I was hanging out with, and if I’d told her I was making fifty a week, without deductions, for bodyguarding a Martian, she’d have…well, she’d have done what she did later. So I kept it quiet and slipped a few bills into her purse when she wasn’t looking. Made up in a small way for all the money I’d stolen out of her purse when she was sleeping.

  I ran peculiar errands for Al Wilson. Food, sometimes, which wasn’t peculiar, but books of a very peculiar nature other times, and strange messages to even stranger people. Then one day, Al brought home a package and unwrapped it on the feeder ledge of the Multilith. I came over and watched; it was a gun. And a shoulder holster. “What’s that for?”

  He looked at me with those weird eyes and said, “You’ll need to wear this from now on when you’re running errands for me.”

  “To the supermarket?”

  “You’ll be flying out this week. Other things.”

  So I started packing the heat. I thought it was funny; and I dug playing pistolero. Sue me.

  He also said, “From time to time I want you to scare me.” It was in one of those moments when Al wasn’t goofing or being weird. It was one of his pathetic moments. He was a lonely man leading an isolated life, he’d been married and divorced long before—even though he was only in his thirties—and now he was all alone inside his skull, thinking things no one else could understand, making friendships slowly, trusting no one. I didn’t ask him what he meant, I knew. He wanted me to feed his strangeness, whatever that was.

  So I would leave, during the dark of the evening, and I’d go down the long hall and down the stairs and go outside and around the side of the building and there, where they’d rolled up the awnings that shaded the big display windows of the supermarket, I’d climb up the ratchet bar that raised and lowered the canvas awnings, and I’d stand on the rolled-up awning, which brought my face to just the level of the second-story window, and I’d make hideous sounds and tap on the windows and scream and scare the hell out of him.

  Did he know it was me? Of course he knew. He’d asked me to do it, hadn’t he? Move it.

  Peculiar errands. “Take this briefcase and go to a man in Cincinnati whose name I’ll give you, and hand it to him and tell him the key to unlock it will come under separate cover by another route. If he asks you your name tell him it’s Roger Conroy, and spell it for him with two ‘y’s.”

  Peculiar errands. “I have this canister of fulminate of mercury,” he said to me one day, showing me a large canister of fulminate of mercury, which explodes on the slightest friction or shock.

  “Jesus Whirling Christ!” I said, with a decibel count that could have gotten me a booking as the PA system for Madison Square Garden. I jumped eleven feet nine inches and came down running. Eventually he collared me and said I had to dispose of it. “You’re outta your mes-o-po-tam-ee-un mind,” I said, feet still running, body held aloft, “no way I’m gonna get near that stuff. That’s dangerous, Al! If it goes off there won’t be enough of me left to slip into an envelope and mail back to my Mummy.”

  So we did it together. We took a bus out Euclid Avenue to what used to be called the Nottingham area beyond East Cleveland. There was this idyllic little pastoral setting, all trees and low hills, right near a shopping area, and running through it, about three hundred yards from Euclid Avenue, which was the main thoroughfare bisecting the heart of Cleveland, was Euclid Creek. Pre-pollution time, it was a sort of park where people went to lie out under the trees and read, play with their children, walk their dogs; nice place.

  Al and I got down from the bus, walked down the slope to the Creek, and Al uncapped the canister he’d been carrying in a paper bag. Those of you who know what fulminate of mercury does on contact with water will know what happened next. You will also understand that I had (and have) a very inadequate grasp of chemistry.

  But Al should have known! (That has always been one of the big mysteries about him: he clearly did know a whole hell of a lot about science…why didn’t he know what would happen? Or did he?)

  He tossed the protective canister into the Creek and we turned to go, when the GODD
AMNEDEST FUCKING GIGANTIC CATACLYSMIC KRAKATOAN EXPLOSION!!! (East or West of Java!) went off and that bloody canister came erupting out of the Creek with a waterspout that drenched us both. And hurled the canister right back at us as if King Neptune had got it right in his kisser. Al grabbed for it, and chunks of mercury were all over the grass, sputtering and exploding and sparking and banging away with a million tiny reports like the Lilliputian militia on maneuvers. He grabbed the canister and flung it back in!

  “No, no!” I screamed, but Al was busy picking up the bigger chunks of mercury with his bare hands, burning the shit out of himself, and whipping the exploding chemical back into the Creek.

  This time it went off with a series of explosions like giant firecrackers, and the canister came up out of the depths skipping across the water like a spasming submarine. I ran like a thief.

  Behind me, last thing I could see, was Al Wilson, a deranged Martian elf, scampering around grabbing up burning mercury with his hands throwing it into the Creek…

  In the distance I could hear police sirens…

  I didn’t see him for a week, but when I went back to his pad, he made no mention of the event, and I didn’t comment on his bandaged hands. Peculiar errands.

  Then Al fell in love. Oh god.

  He came home one night after working the swing shift, and his face was almost beatific with light. Seems there was this girl working a couple of lathes down from him, and he hungered for her soul as no one had hungered since Paolo and Francesca were condemned to an eternal fuck in THE DIVINE COMEDY. He set me to the task of shadowing her, to finding out where she lived. So I went to work with him one day, he pointed her out to me, and I came back when his shift was ended, and followed her. On the bus. I don’t remember where it was now, this many years later, but it was one of the suburban tract house areas. I tracked her for a week till I was pretty sure I knew her habits, and then I asked Al what he wanted to do about it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, why don’t you just go up to her and ask her for a date?”

  “I can’t. I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, Al, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I can’t. I need you to make an introduction for me.”

  “Me?!?”

  “Sure. I’ll send her a gift, and you’ll be my John Alden.”

  “Oh, Gawd! Miles Standish was an asshole, Al. No wonder Priscilla Mullins flopped for John Alden. Do it yourself.”

  “No, no. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll send her a special gift and you’ll carry it for me and you’ll tell her all about me. She’ll like you.”

  Seers, savants and soothsayers will perceive what came next.

  So will dummies.

  I came waltzing up to this girl’s house one evening, carrying Al’s “special gift.” All set to make the big pitch for the Martian. Now, you may ask, what special gift did Al Wilson, who thought like none of us, maybe not like anyone else who’d ever lived on the Earth, select for the girl of his sex dreams? A brooch, an amethyst necklace, flowers, a five-pound box of cherry-filled chocolates, an ermine cape, a complete set of the works of the Brontë sisters, a gift certificate for a year’s worth of McDonald hamburgers, a diamond ring…?

  Al Wilson had bought her an eleven-pound steak, had it wrapped in plastic, and had mounted it on an expensive Swedish serving tray.

  Don’t ask and I won’t have to talk about it.

  “Al,” I’d said, “what the hell kind of a gift is that to make an introduction?”

  He insisted that was what he wanted her to have. Today, that might be a wild gift, the cost of meat being what it is, but this was in the early Fifties and a slab of meat was just plain crazy. But I took it. I was working for him.

  Up to the door of the house, rang the bell, waited. She came to the door, opened it, and looked at me. Did I bother to tell you she was a sensational-looking girl?

  “I was wondering how long it would take you to say hello,” she said. “I’ve been watching you follow me home for a week.”

  Dwell on that for a while. I’ll finish this next week.

  INSTALLMENT 27 |

  Interim Memo

  The conclusion of the story about Al Wilson takes care of itself; but a month elapsed between the original publication of parts one and two. And I make reference to intervening events. Here’s what happened to those sidebars:

  1. The Starlost went on the air, over the NBC owned-&-operated stations. 20th Century-Fox screwed me, screwed the production, didn’t have it filmed by Sir Lew Grade in England, but rather laid it off on a Canadian company. It was a terrible series, and I talk about what happened in an essay titled “Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas, Toto” that originally appeared as the introduction to PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES, a novel based on my Writers Guild Award-winning pilot teleplay. The novel was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal in 1975, and was excellently written by Edward Bryant. It is now out of print (but may return soon). The essay, updated and expanded, can be found in two places: STALKING THE NIGHTMARE (1982) and the thirty-five-year retrospective THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON (1987). So I won’t take up space reprinting it again here. If you’re curious, you can find it. A nightmare.

  2. The novel based on The Dark Forces didn’t get finished. Pinnacle didn’t publish it. The tv series went through script development—another year out of my writing life—and the network gave it a pass. “We don’t think the audience wants to see sf or fantasy,” they said. That was 1973–74. They knew, with the intelligence best capsulated by critic John Simon in the phrase “…as vast and mysterious as the inside of a noodle…” that the American audience was turned off by sf and fantasy. And they were proved as absolutely correct as they always are, by the utter disinterest of the American audience in Star Wars, three years later; as they have been by such films as Alien, Close Encounters, E.T., Brazil, Roger Rabbit, the Star Trek films, Batman and maybe a hundred others since 1973–74; such unarguably immutable disinterest that brought back The Twilight Zone and has become even more concretized, to the extent that sf and fantasy films now hold almost all the box office records. How could I have ever doubted their keen insights and informed extrapolations?

  3. My mother died. I write about that later.

  4. Not only were the charges of strike-breaking against me dismissed, but in the extensive hearing set up according to Writers Guild rules (chaired by the famous Christopher Knopf), an unprecedented censure of the Board of Directors was handed down. Much of the background of this incident—mentioned so casually in my column, as it was just unfolding at that time—is related in the essay about The Starlost. Suffice to say, in this life, the two most despicable things you could call me—that I would sooner put a bullet through my head than be—are scab or plagiarist. I had not, in any way, hindered our strike. I had, in fact, resisted all blandishments and threats on the part of the studio, had even gone so far as to thwart their machinations to get another writer to do the work I refused to do; and had gone to Canada at the direct instructions of the Board of Directors (hence the investigatory committee’s censure), and with grave misgivings.

  5. And “Catman” can be found in my collection APPROACHING OBLIVION. And so much for updating. My, how time flies.

  INSTALLMENT 27 | 28 JUNE 73

  WHEN I WAS A HIRED GUN, PART TWO

  Since the June 1st edition of the Freep, wherein I told the first part of the story of how I was a hired gun for Al Wilson, back in 1951 when I was seventeen…many strange and wearying things have happened to me. My sf tv series, The Starlost, goes on NBC in September, and I’ve been commuting between L.A., N.Y. and Toronto, writing scripts and working with Canadian writers who’ll write other scripts; I’ve written half a new novel that Pinnacle Books will release in October, the first of The Dark Forces series featuring my sorcerer Kraiter and based on yet another tv series I’ve sold (in collaboration with Larry Brody); there was a writers’ conference in the wilds of the Michigan woods; there was the news of my Mother’s near-d
eath in Miami Beach (and I’m still sweating that one out); I’ve been brought up on strike-breaking charges by my own union, the Writers Guild—and I’d as lief not go into that one, friends…it makes me too angry to articulate…but it’ll work out, never fear—I am secure in my own ethical behavior—and I wrote two new stories, one 15,000 words long and the other 5,000. The former is in response to an assignment to write the “ultimate futuristic sex story.” It’s called “Catman” and you’ll find it in a forthcoming anthology titled FINAL STAGE. So. All of that is the reason I haven’t been able to tell you what happened with Al Wilson and my being a hired gun.

  But I’m back now, and here we go again.

  If you recall, last time I told about how I’d been hired by Al, a wealthy neurotic, to pack a Beretta for him, be his errand boy and general all-around companion. Al was a tot weird, if you recall, and when he fell in love with a girl who worked the same shift at Fisher Body in Cleveland, he decided I would be his John Alden to the swing-shift Priscilla Mullins. His “love gift” was a huge slab of meat on a wooden platter. I’d been following her for days, to find out where she lived, and to give you an indication of how suave a secret agent/shadower I was, when I rang the doorbell and she answered, she said, “I was wondering how long it would take you to say hello. I’ve been watching you follow me home for a week.”

  Then she invited me in. She introduced me to her Mother. “Oh, you’re the one,” her Mother said. “We were going to call the police about you.” I guess I giggled nervously.

  “What’s with the steak?” the girl said.

  “Ah-hmm. I am a messenger for Mr. Al Wilson, who works with you at the plant. Mr. Wilson, who is a very shy man, but a very nice man, would like to come calling. He has sent me and this small token of his respect and admiration as a calling card.”