The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  They looked at the steak, then they looked at me, then they looked at each other.

  “I think we should call the cops,” her Mother said.

  “No, no!” I said, my voice rising. “This is strictly legit. Al is just, well, you know, really quiet and bashful about women, and he’s seen you every day at the plant and he didn’t know how to strike up an acquaintance.”

  “You related to him?” the girl asked.

  “I work for him.”

  “Doing what?”

  How the hell do you tell two total strangers that you are a hired gun. I mean, for chrissakes, I had zits…I didn’t look a thing like Dick Powell or Bogart or even, god help me, Audie Murphy. I was just a kid with a dumb steak in my hands.

  “I run errands for him. He has money.”

  That seemed to brighten both of them. “We’ll cook it for dinner,” the Mother said. “Why don’t you stay?” said the girl. So I stayed. The night.

  We talked through most of the night, the girl and I. It is not by chance that I keep calling her “the girl.” After twenty-some years, I can’t recall her name. What I do recall is that she tried to get me to take her to bed, and I was a virgin, a scared virgin, and most of that night was spent in consummate horror of being deflowered. You must grasp that I was seventeen, had never even kissed a girl, and the idea of that lush creature and myself in a bed filled me with nameless terrors H. P. Lovecraft never imagined.

  I fled the next day, in company with the girl, with whom I rode the bus back into Cleveland. When she got off at Fisher Body, I kept going and would gladly have motored right out of the state if it hadn’t been for having to report back to Al.

  He wasn’t home when I got there, so I guess I went off to school. But at the end of the academic day I took the streetcar out to his apartment on St. Clair Avenue, and waited for him. When he showed, I thought the first thing he’d ask me was what had happened on his love mission. But he didn’t. He told me he had a vital errand for me to run, that he’d been out getting me plane tickets, and I was going to Cincinnati.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened with the girl and the steak?”

  “Oh, sure. What happened…but be brief.”

  So I told him she seemed like a nice girl (I didn’t mention that she wasn’t terribly bright, as far as I could tell) and that she seemed responsive to his overtures (I didn’t mention that she had spent the better part of the night trying to reap the dubious benefits of my post-puberty tumescence) and that he should call her.

  I wish I could tell you they got married and had nine kids, or that she had spurned him in a flamboyant scene, or that he had killed her, or she killed him…but the truth of the matter is that I never heard another word from Al about The Great Love Affair of the Century.

  Instead, I readied myself to go to Cincinnati.

  (An Author’s Note: after the first section of this reminiscence was published, I received a call from an old friend of twenty years’ standing, Roy Lavender, formerly of Ohio, now living in Long Beach. Roy remembered Al, remembered the period I had been working for Al, remembered, in fact, things I’d forgotten. You can perceive with what joy I took that call after the long preamble I had written about people thinking the weird things that happen to me are fever dreams made up on the moment. Roy is a living verification of what I’ve set down here, and he gave me some facts about Al I never knew. He also pointed out that the contents of the container Al threw into Euclid Creek—as reported last installment—was not fulminate of mercury but, rather, metallic sodium. Hence, the explosions. Roy also reminded me of the time Al was beset by a group of juvies from the area, who came up over the grocery awning to rip him off and beat him up in the apartment, and how Al beat the shit out of them, at one point using the handle from the Multilith press to slam a kid so hard it lifted him off through the window into the street below. Stay healthy and live long, Roy Lavender: you are my last touch with proof in this important life-experience.)

  Anyhow. Al handcuffed an attaché case to my wrist, gave me a hundred bucks, and sent me off to the airport. I made a mistake, however. It was a school day, and I stopped off at the optometry shop of my brother-in-law, Jerry, at East 9th Street and Prospect in Cleveland, to tell him I was going out of town and would be back the next day. Now, my family has always considered me something of an irresponsible, not to mention a dreamer who might as easily come home for dinner as show up ten hours later with a story that I’d been kidnapped by puce-colored aliens from Proxima Centauri who had kidnapped me and taken me for a ride in their motorized garbanzo bean through the reaches of deepest space. So when Jerry saw the attaché case handcuffed to my wrist, he thought I was into another big lie, and he instantly called my Mother, to tell her to stop me at the airport.

  Thus, when I got there, I was greeted by cops and airport fuzz who yanked me off the flight, searched me—they couldn’t search the case, they didn’t have a key—and finally had to release me, because I was legitimately ticketed.

  I went to Cincinnati, really pissed at my Mother, and ambivalent as hell about my role in life. Was I, in fact, Ashenden the secret agent, or was I a punk kid who needed his Mommy’s approval before he could have an adventure? Not in the least ameliorating my feelings was the memory of Al’s words as he’d handcuffed the case to my wrist:

  “Be careful. There are people who will try to take this away from you.” At that moment I’d decided to leave the Beretta with Al. Good thing I did: can you imagine the looks of lively interest on the faces of the airport cossacks?

  When I got to Cincinnati, I took a cab to the address Al had given me, where I met Don Ford, a science fiction fan (now, sadly, deceased) I knew casually, but whom I knew to be a friend of Al’s. He unlocked the cuffs, took the case into the next room, and came back to offer me the hospitality of his home for the rest of the day and that night. I had no idea what was in the case, but Roy Lavender advises that Al Wilson, for all his weirdness, was a man who had invented a method for producing steel directly from iron ore without going through the pig iron stage. He had contacts in South America and in Newfoundland, and apparently there were big business interests that were willing to stop at very little to get the secret.

  None of this did I know.

  But when, the next day, I went to board the plane back to Cleveland, someone took a shot at me.

  Okay, okay. I’m dreaming. Have it your way. All I know is that as I crossed the tarmac to board the plane—in the days before those access tunnels that take you from the plane’s passenger cab straight into the terminal—I heard what sounded like a gunshot, and a hole appeared in the fuselage of the plane. I may be making that up. I didn’t wait around to ponder the equation. I bolted past everyone else, shoved me widdle way up the gangway and was inside that liner before that pre-Sirhan Sirhan could get off another.

  When I got back to Cleveland, I tendered my resignation.

  It had been a brief but fascinating sojourn in company with the mysterious Martian, Al Wilson, but I suddenly realized I had a deep-seated aversion to bullet holes in my as-then-sexually-unexplored cuteness.

  Al reluctantly let me off the hook, said he would miss me, and we went our separate ways.

  There is a memorably resonant afternote, however.

  I never saw Al Wilson again, save once.

  I was in Philadelphia in 1953, there for a sf convention, and on a dead Sunday morning, while everyone else slept off the effects of having drunk themselves into stupors the night before, I went looking for an open breakfast nook. You may have heard how dead Philly is on a Sunday morning. The reports are hardly exaggerated.

  But as I walked the street seeking a breakfast counter, I saw a man walking toward me. As we neared each other, I recognized him as Al Wilson. I stopped. He came straight up to me, as though he’d known I would be there and had hurried to meet me. There was no preamble, no greetings between two people who hadn’t seen each other in years. He merely came in close, looked straight at me with thos
e faintly protuberant eyes, and said in an undertone, “When you see Stan Skirvin, tell him to examine pages 476 to 495 in T. E. Lawrence’s THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.”

  Then he walked past me and was gone.

  I have read those pages in every hardcover and paperback edition of Lawrence of Arabia’s book ever printed: I have never found the slightest clue to what mystery may be therein hidden.

  But I’ll tell you this: Al Wilson walked out of a chill Philadelphia morning in 1953 to tell me that, and I’ll be damned if I don’t believe that if I can ever unravel what he meant, I’ll be rich, Willy Loman, rich as Croesus!

  And that’s the story of how I was a hired gun.

  Honest.

  INSTALLMENT 28 | 12 JULY 73

  A RARE, KINDLY THOUGHT

  Waxing philosophical is not one of my favorite pastimes. Ever since I was let down by Eric Hoffer, I’ve realized virtually any clown with a sesquipedalian command of the English language can write a book of “philosophy” and get a following of dregs to chant his or her brilliance to the academic skies. Look at the Skinnerians. Saddening, really, how easy it is to dupe a large contingent of lames and wearies, get them to accept a “philosophy of life” in toto. The no-neck nits who followed Senator Joseph McCarthy into the witch-burning arena; the millions and millions of Americans who refuse to accept the responsibility for their own existences and follow Nixon even when they know he’s a thief, a liar and a self-server; all the poor bastards who are into Jesus Freakism because they can’t face the world as it really is and haven’t the stamina to change it for the better; Existentialists, Solipsists, Berkleyites, Sybarites, believers in Atlantis, flying saucers, reincarnation, Catholics who clap their hands in adolescent delight at the Reaffirmation of the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, crazed reactionaries who cling with insupportable paranoia to the Threat of the Communist Menace; and all the phonies who went from dope to Zen to the Maharishi to Baba Ram Dass to macrobiotic dining to astrology and don’t know where their next savior is coming from. All of them, the poor fuckers, washed here and there like flotsam on the inexorable tide of Life. Believing. Having nothing to succor and recommend them but their beliefs. Proselytizing and chanting and stumbling ever forward toward lightless deaths in which they will certainly find none of it carries the spark.

  One guy even wrote me a letter telling me I had The Word and he wanted to be my Follower. Sooner would I have the clap for a thousand years than stalk about spouting The Word. On him I wish a plague of toads in his bathroom.

  However, I did have an idle thought the other day, which I guess comes under the heading of “philosophy.”

  I’ll probably have to wash my mind out with Lava for even venturing that this idle concept is philosophical, but it seemed to me a particularly gentle and humanistic thought, so I’ll share it with you. It’s not often I have these damned things, and while it probably isn’t profound in the Nietzschean sense, it may permit you to love a few more of the walking-wounded around you than you’d thought possible; and if it serves no other end…well, the time is well spent.

  What it was, was this:

  Those we call “phonies” may not, in fact, be phonies at all. They may merely be poor suckers who don’t know who they are. They may not be trying to “put on airs” but may simply be lost souls who haven’t established their own personal ambiences. The universe lets us know it ain’t easy; these days especially. Everywhere you look, someone is telling you how to dress, what to wear, whom to associate with, what to listen to, how you should think and react and feel…and that’s an ugly pressure many people can’t handle. Whether you call it Future Shock, or Cultural Ambivalence, or Alienation, what it means is that most of the people you meet in a day—and probably the both of us, if we’d but cop to it—are spinning. They don’t know what to believe, or how to act to be “cool,” or what is currently in or out. If that weren’t the truth, how do you account for the hypes of “acts” like Johnny Winter or Nazareth or Alice Cooper, none of whom can hold a moment of fascination for an intelligent human being with taste, while Bach and Scarlatti go on and on and on?

  I will cop to having been a phony so long, it’s become my real skin. Now. That out of the way, I can point out that there are people who are so confused as to their true nature that they seem phony because they’re never the same two days running. Take a joker like Buddy Greco. Good singer. Nice voice. The poor slob is so confused about who he is, has always been so confused about it that instead of getting his own sound, he emulates other, more successful singers.

  When folk singing was in, he sounded like a solo Kingston Trio. When Sinatra was hot, he sounded like a surrogate. When Bobby Darin was popular, Greco dropped all the “g’s” off his words (grammatically, it’s called apocope) and ran that number. Now he’s into country-rock. He isn’t a phony, despite the Sicilian cufflinks and the white-on-white shirts. He’s merely confused. He hasn’t got enough personal strength to find out his true name and go with it; for good or ill.

  The same for several dozen friends of mine, nice people all, who move from apartment to apartment and change their phone numbers so often they have a permanent deposit on file with Pacific Telephone. When it was drug culture time, they came around and espoused the joys of honking kitchen cleanser; when flower power was preeminent they were seen on The Strip with garlands of hollyhocks, festooned with beads; when it was Dissent Time, they always saluted with a balled fist from their freshly-coral-waxed cars; now that greed and taking care of number one are the in-trips, they have become the most venal and despicable slugs in the garden. They’re turning Republican.

  For the most part, I can’t bring myself to hate them. Forgive them, Father, they know not who they am.

  They are searching for a skin to wear. For a hat that fits them comfortably. For a scene that won’t reject them in six months when it ain’t chic no more. In the truest sense of the word, they are seekers.

  Formerly, a great number of those tagged “phonies” were gay. That was their lot. They were forced to play at roles that didn’t suit them. Things are a little better now. They can declare and find life-niches that joy them. I wish them Godspeed and good luck. The same for many women I know. Shoehorned into socially acceptable sets, they railed and wept and felt strictured. Now, for them, things can be different, too. But for the mass of men and women who don’t know what they want, have no idea what they’re capable of doing, conceive of no enrichment beyond that which is programmed by their society, there is no way of coming out of the closet. They must search and search, stay awhile in this scene, stay awhile in that scene, and if they get very lucky, they find a face behind which they can hide with security.

  So I have to separate the “phonies” into two major groups. Those who know who they are and find something loathsome in the self-image, and so consciously adopt another mien. I know a writer who, if left to his own devices, with no one peeking through his curtains at night, would live a life of television, bowling, McDonald’s hamburgers and Mad magazine. He’s a sentimental person who secretly digs the effusions on Hallmark cards and cries at movies about dogs, God and paraplegics. But he knows the world he wants to move in would label him a square, so he watches only educational programming on the Living Arts of Japan, has learned to play backgammon (which bores the ass off him) in Beverly Hills, studies the wine list at Scandia and orders the correct vintage straight out of a supplement in Esquire, and actually reads Esquire, something I haven’t been able to do in years, though I have five years remaining of a twenty-year subscription. He has confided that he is dismally unhappy with his lot in life, that he doesn’t know where he’s going or what he eventually wants to be, and when I suggested that he is playing a mug’s game by trying to emulate lifestyles not his own, he shrugs off the answer as too simply structured, and continues looking for The Holy Grail. It’s a no-price life.

  The other group, and larger by far, is comprised of those who aren’t phony at all, who are simply trying to find a way
to get through all the days and nights of their lives without suffering too much. They believe what is told them, they wear those gawdawful platform shoes that make them look like clubfoots, they read Jacqueline Susann or Kurt Vonnegut with equal aplomb because they’re #1 on the Times list, they laugh at Rodney Dangerfield or George Carlin and make no distinctions for originality or imagination, and the dreams they dream belong to others who have had them first and deserve them. They are the Wandering Jews of our Times.

  Someone said to me, the other day, about a woman we both knew, “She’s such a phony.” And I started to agree, and just as suddenly stopped, because the thought—the “philosophical” thought, if you will—I’ve explicated here hit me. She isn’t a phony. She’s just spent all her formative years trying to be the kind of woman one guy after another with whom she’s been involved wanted her to be. It’s made her sly, cynical, unhappy, undependable, giddy, a thing of bits and pieces. She isn’t phony, she just doesn’t know who she is.

  And when I thought that, it was as though someone had drained all the dislike out of me for that person.

  Try it. Maybe it’ll work for you.

  Obituaries are terrible things, and I hate them more than I can say. But yesterday, Sunday the 8th, Gene L. Coon died. He was a writer. He was the Producer of Star Trek for a while, and we served together on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild, and he was as good a man as I’ve ever met. He was enormously kind to me personally, and he was a rarity in this cesspool of an industry: he was an honest, caring human being with taste and discretion and imagination and vast pools of love. He spent much of his life unhappy, and only got happy during the last few years. That his joy should have been cut off so suddenly, so without warning, merely causes those of us who knew and admired him to rail at a Thug God whose list of motherfuckers and thieves ought to be so filled he wouldn’t have time to gather away from those of us who treasure them, one of the few good guys walking around. For those who knew him, who even met him once and drew pleasure from his existence in a frequently loveless world, this is a lousy week. As Dorothy Parker once said of someone else, we will not soon see his like again.