The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  Which is where he is to this day.

  Now. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

  Come on, there are still a few things around that make it all worthwhile, that can keep you from opening your wrists. Just to prove it to you, I’ll give you a few of the ones I’ve fallen back on recently to keep my spirits up:

  Maxim freeze-dried coffee. It’s a damned sight better tasting than 99% of the perc stuff I get when I go to friends’ homes for dinner. Johnny Hart’s B.C. and The Wizard of Id. Bette Midler. The new (and, sadly, last) Bruce Lee martial arts film, Enter the Dragon, which is, I grant you, mindless violence, but so ballet-like graceful and impressive in its depiction of how the human body can exceed its limitations that if you ignore the silliness of what the plot is, you can derive the same kind of joy one gets at a fine performance by Nureyev. The Swamp Thing comic book by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson. Eli Wallach. Pipes by Erickson. Print Mint T-shirts with Mercs and other neat stuff on them. Stevie Wonder’s new album, Innervisions. M*A*S*H, which breaks me up every Sunday. The retrospective of 20th Century-Fox films now going on at the L.A. County Museum. My gardener Alfred Takeda’s kids, Willie and Aileen, who are sensational. The return to the real world of Brian Kirby, now that The Staff has died and released him from his pathological dedication. Walter Koenig and the rediscovery of Big Little Books. The completion of two new stories, one of them a Jewish science fiction story.

  These may all seem to be frivolous, but for God’s sake, we have to take our joys where we find them. It’s an ever-increasingly more complex and crushing world through which we are expected to move, and those who condemn others for “not working or not being productive” need only examine their own existences to see that there is far less pleasure and satisfaction than even ten years ago. So take your little pleasures where you find them, friends. And surround yourselves with joyful people. Downerfolk can kill you quicker than the bite of the asp.

  For my part, I’m presently surrounded by nice people, for the most part, led in their upliftiness by my secretary, the incomparable Mariana Hernández.

  I’ve had a batch of secretaries over the last six or seven years, beginning with Crazy June Burakoff, whom you all remember from my frequent mentions in The Glass Teat columns. When Junie moved on to a high-paying job at Universal Studios I went through two or three temporary associates who either were too spacey to get the work done necessary to keeping my addlepated existence in order, or who frankly couldn’t stand me, and then Sandy Nisbet came on the job and it was a perfect merger of personalities. But then Sandy and her husband moved up to Tumwater, Washington, when he got a new teaching assignment, and I was back to scrounging. Mona Vakil was here for a while, and though she was as deranged as me, she was conscientious and everything worked well till she had to return to Iran, or wherever it was, with her husband. Then I had a couple of bummers, whom shall go nameless whom, and then…ta ra!…in came the Chicana Queen of the barrio, Mariana the Wise.

  When mh came to work for me, I was just getting rid of a secretary who had driven me berserk, and Mariana now confesses that the bestial way I treated that former secretary led her to believe she’d be back looking for a job in a week. But since the 24th of December 1972, when mh hove on the scene, we’ve been doing very nicely, thank you.

  Mariana is a remarkable creature, folks. Not only is she slick and quick and intelligent and feisty, and takes no shit from me, but she has a quite separate existence and career in that she is a perennial runner-for-office, having first attempted to get elected to the office of U.S. Senator from Texas (against the now-famous George Bush) in 1970. She lost. Then she ran for Mayor of Austin, Texas, and lost. Then she ran for Congress in L.A.’s 30th District, and lost. Then she ran for the Community College Board of Trustees in 1973, got 44,000 votes…and lost. Part of the problem may be that mh runs on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.

  Not only does she run, but she delivers periodic lectures here in my home—not to mention in the world at large—on socialism, populism, feminism, humanism and acupuncture.

  She even does a little typing, once in a while.

  Most of all, she answers the door and snarls at those intent on stealing my writing time with their impositions. And if you want to keep sane, as I’ve said, you have to keep all that lunatic stuff on the other side of the door.

  So, until you get your mh to keep you inviolate, I hope this week’s good news column has cheered you sufficiently so you don’t do yourself in…and can return next week, when we’ll deal with The Ethical Structure of the Universe, or something else equally as lighthearted.

  INSTALLMENT 33 |

  Interim Memo

  Look: cut me some slack on this next one, okay? It was a bad day. You’ve had them. You know what it’s like. I’m feeling much better now.

  Except that the only thing I know for absolutely sure in this life is this:

  The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

  INSTALLMENT 33 | 30 AUGUST 73

  I GO TO BED ANGRY EVERY NIGHT, AND WAKE UP ANGRIER THE NEXT MORNING

  Last week I mentioned my secretary, Mariana. mh to her friends and employer. I was going to talk, this week, about how difficult it is to get through the day-by-day bullshit of nickel&dime-death that society lays on us, without being surrounded by competent, helpful associates. I was going to talk about my mailman, George O’Brien from the Sherman Oaks P.O. branch; about my dear friend and CPA, Eddie London; about my auto mechanic, John Wilkes; about my doctor, John Romm; my agents, Marty Shapiro and Mark Lichtman; my housekeeper, Eusona Parker; my attorney, Barry Bernstein; my travel agent, Linda Wolk; my bankers, Al Court and Syl Bunyevchev. That’s what I was going to talk about. Another of my “Ain’t life beautiful” columns, to try and cheer your asses up.

  But today got a blight on it.

  Today, the leaves withered and the bush turned black and fell to ashes.

  So, instead, you get one of my “You stupid fucking bastard” columns. Maybe you’d be advised to pass me up this week, if you’re feeling good. Or come back to this column when they dump bat guano on your parade.

  Last week, a guy came to interview me for his Doctoral Thesis, and he was sharper than hell. He asked me questions light-years beyond the usual “Where do you get your story ideas” questions. At one point he said I seemed to be dichotomous in my reactions to people: on the one hand my writing was clearly humanistic, and I cared about people…on the other I was always railing and cursing “the Common Man” and saying what swine and assholes they are. I couldn’t answer him. It’s true. I am very ambivalent about the human race. Sometimes I weep with joy at the nobility, grandeur and heroism of which individuals are capable…at other times, had I a gun in my hand, I would without compunction riddle the bodies of people who commit such awfulnesses against other humans that my mind and soul cannot contain the pain. So I asked Mariana if she would try and explain me to this guy. And when he re-ran the tape for me, Mariana said something (and I’m paraphrasing) about how I really, at core, was on the side of The People, as opposed to The Establishment, or Big Business, or The System. She didn’t actually say I was a good guy at heart, but she tried to explain to him that my thinking wasn’t entirely fucked. And finally, at the end of her discourse, she must have shrugged (it sounded like a shrug) and she said she didn’t really understand me, either.

  Well, here’s another of those ambivalences, friends. Last week I did a number on how good life is, and this week I want to lay on you four things I heard about today that make me want to rush out into the street with bombs!

  The CBS news gave me two of them. The first was a story out of South Africa, where they have apartheid…you know about apartheid, right? Blacks and whites are separated. Right?

  Well, today there was an auto accident on a road near Johannesburg, and a white kid got all stove in, and the guy who ran to call the ambulance told the hospital, “Hurry up, a boy was seriously hurt, he may be dying.” Well, in Sout
h Africa, blacks are referred to as “boy” and what was sent was a black ambulance, and when it got to the scene of the crash, the dumb stupid eggsucking motherfucking asshole cop who was in charge refused to let them put the white kid in the black ambulance! And nobody did a goddam thing to stop the silly sonofabitchin’ pig! And he sent someone to call a white ambulance, and by the time it got there a half-hour later, and they loaded the kid into the meat wagon, he was DOA. That’s dead fucking on arrival, may that cop’s rotted stinking bigot soul fry in Hell forever!

  The second, you’ve probably heard about. It’s down to modern mythology already in just the couple days since it happened: a little kid, a diabetic, name of Wesley something, had his life-saving insulin taken away from him, somewhere here in beautiful enlightened Twentieth Century California, by his murderously stupid Bible-thumping parents who believed so devoutly in that crock of shit called a “Good Book” that they had decided he would “get well with the help of the Lord.” So he died! Do any of you know how painful a death insulin shock and diabetic death can be? Think about it! Think about it the next time you run your beads, you blind ignorant moronic superstitious dark-ages bastards! And when he’d died, they still weren’t convinced. They swore he’d rise from the dead, because the father of the kid had read in the Bible that it would happen. They laid hands on him and…guess what…goshwow, folks…the kid was still dead! So the cocksucker told the newspapers he’d misread the Bible, had miscalculated how long it would take, and in four days the kid would rise up and walk and live again. And 200 similar schmucks went on down to the funeral today and they all wept and chanted and prayed and laid hands on the poor stiff in his coffin, and gee golly, nothing happened. But there’s still two days to go. By the time you read this, I’ll either be proved a doubting Antichrist fool without faith…or, more likely…that Mother and Father will be ripe for prison for having murdered an innocent child.

  Item number three was one line from Mariana. “Don’t forget the thirty years’ illegal experimentation on blacks,” she said, “using them to find a cure for syphilis.”

  Yeah. That’s number three.

  And number four is Mariana’s own brother, who got the shit shot out of himself in ’Nam, so bad he’s paralyzed from the waist down…and an Army sergeant came to the house to make Mariana and her family feel better by telling them what terrific medical treatment he’d get in an Army hospital.

  What kind of a week has it been? Well, I’ll tell you, gentle readers. It’s been the kind of week that starts out on a Monday with wanting to scream till you fall down and black out. That’s what kind of a week it’s been.

  And you can all go fuck yourselves!

  INSTALLMENT 34 |

  Interim Memo

  A couple of times I made the mistake of trying to read this little essay at one of my lectures. Even years later, I’d fall apart. Please excuse the fuzziness of the photo. There are only two pictures of me with my dog, and the other one was used in another book. This one was taken when I lived in the treehouse on Bushrod Lane in Beverly Glen. Something like 1963 or ’4, something like that.

  Not a day passes I don’t miss him. He was a swell guy.

  INSTALLMENT 34 | 6 SEPTEMBER 73

  AHBHU

  Last year, my dog died.

  There’s nothing more maudlin than reading someone’s treacly and bathetic self-pity in the form of a lament for a pet. Nonetheless, the death of my dog, Ahbhu, did me in. And rather than drowning myself in the loneliness of it, I did what I usually do when I’m going through changes of sadness that I can’t handle. I put it into a story. The story was called “The Deathbird,” and it appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March.

  It will be the title story of my Harper & Row collection, DEATH-BIRD STORIES, in February or March of next year.

  But that section about Ahbhu has brought some odd and sympathetic reactions from large audiences, and so I thought I’d share it with you, here, seeing as how I’ve bared my soul in so many other ways.

  I thought it might be nice if you saw—after last week’s ugly tirade against humanity—that I am capable of love.

  Yesterday my dog died. For eleven years Ahbhu was my closest friend. He was responsible for my writing a story about a boy and his dog that many people have read. He was not a pet, he was a person. It was impossible to anthropomorphize him, he wouldn’t stand for it. But he was so much his own kind of creature, he had such a strongly formed personality, he was so determined to share his life with only those he chose, that it was also impossible to think of him as simply a dog. Apart from those canine characteristics into which he was locked by his species, he comported himself like one of a kind.

  We met when I came to him at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. I’d wanted a dog because I was lonely and I’d remembered when I was a little boy how my dog had been a friend when I had no other friends. One summer I went away to camp and when I returned I found a rotten old neighbor lady from up the street had had my dog picked up and gassed while my father was at work. I crept into the woman’s backyard that night and found a rug hanging on the clothesline. The rug beater was hanging from a post. I stole it and buried it.

  At the Animal Shelter there was a man in line ahead of me. He had brought in a puppy only a week or so old. A Puli, a Hungarian sheep dog; it was a sad-looking little thing. He had too many in the litter and had brought in this one either to be taken by someone else, or to be put to sleep. They took the dog inside and the man behind the counter called my turn. I told him I wanted a dog and he took me back inside to walk down the line of cages.

  In one of the cages the little Puli that had just been brought in was being assaulted by three larger dogs who had been earlier tenants. He was a little thing, and he was on the bottom, getting the stuffing knocked out of him. But he was struggling mightily.

  “Get him out of there!” I yelled. “I’ll take him, I’ll take him, get him out of there!”

  He cost two dollars. It was the best two bucks I ever spent.

  Driving home with him, he was lying on the other side of the front seat, staring at me. I had had a vague idea what I’d name a pet, but as I stared at him, and he stared back at me, I suddenly was put in mind of the scene in Alexander Korda’s 1939 film The Thief of Bagdad, where the evil vizier, played by Conrad Veidt, had changed Ahbhu the little thief, played by Sabu, into a dog. The film had superimposed the human over the canine face for a moment so there was an extraordinary look of intelligence in the face of the dog. The little Puli was looking at me with that same expression. “Ahbhu,” I said.

  He didn’t react to the name, but then he couldn’t have cared less. But that was his name, from that time on.

  No one who ever came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone with good vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to be scratched, and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for scraps at table, because he found most of the people who had come to dinner at my house were patsies unable to escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.

  But he was a certain barometer of bums, as well. On any number of occasions when I found someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to noting his attitude toward newcomers, and I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary of someone Ahbhu shunned.

  Women with whom I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the house from time to time—to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her driver to pick him up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.

  I never asked him what happened on those occasions. He didn’t talk.

  Last year he started going downhill, though I didn’t realize it because he maintained the manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too
much, and he couldn’t hold down his food—not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by the Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was wrong with him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last year. Ahbhu wasn’t afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked tall around vicious cats. But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my bed and threw his forelegs around my neck. I was very nearly the only victim of the earthquake to die from animal strangulation.