The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  Crack is everywhere; driven in, flown in, trained in, floated in, backpacked in, and as easy to score as a McDonald’s toadburger. This week a couple of UCLA scientists released a report based on their tracking of 700 students for eight years, the point of which was that kids who have a heavy dope habit in school fare far worse later in life, than kids who don’t. Gee, honestly!?! Would you believe that those of us out here in the darkness kinda figured that one a while ago? Dope is a trillion-dollar business, and the repeat market is the key to a fat p&l bottom line. And of all those pontificating, well-groomed politicos who appeared on KCBS’s evening-long preemptive special on gangs, a month or so ago, not one of those who paid lip-service to this bogus “war on drugs” seemed to understand that the big business of drugs is what we are reaping for twenty years of self-serving greed.

  What do I mean? What fascinating, obscurantist theory am I pushing here? Well, I’m as scared as the rest of you, out there in the darkness, but being scared hasn’t turned my common sense into spinach. I can still figure it out as easily as Jesse Jackson, who points out quite rationally that we’re a self-indulgent species and if we weren’t wrecking ourselves with dope it would be something else. That if there weren’t vast fortunes being made from selling dope, if there weren’t jefes and Generalissimos getting rich off the trade, it would be better policed. So the theory is that L.A. has long been a model of greedyguts slum lords and pols on the pad and middlemen who are living on velvet from the circulation of dope.

  And why shouldn’t the kids in the barrio and the Projects pick up on that? They see it on television every day. They see the choice between coming home after a shift at the Burger King, reeking of grease, with a few miserable bucks in their pocket, and buying a BMW and a nice home in Orange County from a few days of “slippin’” and moving some crack.

  The Underclasses, the ghetto blacks, the latinos, the Asian refugees, they see the results of twenty years of gimme gimme gimme; and they want theirs!

  It’s about jobs, and it’s about big money; and it’s about the turf where those street jobs and that big money are all that matter. It’s about people learning the lessons Los Angeles has been teaching for more than twenty years, and doing it outside the rules of the game set up by the Old Boys’ Network, and doing it in a violent manner that has the rest of us so scared that it’s made security systems the fastest growing industry in Southern California.

  And, of course, it’s just lovely for the gun merchants. The NRA loves it! Get everyone so witless with terror that their distributors can’t keep up with the demand. Play on all that racist fear, and get guns into the hands of everyone. That’s the new L.A. way!

  And the damned ugliest part of all this, is that nobody can talk about it in realistic terms without sounding like a racist or an apostate Liberal. If someone gets right down into it and says that a large part of the gang warfare problem, for instance, is the insane Latin adoration of the macho mystique, someone else (who’s usually making a buck from keeping his people paranoid) jumps up and yells racism.

  But machismo, and its brutish effect on men and women alike, is not the sole property of the vatos locos. We’re all paying the price for that John Wayne posture. White folks demonstrate it with the need to fight wars all over the world, trumpeting that “God is on Our Side,” with Reagan blustering that even if we shot down a passenger plane by mistake, however inadvertently snuffing out 290 lives, it’s a “closed matter” because he’s the high-steppin’ brass-balled big-muthuh’ President of the Yew Ess, and those Shiites had damned well better listen up! It’s Wally George in the White House, and we can see how effective such posturing has been in the past.

  But that’s how Whitey does it. The Black, Chicano and Asian Underclasses we’ve watched develop have learned the lesson. And those kids, untutored, poor, burning with hate and anger, they strut and blow smoke the same way. They think of “community” as the gang, R60s, Southsides, Crips, Bloods, it doesn’t matter: that’s family. And no one in authority, least of all Daryl Gates, seems to understand that sweeps and busts and arraignments won’t bring us back the daylight. Because for every hundred kids picked up on a big-PR weekend for the LAPD, there will be five hundred replacements out there on Sunday morning, dealing and shooting and tossing Molotov Cocktails. Because it ain’t macho to pay any attention to the cops; it’s like a pit bull punking out and humiliating its owner when it won’t fight. But if someone suggests that a part of the answer is somehow burning that machismo crap out of the consciousness of thirteen-and fourteen-year-old kids, sure as hell someone will leap up and denounce the observation as racist.

  Yeah, racist. Like suggesting that before you can civilize crackers and rednecks you’ve got to get them off believing blacks are inferior, that Jews rule the world on the sly, that Catholics all pay obeisance to the Vatican, or that women have been put here just to keep men fed and happy.

  But such a partial answer won’t put a dime into the budget of the LAPD, and offering kids who can get rich moving crack a part-time job at the Burger King won’t convince one Blood to shuck his colors, and Eddie Murphy bragging to Barbara Walters on-camera that he never reads won’t make one admiring black kid believe there’s any point in getting an education.

  And until you’ve come face to face with just what we’ve allowed the Underclasses to turn into, here in the City of the Lost Angels, you’ll never know how truly scared you can be.

  We live in darkness. And in that never-ending night the roaming madmen burn the libraries, the slumlords debase whole families, freeway shooters pack shotguns to revenge themselves for someone shooting them the finger; and every weekend hundreds attend barbaric pit-bull contests, synagogues are defaced by neo-Nazis, Cotton Mather religious fanatics vandalize family medical centers; trigger-happy cops go more steadily buggy, families are broken and merchants terrorized, lottery tickets replace baby’s milk, and now we can even be treated to one of our ever-so-responsible tv stations offering us The Morton Downey, Jr. Show from the East Coast, just in case we haven’t had our share of deranged bigotry and vigilante justice by way of Wally and his slavering idiot audience of pinheaded fruit-bats.

  Why are we scared? Because when one tries to talk about it, as I have here, one thing leads to another, and one ends up raving. And there is oh so little consolation in the apologia offered by the Pollyannas: “Things have always seemed bad, always seemed on the edge of the abyss. It’s no different now. You’re just getting hysterical.”

  No one in a right mind can go for that okeydoke any longer. Darkness has fallen, and we do grow hysterical. So we look around for a simple sociological scapegoat. It’s them, they’ve got polluted genes. It’s some other them, they don’t have the accepted Good Ole ‘Murrican Values. It’s not enough money from the State or Federal honeycomb. It’s lousy teachers. It’s not enough cops, and let’s get them cops out of the prowl cars and back on foot patrolling the neighborhoods. It’s this, and it’s that.

  But the truth is, we let it happen!

  We lied to ourselves that Los Angeles would be Baghdad forever, and to hell with them over there in BBQ-rib-and-taco land. Hysteria finally wanes, and we admit that it is us, the readers of this very magazine, who distract ourselves with glossy liposuction and plastic surgery ads, with articles about the ten wealthiest people in town, with fashion spreads featuring clothes they couldn’t afford if they worked for a hundred years. We didn’t want this magazine to run articles on the 10 WORST SLUM LORDS or WHY HAS THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS DESERTED ITS UNDERCLASS. We didn’t have time or interest for that. We had time for the latest designer pizza and the newest disposable clothing shop on Melrose. But we didn’t want to admit that the darkness was falling.

  And so now, we’re scared. Even the dullest, most lock-and-bar secure, glossiest and silliest of us: scared. And in the words of Bertolt Brecht, “He who laughs has simply not heard the terrible news.”

  From high above what was once the City of the Angels, one can look down throu
gh the smog and delude oneself that we do not live in the darkness. But even from on high one hears the message of the Uzi. Is anybody listening?

  APPENDIX D | 1986

  LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD

  Lenny died in 1966. Gee, how time flies when they’re busy bumping off the good guys.

  It came over the 11:00 news, and they ran some film clips. The usual sort of flaming-stick-in-the-eye sensationalism: Lenny in a wheelchair after his 1965 window-falling accident; clips from one of his college gigs, with Lenny satirizing a cop at one of his nightclub performances trying to take notes about his act for an upcoming obscenity trial, while roaring with laughter; some random photos of mother Sally and daughter Kitty.

  And then they ran a seventeen-second interview with one of the cops who was on the scene of his death. A swell human being named Vausbinder. He could as easily have been talking about a garbage bucket or a side of beef as one of the sharpest social critics this country ever produced. “Lenny Bruce, whose real name was Leonard Schneider, died at 6:10 tonight. There was evidence of narcotics on the premises and—”

  —and they couldn’t even let him die with a little dignity. We learned later, years later, that they had gone in, found him dead, and propped him up on the toilet with the spike sticking out of his arm. They hounded him and stole his days and they crippled his humor, turning him into a pudgy bore worrying court transcripts like a withered old man with prayer beads, and they broke him financially supporting lawyers, and they wasted his life in courts for “offenses” that were as substantial as fog, and then the creeps rearranged his limbs and wouldn’t even let him die without calling him filthy names.

  He was surely the most moral man I ever knew.

  He saw clearly enough to know it was a terrible world, filled with hypocrisy and casual, random viciousness; and he talked about it. Because he was a comedian, a nightclub comic, a shtickmeister, and not Eric Hoffer or William Buckley, his mercilessly accurate social criticism was labeled “sick,” and his lampooning of the powerful and pious was impermissible of entry as “philosophy.” He talked about what was wrong with us in the Fifties and Sixties in the language of the hipsters and the poor Jews and the showoffs. The language that made you sit and laugh till you thought you’d drop from an infarct. He talked about the most serious concerns of decent men and women the way the guys on the corner talk—honestly, slyly, phonographically reproducing the way people really talk about such concerns, rather than in the simpering, mealy-mouthed “at this point in time” corruption of language employed by frauds and thugs and those shining the seats of power with their pants.

  His was the humor of painful truth; and he was driven by the sheer absurdity of it all or fearless beyond a sense of his own survival—so that he kept talking; never able or willing to back off, even when they told him they would drive him, chivvy and harass him, harry him to a nuthouse or to the grave. He persisted, nonetheless. He was in the American grain of great humorists: Chaplin, Twain, Benchley, Thurber, W. C. Fields. He told them more than they wanted to hear. And they killed him for it, as they had promised. Then they propped him up on the can, and stuck the spike in his arm.

  What was his crime? As the creator of archy & mehitabel, the journalist Don Marquis put it: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

  And rearrange your limbs in death.

  I never knew him as awfully well as many others did. But we had a special liaison in that I was the guy who got him to write some of his material for magazines, and who edited and arranged those higgledy-piggledy columns of prose, and published them in a magazine called Rogue from 1959 through 1961.

  I met him in Chicago soon after I started editing for Rogue. I was fresh out of the Army, and Lenny was the hottest new comedian in the country. He was the darling of Rush Street, and having heard a couple of his albums for Fantasy Records, I was determined to get him to do a regular humor column for the magazine. It was a time when men’s magazines were emerging as more than publications displaying the naked female form, a time when Playboy was publishing better and more daring material than any other periodical in America, and Rogue’s publisher wanted a similar claim to legitimacy. So, though he’d never even heard of Lenny Bruce, the publisher gave me the go-ahead to try and snare him for the book.

  He was working Mr. Kelly’s on Rush when I connived an introduction, and we hit it off. I’d been doing standup comedy on one coast while Lenny was working similar material on the other coast, and we spent many nights prowling and dunking doughnuts in coffee. He was friendly (and always funny) and outgoing; and even then near the beginning, a little wary of how people wanted to use him, then revile him in print.

  He had cause to be wary: already they had started in on him, the Catholic Church, the politicos, the big, Irish cops of Chicago who were coming to scope his act so they could go back to their superiors and report that that motherf—Bruce was using awful words like motherf—right from a public stage and wasn’t it a motherf—shame that a filthy blue comedian like him was littering up motherf—Rush Street with his foul mouth!

  His columns for me were always brilliant. Sometimes they were disjointed and rambling, the way his rap on stage was; sometimes he mailed them in to me from somewhere on the road, scribbled on menus and cocktail napkins; sometimes he’d call me and dictate the copy, and I’d sit there at three in the morning writing furiously, trying to capture the cadence and inflection that made the material work. But they were always pertinent. They were funny and sharp and insightful…and they hurt. Which is what good satire is supposed to do. He knew how to write, even if it was verbal writing off the stage; he wrote a swell book, even if it was ghosted; he produced great American humor. Human and universal…and dangerous.

  His records are for always. They capture only a small corner of the arena he ruled, but even they, incomplete as they are, will last. Because he talked of his times, and the dishonesty of his times, and the absurdity that he saw in the most loathsome lies his times could tell.

  It is now twenty years since Lenny went down. They don’t have him to harass any longer; they’ve gone on to other poor bastards who believe in crazy stuff like the First Amendment. They got their heart’s desire: the junkie, the pervert, the foul-mouthed Lenny Bruce is dead.

  And they made a movie about him, because even in rearranged, disreputable death, legends do not die if they’re played by Dustin Hoffman. That’s called irony. Gee, how time flies when Hollywood’s having a bout of conscience, particularly if there’s a kopek to be made from it.

  Sticks and stones did not break his bones, names never really hurt him. But they broke his heart and they silenced his voice, a voice we needed so urgently, then and now, and the malicious, stupid motherf—s still don’t realize that they killed one of our few heroes.

  APPENDIX E | 1988

  DID YOUR MOTHER THROW YOURS OUT?

  Joe Tobul’s mother ruined my life. Under another name, Joe Tobul’s mother blighted your life, as well. For the past fifty years, all the Joe Tobul’s mothers of America—kind and decent women who kept kitchens so clean you could eat off the floor, and who wouldn’t harm a fly—blighted the lives of boys and girls with absolute innocence. They did it, as Joe Tobul’s mother did it to me, by tossing out all those kid’s funny books.

  Stand in one of the hundreds of direct-sales comic book stores that have sprung up across the country in the last decade, challenging the hegemony of traditional newsstand distribution, and listen to that fifty-year-old man accompanying his twelve-year-old grandson rummaging through this month’s various X-Men comics. Mr. Fifty stares into the triple-locked display case at the unnumbered first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, dated 1941, and he says oh-so-conversationally, “I had that comic. How much is it?” And the clerk smiles benignly, because he’s had this conversation a hundred times, because he knows the guy remembers paying 10¢ for it when it was new, because he knows what’s coming, and h
e replies: “It’s only in fine condition, not near mint. It goes for $2700. Shame it’s got a little spine roll to it, or we could’ve called it very fine; that’d be about six grand.” Pale, very pale, goes Mr. Fifty.

  And he says (make book on it), “My mother threw out all my comics.”

  And that’s why this guy’s kids never got to go to college. Because Joe Tobul’s mother threw out all those comics that would have become an annuity. Guy could have been living on the Riviera today. Could own a controlling interest in AT&T.

  But that’s the way it was. Because comics were kid stuff. They were “bad” for kids, the way a Red Ryder B-B gun was “bad” for kids. The rifle would put your eye out (as Jean Shepherd has told us), and comics would rot your brain. And if you didn’t believe it, along came the 1950s’ own Cotton Mather, the late Dr. Frederic Wertham, in a book called SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, who could give you chapter and verse, gore and protuberant nipples, on how mind-rotting those evil comics were. So all the Joe Tobul’s mothers in this great nation, meaning well or just cleaning out the closet when you went to college, saved their kids from a fate worse than enlightenment, and thereby blighted millions of lives.

  (In Torrington, Connecticut, there is a shop called My Mother Threw Mine Away. Just thought I’d mention that.)

  Yeah, that’s the way it was. Today, following the lead of the rest of the world, coming to awareness behind the eye-opening and groundbreaking achievements of a handful of comics writers and artists who have snared critical and flash-media attention, this great nation is coming to understand that it’s been a long time since comics were only kid stuff, that comics need no longer be a secret “guilty pleasure” for adults, that a vast treasure trove of wonders has been lost, forgotten, mishandled and ignored while its creators have been kept in artistic chains and actual poverty like poor beanfield hands, and that comic books not only have a claim to Posterity, but are one of only five native American art-forms that we’ve given the world: Jazz, of course. Musical comedy as we know it today. The detective story as created by Poe. The banjo. And comic books.