An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  I applaud the editors of L.A. Weekly for printing Mr. West’s letter and compliment them on putting the First Amendment into practice. A true journalistic tabloid presents two sides of an issue and ideally (I say, “ideally,” because each news tabloid favors a particular viewpoint) allows the reader to make up his or her own mind. Perhaps the Weekly staff might consider devoting more space for an “open forum” of opposing viewpoints.

  —Lucy McNulty

  Dear Editor:

  I am quite flattered by all the recent attention drawn to my letter [July 9-15] by Harlan and a Mr. M.J. Straczynski, a.k.a. Contributing Editor, Writer’s Digest.

  Am I anti-Semitic because I am outraged by the senseless slaughter of children, men and women for a half-assed political solution? Apparently, the PLO and the Israeli regime have carefully orchestrated the warfare, as Mr. Arafat seems to walk the streets of Beirut without fear of being killed by I.D.F. shelling. Of course, non-aligned citizens have always been relatively expendable, haven’t they? Am I anti-Semitic because I am repulsed by the sight of our governor hob-nobbing with the High Society Zionists at a Beverly Hills fundraiser for the Lebanon Invasion?

  I’m condoning the destruction and repression of written or electronic materials of information? Did this come to you in some arcane-like vision? I think your political ideology is showing, M.J. All these murky accusations and comparisons to America a.k.a. Nazi Germany, but nothing for our friends in the East. Stalin, Mao and Kim are certainly no newcomers to the techniques of repression, death and destruction to pursue a goal. The Khemer [sic] Rouge had a solution for the problem of book-burning in Cambodia—they simply eliminated the readers.

  Are things getting so repressive, so socialized, so right-wing in America that our survival is in question? Should I charter a boat and start shuttling people to the islands? Is Ronnie listening? Are Tom and Jane listening?

  —Jon Douglas West

  Burbank

  INSTALLMENT 39: 16 AUGUST 82

  This week I come to you in stereo.

  The voice in prose—as you will discover—no less clever, conspiratorial, confessional than the voice as spoken. This week, voyage to a far place with me. The planet Quaymet, vast neon technopolis, smoldering with vice and violence beneath its two pocked moons. Quaymet: extra-temporal, extra-galactic, other-dimensional Casablanca of soiled souls and treachery by the visceral kilometer. Alien Quaymet from the ghetto of desolation at the dead end of Bluemont Boulevard to the soggy underbelly of the Neon Bowery. Quaymet: murderous, bizarre, unfathomable: where stalker and stalked change roles in the flickergasp of a moment…a moment in which the assassin fires his spinal deliquidizer, draining all fluid from the victim’s spinal column…a moment in which the cornered victim turns rabid rat and strikes back using a deadly Cymblian octalizer…a moment whose full significance can be codified only in the advanced brain of Quaymet’s most famous detective, the electronics wizard, futuristic shamus of a world that never knew the names Hammett and Chandler and Cain, the shadowy sleuth named Emille Song.

  Come with me on Friday night, between the hours of ten o’clock and midnight, without leaving the safety and sanctity of your homes. Roll back into the past when Lights Out and I Love A Mystery and Inner Sanctum held you in thrall…and simultaneously roll forward into the future where golden age radio waits to be born again, free of the blight of Top 40 botulism.

  Ever solicitous of your intellectual and entertainment needs, fully cognizant that you suffer blackened fingers turning the pages of this newspaper each week just to keep au courant, I have broadcast my net far and wide in search of new wonders to lubricate your mind’s labia. And, yea forsooth, there in far St. Petersburg, Florida, last March, doing some work for the embattled Equal Rights Amendment, I found Robert Cannon and Marc Rose, 48 years divided evenly between them. “Found” them only in the sense that Columbus “found” the Amerinds on the beach. (Dateline Hispaniola, 12 October 1492: “We didn’t know we were lost,” a spokesman for an obscure Bahamian sect said today. “This pale as a slug dude come wadin’ in off the bright blue ocean, really overdressed for the neighborhood, y’know what I mean, and he plants this truly vulgar flag right in the middle of a strictly nifty piece of top quality beachfront property, and starts yellin’ he’s found us, he’s found us, all inna name of some broad Isabella. So we said, ‘Day-O, day-O, daylight come and you better go home.’ Found us, my ass. We wasn’t nowhichway lost, sucker!”)

  So there I was in Florida, not my favorite place in the universe, and doing a lot of interviews and television nuhdzing, when my liaison gets this request for us to motor across the Causeway from Tampa for what I thought was going to be an interview on the ERA by these two young guys who broadcast on WMNF-FM. Well, imagine my surprise when I get to this spiffy house on 84th Avenue NE and discover that Cannon and Rose are the creators of a radio drama series, a science fiction detective series, a wonderfully clever radio drama science fiction detective series called Dry Smoke and Whispers that puts me in mind of Firesign Theatre and days on my belly in front of our cathedral-shaped Philco standard band radio, drinking in the aural wonders of Captain Midnight, Hop Harrigan, The Land of the Lost and Quiet, Please.

  They don’t want to interview me, they want me to listen to this goddam radio show they’ve been doing for a couple of years. Dry Smoke and Whispers.

  They’ve turned the house on 84th Avenue NE into a studio. It’s ass-deep in dubbing equipment, musical instruments, rogue sitars and freaky percussion implements, electronic recording matrices, reel-to-reel serpentry, ceramic models of Emille Song’s world, paintings of Quaymet…and right in the middle of it…and them…is Alice Rose. Marc’s mother; what we call in the jet set a nifty lady. Elegant, gracious, well-spoken, and utterly devoted to these two whackbats with their cobbled-up visions of Lemincott Syrup Dragons, blotus fish, Troid rock groups and radioactive werewolves.

  I am seduced by her affection for them. They play a demo tape. I’m amused and captivated at the professional quality and the depth of imagination. Emille Song and his Watsonlike sidekick, Professor Henchard the weapons expert, come to life for me. I understand why this offbeat labor of love has become a South Florida underground sensation. Rose tells me he’s done over 145 different voices for the show; he writes all the music; every bit of the sound effects and editing is done right here. As Alice beams with love.

  And then they play me a section of another show, QBS Today, and it turns out to be a marvelously inventive news broadcast from the mythical Quaymet. And next they’re planning to do a radio series called Anomaly Calling, little 25 minute fantasy stories in the vein of Inner Sanctum or Escape.

  Boy oh boy, I say to them, this is what the people of Los Angeles need to hear. This stuff is cleverer than hell and fresh and imaginative and why the dickens don’t I schlep some of these tapes back home with me and see if I can con someone at a radio station in Ellay into running them one night, and I’ll do a column on them, and maybe people will listen in, and maybe if they like this stuff as much as I do they’ll get the station to contract with you for regular broadcast rights.

  And they said whoopdedoo like the guy in the Sparkletts commercial, and we all joined hands and danced around in a ring. As Alice Rose beamed.

  So I brought the tapes back and I called Mike Model, who has been hosting Hour 25 for the last ten years over KPFK-FM (90.7 MegaHertz on your FM dial), and I said, “Michael, I have got for you a deal the like of which you ain’t gonna believe,” and he replied with a testament to the friendship we’ve ripened over a decade, “Piss off, Ellison, no more moron ideas from you. I’m still paying off on the penguin ranch and the chocolate-covered-pickle-on-a-stick-with-whipped-cream-in-the warts investment.”

  It took all my efforts of unleased charisma, plus half a dozen prints in extremely clear focus of a recent scene at the Bide-A-Wee Rent-By-The-Minute Motel on Cahuenga, between a nameless gentleman who wears very thick-lensed glasses and a small but intense group comprising four lit
tle ladies wearing swim fins, mukluks, day-of-the-week panties and rubber gloves, a Hollywood High School basketball player bearing a marked resemblance to the late Montgomery Clift, a short Latino gentleman in clocked socks and brandishing a goldfish bowl, two chickens, a member of the LAPD narco squad in garter belt and Carmen Miranda earrings, three San Pedro Hell’s Angels, and a parsnip in a pear tree, addressed to a woman named Nancy (no last names please), before Michael Hodel decided that, yes, it would be in the interests of giving young talent a break to devote an evening of Hour 25 to Dry Smoke and Whispers.

  I’m holding on to the negatives.

  And that is why, oh my faithful, that tomorrow night, Friday the 20th of August, at 10:00 PM on KPFK-FM (90.7 on your dial), you can hear your obedient servant, introducing you to the brain children of Marc Rose and Bob Cannon, as Hour 25 takes you to Quaymet, to walk those mysterious, foggy streets where detective Emille Song has unraveled the puzzle of “The Blaydenbrook Horror,” solved the “Murder on the Huddleston Ferry,” survived the “Night of the Eclipsoid Man,” and brought to book both “The East-End Reaper” and “The Assassins of Hadragule.” For two hours (unless we run over), this column will come to you in stereo. Read the column, see the movie! No, hold it, that’s not right. Read the column, hear the radio!

  Tune in for Dry Smoke and Whispers, for Anomaly Gaffing, and for details of the autograph party this Saturday at Dangerous Visions in the Valley. Yes, of course, we all want to help young talent like Bob and Marc (keep beaming, Alice), but old fogeys like Ellison have to live, too, and what with STALKING THE NIGHTMARE available for the first time at Lydia Marano’s Dangerous Visions bookstore, with your humble servant plonking his ass there from 2-5:00, signing anything that doesn’t try to run away from the pen, why it’s just a feast of reason for the readers of this column this weekend.

  And they say Los Angeles is a cultural wasteland.

  Interim memo

  By the beginning of September 1982, when this installment was published, my private eye—frustrated to the point where he had become obsessed by “Jon Douglas West”—had thrown in the towel. He assured me that if there was such a creature as was known by the name Jon Douglas West, he was a miracle of contemporary camouflage. There were no records, there was no trace, there was no trail. It was clear at this point that I’d been correct in my assumption that “West” (and probably some of the “supporters” of West in letters to the Weekly) were pseudonyms. And then, suddenly, one night I received a phone call from a woman who would not give me her name. I like to think of her as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. What she told me prompted the last fillip of this 40th installment. And in the Afterword to this volume I’ll tell you what happened. That is, if the snow man doesn’t come to our house and sit by the gas stove until he melts into a puddle of molasses, I’ll tell you about Uncle Wiggily and the Dreaded Jon Douglas West.

  INSTALLMENT 40: 20 AUGUST 82

  Gee, it’s lonely at the top.

  And if you believe that one, I’ve got some slivers off the True Cross to sell you, real cheap.

  The problem is, it ain’t lonely at the top. It’s so damned crowded one can hardly turn over in bed at night without half a dozen total strangers complaining you’ve stolen the blanket.

  What prompts these thoughts is a remark by some pencil-necked geek dropped in a letter to Rolling Stone or some other magazine (I forget which, but it doesn’t matter) soon after John Lennon was murdered. This jerk—what Mike Hodel would have called a “zero charisma”—opined that yeah, it was sorry sad that Lennon was dead, but after all, it was his own fault…if he hadn’t wanted to get killed he wouldn’t’ve gotten famous, would he?

  Now before you shake your head and mumble, “What a bean brain!” stop and consider how many times you’ve had the same quality and kind of rumination. How many times have you heard a story about some movie star whose house was robbed, whose jewels or irreplaceable objet d’art got boosted, and you shrugged and said, “Serves’m right. If s/he didn’t want to get robbed s/he shouldn’t have been living in that mansion; obvious target for a burglar.” Similarly, when you were at LAX and you saw Richard Dreyfuss eating a hamburger in one of those gawdawful Host passenger puke restaurants, and you dashed up with a pencil and a chunk torn off a brown paper bag, and loomed over his shoulder and demanded, “Hey, ain’t you Dustin Hoffman? Sign this for my retarded seven-year-old, will ya? She likes your movies. I’ve never seen one of course, I’m more partial to Burt Reynolds, but she’d get a big kick outta this. Here, just sign any old thing, and say somethin’ cute to Bernice Anne Lothskiller, so she’ll know I’m not makin’ this up,” and Richard looks up with a piece of flaccid onion hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and he says (a lot more politely than you deserve), “Not now, please. I’m eating,” being kind enough not to mention that nowhere in your demand did the word please manifest itself, how many times did you tell your family and friend(s), and all the guys and dolls at the plant what a stuckup, rude, insensitive bastard Dreyfuss was (or Hoffman was)? Who the hell does he think he is? We pay to see his goddam movies; the least he coulda done was stop his life, miss his plane, bolt his food, let me impose on him, invade his privacy, insult him without even being smart enough to know I was doing it, and sign that greasy paper bag for my kid!

  And then, so you don’t look totally like a schmuck, you proceed to do a little Jungian analysis: “This guy’s forgot his roots. He’s gotten too big for his britches. He’s like alia them movie stars and hoity-toity jet setters. Thinks his spoor don’t stink. Forgot all the little people who made him what he is today. Sonofabitch just can’t handle success. Prob’ly coked out of his brain on some expensive shit anyhow.”

  Lonely at the top? Not on your tintype, kiddo.

  With the plague proliferation of gossip glossies like People and the continuing sale of those tabloids you reach for at the supermarket check-out counter, all packed to the gunwales with useless trivia guaranteed to make you think anyone who achieves even low-energy level notoriety is a dope fiend, a profligate slut, a Nazi spy in hiding, a drunken bum who runs down schoolkids or a crazed psychopath, the monkeymass now believes it is its right to know everything about these men and women whose only sin is that they have achieved success.

  No one bothers to tell you, when you’re poor and hungry to make it, that fame—of even the smallest sort—brings with it a disconcordant horde of moochers, self-seekers, time-wasters, dynamiting hype artists, emotionally starved groupies and just plain clipsters. One tries to be polite, but after a few years, after a few million incursions, after a ceaseless barrage of requests, demands, hard-luck stories and assorted annoyances that in and of themselves are minor but taken in sum drive you bugfuck, one looks up with flaccid onion hanging out of one’s mouth and says, as sweetly as possible. “Get the hell out of my face, you spittoon; can’t you see I’m trying to eat? Have a little common courtesy and a little respect for someone’s privacy.”

  You wouldn’t have the temerity to walk up to a total stranger and do it, why do you think you have the right to shoehorn yourself into the presence of an equally total stranger, just because you caught him or her on The Late Show?

  The warped concept we’re dealing with here, beyond bad taste and lousy manners, is the concomitant of the Cult of Personality. It is the sense that one is entitled to anything beyond the work the artist proffers. It is all Johnny Carson Show time. An actor performs in a screenplay, and what he or she does in that film is the gift. Beyond that, the audience is entitled to nothing. A writer commits a book, it is published. That is the outer limit of what the reader is entitled to.

  Over the past three weeks a woman has called me repeatedly from Detroit. She phumfuh’d and stammered and couldn’t speak the first couple of times. When she asked for me by name, and I said it was Ellison speaking, she got so flustered she mumbled, “Oh. Uh…oh! I wasn’t prepared to speak to you.” I asked her who she thought she’d get if she rang my number? Winston Churchi
ll? Jonas Salk? She hung up instantly. I felt sorry for her, but I forgot it. She kept calling back. Bugging my secretary. Finally, at 2:00 AM (which is 5:00 in the morning in Detroit), she roused me out of a dead sleep, finally to make her wishes known. She’d read one of my books and didn’t understand one of the stories. She wanted me to explain it to her. At two in the morning.

  Why I was polite, I have no idea. I suppose it was because I recognized her voice and knew the poor thing had been trying to summon up the ego-strength to make this contact. So I tried to explain it to her. Tried. Didn’t succeed. Either she was being purposely dense, or she just wanted to chat with this faceless character who’d written a book that touched her.

  Finally, when it became obvious that I could not aid her in whatever her secret need was, I told her to forget it. “I’ve written over a thousand stories, lady. Let it go. You understand 999 of them…try to live with the knowledge that this one is beyond you.” And she started to get very upset with me. “I didn’t expect you to be rude, “she said. “I’ve been speaking with you for fifteen minutes, and you woke me for what is, after all, lady, a matter of no concern to me. I’ve been polite in not telling you to fuck off. And a lot more courteous than some guy you hassled at this hour for a wrong number would be.”

  So she started screaming at me that I was a terrible person and she certainly never expected anyone who could write such sensitive books to be so awful to poor little her. And she vowed never again to buy one of my wretched tomes.

  I said, “Thank you ever so much. It was wonderful hearing from you. Thank your mother for the chicken soup,” and I hung up. For a rotten person, I sleep wonderfully well, and fall off instantly.

  John Lennon gets shot by a love-hate fan, Jessica Savitch is trapped at gunpoint in her office by a viewer who fantasizes he is having an affair with her even though he’s seen her only on the tube. An actor of my acquaintance is sued for paternity by a woman who lives (and has never been out of) a small Texas town…a town the actor has never even heard of. Three times in the last six months I’ve had my garbage stolen. For what purpose, I have no idea. Don’t ask. I just hope they eat hearty.