An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  All phone numbers are, of course, in either the 213, 310 or 818 area code areas.

  INSTALLMENT 43: SEPTEMBER 82

  The drummer to whose beat I march this week is the Editorial Gestalt, a syncopater decked out in perfection. “This issue of the Weekly is devoted to ’The Best in Los Angeles,’” I was told. “So if nothing has you too grouchy this time, why not give us a list of Ellison’s Best,” I was told.

  You have but to command, effendi. Herewith: idiosyncratic, but amassed from twenty years’ joy and pleasure living here in Baghdad, a random selection of unqualified recommendations.

  THE BEST WAITER IN TOWN: Carlos at Pacific Dining Car.

  THE BEST (NON-BLACK) BBQ: Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas Pit Barbeque, on Sepulveda near Roscoe, in the Valley.

  THE BEST DENTIST: Robert P. Knoll, in Pacific Palisades.

  THE BEST FINISH CARPENTER & MASTER WOOD WORKER: Phil Blake of Design Innovations (P.O. Box 2297, Toluca Lake 91602).

  THE BEST PICTURE FRAMER: Tommy Sand of Pesha’s, on Melrose.

  THE BEST MATTE-DESIGNER TO GO WITH THE BEST PICTURE

  FRAMER: Michael Craven (466-5810) whose art deco mattes defy description. THE BEST ATTORNEYS: The world-renowned kneecapper Henry W. Holmes, Jr.; Gloria Allred and her Doom Patrol.

  THE BEST ELECTRICIAN & LIGHTING WHIZ: Dennis Smith of Pacific Architectural Design, Inc.

  THE BEST CONSTRUCTION GUY: Leon Opseth (761-8329), who also takes the title of MOST HONEST CONSTRUCTION GUY.

  THE BEST CUBAN FOOD IN TOWN: The Versailles on Venice Blvd.

  THE BEST BICYCLE SHOP: Beverly Hills Bike.

  THE BEST TYPEWRITER REPAIR: Jesus Silva of Hi-Brand Office Equipment in North Hollywood who, amazingly, makes house calls!

  THE BEST FANCY TILE LAYER: Earl De Castro (353–4239), who does with stone what Louise Nevelson does with wood.

  THE BEST ISRAELI FOOD: Tempo Restaurant in Encino.

  THE BEST CROISSANTS: Michel Richard on S. Robertson and on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City.

  THE BEST STAINED GLASS WINDOWS TO ORDER: Barbara Hunsinger on Magnolia in Sherman Oaks.

  THE BEST PLACES TO BUY ART DECO: H. Frank Jones and Thanks For The Memories on Melrose.

  THE BEST HOT DOG IN THE WORLD, INCLUDING LA.: Pink’s, naturellement.

  THE BEST TCHOTCHKE SHOPS: Fantasies Come True on Melrose and Propinquity on Santa Monica. Selections arrived-at by totalization of vast sums dropped by your columnist for useless-but-spiffy items over a five year period.

  THE BEST OVERALL BAKERY IN TOWN: Brown’s Victory Bakery near Coldwater Canyon on Victory in the Valley.

  THE BEST LOAF OF CORN RYE WITH CARAWAY SEED: Nate’N’Al’s, in >Beverly Hills. Also the best chicken soup with kreplach.

  THE BEST FRENCH TOAST BREAKFAST: The Yellow House, on West Channel Road out in Pacific Palisades, down near the Coast Highway.

  THE BEST CHEESEBURGER FOR THOSE OF US WHO LIKE IT NEAT AND NOT SLOPPED UP WITH CHILI, PEANUT BUTTER, DEAD MICE OR MAYONNAISE: “Raldo’s” on Moorpark at Fulton in the Valley (ask for Rose and tell her Harlan sent you).

  THE BEST GOURMET THAI FOOD: The Tepparod Tea House, off Vermont.

  THE BEST CHINESE FOOD: The Mandarin in Beverly Hills, though the Shanghai Winter Garden on Wilshire cannot be touched for its lemon chicken, from which it is to die.

  THE BEST ONION RINGS: Charlie Brown’s in Woodland Hills (but you have to call ahead and ask for the Manager, Jane, and tell her you want the thick ones they just took off the menu). A near second place is the heaping plate served at Hamburger Henry’s in Santa Monica.

  THE BEST FRENCH ONION SOUP: Shain’s, in Sherman Oaks. (Not only is it terrific, but when you get halfway down, and you’ve eaten all the cheese, you can ask for a fresh larding to top off.)

  THE BEST HOME COOKING: Maurice and Verna’s Snack’N’Chat on Pico.

  THE BEST MEXICAN FOOD (DINNER UNDER $5.00): El Rancho on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

  THE BEST MEXICAN FOOD (DINNER OVER $10.00): Antonio’s on Melrose (don’t miss the beef molé.)

  THE BEST PLACE TO HAVE ITALIAN FOOD WHILE WATCHING MOVIE STARS AND / OR MAFIA BUTTON-MEN: Adriatic’s in the Beverly Glen Circle or Sarno’s Caffe Dell’Opera on Vermont. Matteo’s and Martoni’s no longer draw the heavy-duty killers.

  THE BEST FAST FOOD CHICKEN: Louisiana Fried Chicken on 6th near Alvarado. The local recipe version of New Orleans’s Popeye’s.

  THE BEST PRIME RIB WITH A PROPER YORKSHIRE PUDDING AND NOT ONE OF THOSE TOOTH-BREAKING POPOVERS THEY TRY TO PASS OFF AS A YORKSHIRE PUDDING: Lawry’s Prime Rib on La Cienega and Gulliver’s in the Marina.

  THE BEST RECORD SHOPS: Tower Classical on Sunset and Aron’s Records on Melrose.

  THE MOST INTERESTING MYSTERY PERSONALITY: Jon Douglas West. Lucy McNulty and Mike Kingsley come in as close seconds. But that’s another column.

  THE BEST WRITER IN LOS ANGELES: Modesty forbids me.

  Space does not permit me to go on in this vein any longer. I know, however, with a certainty that approaches epiphany, that within mere moments of this column hitting the streets, you will be at your postcards, correcting my thinking and apprising me of the apposite selections in each category. Like all of you, be assured, I am of an open mind and only wait to be introduced to your superlative choices, each and every one of which will dwarf mine own by their Olympian wonderfulness.

  Incidentally, the autograph party for my new book, STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, was so successful at Dangerous Visions in Sherman Oaks five weeks ago, that we’ve decided to give all of you who feel you need inoculations to visit the Valley a chance. I’ll be reprising the gig at A Change of Hobbit (1853 Lincoln Blvd. in Santa Monica, phone: GREAT SF) this Saturday the 18th, from 2-5:00 PM. Buy a book; help send this boy to camp.

  INSTALLMENT 44: 20 SEPTEMBER 82

  Nixon and Agnew finally had their way with us. Because we had been fighting for ten years, resisting LBJ and Tricky Dick, we saw the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate as the triumph of Good over Evil; and we relaxed. We rested because we were weary. Even the most reactionary of us had seen the face of Corruption, upper lip beaded with sweat, mouth saying I am not a crook, and the face had been wiped off our television sets and we thought we were safe forever. But as the man said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And we mellowed out for too many lazy afternoons. We wanted national self-respect again so badly that we invested poor Jimmy Carter with a potency of white magic he did not truly possess. And we were not vigilant, and while we dozed all on a summer’s day, the Schmitzes and the Falwells and the Wattses and the Reagans slipped in and finished the job for Nixon and Agnew.

  On November 3rd we go into battle again.

  I am determined we will not sleep through this one.

  Our implacable foe is an old one. The National Rifle Association. The battlefield is Proposition 15. California’s Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Polls tell us it will pass if we marshal our efforts. Six weeks ago it was pro-passage by twenty points. Last week it was pro-passage by only four points. In the interim the NRA jumped the gun—as is their wont, gun-wise—and rather than waiting till Labor Day, the traditional date for political campaigning, began a million dollar mixed media advertising saturation campaign to plant early doubt in the minds of the electorate.

  They are frightened. The banning of handguns in Morton Grove and Evanston, Illinois has shown them that their throw-down grip on us may be loosening. And the money is pouring in to stop Prop. 15. As of August 16 the anti-15 forces had received $565,500 in support funds from gun manufacturers (all but one out-of-state).

  The California gun lobby has seen the moving finger taking aim. As one with the NRA, it understands that passage of Prop. 15 in California, a bellwether state of public opinion, means an important advance toward a national gun control law, something the arms manufacturers who shadow-back the NRA fear worse than atomic annihilation.

  Californians Against Street Crime and Concealed Weapons is the cutting edge of our for
ces. They have recently been joined by the Washington-based Handgun Control, Inc. to mount a concerted effort against the gun lobby’s war chest and media blitz. They have lined up five of California’s most prominent police chiefs to cut radio and tv commercials. Those spots will go a long way toward regaining the lost public opinion points subverted by NRA advertising.

  But they need help. They need money, of course. Yeah, you get tapped once again. (Send a check to Californians Against Street Crime; 3315 Motor Avenue; Los Angeles 90034.) But more than that, they need you out there spreading the word. They need your fire and your determination that this time the babies with popguns won’t bulldoze the rest of us with scare tactics.

  Call for an information packet—204-6690—and send some bucks. And just to fire up your blood for this crusade, I’m departing from my policy of not reprinting material I’ve previously written, by inclusion here of an essay I wrote a year ago December. On December 9th, 1980—the day after John Lennon was assassinated—I received a call from Julie Simmons, editor of Heavy Metal magazine. Through tears she asked me to write an editorial pleading for gun control. I sat down the next day, angry and miserable, and wrote what follows. It brought more mail to the magazine than anything they had ever published. It brought out of the slime and dust a vomitous spewing of madness and violence from members of the Klan, from neo-Nazis, from babies with popguns whose verbal insanity was more shocking than the essay; and those letters caused hundreds of readers to turn away from the gun lobby. I hope this reprinting of the essay produces the same maniacal outpouring of hate mail. The more of these twistos you see reveal themselves, the faster you’ll be in sending big bucks to the Prop. 15 forces.

  Between now and November 3rd we’ll write more about this. It’s urgent, it’s a matter of life and death, and it’s righteously intended to stanch the terror the NRA will try to use to confuse you. But we can win if you truly believe you need only

  Fear Not Your Enemies

  John Lennon’s on the menu. The worms are having him for dinner.

  It’s a fucking banquet: Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Luke Easter, Sarai Ribicoff, Stella Walsh, Lyman Bostock, Michael Halberstam, and one hundred and fifty assorted nonentities slaughtered each week, every week, here in our macho democracy. Nonentities, that is, to all but the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, lovers and friends to whom each of those nonentities meant something.

  I’d have included JFK in that list, but we all know that executive ticket-punch was part of a giant conspiracy.

  And I don’t want to bother with pitiful little conspiracies that include only maybe the CIA, the Mafia, the FBI, the Dallas police, Communists and anti-Castro terrorists. That kind of conspiracy is shirred eggs and squashed potatoes. What I like dealing with is the big conspiracy, the one you’re part of.

  Thought we didn’t know you were high up in the order of the big cabal, didn’t you? Thought we didn’t notice, right? Well, we noticed; so don’t go slobbering over the loss of John Lennon, you cowardly punk. Don’t beat your breast as you stand out there in the cold behind the NYPD sawhorses across the street from the Dakota, kiddo. We’re on to you, and as far as I’m concerned you’re as guilty as Mark David Chapman of pumping those four shots into Lennon’s back.

  You didn’t cry for 69-year-old ex-Olympic star Stella Walsh on December 4th when some sonofabitch left her face-down in the parking lot of a discount department store on Cleveland’s near East side, wiping out the 65 track records she set in her extremely worthy lifetime. You didn’t cry when Luke Easter was blown away on March 29, 1979, outside the Cleveland Trust; probably because you didn’t give a shit that the old black man hit twenty-five home runs in two months in 1949 and played a lot of first base for the Indians. You didn’t cry for twenty-three-year-old Sarai Ribicoff, senselessly shot to death in the course of a petty holdup outside Chez Helene in L.A.’s Venice section; most likely because she was Senator Abe Ribicoff’s niece and a Jew and a newspaper reporter and hell, that’s three strikes right there; no pity for the rich, the powerful, the vocal and the members of the International Money Conspiracy. And you’re probably only wailing over Lennon because it’s in the air and gives you a chance to vent some of your fear and frustration. But you belong to the big cabal, chum, and we see through your disingenuous sorrow.

  You started your membership sucking up the BB gun ads in copies of The Incredible Hulk and Batman comics. You paid dues every time you sat in a movie theater and watched the fever-sick violence dreams of Dressed to Kill or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and went down the line proclaiming twisted crap like that “high art” as do some of our more prominently brain-damaged critics. You rose in the ranks every time you accepted the eloquent vocabulary of a bullet in the gut or a punch in the mouth as the final statement of any argument on Starsky & Hutch or Charlie’s Angels. So now you’re a fully-paid-up, card-carrying psychotic doting on the wonderful full color panels in Heavy Metal that show some poor slob with his head blown apart like a casaba melon.

  And you’re as much against gun control as our soon-to-be installed Chief Executive, Mr. Reagan. And you know what he said, mere hours after Chapman’s Charter Arms .38 special had its say?

  Well, Ronnie said, “I’ve never believed that gun control laws would help reduce violence. I believe in the kind of legislation we had in California. If somebody commits a crime and carries a gun when doing it, add five to fifteen years to the prison sentence.”

  I’m glad so many of you voted for that kind of asshole thinking. Mr. Reagan’s terrific, use-a-gun-go-to-jail law is so effective that Los Angeles has become Murder City: homicides for the first ten months of 1980 were over 800 in the city proper and over 1500 in the county.

  Reagan, you crepuscular old fart, what the hell is wrong with you!?! Who gives a damn how long Chapman lies up in the slam? Lennon is dead, you pudding brain. Dead. Revenge don’t beat the bulldog. Chapman wasn’t some amoral mugger making his living in the streets ripping off wallets and tv sets. He was a nut. Like all the other nuts who commit a murder every 24 minutes, night and day every day of the year in this country. When the hell will you read the statistics, Reagan? When will you realize that over fifty percent of all the gun slayings every year are committed not by the dreaded composite darkie-mestizo-latino alley killer but by friends and relatives, by angry lovers and total strangers when you screwed them out of a parking space or gave them the finger in a moving car. Fifty percent and more: stupid accidents where a ten-year-old kid sprays his brain matter across the bedroom wall playing with Daddy’s surrogate penis, the bureau drawer Luger; heat of passion arguments in which your girl friend opens up your stomach so your intestines start unwinding on the carpet like a Duneworld sandworm; deadly misunderstandings like the one that killed baseball star Lyman Bostock, a case of mistaken identity that didn’t mean a damn because Bostock was on the menu.

  How about that, gentle reader, out there crying because Lennon bit the dust, how about that you’re a member of the big conspiracy headed by Uncle Ronnie? You like the tag?

  Don’t give me no shit about how you ain’t in on it, Chuckles. You’re in on it! Because if you weren’t, you’d be doing something about it, instead of sitting there on your ass growing lesions on your brain watching television and putting all that good dope down your neck and reading half-witted sci-fi trash and eating junk food till you’re too lazy to get out of the chair to take a dump. If you weren’t part of the conspiracy to keep the National Rifle Association one of the biggest goddam lobbies in Washington, you’d be sending all your spare cash to Handgun Control, a citizens’ lobby in Washington.

  And don’t hide behind that god-fearing gobbledegook, either. I’ve had it up to here with the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Ernest Angley and Billy Graham and all the rest of those tv clowns perverting the tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethos with their non-specific mumble about moral rectitude. They want to censor books and movies and tv and magazines to fit some ancient worn-out
idea of purity, but all those fundamentalist millions who’ll deluge a sponsor with vengeful letters because some model exposed her thigh in an advertisement won’t lift a finger or a buck to beat the NRA lobby at its own game. And you know why: because all those whited sepulchers own guns…or if they don’t, they actually believe that the Constitution gives any dip who can sign his or her name to a handgun application the right to own a .357 Magnum.

  Because that’s all the same game.

  It’s removal from reality. And only a step or two from “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” to seeing oneself as the instrument of that vengeance. Who knows what pustule scab soup steams and bubbles and smells bad in Chapman’s reeking cauldron of a brain? And who cares? If he hadn’t been able to get a gun in Hawaii so easily, he might not have been able to get Lennon so simply. Yeah, I know: he could have knifed him, garroted him, hit him with a 2×4. But not from five feet away. Yeah, people kill people…with guns.

  I have no tears in me for John Lennon. I’ve used them all up on King and Kennedy and a woman I once loved who was raped and then murdered—with a handgun—in the parking lot of a bowling alley in the San Fernando Valley.

  So you can dry your public show of misery, li’l heavymetal babies. When it’s fashion time for roller disco or cowboy boots or electronic wargaming or freebasing or whatever the panhandlers have in store to separate you from your bucks next season, you’ll forget. And you’ll renew membership in the big conspiracy.

  Let me leave you with these words from the Polish poet Edward Yashinsky, who survived a Nazi prison camp only to die in a Russian one. “Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.”