An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  We pause for a moment of reflection.

  How do you grade a woman’s ass from 1 to 10? Which nylon-clad leg is a 4 and which an 8.5? No doubt someone who spends eight hours a day photographing exquisite women—say, Helmut Newton or David Hamilton or Francis Giacobetti—can discern the subtle variations in parallel muscular fasciculi forming competing glutei maximi, or accurately substitute eyeballing for calipers in gauging the relative esthetics of the dear little popliteal space…but not I. And when confronted by fifteen women, the least of whom is what my friend Shelley calls a “to die,” by what yardstick of goddessdom do you presume to estimate another human being’s grace at 3 rather than 5?

  It may seem berserk even to have to put oneself in a position to have to do it, but as I said earlier, there I was and: It seemed like a good idea at the time. So I took the job as seriously as my co-judges were taking it, as seriously as if we were selecting a Nobel prizewinner. One can do no other. As Thomas Carlyle said, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.”

  And so, as Sheree (26, 5′5′, French and Italian ancestry, 112 lbs., degree in Business Management from El Camino College) pirouetted up there on the runway in front of me, wearing a red and white fringed baby doll and panties, I forgot that I was made of mere mortal clay, and ran the line of thigh and hip through the caliper computer and graded her.

  As Cindi (5′9′, brown eyes, brunette, married) passed before us, ethereally turned out in a two-piece hand-painted emerald-green toga and briefs, I graded her.

  Debbie (5′8′, 125 lbs., 36-26-35, actress, waitress, Softball pitcher) in her tuxedo teddy; Hope (blonde, blue eyes, 110 lbs., “Miss California Bikini,” “Miss L.A. Bathing Beauty,” “Miss José Cuervo”) in her sheer pink nylon baby doll, doing erotic little movements with her hands, her hips, her candy cane; Shallon (26, 5′8′, 120 Ibs., journalism degree from Cal State, Long Beach) in a sheer strapless lace teddy…

  I graded them. God help me, I graded them. Here a 4 on the basis of knobbly knees, there an 8 for the humanity of a leg trembling with nervousness at the turn; here a 6 for too much fleshiness, there a 10 because I felt my groin stir.

  We pause for a moment of reflection.

  Nearly three hundred women turned out for the preliminary selection of contestants. One of the contestants told me that the turnouts are equally as large for the Mr. Tush contests. She also told me that the female turnout for the male pageants is overwhelming. The women come and ogle and hoot and scream and whistle. She said it made a night at Chippendale’s look like meditation hour in a nunnery. I asked her why she thought male-watching was so popular. She chuckled, with an edge in her voice, and said, “Maybe we’re just paying the men back.”

  Maybe so. Because as one after another of the women passed silkenly before the crowd, the men lost control of their cool. Decorum went south for the winter. There were more glassy eyes in that ballroom than in a doll factory. The whooeeee that you hear in crowds at rock concerts. Behind me and to the left I turned to see a guy in a tux, with his jacket off, his tongue actually hanging out of his mouth. I have seen a great many things in my life: I have seen a blacksnake water moccasin kill a ferret, I have seen a Cessna plow through a dozen cars on a turnpike; I have seen John Steinbeck up close. Never, till Sunday the 5th of December in 1982 had I seen a man watching women in their underwear, with his tongue hanging out.

  Let’s cut to the shootout.

  There was another pass of all 15 beautiful contestants, this time in peignoirs, nightgowns, hostess sheers; there was a fifteen minute break in which a comedian named Denny Johnson performed well, I am told; I wouldn’t know how well he did: after seven Perriers, I had more pressing considerations; there was a final run with the women stunningly attired in Merry Widows, nylons, garter belts. Then we toted up our grades, passed our sheets to the tabulator, and waited while the Waggoners introduced Madame T, Pauline Barilla, who thanked everyone who needed thanking; as Edie Webber, Her Honor the Mayor of Hermosa Beach, presented a proclamation to Madame T. praising her and the Tushery as pillars of the South Bay community and declared December 5th “Miss Tush Day.”

  And then, against all odds, Shallon Ross was named the winner. Miss Tush 1983. All but one of the other contestants seemed genuinely delighted. There was clearly a sense of good wishes, of camaraderie among them. Miss Tush won an all-expense-paid trip for two for a week in Hawaii, plus $500 cash, plus a wardrobe valued at over $1100, plus a modeling contract for 1983 with The Tushery, including featured presentation on the Miss Tush Calendar.

  Then I went home and began to write this column. I thought I’d have it ready for publication by Monday morning. Last week I was not represented in these pages, because I found I could not simply write of my evening at the Proud Bird as an amusing lark. I have returned from the dark and smoldering interior of that strange land, one duchy of which is my own erotic male sensibility, and I have no answers.

  What might have seemed a silly and socially indefensible hype to promote a couple of lingerie shops, resisted that easy a pigeonholing. Even with the bear pit sounds of the male honkers still ringing in my ears, I could not simply dismiss what I had seen as the atavistic preening rituals of superannuated postpubescents. Something more was going on with the Miss Tush Pageant. Parts of the puzzle don’t fit, no matter how hard I whack them with a hammer of intellect.

  To write of my bewildering species I would even go to be a judge at a beauty pageant. It seemed a good idea at the time. And once there, having taken on the job, I did it with all my might. But now I come back to you, to report what I found out about a sizeable segment of the South Bay population, about what they do on a Sunday night and pay twenty bucks a head to do.

  Each of the contestants with whom I spoke about motivations for having entered the contest, spoke of the experience in glowing terms. Each rhapsodized about Pauline Barilla, saying she was determined that the women conduct themselves “like ladies.” Not one of them felt used. Some few of them had been pushed into it by their boy friends. I leave that aspect of the puzzle to conjecture. But each of them felt enriched by having done the Pageant. Shallon Ross, in particular, an intelligent, thoughtful young woman whose decency and bemusement were so obvious up there on the runway that I’m sure they were the deciding factors in her winning the crown, told me that her self-image had always been lower than she might have wished, and she had entered the Pageant as an amateur because she had always been intimidated by Playboy centerfolds, by models in Vogue ads, by the ideals of womanhood that had always been held by the male dominated world.

  And when I asked her if it didn’t give her pause now to be one of those icons that might intimidate other women, she said softly, “Yes I’ve thought of that. I’ve wondered if I just became part of the problem.”

  The problem. Even Madame T. thinks about it. Is the Miss Tush Pageant—and all the other public parades of women as objects—something intrinsically vile and demeaning? Is it a well-staged, commercially exploitative excuse to afford concupiscent louts a chance to let their tongues hang out of their mouths in a socially-acceptable setting? Or is it simply good fun? Is it, from the other side, an opportunity for male and female to do the time-honored and arguably honorable dance of the sexes? Have we overintellectualized ourselves into a place where we deny the primal urges birds and deer and fish and monkeys enjoy? Is this sort of display merely the attitudinal breeding ground for the rape fantasy, or is the woman on a pedestal-as-runway, being eternally feminine?

  Half of you, as you read this, will be on one side. You will know goddam well what the Miss Tush Pageant means. The other half of you will be on the opposed side. And you will get madder than hell that I could even pose the question, because you know what’s at stake here.

  But let me put it to you this way. I stopped going to a well-known Valley restaurant because the management made the lovely waitresses wear costumes that exposed body parts that a man would be considered a boor if he ogled elsewhere. Little ruff
led panties peeping out from under short, puffy skirts; corded bodices that provided dark, interesting cleavages into which eyes were drawn. I stopped going there because I didn’t like being manipulated by businessmen. If a woman in my company chooses to dress that way, to attract my attention, that’s her choice, and if I respond, I respond to her. But to be manipulated at the level of my groin for the mean purpose of ordering more booze, is to demean the waitresses and give me over to excessive feelings to which I’m not entitled at that place or with that stranger, with whom I have no connection apart from good service and a proper tip.

  Notwithstanding that view, there is this to consider: if I go to a cannibal culture, by what right do I tell the natives it’s evil for them to chomp human flesh? When I marched behind a great man who was later shot for his beliefs, I was confronted by natives of those Southern Lands who called me “an outside agitator,” who demanded to know by what right I came to their homes and told them how to live their lives. I said to them that I was not an “outsider,” that I was a member of the Human Race and a resident of the planet, and thus I was entitled to make my voice heard in protest against their denial of human rights to that great segment of others who also abided in their states. But in what way are the women who willingly, even joyously, enter the Miss Tush contest being denied their rights? They’re not drones, and they’re not stupid. They may be under some pressure from boy friends, in some cases, but how much pressure does a boy friend have to apply to get a woman to parade around in front of nearly a thousand men in the scantiest, sexiest of undergarments? They’re not even being exploited by a man. And Pauline Barilla says, with some truth, “The only way a woman can be taken off a pedestal is if she steps down by herself.” Some truth: because the question should also be asked, why the hell should women be on pedestals? Isn’t that one of the reasons women have been kept so dependent for so long, because the image of them was that they were Dresden figurines? And hasn’t the major gain of the feminist movement been to demonstrate to women that, like Pauline Barilla who is independent and has raised four kids and is one helluva sharp business woman, no woman need base her worthiness on pedestaldom?

  I have been to a strange land, where men hoot and sweat, where women preen and strut, where buffet with and without forks is proffered in service of eyeballing. And I do not know whether the several erections I had on the night of December 5th were okay because I’m still human and would be seriously troubled if I had been utterly oblivious to what was going on in front of me…or if I was manipulated as nearly a thousand other men were manipulated…if I was in the midst of something professionally corrupt…or if I was in the middle of a bunch of healthy people engaged in a form of art appreciation.

  It could be said that even the Miss America Pageant, as basically dolorous and boring as it is, makes some small nod to recognizing the contestants as whole human beings: they must have a “talent,” and they must give a little speech about how much they love God and America. And even though it is clearly eyewash, even though we all understand it is an excuse to see beautiful women in bathing suits…at least the nod is there. It could be said that the Miss Tush Pageant reduces women to nothing but walking clothes hangers, that the insipid questions asked by Lyle Waggoner and the rehearsed answers by the Tushettes are insulting as well as humiliating.

  It could also be said that in our sincere desire to bring equality to half the population of this country, that we are becoming ashamed of our own basic drives and the Romantic Ideal that trembles between men and women, between men and men, between women and women.

  All of the above can be said. And as my report from the darkest interior of that strange land…has been said.

  It is not necessarily incumbent on one who perceives the nature of the problem, to have the answers to the problem.

  It may simply be that the only answer that makes sense is this: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Interim memo

  This one, sadly, is my favorite of all the columns I wrote. I have read it, from time to time, on the lecture circuit; and I’ve yet to be able to get through it without breaking down and embarrassing myself with tears.

  INSTALLMENT 55: 19 DECEMBER 82

  They killed him because he cared too much. He hurt no one but himself, and no doubt his dedication had driven him past the point of socially acceptable behavior; but his death brings shame to us as a nation, because it demonstrates that both common sense and compassion have been leached out of our national character to a degree heart rending to consider. We are, finally, no better than Richard Nixon, who went to the windows of the White House, saw hundreds of thousands massed in the streets to protest, snickered, and went back to watch the Super Bowl.

  I tell you his name because it has been just two weeks since Wednesday, December 8th, and already you’ve forgotten who he was: his name was Norman Mayer, he was a mad saint, and he loved us enough to die for our sins.

  He was the man in the blue jumpsuit and motorcycle helmet who, at 9:30 AM, Eastern Standard Time, drove his white 1979 Ford van up close to the main entrance of the Washington Monument, stepped out, and began a ten-hour act of humanism that culminated at 7:23 PM with his needless death.

  Professionally-lettered on the side of Norman Mayer’s van was a placard that read #l PRIORITY: BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

  He drove past the Park Service rangers, a little more than two weeks before Christmas, the time of celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and he handed one of them who had come running a manila envelope on the outside of which was written his determination to speak only to a reporter. He told the ranger he had 1000 Ibs. of TNT in the van, and if we didn’t begin a “national dialogue” on the threat of nuclear weapons, he would reduce the 555-foot-high obelisk to “a pile of rocks.” He held in his gloved hands what the saturation tv coverage kept referring to as “an ominous black control box.”

  Photo: Nancy Melynn McKay

  It was, in fact, a harmless joystick mechanism used to fly model airplanes. There was no “radio gear in the knapsack.”

  There was not, as any fool with common sense knew from 9:30 AM on, even one stick of TNT in that van. Nor, as simple logic would have shown, was there ever a moment’s danger from “the menacing terrorist who held the Monument hostage.”

  Everything he did, from the moment he pulled up to the obelisk, till the moment he lay handcuffed to the steering wheel of his van, shot four times and dying from a bullet wound in the head, was the action of a compassionate man who understood just how bloody we have become. And who gave his life to prove the point.

  At seven AM Los Angeles time on that Wednesday morning, after having written all night and being unable to sleep, I was tuned to Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, as the first live on-site pictures of the “emergency” broke in on regular telecasting. I saw the van tight to the main entrance of the Monument, I listened to the explanation of what had happened, was happening, and the first thought that came to me was, “It’s a bluff. He hasn’t got any dynamite in that truck!” I knew it. Common sense dictated the conclusion; it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes and deductive logic to know the truth. Everything the man in the black helmet did led one’s reason to the conclusion. It was a bluff.

  Within an hour of the start of the siege, the police and FBI knew who he was. They knew he was an old man, 66 and deeply committed to the banishment of nuclear weapons. They knew he was no international terrorist, no crazed killer, just a wild old man trying to make a point. More important, they knew that a half ton of TNT would barely scratch the surface of the Monument. But property is more important than human life.

  He demanded nothing for himself. No ransom, no great sum of money, no fast plane to take him out of the country, no release of Red Brigade assassins. He merely wanted us to talk. He just wanted to plead with us to expand the dialogue. He was as one with the millions across the world who have marched and pleaded this last year. Marched and pleaded for the right of the human race to live out its d
ays without the mushroom-shaped shadow blighting our joy. Yes, he was an extremist; yes, he was bereft of his senses; but he did not deserve to die.

  Within a few hours his actions bespoke that intention. Had there been a scintilla of compassion, rather than macho posturing, in any of the authorities handling the situation, it need not have ended as it did. But there was none. Not on the part of Associated Press reporter Steve Komarow, who spoke to him five times; not on the part of Capt. Robert Hines, commander of the Park Service police, who preened and pontificated before tv cameras like one of those satraps on a road repair crew who is given the red flag to stop traffic and becomes a martinet with that puny power; not on the part of the White House advisors who moved Ronald Reagan’s luncheon out of the room facing the Monument. And not on the part of our noble President who, like Richard Nixon, saw what was going on and shrugged, and ignored his responsibility.

  And when, shortly after seven o’clock that night, Norman Mayer came to his senses and was terribly frightened by his own boldness, and tried to flee, to return to the anonymity from which he had emerged…they blew him away. When the first FBI special agent reached the van, the old man was lying there mumbling, “They shot me in the head.”

  And no one has protested the violence. He deserved it. He was a threat. He was a terrorist and we can’t bargain with terrorists. “We couldn’t take a chance he’d be driving around Washington in a van full of TNT,” is the standard explanation for his death.

  But common sense would have informed the conclusion that there was no threat, that there was no TNT. Common sense and a dollop of human compassion would have softened that killing posture. Had he been a man with death in his heart, he would not have walked into the Monument at 9:30 and told all the tourists, “Please leave quietly.” He would have held them as hostages. He would have kept those seven people trapped at the top of the obelisk. He would have threatened the SWAT teams with instant explosion of the mythical TNT if those seven people tried to walk down the 555-foot structure. But he didn’t. He asked that they be escorted from the Monument by Park Service rangers, and some of them even nodded to him as they passed him. He nodded back. I saw it on the news.