An Edge in My Voice
Page 48
So I pass the hot sauce, and we don’t talk about the days in the trenches. We got through the war without taking a slug; we remain; and this book exists. That’s enough.
There were a few things left undone when I stopped writing An Edge…I never got around to writing the column about Ridley Scott and his contention that “the time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films to come along, and I’m going to be that guy.” Never wrote it because I never saw Ridley again. And once I’d written that quote, it said just about everything I’d have put in the column. Never got around to writing the long essay on attorney Gloria Allred and what a Force for Good she is, how her Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund is a wonder, and about how she defended the guy who ran down the rapist who’d attacked his girl friend. Never wrote it because, well, I just never got around to it. With regret. I never got to do the column about the world’s most indecently delicious hot fudge, a purely felonious confection guaranteed to drive any chocolate junkie into paroxysms of twitching and slavering, a magical stuff made by Narsai’s of Kensington, California 94707 with the truth-in-advertising name Orange Chocolate Decadence. Mere a jar of this stuff could have convinced the Inquisition that the Earth does, honest Injun, move around the sun. Never got to do that column.
And I never got to tell the conclusion of the infamous “Jon Douglas West Mystery.” But that’s what the Afterword to a book is for; and so, for the terminally curious, here is the part that usually follows and they lived happily ever after.
September 1982. The private eye had given up trying to locate someone who had signed his letters “Jon Douglas West.” I’d been told in print by West that he lived in Burbank—just down the road from where I live—and that if I wanted to come kick his ass, I’d find him listed in the phone book. Of course, no such thing. There was no Jon Douglas West in any Burbank records; not telephone, not water and power, not Southern California Gas Company, not postal delivery, not DMV not tax rolls, not property.
Back in July the Weekly had received several letters from supporters of West, and one of them, signed “Lucy McNulty, Informed Citizen,” had been written on the same typewriter as the West missives. Some of the same typos appeared in the West and McNulty correspondence; complement for compliment, and Zionests for Zionists come immediately to mind.
The West / McNulty comments re Beirut and “High Society Zionests” [sic]—both in the sections of the letters as published, and in portions deleted by Phil Tracy due to restrictions of space and good taste—were sufficiently hysterical for me to write the following response which, because I’d thought back in July that I might scare them off, I never used in my column.
Both West and McNulty seem so startled that the editors of the Weekly would run letters that disagree with my column. How many of you were startled? I sure as hell wasn’t. What I write is open to fire upon; that’s been obvious from the first installment. But West and McNulty (who may be the same person, neither of whom is named West or McNulty) treat this run-of-the-mill freedom of access to the press as a rare and courageous act. One wonders—if the person behind these letters bears a more, how shall I put it delicately, Middle Eastern name and background—what sort of cultural heritage leads our indefatigable letter writer to think newspapers don’t give equal time to the opposition? Is it possible that the party who would have us believe his name is West is actually someone from the East…where media censorship at gunpoint is the commonplace, making the publication of his / her letters in the Weekly seem so courageous and unusual.
I’m just asking.
But by late August, with all tracking efforts having come up empty, I was resigned never to knowing who lurked behind the West monicker. Then one night, as I mentioned in Interim Memo number 40, I received an anonymous phone call from a woman who said, “I understand you’re looking for Jon Douglas West.”
It was late. It was dark. I spoke slowly. “That’s right; maybe. Who’s this?”
“A friend of his.” Then she paused and said, “Anyway, I was a friend of his.”
“He seems to have some trouble making and keeping friends,” I said. She made one of those sounds midway between a snort and a sneer, and said, “Damn straight.”
“You don’t have to worry about it,” she said.
“Worry about what?”
“Worry about finding him. You already met him.”
I felt a chill.
“You even shook hands with him.”
“That so? When?"
“Last weekend. He came to your autograph party. I was there, too.”
The chill wouldn’t go away. On Saturday, August 21st, I had sat from 2:00 until 5:00, signing books at the Dangerous Visions Bookstore in Sherman Oaks.
I had met Jon Douglas West, had in fact touched him; and hadn’t known it.
“Which one was he?” I had the sudden paranoid feeling that he was right there with her, listening in on another phone, having put her up to it, not at all a former friend.
Then she described him, and I remembered the guy. No, he wasn’t a Middle Eastern émigré. He was one of those guys named Sonny, or Buddy, or Bubba. The kind of guy who played nose guard in high school, who went into his father’s plant to work alongside Dad on the line. The style of mean furniture that John D. MacDonald always uses as the villain in the Travis McGee books. One of those chunks of meat who, when he’s having a public fight with his wife or girl friend, grabs her bicep a little harder than is called for; nobody notices, but she’s black and blue for two weeks afterward.
When we’d clasped hands, his mitt covered mine till the fingers met in the back of my wrist. He hadn’t applied any special pressure.
I didn’t remember her at all.
“Fan of mine, is he?” I asked.
“He just wanted to get up next to you, to see what you looked like. It made him glad, your not knowing who he was.”
I felt my jaw muscles clenching. “Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Him knowing me, but me not knowing him.”
So she told me his name, and where he lived. It wasn’t West, and he didn’t live in Burbank. He lived in Van Nuys, about fifteen minutes from my house.
“So how come you’re telling me this?"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “If I didn’t do it, my sister would. I just beat her to it.”
I didn’t go after that one at all.
Over the next few weeks I made it my business to check out “West’s” situation. My private eye, delighted to have the puzzle solved, found me everything I needed to know about the large, unmarried, working-class gent with pretensions of literary ability who had taken such a ferocious dislike to sweet little me. I knew more than I cared to know about this joker. But I was patient. I did nothing. I just waited.
Then in early November, after publication of what appear here as Installments 44 and 48, two columns about the gun control initiative Proposition 15, I received via the Weekly, in an envelope postmarked Van Nuys, addressed to Mr. Harlen [sic] Ellison (Personal) return addressed only with the initials J.D.W., a Xerox copy of a letter he’d written to the paper on October 4th. Attached to the letter was a personal note.
With permission of the L.A. Weekly (a permission that extends, by letter on file with Donning Publishers, to all correspondence used in this book), that note and letter are reproduced here and on the following pages:
4 October 82
To the Editor:
“Guns are not the only weapons. Control the guns and somebody will think of another method. It’s not the weapon that creates murder, it’s the mind…it’s too simplistic to say, yes, if we have gun control everything will be okay.”
Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow (10-1-81 Issue of Rolling Stone Magazine)
I Just bad to write and thank the Chicken Little of hypocritical, yellow-journalism for enlightening the unenchanted public on the virtues of Proposition 15. (September 23–30) Thanks, Harlan. But, no thanks…
Again, serving Judgement and atte
mpting to do our thinking for us from your security-tight estate in Encino (or wherever). Again, anguishing and accusing us for lethargy and insensitivity, clouding the reality of a very serious issue with your paranoia and persecution complexes and very few facts.
I would imagine your juvenile conspiracy theories are quite meaningless to many California merchants and citizens who are forced to make a decision involving an impending robbery or assault because they do not have the luxury of waiting for a black and white to appear or cannot afford robbery insurance. I certainly think the use of deadly force is their decision and theirs to live with (not yours, or a lone idle-minded committee of fat cats) You seem more concerned with a fetish for the “Celebrity Dead” than any concern for “John Q. Public” or his dire circumstances. You can’t expect Dean Martin to drive around West Los Angeles drunk without his .38, can you? Now really, Harlan, do you expect David Crosby to protect his cocaine or assault women without his .45’s? And Dave was at Peace Sunday, too! Oh, the irony!
Do you really believe that a state-wide ban on handguns will reduce the nature or degree of crime in L.A.? Of course, it’s well beyond your dignity to question the professional police officers (on the streets, not in the law enforcement bureaucracy) who openly reject Proposition 15 as any deterrent to crime or violence. I hardly think the average “boost artists” buy and register their hardware from Big 5 or any legitimate gun outlet. I also challenge your assumption that the limited availability of guns could stop a person who is quite willing to destroy a human life. Bremer, Chapman and Hinckley stalked their victims with premeditation and would have pursued their goals of violence with or without a gun. Some of Southern California’s most notorious “stereotypes—William Bonin and Lawrence Bittinger—tortured and murdered many young men and girls in the most heinous and sadistic manner beyond imagination without even possessing a gun. Wirehangers, ice-picks, pliers and sledgehammers are probably available in most hardware and discount stores and, to my knowledge, don’t require an investigative waiting period or registration. (Have you used any Tylenol or eyedrops lately?) I’m sorry, dear Harlan, but my surrogate penis has saved me at least once from serious bodily ham (in my own apartment) and I’d kind of like to keep it. Unless, of course, you have room for me in your security bunker?
Blaming film, the media or authors is another weary escape route. I suppose you could incite someone to murder with a Stay-Free Maxi Pad or a can of Lemon Pledge under the right psychotic circumstances. For that matter, could Son Of Sam have gotten his telepathic dog from the film “A Boy and His Dog”? Can you live with that?
In closing Harlan, shed a tear or two for those hundred of mutilated, butchered (none were shot) cats and their owners in Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks. Of course, that apparently unbalanced stereotype doesn’t discriminate as to whether the cats are female or Journalists or Jewish. I hope he doesn’t graduate to humans…Hopefully, they’ll shoot the son-of-a-bitch when they catch him.
—Yours dearly,
Jon Douglas West
Jon Douglas West. Dear god, what an iniquitous man. Here is what happened to him. I report it as it was told to me.
Apparently, sometime late in December someone broke into his apartment. Peculiarly, nothing was stolen, nor was anyone ever tagged for the break-in; but shortly thereafter, on a probable cause warrant requested by the office of the assistant District Attorney for Van Nuys, Mr. West was visited late one evening by plainclothes detectives representing the LAPD, who entered and searched his premises. Mr. West was taken into custody for possession of unregistered firearms. Other, printed materials, named in the warrant, were also confiscated.
Subsequently, after interrogation resulting from his possession of the printed material, Mr. West was connected to the defacement (swastikas, references to “another Holocaust”) less than a month before of Temple Beth Torah on Woodley Avenue in Sepulveda.
Mr. West went away for a while.
It is my understanding that he’s out now. He no longer lives at his former address. Though his true name and a copy of the police report are enclosed with a registered letter in the caretakership of a friend of mine who is renowned for his suspicious nature (he sees assassination conspiracies under every cabbage leaf), the whereabouts of the man who called himself Jon Douglas West are unknown to me at this time.
Lucy McNulty, informed citizen, has not been heard from.
According to the most recent Ford Foundation study, sixty-four million Americans are functional illiterates. That’s better than 28 out of every 100.
I have been asked repeatedly why I write essays such as those appearing here, why I’m such a pain in the ass, why I seem cynical and troublemaking. I respond: we are in a time of crisis.
Here are some words from a long-ago issue of The New Yorker (unsigned as to authorship) on the subject of crisis:
This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don’t turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we’re stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period—sometimes only minutes, sometimes hours, rarely as much as a day—nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody.
The more you agree with what a columnist has to say, the less effective the columnist is for you. The more closely the opinions of a columnist coincide with your own, without his / her raising questions in your mind, the less valuable the work is to you. Every column that you read, during the course of which you experience no anger or contentiousness, is a column you never needed to read.
“I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?”
—Franz Kafka
The value of a columnist, of an essayist, is in his / her viewpoint; the quirkiness of his / her insights; the originality, the freshness of his / her sense of what may underlie the obvious. Reading one more review in praise of, say, Lucas-Spielberg films…is merely the use of paper. But reading a column in which a cinema critic suggests that films by these men vacillate between a supersweet, lachrymose sentimentality that is as cloying as a Sammy Davis, Jr., homage to his show biz buddies or Richard Nixon, and a genuinely vicious cynicism and fascination with violence, as demonstrated in the scenes of brutalization of children in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and nakedly, blatantly in most of Gremlins…is to look at the received world in a different way.
As John Simon noted in 1981: “…there is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said.”
(It should be noted that I don’t think merely being negative in one’s insights necessarily makes for valuable criticism. Crankiness is unbecoming and unproductive. For instance, most of the attention garnered by the recently-deceased comedian Andy Kaufman, during the last five years, was negative. No one seemed to notice that he was our most valuable comedian because, like Lenny Bruce, he was our most adventurous, our most dangerous funnyman. He expended more courage, took more chances, developed more unsettling original forms of presentation of his material—which dealt exclusively with aspects of the human condition we’d rather not acknowledge—than anyone working in the medium of stand-up humor.)
As John Le Carré has pointed out in terms of writers—and it goes doubly well for columnists—“a good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.”
This has been the week-by-week record of the world as I saw it
for more than a year. It was your world, too. And though I would not have you deface a synagogue, or bomb the Washington Monument, or reveal in print the secret affairs of the government agency for which you work, or even smile were you pounced upon by a Bengal tiger, I would hope these random thoughts unsettle you and move you to informed disagreement. And what about that edge in your voice?
—Harlan Ellison
13 October 84
Los Angeles
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Foreword by Tom Snyder, copyright © 1985 by Tom Snyder.
Introduction: "Ominous Remarks for Late in the Evening," © 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
The letters reproduced in AN EDGE IN MY VOICE are used with permission from the L.A Weekly.
Copyright © 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation
ISBN 978-1-4976-0474-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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