Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  And I was afraid, too. If they had known who I was, and I had come back on the scene after having disappeared so effectively, it might have meant serious trouble for me. Uptown, hair cut normally, suited, carrying an attaché case, I was definitely not Cheech Beldone. I was someone else entirely, and it was better that way.

  And it had been seven years. A long time.

  In seven years I had lectured many times on the subject; had even gone on television and radio with my experiences. I had said, “You can’t stop a rumble or a kid gang once it gets rolling. There isn’t much you can do when slums take the place of football fields, or when alleys are more convenient for loving-up a date than taking her to a canteen for dancing and clean entertainment.

  “But as long as there is a solid family unit that will recognize the kid as an integral part, that will respect his intelligence, his honesty, his status, a family he can run to when the city closes down on him and the world snaps and snarls, as long as the parents and the school and the church and the local government stop looking at delinquency as a recent cultural leprosy, get off their behinds, and try to understand the kid, try to aid him in helping himself grow up, not shove him the way they think or half-think he should go, there’s a chance.

  “When everybody stops passing the buck and blaming it on girlie magazines or television or the H-bomb, then a start will be made toward solving the problem.”

  That’s what I’d said, and showed the knives that had ripped, and the knucks that had smashed. That was what I’d said, though I’d known that wasn’t the whole answer, perhaps not even the right answer.

  But I’d known it was a start, and they had to start somewhere.

  Sometimes it came down to insulting the parents…

  I told them they needed to be educated, like their kids. “Honor thy father and mother” was a sweet sentiment once, but what if the father is a lush and the mother is too lazy to notice whether the stains on her son’s shirt are lipstick or blood? I said, “Get the adults trained! Rid them of the idea that just because they gave birth to something they are competent to bring it up. Most parents are so incompetent they wouldn’t know their kid was Public Enemy Number One unless they saw his picture in the post office.”

  Sometimes it came down to insulting the police…

  “We need more beat cops. Get them out of the prowl cars. There isn’t a thing they can do rolling along like conquering heroes, advertising their presence, blocks from trouble when it breaks. Let the paid servants of the people earn their pay instead of grousing about how many callouses they have on their backsides for the pittance they’re paid. Pay them more. Then let the cops walk around. Then give him more cops to walk over the ground he’s just covered. Blanket the rough sections. Stamp out the street mugger and the rapist and the lice that push junk to the kids. Stop the rumble by forming more youth groups, that want to let the kids help and grow, not keep them out of the way. Show them they’re needed, not in the way.”

  Sometimes it came down to insulting the educators…

  “You don’t call what you’re shoveling at kids these days education, do you? They go in stupid, and they come out stupid, if they bother going in at all. Most of them are fucking illiterate! They can’t read or write or enjoy even a simple pleasure like thinking a new thought. Read a book? Like hell! Think straight enough to see through all the jingo-spouting phonies running for office or trying to sell them ass-wipe on television? Fat chance! Develop their cleverness enough to get a job that’s better than sitting for eight hours a day in a windowless box making money for someone else? Don’t make me laugh! You program them to be no-necks; to be nerds; to take what’s fed them and make no noise. Behavior mod them, brainwash teach them, scare the authority into them. You get put in a classroom with a bunch of wild animals and all you can think about is keeping them from eating your heart and eyes out. That’s teaching; sure it is. You people’d be better off serving the commonweal as bricklayers.”

  I tried to get across the idea of action on the part of parents too busy with churchkey and time-card, action on the part of school boards too hypocritical and stingy to persuade good teachers to stay in education, action on the part of clergy and government too busy dredging up the proper indignant expressions and the proper flowery phrases for “the present outrageous situation” to get out in the streets where the kids play stickball.

  I wanted them to talk to their kids, and to listen.

  Many lectures, many showings of the weapons the kids used, and in seven years—nothing. The same. No change, unless it was to get worse.

  So my interest turned in futility to other things. I wrote about other things, saw different scenes, and the ten weeks in 1954 began to fade. It was all to come back to me, much more forcibly, later that month…September, 1960.

  I had gone to a party in the Bronx, and there met a fellow named Ken Bales, someone I’d known in 1955, a fellow I’d loaned a typewriter to. He had pawned it; he had been a deadbeat then, and in 1960 he was no better. I advised him if he didn’t pony up the cost of a new typer, or get me that one back, I would lean on him. That happened early in September. It was to result in an experience I never want to relive, an experience that brought back my memories of the Barons so sharply I felt I had never left Brooklyn. It happened like this…

  Bales, frightened by my determination to make him pay up, and aware of the weapons I had in my apartment (locked in a filing cabinet), which had never been a secret, as I had displayed them on television, anonymously phoned the police.

  He told them I had an arsenal in my Greenwich Village apartment.

  On Sunday, September 11th, a hot summer day, I was doing nothing in particular, loafing around the apartment, when the bell rang. I answered it, and was confronted by two plainclothesmen of the New York Police Department. They asked if they might come in. I thought it was a gag and asked to see their tin. They showed me their credentials and I admitted them.

  They were pleasant enough, sat down, and asked me if I had any enemies. I answered with a grin, and said, “I lead a normal life; I suppose I’ve got as many as the next guy.” They didn’t smile back. They asked me how long I had been living at 95 Christopher Street and if I knew of anyone in particular who would like to do me harm. I told them how long I’d been in the apartment, since I’d come in from Chicago, and the only person I could think of at the moment who disliked me enough to fink on me was Ken Bales.

  Then they asked if I’d ever used narcotics.

  I didn’t quite know what to answer them.

  Friends who knew me often thought I was a fanatic, so opposed to junk was I. A young friend of mine, in fact, had been experimenting, and with another friend, a jazz critic named Ted White, we had threatened to knock his teeth in if he ever went near it again. Narcotics? Hell, no…I didn’t even use NoDoz.

  I told them I had never had anything to do with narcotics and felt this thing was going a bit too fast for me. I asked them what this was all about, and was I being charged with something. I noticed they were looking at me carefully, at my arms and my legs. I had been washing the bathroom sink at the time they had arrived and was wearing nothing but beach-boy slacks, rolled to the knees, with no shirt. They could see I had no needle marks on my body.

  Then they informed me that an anonymous tip had come in to the Charles Street police station that a writer named Ellison at 95 Christopher Street was having wild narcotics parties, had a storehouse of heroin secreted in the apartment, and also had an arsenal of lethal weapons.

  I knew it had been Bales, but I couldn’t prove it.

  At that point I asked them please to search the place. They said they had intended to do it in any case, but they were glad I’d offered so they wouldn’t have to go and get a search warrant.

  They spent the better part of an hour searching my one-and-a-half-room apartment, and naturally found nothing. Then they came back into the living room and sat down.

  The senior officer asked me if I had a gun in the pla
ce. I had to think a moment. It did not dawn on me to equate the empty .22 short revolver I had used for seven years as a prop, with a lethal weapon that should have been registered in the State of New York. After a moment I said, “Well, I have some weapons that I’ve used on lecture tours, in connection with talks about juvenile delinquency.” I showed them my books.

  They asked if they might see the weapons.

  I went to the closet, found my keys in a pair of pants, and unlocked the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. Far in the back, under a stack of papers (for I had not been lecturing for six or eight months), I found the gun, the knife, the bayonet, and two sets of knucks. (The second set had been given to me by a student at a high school in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, after a talk I had given there, thus proving to me that j.d. was not a big city disease, solely.)

  I handed these items over, though the bayonet and the knife (without a switch) were both legal in New York City.

  They took these and I added, “I have bullets for the gun, too, if you want them.” They indicated they did, so I located the box of .22 rounds and gave them to the officers, also. They smelled the gun. “When was the last time this was fired?” they asked.

  “It’s never been fired while I’ve had it,” I said. “And that’s seven years. Before that, I don’t know.” The officer with the gun nodded to the other and said it smelled clean.

  We talked for another half hour, and still the seriousness of what was happening did not reach me. I was a legitimate writer with a legal use for these tools, and the whole anonymous call was a hoax, used by a kook to get me in trouble. They agreed that such might be the case, and while they were satisfied that the narcotics charge was absolutely unfounded, they would have to arrest me on The Sullivan Act for illegal possession of a gun. I thought I’d fall over, it was so weird. I’d done nothing, as far as I was concerned, and yet I was to be arrested.

  They apologized, said they had no doubt I was innocent, but a complaint had been lodged, and they were compelled to follow it up. I tried to reason with them, but they were adamant in the pursuit of their duties.

  I could not argue with them.

  Today, I still feel I was treated fairly and honestly by those two police officers, whose names I cannot and would not reveal, for they helped me as much as they were able, later.

  They advised me to get dressed, for they would have to take me in. I got panicky. My mother, whom I had not seen in over three years, had come into town from the Midwest, and had gone out for the afternoon. She would be back to make dinner in a short time. The thought of her coming in, finding me gone and not knowing where I’d disappeared—who knew how long I’d be kept in detention?—all this whirled through my mind. I asked them if I might tell a friend where I’d gone. They said it was all right to do so.

  I went downstairs in the building with one of the officers and told an acquaintance, Linda Solomon, what had happened to me. She thought it was a gag. “You’re putting me on,” she said, laughing. Then she opened the door a bit wider, saw the officer, and the smile vanished.

  We made arrangements for her to tell my mother what had happened, and I went back upstairs, dressed, and left with the officers.

  It was the beginning of twenty-four hours caught in the relentless mechanism of the N.Y.C. judicial system. A 24-hour period that so filled me with hopeless desperation that at times I thought I would crack.

  But it was a fitting ending to my researches about the gang. For in the Tombs—New York’s affectionate name for its jail—I was to encounter one of the Barons, seven years later, when I was someone else, and he was someone else, and it all tied together too terribly, too neatly, to even let me slip into the forgetfulness I’d known.

  How ironic…that a guy who had wanted to tell the truth about the kids, should be arrested seven years later as a result of having run with them. It was like the second half of a book, tied inextricably to the first by sadness and desperation and the evil that seems never to leave someone who has experienced the filth and horror of the streets.

  I was going back for another visit in hell.

  BOOK TWO: THE TOMBS

  TEN

  The bullpen around me was clean and bare, and filled with the naked faces of men who were guilty, except for the innocence in their hands. See, their hands said, as they scratched at stubbled jaws, or lay soddenly in laps, or hung outside the bars (why outside the bars?), see, this body I’m attached to may have done evil, but I’m innocent. The lily-white hands, so pure and free of guilt. I sat among them and wondered what I had done to get involved in this treadmill horror underneath the city of New York. I honestly thought I might go out of my mind at any moment.

  From the larger marshalling room, outside the bullpen, sounds of typewriters and filing cabinets belied the fact that we were imprisoned. It sounded like an office, with busy little secretaries filing inconsequential reports. But it wasn’t an office, it was the records-preparation area of the Tombs, and they were cataloguing human beings. Punch carding and numbering them, and with each black mark made by pencil or typewriter key, the humanity of the subject vanished a little more. Reduction to symbol and file, disappearance by folio and reference number. The cold, mechanical equations of salting a man away in a cell, and knowing which cell to go to when you want him. An iron, inflexible system, prone to error that can never be traced, that keeps a man in that cell or under those tons of steel and concrete for hours longer than he should be kept. The regimentation of callousness.

  I could feel the entire weight of the city on me. I had been in custody for twelve hours now, and it was one automated step after another, with no opportunity to get humanity back into my actions. I was a cipher, one of a great string of bodies run through a computing system that would break me down into component parts and file me away like a piece of fruit in the proper bin.

  Sitting in the bullpen, looking around me, trying to comprehend all the facets of what had befallen me, and at the same time trying to understand these others whose hands said they, too, were innocent, I was not so much a participant as a victim.

  It had all happened so quickly, the arrest, the accusations, the dawning realization that this was not, indeed it was not, a hoax. All idea that this was an elaborate gag, rigged by my bohemian friends in the Village, had vanished like morning mist as the two police officers had hustled me into the unmarked squad car, and transported me to the Charles Street police station.

  Now as I sat in the bullpen, gray and cold and filled with men who might have been the best or the worst of any culture—Who could tell, when the mechanical thumb of the System had pressed down on each, making each the same, all equal, all guilty save for the hands?—now I tried to recall every slightest memory and tactile sensation, every sight or snippet of sound, that had come to me since the officers had walked into my apartment.

  We had gone down in the elevator at 95 Christopher, and the doorman, an easily-bought type named Jerry, was watching us with the beady ferret eyes of the short-line entrepreneur. “I’ve got some business to take care of, Jerry,” I told him. “If my mother comes in, please ask her to call Miss Solomon.” He nodded and smiled with that obsequious double-meaning known only to Manhattan doormen and bellboys. He knew something was up; I wasn’t to learn till much later how much he had known, and how that could hang me up, nearly ruin my career…

  They hustled me into an unmarked squad car, and started down Christopher Street to the Charles Street station house, just a few blocks away. “Hey, listen,” I said, trying to get some hold on myself or the situation, “do you think I’ll have to stay at the station very long?”

  They tried to be helpful, and said something reassuring, but it didn’t make me feel much better. I began to get the full idea that I just might have to be locked up for a few hours, and the prospect did not entice me.

  “Are you going to mention this narcotics thing?” I asked. They gave each other a brief, knowledgeable look, and the officer driving said, “No, I don’t see any r
eason why we have to mention it at all. I don’t think there’s any doubt that was a phony charge from the start.”

  I felt better when they said that, and decided being open with them had been the smartest course. So if they weren’t going to mention the junk nonsense, and they were satisfied I had the weapons for a perfectly valid reason, why was I being taken in?

  I asked them.

  “Because a complaint has been lodged,” they said, simply. “Someone has raised a beef upstairs, and it’s filtered down to us. Now we have to act on it.” It was my first really chilling encounter with the mindless, soulless, heartless machinery of the law as practiced in a great metropolitan area.

  “We have to do our job, or we’ll be in trouble,” one of them added. I couldn’t really blame them. They had homes and families to protect, too, and after all, what and who was I to them?

  We arrived at the Charles Street precinct house, with the smell of the Hudson River and the docks flowing up the block to us. The Charles Street station, famed in song and story (and mentioned so notably in Gelber’s play THE CONNECTION), is a great gray mass, completely blended into the surrounding warehouses and falling-down buildings. It almost seems to hunker, as though it were trying to go unnoticed in the street foliage. I’ve gone back to look at it many times, but each time I come away from it, the details fade and merge in my mind’s eye, and all that is left is that inhospitable, gray dawdling mass.

  That was the building into which they took me, a stranger and terribly afraid.

  We went up the steps and into the cool interior. It had been drizzling outside, a formless, slanting sadness that collected along the gutters and ran over my shoes. It seemed appropriate, somehow. Now, as we came inside, the rain still seemed to be falling indoors. I knew it was only an illusion, but the windows high and fat on the walls carried the rain like paintings. It was cool but sterile in the main hall of the station, with that faint odor of lye or detergent or whatever it is they use to keep the floors dirty-antiseptic. The front desk was shoulder-high on me, and the Sergeant behind that desk looked up with a bored, uncaring nod to the two plainclothesmen. They exchanged words and the Sergeant, holding a thick black marking pencil (almost like a manuscript pencil), jerked his thumb toward the stairs. “Take ‘im up to the detective section,” he said.