Slippage

by Harlan Ellison

  By the time I came to TZ, George had noodled the idea that formed the core of "Nackles" to a point where he could write it up as a story outline. I had had success adapting Stephen King's "Gramma"—a difficult but enjoyable assignment—and was busily writing both the short story and the teleplay of "Paladin of the Lost Hour" when George's treatment came in.

  Those of you who have read "Nackles" in its print medium incarnation (included, seriatum, in this volume), will perceive that what works on the page would not work on the screen. The core idea, the anti-Santa, was so strong, that it obliterated the rest of the story for visual adaptation. George, who at that time had had very little experience with the script idiom, though he has gone on to do some excellent teleplays and subsequently was hired as a Story Editor on TZ, stubbed his toe on the piece, and no one (George included) was particularly happy with the result.

  At the same time, we were trying to breathe life into an idea submitted by a writer named Bryce Maritano; a story about an Elvis imitator who goes back in time to meet The King. The story meetings we held, in which we sat for hours trying to make either silk purses out of sow's ears or sow's ears out of silk purses, invariably foundered on Maritano's story, "The Once and Future King." It was a touching, dangerous concept, but Maritano didn't seem to know where to go with it. There was talk of putting the story in abeyance, but with one of those rare insights my wife refers to as "dumb luck," I said to DeGuere, "Jeezus, what dummies we are! One of the basic problems of this script is that Maritano doesn't have the feel for rock'n'roll. He's even got Elvis playing an electric guitar, and everybody knows Presley played only acousticals. Give the story to George. He's perfect for it. He's got the smarts for this one if anybody has!"

  So George was relieved of "Nackles" and went on to write a killer segment based on the Maritano idea, the premiere show of the second season.

  But we still needed someone to write "Nackles" for the special Christmas show. Since it was my big mouth that had freed the job for a new writer, and since it was my big mouth that ventured ways in which Westlake's gruesome little bon mot could be altered to work visually, it was into my big mouth that Crocker, O'Bannon, DeGuere and Brennert wadded the script.

  It was summer before I got to it. I began by doing research. Richard Finkelstein, Director, Bureau of Client Fraud Investigation, New York City Human Resources Administration, spent several hours on the long distance phone with me, explaining how the welfare setup works these days in Manhattan. Then I went back to all the stories I'd written about tenement life in New York, and refreshed the recollections, the smells and sounds.

  Understand: I am no part of the shared delusion that if one merely entertains with television, that it is a job worthy unto itself. Entertain, yes! That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo. It is not whimsical that the Falwells and Tipper Gores and Wildmons of the world seek to silence music and to burn books: they correctly perceive them to be dangerous. Kafka tells us, "I believe that we should read only those books that wound and stab us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." So should it be with television, a medium so powerful that it can change our cultural values in a generation. But it isn't so. And television is merely entertainment. At best. For the most part it is as memorable and meaningful as what Aquinas called "a fart in the wind." Writing, done well, after the entertainment part has been taken care of, should be journalism.

  And I am one with Joseph Pulitzer, who is reputed to have said, "The purpose of journalists should be to afflict the comfortable."

  So for Christmas, I turned "Nackles" into a statement on bigotry and racism. You read it; I'll abide by your judgment; and see if it is a strong statement. It was certainly intended to be strong. To sit between a remake of that gentle Yuletide fable The Night of the Meek and Alan Brennert's adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" in a tripartite holiday package that would make a viewing experience no one would soon forget. Ah, vanity, thy name is scenarist.

  My first draft teleplay was handed in on July 15th, 1985 and by September 25th, when I had completed a rewrite, we knew we had something in the oven that might be difficult to get past the network, but if it could be done...gangbusters!

  I sent the script to Don Westlake, to get his feeling about it, and on October 25th he wrote me (in part): "Okay. In fact, okay! It's different, God knows, but it would have to be, wouldn't it? When this idea first came along, I said to myself, well, if they want to, but I don't think it's possible. I looked at the story again at that time, and it seemed to me it wasn't a story at all, it was just an essay with incidents. I wouldn't have had the slightest idea how to turn it into a real-life narrative, and I'm amazed that you not only believed there was a way, but found it."

  I felt like a million bucks.

  A final draft was handed in on November 3rd, followed by a "revised final" on the 13th of that month. Christmas was coming at us steadily, and we had to get moving or we'd never get the segment into that triple-play package. Another revised draft: November 14th. A third revised final: November 20th.

  For some time on the show, DeGuere and Crocker and our line producer Harvey Frand, and Alan and Rock had been trying to convince me that I should try my hand at directing. I'd resisted, because I'm a writer, and that's what I like to do. But in the course of the season I'd seen so many lame directors mess up so many sweet scripts, that by the middle of November I was convinced a talented mollusk could direct decently. So on the 21st I told Harvey and Jim I wanted to direct "Nackles."

  It was a short script, perhaps only eleven minutes long as it would finally be aired, and it had gone through all the personnel at CBS programming, as well as the L.A.-based CBS Standards & Practices people. They'd seen it as a dangerous script, but we'd bartered a word here, an epithet there, and it had been approved for us to go forward into production.

  On the 22nd, CBS approved me as director for the segment. It was a scary step for me to be taking, but I knew what I wanted to see there on the screen come Christmastime, that rushing-toward-us Friday night, and I knew I could pull it off. Hell, ain't I the guy who writes such visual scripts, with all the shots in there just to give the director a vision, not a floorplan?

  That day I scouted locations with my Assistant Director, Paul Deason; costumes were set; and I called in a favor by getting Edward Asner to play the loathesome Jack Podey. Ed and I had been on a few barricades together, and though I knew he did not do ordinary episodic tv, and that he drew down a much heftier salary than TZ could pay, I felt he would want to do a show like this one. "Nackles," by the very presence of an Asner, would be a statement of moral imperative that nobody could dismiss. Ed agreed to play Podey. I loved it...because I'd had him in mind as Podey from the first line I'd written. (True to his nature, Ed Asner announced he would donate his entire fee to charity. So what's not to love about him?)

  We worked through the weekends painting mattes, dressing sets, hiring the other actors, looking at dozens of kids till we found one who could play Pooch to the hilt.

  Everything was set.

  And then, in New York, a woman named Alice Henderson, bearing some sort of title or other, but high up in the CBS Standards & Practices division, finally got around to reading "Nackles." Later, CBS would say that they'd gotten the script at the last moment. As you can tell from the dates of various versions of the script, which would have been approved all the way through the process, they knew what "Nackles" was to be, as far back as July. Notwithstanding the duplicity, Alice Henderson's hair rose like Medusa's serpentine locks.

  The word came down on Monday the 25th:

  You cannot do this script. Not no way, not no how, not never!
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br />   DeGuere and everyone else went crazy, we were thousands of dollars into the game already. Asner had a pay-or-play contract. They would have to pay me the full director's fee, even if the show never got made. Everyone started trying to get Henderson and her department to suggest ways in which it could work.

  The suggestions were vile, infamous!

  It couldn't be New York. (Because the week before, CBS had aired a special starring Lucille Ball as a bag lady, and the head of CBS had gotten a cranky call from Mayor Koch, upset that the Apple was always being portrayed as a cesspool.) We couldn't have the Puerto Rican woman fudging on her welfare, no matter how compassionately we portrayed reality. It couldn't under any circumstances be Christmas, but we could pick any other holiday we chose. (TV Guide quoted me as suggesting, "Perhaps the dark side of the Easter Bunny!")

  There were more strictures. Many more. I won't name them, because you may be reading this before you read the teleplay, and I don't want to spill the beans. But when you reach the punchline, you'll understand that they absolutely forbid...

  Well, you'll see.

  I resigned on the 26th. There was a lot of noise about it. I don't suffer in silence. It was in the New York Times, TV Guide, Los Angeles Times, Variety, dozens of newspapers all over the country, on Entertainment Tonight and, ironically, CBS News.

  But they wouldn't back down.

  They pulled the plug, costing the TZ production company what has been estimated at between $150,000 and $300,000.

  And the Christmas show had a substitute segment slipped into it. And I was gone. And that was that.

  Except. In the Spring of 1986, when it appeared that TZ would be picked up for a second season, DeGuere called and said CBS wanted me to meet with Alice Henderson, who was coming in from New York, to discuss my returning to the show. We three met and had lunch at Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood, and I presented my case to Ms. Henderson. I told her that I respected her desire to protect the American public from dangerous materials but that I felt it was very shaky ground for the network, to be taking a stand against a potent indictment of racism and bigotry. I told her this was intended to be the real thing, not Archie Bunker calling someone a "spook" and then smiling, and everybody knows he's at heart a good guy, didn't he cry when Edith died?

  I told her that I perceived her actions as intending to serve the commonweal, but that, in fact, she was serving the status quo. And since the status quo was one of bigotry and racism, that she was in no way defending the responsibility of the network.

  It was an amicable talk. Nice woman, actually. And she said she'd consider revising her decision.

  Well, they jerked me around for months. Finally DeGuere had a meeting with the Powers In Charge, and we arrived at some revisions (they've been included as gray-tone sidebars at the appropriate places in the teleplay), revisions that I thought we could live with.

  I did the rewrite free of charge.

  Sent it in.

  And they switched censors. They altered the rules of the game, and some new jamook said not no way, not no how, not never!

  And that was that.

  I forgot. I forgot that for every DeGuere and Crocker who cares about what comes to you through that little box, there are a hundred clowns in suits, terrified of making waves, who puff up like a banjo player who had a big breakfast with the import of the job. Men and women who care only that a loaf of bread costs more than 13¢ and they will make damned sure no little smartmouth writer endangers their purchase of the Staff of Life. Let us offend no one, even if the cost of that chickenshit political correctness cowardice is a perpetuation of despicable practices and mores and vile, outmoded, cultural values.

  For some of us, who live to regret having forgotten the lessons of history, there are other, more important Staffs in this life. The Staff with which I worked for a year on T2 was more important, and CBS has broken that staff...Brennert and Crocker and I are gone. The Staff of honor is also important. And if a writer cannot do with honor what he/she does best, then working in the medium is only for the buck.

  And that's no reason worth a fart in the wind.

  ___

  I took a moment to clear my head, and went over next door, to the house of the woman who had rented us the place, and I borrowed a broom from her. Then I swept up every room in the house, clean as a whistle, obsessively neat, and whisked the piles of dirt into a big shopping bag, and tossed the bag into the garbage can, and returned the broom, and went away from there. I didn’t think about her again till nearly a year and a half later.

  ___

  Nackles

  a short story by

  Donald E. Westlake

  Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.

  It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn't He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.

  Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the Good, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahrinian. And we ourselves know God and Satan.

  But of course it's entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under the age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus does not possess?

  And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa's power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)

  Santa Claus is a god. He's no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn't ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And don't gods reflect their creators' (?) society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.

  And wherever there is a god, mustn't there sooner or later be a devil?

  Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who's to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is—or was—a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I'll never know. Why Susie wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn't explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.

  Frank is—Frank was—I just don't know what tense to use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive linebacker for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other way to make a living.

  Ex-football players tend to become insurance salesmen, I don't know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same compan
y, they soon became acquainted.

  Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and handsome? She's never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully know what goes on inside the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she decided she was in love with him.

  So they were married, and five weeks later he gave her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn't have been, since Susie tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me she had a headache and we'd have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.

  I got the story out of her slowly, in fits and starts. Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the gridiron again, but I want to be President and I'm an automobile salesman and I don't go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me to let Frank know he wasn't to vent his pique on my sister any more.

  Unfortunately, I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday Times under my arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he'd surely give me a black eye to go with my sister's. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation baseball bat, and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.

  He opened the door himself and snarled, "What do you want?"