Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  Quite apart from its intrinsic merits as compelling viewing, as well-written and handsomely mounted theater, it is an object lesson for all of us when we castigate the juju box, as to what the outside limits (at the moment) seem to be when attempting to portray the status quo as the corrupt enterprise we’ve come to know so well. It was Universal being courageous, and we must give everyone connected with getting it on the air our thanks and respect. It may have served an inestimably worthwhile service.

  I was part of a tv panel at USC last week, in company with 20th’s Grant Tinker and Universal’s Norman Glenn, and in the audience was a student who said her mother (who’d apparently been unsympathetic to the Movement before the show) sat there murmuring right on through the show. Now that may not be an indication of radicalization on the part of the Middle American per se, but it is the kind of acceptable agitprop material we need to see more of.

  Mr. Glenn noted, however, that the ratings for the second half of the two-parter were considerably higher than for the first installment.

  The second installment followed John Wayne’s flag-waving special.

  What that says to all of us is, I think, reaffirmation of our wildest fears, but maybe not. Either way, Rintels and the Universal cadre stuck their necks out, and as we said to Baxter Ward last week: you are not alone. And

  Thank you.

  •Some months ago I did a turn on those debased Winston commercials in which the anti-intellectuals had their ups. I noted, in particular, the commercial in which a prissy white-collar type advises his boss at the board table that Winston tastes good as, not like, and for his trouble is thrown out through the swinging doors by the boss’s yes-men. At the time I didn’t know the name of that actor, but since I’ve been informed his name is Damian London, and I thought I’d pass it on to you and to any casting directors who need a good character actor.

  On the same subject, correspondent L. P. Desprez of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, reports the following:

  “As I was riding around on my bicycle this afternoon, I saw some young boys, approximately age 11, playing an amusing game that went like this:

  “One boy was it and the other five or six would gather around him, back him into a corner and hit him on the head, all the while screaming, ‘Whaat Doo Yoo Want? Good Grammer’r Good Taste?!’

  “I swear by whatever you would have me swear by that I did not make this up.”

  We believe you, L.P. We believe you. Sob.

  •Cowardice shows its colors in the action of NBC in promising to kill Bracken’s World in January. Or as pinafored Tricia Nixon has advised us, “You can’t underestimate the power of fear.” Which is to say, I had a 3000-word column all set to go (at long last) on the Olympian awfulness of that series. Oh, you’d have loved it, gang. Words like “debased” and “vomitous” and “evil” garlanded the review. Simply marvy phrases like “stories that make Jacqueline Susann look like Emily Brontë,” “the aroma of an Army co-op kitchen grease trap rises from this swill,” and “never has so much psychotic behavior earned so many no talents so much money” dotted the column like weevils in pancake batter. But all that is pointless now. NBC is deserting the ship before the rats turn on them, and I’d be the last guy in the world to kick a wounded animal as it was trying to crawl into the brush to lick its wounds.

  •Miss Barbara Shoemaker of Long Beach dropped me a note carping about having to wait forty-five minutes till a football game ended before she could watch The Young Lawyers, and, while she found it difficult to understand how some of us could bear to watch a group of padded loons obviously suffering from giantism push around another gaggle of plug-uglies, all for possession of what she terms “a peculiar little pointed object,” she opined the show was worth it. To her I pass along the information that, as of January, The Young Lawyers hangs onto primetime by its teeth by being moved to 10:00 Thursday nights and very shortly thereafter she won’t have to worry about ABC’s Monday night NFL broadcasts—because there won’t be any. Incidentally, ABC has been getting alarmingly low ratings on the games and that, coupled with the many hours of new shows they’ve been forced to kill, all because the “youth audience” they expected to pull never materialized, should make all of you under thirty out there deliriously happy: by boycotting their hypocritical and exploitive programming, you’ve cost them millions of dollars, all by your little beautiful selves. Now don’t that make you feel good?

  Put gold stars up beside your names.

  •A review of the Don Knotts Show, in brief, from notes, sans continuity, but with meaning clear:

  Tuesday 7:30, NBC. The most forgettable hour in tv. Dull comedy skits…band blared so loud they overrode Smokey Robinson and the Miracles…Knotts is the ultimate morphodite nebbish…moronic, tawdry elevator skit, bloodless, improbable, awkward, tasteless…cheap Kiwanis stag humor. Lesley Warren singing with that phony white pseudo-country bullshit downhome pronunciation: goddamn you to the last tick of recorded time, Keely Smith, for ever introducing a singing style with bastardizations like “tahm,” “goodbah,” “ah,” and “forgate” in it. Now every second-rater with aspirations of Caucasoid Soul substitutes it for feeling; I only wish on you that you should get hit by a falling Buddy Greco locked in an embrace with a downdropping Louis Prima from a fifty-storey office building, and the shrapnel should ricochet off Lesley Warren.

  Big-time variety comedy shows are for wieners.

  •Final note. The next time the Administration tells us how much freedom of speech and equal time there are in the good ole U.S.A., all together in unison leave us chant, “It ain’t equal time if Nixon gets primetime to millions and the opposition gets a soapbox on the corner.” Yeah, I know I said that a couple of weeks ago, but it bears repeating, especially when we note that NBC broadcast every loathsome moment of last January’s Super Bowl half-time ceremonies in which the War of 1812 was restaged, complete to bloody soldiers falling before booming cannons, extolling the grandeur and glory of mortal combat, but ABC refused to air the half-time festivities at the State University of Buffalo on October 31 because it was a peace demonstration. The swine bastards cut away for nine full minutes to give scores of incomplete games-in-progress rather than show the university’s marching band forming the peace symbol.

  Three days before the game ABC announced it wouldn’t carry the “Give Peace a Chance” ceremonies because they were political in nature.

  All the things that can be said about this disgraceful action leap to your minds as easily as they do to mine. So I won’t belabor it, save to say I hope it makes enough of you so sick to your stomachs and ethics that you write the FCC and the necessary Congressmen to insist on a full hearing. If ever there was reason to have a network’s license pulled…

  Well, shit, they should’ve known better. The marching band, that is. They should have formed a hard hat, not a peace symbol. They should have planned a “John Wayne All-Amurican Celebration” instead. They should’ve known better. And so should we.

  I’ll believe there’s “equal time” on the networks when I see TV Guide listings for specials like:

  THE PLEASURES OF GRASS

  DAVID FROST INTRODUCES THE WIT & WISDOM OF ELDRIDGE CLEAVER

  THE LENNON SISTERS SEX AND SADISM HOUR

  and Punch Detergent solicits KKKers to show how the enzymes remove bloodstains from their sheets.

  Frankly, folks, my karma feels threatened.

  90: 25 DECEMBER 70

  Turn off the bright lights, kindly remove the bamboo shoots from under my fingernails, and release my aged mother from the bingo parlors of Miami Beach, I’ll confess.

  This week I took payola.

  My column on Baxter Ward sufficiently delighted the folk at Channel 9 for them to send me a promotional item I feel compelled to fess up I accepted. A Baxter Ward wristwatch. With only four numerals on the face, all of which are 9. And the hands blend in with the background so it’s virtually impossible to tell what time it is. I suppose because the face of the item says WATCH B
AXTER WARD, it is no more reprehensible to have accepted the gift than, say, keeping record albums sent for review or using movie passes sent to film critics, but since I keep getting letters from brain damage cases out there saying they trust me (apparently because I continue to insist I’m not to be trusted), latent guilt drives me to the point of confession.

  I took the watch.

  I also took the genuine simulated pressed cardboard watchband attached to it.

  Anyone desiring to start a recall movement of this columnist for malfeasance in office had best know, additionally, that once before this I accepted payola. Which brings me to the deranged subject of this week’s maunderings.

  Last September I received a phone call from Jack Nesoff of the Hollywood Water Bed Company, advising me that because of the wonderfulness of myself, he was giving me a free water bed. “Gloryosky, Zero!” I caroled, leaping in the air in the elfin manner I adopt when confronted with loot, clapping my tiny pink paws in childlike glee. “Send it over,” I said.

  And it came over, and it was too big for inside the house, so I put it out on the back porch and we slept on it all through the summer and it’s just as lovely a sleeping experience as all those badly laid-out ads say it is; but then there’s more to it than just sleeping, which I’ll get into in a moment.

  About a month later, I received a phone call from Dr. Michael Valentine Zamoro, who vouchsafed that my beautiful vibrations via this column were so surfeiting the community with happyjoy, that he was sending me a Shair Water Bed in what he termed the “oceanic” size. I will not here chronicle the chirrupings and guttural sounds that emerged from my face into the very air. “Send it over,” is how it ended.

  So over came this even bigger goddamn water bed, and I sold the first one cheap to Chris Bunch, who promptly put a spike heel through it. (At least that’s how he tells it; you don’t catch me asking that freak Bunch why he was wearing spike heels. It’s all I can do to keep from commenting on his tacky dresses when he comes over for our Tupperware parties.) And then came winter, and while I suppose water beds indoors are the essence of heavenliness all year round, on a back porch during the monsoon season here in Elay, it is cold enough to freeze off your ass. And hers, too.

  Nonetheless, I accepted payola, and went so far as to promise Mr. Nesoff I would do a column about his water thing, telling people how sweet can be the joys of watching television while fucking on a water bed. Now if that isn’t rank selling of one’s position for material remuneration, then The $64,000 Question was a charity telethon and the Teapot Dome scandal was a bookkeeping error.

  Not to mention really stretching for a valid tv tie-in.

  But since I’ve done it, and since I’ve used both Mr. Nesoff’s Hollywood Water Bed and Dr. Zamoro’s Shair Water Bed as launching pads for incredible carnal pleasures, not to mention ghastly video experiences, the least I can do is keep faith with them and describe to all of you throbbing little voyeurs how water beds, sex, and television meld for an evening’s entertainment.

  (For those in Kansas, reading this column some weeks after Los Angeles subscribers, let me describe what it is a water bed: it’s this big kinda triple-seamed rubber bag filled with water. Big deal.

  (I know there are all sorts of frames and lights and pads and heaters and other jazz à la Playboy one can get to make the water bed seem more sumptuous than a big balloon lying on a floor, but neither of my benefactors apparently thought my vibes were beautiful enough to slip me the full deal. And really, it matters not, because all the benefits you’ll derive from a water bed can be derived without the accouterments. But keep the thing indoors, know what I mean?)

  Because there is a constant tidal effect when you move on a water bed, sex is best enjoyed thereon while watching old Western movies. I’ve found the rhythms are best established with the aid of Audie Murphy, Randolph Scott, Rod Cameron and Macdonald Carey shoot-’em-ups. Gary Cooper and Richard Widmark oaters aren’t so good: too much psychological stuff; you break the beat too often while they go through agonizing self-appraisal.

  Indian attacks on wagon trains and fistfights on the edges of cliffs are also pretty good. But cattle stampedes can be dangerous. I know a guy who got hundreds of gallons of tap water (with a dash of Clorox in it to keep it from getting funky) all over his bedroom during a sex-cum-viewing trip with John Wayne in Red River.

  One feels disquietingly unclean performing some of the more intricate sexual positions—such as “The Hong Kong Hod Carryer” and “The Mesopotamian Mash”—while watching family situation comedies. One gets the distinct impression Brian Keith or Mary Tyler Moore is tsk-tsking at every stroke. This same impression is conveyed by Marcus Welby, M.D. and Robert Young. For this reason I strongly advise against fucking to reruns of Father Knows Best. I would not even begin to evaluate the trauma attendant on getting laid during Lassie reruns featuring June Lockhart.

  For serious viewing while engaged in a more cerebral breed of sex, I highly commend to your attention the “Rocking Chair” position for First Tuesday and 60 Minutes. Not only is there a, well, uplifting feeling pursuant to this coupling, but it is much more comfortable for the extended length of First Tuesday airings. Groupies and gumchewers are not recommended for such sessions. I suggest magna cum laude graduates of Stanford currently engaged in eco research for one of the smaller corporations. Inexplicably, telex operators function well in this setting.

  Never fuck on a water bed while watching The Mod Squad. There is the inescapable feeling that those three young finks are watching and that they will instantly dash into a phone booth to tell Tige Andrews you’re out there doing something dirty. Visions of Clarence Williams III pulling the plug on your water bed leap unbidden to the mind. It is really hard keeping it erect with such horrors imminent.

  Thank god The Silent Force has been canceled.

  Red Skelton, Don Knotts, and Ed Sullivan, as well as Lawrence Welk, can best be watched while lying face to face on your side, moving slowly back and forth and allowing the tide to do all the work.

  Only perverts watch Laugh-In while water-bedded.

  Water bed masturbation is best served by George Putnam and the news as he sees it. Myopically.

  For those engaged in mutually destructive sexual relationships, I recommend the water bed during speeches by Nixon. One has the overwhelming urge to clobber; and if you’re involved with a fingernail digger/neck biter, Nixon is the one.

  Rona Barrett’s Hollywood report can make an erection fall faster than a spent Apollo missile.

  A “cute” fuck can be obtained on your water bed during reruns of Flipper. Obvious, but cute.

  For old marrieds, I reluctantly advise the Tom Jones Show. I realize it’s forced and transparently phony, but realities are realities and for those who’ve been locked in connubial bliss to the point where the partnership has palled, a little cheap sensationalism never hurts. You’ll hate yourselves afterward, of course, but remember, when two people love each other, anything is beautiful.

  To date, the best shtup on record was obtained by a Van Nuys plumber’s assistant and a casual Friday night pickup who works as a carhop at the Big Boy, on the following Saturday morning, atop a double water bed watching The Bugaloos. Windows were shattered for blocks around.

  Thus, from Baxter Ward’s punim on my watch, through KY sterile lubricant and Kama Sutra love oil, via Mayberry and Shiloh, we have examined the latest and most productive use to which can be employed the most potent form of education and communication the world has ever known.

  Isn’t it amazing how I can turn naked greed into an ennobling experience?

  91: 1 JANUARY 71

  As I sit down to write this week’s installment—the ninety-first to see print—it is Christmas Eve day. Tomorrow is the day They decided—

  erroneously, historians tell us—He was born. By the time you get around to reading it, however, it will be into the New Year, 1971, and the decade will be rattling right along without pausing for more than a cursory gl
ance back over its shoulder at peace on earth and et and cetera.

  But that’s all in the future as I sit here, and at the moment Christmas is hurtling down on me with the inexorable momentum of a cannonball whizzing across a battlefield. In case you haven’t perceived from just these few words that I intensely abominate Christmas, let me dot the i and cross the t by saying I have always judged the only person in A Christmas Carol worth his salt to be Ebenezer Scrooge. Bob Cratchit is a weakling; Marley is a fink for the Hereafter, trying to save his ectoplasmic ass from Limbo; Belle was so marriage-slaphappy she couldn’t muster up sufficient ego reinforcement to stand by her man till he overcame his personality problems; the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are not only buttinskies, but bullies as well; and Tiny Tim is a one-man diabetes plague:

  “God bless us, every one!”

  Terrific.

  “God bless us, every one!”

  Right, kid. Thanks

  “God bless us, every one!”

  All right, awreddy, you mongoloid, shut the fuck up!

  “God bless us…awwwwkkkk…”

  The only character in that whole damned offensive tract in praise of simpering goodness is Scrooge, a man who perceived the truth about Christmas with a degree of clearheadedness and cynicism I find laudable. It is the one cavil I have with Dickens—a man whose work I greatly admire—that he spewed forth such a treacly treatise and copped out as a storyteller by refusing to allow Scrooge to stand his moral ground.