The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  For their part, they pledged me on the most indefensible grounds imaginable. First, I was working on the Ohio State Sundial, the humor magazine (which at that time was one of the leading college humor magazines in the nation), and though the chapter was heavy on members who had money, or who were affiliated with the football team, or whose fathers could contribute Scotty freezers for beer busts, they needed to insure their standing on the campus both scholastically and in the area of student activities. I was only a freshman, but already I was writing for the Sundial, and everyone knew what clever, witty people those Sundial bohemians were…so, ergo, I had to be a heavyweight in the grade department, thereby aiding them in pulling up the house average lowered by the Cro-Magnons or the scions of wealthy families. (Little did they realize what a downer I was to be in that department: lowest grades in the history of the school.)

  The other reason they pledged me was a peculiar talent I’ve always had…that of being able to “read” people from their walk or speech or mannerisms…a kind of primitive body language thing that is in no way ESP or occult or…I’ll talk about that in another column some time, but for the nonce let it suffice that one manifestation of that talent was, and is, the ability to tell if a woman is a virgin or not. I always had that “talent” (if such it can be called) and it never seemed like a big deal to me; just something I knew. But they thought it was very rare metal, trace element stuff, a valuable property. So they pledged me.

  Right from the git-go, I was less than a satisfactory pledge. I’d been on my own, making my own living since I was thirteen years old, and I was used to a degree of personal freedom and personal pride that did not square with the essentially demeaning, dehumanizing, disgusting treatment accorded pledges by actives. Some brain damage case from Sandusky would come up to me, extend his Bass Weejuns and tell me to polish them, and I’d look confused and bemused and annoyed and say, “Do what?” And when he’d repeat the order—never request, always order—I would politely suggest he remove the pennies from the slots on the shoes and jam the leathers up his ass, horizontally.

  This made for some small pique on the part of the ZBT super-structure.

  They attempted to break my spirit (to what end I have never understood, but then I’ve never been able really to perceive what valuefraternities had from the outset, save as enclaves to buffer the timorous and snobbish from having to rub elbows with the common herd). Their attempts to whip me into shape were doomed, of course. Nothing worked. Not the thousand chickenshit barbs to which I was heir, not the hell sessions late at night, not the ugly pranks, not the crummy errands I was ordered to run, not the unveiled attacks on my coarse and hardly fraternal manners, not even the night one winter when a BMOC named Gene Somethingorother demanded milk (during a meat meal at which milk was omitted as a weak-wristed gesture toward keeping kosher), and shrieked for me to go get it, when he knew there was none in the entire house; and I slipped and slid through the snow to the Protestant fraternity house next down the line; and brought the dumb fucker a ten-gallon can and dumped it on him at the head of his table. No, I was a hard punk to break.

  So they slipped into high gear.

  During mid-term week, during which I was having problems studying, during which I was coming to the realization that I was a lousy student, they came at me with pranks that tested my patience sorely.

  I would study till three or four in the morning, then crawl wearily into my bunk-bed to get a few hours’ sleep till my first class and/or mid-term test. No sooner had I crashed, than one of their number would come and roust my exhausted ass from slumber…to clean the garbage shed down behind the house.

  The first night it happened, I was too exhausted even to argue. In my pajamas I half-fell down the three flights of fire escape stairs on the side of the ZBT house, and shoveled orange peels and eggshells into garbage cans, and swept the metal walls and slab floor clean. It took about an hour, the active assigned to the ordeal supervising my efforts, heaven forfend I should miss a milk carton or blob of spaghetti. When I’d finished, he let me go back to bed.

  The next day, I slept through my biology mid-term.

  The following night, they did it again. I’d studied till around midnight, then collapsed. Fifteen minutes after I’d dropped off…fully dressed…lights still burning…another active came to roust me.

  Comatose, I stumbled ahead of him, down the third floor corridor to the fire door at the end of the hall. I pushed open the door and stood on the landing, chilled by the December wind. In December, Ohio is not a terribly hospitable environment. I started down the stairs, and stumbled. The active shoved me. “Get your ass in gear!” That was his second mistake.

  He was wearing a jacket and tie. I half-turned, reached over my shoulder, and grabbed the tie. I jerked him forward sharply and he sailed past me, went over the fire escape railing, and fell three floors through the roof of the garbage shed.

  I went back to bed.

  That incident, coupled with one other, melded to bring about my expulsion from ZBT during my first quarter at Ohio State. I never went active.

  They called me down to the office of the President of the fraternity, and there they sat (in jackets and ties): the President, the Vice-President, the Treasurer, the Recording Secretary and the Strawboss of Pledges, or whatever dumb title it was that he held with such honor. And they suggested I move out at once. My behavior, they said, was something less than fraternal. They cited the two big incidents that had happily driven them to this expulsion. And, though he was grievously wounded, they told me, the noble active who had done the Brodie off the fire escape was prepared not to sue me for assault and battery, if I’d get the hell out within the hour and keep my mouth shut about the whole thing. Apparently, the garbage had cushioned the clown’s impact, and they’d prevailed on him not to have me wiped out…in the good name of Zeta Beta Tomatah.

  So I moved out, following the route taken by Don Epstein, who had pledged with me briefly. I’ll tell you about Don next week. About how we lived in the same rooming house at Ohio State, and about the special tragedy that Don Epstein came to represent to me.

  But that’s next week. Right now, I’ll finish the fraternity story, and make the point how the Wheel turns, and how we sometimes are accorded the luxury of knowing the moment when the past is dead and we need not lug it around with us like a millstone.

  That moment came five years ago, in 1969, fifteen years after the morning in the office of the President of the Nu Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau; the morning during which one of those grand officials of that grand Greek organization told me I was, strictly between us, a bum, a creep, a hick, and a guy who was destined for the toilet.

  Fifteen years later, that noble Greek called me, here in Los Angeles. Said he was in town for a convention. Said he was with his wife. Said he’d followed my career. Said he was proud to have been such a close friend of mine. Said he wanted to drop by and strike up acquaintances. Said he might be moving to Los Angeles. Said a lot of bullshit.

  I confess to the cheap desire. I wanted to flaunt my success. I invited him and his wife to drop by.

  When he arrived, his first words as he stepped through the inlaid-wood art treasure by Mabel and Milon Hutchinson that serves as my door were, “Damn! It’s good to see one of our guys has made it so big!” My gorge became buoyant.

  It was a ghastly few hours. He was the same age as I, thirty-five, and he looked fifty. He had “made the right connections” in the fraternity. He had married the daughter of the boss and moved into the company, they had 3.6 children, he was in debt up to his ass, and she tried to proposition me as I showed her around the house, telling me what a wimp he was. I advised her that no matter what a loser her old man was, she wasn’t about to make any points with me by badrapping him. For his part, he could not take his eyes off my lady friend, who was polite to him, but had the eerie feeling he might shed his skin and slither after her at any moment. My visitors were a pair who deserved each other.

  Finally
, they left, and with the same feeling of release I mentioned two weeks ago when I talked about having returned to Ohio State to lecture at the school that had bounced me, I felt free at last, free at last, gawd a’mighty, free at last.

  It was very clear that the Wheel had come around, and what I’d believed about the insular and debilitating nature of fraternities had served me in good stead. I had gone my own way, and I was a happy (though flawed, even as you and you and you) individual, doing what I wanted to do, living the life that enriched me. And there was no need to seek any cheap revenge on that poor sonofabitch: there was nothing I could do to him half as terrible as what his own false gods, cheap goals and debased ideals had done to him. Time had taken care of him in a way I’d have had to be a monster to attempt.

  But he was an object lesson. From that moment on, I never felt hatred for the time I spent in ZBT. I wouldn’t mention it now, save to add a penultimate brick of memory in the final monument to my school days, occasioned by that final purge at OSU early last month. I mention it for that reason, and to tell you that you’re grown up now, you’re a different human being…you’re free. Honest you are.

  So smile, hey!

  INSTALLMENT 40 |

  Interim Memo

  They paid. I’d met an extremely attractive woman during that stopover in Columbus, Ohio; a reporter for the Dispatch. We liked each other, and we spent time together. After I’d returned to Los Angeles, and she got wind that OSU was refusing to pay for the appearance, she called me and told me she’d be delighted to do a follow-up story on their perfidious behavior.

  I thanked her and said perhaps merely the threat of public disclosure would do the job. I called the comptroller or whoever it was who’d said I could whistle for my fee, and I advised him that I was on the other line with a reporter who wanted to do such an article, and did he want to interdict the process by some salutary action? He raged for about thirty seconds, and promised the check would be in my hands by special delivery the next day. I thanked him prettily, and assured him if the check wasn’t in my hands in a day or two—and I made it clear it had damned well better be a certified cashier’s check, not an OSU check they could stop-pay—that I had the reporter’s number and would take up where we’d left off.

  I thanked Cynthia, and two days later OSU had paid off.

  Living well is the best revenge. And making them eat it ain’t bad, either.

  INSTALLMENT 40 | 15 NOVEMBER 73

  COLLEGE DAYS, PART THREE

  Don Epstein is out there somewhere, but you’ll never find him. Shit, he can’t even find himself any more. And you know who got him lost? The Pope got him lost. Not the current one, the nut who says everybody ought to keep having babies; the one who died in 1963, the good one, John XXIII. Good John got Don Epstein lost because he didn’t tell all them terribly christian Christians sooner that we Jews didn’t nail up the Son of God. I mean, if John had gotten it on a little sooner, say around 1954, or even 1953 (1952 would have been best), Don Epstein would not be lost today.

  What’s that you say? I’m babbling again? Well, hell, friends, you should know by now that I’ll make it all ugly clear before I say goodbye, so just hang in there with me and let me play my nasty word-games.

  You see, Don Epstein was just about my only friend in college, and since I’ve been telling college-days stories in this column for the past month, I thought I’d tag them off with the story of my pretty-much-only-friend at Ohio State, Don Epstein, and what happened to him, and how he wound up getting so lost he’ll never be found.

  It’s not one of my happy stories. You may not smile even once. But then, that’s only fair: Don Epstein went a lotta days without smiling.

  I met Don when I pledged ZBT. Well, Don was too dynamite a guy to put up with Greek bullshit very long, and he checked out about a month before I got booted. He moved into a rooming house across from Ohio State, but during the few weeks we knew each other in the fraternity, we became friends, so when I got the axe, I moved into the same rooming house, and the friendship flourished.

  Don was a tall, good-looking guy with a gentle nature and a marvelous wry sense of humor. He was also literate, had a fine ear for classical music and jazz, and he was a marvelous dresser. He also looked very Semitic. That means something, so remember it.

  Don was signed up for pre-med. He had a 4.00 average, which for those of you who don’t know how they graded students in those dim, dead days before students graded themselves, was as high as you could get. It was a four-point, gentle readers, a bloody beautiful four-point, which was straight A’s. What I’m trying to tell you, was that Don Epstein was a brain. And he wanted to be a doctor. Worse than anydamnthing, he wanted to be a doctor. What kind, I don’t remember now. It’s been twenty years. Things blur.

  But what doesn’t blur is that I learned so many things from Don that I could never repay him if I started now and kept on paying till 2001.

  He turned me on to jazz. Mulligan, Brubeck, Chet Baker, Lennie Tristano, Kenton, Manne, Shorty Rogers—the whole West Coast jazz scene that was so exuberant during the mid-Fifties. It was like getting a whole new set of ears.

  He introduced me to classical music. Hell, I’d been a dumbass Ohio kid who’d thought Spike Jones was the height of creativity and Perry Como and the Four Freshmen the pinnacle of vocal interpretation. Through Don I heard my first Bach, Scarlatti, Monteverdi, Buxtehude, Grieg, Holst…the list is endless. I listened to the imperishable sounds of genius and began to grow as a human being.

  He taught me how to dress. Oh, shit, you should have seen me before Epstein wrinkled his brow and said, “Yellow socks and a green tie don’t go with a charcoal-gray-and-pink sports jacket, Harlan.” He showed me what shoes to buy, helped me pick out slacks and jackets that didn’t make me look like a munchkin dressed up for a rat shoot. You might not think learning how to wear clothes was important—today I suppose it isn’t all that important—but in the Fifties, what you looked like predicated what others thought of you. And I was so damned insecure that anything that helped make me look less like a nerd was a godsend.

  He hipped me to Jean Shepherd, to Salinger, to pizza, to puns, to dinner table etiquette, to talking to girls, to how to do research in a library…he opened doors for me that I never even knew existed.

  In a very special way, Don Epstein was a mentor and a guru for me. And man did I love him. He was beautiful.

  So. It is with considerable sadness that I report what happened to Don Epstein. And I can do it quickly, briefly, shortly, succinctly…just the way it happened to him…and just this fast a superterrific person gets so lost he can’t be found again.

  Don wanted to be a doctor. But Ohio State had a “Jewish quota.” Only so many yids per year. And Don came from a family of modest circumstances. They didn’t have the clout or the money to buy him into the quota. So even with his straight-A four-point, Don could not get into medical school. So he plugged on, making straight A’s, and he signed up for pre-dental. Same story. Quota. He couldn’t make it there, either. No connections, no heavy sugar to squeeze the juice it took to get lesser lads admitted.

  That was the way it went for several semesters, with Don growing more and more bitter, more and more cynical, more and more morose. He hit the books harder, didn’t go out, sat for long hours in dark depression.

  My last semester before I was booted out of State, Don dropped even lower in his goals. He registered for veterinarian school. I didn’t find out till years later that he hadn’t been able to score that one, either.

  I ran away from OSU and started writing, started selling, got married the first time, got drafted, did my time, got discharged, went to Chicago to work on Rogue magazine, split Chicago when my marriage crumbled and I got divorced, went back to New York, wrote some more, got married again, and returned to Chicago in 1961. While living in Evanston with my second wife, I got a call from Don.

  Except it wasn’t Don Epstein anymore. Now it was Don Forrester. He told me he’d gotten the n
ame off a bottle of booze. Gentile booze.

  I invited him to come over, and he did. With his wife.

  When he came through the door, I hardly recognized him.

  Don had changed. A lot. Because of the Pope.

  You see, he had missed out on vet school and then gone to the last place a guy who wanted to be a doctor and had the brains and skill to be a doctor could go: he had entered the school of undertaking.

  And there he was, seven years later, in my living room in Evanston, Illinois. Don Forrester. He had had a nose job. He didn’t look even remotely Semitic now. And he had a Protestant wife. And he had a WASP name. And he looked like a man crushed by a pylon-sinking machine.

  I helped him find a place to live. He was moving to Chicago for some reason or other, I don’t remember why at this point. But we talked a few times. Not much. The Don I’d known was lost. Gone somewhere; where the wry dynamite guys go when history and compassionless forces over which they have no control make them ashamed of their heritage, make them ashamed of what they look like and who they are. Forrester (as opposed to Epstein) was a nice-enough guy, I suppose. But in my sad eyes he was a loser. A sad, beaten guy who had fought as hard as he could…but had lost.

  It was painful to be in the same room with him.

  Anyhow, I like to tell myself, I was too deep in my own grief at that time, and I didn’t have much pity left for anyone but myself. I left Chicago soon after, went through another divorce, wound up here in Los Angeles. That’s thirteen years ago, almost.

  And when some asshole asks me if I’ve changed my name, I tell him, no, Harlan Ellison is my name, and if it’d been Ira Finkelstein, it’d still be my name, and my nose is my own, and I’m a Jew, and if I ever gave it a moment’s thought that changing any of those things would make the slide smoother, all I have to do is pass a liquor store and see a bottle of Forrester, or Old Forrester, or whatever the fuck it’s called, and I know all the bloody noses in the world aren’t worth changing one Semitic syllable of monicker or one Yiddish inch of snout.