An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

Monday night the 17th. Nine o’clock to eleven, smack in the middle of that primetime window when we usually can rely on Asner and his co-stars to give us something to think about, as a brief respite from the profundities of those other, renewed, CBS winners—The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum, P.I., Dallas, Simon & Simon and Knots Landing. Forget having your cat spayed; give a pass to washing your hair; shine on getting laid; definitely eschew a night of Coors and teevee. Be there or be square. You’re needed! All of you: the two-car split-level layabouts, the San Pedro bikers, the Hollywood Hills dilettantes, the Reseda shift-workers, the barrio hideaways, the Fairfax ghetto septuagenarians, the three-piece Beverly Hills gourmets, the UCLA frat rats and Powell Library bookworms, the Orange County crypto-liberals and all of you who bore the ass off your kaffee klatsch partners deploring the encroachment of the book-burners in our daily lives. All of you!

  You’re so goddamned adroit at finding rat-hole rationalizations for not laying it on the line. This time there’s no out.

  It’s not the loss of a television show that matters! It’s the reasons they did it! Kimberly-Clark pulls its spot ads from Lou Grant, Wildmon targets the show as evil, the White House sends out its yapping mouthpieces, and we are one step closer to the pit. Be there or be in peril of losing your mortal soul. Do I overdramatize? Sue me. But be there!

  They were picketing at Fairfax and Beverly last Monday night, the 10th; there was a protest march in San Francisco; thousands have already begun deluging the President of Kimberly-Clark (whose products include Kleenex nose-wipe, Delsey ass-wipe, Kotex, New Freedom and Light Days feminine hygiene products, Huggies baby bottom wrappers and various other paper products from table napkins to cigarette papers employing the Kleenex trademark), Mr. Robert C. Ernest, with outraged postcards and letters advising him that Kimberly-Clark’s cowardly decision to abandon Lou Grant in the face of an idle boycott threat by the Falwell-Wildmon forces has infuriated them to the extent that they are refusing to buy Kleenex products.

  An idle threat it is. Only the most fervid subscriber to Ronald Reagan’s oft-stated quote from Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America…is Business” is blind to the timidity and floating ethics of many great American corporations. (When Wildmon’s Coalition for Better Television linked up with the Falwell horde, and began threatening sponsor boycotts of shows the Fundamentalists considered “saturated with sex, violence and profanity,” such pillars of corporate mettle as Gillette, General Foods and Procter & Gamble caved in and ran scared before Wildmon had even released a list of targeted shows.) But an ABC-TV poll conducted last year produced the heartening statistic that as little as 1.3% of the total population would actually support boycotts of advertisers on shows they watched.

  One would think that such monoliths of industry would just tell The Reverend Wildmon of Tupelo, Mississippi to go get stuffed. But they didn’t. They caved in and pulled their support from an array of series on all three networks. But they never copped to the reason they’d done it. It was always dissembling: “We feel our advertising dollars can be better spent elsewhere,” or “The ratings did not indicate we were reaching the desired demographic audience for our products.”

  But Kimberly-Clark is the most flagrant case yet. They assault us night and day to buy their paper goods, but they won’t demonstrate any scrupulousness in the area of social conscience. They are forever taking out institutional ads advising us what models of probity they are, but they won’t even hang in there, in the face of empty threats from the fundaments called Fundamentalists, to support the First Amendment.

  Why not join with the thousands already letting the Kleenex Krowd know you despise their craven behavior? Why not pause in the reading of this column to dash off a postcard or brief letter to Mr. Robert C. Ernest, President; Kimberly-Clark Corporation; North Lake Street; Neenah, Wisconsin 54956, to let him know that pulling his spot ads from Lou Grant permitted CBS to rationalize its cancellation of a show whose star had the courage to speak out against Administration policy. Why not do that, right now. It’ll take you three minutes.

  I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. If you’ll put down this column for three minutes to send such a telegram, or write such a postcard or letter, I’ll tell you a new joke I heard. It’s a terrific joke. How could anything be fairer?

  Okay. Go do it. When you come back, I’ll be here humming to myself, and I’ll tell you a joke that’ll brighten your day.

  Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm-dee-dee. Hmmm.

  That was swell of you. Thank you. (I was humming Bizet’s L’Arlèsienne Suite No. 1 while you were away.) Here’s the joke.

  God is taking a constitutional through Central Park in New York City, see. Just kind of a late evening stroll checking out the mugger population, and S/He passes this statue of Adam and Eve they have in Central Park. And S/He stops for a second, and looks at the statue thoughtfully, and S/He murmurs, “Why not?”

  So God snaps the fingers and the statue comes to life.

  “Look,” God says to the now flesh-and-blood Adam and Eve, “I’m going to give you an hour of life, since before everybody else was, you were, and now you ain’t but they are. You’ve got an hour, free and clear, to do what you want.”

  So Adam, stark naked, looks at Eve, also starkers, and they both get all flustered and embarrassed and red in the face, and Adam says, very shyly, “Uh, er, you want to, uh, maybe go in the bushes and uh er…?”

  And Eve, blushing furiously, says, “Uh-huh. That would be terrific.” So they rush off into the bushes and God stands there bemusedly, and in a moment S/He hears a thrashing and crashing and flailing of branches and uproar of such exertion that S/He smiles.

  Half an hour later out come Adam and Eve, drenched in sweat, pink all over from their activities, grinning sheepishly and holding hands. So God looks at the Cosmic Digital S/He has on Her / His wrist, and S/He says, “But that was only half an hour. You’ve still got another thirty minutes to do anything you want.”

  So naked Adam looks at naked Eve and he says, “You, uh, wanna go back and do it again?”

  And Eve grins broadly and says, “Yeah, sure. Except this time you hold down the pigeons and I’ll piss on ’em!”

  And on that note of jubilant pragmatism, I take my leave for another seven days and we will part smiling, and not be in contact again for another week unless you want to take a stand against the shadow legions and join me at 9:00 this Monday night, on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly Boulevard, in front of CBS, to carry a picket sign and let the spineless masters of tv’s fattest network know we think they suck runny eggs.

  You can come up and say hi, if you like. You can’t miss me. I’ll be the angry guy wearing the Harlan Ellison cap, looking to see if the guy who told me to go surfin’ got back from Malibu in time to join us out there.

  Interim memo

  Back in Installment 16 I did a rap on my then-car, my dear ’67 Camaro. You’ll read what happened to it in this installment; and the update is that I heard from one of my readers, who sold me a gorgeous 1950 Packard, which (I’m told) after only two years in the refurbishing shop, will soon be schlepping my bones around Los Angeles. Very deco. Cream and ocher.

  The day after this column appeared, things got terminally scary when Installments 18, 28 and 29 beat out entries from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to win the prestigious Silver Pen award of the international journalism society, P.E.N. It was my first journalism award, and the plaque commends the work in the name of “protecting freedom of expression and opposing censorship, dishonesty, discrimination, or any other threat to a free and responsible press.” P.E.N. Los Angeles Center awarded me an actual, real Silver Pen, a replica of a 1920 Lalique implement. I use it constantly. But it was scary. These little pisher commentaries of mine were being seriously considered. Oh, sure, it was heady and made my ego swell up ever larger; but it was also très scary. A. J. Liebling I ain’t. E. B. White I ain’t. Jimmy Cannon I ain’t. I find humility exceedingly unnerv
ing.

  INSTALLMENT 29: 25 MAY 82

  Shoulder blade deep in ruminations about mortality, this week’s installment comes to you from very near the scythe-edge of the Hereafter.

  Today, Thursday 27 May 82, is my birthday. I’m 48. Happy happy the usual bullshit.

  Last Thursday, I had my closest dance with the Faceless One who lives in the Boneyard. If you were on the San Diego 405 Freeway at about 2:45 in the afternoon, you saw my beloved 1967 Camaro, about which I’ve written in this column, overturned and spilling gas across four lanes southbound this side of the Venice off-ramp. Close, dear friends, too fuckin close. When the driver ahead of you in the #1 lane suddenly hits her brakes for no discernible reason when the traffic has suddenly clogged up, and you’re doing fifty, and suddenly she’s doing thirty, either you decide in that instant simply to pray that your karma account is in the plus column and keep on driving up her tailpipe and out her front windshield, or you get very responsible and decide to let her reach a ripe old age by cutting into the median pulloff lane. Remind me never again to think like a humanitarian.

  The swing into the pulloff lane was fine. Had she slowed down to let me pass on the left, had she speeded up to get the hell out of there, nothing would have happened. But as I zipped past her thirty, doing fifty and slowing, I saw her face—a white balloon with a terrified expression on it—staring at me through the window. She stayed right abreast of us. God bless you, lady. The back end started to slew. We were going to broadside her, center punch her into the other three jammed lanes of traffic. You’d have heard about it on the 5:00 news. So I cut back toward the divider.

  The wheels went up onto the curved surface designed to flip you so you don’t go straight over into the oncoming lanes. We started to turn over.

  (They tell no lie. Time does elongate. You don’t get your life flashing before your eyes…thank God…I wouldn’t want to have to go through all that again…but the nanosecond of what’s happening at that instant slows down to a crawl. The mind carefully and leisurely considers everything. My assistant, Marty, was riding shotgun. If we flip once and land on the right side, please let it only be one roll, then I’ll fall on her and crack her spine. What about the cab flattening? What about sliding?)

  I wedged my foot under the brake pedal, hung onto the steering wheel, jammed my ass into the corner of the seat…and we went over. We landed on the right side, slid about six feet and came to a stop. The woman in the car beside us went blissfully on her way, leaving destruction behind without thought to stopping. But the guys behind us saw what was going down and they slowed and stopped. Marty was rattling around in the bottom of the car like a ping-pong ball. I was hanging above her like a Carlsbad bat.

  Then I smelled the gas. The tank was dumping all over the car. Suddenly there was a face at the window over my head. The guys from the cars behind us were screaming, “Gas! Get out of there, it’s gonna blow!” But they couldn’t pry open the door overhead. It had sprung, and the weight was at a bad angle. I yelled back to them to press in the door button on the outside, and I swung around and used my legs to jack open the door. Then I crawled out, grabbed Marty, yanked her up, dropped her into the arms of the good citizen, and dove back inside.

  My typewriter was in there.

  I went back a second time for my suitcase with the manuscript of the film I’ve been writing—the only copy—and as I was rooting around trying to pry it loose, a cop appeared overhead.

  “Get the hell out of there!” he screamed. “Not till I get my stuff,” I yelled back. “Get the hell out of there, I’ll arrest you if you don’t get out of there!”

  “Before or after it blows up?” I said.

  He ran.

  I got the suitcase, threw myself out of the car with it, and there we waited as gas drenched the San Diego Freeway till the fire truck came.

  At 6:00 I was on a plane to Anchorage, Alaska, to deliver a lecture. “Wear the grease-stained pants for the lecture,” Marty said. “Scars of battle. It’ll be impressive.”

  So much for you, Faceless One! I’m gonna live forever!

  A couple of Mondays ago, the 17th of May, a great many of you who read this column came out to picket at CBS, to protest the political censorship that resulted in the Lou Grant show being cancelled. There were two thousand of you out there, including the surfer. There were a few actors—Nick and Trish Mancuso, Paul Kreppel who played the cocktail pianist Sonny on Making a Living, and a few others—not many, though. You’d have expected more of them—it is, after all, their fight, too. You’d have been disappointed. They weren’t out there. Not many students, either. Some. Not many. I didn’t see any directors. A few writers. Not many, a few. Mostly what I saw was people. No stars, no media faces you’d recognize, nobody very prominent. Just you two thousand dynamite citizens concerned about the erosion of your rights. A lot of members from the ACLU who understand that freedom has to be safeguarded endlessly, without surcease, without catching a well-deserved nap. And people.

  I came down wearing the Harlan Ellison cap I said I’d wear so you could stroll up and say hello. I also came down with my Joe Morgan little league Louisville Slugger just in case any Mark David Chapman John Hinckley Sirhan Sirhans wanted to get physical in reference to something offensive in my writings. Not to use it, merely to use it as a walking stick deterrent against the unexpected. Pasteur said: “Change favors the prepared mind.”

  A lot of you came up and said, “You brought us out here.” I always said the same thing in response. “No. You brought you out here!” One kinda sad-eyed guy said he’d been laying back since the late Sixties early Seventies. He said coming out and walking with us made him feel good about himself for the first time in longer than he cared to remember. I liked him a lot.

  It was a high, gentle readers. It probably didn’t do one scintilla of good toward getting CBS to reconsider its cowardly actions, but it was the doing of it that was worthy.

  There was a sense of being at the right place for the right reason; of being correct in our actions. A sense of community. The three hundred Spartans standing off Xerxes’ multitudes at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae. The SNCC marchers going against Alabama mad dogs and cattle prods. Children in the streets of Budapest flinging Molotov cocktails at invading Russian tanks.

  Yes, yes, I know. I overdramatize. Sue me. You shoulda been there. A chill up the spine, friends. Something real happening, life happening, and most of all: people.

  I have come to care for some of you very deeply.

  Today is my birthday. Don’t send candy, I’m overweight already.

  Flowers grow in my backyard. I can use any of the non-L. Frank Baum Oz books written after 1921, or a nice pipe from the Cigar Warehouse or…most of all…a solid lead where I can buy a spiffy clean, well-running Packard circa 1951.

  Other than that, send no gifts. But if you know where there’s a Packard, let me know. My poor dear Camaro is in the Rheuban Motors impound yard, and they tell me it’s dead. That motherluncher the Faceless One is squatting on the corpse. He didn’t get me or Marty, but he finally caught up with Camaro.

  A 1951 Packard could ease the pain.

  Happy birthday to all of you. We’re all gonna live forever!

  Interim memo

  I actually put a title on this column and its follow-up. I called them “The Spawn of Annenberg,” Part 1 and Part 2. For me, these two columns were what the whole thing was about, the columns of personal observation. I’d like to take a forked stick to the TV Guide mentality.

  When they were reprinted they were retitled “Hysterical Paralogia” and if you recall my Interim Memo on Installment 18, this column and that earlier one inspired a late entry in the Edge sweepstakes, the final installment of this collection, item 61. If you’ve forgotten that reference, I urge you to return to that glorious Interim Memo of yesteryear and to the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver.

  INSTALLMENT 30: 7 JUNE 82

  The Spawn of Annenberg, Part I

&n
bsp; Memories of being on Death Row at San Quentin twelve years ago rush back to me this week as I read TV Guide.

  My then-attorney, pre-Henry Holmes, was Barry Bernstein. We were, and are, friends. He had smuggled me into Q in the guise of a law clerk. He thought I might like to write a column about a man whose appeal he was handling, who had been convicted of beating to death his common-law wife’s five-year-old son. I was fascinated, but I did not like it. Not a moment of it. That was in 1970. In 1973, for another newspaper than this one, I wrote two columns about that day in the joint. Between the visit and the writing of the columns, the judgment of Murder One was reversed; and in October of 1979 the man fulfilled the final requirements of his parole and, today, when I had these thoughts I will impart in a moment, I called Sacramento to find out from the state Parole Board what had happened to the man with whom I had visited on Death Row, before the Death Penalty had been outlawed. I was told the man was now totally free of jurisdiction of the Parole Board, that he had been fully rehabilitated, that he had paid his debt to society, and they had no idea where he was. I am not using his name. I don’t have the right to muck about with his new life.

  Yet the memory of him there in that tiny interview cubicle, that day in September of 1970, of what he revealed of himself, still frightens me. I sat and listened to a creature human in form, but utterly alien in nature. I hope to God he has been thoroughly rehabilitated—as I am told the wife who now appears on television speaking out against child abuse has been rehabilitated—but the clear memory of him persists, and knowing he is out there somewhere…still frightens me.

  Most frightening, most non-human, was the moment when he manifested what penologists and psychiatrists refer to as Ganser’s Syndrome.

  I said to him (it’s been twelve years and I have to approximate this), “The trial record says you kicked the boy to death. Is that true?” And he replied, “I always wear tennis shoes. They’re not hard shoes, you know.”