An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Lonely at the top?

  You should live so long.

  It is so bloody crowded here in the middle, that life at the top for Richard Dreyfuss and John Irving and Itzhak Perlman and Jackie Onassis must be like an invasion of the marabunta army ants. And before you shrug and say, “Well, it’s his own damned fault; if he didn’t want to be bothered he wouldn’t’ve got famous,” remember that no one told any of us precisely how much a lot of you have been warped by People magazine.

  Oh, and by the way…this column will be giving that world famous letter-writer, Mr. Jon Douglas West of Burbank, a little touch of notoriety very shortly—not next time—but soon. All in aid of proving that it need not be lonely at the bottom, either.

  Fun’n’games is comin’, folks. Don’t get lost.

  INSTALLMENT 41: 30 AUGUST 82

  A little more about how lonely it ain’t, at the top.

  Part two the last: picking up checks and “good causes.” Having less to do with social conscience and responsibility than it does with whipping guilt on someone. Also, to borrow the title of a remarkable book first published in 1841, it has much to do with “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.” (Now available in paperback, I cannot commend this astonishing study of mass movements strongly enough.)

  Having been—like most of you—scuffling for a buck all of my life, having run away from home at age thirteen and having earned my living since that age (and never having been trained for any acceptable trade I have often noted that I am a self-made man…thereby demonstrating the horrors of unskilled labor), the nuances of Living High escaped me till I came to Hollywood and Struck It Rich. F’rinstance, when one is poor, and one dines out with chums and buddies, one never thinks much about who’ll take the check. Automatically it gets divvied up. Okay, who had the tuna on white and the little nut cup? David, that’ll be another thirty cents for you; they charged extra for the dijon mustard. We need another thirteen cents all around to make 15% for the tip.

  Goes without saying.

  But after about five years of my having made enough decent money that I could actually ask a few friends to go out to dinner, on me, I began to notice something that troubled me profoundly. I’d get a call from people I’d known intimately for years, and they’d say let’s get together for dinner Tuesday, and I’d say terrific, and come Tuesday a bunch of us would assemble, me with a date, them with dates, and we’d score some Szechuan or Magyar, and when the check came it would automatically wind up in my pocket.

  Went without saying.

  Now, apart from my tendency to grab for checks anyhow—one tries to be a mensch—and apart from occasions where it was very clear I was hosting the feed, I began to notice that it was assumed I was paying. No one even made a move. At first I sorta kinda shrugged it off on the grounds that I was working and some of them weren’t, or I was making more than some of them, so it seemed reasonable: it’s what friends do: the one who has…puts it out for them as hasn’t. Goes without saying.

  But it went on for years, and I started to get cranky about it. It was being taken for granted: Ellison will pick up the tab. (Now let me hasten to add that this didn’t obtain for all my friends. Arthur and Lydia always chipped in or reciprocated in other ways; Walter Koenig and the Barkins never mooched; Silverberg and I alternated unless one of us could bamboozle the other into thinking it was his turn; many others I don’t recall right now were upstanding in this respect.) But after a while it became obvious to me that I was expected to extend this largesse.

  I didn’t mind doing it enough to call a halt, but in my gut I resented that no one made the move.

  The same thing has started happening with this column.

  Because these weekly outings seem to have reached many of you in a way that made you want to do something about whatever contretemps or inequity I shared with you, it is now perceived as a vehicle for mass movement. On a small scale, surely; but nonetheless a great many of you flex and move. (And at this point in the writing, I will start saying we rather than I. In the purest sense of a gestalt, we are partners in this column. One does not cast out words into a vacuum. If Helen Keller falls in the forest, is there a sound? Without exchange and abreaction it is merely idle chatter unheard on the wind. That’s why I answer your mail every six weeks and why Jon Douglas West interests me so.)

  What has begun to happen is that we are being deluged with appeals for attention. We are being asked to devote whole columns to endless “good causes.” They range from public presentations such as a Jackie Wilson memorial concert, promotion of which is of slight interest to me…through apparently urgent matters such as the campaign to save Mono Lake, about which I know less than I need to know to compel your attention…to crusades in which I believe fervently, such as NARAL’s fight to defeat the anti-abortion Helms Bill and Hatch Constitutional Amendment in the U.S. Senate. (Don’t worry about this last one, gang; your letters and phone calls have already been conveyed to Cranston and Hayakawa; and I understand through NARAL’s Washington offices that phone calls and mail to Senators is running 200 to 1 against Helms / Hatch.)

  Is it lonely at the top? Hell, it’s so belly-to-butt up there that one imagines the few courageous souls like Alan Alda and Jane Fonda and Ed Asner and Vanessa Redgrave and Elmo Zumwalt, who are not easily intimidated by ridicule or hate mail, whose names can be found signed to encyclicals intended to enlist your support in aid of “good causes,” being unable to go out for dinner without the arm being put on them.

  The problem is that none of us can be in more than four places at once. If you are concerned about nuclear proliferation, the anti-nuke forces can keep you busy seven days a week stuffing envelopes and soliciting funds. If you think combatting the Moral Majority is the burning issue of our times then you can fall into your bed exhausted every night after having fought them on the fronts of creationism, censorship, political pressure, school prayer, women’s rights or a dozen other brush fire areas…and you’ll find you had no time during the day to take in your dry cleaning, write that college application, see your lover, or put gas in the car. If it’s working for citizen review boards of cops who use the choke-hold too freely, campaigning for an assembly person dedicated to stopping the construction of condos in the hills, banning handguns, supporting anti-Klan groups or funding arts programs in deprived neighborhoods…you can never do enough. There is an infinitude of pain and unfairness in the world, and one never knows where to begin. Nor do those pressures on our social conscience ever give us a moment’s peace. One can never do enough, not even if we devote our waking hours in toto. As for Toto, he regrets ever having returned from Oz, where the biggest problem is an occasional Wicked Witch.

  It goes further. Not just the sincere and imploring letters asking for publicity in support of Dr. Stanley W. Jacob, who has been indicted for the alleged bribing of an FDA official in conjunction with his having prescribed the unregulated drug DMSO; not just the urgent call for donations and writings in support of Handgun Control, Inc. against the stepped-up advertising of the National Rifle Association; not just the appeal to promote and speak at the NOW rally in Westwood. It goes much further.

  It proceeds past these heartfelt gardyloos in aid of solutions to complex and important social problems, it gets into the area of who picks up the check, and how they whip guilt on you if you choose not to pick up the check.

  In the past few weeks, I suppose because so many of you came out to CBS to picket against the removal of the Lou Grant series and so many of you came out to fill At My Place in Santa Monica when Susan Rabin sang (she’ll be back there on September 12th for those of you who missed her first time around), we’ve been hustled by friends and acquaintances to run columns puffing restaurants, to sell gimcrack novelties, to rhapsodize over this or that young rock group, to serve—in short—a particular narrow interest.

  I’m dismayed at the friends and casual acquaintances who are taking a newfound interest in seeking our fellowship. It is dismaying
because it’s transparent. They want us to pick up their checks. And I’ve had to say no to them. If I’ve managed to engender any trust with these essays, then I have the responsibility of not permitting you to be manipulated.

  I’ve lost a friend of some years’ standing because I told him no, I wouldn’t hype for him in these pages. What he wanted you to get excited about was bogus, and would only serve to make him a few bucks. That isn’t why we’re here. He is fit; he can earn his own living; we have to; so can he.

  We can only do so much. Each of us has a built-in survival mechanism, and it is a given that we will spend ninety percent of our day making sure we hobble on into tomorrow. But we are not sloths, we are not members of the Sleeping Wad, and ten percent of our day is available to “good causes.”

  As long as we dedicate that ten percent every day, and occasionally get so fired up we expend sixty percent of our energies for a brief spurt…we have nothing to be ashamed of. Nor should we permit those who apply the pressure to whip guilt on us if we say, no, I’m sorry, I can’t Save The Goshawk or Defeat Litterbuggery, because I’m busy at the moment auctioneering for the ACLU and preparing a public presentation for the recently torched Hollywood Library.

  Yeah, we want you to stay awake, stay alert, and give a shit about the rest of the human race; but you’re entitled to a good night’s sleep and some lighthearted moments, too.

  Don’t forget: free-floating guilt is society’s way of saying you’ll be drained to the husk if you don’t operate in moderation. This warning comes to you through the good offices of the Surgeon General and a very very weary columnist who said, last week, when a check was presented: “I think this one’s yours.”

  Interim memo

  Mention is made in this column of Senator John Schmitz. Those who live outside California may be unaware of this pimple. He is a Far Right eggsucker against abortion, civil rights, feminism, First Amendment freedoms, decent treatment for prisoners…in short, the usual grab-bag of fatheaded attitudes. But Schmitz is one of those classic whited sepulchers who’s always shouting about God, Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Amurrrican Way…who got slapped with a terrific lawsuit by attorney Gloria Allred for calling her and other feminists “bull dykes”…who made open remarks about “kikes and spicks” for television…and who, it was revealed to our utter delight, had fathered a baby by some woman not his wife, and the baby was removed from the mother’s care because of serious abuse…a whole can of worms that, once opened, revealed the Fascistic Schmitz to be the prime maggoty example of the meat he was always condemning.

  INSTALLMENT 42: 3 SEPTEMBER 82

  Oh my God, just look at you! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Come crawlin’ back here after Labor Day in that condition, it’s a goddam disgrace! You know your mothers and I have been worried sick over you. Now you come crawlin’ back looking like that; where the hell have you been!?! And what is that…crapall over your clothes. Just tell me how the hell you expect me to talk seriously to you about anything this week, with you in that condition? Sit down. No, not there, not with that crap all over you. Here, lie down on these brown paper bags. I’ll get the K2R later.

  Now what am I supposed to do with you? I was going to do some heavy duty ruminating about a statistic I heard the other day, about how 55,000 GI’s were killed in the Vietnam War and how 60,000 have successfully committed suicide since the war ended, and how they don’t expect that figure to peak until 1990, and about this being the ongoing cost of an immoral war that none of those sanctimonious Hallelujah Patriots want to face up to when they continue to spout off about how “we coulda won if we’d really wanted to.”

  Yeah, I was going to dwell on that ugliness, but in your condition I doubt if you’d be able to blink at the appropriate places. And I sure as hell couldn’t even get a decent tsk-tsk out of you.

  So okay, this week I’ll let you recover from your debauch, and I’ll just do my flea imitation, jumping from item to item, in hopes your little pink eyeballs don’t just roll up in your heads. Try to pay attention. (Jeezus, your mothers’re gonna have a cardiac when they see you. See you…? Wait’ll they smell you!)

  You look as though you spent four days locked up in a motel room in Visalia with Senator John Schmitz and a diseased goat.

  Occassionally a typo creeps into thx colhum.

  Once they fired the est graduates and Scientologists, though, things improved considerably. You must realize the Weekly has a wonderful humanistic policy of hiring the handicapped for these sensitive jobs, so they won’t feel demeaned. Most of the time (since so many of you already speak in tongues and random squeaks), the errors aren’t hard to figure out. But it has been brought to my attention by The Woman With Whom I’m Goofily, Desperately In Love, that one typo a month or so ago gave an entirely different meaning to an important quote. Herewith, a rectification. “Chance favors the prepared mind.” As spake by Louis Pasteur. That’s chance, folks, not change.

  Speaking of the Los Angeles Weekly—this great gray eminence that brings you not only my ramblings every seven days, but also brings you such profundities as this one from Elliott Solomon’s letter to the editor last week, “like others (Ellison, et al.) who pass as writers…” which is hip-deep in profundity because after almost thirty years of making my living behind a typewriter, with thirty-eight books published, translated into eighteen languages and millions of copies sold, not to mention having won enough awards to stuff a piñata, Solomon the Wise is the first one to perceive that I’ve been passing as a writer (actually, I’m a bricklayer…imagine your surprise at having been so thoroughly flummoxed)—take a walk, Elliott; off the Venice Pier preferably—speaking of this paper, I am surprised to learn how few of you realize that the Weekly is the fourth largest paper in L.A., that its readership is somewhere between 185,000 and 212,000, that it has won almost enough awards to stuff a piñata, and just because you get it for nothing on the L. A. Basin side of the hills (while equally nifty folks in the Valley and South Bay and at newsstands all over the place pay 50¢ a shot) does not mean it is a throwaway like those mailbox stuffers offering you pullets at 62¢ a pound.

  What I’m trying to tell you here, gang, is that the Weekly is not just another pretty face. Nor is it a tool of Reagan. Nor is it an outcall service. Nor does it even restrain Free Speech to the extent of suggesting that Elliott Solomon wouldn’t know a writer if one came up and tattooed the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám on his sternum. Moving right along…

  I never heard back from that guy who offered to buy me a $300 pipe in exchange for two limericks. Imagine my surprise.

  For those of you who followed up my invitation to hear Dry Smoke and Whispers on KPFK’s Hour 25 show a few Fridays ago, and whose enthusiasm for the work of those two Florida kids was made known to Mike Hodel of KPFK, you’ll be delighted to learn that the response was so great that KPFK will begin regular broadcasts of the adventures of alien detective Emille Song sometime in October. Stay tuned.

  For those of you who accepted my invitation to hear Susan Rabin sing at the club called At My Place in Santa Monica five Sundays ago (where I met The Woman For Whom I Would Crawl Through Monkey Vomit On Hands And Knees Clutching A Rose Between My Teeth), be advised Susie Rabin returns this Sunday the 12th at 8:00 PM for a one-performance showcase. If you missed her last time, you’d better call for a reservation early this time: the joint was booked solid the last time.

  Please stop sending me Hydrox! That column—as has been the case with so many columns that Elliott Solomon hasn’t understood—was intended as a paradigm. For the way our taste is bastardized. Yes, I know you can get Hydrox at Gelson’s on Riverside, Michael Schlesinger of North Hollywood. I know, I know! It was a trope, Michael, a metaphor, irony, satire, a bit of reverse-entendre; it was supposed to make you laugh hollowly, make you look over your shoulder while chuckling. Jeezus, Michael! (On the other hand, when you ask the countermen at Trader Joe’s on Riverside at Hazeltine why they are ass-deep in Oreos without a single Hydrox anywh
ere on view in that “gourmet” emporium, they get a frightened look in their eyes, their voices drop, they begin to sweat and stammer, “Uh…uh…we’re…stocked by Nabisco.” And then they change the subject. Fast.)

  Well, that looks like about all you can handle this week. I won’t even get into wondering why it is that menus in Chinese restaurants are in English but the check is always written in Chinese so you can’t tell if you actually had all those dishes or not, and when you ask the waiter what that little squiggle across from the $12.95 is, he always looks at you as if you’d insulted his ancestors and calls the tiny Oriental woman who takes the check from him, stares at you with narrowed eyes, snarls something that sounds like “shaoh-mee,” and thrusts it back at you with a movement that makes it clear you’d better not give her any further shit if you want to continue wearing your nose under your eyes. I won’t get into that.

  And before we get together again next week will you fer chrissakes clean yourselves up. We run a class column here, and we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone lying on brown paper bags with all that…that…crap on them!

  Interim memo

  This column may not be as sociologically important as some of the others—which may not be as sociologically important as I like to think—but it’s part of the run, and we hold nothing from you, nothing. Also, this column was heavily edited by the publisher of the Weekly. Not the first time he’d played patty-cake with my copy, and perhaps not significant in this instance, but there was a pattern emerging, and it led, at the end, to my killing the column in the Weekly’s pages. But for posterity, this installment appears complete here for the first time. Alert the media.