Memos From Purgatory

by Harlan Ellison

  And more than any other effect, this pale, trembling timelessness, this experience out of time and space, leaves a person feeling disembodied, prey to any physical ill that happens along, prey to weird schemes and images of the mind. I can see why men go “stir-crazy” in a short time; to them, it’s a long time.

  While I sat there, disembodied and expectant, breathing once out of every three times (I imagined), another line of men was brought in.

  Now that I had nothing to do but sit and stare, I examined them closely. Minutely. These were the vags, the bums, the wineheads and the wetbrains from the Bowery, the Sneaky Pete drinkers and the Sweet Lucy lovers, the ones who filtered bottles of after-shave lotion down through a loaf of pumpernickel, the ones who drank canned heat and panther sweat, the ones who had left too many pieces of themselves in too many bars for too many years. These were even lower than the felons and the thieves and the boost artists. These were the absolute dregs of humanity. Men to whom life had lost its meaning, thought had lost its verve, existence had lost its color. Men with newspaper serving as soles for their shoes, with ragged clothes and ragged faces, with dull eyes and runny noses, with unshaved jowls and uncut hair. Faceless men, into the wrinkles of whose cheeks had been weather-ground the dirt and grit and soot and degradation of half-lifetimes spent on knees, in gutters, in doorways and alleys. These were the men the society had dumped out its backside.

  These were the men they spoke about when they asked: “Are we fulfilling our obligations to our citizens?”

  No good to say they could work if they wanted to work. No good to say they were lazy, dirty, stupid, unable to keep a job, irresponsible, shiftless, belligerent. No good.

  These were the men who had passed through the mill of our culture, been unable to fit any molds, been unable or unwilling to discover themselves, and been flushed out the rear end of the System. Here was the dung we called the deadbeats.

  In the Tombs they are called the “skids.”

  See them, then. See the truly lost ones. How easy it is to condemn them, when you pass them lying in an alcove, the stench of sour rye on them, their clothes fouled with their own waste. How bloody easy it is to laugh at them and let the kids mug and roll them and cast them out. And the fury of it all is that the outer darkness into which they cast themselves is so much more terrible, so much more final than any social darkness we could use.

  All of this went through my mind as they stopped right beside my bench. I was close enough to touch four of them but I didn’t.

  Old men, they were. Even the young ones. Old men, very tanned, even in September. Tanned from spending their days in the park, in the sun. Old men, their pants baggy and their hair white and their jowls stippled…almost a dirty uniform. Vests and pin-striped suits with wide, wide lapels, gifts of the benevolent and pretentious, doles from a too-busy citizenry. And the shoes…the rotting, falling-apart shoes, with the friction tape wrapped around the toes to keep sole and leather together. The rags for stuffing.

  And their pallor. Their white, blue-veined, bulbous red pallor that comes right through the tanned, leathery skin. Brown on the surface, and so horribly, fish-belly white underneath. Sick old men, lost old men, decent and starving and frightened old men turned off by luck, turned off by time, turned off by life. Gone to ground, finally, in the Tombs.

  For a big Thirty w/3-a-day.

  The stench of dead whiskey was almost too pervasive an odor to bear. But I could not move, and would not move, and let them stare at me with their dead, unfeeling eyes, with the sparks gone and just any old thing there.

  It sounds strange, now, to say it, but I think the most honest emotion I’ve ever had was while staring at those poor saucehounds and winos, I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to tell them they could have a piece of my life, if it would help end their misery. Anything to stop the hopelessness of what they had become. They looked back at me without curiosity, seeing a young guy with the world by the tail, and their world was not my world.

  They had been lost for a very long time.

  And all the good wishes or self-conscious duty-shirkers could not find them. The work should have been done many years before.

  A hack, standing nearby, snapped a half-inch cigarette butt onto the floor near the line of vags, and four of them dove for it; the one who came up with it was shaking so badly he burned his lips getting it re-lit for one puff before his spastic movements confounded him.

  The lank hair. The unshaved faces. The twitches and starts and odors and shiftings of feet. The very smell of death about them. And the absence of desperation. These men had long since forgotten what desperation was.

  Watching them, feeling the humanity draining out of me as the full import of what these ex-human beings had been turned into rose in me, I felt more trapped than ever before by the System.

  Because this was the reward you got for screwing up in the Glorious System. This was the ax that fell. And here was a manifestation of the lost, who seemed to be the guilty.

  The waiting. The nothing-to-do. The putting my hands before me so I could see the black stains. (And then it dawned on me, why I had been constantly putting my hands through the bars while in a cell. Why everyone did it. Putting my hands through the bars so just a little of me could be free.) The feeling I was no longer a human being. The absolute loss of all humanity. The penultimate agony of realizing my life was in someone else’s hands completely, subject to his whim or fancy.

  And I couldn’t yell: “The game is off. I don’t want to play any more!”

  It’s their game, their rules.

  “Okay, Ellison, let’s go.”

  I stared at the old men, and inside somewhere I honest to God cried for them. They were me, I was them, we were all brothers, and they were down here for keeps.

  “C’mon, Author, let’s get goin’, your bail came through.”

  Tooley lifted me off the bench, cleared me with the Captain, and hustled me out of the Processing Room, taking me upstairs to be turned loose at last.

  I was free.

  But I didn’t realize it till I was in the reception room. Because the last thing I had seen was all I could still see, all I could remember, what I’d never forget.

  The old men.

  The ones who could be anyone, who could be me, if I ever lost the drive to keep living, if I ever let the System and Life in all its Mechanized Modern Majesty grind me into the ground.

  The old men, and the young men, and the fags, and the winos, and the junkies, and the poor sonofabitch whose life had somehow been warped about the time he should have had his first woman, who had wound up using a hammer on a chick. The old man who needed his juice and wound up with a broken head. The teen-ager who was scared and Tooley who was just crummy. All of them were back down there, like creatures without souls, waiting to see and be seen.

  Waiting down there in Hell, in Purgatory, in the Tombs.

  Yeah, I was out. I was free. But who would cry for the old men?

  CONCLUSION

  There are some loose ends to these two periods in my life. They aren’t as important, perhaps, as the stories the truth tells in what happened to me—among the young men and among the old men. But they tie everything up in the accepted non-Existentialist manner we’ve grown accustomed to expect from Western storytellers…

  My mother was waiting in the check-out room of the 110 Centre Street building, when they brought me up from below. She was soaked to the skin, and I realized that it was still raining. I had a strange feeling that in all the months I had spent downstairs in the Tombs it should have stopped raining. A rain that long would have meant another Noah and his Ark. Then, of course, I realized I had only been down there one day, just twenty-four hours. Yet it had seemed so much longer.

  My mother told me how she had heard the Judge say one thousand dollars, and how Linda and Ted White and my agent Theron had all jumped—almost as one—to say they would pool their money and buy me a bail bond at one of the schlock bondsmen in
the neighborhood. She told me how she had said she would take care of it, that I was her son and it was her responsibility, and how they had all argued to get me out as quickly as possible.

  Serita Ellison, my mother, is in many ways a very remarkable woman. She has great personal strength. A woman who seems able to stare the most deliberately evil forces of Nature in the eye and not flinch. This is something it took me many years to realize; for her reserve of energy is too often hidden beneath a guise of feminine softness. Yet I have seen her perform acts of incredible stamina for a woman her age, that I would not expect from a person fifteen years her junior. I say this now, for the first time within the reach of her attention, not only as a thank you and a recognition of her importance in my life—a life that many times might have gone very wrong had she not been handy, but as an admission to myself that no one—not even myself, though I’d like to believe it sometimes—is ever really alone.

  She went out in the storm and she called a money source I had never even suspected she knew. She called on a man whose name she will not tell me to this day, and she asked him for one thousand dollars. She went up to the lower Forties on the West Side, got the money, and came back, to get me out of the Tombs.

  They gave her the usual machine-made runaround.

  “Not this building. Take bail money to the other building.”

  “Yes, we’ll take the bail money here, but we haven’t gotten the papers on him yet. You’ll have to go see the Prosecutor’s office.”

  “No, we don’t have the papers here. They went down half an hour ago. Those people are nuts down there.”

  “Oh, yeah, hey here they are. But we’re going out to lunch now. Come back after one o’clock.”

  “You, here again? No, nothing we can do till they get back from lunch. Sorry.”

  “Yes. We’ll have him up in a minute.”

  And four hours later, from the time she presented the money, till the time I was brought through the grilled cage door, she waited in the check-out room, watching a Puerto Rican woman thrash and scream and plead for her own husband to be turned loose; identifying with this woman who spoke no English and was paralyzed with hysteria and fear in the presence of the Machine System.

  Four hours, wet and cold and very much afraid this time her kid had done himself in properly. Then I came out, and it was all right again. Everything was all right again.

  I got my belongings back from the clerk, and we went back to 95 Christopher Street. As we walked into the building, Jerry, the doorman I had told I was going away on business, the one I had asked to tell my mother to get in touch with Linda Solomon, was standing in the lobby.

  Jerry has a ratty way about him, and he could barely contain his enthusiasm as he trotted across the lobby to tell me, “Say, I read about you in the paper this morning…heard it over the radio, too.”

  “Heard what, Jerry?” I asked him, already cold with intuitive certainty that he had tipped the papers,

  “Well, you know, about the trouble with the narcotics and goin’ to jail. I mean, you’re a tenant here and I recognized the address they gave in a paper.”

  “Got a copy of that, Jerry?”

  He fished around in his wallet till be came up with a scrap of newsprint. It was from the New York Daily News and it was headed up by AP—Associated Press. That meant it had gone out over the wires of the AP on Monday morning, September 12th, and every paper in the country would get it. No matter how few picked it up, everyone who knew me, anyone who had read my books and remembered the name of the author, my family (who had been kept in the dark about this by my mother), my publishers, everyone in the trade…they would all know.

  The story was short, but cleverly worded so that (1) it was made clear no narcotics were found, (2) explained that the weapons in question were in my possession for a thoroughly rational reason, and (3) defamed me completely. By inference. By non-statement. Sins of omission. By veiled innuendo. The twisted word, the unstated obvious, the malleable semantic wonder of “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

  I gave it back to him, and didn’t say anything. I was too hung up to bother taking him apart. Jerry was operating as a stringer for the newspapers. It was common practice; too many bellboys, doormen, elevator operators, desk clerks and cabbies in the city were stringers. For a couple of bucks they’d feed any tip they got in to the City Desk.

  Jerry had tipped the newspapers.

  It was obvious no one else could have known, since the narcotics charge had died with the two plainclothesmen who had arrested me, and had not even been the booking charge at the Charles Street station. I knew neither of the plainclothesmen had passed it to the tabloids, and I knew the Captain who’d finally had me booked at Charles Street would not mention it; so the information had to emanate from somewhere prior to my arrest. Ergo, Jerry, who had been met—apparently—by the plainclothesmen when they had first come looking for me the day before. They’d probably identified themselves as being on the Narcotics Squad, found out if I was in, and come upstairs. When Jerry saw the three of us go out, he got on the horn.

  I had always been on good terms with him.

  An extra buck or two for finding me a parking space on Christopher Street. A quiet chat late at night when he was on duty. A cup of coffee when he couldn’t sneak away for one. So why had he jammed it in when my back was turned? He had done it for a couple of bucks, stringer’s fee.

  Because Jerry, gentle reader, was one of the Common Man-types everyone lauds. He was, and is, a sample of the great ethic and morality of the Common Man in our time.

  Jerry had done what he could do for two bucks, and within 24 hours I found myself referred to as: “Oh, yeah, Ellison. Isn’t he the writer who got picked up on the junk charge?”

  And as I went upstairs to catch a shave and change out of my cruddy clothes, clothes I’d slept in the night before, on a hardwood slab…as I went upstairs to shave my face and alter my thinking about the world in general…as I prepared my thinking for courts and lawyers and trials and possibly (now that I’d sampled the System) a jail sentence, I considered Jerry as a symbol:

  What good is it? You try to make it in the game, you ply your trade the best way you can, and you don’t step on any more necks than are absolutely necessary to keep you in the running, you begin to think you’re doing okay and you have friends and you’re not too bad a guy, and what good does it do?

  The Common Man is on the scene. He’ll play with another man’s life and career for revenge—Ken Bales, are you there? I haven’t forgotten—or for a lark, or out of misguided idiocy, or for a couple of dollars…and you’ve had it. There are guys who will wash someone down the drain to get two or five or fifty bucks from the Daily News for a not-quite-accurate tip. There are newspapermen who will go for news even if it isn’t really news: To hell with him; if we’re wrong we’ll run a retraction.

  Yeah, sure.

  Accuse him in twelve-point type on the front page and five days later say he’s innocent in an eight-point box on page thirty-six. Who remembers the retractions?

  Who do you curse? That’s the question. God help us all. That’s the big thing: who do you blame? Do you blame the Authorities who are too busy keeping their ever-loving System running to be concerned about humanity? Do you blame the times, and its stamp of financial necessity? Who do you slug in the mouth? Who do you fight when you can’t fight City Hall?

  On October 31st, 1961, before a duly authorized Grand Jury panel, I was “severally discharged from their Undertaking to Answer” on the charges for which I’d been arraigned on September 12th. They passed down “no true bill” which meant I was an innocent man. But though I received my Certificate of Dismissal of Complaint (a copy of which occupies the next page), the repercussions of my arrest are still to be considered.

  Friends from all over the country wrote asking if I needed either (1) financial aid, (2) the name of a good lawyer, (3) character witnesses, (4) pall-bearers or (5) a cure for narcotics addiction.


  Lawsuits were instigated, then killed, to garner damages from the wire services and individual newspapers who had run the piece on my arrest. What was the use in taking something to court when we couldn’t win…their language was lovely. Yellow and obscure and all by inference.

  My prints and mug shots are still on file in the New York Police Department.

  I have a record, of sorts.

  But all that is very minor indeed. All that is petty next to the good that came out of my last trip through Hell. I found who my real friends were…a bearded jazz critic who very often had to take back empty Pepsi bottles to get food for the table, who was willing to fork over every cent he had to bail me out…a girl who spent most of her time partying and wondering who she really was, who had no difficulty recognizing her place when a buddy needed help…all the people I’d known, who wrote me asking if they could help in some way…the editors who called and said they might find me story-assignments if I had to make lawyers’ fees…The Village Voice, its editor, Daniel Wolf and its publisher, Ed Fancher, who asked me to write my story for their pages, in one of the finest liberal newspapers in the country…the publishers of Regency Books, who read that little Greenwich Village newspaper piece, and commissioned me to write this book…

  And the display of sincerity, honest judgment and decency shown me by Mrs. Marion Walsh of the District Attorney’s Office of the City of New York, and the honorable ladies and gentlemen of the Grand Jury panel that sat in judgment of my case. The hard work and direct approach of my lawyer, Herb Plever, who knew there was no sense in wasting time with hanky-panky and fancy Perry Mason tactics when a simple laying-out of the facts would prove my innocence.