Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

And the old man purses his lips and beetles his brow; he perceives the kid is really serious about this; it’s not just jerk-off time. So he nods sagely, and clasps his hands behind his back, and he walks to the window and stares out at the deep city for a while, just sorta kinda ponders for a while. And finally, he turns to the kid and he says, with core seriousness, “You know, there’s a lotta bastards out there.”

  Now that’s pretty significant. I think. On the other hand, I have never made my residence in a stalactite-festooned cave high up on the northern massif of Chomolungma (Everest to you). I have never been sought out by fawning sycophants, whimpering to abase themselves before my wisdom, hungering to prostrate themselves and to offer oblations at the altar of my Delphic insights. In short, unlike the Great Thinkers of Our Time who appear regularly on talk-shows—Merv Griffin, Debbie Boone, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jim Nabors leap instantly to mind—I doubt that the Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will ever crib from my notes.

  Nonetheless, having become something of an ingroup cult figure among those with a high death-wish profile and a taste for cheap thrills, I am often asked, “What’s the big secret, Ellison?” At college lectures, for instance, bright-eyed young people, the great hope of our society, come up to me and murmur in reverential tones, “Wanna buy a lid of tough Filipino Scarlet?”

  Naturally I try to demonstrate a certain humility in the face of such trust and innocence. I try to explain that Life is Real, Life is Earnest. In my own toe-scufiling fashion I attempt to encapsulate in three or four apocryphal phrases the Ethical Structure of the Universe. The better to aid these fine young people as they set out to change the world.

  And from this long, terrifically fascinating life of encounters and adventures, I have selected three examples of what I think are the most important things in life. Notes should be taken; this will count as sixty per cent of your grade.

  1. SEX

  I could have started with one of the more esoteric of the three, but I know your attention-span is short and, in lieu of playing The Saints Go Marching In, I decided it was best to catch your notice with instant sleaze.

  Sex is one of the most important things in life. It comes built into the machine. Understanding sex is real important, y’know. And it’s not enough just to say, “All men are shits,” or “What the fuck do women want?” That’s good for openers, but one must press on to deeper insights. As an aid to your greater search, I offer the following anecdote from my own humble experience: an only-minimally exaggerated retelling of the single kinkiest sexual encounter I ever had.

  When I got to Los Angeles in 1962, I was well into terminal destitution. Poverty would have been, for me, a sharp jump into a higher-income bracket. Consequently, I wasn’t getting laid much. More astute observers than I have charted the correlations between one’s D&B rating and one’s attraction for members of the same or opposite sex.

  Anyhow, I met this young woman at Stats Charbroiler one afternoon, and somehow conned her into accepting a date. It has been fifteen years since that encounter, but I remember her name today as clearly as if it had been intaglio’d on my brain with a jackhammer. Brenda.

  A substantially constructed female person, honey blonde of hair, amber of eye, insouciant of manner and expansive of bosom. We exchanged pleasantries, I explained that I was new to L.A. and was, in fact, a published author.

  She went for it.

  I took her phone number and address, and promised to pick her up the following Saturday night around 8:00 for a rollicking evening of camaraderie and good times, cleverly scaled to my nonexistent finances. Long walks in the bracing night air, that kind of thing.

  Came Saturday, and I hand-washed the wretched 1951 Ford that had brought me to California from Chicago and New York. I dressed as spiffily as I could manage, aware at all times of the fact that having postponed a good number of meals had dropped my weight to about ninety pounds and I was beginning to take on the appearance of a card-carrying rickets case.

  I drove to her home, which was in the posh Brentwood section of Beverly Hills. I walked to the ornate apartment door of the garden lanai, and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I waited and rang again. Nothing happened. Minutes passed, and I began thinking unworthy thoughts about Brenda’s ethics. Finally, I heard footsteps from within, and the door was flung open.

  There stood Brenda in her slip, with machines in her hair. “Come in, come in,” she said huffily, as if I had interrupted her at the precise moment when she had been decoding the DNA molecule or something equally as significant. “I’m running a little late. I have to finish doing my hair. Well, come in already.”

  I stepped into the foyer, standing on a ribbed plastic runner that stretched out into the distance. As she closed the door behind me, I began to take a step off the plastic stripping so the door wouldn’t hit me. My foot was poised in mid-step as she let out a shriek. “Aaarghh! Not on the carpet! Mama had the schvarize in today!” I spun, widdershins, barely managing to balance myself on one leg like a flamingo. I steadied myself on the plastic runner and looked to my right, the direction my errant foot would have carried me.

  There, stretching off to the distant horizon, flooring a living room only slightly smaller than Bosnia and/or Herzogovina, lay the pluperfect lunatic symbol of the upwardly-mobile, nouveau-riche household: a white carpet, deepest pile, a veritable Sargasso Sea of insane white carpet-who but nutcases would carpet a room in which human beings are supposed to relax in white, fer chrissakes?—with the nap pathologically lying all in one direction, clearly having been carpet-swept by Nubian slave labor so it was anal retentively flowing in one unbroken tide. Hours had been spent making sure each bloody fiber lay in that north by northwest direction.

  “Stay on the runner. I won’t be long,” Brenda commanded.

  “I’ve got to stay on the runner?”

  “Sure. Just stand there. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  And she vanished. Back into the bowels of that cyclopean domicile, leaving me standing frozen and tremulous in my baggy pants while she went off to complete her toilette. The plastic runner extended out beneath my feet, back into the dim and vaulted interior. To my left a closed door. To my right the inviolate expanse of white carpeting and a living room in which Xerxes could easily have assembled his armies for an attack on the Hot Gates.

  I stood there, shifting from one foot to the other like a grade school troublemaker waiting for his audience with the Principal. And time went by. Slowly. I waited and waited, and heard nothing from the back of the residence. The living room looked invitingly comfortable with all those massive sofas and the huge baby grand piano. But I had been denied entrance. I felt like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon standing at the doorway to the antechamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb, faunching to enter a space unvisited for three thousand years, but fearing the terrible wrath of Beware all ye who violate this sacred place …

  Now I don’t know about you, friends, but if you leave me all alone someplace, with nothing to amuse me, for any extended period of time, I will sure as shit get in trouble.

  And so, possessed by some devil-demon from my childhood, I became obsessed by the purity of that goddam carpet. I stared at its unblemished white expanse, that sea of bleached grass rippling away to forever. And finally, when it was either do something or go bugfuck, I stepped to the edge of the plastic runner, crouched, and jumped as far out into the carpet as I could. There was no way of knowing where I had come from. My footprints just magically appeared out there.

  I hesitated only a moment, and then, scuffling my feet to produce impressions in the carpet, I began spelling out the classic Chaucerian PHUQUE. In letters four feet high. In virginal white carpet.

  And I was just putting the . on the ! when I heard a strangled, “Aaaaarghhh!” behind me. I turned, and there stood the missing Brenda, looking really pretty terrific, but with this, how shall I put it, uh, green expression on her face. “OhjeezusOhmiGodOhshit! My mother’U kiiiill me!” And she ran off, leaving me standing the
re rather shamefaced, wondering just which mental gargoyle had taken possession of the cathedral of my mind, knowing that there was no way I was gonna get laid.

  Then, in a moment, here she came, schlepping a carpet sweeper, not a vacuum cleaner, just one of your basic hand-pushed carpet sweepers, and she starts sweeping the nap back north by northwest!

  And I watched this demented scene for about thirty seconds until it got more than I could handle, and I yelled at her, “This is nuts! How the hell can you be a slave to a fuckin’ carpet?” But she was in the grip of more powerful forces than my charisma. She was under the unbreakable spell of toilet training, and if the Apocalypse had come along just then she’d still have finished laying that nap back.

  I went crazy.

  I grabbed for the sweeper. She pirouetted out of my reach. She never broke stroke. I lunged for her again, and got my hands around the sweeper. We struggled back and forth across the living room, caroming off the furniture, lousing up the carpet worse than before. She fought like one of those lady barbarians out of a Conan adventure, punching and kicking.

  Then the sweeper went that way, and we went this way, and we fell over and wrestled over and over across the floor, thumping our heads and legs. Over and over, and I came up on top for a moment and pinned her arms and stared down at her, trying to catch my breath …

  And in that instant I perceived a mad light glowing out of her eyes, and she murmured huskily, “Hit me.”

  Oh shit.

  Now you gotta understand: I’m a quiet, well-mannered, Jewish kid from Ohio. Not even years sunk to the hips in the fleshpots of New York, Chicago, London and Billings, Montana have been able to sully the rigidly Puritanical morals that have led me to the pinnacle of success and clear complexion you see before you today. To put it simply, I was terrified. After all that time, at long last, despite my best efforts at avoidance, I had encountered one of those kinda ladies.

  “Uh … beg pardon,” I said weakly.

  “Hit me,” she said again. The light in her eyes strobed.

  “H-h-huh-to you?”

  “Punch me around a little bit. I love it.”

  “P-p-puh—?”

  “Don’t leave marks. Just hurt me some …”

  Oh shit.

  She was watching me, naked lust in her face, her lips wet with unconcealed desire. Nice quiet Jewish kid from Ohio. But what the hell, I’m adaptable.

  Bogart asserted himself. My voice dropped four octaves. “You like a little smacking around, right, shweetheart?” She nodded, bonking her head on the carpet “Okay,” I said roughly, “get naked.”

  She looked troubled for a moment. “Naked?”

  “Now!” I said, my voice a brutal rasp. I got off her. I stood over her as she stripped out of her clothes. My eyes slitted, my jaw tensed. I watched silently.

  When she was naked—and pretty terrific she was, I might add—I said, “Okay, He on your back.” She lay down again. (For a crazed moment I wanted to tell her to “make an angel” the way we used to do it when there was a heavy snow in Ohio. You lie on your back and flap your arms up and down, making angel wings. But I didn’t. That would’ve been really crazy.)

  The heavy drapes on the living room windows were secured by thick gold cord ropes with tassels. I unhooked four of them. I wrapped one around her left leg, secured it, and tied it to one leg of the baby grand. Then I did the same to her right leg and attached it to the piano at the other side. Then one arm stretched above her head and fastened to a leg of the massive sectional sofa. The other arm to another post of the sofa. She was spread-eagled, right in the middle of the word PHUQUE! (without the .) out flat on her back, her perspiring body trembling with barely-restrained passion.

  “Can you move?”

  She tried, then shook her head.

  “Tied down tight? Can’t get loose?”

  She nodded again, breathing raggedly.

  “Terrific,” I said, heading for the door. “Say hello to your mama for me, and thank her for the chicken soup.”

  And I ran for my life.

  All I could think of was when her mother got home that night, and found her baby girl staked out like a gazelle at the waterhole, she’d take one look at this monstrous scene and start screaming, “My caaaarpet … !”

  You ask me if sex is one of the most important things in life? Absolutely. But the lack of it is even likelier to drive you nuts.

  2. VIOLENCE

  Not the pale, pallid nonsense Starsky and Hutch indulge in every week. Real violence. Sudden, inexplicable, ghastly.

  How seldom we see it. How unhinged we become in the face of it. Because when it really happens, when it manifests itself on its most primitive, amoral level … we understand just how fragile is the tissue of social behavior. In a life singularly filled with violence, only one sticks out without even close competition as the most horrendously violent moment I ever witnessed. I’ll tell it briefly; even today, years later, my blood runs cold remembering …

  New York. Early Seventies, maybe ‘73 or ‘74.1 was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, piss and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anydamnthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the porn jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks … all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.

  I don’t remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was Fear is the Key, a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair Maclean novel. The main feature was Save the Tiger, a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.

  And there we slumped, way the hell up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us—and it was steep up there, what I’m talking here is damned near per-pen-d/c-u-lar—some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.

  My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes Good’n’Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly, Fear is the Key ends, and Save the Tiger begins.

  About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above the floor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.

  “Muh-fugguh! Gahdamn muh-fugn stupid piece’a shit. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin’ piece’a shit garbage … Leroy! Hey, you sumbish nigguh prick Leroy! Le’s get th’ fuggoutta here, Leeeee-roy!”

  Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle class morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon’s knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the shitty slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin’ honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn’t soon enough for him. “Leeeee-ROY!”

  I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.

  Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the brass rail, his pa
rtner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his ass and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the goddam muh-fuggin’ movie.

  But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don’t twitch a bun.

  And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from behind me I hear The Voice of Doom:

  “Shut your face, nigger, before I come down there and kill you.”

  Pause with me for a nanoinstant. This was not one of those angrily shouted shutups one encounters all-too-frequently these days in pillbox-sized Cinema I/II/III/IV closets filled with slope-browed, prognathous-jawed pimplebrains who jabber endlessly as though they were still in front of the tube in their living room. This was—trust me—the most blood-curdlingly threatening voice I have ever heard. It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing mene mene tekel in letters of fire. This was an abominable snowman, a tyrannosaurus, a behemoth, a stone righteous muh-fuggin’ killer. Deep, resonant, commanding, powerful… and very very black.

  I don’t want to belabor this but whoever or whatever was sitting back up there behind my Texas buddy and me, it was bad.

  Beside me, I felt the hand of my Texican partner on my wrist. Softly, he asked, “What the fuck was that?”

  “Voice of Doom,” I said. “Pretend we’re black. Better still: pretend we’re at another theater.”

  All this happened in a second. And only an idiot would have talked back to the owner of that voice. Guess whose name was in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance by an Idiot? You got it: Leeee-ROY’s buddy with the scoop shovel mouth.

  Is violence important in this life?