For the record. One of the dumb expressions. For whose record? Who the hell is keeping track? What a paranoid phrase: as if one day we’d be called on to make an accounting. Shades of Joseph McCarthy and Reagan’s subversive list (whereon your gentle correspondent’s name appears). Also a grotesque manifestation of ego run mad. As if anyone gave a damn where someone stood on the smallest issue. God (or whoever’s in charge) knows we ignore the “record” most of the time; we continue to elect thieves and reprobates and moral salamanders; truth to tell, most of the nits who use the phrase “for the record” a hundred times a month would re-elect Nixon tomorrow, in defiance of the “record.” So. It’s a stupid phrase, and I hereby move we stop using it in our daily speech as though it had some significance, and further, that we cease to allow politicians and other mainliners to use it. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…
For the record, I’m writing this in Billings, Montana. I’m on my way home from the lecture tour, and by the time your beady little marmoset eyes read this in the Freep, I’ll have been home for a day or two, recuperating, and thanks a lot I had a nice time, but don’t bother to call, I’ve got work to catch up on.
Perhaps one day soon I’ll do a column or two on what it’s like being on the road for a month, lecturing at colleges, hustling business at publishing houses in New York, riding the Amtrak Metroliner between N.Y. and Philly, the joys of Dartmouth, the anguishes of science fiction conventions, the pains of knowing you lost not one but two Nebula awards a priori and then having to be a cheerful and witty toastmaster at the banquet where others get the goodies, the rain in Wisconsin which is seldom on the plain; I’ll write about Max and Karen and Bettina and the Countess Von Sternberg from Brooklyn and Susan and Denny and Ann and Stephanie and Andrea and Dana and Doxtater and the loons at Dartmouth who had a “Harlan Ellison Look-Alike Contest” and a “Nubile Co-Ed Availability for Dinner with Ellison Contest” before I ever got there, thereby making it a foregone conclusion that I was a sexist swine and effectively putting me beyond the pale of any human relationships. Perhaps I’ll write about that, one day. Perhaps not. I wouldn’t want to bore you.
And besides (and here we come to the nubbin of this week’s ruminations on the state of the universe), when I rather matter-of-factly relate the weird and fascinating experiences that seem to happen to me in carload lots, I keep being accused of making up stories out of whole cloth to perpetuate some deranged charisma myth about my loveable self. And it’s that I want to talk about today: shadow and reality, witnesses, and all the lies that are my life.
Look: I lead this really dynamite, interesting life. I tell you that not merely to make you miserable in your own wretched existences, but to set forth what I’ve come to believe is the mark of success in life:
You’re a success if you live a life that brings you as close as possible to the dreams you had when you were a kid. Whether it’s to be a cowboy or a movie star or the best goddam milkman in the world, if it’s what you dreamed of being when you were a tot, and you’re doing it now…you’ve made it.
I always wanted to be a world-famous writer. Well, I’m a world-famous writer, and I love it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll dig my toe in the dirt and do an aw shucks number. Or, as Zero Mostel said in The Producers, “When you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!”
And because I’m living the best possible kind of life I can lead, I have adventures. Now maybe my adventures aren’t as wild as Cousteau’s or Lawrence of Arabia’s, or even Mailer’s, but because I’m a good storyteller, I can see the plot-line in the daily occurrences of my life, and when I retell them, I try and put a punch line to them, to tie them up dramatically the way I would a story. Now I’ll grant you that this kind of minor rearrangement of the time-sequences, emphases and insights is akin to lying, but that’s what I get paid to do: lie professionally. And it sure beats the bejeezus out of the dull, random manner in which life feeds us our experiences. So, in a very special way, everything I ever relate about how I live my life is a lie. Or maybe “lie” is too harsh a word. “Fib” is closer, but I suspect Vonnegut’s “foma”—harmless untruths—is the best. I never change the facts, just the way they are colored or arranged. I’ll never tell you I won if I lost, I’ll never tell you I was a good guy if I was bad. But there’s a bit of the imp in me, and if I add a flying fish or troll to an otherwise ordinary tale, it’s only to make you a little sunnier and happier as you move toward the grave. How can you condemn a man for such a noble and humanitarian activity?
On the other hand, there are times when truly amazing adventures befall me, solely due to my fearless wonderfulness and the core truth that I have more charisma than even the Pillsbury Dough Boy. And when I later go back and recount such exploits, there are bound to be those who say, “That crazed fucker is lying in his teeth.”
At which point I say, “Just ask Avram Davidson. He was there when I stood off an entire Italian street gang in Greenwich Village.” Or I say, “Just ask Bob Silverberg. He was there when the drunken Puerto Rican came at me with a busted Rheingold beer bottle, quart size.” Or I say, “Just ask Mariana Hernández—she’s my secretary—because she was there the morning I fell face-first into my bowl of chocolate Malt-O-Meal.”
And it’s those witnesses whom I adore, because they rig the line between my fantasies and my reality. Truth to tell, friends, I’ve long since given up trying to differentiate between the two. My fantasies seem so much a part of my world, I can’t tell where the shadow leaves off and the substance begins.
And since I intend to launch off on a series of these tales, I wanted to lay the ground rules this week, so you’d know what to expect. And to offer witnesses who can be contacted to prove that what I say is pretty much the truth.
I do this not so much because I really give a shit, but because Chris Van Ness at the Freep tells me he’s had a few complaints about the column. People writing or calling in saying, “Who the hell cares about this Ellison schmuck and whether or not he was a pimp in Kansas City?” Well, to begin with, I was never a pimp in K.C. Or anywhere else for that matter. But I was a hired gun for a wealthy neurotic in Cleveland, when I was a teenager, and it’s a pretty good story, which I’m going to tell you next week, and I simply feel the time is ripe for us to understand what this column is all about, and what it’s not all about.
Maybe I should have done this twenty-four weeks ago when the Hornbook started, but it never occurred to me that there would be people who objected to being entertained.
That’s what this column is all about. Entertainment. I’m not a political columnist, nor a literary critic, nor a historical analyst. I’m simply a writer, a storyteller; if you read this column expecting to learn great lessons about Life, or expect me to explain the Natural Order of the Universe, forget it. Jack Margolis, poor Jack who’s getting his ass kicked by various and sundry because he’s a sexist, that poor Jack who never copped to being anything but a sexist so how can you revile him, friends, well, he’s into saying meaningful things from time to time…but I try not to. It’s long been my feeling that a writer who sits down to write The Great American Novel usually winds up writing The Great American Shitpile. Too self-conscious. You can read great pronouncements about the condition of life in our times by Reagan and Unruh and all sorts of others from Ann Landers to Billy Graham, and maybe that’s what you need to enrich you; but as for me, all I want to do in these little journals is entertain. Make you laugh, make you cry, make you wait. As the English novelist Charles Reade said.
If that isn’t good enough for you, why, simply turn to another page of the Freep and get uplifted or informed. But I’m confounded by readers who can’t be amused by foma, who want every stick of type in this paper to be heavy, redolent, festooned with import. It’s like a female editor I met in New York, whom I referred to as an “Editrix,” for a gag. It was to giggle, but a feminist in the crowd hissed and made a nasty to-do about it. Well, shit, friends, anything that can’t be made fun of, anything, anydamnthing, is doomed to sink of its own humorless weight. You’ve got to laugh, dammit! You’ve got to find giggles throughout the day or simply fucking die! Why the hell do you think so many deep-thinking intellectuals watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island on the sly? Because they’ve got to lighten up.
Well, that’s what this column is. A lighten up.
And if you find that an ugly, or a waste of space, well, just consider that the space might be used for rectal suppository ads or as promo for The Clint Eastwood To Replace John Wayne As Reactionary Sex Image American Patriot Hero Figure Committee. On the other hand, it might be used to run something worthwhile, so that argument doesn’t hold.
All of which brings me with very little linear sense to the end. This week. Oh, I’ll be back all right. Until the shrieks outnumber the sighs of joy. But as long as Kunkin & Co. permit me to journal out my days in small parcels, the Hornbook will continue to try to outrage, tickle and lie to you.
But next week I’ll tell you about how I packed this .25 Beretta for Al Wilson when I was seventeen years old, and if you don’t want to laugh, then you can either go fuck yourself or read Chris’s record reviews.
And if you need a witness, call Ben Jason in Cleveland. He was there. So was I. And next week, so will you.