Don Epstein is out there somewhere, but you’ll never find him. Shit, he can’t even find himself any more. And you know who got him lost? The Pope got him lost. Not the current one, the nut who says everybody ought to keep having babies; the one who died in 1963, the good one, John XXIII. Good John got Don Epstein lost because he didn’t tell all them terribly christian Christians sooner that we Jews didn’t nail up the Son of God. I mean, if John had gotten it on a little sooner, say around 1954, or even 1953 (1952 would have been best), Don Epstein would not be lost today.
What’s that you say? I’m babbling again? Well, hell, friends, you should know by now that I’ll make it all ugly clear before I say goodbye, so just hang in there with me and let me play my nasty word-games.
You see, Don Epstein was just about my only friend in college, and since I’ve been telling college-days stories in this column for the past month, I thought I’d tag them off with the story of my pretty-much-only-friend at Ohio State, Don Epstein, and what happened to him, and how he wound up getting so lost he’ll never be found.
It’s not one of my happy stories. You may not smile even once. But then, that’s only fair: Don Epstein went a lotta days without smiling.
I met Don when I pledged ZBT. Well, Don was too dynamite a guy to put up with Greek bullshit very long, and he checked out about a month before I got booted. He moved into a rooming house across from Ohio State, but during the few weeks we knew each other in the fraternity, we became friends, so when I got the axe, I moved into the same rooming house, and the friendship flourished.
Don was a tall, good-looking guy with a gentle nature and a marvelous wry sense of humor. He was also literate, had a fine ear for classical music and jazz, and he was a marvelous dresser. He also looked very Semitic. That means something, so remember it.
Don was signed up for pre-med. He had a 4.00 average, which for those of you who don’t know how they graded students in those dim, dead days before students graded themselves, was as high as you could get. It was a four-point, gentle readers, a bloody beautiful four-point, which was straight A’s. What I’m trying to tell you, was that Don Epstein was a brain. And he wanted to be a doctor. Worse than anydamnthing, he wanted to be a doctor. What kind, I don’t remember now. It’s been twenty years. Things blur.
But what doesn’t blur is that I learned so many things from Don that I could never repay him if I started now and kept on paying till 2001.
He turned me on to jazz. Mulligan, Brubeck, Chet Baker, Lennie Tristano, Kenton, Manne, Shorty Rogers—the whole West Coast jazz scene that was so exuberant during the mid-Fifties. It was like getting a whole new set of ears.
He introduced me to classical music. Hell, I’d been a dumbass Ohio kid who’d thought Spike Jones was the height of creativity and Perry Como and the Four Freshmen the pinnacle of vocal interpretation. Through Don I heard my first Bach, Scarlatti, Monteverdi, Buxtehude, Grieg, Holst…the list is endless. I listened to the imperishable sounds of genius and began to grow as a human being.
He taught me how to dress. Oh, shit, you should have seen me before Epstein wrinkled his brow and said, “Yellow socks and a green tie don’t go with a charcoal-gray-and-pink sports jacket, Harlan.” He showed me what shoes to buy, helped me pick out slacks and jackets that didn’t make me look like a munchkin dressed up for a rat shoot. You might not think learning how to wear clothes was important—today I suppose it isn’t all that important—but in the Fifties, what you looked like predicated what others thought of you. And I was so damned insecure that anything that helped make me look less like a nerd was a godsend.
He hipped me to Jean Shepherd, to Salinger, to pizza, to puns, to dinner table etiquette, to talking to girls, to how to do research in a library…he opened doors for me that I never even knew existed.
In a very special way, Don Epstein was a mentor and a guru for me. And man did I love him. He was beautiful.
So. It is with considerable sadness that I report what happened to Don Epstein. And I can do it quickly, briefly, shortly, succinctly…just the way it happened to him…and just this fast a superterrific person gets so lost he can’t be found again.
Don wanted to be a doctor. But Ohio State had a “Jewish quota.” Only so many yids per year. And Don came from a family of modest circumstances. They didn’t have the clout or the money to buy him into the quota. So even with his straight-A four-point, Don could not get into medical school. So he plugged on, making straight A’s, and he signed up for pre-dental. Same story. Quota. He couldn’t make it there, either. No connections, no heavy sugar to squeeze the juice it took to get lesser lads admitted.
That was the way it went for several semesters, with Don growing more and more bitter, more and more cynical, more and more morose. He hit the books harder, didn’t go out, sat for long hours in dark depression.
My last semester before I was booted out of State, Don dropped even lower in his goals. He registered for veterinarian school. I didn’t find out till years later that he hadn’t been able to score that one, either.
I ran away from OSU and started writing, started selling, got married the first time, got drafted, did my time, got discharged, went to Chicago to work on Rogue magazine, split Chicago when my marriage crumbled and I got divorced, went back to New York, wrote some more, got married again, and returned to Chicago in 1961. While living in Evanston with my second wife, I got a call from Don.
Except it wasn’t Don Epstein anymore. Now it was Don Forrester. He told me he’d gotten the name off a bottle of booze. Gentile booze.
I invited him to come over, and he did. With his wife.
When he came through the door, I hardly recognized him.
Don had changed. A lot. Because of the Pope.
You see, he had missed out on vet school and then gone to the last place a guy who wanted to be a doctor and had the brains and skill to be a doctor could go: he had entered the school of undertaking.
And there he was, seven years later, in my living room in Evanston, Illinois. Don Forrester. He had had a nose job. He didn’t look even remotely Semitic now. And he had a Protestant wife. And he had a WASP name. And he looked like a man crushed by a pylon-sinking machine.
I helped him find a place to live. He was moving to Chicago for some reason or other, I don’t remember why at this point. But we talked a few times. Not much. The Don I’d known was lost. Gone somewhere; where the wry dynamite guys go when history and compassionless forces over which they have no control make them ashamed of their heritage, make them ashamed of what they look like and who they are. Forrester (as opposed to Epstein) was a nice-enough guy, I suppose. But in my sad eyes he was a loser. A sad, beaten guy who had fought as hard as he could…but had lost.
It was painful to be in the same room with him.
Anyhow, I like to tell myself, I was too deep in my own grief at that time, and I didn’t have much pity left for anyone but myself. I left Chicago soon after, went through another divorce, wound up here in Los Angeles. That’s thirteen years ago, almost.
And when some asshole asks me if I’ve changed my name, I tell him, no, Harlan Ellison is my name, and if it’d been Ira Finkelstein, it’d still be my name, and my nose is my own, and I’m a Jew, and if I ever gave it a moment’s thought that changing any of those things would make the slide smoother, all I have to do is pass a liquor store and see a bottle of Forrester, or Old Forrester, or whatever the fuck it’s called, and I know all the bloody noses in the world aren’t worth changing one Semitic syllable of monicker or one Yiddish inch of snout.
And as a period point to all of this purgative about Ohio State, and my return there after twenty years, be advised things don’t change much, they only get a glossy new skin:
I did my lecture at State last month, and I told the fraternity story, and the getting-thrown-out story, and the Don Epstein story, from the stage of Mershon Auditorium…and the audience loved it. I’ve got it on tape, I know they loved it. But the Administration refuses to pay my fee. My lecture agent tells me the only school that hasn’t paid what it owes me is Ohio State, that the Administration was upset that I spent only part of the three hours I did my number talking about nice safe shit like science fiction and what a sweet world it is. They’re pissed because I “harangued” OSU from the sanctity of the stage of good old Mershon.
They don’t like to hear the truth, friends. But you know that. They like to pretend it’s all pom-poms and high scholastic honors. They don’t like to be reminded that they were, and probably still are, bigots and racists and anti-Semites and creeps.
They don’t think they’re going to pay me.
Well. Let me assure you, if not for my own greed and desire for revenge, they’ll pay. They’ll pay high. If not for me, then sure as shit for Don Epstein.