There was an even better story that came out of my trip to Billings, Montana—where this installment was written. Exactly the kind of berserk life-experience about which I speak in this piece. But it hadn’t happened as I sat in a Holiday Inn (or whatever it was) writing this column. It happened later that night, and when I tell people about it they get the special look I describe herein, that look of This guy is lying in his teeth.
You see, the night of the day I wrote this, I gave an evening lecture at Eastern Montana University, and someone in the audience took a shot at me. It’s a long story, and one I’ll save for another book, some other time. But I’ve recounted it hundreds of times since it happened; and every time I tell it, someone gives me a hoot for making up bullshit.
Now, when I married Susan, and she commenced traveling with me to my lectures, and she began hearing these seemingly berserk episodes from my past, her eyebrows went up. She loves me, so she never once said, Oh, c’mon, gimme a break! but I could tell that I was stretching her credulity.
Until—and this happened again and again—I’d tell some wild experience, and unbidden, someone would jump up in the audience just as I described it in the essay and yell, “He’s not lying! I was there when The Hole In The Wall Gang, all one hundred of them, came charging at him with six-guns blazing!”
And Susan came to understand that yes, this lunatic stuff had, in fact, honest-to-spinach, happened. But the one story she found a little dicey was the Billings, Montana, episode where someone got off a shot at me while I was in the middle of my lecture, right there in an auditorium jammed to the walls with Montanans.
Until we made a pit stop at the International Superman Exposition in Cleveland, last year, 1988. I was standing with Susan in the hall of the Cleveland Convention Center, middle of June, talking to Tony Isabella and Bob Ingersoll, and up walked a woman I didn’t recognize at first, and she smiled and said, “Hi, Harlan, remember me? Sue Hart, I brought you to Billings for a lecture and they took a shot at you on the stage. Remember?”
And my wife, Susan (not the Sue who’d walked up to us), gave a hoot-hoot-hoot of eureka! and squealed, “Ohmigod, it did happen!”
I rest my case as to veracity. For the record.