Here is one of the ways in which I met Harlan Ellison:
I was down to Eddie Dipente’s dojo just below Crenshaw, here in Los Angeles, trying to work off the cloudy mind and soft body I get from too much writing. It’s always the same that way. I’ll get wrapped up in a project, spend twelve, fifteen hours a day on my butt, eating poison and wrecking my body until finally I can’t stand it anymore, just about go nerve-snapping crazy with it, and I run down and let Uncle Eddie straighten me out.
You’ve got to know Eddie. Six-one, one ninety-five, something like that, a rich mocha color with a sprinkling of gray in whatever tight-packed hair he has left. For twenty-two years he taught hand-to-hand down at Pendleton until he bailed out of the Corps and set up shop here in “Laz Anglas,” teaching actors and cops and imitation tough guys some of the nifty things he knows how to do with and to the human body. For the record, he also plays a fine jazz piano, can’t sing worth a stick, and is one of the warmest, most caring human beings I’ve ever met. Go figure.
Anyway, I was down at Eddie’s dojo, off in a corner by myself, struggling through a couple of katas that Eddie had set up for me, just stuff of his own, not the formal stuff, a little tae kwon do, a little kung fu, when he came up with the big blind-you-it’s-so-white smile and said, “Got a little treat for you. Got a friend coming in you gonna like. Another writer.” Eddie takes much joy in knowing writers, and can quote at embarrassing length from Kipling and Twain and Raymond Chandler and I think he must know every haiku ever written by Matsuo Bashō. Eddie said, “I’ve been trying to get this guy back to the mats for years, and he’s gonna give it a shot again, so you guys can work out together.”
I said, “Uh’huh,” a little pissed, because I like working out alone and Eddie knew I like working out alone, and he could tell I was pissed and I knew he could tell because of the way his eyes were enjoying the hell out of it.
Harlan Ellison came out of the locker room.
Eddie made the introductions, told us what he wanted us to do, then walked away. It was hot and sweaty, there in our corner of Eddie’s world, and we grunted and puffed and strained, and you could tell that Harlan had not done these things for many years. A long time ago he had been through Ranger School at Fort Benning, and had studied jeet kun do with Bruce Lee, but in recent years he had been ill with some sort of bizarre Andromeda Strain-version of Epstein-Barr Disease and he was…is there a sensitive way to say this?…an absolute wreck.
I watched him struggle to work through the tight hamstrings and the frozen lower back and the stiff shoulders and the Achilles tendons like dried leather and I thought, Christ, if this guy throws a head-high roundhouse kick we’ll have to call an ambulance. Eddie would drift over, watch a while, then try to look encouraging and say stuff like, “Good effort, man. Take it slow, Harlan. You’ve got all the time in the world.” That kind of thing. You see?
I’m not sure why now, but we barely said a word, Harlan with his pain and me with mine, though about halfway through we stopped for a breather and he looked at me, sweat running into his eyes and down his nose, and said, “Man, if I ever had to use this shit, I’d get killed.” He looked sort of sad when he said it.
An hour and a half later it was over, Harlan gray-pallored and hurting, unable to raise his arms above shoulder height even to dress. We said our goodbyes, mumbling the sort of things two guys who’d just met in a gym and worked out together say, good workout, man, get together next week, grab some lunch or something. I left first, heading out to my car, thinking I would never see Harlan Ellison again.
Half a block down the street, five pseudo-humans jumped out of a 1968 Chevy Impala and tried to shake me down. It was not a smash & grab. It was the “hey, don’t I know you?” number. You know the drill. Pretty soon you’re getting shoved and the knife or the Special comes out and then your keys and credit cards are gone along with whatever dignity you might’ve had in your back pocket. Only it had been a rough week, I didn’t much feel like handing over what was in my pocket, and I pushed back. Okay, so sometimes I’m dumb. It was getting bad fast and the Korean guy in the little fruit market was doing everything he could not to see what was going on right in front of him and I was wondering if I was going to die for forty-two bucks and some plastic when Harlan came down the sidewalk and I yelled, “Get Eddie.” Harlan took in the scene in a microsecond and started back for the dojo. The sub-humans, displaying their quota of rationality for the decade, saw Harlan headed for help, began to back off…and I went for them. Call it spring fever. Here they were, backing off, going away, leaving me alone, and I was so damned blind-furious ANGRY that all I could think was, “You fuckers ain’t gettin’ away from me!” Okay, so sometimes I’m really dumb. I grabbed the nearest cretin, pulled him backward, and the others converged like piranha at a chum line. I thought, oh, jesus, I am dead.
Then Harlan was there, Harlan who could barely move and who knew that if he had to use this stuff he would surely die, there he was, showing Crane technique from the Kung Fu, arms thrusting and windmilling as best they could, a Jack-Haley-as-the-Scarecrow movement out the corner of my eye….
They kicked our asses.
I got slammed backward into the car, caught a knee in the groin, and then I was covering up on the street, trying to survive. When I looked up again, after what seemed like years, Harlan was sitting on the sidewalk, feet out in front of him and legs locked like some kind of Raggedy Andy, hands in his lap, and I said, “Your nose is bleeding.”
He said, “There’s a cut over your left eye. Can you see okay?”
I touched at the eye and saw the red on my fingers. “Yeah.”
He said, “I think I tore a couple of muscles in my left shoulder.”
“Uh-huh.”
We sat like that awhile, a couple of dopes, him on the sidewalk and me in the gutter, big deal Hollywood writers out on the town. He wasn’t yet married to Susan, but I was married to Pat, and would have to explain, and it would go hard. The Korean guy came out, swatted flies away from his fruit, and went back inside. Didn’t see us, I guess. I said, “Hey, Harlan?”
“Huh?”
I ever have to use this shit, I’m gonna get killed. “You shoulda went screaming for Eddie. You shouldn’t’a come tried to help.”
He cocked his head and gave me genuine honest-to-god confused. “What else could I do?”
Being into the zen of martial arts, I look for lessons in the world around me and, in Harlan and his work, find them.
There are lessons here: “One’s bad karma defies space-time equations; a continent is no thicker than a membrane when one carries the misery inside; there is no escape, no place to hide.” Read of Valerie, and learn of duplicity and betrayal. Read of Ahbhu, and learn the harsh responsibilities of love and friendship. There are lessons here: “Surround yourself with joyful people.” Read of Don Epstein, and learn of the singular importance of individuality and strength. Read of the deaths of Harlan’s mother and father, and the lesson is this: rush home now, tell your parents what you need to tell them now, ask the questions that your childhood demands you ask now, hug them or hit them or kiss them or shriek at them and risk that they will hug you or hit you or reject you but do it now, because when death knocks it is too late. There are lessons here. Read of Ronald Fouquet, the child killer, and learn of rage and fear. There are lessons here…
Harlan denies this. He says, “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.” He’s wrong, of course. He often is. Take Christmas. A perfectly wonderful, nifty, heartwarming time of the year, yet Harlan loathes it. You see? Wrong.
Even though Harlan may deny that he is a teacher, or be uncomfortable with having an influence on the lives of other people (see his essay concerning his friend, the wonderful writer Herbert Kastle), the facts speak for themselves—Harlan is, and does. He might rail that young people at a lecture he gave did not know of Dachau, but they know now, because Harlan told them about it. And I’d bet heavy sugar that somewhere out there, a kid who has never heard the name will read Harlan’s essay in this volume on the death of Lenny Bruce and, because of that essay, track down the sides to Religions, Inc. and Fat Boy and How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties. Man, that kid is in for a kick.
Harlan Ellison writes about the physics of being human and, whether he knows it or not, accepts it or not, these are the lessons he offers. Not by way of lecture (though he does), but by example. Harlan Ellison does not tell you how to be; he tells you how he is and by so doing provides a measure with which you might gauge yourself. Here is how a specific man comports himself. Does it make sense? Is it ethical and good? What would I do in that situation? Would my actions cause shame or pride? Where does my responsibility end, and where does it begin, and what do I want to see when I look in the mirror?
Since these columns are better than fifteen years old, one might wonder if they can possibly be relevant to today’s experience. (In point of fact, there are things in here that, not to kick it bloody while it’s down, we couldn’t give a shit less about. Say, the dubious culinary qualities of long-defunct restaurants, the lineage of Harlan’s marabunta horde of housekeepers/assistants/secretaries, and Harlan’s aforementioned [and wholly incorrect] views on Christmas. But Harlan is a master showman, and whether writing about things as obscure and mind-numbing as the vocal stylings of Buddy Greco or the vagaries of microcephalic science fiction groupies, you will be entertained and pleased. As he says, he is not above tossing in a flying fish or a troll to make the story more interesting, and Harlan can sling fish faster than a Japanese trawler at Marineland. But back to relevance…) Read his column on the apathy of college students, and of how their only interest in him as a lecturer was in how much money he makes, and you will think he wrote it this morning after a run-in with a truckload of Harvard Business School yuppies. It was written in 1973. Courage, honor, responsibility, joy, love, friendship, pain, outrage, anger, trust—the things of being human—are always relevant.
Harlan Ellison is Jiminy Cricket to our Pinocchio. But did you know there were two talking crickets? Walt Disney based his cute, lovable creature Jiminy (as well as the rest of the movie) on a book, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. In the book, the talking cricket wasn’t named Jiminy and wasn’t cute and lovable. Collodi referred to it simply as the Talking Cricket. In the film, Jiminy spoke the truth as he saw it to Pinocchio and the two of them lived happily ever after. In the book, the Talking Cricket spoke the truth to Pinocchio, and Pinocchio smashed it to death with a hammer.
Spreading the truth is neither safe, nor easy.
Herein, there are lessons. Open your eyes and take advantage of them. Harlan the Fish Juggler will make you laugh and cry and snigger and giggle and probably pee in your pants. High entertainment is at hand. Harlan the Cricket offers larger opportunities.
You will be tested, from time to time throughout your life, and if you pay attention here your point score will be higher than it otherwise might be.