INSTALLMENT 21: 10 MARCH 82

 

One do get mail. And, as promised, a valiant attempt will be made by your faithful columnist to answer as much of it as seems rational. As I noted in an early installment of this column when I was doing it for Future Life magazine, the mail I receive in response to the wry observations of the world I set down in these little outings is ennobled by the word weird. Some of you veer dangerously close to sanity.

But I must confess that I have come to love you as an audience. There are far fewer of the whackos writing me from the Weekly’s readership than I used to draw from those who bought Future Life. Don’t ask me why. Most of you heeded the appeal only to write postcards, so I was spared elongated screeds. And nine out of ten of you during the first nine weeks have been extremely kind in your remarks. Several of you have not. The Weekly has published some of those. Each of the correspondents who wrote snotty letters has been visited in the dead of night. The grief-stricken families ask that flowers not be sent; contributions to the Home for Unwed Writers should be sent in memoriam.

 

As a ground rule, I won’t be replying in these pages to kind and gracious folks who wrote to say I am a credit to my species and a wonderful fellah who speaks out against the evils of our times. I accept the compliments with toe appropriately scuffing the dust, but it ain’t truly the sort of thing that deserves comment beyond a deep bow and a sincere thank you.

 

Photo: Mark Shepard

 

The complaints are, of course, another matter.

They are usually deranged and I will do my best to present said material in as unflattering a light as possible, thereby affording me the opportunity to ridicule my critics without permitting them a proper forum to reply. This is called Democracy. I learned the technique from Spiro Agnew and Richard Whats-His-Face—you know, the one whose upper lip always sweated when he was lying.

Take for instance an unsigned letter I got from a woman the week following my column about how I preferred my dirty 1967 Camaro to one of those incredibly expensive “sporty little Oriental runabouts in which one rides with knees tucked up under one’s chin.” The letter (with the plethora of typos and illiteracies and misspellings corrected) read as follows:

“Hey, Ellison, a ‘sporty little Oriental’ etcetera etcetera must be awfully small if even your knees are tucked up under your chin. I guess you can tell that my opinion of you is pretty small, too. Signed, Not a Fan.”

The allusion is made, one supposes, to my height. I am 5′5′ tall, which seems to me a perfectly acceptable height for a human being. Or a caterpillar. Heightist remarks of this inane sort are one of the last conversational bastions of the intellectually deprived, to be sure, but we must go beyond the content of the denigrative to pierce the true motives of one who takes time out of her day just to cast a random insult at a stranger. When we slog our way through the psychotic morass we find that surely this is no casual brickbat, but the need of a seriously inadequate person to draw attention to herself while hiding behind the anonymity of an unsigned letter.

We all know the syndrome. It is a classic symptom of arrested adolescence. The kid in the schoolyard who throws a stone when the object has his or her back turned.

But being an essentially loving and concerned guy, I could not let this cry in the wilderness go unheeded. Attention was what the correspondent sought and, in a spirit of Christian charity, not unknown to those of us of a Semitic-Atheistic persuasion, I determined to locate the letter-writer and give her some of the attention she so desperately sought, (I’ve always thought it was just disgraceful the way they used to throw those Christians to the Protestants) craved, yearned for.

It wasn’t all that difficult. Like most people who do an unsavory act and want to be punished for it, she left all manner of clues behind. The most important was that while she had not signed her letter, she had used a business envelope stolen from her previous employer. As I knew some people in that firm, I called them and asked them to check around, to see what possibilities for identification they might find. In an hour or so I received a phone call advising me that the woman my contacts had suspected was the writer, who had been fired from the firm some time earlier, was now working for another company in Los Angeles, a record promotion company or suchlike.

I was told that she went by the name “Spock” and that she was quite a fatty. I was given the phone number and address of the company for which she now worked as receptionist. All in the spirit of helping her overcome her feelings of unworthiness, I called the company and asked for “Spock.”

“This is Spock,” said the woman who had answered the phone.

“Ah,” I said. “Well, it seems to me that if you’re going to insult people, you ought not to be in a position to get found out. And while I may have to ride around in even a tiny car with my knees tucked up under my chin, at least I’m not such a grotesque overweight blimp that I can’t get into the car.”

There was a horrified silence at the other end of the line.

“Who is this?” A tremor of panic in the voice.

“You know who it is, Spock,” I said. “I’m watching you. My agents clock your every move. You can’t sneak a Twinkie without my killer minions letting me know.”

There was a discernible gulp at the other end. I knew the therapy, generated out of compassion, was already having salutary effect. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Do? Do?” I responded. “Why, Spock, dear old tugboat, I’m not going to do anything.” And I added, “I guess.”

“Bye-bye,” I said, and went my way, knowing that another good deed, like bread upon the waters, had been cast out into the lonely darkness of the world.

Beyond that exchange, the most interesting of the several hundred I’ve received in nine weeks, only three postcards seem to need responses this time.

The first was from Nancy Buchanan, who applauded the stand this column took against knife-kill splatter movies in which women were endlessly brutalized, but who suggested I dote for a moment on films that were child-hating. She noted the existence of a number of films reprising the sentiments of The Bad Seed in which children were portrayed as the spawn of the devil, or as harbingers of evil—The Omen, The Exorcist, et al. And she asked, “Do Americans really hate kids?”

To which I respond, of course Americans hate kids. Older Americans, that is. And kids hate older Americans. It is called the generation gap. And there is provocation on both sides. But I don’t think films such as The Exorcist are manifestations of that distrust and hatred. I think such films seek to enhance the terror and evil of the plot by taking the symbol of innocence, a child, and using it as a vessel of ghoulish malevolence. It is an artistic construct, not having much to do with sociology.

Richard Morse asked, “Given the horrors you’ve written of so far, how do you preserve your outlandishly high opinion of humanity?”

Easy, kiddo. I believe to my shoe-tips that the human race is the noblest experiment ever attempted by the uncaring universe, and any species capable of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, of writing MOBY DICK, and of putting a man on the surface of the moon, is a species worth giving a damn about. It is when representatives of that noble experiment settle for McDonald’s toadburgers, Judith Krantz novels and The Dukes of Hazzard that my love affair with the human race becomes polluted, and I rail not against what we can be in our noblest moments, but what we settle for. I wrote an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times to that effect, shortly after New Year’s, speaking out against The Common Man…saying that it was the Uncommon Man who moved society forward, brought about social change that bettered people’s lives, and made us proud to be human beings. Like the “man in the water” at the Washington, D.C. crash of Air Florida’s flight 90 back in January, the man who passed the rescue ring from the helicopter to five other survivors while waiting in the freezing water until they had been saved. And who drowned for his act of humanity. He has been painted as an example of “the common man,” but I see him as an Extraordinary Man.

With recurring examples of nobility such as that, how can one hate our kind totally?

And the final card was from one Kent Beyda who sought to invalidate my criticism of splatter movies by saying he had sat behind me at a press screening of The Howling, a film he said he “would defend to the death,” as a wonderful example of film making. Well, my carp about that movie was less with what was on the screen than the ghoulish manner of the audience. Mr. Beyda swears I screamed my objections out loud and made it difficult for him to hear the full richness of sound as the werewolves ate their victims. If such was the case, and I suggest Mr. Beyda is full of horse puckey right up to his eyeballs, I apologize for getting in the way of his full enjoyment of the gore he so clearly needs to sustain him in his otherwise tragically boring life. But as I have checked with the others who sat in the row on both sides of me, to ascertain if I was, in fact, so rude…and as they have informed me that I sat there like a little gentleman throughout the film save for the one time I turned around and said to the guy behind me that his fetid breath was wilting my shirt collar, I must believe that Mr. Beyda is perhaps fudging the truth just a tot.

Beyond these specific responses, I thank all of you—too numerous to thank individually—for your support and kind words. I trust next time we sweep up the mail, in about six weeks, there will be more scintillant examples of run-amuck thinking and verbal mayhem.

Until next week, I take my leave. Incidentally, as you read this column, know that it was written in a motel in Florida where I pound out these words while getting ready to go out to do yet another public speaking engagement in behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. We have less than four months, friends. And if you have it in your power to add some thrust to the final days of this noble effort, it behooves you to get off your complacent asses and do it now.