No Doors, No Windows.
Harlan Ellison.
For Years of Friendship, for Forcing Open Doors and Busting Out Windows, This One, with Love, for JOE L. and CHARLOTTE HENSLEY
"I feel it"s tremendously satisfying to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a ma.s.s emotion; if you"ve [written] a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the j.a.panese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience."
Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k
Introduction.
Blood / Thoughts.
"Writing has nothing much to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint ...
"Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are unacceptable. Every fiction writer dreams of imposing his invention upon the world and winning the world"s acclaim. (Such dreams are known as delusions of grandeur in pathology but tolerated as expressions of would-be genius in bookstores and libraries.) Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing."
GEOFFREY WOLFF, 1975.
What are we to make of the mind of humanity? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls throughout a life of endless lies.
Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert Burns and his love from a Leopold Sacher-Masoch and his hate?
Is it too terrible to consider that a d.i.c.kens, who could drip treacleand G.o.d bless us one and all, through the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the despoiler of children, f.a.gin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Sh.e.l.ley, wife of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, the greatest romantic poet western civilization has ever produced, could herself produce a work of such naked horror asFrankenstein? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that allow both anAnnabell Lee and aMasque of the Red Death to emerge from the same churning pit of thought-darkness?
Consider the dreamers:all of the dreamers: the gloriousand the corrupt: Aesop, Attilla; Benito Mussolini and Benvenuto Cellini; Chekhov and Chang Tao-ling; Democritus, Disraeli; Epicurus, Edison; Faure and Fitzgerald; Goethe, Garibaldi; Huysmann and Hemingway,ibn-al-Farid and Ives; Jeanne d"Arc and Jesus of Nazareth; and on and on.All the dreamers. Those whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fashioned of words, and nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Speck - who slaughtered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison - was a devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of G.o.d, while Jean Genet - avowed thief, murderer, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society, and in the jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment - has written prose and poetry of such blazing splendor that Sartre has called him "saint"? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch could create h.e.l.l-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever evenattempted to copy his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ec.u.menical purity as "L"Epiphanie"?All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the n.o.ble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who strolled through sunshine springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the same desire.
Speechless, we stand before Van Gogh"s "Starry Night" or one of those h.e.l.l-images of Hieronymous Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist ofwhat must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A pa.s.sage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths; and the blood and thoughts stand still in our bodies as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what he has done.
The impossibility of it. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pa.s.s along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with pride and wonder, touching us and them for a nanoinstant with magic. How staggering it is then, tosee, toknowwhat Van Gogh and Bosch and Thomas knew and saw. To live for that nanoinstant what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a never before conquered height, from a dizzying, strange place.
This, then, is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable, priceless gift from the genius dreamer to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine save death.
Mud-condemned, forced to deal as ribbon clerks with the boredoms and inanities of lives that may never touch - save by this voyeuristic means - a fragment of glory ... our only hope, our only pleasure, is derived through the eyes of the genius dreamers; the genius madmen; the creators.
How amazed ... how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the creator.
When we see what his singular talents - wrought out of torment - have proffered; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; they have brought it forth nonetheless, for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.
And how awed we are, when caught in the golden web of that true genius - so that finally, for the first time we know that all the rest of it waskitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we really are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second-hand from our d.a.m.ned geniuses. That the closest we will ever come to our "Heaven" while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.
And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, chivvy and hara.s.s them, drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them?
Who is it, we wonder, wh.o.r.eally still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?
Who, the question asks itself unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?Fortunately, the night comes quickly, their graves are obscured by darkness, and answers can be avoided till the next time; till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agony of his rhapsodies.
On all sides the painter wars with the photographer. The dramatist battles the television scenarist. The novelist is locked in combat with the reporter and the creator of the non-novel. On all sides the struggle to build dreams is beset by the forces of materialism, the purveyors of the instant, the dealers in tawdriness. The genius, the creator falls into disrepute. Of what good is he? Does he tell us useable gossip, does he explain our current situation, does he "tell it like it is"? No, he only preserves the past and points the way to the future. He only performs the holiest of ch.o.r.es. Thereby becoming a luxury, a second-cla.s.s privilege to be considered only after the newscasters and the s.e.x images and the "personalities." The public entertainments, the safe and sensible entertainments, those that pa.s.s through the soul like beets through a baby"s backside ... these are the hallowed, the revered.
And what of the mad dreams, the visions of evil and destruction? What becomes of them? In a world of Tiny Tim, there is little room for a Magwitch, though the former be saccharine and the latter be n.o.ble.
Who will speak out for the mad dreamers?
Who will insure with sword and shield and grants of monies that these most valuable will not be thrown into the lye pits of mediocrity, the meat grinders of safe reportage? Who will care that they suffer all their nights and days of delusion and desire for ends that will never be noticed? There is no foundation that will enfranchise them, no philanthropist who will risk his h.o.a.rd in the hands of the mad ones.
And so they go their ways, walking all the plastic paths filled with noise and neon, their multifaceted bee-eyes seeing much more than the clattering groundlings will ever see, reporting back from within their torments that Nixons cannot save nor Wallaces uplift. Reporting back that the midnight of madness is upon us; that wolves who turn into men are stalking our babies; that trees will bleed and birds will speak in strange tongues. Reporting back that the gra.s.s will turn blood-red and the mountains soften and flow like b.u.t.ter; that the seas will congeal and harden for iceboats to skim across from the chalk cliffs of Dover to Calais.
The mad dreamers among us will tell us that if we take a woman (that most familiar of alien creatures that we delude ourselves into thinking we rule and understand to the core) and pull her inside-out we will have a wondrousness that looks like the cloth-of-gold gown in which Queen Ankhesenamun was interred.
That if we inject the spinal fluid of the dolphin into the body of the dog, our pets will speak in the riddles of a Delphic Oracle. That if we smite the very rocks of the Earth with quicksilver staffs, they will split and show us where our ghosts have lived since before the winds traveled from pole to pole.
The geniuses, the mad dreamers, those who speak of debauchery in the spirit, they are the condemned of our times; they give everything, receive nothing, and expect in their silliness to be spared the gleaming axe of the executioner. How they will whistle as they die!
Let the shamans of Freud and Jung and Adler dissect the pus-sacs of society"s mind. Let the rancid evil of reality flow and surge and gather strength as it hurries to the sea, forming a river that girdles the globe, a new Styx, beyond which men and women will go and from whence never return. Let the rulers and the politicians and the financiers throttle the dreams of creativity. It doesn"t matter.
The mad ones win persist. In the face of certain destruction they will still speak of the unreal, the forbidden, all the seasons of the witch.
Consider it.Please: consider.
Enough philosophy. The preceding, in different forms, was an essay I wrote in defense of the nightmare vision. Its t.i.tle has changed from "Black / Thoughts" to "Dark / Thoughts" (for obvious contemporary reasons), to "Blood / Thoughts," which I think will remain on the piece forever. I"ve rewritten it and used it as the opening of the introduction to this, my first collection of suspense stories,per se, because it speaks directly to the intent of the works in this book: to scare you, to keep you guessing, and to demonstrate how much fear can be generated in lives that have been bent and twisted so there are no exits.
It"s a special pleasure to have a book of suspense stories published, at last. Even though a large segment of my weirdo readership knows me as a "sci-fi writer" (and G.o.d how I hate that ghastly neologism! If you ever want to see my lips skin back over my teeth like those of a rabid timber wolf, just use that moron phrase in my presence), I was writing a good deal more detective and suspense fiction than fantasy when I began my career. But that was in the middle and late Fifties, when there was a hot truckload of magazines publishing that kind of fiction.Manhunt, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mantrap, Pursued, Guilty, Suspect, Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k"s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Trapped, Terror, Murder!, Hunted, Crime and Justice, boy the list just went on endlessly with one lousy imitator after another; and of course, in a cla.s.s by itself,Ellery Queen"s Mystery Magazine .
But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception ofEQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead.
Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.
After having been tagged a writer of sf for so many years - and having fought the categorization for the past ten or twelve - with the help of Pyramid Books I"m breaking out of the corner at last. And it feels good. Not only because I want to be judged on the merits of what I write, as opposed to being judged as a representative of a genre that means one thing to one reader and quite another thing to someone else, but because it permits the publication of a book like this. (The fight isn"t quite over yet, either. Nine chances out of ten, when you bought this book it was in among the giant c.o.c.kroach and berserk vacuum cleaner books. It was in the "sf section," right? And it isn"t even remotely a book of sf stories. Oh, there are four stories out of the sixteen that could be called fantasies, but I guarantee thatnowhere in these pages will you find a s.p.a.ceship, a robot, an android, a mad scientist, a death ray, a bug-eyed monster, an ecology parable, a malevolent computer, an alternate universe, an insect big enough to eat a city, a menace from interstellar s.p.a.ce, a lost race of super-scientific villains or even a mention of the planet Mars. But there it was, right between a Philip K. d.i.c.k novel on one side, and a Philip Jose Farmer novel on the other. Now those are pretty heavyweight guys in whose company to languish, waiting for you to come along to buy me, but it"s a ripoff. They write sf, theysay they write sf, if you buy one of their books with sf on the cover you"ll begetting sf of a high order, and no one will feel cheated. But think how annoyed all those dudes are gonna be who picked up this book, paid for it, got it home and are now reading what you"re reading. "What," they"ll be saying, their fingers balling up into fists, "what the h.e.l.l is this? Not sf? Not my nightly fix of extrapolation? No sci-fi to wile away the hours?" And they"ll read, oh, say, "Pride in the Profession," which is a story about a little guy who always wanted to be a hangman, and they"ll finish the story and - even if they liked it - they"ll hurl this book against the wall. "I been robbed!" they"ll shriek. And I don"t blame them. If I go to a ma.s.sage parlor for a ma.s.sage, and some nice young woman suggests we perform acts of a personal nature one would have to really stretch the word "ma.s.sage" to include, well, I"d be annoyed also. If I buy a can of pineapple, I don"t want to spill beets out into my plate. I am dead against false advertising. Yet there NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS was, right smack in the middle of the sf shelves. So. In the name of fair business practices, I urge you to b.u.t.tonhole the management of the newsstand or bookstore where you purchased this nifty tome, andinsist on the following: "Mr. Owner [you should say], the books of Harlan Ellison that are being published by the wonderful Pyramid Books cover the full spectrum of Mr. Ellison"s multifarious literary talents and virtually horizonless range of interests. Each one is numbered." And then you point out to him or her - in which case it would be Ms. Owner - the big series number in the "O" of the name ELLISON on the front cover. "These books are not always speculative fiction [you will continue, I hope, dashedly cleverly avoiding that nasty phrase we agreed you"d never use again]. Some of them are contemporary novels; some are nostalgia fiction of the world as we knew it in the Fifties; some are autobiography; some are television essays; and this one I hold in my hand is a superb collection of crime and suspense fictions."
Then the Owner, not a bad sort, but sadly in need of guidance, will moan, "But Ihave to categorize everything, otherwise the a.s.sholes who never read anything but their specialty wont be able to find what they want. See, over here, ten thousand gothics. You can tell they"re gothics because there"s a scared lady in a nightgown running away from a dark house on a rainswept mountaintop, and there"s only one light lit in an upper storey of the mansion, see? And here ... fourteen hundred nurse novels, all with apple-cheeked angels of mercy staring covertly at interns with naked l.u.s.t in their clear blue eyes. And here ... violence series novels: The Slaughterer, The Crusher, The Kung Fu Brigade, The Pillager, The Hardy Boys." And he or she will take you on a tour of the westerns, the cla.s.sics, the s.e.xy historicals - all with t.i.tles like THE FALCON AND THE HYACINTH or THE PLUME AND THE SWORD or THE DIKE AND THE FINGER - the fact science books, the metaphysical books - where forty-two versions of the few lines Plato wrote about Atlantis have been rewritten and re-rewritten by shameless hack popularizers in direct steals of Ignatius Donnelly and that poor coocoo, Madame Blavatsky - the self-help books, the cookbooks, the stiffeners with their wonderfully exotic t.i.tles like SUCK MY b.u.t.tONS and WHIP GIRL, the war novels, the detective books and, if it"s a fairly large stock, the movie star biography books cheek-by-jowl with all those handy reference works on how to shoot a movie in your spare time, by people like Jerry Lewis and Peter Bogdanovitch, at least one of whom [to borrow a phrase from John Simon] does not exist. And thenyou can release the poor Owner from this labyrinth of spatial immurement by saying, "But sir, or ma"am, you have merely fallen prey to the outmoded theory of commercial marketing distinctions. Mr. Ellisontranscends such pitiful categories. His work is one with the ages; something for everyone; no home should be without a full set of all nineteen of his handsome Pyramid Books with their delicious Dillon covers; his work uplifts, it enthralls, it enn.o.bles, it clears up acne and the heartbreak of psoriasis; babies cry for more! Why not start a Harlan Ellison section, right here in the very forefront of your shop, directly next to the cash register, whose charming tinkle win be heard ever more frequently with Ellison product chockablock beside the Dyna-Mints and TV Guide, where your unenlightened flock can grab a stack of meaty t.i.tles as they would a life preserver in a turbulent sea? Mr. Ellison is a category unto himself.Sui generis! Oh do, do, kind sir or madame!
Make this a better world in which to live. Put Ellison where he belongs: all by himself." And having said that, the Owner will, with tears in eyes, clasp your hand and thank you for the pristine lucidity of your thinking.
(And I won"t have to argue with Tom Snyder that when I do theTomorrow Show he shouldn"t have a flash-card overprinted on my beaming image that says HARLAN ELLISON, SCI-FI GUY.) Where was I? Oh, yeah. A book of suspense stories, and how nice it is to finally get noticed as a writer who"s written lots of other things than fantasy.
It began, I suppose, when the Mystery Writers of America awarded me the Edgar Allan Poe statuette last year for the Best Mystery Story. The funny thing is, the story isn"t even a mystery. Not in the terms usually a.s.sociated with mysteries. The yarn is the lead-off piece in this book, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." And for those of you who bought THE OTHER GLa.s.s TEAT [Pyramid A3791] and who read a script I wrote for the now-defunct TV series,The Young Lawyers, a script with the same t.i.tle, be advised they have no connection. I just liked the t.i.tle, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." The story is ...
well, I"ll hold off on that till I hit the section of this introduction where I tip you to the background orimpetus that caused me to write the various pieces included here.
In any case, what I was getting at is that "Whimper" is a fantasy, not a mystery. In the usual sense.
Though I guess there must have been a sufficiently weighty suspense element in the story to convince the judges of MWA that it belonged on the ballot. (One tiny horn-toot: I beat out a story by Joyce Carol Oates for the award. Hot diggity!) So here we have twenty years" of my writing, all across the board from western stories and mystery fiction to critical literary essays and occasional columns of contemporary events, and they keep labeling me a "science fiction writer." Very frustrating, particularly when my compatriots in the literature of the fantastic keep pointing out, "Ellison isn"t a science fiction writer," and they"re right; and there"s no reason whythey should have to suffer denigration because they"re held responsible for the berserk stuff I write.
Also,my books shouldn"t have to suffer the kind of dumb reviews from the hinterlands - such as the New YorkTimes - that say, "Well, this was a good book, but it certainly isn"t sf," not to mention the treatmentanything labeled sf gets from "serious" reviewers who will wax ecstatic about the nine millionth nostalgic novel dealing with Jewish or Italian home life in the poorer sections of Brooklyn or tike Bronx, in the late Thirties, but who turn up their patrician noses at anything with fantasy in it. Unless it"s by an accepted "serious" writer. Like Ira Levin or Fred Mustard Stewart or one of the many other nameless (and frequently talentless) clowns who"ve just last week discovered such fresh and untapped themes as exorcism, cloning, diabolic possession or reincarnation. If I had a dime for every half-a.s.sed novel published in hardcover since 1967 when Levin stumbled across ROSEMARY"S BABY, that deals with a supernatural or fantasy theme in cornball terms that would get it rejected fromThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I"d have a lotta dimes to make obscene phone calls to the know-nothing publishers who lay out fifty grand a whack to reprint them in paperback.
But then, I"m just an unhappy, bitter, sour grapes writer who resents the h.e.l.l out of popularizers who get fat on worn-out themes sf / fantasy pa.s.sed by twenty years ago, right?
So how come I ain"t p.i.s.sed at John Fowles or John Barth or Vladimir Nabokov or Michael Crichton or Jorge Luis Borges or even Ira Levin? Answer: because they"rewriters, dammit, and they bring freshness and talent even to tired ideas.
Tha.s.s why!
This has wandered rather far afield, I now realize. (If you want an eight-hour diatribe on the state of the market situation for a writer today, just drop in a slug, wind me up and aim me in the direction of The New York Literary Establishment.) Suffice to say, it ain"t all as terrific as it looks from the outside. Being labeled a science fiction writer today guarantees you a certain amount of readership, but it denies you an even larger group. For a writer who cares about what work comes out with his or her name on it, who fights to keep expanding his or her talent, and who wants freedom to experiment while making a decent living and providing entertaining books for as wide an audience as possible, having a category tag slapped on can be pure death.
So. A book of suspense stories. Filled with visions of murder, mayhem, deceit, fear, psychopathia, crime and rotten interpersonal relationships. Your basic light-time reading fare. Something to make you laugh at your own nasty life struggles. No matter how bad you"ve got it,believe me, you haven"t got it as tough as Beth O"Neill in "Whimper" or poor old Mr. Huggerson in "Status Quo at Troyden"s" or quick-tempered Hervey Ormond in "Ormond Always Pays His Bills."
I"ve been talking a lot lately about the condition of fear by which many of us judge the value of our existences. In THE DEADLY STREETS (last month"s Pyramid paperback offering of the Ellison-of-the-Month Club) I did an introduction touching on the subject, and I"d like to share with you aletter I received yesterday that speaks to the same situation.
A word about my mail. There"s an ever-increasing amount of it these days, which is nice on the one hand because many people feel so comfortable in these books that they take the introductions and the comments as an invitation to chat; but it"s a drag on the other hand, because I"m averaging about 200 pieces a day, and even with two a.s.sociates helping me out, justopening the mail has become a long, arduous ch.o.r.e each day. I tried sending out a long form letter for a while, but that was costing a fortune and it only encouraged the correspondents to write another letter. Iread everything, but I"ve just simply decided to h.e.l.l with it: I can"t reply to all that mail and still keep writing. And since it"s the stories and comments that make people want to write in the first place, that"s wheremy writing time should be spent, not in responding to questions about writing, my life, the correspondent"s life, how to write a teleplay, how to get an agent, where the Clarion Writers" Workshop will be this year, why more of my books aren"t available in Kankakee or Billings, what my s.e.xual proclivities might be, or why and how the letter-writer feels we aresimpatico because the both of us hate a) Richard Nixon, b) Rod McKuen poetry, c) the military-industrial-CIA-FBI-IRS complex and / or d) movies starring Cybill Shepherd. I refuse to read stories submitted for my august opinion. For a lot of different reasons, but most prominently because I"m too deep into myown stuff to play teacher to amateurs. I used to send the following rejection note, but I don"t even do that any more:
A CHINESE REJECTION SLIP.
Ill.u.s.trious Brother of the Sun and Moon: Behold thy servant prostrate before thy feet! I kowtow to thee and beg that of thy graciousness thou mayest grant that I may speak and live. Thine honored ma.n.u.script has deigned to cast the light of its august countenance upon me. With raptures I have perused it. By the bones of my ancestors, never have I encountered such wit, such pathos, such lofty thought! With fear and trembling I return the writing. Were I to publish the treasure thou hast sent me, the Emperor would order that it be made a standard of excellence and that none be published except such as equaled it. Knowing literature as I do, and that it would be impossible in ten thousand years to equal what thou hast done, I send thy writing back by guarded servants.
Ten thousand times I crave thy pardon. Behold! My head is at thy feet and I am but dust.
Thy servant"s servant, Wan Chin (Editor).
Note: author unknown.
So the point of this digression is to plead with younot to write to me unless you want to give me money.
And since that eliminates 99% of you, all that remains is for me to express my grat.i.tude for yourwanting to write me, even if it was only to tell me what a b.a.s.t.a.r.d I am. But we"ll get along much better if we keep the communication a telepathic one. You just shoot the good vibes in my direction, I"ll pick up on them, it"ll spur me to more and better stories, and we"ll both come out happier and more productive. Please!
(G.o.d, I"m scatterbrained here. I keep going off into every little byway of thought that presents itself. Like one of my lectures. Very free-form. But let me wrench myself back to the topic of fear and lay that letter on you.) I"m having it set by the typographer exactly as I received it. Hold it! Another digression, but to the point.I recently had a b.u.m experience with a dude who sent me a letter in response to the dedication of one of my books. The book was dedicated to the memory of the Kent State students who were slaughtered, and one day a few months after the book first came out, in flew this letter, informing me those college students were Commies and they deserved to be shot. Well, last year I did another book; in the introduction tothat one I reprinted the dedication from the first book and the guy"s letter. It wasn"t a nut-case letter, despite the content; it was well-written, grammatical, perfectly coherent; I said so in the introduction, but went on to comment how sad such brutal beliefs, in these perilous times, made me feel.
Well, the tone of the letter was a mild one - the guy said he just wanted to straighten me out on how the world was really run - and it seemed to me to be one of those probably misguided but at least honest communiques. Imagine my feelings of revulsion when, six months after publication of the book containing the letter, my publisher and my agent received a terse communication from this wonderful, patriotic American chap who "only wanted to straighten me out," demanding "substantial remuneration" for the use of his letter. Apparently, he wasn"t quite as selfless and dedicated to his beliefs as the innocent letter seemed. He was clearly another one of those whiplash cases trying to make a few bucks from a nuisance suit. Well, at least, that"s how it looked to me; it also looked that way to my publisher, my agent, and my attorneys, who sent him a long, detailed legal brief explaining why he had no claim and could forget the whole attempt at the grab.
I mention this here, before runninganother unsolicited letter, just to let the author of the missive following know that he has no claim, either. Notably, because it"s ananonymous letter, and because I suppose I agree with it.
But, anyhow, on the subject of fear, here"s another face of the monster. I reproduce it in the form I received it, without grammatical corrections. It"s disturbing, to say the least.
Mr. Ellison, I plead guilty. I"m the one ...
... removing the drunk from the emergency room to late. The eighteen year old girl has died while the doctor was preoccupied with the drunk. I"m listening to the nurses deciding how to fake the report on the girl who should not have died. The explaining to the mother is mine.
... picking up drunks at midnight in frount of the bar full of onlookers shouting and screaming protest. I left a drunk here once before and he ended up a crippled vegestable when these kind folks robbed him. So I pick up the drunks and take them (not to jail?) home.
... finding the kid swearing to commit suicide and take him to the hospital. The one who talks to him when the psychiatrist tells him to go to h.e.l.l. I"m the one finding him the next day, a block away, face up, dead.... wondering what the h.e.l.l is wrong when I pick up a kid speeding thru the hospital zone to late.
Something went wrong. Did the pedestrian know that she was carried six blocks on the boy"s frount fender before she slid under the wheels? Why blame the kid? He didn"t buy the car or set up the law.
... b.a.s.t.a.r.d who was trying to give a kid an even break when I caught him running from a mobile home with the goods. The idea wavered when the owner stumbled out with a busted head.
... fool trying to tarn kids over to their parents. I call and talk to some kid"s little sister saying mommy isn"t home and, oh, by the way, mommy wants to know what Jonny did. So the kid goes to jail to lose his rights, his scholarship, and his future career.
... motherf.u.c.ker buying the c.o.ke for the scared kid who threw p.i.s.s on me from a can. I let him go becuase no parents show.
... idiot who fought on off-duty cop to save derelict with a lip from a belting.
... whose a State police officer that is just like every city and federal officer across the United States. Just a guy trying to protect people from themselves.
... who wants to stop working in this lousy business but can not. I can not let some trigger-happy cop take my badge. I can"t let people kill the loser when he is down. I can"t let you kill because of hate, carelessness or indifference. I"ll die one day protecting the losers you and the Society of Man hate so much because I"m a loser too. If there is anything lower than Black, it"s Blue.
... who personally likes your writing about reality. In your stories I don"t escape reality, but see an end to this senselessness. Either good or bad wins in your story and with the end I"m satisfied because I"m so tired of the war. But I"m one who"ll never agree that all cops are bad, and one who"ll probably die by your hand or others like them either physically or spiritually in the street.
Sincerely,
1.
A Policeman.
Whew! Occasionally, gentle readers, the mail gets heavy in here. The letter from the nurse I quoted in PAING.o.d [Pyramid V3646]. The suicide note from the woman who said one of my stories kept her going a few weeks longer than she would have hung on otherwise. The unsigned letter from the Viet Nam vet who confessed to all the people he"d shot up in free-fire zones. The crazed postcard from the Fundamentalist loonie who vowed he"d kill me because I was obviously the antichrist. My patriotic whiplash correspondent with the scoop on Kent State. And now this one.
Listen, friend, if you"re out there, and you"ve picked up this book, let me tell you I neither hate nor fear you. Even swathed in Blue, m"man, you come across filled with pain and concern. I would like to meet you some day. But only when you"re off-duty, when you"re not packing heat.
I know d.a.m.ned well there are cops like you. I"ve met a few; and they always wind up like Serpico, brokenhearted or bust-headed. Because police these days aren"t like police when I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, in the Forties. Friend of mine, a lieutenant of homicide, got a trifle bombed one night, sitting around rapping with me, and he let slip one of the most scary things I"ve ever heard. He said, "Harlan, it used to be, when a cop said "them or us" he meantus were the good people, the cops and the decent citizens and the responsible business community, anybody on the side of Law and Order, the wayit used to be in those Frank Capra films.Them meant bank robbers, homicidal maniacs, rapists, guys who torched their own stores for the insurance, murderers, all the kooks. Things"ve changed so much, these days when we say "them or us" we mean anybody with a badge isus ... all the rest of you arethem. "
There are lines written by Maxwell Anderson in the Kurt Weill musical tragedy version of Alan Paton"s book CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY - the stage production is, of course, LOST IN THE STARS - in which the chorus sings of the condition of fear that existed (and exists) in South Africa, the fear of the whites for the blacks, the fear of the blacks for the whites, and the lines are, "It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! / Who can enjoy the lovely land, / The seventy years, / The sun that pours down on the earth, / When there is fear in the heart? ... Yes, we fear them. / For they are many and we are few! ... Yes, we fear them, / Though we are many and they are few! ... Men are not safe in the streets, / Not safe in their houses. / There are brutal murders, robberies. / Tonight again a man lies dead. / Yes, it is fear. / Fear of the few for the many, / Fear of the many for the few."
That is the condition of existence under which we sustain ourselves in this country, tied umbilically to our police. I"m not fool enough to lay it entirely on the police, the crushing responsibility for this fog of uneasiness through which we feel our way, always on edge, always angry, more than a little mad. Police are just postal people, milkmen, sanitation workers. They are employees of city, state and federal government. Only a lunatic would shoot down a mailman. But they are something else. They are representatives of the System. They are the visible fist at the end of the long arm of government, the status quo, order, the establishment need to keep waves from being made. And in an era when big business, the corporate giants, the megalopolitan conglomerates serve their own ends much more ruthlessly than ever they served the needs of the people they no longer even think of as consumers (we are now only "economic purchasing units"), the police find themselves - reluctantly in many cases I"m sure - cast in the roles of thugs, strike breakers, a.s.sa.s.sins and hara.s.sers for the extruders of plastic, the smelters of ore, the manufacturers of aerosol sprays, the foreclosers and the short-sellers.
Police represent (and in many cases cannot seem to get straight in their heads) notjustice, but retribution.
Those who were in the dissent movement in the Sixties and early Seventies understand that terrifying fact.
They still cling to the naive belief that they work for the Law and the Order, and here in Los Angeles the black-and-whites bear a colophon that reads, "To serve and protect," yet they no longer a.s.sume responsibility (as beat cops used to do) for averting rancor between antagonistic neighbors, for helping drunks out of the gutters to "sleep it off" in a cell till they can be taken home tomorrow, for dealing sympathetically with a woman who has been raped, without asking, "Did you like it?" or "What did you do to encourage him?"
Yes, there are cops like the man who sent that letter you"ve just read, but dig the tone of submerged guilt and misery in that poor guy"s letter.He knows. And why should a man obviously sincerely dedicated to making the world just a tiny bit better, have to feel such pain? Why should he have such a hard time doing the job of easing the anguishes of everyday life for the people he meets? Why do we suddenly totemize and revere the snipers of the S.W.A.T. teams?