A Harlan Ellison Memory - Cambridge, MA, January 1981

Harlan was at least an hour late, of course. He had enjoyed a lengthy dinner with friends before striding in dressed in a jacket over a black T-shirt that depicted a penguin armed with a submachine gun with the caption “Penguins Have No Mercy!”

I apologize, he said to the room; I’ve got only about 11 pages written of a 16-page story I had intended to read tonight. But with your indulgence, I’ll finish it right here and then read it. It was a Friday and I could walk the 10 blocks home, so I wasn’t worried about staying out late. I don’t recall that anyone else objected (or walked out) either.

The Sheraton Commander is a grand old hotel at the north end of Cambridge Common, the “village green” that stands northwest of Harvard Square, between most of the campus of Harvard College and the former Radcliffe College. (The two, Harvard and Radcliffe -- once all-boys and all-girls schools -- gradually merged in the late 1960s and 1970s.)

In retrospect, I was lucky to have arrived from Oregon the very year (1977) that a small second-floor operation known as the Science Fantasy Bookstore opened just a half block south of Harvard Square. Back then, the street leading down to the river (and the Anderson Memorial Bridge, from which Quentin Compson was said to have leaped to his death by drowning, according to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) was known as Boylston. It became JFK Street in 1981.

After several years at that location, the bookstore moved a few blocks closer to the river and around a corner to 18 Eliot Street, and continued operations on the floor above a restaurant known as The Wursthaus. The store was run by a little man with very thick spectacles -- classic bottom-of-a-Coke-bottle lenses -- named Spike McPhee.

Over those years, I bought many of the earliest books in my Ellison collection there: several of the older Pyramid and new Ace editions, mainly. The latter had ads in the back which announced the establishment of The Harlan Ellison Record Collection, a sort of private club that would issue occasional LPs and tapes of Harlan reading his own work for fans, as well as an occasional newsletter titled “Rabbit Hole” (as in “down the”), and I joined up early on.

Harlan was at the Sheraton to give a benefit reading for Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, a classic used bookstore that operated for 27 years on Newbury Street, across the Charles River in the Back Bay neighborhood of downtown Boston. The AVH often won the “Best Used Bookstore in Boston” award from Boston Magazine before it closed in 2004. For a while it continued to do book sales via the web, but I see from its Facebook page and its “official” web page that the Avenue Victor Hugo is currently poised to reopen as a brick-and-mortar establishment (with online sales, no doubt) in Lee, New Hampshire.

When I lived in Cambridge in the late 1970s, and also in Boston in the early mid-1980s, the Avenue Victor Hugo was in its prime. It was a classic used bookstore in an old brick residential building with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books to browse as well as locked glass cases that contained first editions and other collector’s items.

Of course it had a Harlan Ellison shelf. I’m certain AVH is where I bought my copy of the 1977 Alternate World Recording of “Blood! The Life and Times of Jack the Ripper” -- a double-vinyl LP of Robert Bloch and Harlan reading “A Toy for Juliette” and “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”. I believe Harlan had done his “write a story a day sitting in the window” thing at the AVH over three days some time earlier, but I had missed that.

The night of the benefit in Cambridge, January 30, 1981, a conference room at the Sheraton had been set aside with perhaps 200 or so chairs for ticket holders. Harlan pulled out a small portable Olympia manual and went to work while the rest of us sipped wine and talked amongst ourselves.

At one point, he looked up and said, “Does anyone here know anything about fire extinguishers?” A woman at the back of the room piped up, “I know everything there is to know about fire extinguishers!” She trotted up to the front of the room, where they put their heads together, and we heard the result an hour or two later.

(You can read a list of all the ingredients in a fire extinguisher when it gets emptied on the penultimate page of “On the Slab,” Harlan’s take on the Prometheus myth that first appeared between book covers in Angry Candy. Somewhere, there’s a woman who has a reason to smile every time she encounters that passage.)

I recall at one point, Harlan had to leave the room for some reason, maybe to fetch the Olympia. He left his companion at the time -- a tall, striking redhead named Jane Mackenzie (who would execute the cover art for both the first edition of Stalking the Nightmare the following year and HERC album no. 2, “Jeffty Is Five”) -- to the mercy of the ravening horde, with the provocative instruction: ask her anything you like; she has to answer.

There were probably multiple questions, but the only one I remember was posed by a rather spiky young woman who noted that Ellison had stated in the introduction to the Pyramid edition of Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled, already more than five years past, that he’d been intimate with more than 500 women. How does it feel to know that, the woman asked Mackenzie, who replied, calmly and simply, “He’s with me now.”

I took a photo of the master at work with an old Minolta twin-lens reflex camera that was older than I was -- a gift, in fact, to my parents when they were married. My Dad had used it throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and it had traveled all over Europe with us in 1969-1971. My folks let me take it to college in Boston, since by that time Dad had a much finer Leica single lens camera. I didn’t often have occasion to use it, but I was sure glad I had it that night (as well as a little later, when I caught a beautiful shot of another hero, Jules Feiffer).

As you can see, Harlan was still smoking a pipe. Decades later, when I put a scanned copy of this photo on my website and casually referred to it as a meerschaum, I received a (figurative) rap on the knuckles at Unca Harlan’s Art Deco Dining Pavilion, on Rick Wyatt’s official website, from Somebody Who Oughta Know. He informed me that it was a hand-carved, Danish plateau briar. He added that it might have been sold off around 2000 . . . or maybe not.

Harlan completed and read “On the Slab,” then either auctioned off the original manuscript after making sure he could get a photocopy made on the premises, or maybe just promised an autographed photocopy to the highest bidder, and that money went to the Avenue Victor Hugo as well.

That was my first time getting to see him relatively up close, but not, as it would turn out, the last.