If you’re just joining us, I’ve reproduced the “non-interview” I conducted with Harlan Ellison in 1984 . . . described seeing him live and up close in Boston in 1981 . . . and explained how I got to work for him proofreading (and incidentally copy editing) volume 3 of Edgeworks and then the 1997 story collection Slippage. We proceed to my first dinner with Harlan.
In early June 2001 I learned that Mr. Ellison was coming to town! Mike Richardson, who had launched Dark Horse Comics 15 years before, was cosponsoring the 38th annual Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts on June 22-24, and bringing Harlan as a special guest, along with “Spirit” creator Will Eisner, “Concrete” creator Paul Chadwick, and a display of historic comic book art as well as more recent work of Dark Horse artists and writers.
Thursday evening, June 21, I went to Lakewood Centre for the Arts for the festival’s opening night. Those of you from out of state must understand that Lake Oswego is one of the wealthiest cities in Oregon. A bedroom and retirement community situated roughly six miles south of downtown Portland, it’s very white-bread, save for a handful of wealthy minorities who are high-tech corporate and financial execs or players for the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team.
The lobby of the arts center was filled with pleasant, older, well-dressed Caucasian folks sipping plastic cups that contained chardonnay and pinot noir — many of them greeting one another as old friends. I spotted Harlan in the company of an older gentleman who turned out to be Eisner, both being shepherded through the crowd by a pale blonde giant (Richardson), and it was evident that most everyone else hardly knew any of the trio from Adam.
We filed into the auditorium, endured a parade of local dignitaries thanking one another and pointing out friends in the audience who helped to make the festival happen. Richardson offered some earnest remarks about his crusade to make comic books a respected American art form, and Eisner shared some cultured comments about how comics were an “immigrant art form” that taught many recent arrivals to these shores about the American way of life and values in simple language and pictures.
Then Harlan hit the stage. Another rabid fan who had had no idea Ellison was going to be there and shown up only because his wife had dragged him, walked in just as The Man was being introduced and said: “It can’t be! It’s GOD!” (He and his spouse stood me to a couple of drinks later.)
The speaker fiddled with the mike, trying to remove it from the lectern, then gave up and walked out to the center of the floor to speak to us unassisted by electronics. An alert and helpful floor manager brought up all the stage lights, and Ellison donned an expression of mock startlement and fear, and cried: “I confess! I’m a Jew!” With the ensuing laughter, we were off to the races.
No doubt he shocked the well-to-do, white-bread, and highly Catholic and high Episcopalian crowd a number of times. He NEARLY said the F-word twice but “managed to catch himself,” and casually stated that he’d had a baby with one of the elder but elegant female City Council members whose name he’d heard in the introductory speeches and liked. (If I recall correctly, she was the spouse of a retired four-star Air Force General — known then and after for fairly outspoken liberal views, given his background; she was apparently puzzled by Harlan’s crack but not insulted, and I later heard one of her friends remark, “I almost peed my pants when I heard that!”)
On a more pleasant note, I sat near Harlan during dinner at a long table out on the sunny summer plaza that evening, and he mentioned that in the course of his service in the U.S. Army, he was busted from PFC to private three times and courtmartialed three times. He added that he slugged a second lieutenant on the day he was inducted, and arranged for a sergeant who was out to get him to “receive” a broken back. (Harlan also asserted shortly thereafter, on the Art Deco Pavilion at Ellison Webderland on July 25, that “I came THIS close to Leavenworth on at least five occasions. This is straight from the mule’s mouth, kiddo.”)
This is one of the thousand-and-one reasons I wish Harlan had written a memoir (he occasionally joked that he had one in production, with the working title Working Without a Net). At one point he started the thought, “That’s the problem with writing an autobio—,” but something interrupted him and I never heard his reason.
I also asked how he’d gotten his hands on official Donny Osmond stationery. The infamous letterhead turns up both in the audio story “Did You Really Mail a Dead Gopher to an Editor?” recorded at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute on April 1, 1982 and released as the final cut on side one of On the Road With Ellison, volume 1, and recorded on paper in his essay “Driving In the Spikes.” I got to walk back to Harlan’s lakeside motel with him that evening and chat further along the way.
In retrospect, I wish I had noted down everydamnthing he said that night while it was happening, but of course at the time, as with so many other wonderful events of one’s life, I was just enjoying the ride. Now, 19 years later (my god — at that point, 9/11, the elections of Obama and the Incumbent, not to mention the release of Erik Nelson’s “Dreams With Sharp Teeth,” were all still in the future . . . ), precious little comes back to me.
On Saturday, June 23rd, I had volunteered to be a “docent” at the comic art exhibit on site in the arts center. Dark Horse had arranged for an exhibit of original comic art from Superman, Batman, and Prince Valiant comics in the late 1930s, Archie comics from the 1940s (“That poor kid has been trying to get laid for a LONG time,” Harlan cracked), and the newer classics I recognized from my own collection: The Watchmen, Hard Boiled, and Dark Knight.
Four years earlier, in the introduction to Slippage, Harlan talked about sharing this concept in Chicago with a table of eight or ten young people in publishing, and not a single one recognized the reference to one of his favorite movies. Sure enough, now that the painting was on display at the exhibit in Lake Oswego, a stone-faced fellow in at least his late 30s, possibly even late 40s, stared at it, listened to Harlan’s laborious explanation, and never cracked a smile. When Harlan said, “Ah, I guess you’re too young to get this,” the guy growled, “Maybe you’re too old.”
For some reason, Danielle Steel came up at one point and Harlan commented: “I once dated Danielle. She’s a nice woman, she’s a lovely woman, and she’s doing the best she can. If she could write better, she would.” (I just looked her up on Wikipedia, which revealed to me that her full name is Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schulein-Steel and that she is “the bestselling author alive and the fourth bestselling fiction author of all time, with over 800 million copies sold” — despite, in the words of a Publisher’s Weekly review, “a resounding lack of critical acclaim.” Though Ellison and Steel have very little in common, they do share a couple of interesting traits: five marriages apiece, at times to some very dubious characters, and they both wrote/have written all of their work on Olympia standard typewriters!)
I also witnessed an exchange between Harlan and a boy who happened by with his father. As those of you know who own a copy of the recording On the Road With Ellison, volume 1, Harlan loved engaging with kids. This one was 6 or 7 years old, by my estimate. Harlan immediately turned to the boy and asked: “Do you have a job?” The youngster answered simply, “No.” From there, the conversation proceeded as follows.
— “No.”
— “So you’re still just hanging around at your parents’? Is that your plan?”
— “Yes.”
— “So you’re still just hanging around at your parents’? Is that your plan?”
— “Yes.”
— “I like this guy!”
Turned out the kid had the great name of Spencer.
A little more Ellison-esque incident happened while Harlan was chatting with two young male employees of Dark Horse Comics. I didn’t pay attention to much of their rambling and wide-ranging chat, but I happened to catch when they veered into the subject of pornography (a topic about which I was soon to publish a book, myself). Harlan explained that many years back, for the purposes of something he was writing, he wished to see an example of bestiality porn. Someone he knew was able to procure a sample for him to view. It had been made in Sweden, and apparently starred a simple-minded woman engaged in coition with various barnyard critters. As near as he could read the content, Harlan said, the human participant truly seemed to enjoy the activity as well as display a caring attitude toward her partners. Harlan’s reaction appeared to be one of puzzled wonder as he related the facts of the matter.
Unbeknownst to him, however, a large elderly woman had been lurking behind his shoulder, listening to all this, and having heard it, she proceeded to cause a scene, bellowing to a security guard who was on duty only to safeguard the valuable exhibits to do something about this outrage. Since she had been eavesdropping on a conversation to which she had not been invited, no one else appeared to see it her way. Eventually, she had to be escorted out of the art gallery by sheriff’s deputies . . . and wouldn’t I LOVE to hear how she related the tale to her circle thereafter!
Just another day in the life of a gadfly. I shared the particulars of this incident to a friend who was also a Harlan Ellison fan and a biologist who worked for some years for one of the big Aquariums on the East Coast. She responded:
“Non-human animals enjoy sex (though I can’t imagine sex with a chicken; birds aren’t built like people). Dolphins are particularly fond of it. Before the Aquarium got rid of its bottlenose dolphins, there were only males left. They were horny all the time, and would do stuff like catch rings and sticks on their erections, and rub against the platform the trainers stood on. It drove some of the girls nutty with embarrassment. Also, all the trainers had to masturbate the dolphins so they didn’t get too aggressive. I guess that wasn’t too much fun for the one male trainer.
“Things got worse after the males tormented a female to death. She was fairly small and young, and male bottlenose dolphins tend to approach sex in a way that we humans would consider rough trade, if not rape. Groups of males will cut a female from her pod, and have her whether she wants to or not. One of those things we discover about creatures like Flipper and Bonzo that we would prefer not to know. In other words, smart animals, like the human animal, are not always sweetness and light. But that is what makes us all intriguing, n’est-ce pas?”
“Things got worse after the males tormented a female to death. She was fairly small and young, and male bottlenose dolphins tend to approach sex in a way that we humans would consider rough trade, if not rape. Groups of males will cut a female from her pod, and have her whether she wants to or not. One of those things we discover about creatures like Flipper and Bonzo that we would prefer not to know. In other words, smart animals, like the human animal, are not always sweetness and light. But that is what makes us all intriguing, n’est-ce pas?”
Harlan also apologized to me that Saturday for having lied two days before. He had made up a colorful story about the Donny Osmond stationery (which I don’t remember now) just to shock the bourgeois crowd with a lovely, colorful tale. So I still don’t know how he got his hands on that paper. Apparently, not even did . . . but now we know how SOME of the crazy stories about him got started.
A week or so later, the weekly paper for the town, the Lake Oswego Review, had a lengthy front-page feature story about the Festival of the Arts and the comics exhibition, wherein I found the following passage:
“Legendary comic creator, Will Eisner, visiting from Florida, along with an acclaimed and zany author from Los Angeles, Frank Ellison, spoke to many festival-goers during the three-day event.” Evidently, the reporter did not attend the Thursday night reception, or either of the panel discussions, and maybe not even the exhibition itself. She certainly didn’t check her sources.
[ Still to come: indexing the Teats while recovering from my knee surgery, and pushing a dead 1947 Packard down La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles in 2007. . . . ]
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Your Ellison memory essays are treasures.
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