I Had a Friend Once: Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison was my friend and mentor from 1984 to his death in 2018 - based in decency, honesty, and respect for the gifts he (and all good humans) share
When I was in kindergarten I was forbidden a special treat other kids took for granted: Dubble Bubble.
I wanted bubble gum so badly but there wasn’t any in my house and I wasn’t likely to get any by begging at the store the way I saw other kids do..
So shopping with my grandmother, I spotted a small basket filled with bright yellow wrapped balls of sugary pink chewy goodness.
Part of me knew they weren’t “free” but I was five and I had hope. Out snuck my small hand. Into my pocket went the gum.
My grandmother with her all-seeing eyes spotted it immediately.
“What’s in your pocket?”
“Nuh-nuthing.” Great — just add lying to stealing — said my conscience.
“Show me.” She put her hand out and gestured. Gimme the contraband.
“I — I — uh… I…”
My conscience spoke. Just give her the gum you big dummy. So I handed it to her.
“You took that gum,” my grandmother said in her iciest voice.
“It was in the basket,” I peeped.
“Come with me,” she said, grasping my small chubby wrist firmly. Her watch band pressed uncomfortably against my palm as she strode purposefully toward the back of the store. I wasn’t sure where we were headed but I knew it was nowhere good. Her heels clacked on the cold and grimy linoleum floor.
We were headed for the manager’s office.
When we got there, the manager knew his part well.
“Young lady, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the police,” he said. “Stealing is a crime.”
“They will take you to jail,” my grandmother hissed. She was at least a billion times scarier than the chubby manager with his pink nose and shiny bald head.
My grandmother took the gum out of her purse and put it into my unwilling small and sweaty hand.
“What do you say to him?” she commanded.
“I — I’m sorry,” I said timidly. I put the gum on his paper-filled desk. “I’m sorry I took the gum. It was wrong.”
I knew if I started to cry it would be a hundred times worse so I bit my lip and looked at the manager. His eyes were kindly. I think they were hazel or light brown.
“Young lady, that is the right thing to do,” he said.
My grandmother’s hand came down on my shoulder and squeezed like a vice.
“You can call the police now,” I said. “I confess.”
He burst out laughing.
I can’t even remember all the chores I had to do and the penance I had to make for that piece of bubble gum.
I don’t think I needed lots of additional lessons in “Don’t steal” but if one was needed, I’m just like the guy who learned everything he needed to know in kindergarten. I loved my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Geiger. Of course my grandmother reminded me on the daily that Mrs. Geiger would be so disappointed to hear that I had stolen a piece of bubble gum.
I didn’t stop hearing about the Great Bubble Gum Caper for years. My grandmother even mentioned it way up in her 80s. She loved to tell the story to strangers.
I learned not only this basic lesson which appears in The Bible, the Qu’ran, the Torah, Buddhism, and traditional African religions, but also “always tell the truth,” and “always consider others first” and “Don’t get a big head — no matter how good you think you are, there’s always someone better.”
These silly little lessons I was raised with. So silly.
Smart, successful people don’t believe in them.
As I wrote this, my phone told me that a man I have loved since I got to know him many years ago had died. A real progressive— Harlan Ellison. My heart is heavy and aching. Harlan did have a life well-lived. The world is by far a better place because Harlan was in it and I think — I think it will go the right way. If you do not know who I am talking about this is who it is.
But we were talking about character. And that was the basis for my relationship with Harlan. He only hurt me one time and I’m certain he didn’t mean to. He demanded I go get somebody for him like I was his servant.
And that somebody he wanted me to bring to him is someone I didn’t like or respect. I didn’t want to ‘get into it’ with him so I did it and never said a thing. I have let it go because the things I didn’t like about that person were the contemporary capitalist hypocritical package. Status-oriented, domineering, dishonest, poor-quality work, big swelled head, only caring about externals, enjoyed being fawned-over …
None of this package is a way I consciously choose to live or things I value any longer. Back then I just knew I didn’t care for the attitude and didn’t like that person because of how I had observed them acting. I didn’t—at the time—associate my dislike with a huge societal problem that needed to be reduced while other, better things came to the fore.
But there is no writer more emblematic and visionary of these issues and the progressive mind than Harlan Ellison. Some in the sci-fi community may recall a controversy that arose after Harlan was accused of sexually harassing other award-winning author Connie Willis while both were serving as emcees at a Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention.
My memory said this was the 2006 Los Angeles WorldCon and sure enough Dr. Google tells me I was right: it was. Neither of these folks involved in the incident were exactly “young” at the time and as to me? I was sleeping through the event having been up ‘partying’ the night before. So I didn’t witness the horror that was Harlan grabbing Connie’s breast and sexually harassing her.
Harlan said that he was telling a joke, acting like a baby, and miming being an infant for purposes of humor.
I defended Harlan against the extreme outrage that ensued via online forums because I knew something 99.9% of those screaming about his vile harassment didn’t know.
Harlan was not only not a sexual harasser or rapist, to me he was head and shoulders above the majority of men I’d known. He did something very few other men had ever done: he treated me like an equal. As a writer. As a person. He didn’t talk to my boobs, nor did he grab them. He talked to me like I was … human.
Most who know me now know that I have publically disclosed how I was raped by a professor at Pomona College when I was 21 years old. This is even in my Wikipedia entry. Little I’ve actually done, mind you: but this was and remains highlighted.
After, when I declined admission to literary graduate programs (Iowa, Irvine) and lost my opportunities for a Rhodes Scholarship and Watson Fellowship because of the rape, I instead chose to go to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ workshop at MSU in 1984 on a scholarship.
Because of this incident, I saw sci fi writing, the stories I loved, as something pure and innocent. Not like “literature” and “the Academy” which I came to see (correctly) as something evil. I remembered Ray Bradbury speaking at our local library and how he inspired me to want to be a sci fi writer. His goodness. Sweetness. I had never sought help or even processed what happened to me.
Harlan spent time with me. He talked with me. Desperate, in tears, I asked him a question no young writer should ever ask an older writer or mentor. “Do I have what it takes to make it?” I asked.
I was tied in a million knots. I hated him. I loved him. I reviled him. I worshipped him. Someday I wished, I wanted to write like him — so free — anything he liked. I didn’t feel quite here, quite human. I saw myself as worthless. Harlan was such an important man, such a great writer (and I felt that — such a fine writer).
His large dark eyes flickered when I asked that. He was a kind man. A kind, good man.
“Damnit,” he said. “Yes. Of course. Yes.”
I burst into tears.
But he knew there was something else wrong. He kept picking at me.
Finally I told him why I was so on edge, why I did all the things he had already lectured me were bad for me (drinking, smoking). He had yelled at me for getting married to “Gorgo” (Mike Casil) at such a young age — he felt I didn’t know what I was doing.
So I trusted him. I told him what had happened to me. After that long ago time (14–15 months?) I had only told Mike.
“You have to go for help,” he said. He explained that he meant counseling and professional support. He said every single thing that is appropriate to say to a rape survivor after the trauma.
He said, “I am ordering you to go to a rape crisis center the minute you get home.”
I did. To this day, I credit him with saving my life.
He talked to me about the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). About so many other things he so strongly believed in. He talked about marching with Black Americans in the Civil Rights era. He talked about getting beaten up, about the people who wanted to hurt a Jewish guy for standing up for another race.
Harlan Ellison no more sexually harassed Connie Willis than Bernard Sanders raped any of the online trolls who said he raped them, with the aim of sweeping him into the #MeToo bin of creepy guys, only a few of which are history. Harlan Ellison Sexual Harasser is like Bernie Sanders Rapist!!! Really?
It’s akin to today’s effort to say that drag queens will molest children in schools, at a time when there are multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against every major church and scouting organization. But the perps in those cases? Not drag queens. And not Harlan Ellison.
He was fearless. He had the gift.
I used to think sitting quietly sometimes, “Well you do have big guns, Amy. Big guns. Like Harlan. You can write like rolling thunder. No limits. Take no prisoners.”
I could even do a few things Harlan couldn’t. Write in meter and rhyme on command. Wrote dozens of nonfiction books. Wrote novels.
A sore topic, one not brought up. The last time I talked to him was about Borges.
He was a short fiction writer and one of the greatest ever. Maybe he was an American Chekov.
I can see him smile. People were afraid of him. After those first days, I never was.
But above all, Harlan was a leftist, a progressive. He was a poor boy, not a rich one. He always suspected rich people. A poor boy from Ohio with dreams the size of the universe.
And nightmares.
He dreamed this algorithm that is strangling us all. AM is real. AM is here. AM’s the one who silences common people. AM encourages mass shooters. AM makes sure people fight online.
AM makes people think blue checks are important.
AM tells people it’s time to go back to work and to watch their credit scores.
AM sends messages to our phones. AM told me Harlan had died.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, AM is the massive supercomputer that Harlan invented which has destroyed the world and is holding a tiny group of postapocalyptic survivors captive in his hellish cyberbowels to torture them in “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.” This is a link to a free copy of the story online and Harlan would kill me for doing that.
But I am in a different place to him. I understand that we must not connect our writing to money purposely in any way because of how money harms the work. At the same time, there was no other, fiercer advocate for writers earning a living wage than Harlan Ellison.
He is gone now so it is more important that his words live than money.
I just read that Harlan sued James Cameron for intellectual theft (unsuccessfully). Harlan received a settlement from AOL for the service’s facilitation of online literary piracy. I cannot even begin to describe the fierceness with which Harlan fought in court and with his weapons (words) for money for writers. That’s what all these legal battles were: he saw online services and studio executives and self-promoters like Cameron as thieves.
He knew his ideas had value and that others wanted to make money from them. He did this because he knew Poe died face down in the gutter. He knew Oscar Wilde died branded as a gay man, humiliated, estranged from his family, and penniless. He knew that Faulkner’s novels were out of print for a decade before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He knew that even though Dickens died a rich man, one of our greatest poets, Emily Dickinson, was paid a grand total of $10 during her lifetime for her work.
So like tech leftist John Graziano said a while back: we all work for a murderous neoliberal billionaire capitalist.
No matter how much any megabillionaire capitalist thinks his all-powerful algorithms enrich him by $250 million each and every day, he in fact: works for AM.
The massive capitalist thinks he’s an important individual and AM works for him but he is really Nimdok. The man wholly-owned by and tortured by AM.
“I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” is one of the only works of fine short science fiction I have ever read with a strong Black American female protagonist. Ellen. I can’t get that published today. Harlan got that published in 1967. Harlan didn’t speak ill of Ellen in that story. Ted, the narrator, did. It’s Ted’s twisted voice revealing the deep misogyny that persists today. Harlan was not a stupid man. He made Ellen a Black woman for a reason: all of the ones I’ve just described.
When I got in so much trouble for stealing that piece of Dubble Bubble, Harlan wrote and published “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream”.
1967.
I realize by seeing Harlan’s birth date that my friend misled me regarding his age all these years though I knew how he hated getting older, how badly it made him feel.
Harlan could not stand losing his mojo. And he had it. The first time I saw him he was wearing a black moto jacket with the Flying Tigers logo embroidered on the back. “Over the Hump to Burma!” it declared. The tiger head looked like the Tiger Balm Tiger. Mike Casil had the mellow tiger on his arm.
Like shards of a broken mirror piece by piece our lives are
a series of moments
which we may piece together and perhaps
make a coherent whole.
AM the giant sentient supercomputer created from a combination of Yank, Chinese, and Russian supercomputers fighting WW3, is consumed by hatred, torturing the tiny band of surviving humans living in his bowels for hundreds of years.
This was written more than 50 years ago. And it’s as fresh today as it was then. Today with the war in Ukraine and the advent of artificial intelligence, AM seems a more possible nightmare than ever. By the way, regarding the originality of an abuser like James Cameron?
AM appeared in its classic story decades before you ever heard of the Terminator and Skynet, the computer that destroys the world.
That’s who and what provides your entertainment and it is not about talent or originality.
Ted, the narrator of this story, manages to kill Ellen and the other three hapless human victims. But AM keeps Ted alive. And what AM does to Ted is the source of the story’s title: AM turned Ted into a jelly creature. He has no mouth but he must scream.
So we’re all like Ted right about now and this hellscape Harlan escaped from is just like the Belly of AM.
There’s only one way out and it’s not Ted’s way (murder) or Ellen’s way (mercy killing).
We dream ourselves out just the way Harlan dreamt us in.
If you uncritically follow entertainment provided by individuals like James Cameron, you’re consuming second- and third-hand nightmares meant to enrich … James Cameron and all of his friends and all of the billionaires and on and on … it’s slurge from the soulless meant to kill your soul, too.
Harlan told me I was like Dickens’ Agnes Wickfield, “a bright star, ever pointing upward.” That’s right you pieces of corrupt, soul-free status-conscious money grubbing shit, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century respected me. Cared for me. Because of what I could do. Can do. And he also respected you if you were a regular person, not a dishonest soulless thief.
I can dream other-wise. And so can you.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from another star-crossed dreamer.
We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.
We got to keep our selves out of AM’s belly. We got to keep believing and dreaming what is good and true and real. When we stop: that way lies madness and death.
Yes, I have written a story about this. You can buy it here.
Disregard the ratings. They never learned they shouldn’t steal Dubble Bubble.
This.
Deserves a react, praise, from all of the people who read this, from everyone who ever reads it.
I don't dare speak directly to it. It's rearranging my perception of him, and of you and your writing, in my head. Right now, it feels like anything which I could say isn't adequate to the subject, and might/would somehow minimize or disrespect it.
I didn't know him except as an author, and that mostly through "A Boy and His Dog [paperback]," and "Again, Dangerous Visions [Science Fiction Book Club, hardback]." I hadn't known that he was so much bigger than that.
I hadn't known your history, or about Emily Dickinson.
Thank you for amping signal on all of this. All of it.
He was a superb writer who worked in many different genres and forms and succeeded in them all. This, and the fact that he was first and foremost his own unique man in everything he did, has made him a major influence on me.