With I heard these words on my
answering machine* I knew I was pipik-deep in serious shit. For those
of you unacquainted with the legend of Harlan Ellison, allow me to
introduce you. He wrote sci-fi...no, sorry...speculative fiction
for more than sixty years. He wrote episodes for several
popular TV shows including Star Trek and
The Flying Nun. He wrote hundreds of short stories,
novellas, screenplays, and scathing criticisms. He won dozens of
awards. He was as well-known in the genre of science fiction as
anyone could be. He had a years-long friendship with the
uber-brilliant Isaac Asimov which manifested itself in public dueling
put-downs, each trying to out-insult the other, claiming the other
was the bigger blowhard.
His prose, like himself, was without
restraint. He once claimed an executive at Warner Bros. had the
“intellectual and cranial capacity of an artichoke.” He was fired
from a job at Disney on his first day for describing his idea for a
pornographic film featuring several of the company's beloved
characters.
He pulled no punches anywhere in his
life, and often wrote about the most disturbing things. He gruesomely
described the murder of Kitty Genovese, imagined people trapped in a
cyber-landscape, unable to speak. His end of the world featured a
Deathbird soaring over a devastated wasteland abandoned by a tattered
and insane God. His lexicon was impressive; my vocabulary practically
doubled looking up words like meretricious, fantod,
widdershins, and my favorite, undinal.
Legend has it Ellison sent 200
bricks (postage due) and a dead rodent to a publisher who pissed him
off. He may or may not have locked one of his five wives out in the
snow...naked. His language was rife with vulgarities. His opinions
would never be regarded by anyone as subtle.
You either loved him or stayed the
hell away from his ever-boiling bile.
And this is the guy I managed to
piss off.
I've had a few death threats in my
time. Not just the usual drunken, swaggering barroom banalities, but
ones with unmistakably genuine lethal intent. I've been cornered by a
gang of drug ruffians who let me know under no uncertain terms that I
was one syllable away from an ignominious demise in a back alley.
I've had a greatly put-out boyfriend come after me with a rusty blade
after I attempted to woo, okay, steal his girlfriend. But nothing
remotely as colorful as the threat I would receive from Harlan
Ellison.
To wit: Back in the 1980s, I'd seen
the movie A Boy and His Dog, which
the credits said was based on Ellison's novella Vic and
Blood. This cheesy, terrible movie starred a young Don Johnson and a highly
intelligent, wisecracking dog. It quickly became a personal favorite.
Curious, I sought the original story and became a fan of Mr.
Ellison's work, reading every volume of his I could find.
Fast-forward to June or so of 2001:
I had been a playwright for several years. I'd recently been honored
with a major award and was feeling pretty darn peachypoo about my
ability. Remembering that a certain short story of Ellison's had
always fascinated me because of the ethical and moral dilemmas it
raised, I thought, Well, Albee-to-be, why not turn it into a one-act?
Wouldn't that be a great subject? Of course it would!
So I sat down behind my PC and
proceeded to type out what I envisioned was a rather gutsy first
draft of what I hoped HE would see as a credible dramatic rendering
of his original idea.
(You can see where I'm going with
this, can't you? It's a train wreck in slo-mo. Like jabbing a
sleeping ogre with a pitchfork and asking him to admire the
instrument's polish. Read on.)
So I sent it along to HE's agent
with a polite and respectful letter explaining who I was and what I
wanted permission to do.
I heard nothing for three months.
Then, on September 21, 2001, I got the call. Even though I'd
correctly interpreted the tone of HE's attitude, I still managed to
entertain the slimmest of possibilities that it might not be too bad.
He left a number. I called him back.
I wouldn't say I received a
drubbing. Or even a chewing out. I was told in no uncertain terms by
the man himself that my transgression violated not only copyright
laws but the laws of respect, historical tradition, and nature. I was
obviously the imbecilic spawn of a leprous pig and a brick. My
unbelievably dimwitted transgression would no doubt cause major
geologic faults to slip, thereby causing a reign of physical
catastrophe so severe we'd be back in the ice ages by Wednesday.
Who was I, he railed, to tamper with
a writer's work? Who did I think I was, he snarled, to steal an idea
and rewrite it for myself? The fury coming out of the telephone
receiver was so intense that it made a wall calendar across the room
spontaneously explode into fiery fragments. And up until now all I'd
said was “Hello, this is George Sapio returning Mr. Ellison's
call.”
I was warned that unless I wanted
every lawyer in Los Angeles attaching all I owned I'd leave the
project alone and never try to make contact with him again. Meekly, I
agreed. On the other end the phone slammed down with vehement
finality.
A week later I received another
call. “Mr. Sapio, this is Harlan Ellison.”
Oh Christ. I dreaded another
onslaught. “What did I do this time?”
Instead he chuckled. “No, Mr.
Sapio. After speaking with my wife, Susan, I realized I may have been
too harsh on you.” Clearly a woman for whom sainthood would be
too trifling an honor, I thought. I sent her a grateful virtual
hug.
“I'm gonna send you a contract and
I'm gonna pay you $20 to do up a first draft, after which I will read
it. If I like it we will proceed. If I don't I will tell you so in no
uncertain terms and we will hear no more about this. Do you
understand?”
“But... I already sent you a
sample ten-page first draft.”
“I'll read that later. In the
meantime Susan will send you the contract. I advise you to take this seriously and
not fuck around.”
Holy SHIT. I was on fire for for a
week. Lil ol' Me...I was working for...no...no, that's not right...I
was working with Harlan Ellison. One of my literary idols.
One week later he calls again. This
time there's not even time for a hello.
Every word of that conversation is
still etched in letters two feet tall and a yard deep into the
granite of my memory:
“This is the worst piece of shit
I've ever read. By anyone, anywhere.”
And:
“Whoever told you you could write
was a fucking moron.”
And the finale:
“If you ever try to write and
market this execrable pile of vomit I will sue your fucking ass. I
will take everything you have right down to the switch plates. I will
then come to your house, rip out your alimentary canal and strangle
you with your own intestines. Am I clear?”
I am by no means the only person to
be a target of Harlan Ellison's vitriol. There have been many over
the years. And to be perfectly fair, looking back at the script I
sent, he was right. It was effluent. Amateurish. Cloddish. I really
wish I had done it better.
Few people have passed through this
life as loudly as he, or with as much passion. While not every story
he wrote may have won an award (although many did), every one was
written with a gripe, a lesson, a skewering, a condemnation, and
cries for generosity, civil humanity, and love. Responding to
criticism about his less than rosy outlook, Ellison wrote that he
preferred to be sand in the cogs rather than grease, because, he
said, sand makes things slow down and require periodic examination
and restructuring, while grease just makes the giant machine operate
faster without any oversight.
And recently he passed away at age
84. To me it seemed as if he was much older, maybe because I've been
aware of him for so long.
I wonder where his soul is now. He wrote
about so many dimensions and alternate realities that he may just
have had his pick about what comes next. I'd like to think that might
be true.
* A device for recording messages
for when you were not at home. Pre-mass cell phones.
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