(no subject)
Summer 1992: Just after a brief phone conversation with Fritz Leiber, I decide to call another child hero, Harlan Ellison. It takes me a moment to realize that I'm actually speaking to him, until he says "You don't want to write me. I get 250 letters a day, I'll never write back, and you'll tell everybody what a shit I am." Still, I manage to thank him for the impact his work has had on me, and say goodbye.
Summer 1981: Introverted young me is at the Waldenbooks in the PennCan mall in Syracuse, New York. I'm browsing the paperbacks; a stark white cover with an image of a man recoiling from an old-fashioned telephone that's turning into a cobra catches my eye. (No idea, then, that it was a likeness of Ellison himself.) Underneath, in blood-red type, I read a quote from Stephen King: "If there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980's, Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer!" Eye-catching, to be sure.
I pick up the book, and start flipping through; the author's forewords to each story catch my attention: I am a lonely, introverted kid, and this writer is speaking to *me* in direct and emotionally gripping ways that resonate all too clearly for a child living through the trauma of divorce. I pick a story almost at random, and start reading: "An international conference of Violently Inclined Filmmakers at the Bel-Air Hotel in Beverly Hills was interrupted when it was noticed that Roman Polanski was under a table making violent love to a thing no one wanted to look at. Sam Peckinpah rushed over to abuse it. That went on, until Peckinpah's disgusting thing materialized and the director fell upon it, moaning."
WELL. I knew just enough about directors to get the joke; that did it; I was buying the book. Along the way, I learned much more of the work of a writer who did more to shape the inside of my head than any other human being; although we never spoke again after that minute-long phone call in 1992, there hasn't been a week of my life where I haven't heard his voice in my mind, cajoling, praising, arguing. Telling stories. In some long-forgotten anthology, he had three stories; out of long habit, I read the author fore- and afterwords; the last one ended. "...and if you remember these stories, you'll be remembering me. And I'd like that."
Unforgettable.
Summer 1981: Introverted young me is at the Waldenbooks in the PennCan mall in Syracuse, New York. I'm browsing the paperbacks; a stark white cover with an image of a man recoiling from an old-fashioned telephone that's turning into a cobra catches my eye. (No idea, then, that it was a likeness of Ellison himself.) Underneath, in blood-red type, I read a quote from Stephen King: "If there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980's, Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer!" Eye-catching, to be sure.
I pick up the book, and start flipping through; the author's forewords to each story catch my attention: I am a lonely, introverted kid, and this writer is speaking to *me* in direct and emotionally gripping ways that resonate all too clearly for a child living through the trauma of divorce. I pick a story almost at random, and start reading: "An international conference of Violently Inclined Filmmakers at the Bel-Air Hotel in Beverly Hills was interrupted when it was noticed that Roman Polanski was under a table making violent love to a thing no one wanted to look at. Sam Peckinpah rushed over to abuse it. That went on, until Peckinpah's disgusting thing materialized and the director fell upon it, moaning."
WELL. I knew just enough about directors to get the joke; that did it; I was buying the book. Along the way, I learned much more of the work of a writer who did more to shape the inside of my head than any other human being; although we never spoke again after that minute-long phone call in 1992, there hasn't been a week of my life where I haven't heard his voice in my mind, cajoling, praising, arguing. Telling stories. In some long-forgotten anthology, he had three stories; out of long habit, I read the author fore- and afterwords; the last one ended. "...and if you remember these stories, you'll be remembering me. And I'd like that."
Unforgettable.