Shatterday (2 page)

The interviewer looked
really
uncomfortable now.

"Well, oh boy, that was some helluva thing to have to admit to myself. 'You slimy sonofabitch,' I thought, and I was still reading aloud to the audience that had no tiniest idea what monstrous and hellish thoughts were tearing me up. 'You evil, ungrateful, selfish prick! How the hell could you even
consider
something as awful as that? She never did anything to you, she raised you, put up with your craziness and always had faith in you when everyone else said you'd wind up in some penal colony or the chipmunk factory! You sleazy, vomitous crud, how can you even
think
of her being dead?' And it was terrible, just terrible. I thought I was scum unfit to walk with decent human beings, to harbor these secret feelings about a perfectly innocent old woman. And I remembered what Eric Hoffer once wrote: 'What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.'

"But there it was, in the story. I'd written it and had to confront it and learn to live with it." It was like the line out of another story in this book, "All the Lies That Are My Life," where I mention the ugliness of simply being human. But I hadn't thought of that line then. And the interviewer didn't quite know what to say to me. What the hell can you say to some dude sitting there copping to wanting his mother to pass away?

Well, it was one of those call-in radio shows, and we started taking calls from Salt Lake citizens who were pissed off at an "outsider" coming in to tell them that Utah's not ratifying the era was a sinful and mischievous act. And then, suddenly, there was a woman on the line, coming over the headphones to me in that soundproof booth, with tears in her voice, saying to me, "Thank you. Thank you for telling that about your mother. My mother was dying of cancer and I had
the same thoughts
and I hated myself for it. I thought I was the only person in the world who ever thought such an awful thing, and I couldn't bear it. Thank you. Oh, thank you."

And I thought of that heartrending scene in Jack Gelber's play,
The Connection
, where the old Salvation Army sister who has been turned into a medical junkie by inept doctors says to this apartment full of stone-righteous street hypes, "You are not alone. You are not alone."

I damned near started to cry myself. I wanted to hug that nameless woman out there in Salt Lake City somewhere, hug her and say
you are not alone.

That's why I tell you all this.

You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, all prey to the same mortal dreads.

When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent—atomic war, multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from Mars—those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones, fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear is the same for
everyone
.

Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O'Bannon and Ridley Scott's
Alien
, slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn't who he was when he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on the abandoned houseboat. The fears we are all heir to simply because we are tiny creatures in a universe that is neither benign nor malign … it is simply enormous and unaware of us save as part of the chain of life.

And all we have to stand between us and the irrational crazy chicken-running-around-squawking terror that those mortal dreads lay on us is wisdom and courage.

That is why I tell you all this, and why I write to shock you and anger you and frighten you. To tell you with love and care that you are not alone.

These stories are about the mortal dreads.

Each one is a little different from all the others because, to fall back on words of Irwin Shaw again, "… in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned."

And so, with the serious warning that you not try to pick out the pieces of the Author that went into the writing of each of these little cautionary tales, I give you another year or two of my life's work, all of which say, with love and care, and the intent to anger, shock and frighten you …

Honest to god—or whoever's in charge—you are not alone.

HARLAN ELLISON

Los Angeles
14 February 80

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Writers take tours in other people's lives.

The purpose of these introductory notes to each story is to reaffirm that fact, over and over again. It cannot be said too often. A writer cannibalizes his own life, that's true: all we have to relate are the perceptions of ourselves and our experiences that parallel other people's perceptions and experiences. But you are not alone; where you've been, there have I gone; what you've felt, I have also felt. Pain and joy and everything that lies between are universal.

I have taken what you've given me—though you never knew I was watching—and I've run it through the purifier of my imagination for the sole purpose of giving it back to you with, I hope, some clarity. If you would best use these reconstituted snippets and scintillae of your lives, I urge you to hold up the realities portrayed here to the mirror of fantasy. Things often seem clearer in the silver light of the extraordinary. Some call this magic.

Take "Jeffty Is Five" for example.

At the moment, this is one of my half dozen favorite stories. It is both a hard-edged and a romanticized view of the innocence that we all possessed as children. Jeffty has become an image of reverence for the parts of my childhood that were joyous and free of pain.

I suppose what I'm saying is that a large part of myself as an adult is Jeffty. They are parts of my nature I hold very dear. But, sadly, Donny is also a part of me. The part of me that grew up in order to deal with the Real World.

The Real World exists utterly in the Now; in a present time that seems to find the dearly remembered Past abhorrent, unbearable. And so, as this story contends, the Present tries to eradicate the Past. Please note that a distinction is drawn between change and eradication. This is not one of those embalmed adorations of nostalgic sentimentality. It merely suggests for your consideration that there are treasures of the Past that we seem too quickly brutally ready to dump down the incinerator of Progress. At what cost, it suggests, do we pursue the goal of being
au courant?

There are those who ask me, "Where do you get your ideas?" Of all the silly questions asked of writers, that one, surely, is the silliest. It presupposes there is a
place
or a
method
by which dreams become actualities on paper.

No. There is no such place (though I usually respond with the spine-straightener that I get my stories from an idea service in Poughkeepsie, New York … $25 a week and they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas fifty-two times a year) and there is no universally explicable method (hell, not even Aristotle could codify the act of creation). But you'd be both amazed and appalled at how many people ask me for he address of that idea service in Poughkeepsie.

But this I can tell you of how I came to write "Jeffty Is Five":

My friends Walter and Judy Koenig invited me to a party. I don't like parties. I do like Walter and Judy. I also like their kids. I went to the party.

Mostly I sat near the fireplace, friendly but not overly ebullient. Mostly I talked to Walter and Judy's son, Josh, who is remarkable beyond the telling. And then I overheard a snatch of conversation. An actor named Jack Danon said—I
thought
he said—something like this—"Jeff is five, he's always five." No, not really. He didn't say anything like that at all. What he probably said was, "Jeff is fine, he's always fine." Or perhaps it was something completely different.

But I had been awed and delighted by Josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is Josh: the sweetness of Josh, the intelligence of Josh, the questioning nature of Josh.

Thus from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. And soon afterward, Jeffty and Donny and the terrible and wonderful thing that happened to them ordered itself on paper.

One more thing about this story.

Despite what seems to be a quality of universality that I attribute to
you
more than to me or to any great genius in the writing of it, the ending of the story somehow escapes the slovenly reader. It's all there, what happened to Jeffty. Very clearly. It's done with, what I hope is some subtlety, and you may have to read the last page or so with some careful attention to detail … but it's all there.

As the Past is always there, if you learn from it; treasure the treasures and let the dross go without remorse.

Writers take tours in other people's lives. Jeffty is me; he is also you. This is a short, memory-filled trip through your own life.

WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, years old, there was a little kid I played with: Jeffty. His real name was Jeff Kinzer, and everyone who played with him called him Jeffty. We were five years old together, and we had good times playing together.

When I was five, a Clark Bar was as fat around as the gripping end of a Louisville Slugger, and pretty nearly six inches long, and they used real chocolate to coat it, and it crunched very nicely when you bit into the center, and the paper it came wrapped in smelled fresh and good when you peeled off one end to hold the bar so it wouldn't melt onto your fingers. Today, a Clark Bar is as thin as a credit card, they use something artificial and awful-tasting instead of pure chocolate, the thing is soft and soggy, it costs fifteen or twenty cents instead of a decent, correct nickel, and they wrap it so you think it's the same size it was twenty years ago, only it isn't; it's slim and ugly and nasty-tasting and not worth a penny, much less fifteen or twenty cents.

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia's home in Buffalo, New York for two years. My father was going through "bad times" and Aunt Patricia was very beautiful, and had married a stockbroker. They took care of me for two years. When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.

I was seven. Jeffty was still five. I didn't notice any difference. I didn't know: I was only seven.

When I was seven years old I used to lie on my stomach in front of our Atwater-Kent radio and listen to swell stuff. I had tied the ground wire to the radiator, and I would lie there with my coloring books and my Crayolas (when there were only sixteen colors in the big box), and listen to the NBC red network: Jack Benny on the
Jell-O Program, Amos 'n' Andy
, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the
Chase and Sanborn Program
,
One Man's Family, First Nighter
; the NBC blue network:
Easy Aces
, the
Jergens Program
with Walter Winchell,
Information Please, Death Valley Days
; and best of all, the Mutual Network with
The Green Hornet,
The Lone Ranger, The Shadow
and
Quiet Please
. Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.

When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was "a troublesome kid," and they sent me off to military school, so I could be "taken in hand."

I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.

When I was fourteen years old, I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons and a matinee was ten cents and they used real butter on the popcorn and I could always be sure of seeing a western like Lash LaRue, or Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder with Bobby Blake as Little Beaver, or Roy Rogers, or Johnny Mack Brown; a scary picture like
House of Horrors
with Rondo Hatton as the Strangler, or
The Cat People
, or
The Mummy
, or
I Married a Witch
with Fredric March and Veronica Lake; plus an episode of a great serial like
The Shadow
with Victor Jory, or
Dick Tracy
or
Flash Gordon
; and three cartoons; a James Fitzpatrick TravelTalk; Movietone News; a sing-along and, if I stayed on till evening, Bingo or Keeno; and free dishes. Today, I go to movies and see Clint Eastwood blowing people's heads apart like ripe cantaloupes.

At eighteen, I went to college. Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe's jewelry store. Jeffty hadn't changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.

At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don't die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I'm running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we've lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can't buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There's no such thing as oilcloth any more; you'll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother's kitchen. Furniture isn't made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new, color-coded borax every seven years. Records don't feel right; they're not thick and solid like the old ones, they're thin and you can bend them … that doesn't seem right to me. Restaurants don't serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. You can make a dent in a car fender with only a sneaker. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and McDonald's and 7-Elevens and Taco Bells and motels and shopping centers. Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past?