Strange Wine

Authors: Harlan Ellison

Tags: #Short Fiction, #Collection.Single Author, #Fiction.Horror, #Acclaimed.Danse Macabre

STRANGE WINE by Harlan Ellison

ISBN-10: 0-7592-9184-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7592-9184-3

STRANGE WINE
is an Edgeworks Abbey® Offering in association with ereads.com.
Published by arrangement with the Author and The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

Harlan Ellison and Edgeworks Abbey are registered trademarks of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

Front Cover Illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon
Copyright © 1966 by Leo & Diane Dillon.
Renewed, © 1994 by Leo & Diane Dillon.
First E-Reads publication: 2009
www.ereads.com
Harlan Ellison website:
www.harlanellison.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopy, recording, Internet posting, electronic bulletin board or any other information storage and retrieval system, or by any other method, means or process of embodying and/or transmitting information, text or the spoken word now known or hereafter devised without permission in writing from The Kilimanjaro Corporation, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or in a recognized on-line journal. For information address Author’s agent: Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, New York 10021, USA.

All persons, places and organizations in this book-except those clearly in the public domain-are fictitious and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.

Introduction: “Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself,” copyright CO 1978 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

Excerpts from “The Cart” by W.S. Merwin, which originally appeared in
The New Yorker,
are reprinted by permission of Atheneum Publishers, from the book HOUSE AND TRAVELERS by W.S. Merwin. Copyright © 1977 by W.S. Merwin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to note the following persons whose kindnesses and support enabled him to write these stories better and more easily than would have been the case without their good offices: Jane Rotrosen; Ray Bradbury; the staff of Words & Music in Charing Cross Road, London; Martin Miller, Director, Marketing Research, Mattell Toys; Vonda N. McIntyre; David Wise; the late, much-missed William Rotsler; Robert Silverberg; Barbara Silverberg; Arthur Byron Cover; both Mike Hodel and Richard Delap, now both gone; Don Pfiel; Edward L. and Audrey Ferman; Eric Protter; Arline Inge; Gerard Van der Leun; Terry Carr, my friend, also gone away; Sherry Gottlieb, Lydia Marano, and staff of the long-defunct A Change of Hobbit in Los Angeles; Stephanie Bernstein, who was senselessly murdered by an ex-con on parole, in Santa Monica; Edward Bryant; Norman Goldfind; Larry Todd; Byron Preiss; Neal Adams; Michael Moorcock; Jill Riches; Jane Gould and the staff of The Portobello Hotel in London; Joe Oles and his family; Haskell, Carol and Tracy Barkin (some of whom are née Klotz); Maggie Pierce and Linda Steele; Karah and Blaire Preiss; Prince Charles Curtis, his father Richard; and Howard Zimmerman and my exquisite honey, my wife, Susan, the Electric Baby.

Dedication

This one, with love,
for my friends,
JULIEANNE and
CHARLES EDWARD
POGUE

Epigraph

A
ll men dream…but not equally. They who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it is vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. LAWRENCE

O
nly fantasy has eternal youth. What happened nowhere and never can never age.

SCHILLER

GROTESQUE:

“…the expression in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truth…”

JOHN RUSKIN

GROTESQUE IN THE CLASSIC SENSE: “anticke figures”

“I write of things which I have neither seen nor suffered nor learned from another, things which are not and never could have been, and therefore my readers should by no means believe them.”

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA

“I sing of places I’ve never seen, of people I’ve never been. But savor my songs, because they’re free.”

PETER ALLEN

“Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.”

ALEKSANDER PUSHKIN

INTRODUCTION: Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look so Terrific Yourself

It’s all about drinking strange wine.

It seems disjointed and jumps around like water on a griddle, but it all comes together, so be patient.

At 9:38 A.M. on July 15th, 1974, about eight minutes into
Suncoast Digest
, a variety show on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, anchorwoman Chris Chubbuck, 30, looked straight at the camera and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, you’re going to see another first–an attempt at suicide.”

Whereupon she pulled a gun out of a shopping bag and blew her brains out, on camera.

Paragraph 3, preceding, was taken verbatim from an article written by Daniel Schorr for
Rolling Stone
. I’d heard about the Chubbuck incident, of course, and I admit to filching Mr. Schorr’s sixty concise words because they
are
concise, and why should I try to improve on precision? As the artist Mark Rothko once put it: “Silence is so accurate.”

Further, Mr. Schorr perceived in the bizarre death of Chris Chubbuck exactly what I got out of it when I heard the news broadcast the day it happened. She was making a statement about television…
on television!

The art-imitating-life resemblance to Paddy Chayefsky’s film
Network
should not escape us. I’m sure it wouldn’t have escaped Chris Chubbuck’s attention. Obvious cliché; onward.

I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on
Bonanza
. He was a wise and a kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goofing off on writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he’d been reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered saloon that probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or other…and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

He told me–and he said this happened
all
the time, not just in isolated cases–that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, “Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some decent food for you and your family.”

So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I’ve ever met), “Excuse me, ma’am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I’ll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting.”

And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she
knew
all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, “Yes, I know…but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said…”

For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same.

There was a woman who had the part of a home-wrecker on a daytime soap opera. One day as she was coming out of Lord & Taylor in New York, a viewer began bashing her with an umbrella, calling her filthy names and insisting she should leave that nice man and his wife alone!

One time during a college lecture, I idly mentioned that I had actually
thought up
all the words Leonard Nimoy had spoken as Mr. Spock on the sole
Star Trek
segment I had written; and a young man leaped up in the audience, in tears, and began screaming that I was a liar. He actually thought the actors were living those roles as they came across the tube.

Why do I tell you all this; and what does it have to do with drinking strange wine?

Chris Chubbuck perceived at a gut level that for too many Americans the only reality is what’s on the box. That Johnny Carson and Don Rickles and Mary Tyler Moore are more real, more substantial, more immediately important than the members of their own family, or the people in their community. She knew that her death wouldn’t be
real
unless it happened on television, unless it took place where life is lived, there in phosphor-dot Never-Never Land. If she did it decently, in the privacy of her home, or in some late night bar, or in a deserted parking lot…it would never have happened. She would have been flensed from memory as casually as a popped pimple. Her suicide on camera was the supreme act of loathing and ridicule for the monkeymass that watched her.

When I was writing my television criticism for the Los Angeles
Free Press
, circa 1968–72, I used
The Glass Teat
columns to repeat my belief that those of us who cared, who had some ethics and some talent, dared not abandon to the Visigoths what was potentially the most powerful medium the world had ever known for the dissemination of education and knowledge. I truly believed that. And I said it again and again.

But it’s been five years since I last wrote those words, and I’ve done so many college speaking engagements that Grand Forks, North Dakota, has blurred with Minneapolis, Minnesota, has blurred with Bethel, Maine, has blurred with Shreveport, Louisiana, and what I’ve come away with is a growing horror at what television has done to us.

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning,
a bad thing
.

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