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That’s another kind of pain, and it’s real, and if that letter didn’t hurt you where you hurt best, then nothing in this book will touch you, and maybe you ought to be volunteering for something like the Genocide Corps in Brazil.
Here’s another pain that crushes.
I went to Driver Survival School last Saturday. I’d gotten a ticket I didn’t deserve (are there any other kinds?) and the judge at my trial suggested if I wanted to take a day’s worth of traffic school the ticket would be dismissed. So I did the deed.
Traffic Survival School, what a rip-off, I thought. Cynical and smartass like the other fifty people booked for that day. Seven and a half hours of bullshit from some redneck cop.
Sure.
But something happened. Something that turned me around. You’ve got to know, I don’t like cops. It’s a gut reaction I’ve had since I was a tiny tot. My first encounter with the Man is recorded in a story called “Free with This Box” and you’ll be able to read it in GENTLEMAN JUNKIE. The story was written a long time ago, and the event happened even longer ago, but the reaction is as fresh in me as if it had happened yesterday. So I went with a snarl on my lips and a loathing for the Laws that Bo
But the two California Highway Patrol officers who lectured the class were sharp and open and knew they had a captive audience, and course-corrected for it. But still everyone in the room was cynical, taking it all as a lark, dragged by the waste of having to spend a dynamite Saturday in a small room in the Sportsmen’s Lodge, sitting on a hard chair and learning the whys&wherefores of the new California U-turn law.
Until they showed the obligatory highway safety horror film.
I’ve seen them before, so have you. Endless scenes of maimed and crushed men and women being crowbarred out of burning wrecks; women with their heads split open like pomegranates, their brains on the Tarmac; guys who’d been hit by trains at crossings, legs over here, arms over there; shots of cars that demonstrate the simple truth that the human body is only a baggie filled with fluid — the tuck&roll interiors evenly coated with blood and meat. And it sickens you, and you turn your head away, and sensitive stomachs heave, and no one makes clever remarks, and you want to puke. But it somehow has no more effect in totality than the 7:00 News with film of burned Vietnamese babies. You never think it’ll happen to you.
Until they came to the final scene of the film, and it was so hairy even the Cal Highway officers grew weak: a six-year-old black kid had been hit by a car. Black ghetto neighborhood. Hundreds of people lining the street rubbernecking. Small shape covered by a blanket in the middle of the street. Cops all over the place. According to the film it wasn’t the driver’s fault, kid had run out from between parked cars, driver hadn’t had time to stop, centerpunched the kid doing 35.
Shot of the car. A tiny dent. Not enough to even Earl Scheib it. Small shape under a blanket.
Then they brought the mother out to identify the kid. Two men supporting her between them. They staggered forward with her and a cop lifted the edge of the blanket.
They must have had someone there with a directional mike. I got every breath, every moan, every whisper of air. Oh my God. The sound of that woman’s scream. The pain. From out of the center of the earth. No human throat was ever meant to produce such a terrible sound. She collapsed, just sank away like limp meat between the supporting men. And the film ended. And I still heard that scream.
It’s five days later as I write this. I ca
Are you aware of how much pain there is in the world?
Yeah, I’m aware. Now. Because I’ve been writing for eighteen years and I keep getting these letters, and I keep listening to people, and at times it’s too much to handle. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read Nathanael West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS.
And so I write these introductions, what my friend and the brilliant writer Avram Davidson calls “going naked in the world.” Avram wrote me recently and, in the course of taking me to task for something he believed I had done wrong, he more-than-mildly castigated me for dumping it all on paper. Well, he’s not the first, and from time to time I’ve considered never writing another of these self-examinations. But Irwin Shaw said, “A man does not write one novel at a time or one play at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’ ”
This report, then, is about pain. The subject is very much with me. My mother had another heart attack, and the general topic of mortality obsesses me these days. We will all die, no reprieve. A beautiful young lady of my acquaintance, who happens to be an accomplished astrologer, told me (though she knows I don’t believe in astrology) that my chart says I’m going to die by being beheaded. Terrific remark. She told it to me one night when we were out on a date, and she was surprised that I turned out to be no goddam good in bed that night.
Well, she needn’t have been so surprised; I know I’m going to buy the farm one day, sooner or later depending on how much I run my mouth in dangerous situations. But it isn’t death that bothers me, it’s dying alone.
So I think about pain, and I present you with this group of stories that say a little something about what I’ve learned on the subject. They may not be terribly deep or illuminating, just some random thoughts I’ve had through the years. A few of them seem fu
Because there’s only one thing that links us as human beings: the universality of our pain and the commonality of our need to go out bravely.
Harlan Ellison
9 November ’74
Introduction to First Edition
THIS IS MY ELEVENTH BOOK. (It should have been thirteen, counting the one I did under a pseudonym for a schlock publisher because I needed the money some years ago, but number twelve was a false start Avram Davidson and myself wish had never happened and fortunately never got into print, and thirteen is a book of short stories no one seems constitutionally capable of publishing, and which seems well on its way to becoming an “underground classic” for those who have read it in manuscript form.) That doesn’t seem too bad, for thirty years; twenty of which were spent in learning on which end of this particular body the head was attached.
Very nearly all of the past ten books have had some sort of introduction or prologue by myself. I have the feeling it is necessary to know what a writer stands for, in what he believes, what it takes to make him bleed, before a reader should be asked to care about what the writer has written. This is patently foolish. B. Traven writes eloquently, feelingly, brilliantly, yet he is an unknown quantity. Wilde’s life contradicts most of what he wrote. Shaw and Dickens and Stendhal were virtually anonymous in their seminal, important years, yet what they wrote remains keen and true and valid. Granted, the philosophy of “love me, love my writing” is my problem. Still, it is the one to which I pander, and so each of my books has had some viscera-revealing treatise at the opening, from which the usual reader reaction has been total revulsion and a mind-boggling reeling-back in disbelief. I have the unseemly habit of going naked into the world. It comes from a seamy desire on my part not only to be a Great Writer, but to Be Adored as well.