Paingod and Other Delusions

There is no introduction this time.

I’m tired.

This is my first book in over two years. (In early 1962 I came out to Hollywood, as part of a package deal that involved dismembering a marriage and fracturing a small but intense group of lives. I’ve been here over three years, as this is written, and I’ve been busy making a decent living in television and feature films to do much book work. And I cry a lot.)

I hit thirty-one last May; I turned around, and I’d grown up. I knew Santa Claus was a winehead who spent the other eleven months sopping up watery chicken soup with brown bread in a Salvation Army kitchen; the Easter Bu

So there is no introduction. It has made this book incredibly belated in appearing already. Seven times I tried to start an introduction to it, while Don Bensen (an incredibly patient, longsuffering, extremely fine editor) was stu

The first few times it was a compendium of bitter, cynical comment on writing for the science fiction field. Then there was a lighthearted rollicking essay on Life in Our Times, but by the time I had hit the thirty-six ball-less wonders who watched Catherine Genovese get knifed to death in New York, my rollick was a bit strained. So I attempted a more serious assaying of the contemporary scene. It touched on such matters as the afternoon I was called a Communist by the bag-boy in the Thriftimart because I objected to the Goldwater pamphlets at point-of-sale; the impertinence and nosiness of credit checks for job applications or credit cards; the shocking bastardization of news media and lack of responsibility thereof; the fetish for style and luxury, not safety, in new cars.…

Oh, I went the route.

And when I was done, it took three close friends to keep me from dashing into the bathroom and opening an important vein with the new beep-beep Krona edge.

So I tried a sixth attempt. A personal statement about how crummy it was writing for television, and seeing your best work masticated and grab-assed and garbaged-out by no-talents afraid of their shadows. But that was only a repeat of a speech I made at the World SF Convention last Labor Day, and my attorney warned me if I put it into print (instead of playing it via tape at parties), I’d be sued for roughly eleven million beans. So there was a seventh attempt, in which I commented sagely on the stories in this book.

But let’s face it, friends, this book simply ain’t go

So there is no introduction to this book.

There are some pretty fair science fiction and fantasy stories here, and one or two I particularly like because they say something more than The Mutants Is Coming; if Bensen can wangle the space away from Pyramid’s advertising department to cut the latest notification of a Taylor Caldwell or Louis Nizer offering, there may or may not be a photo of me on the back of the book (should you happen to be the sort of good-looking broad who digs writing to weary authors, but need to know they aren’t hunchbacked lepers before committing yourself); there is a nice cover; and a fair-traded price.

More than that you can’t expect.

After all, Golding doesn’t introduce his books. Bellow doesn’t introduce his books. Ike Asimov has proved his virility enough for all us science fiction writers. And Ayn Rand is better at karate than all of us. So forgive the omission this time. I’ll catch you next time around.

You wouldn’t have liked an introduction, anyway.

I tend to pomposity in them.

Harlan Ellison

Hollywood, 1965

Short stories

Paingod

Late in March of 1965, I was compelled to join twenty-five thousand others, from all corners of the United States, who marched on the then-bastion of bigotry, the then-capitol of corruption, Montgomery, Alabama (though South Boston now holds undisputed title to the designation, Montgomery is still no flowerbed of racial sanity) (but the myth of the “liberal” North sure got the hell shot out of it by the Southies from Irish-redneck Boston).

I was part of the human floodtide they called a “freedom march” that was trying to tell Governor George Wallace that Alabama was not an island, that it was part of the civilized universe, that though we came from New York and California and Illinois and South Dakota we were not “outside agitators,” we were fellow human beings who shared the same granfalloon called “Americans,” and we were seeking dignity and civil rights for a people shamefully bludgeoned and mistreated for over two centuries. It was a walk through the country of the blind. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere.

But now it’s ten years later and yesterday a friend of mine’s sixty-five-year-old mother got mugged and robbed in broad daylight by two black girls. It’s ten years later and a girl I once loved very deeply got raped repeatedly, at knife-point, in the back seat of her own car in an empty lot behind a bowling alley in the San Fernando Valley by a black dude who kept at her for seven hours. It’s ten years later and Martin Luther King is dead and Super Fly is alive, and what am I to say to Doris Pitkin Buck, who lost her dear and magical Richard on the streets of Washington, D.C., to a pack of black killers who chose to stomp to death a man in his eighties for however much stash-money he might have been carrying?

Do I say to that friend of mine: when they went to drag the Mississippi swamps for the bodies of the civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, they dredged up the bodies of sixteen black men who had been cavalierly murdered and dumped in the muck, and no one even gave a damn, the newspapers didn’t even make much of a note of it, that it was the accepted way to handle an “uppity nigger” in the South? Do I say that and hope I’ve said something rational?

Do I say to that girl I loved: every time you see a mocha-colored maid or waitress it means her great-great-grandmother was a sexual pin cushion for some plantation Massa’, that rape and indentured bed service was taken for granted for two hundred years and if it was refused there was always a stout length of cordwood to change the girl’s thinking? Do I say that and hope I’ve drawn a reasonable parallel?

Do I tell brave and talented Doris Buck, who never hurt anyone in her life, that we’re paying dues for what our ancestors did, that we’re reaping the terrible crop of pain and evil and murder committed in the name of White Supremacy, that white men rob and rape and steal and kill as well as black, but that blacks are poorer, more desperate, more frustrated, angrier? Do I say that and hope to stop her tears with logic?

Why the hell do we expect a nobility of blacks that whites never possessed?

Of course I don’t say that pack of simple-minded platitudes. Personal pain is incapable of spontaneous remission in the presence of loss. I say nothing.

But my days of White Liberal Guilt are gone. My days of championing whole classes and sexes and pigmentations of people are gone. The Sixties are gone, and we live in the terrible present, where death and guilt don’t mix. Now I come, after all these years, to the only position that works: each one on his or her own merits, black/white/yellow/brown. Not all Jews are money-gouging kikes, but some are. Not all blacks are slavering rapists, but some are. Not all Puerto Ricans are midnight second-storey spicks, but some are.

And we come to the question again and again, what kind of a god is it that permits such misery … are we truly cast in his image, such an image of cruelty and rapaciousness … were we put here really to suffer such torment? Let the Children of God answer that one with something other than no-brain jingoism. Mark Twain said, “If one truly believes there is an all-powerful Deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is led inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug.” That’s the quote that caused me to write “The Deathbird.” It’s a puzzle I ca