HARLAN ELLISON(tm)

AT MADCON, AN AILING HARLAN ELLISON WILL SAY GOODBYE

When I was a sophomore in high school, my Dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor close to the optic nerve, probably produced or speeded up by Agent Orange during his military service in the Vietnam War. My mother was diagnosed with MS *and* got pregnant with the new little brother I begged her for ten years prior, in the same year. My older sister was off at Army language school in Monterey by that point.

As you might imagine, I didn't sleep much in high school. Ephedra was still legal, and with undiagnosed ADHD, coffee and ephedra were almost the best friends I had to keep up with the sinking ship at home; on top of AP coursework, vicious persecution at school and no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

At a time when most kids were getting "help" from their families (that is, learning how to drive, learning how to get and keep a job/apartment/relationship, etc.), I was the one manning the bilge pumps with my little sister Amy (the acme of old time toughness herself, as I learned to see in those years while that came to flower within her.)

"When you looked into the abyss, Angry Candy would have sustained you. Here is the bittersweet: You are not alone."


The house where I read those words doesn't exist any more. The back stairs where I rediscovered an old friend from OMNI during the worst time in my family's life, are now so much fire-hardened rubble at the bottom of a landfill someplace.

I didn't know my Dad for a long time before his diagnosis. He got really strange, as the tumor began to grew. You could almost plot it on a graph, and my whole life there were things about him that were sick.

But before all that, when I was younger, there were times when he was the nicest human being on Earth, the one my Mom married. The one with the OMNI subscription, who poked fun at Harlan Ellison in a number of different ways, right around the year ANGRY CANDY was released in paperback.

I didn't read AC that year... but I found it three years later, in 1991, when all this was happening. ANGRY CANDY and THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON and THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD and SPIDER KISS and and and...

That's the thing about Harlan, and his work. There will always be an "And..." My "and" from that library run was STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, with his Surrealist exordium 'Quiet Lies The Locust Tells' that I still can't read without Kleenex.

That essay, and 'Eidolons', got me through that awful year at school, and helped me learn tools to make it magnificent. I began studying martial arts, and taking time away from being scared shitless of my coursework to use that old manual typewriter I hauled outside late at night, to work on other things.

I'd taken LSD for the first time that year, and had a marvelous experience in that I never, ever wanted to stop writing fiction after I came down. (Nothing like watching one of one's own stories played out on a blank wall to kick-start the Muse.)

But it was in sobriety that I was told by my Mother, "If you approached everything in life the way you approach writing, you'd have it made." So that's what I did. And through his work, Harlan showed me how. Not by all the legends about him, but what he actually wrote, and said. He was my Virgil, and I owe him. Big-time.

People besides me have written reams and recorded hours about *the rest*. Yes, I know he is the angriest sandy little butthole in the world, shot J.F.K., threw a drink in your Mom's face, etc. He was a friend to me, when I needed a friend like that so much. I will never forget him for that.

That... and one other thing.

I was working the Dealer's Room at the 2006 WorldCon, in Anaheim, not long after my first short story sale to Interzone magazine. I sold them a novella called 'Journey To The Center of the Earth' that they were wild about at the time. Editor Jetse de Vries invited me down to the Con and comped my ticket for helping him in the Dealer's Room.

I was delighted. I met David Gerrold and Gardner Dozois, Pat Cadigan and Ellen Datlow, Harrys Harrison through Turtledove and a dozen more great writers and editors besides. I got to drink a beer with Geoffrey A. Landis and thank him for answering all my noob-writer tech support questions. I got to sit poolside with a writer from Dr. Who and listen to him enlarge Reality.

But the story I always take with me had to do with my novella. L.A. artist Pamelina H. did the cover for 'Journey', and was so much fun to hang out with that Jetse and I were nearly late to the Hugo Awards.

We got there with five minutes to squeak in, and a closed bar. The doorman was less than thrilled, but got us in.

We immediately began hunting around for programs. Jetse found four on top of a tall amplifier on the way in.

He reached for them, and his hand was immediately slapped away by this slithery, reptilian little demon, with basilisk eyes of a hue and piercing intensity that reminded me of two of the hardest-working people I ever met: my Grandmother Morris and my great friend Finn Robins. Harlan was floating in a guess-which-one-of-the-Away-Team's-gonna-die-red hoodie and the coolest pair of Adidas sneakers I have ever coveted. "MY BOOK!" Harlan Ellison snarled. "GO GET YOUR OWN---"

Then he looked up. Jetse's a big dude, a Dutch hair farmer who looks like he could fill in on guitar for Slayer and no one would notice.

My inner bouncer went off then and there, and I got between them as the fumfuh started and Harlan immediately backpedaled, "No problem, no problem, here, have some food..." And he thrusts his small plate of taquitos at Jetse.

Jetse is not a fighter at all. Quite the reverse. So, beet-red, he takes the plate of taquitos and sits down. Harlan looked at me, "Who the fuck was that?" "The editor of Interzone," I replied. Harlan threw up his hands.

"Ohhh, INTERZONE, the guys who said you can't put a price on one of my stories..." He went on in that vein for a little while. It was plain to see that, under the five coats of snark, he liked the magazine very much, and wanted to work with them.

"Let me check on that for you, sir," I told him, made a few more manners and let him get back to what he wanted to do, which was walk around and bitch to warm up for all the speeches he was about to make.

But long story short, a few weeks later, I was told that "through the good offices of Edward Morris" (Harlan's words), he sent a beautiful essay called 'Mistral in the Bijou' to IZ, and they ran it. That essay had to do with another mouthy workaholic writer from Oregon, Ted Sturgeon, and the several weeks Ted stayed at Harlan's house.

I read in the above article that Harlan is ending the only way Harlan can: By riding his giant, clanking brass balls gracefully into the sunset. I had to stop everything I was doing today and get some of this down, out of respect to the Harlan underneath... as well as the Magnificent Bastard I wish I could be, when I have to go around and flex on clients and editors who won't pay up.

"Do you do that at the gas station?" I ask, "At McDonald's?" When I say that, I can hear the buzzing song of The Locust in my voice, the blast and the burning shame and the bitter frost and the fright of all those long nights knocking my brains out on a manual typewriter for whatever purpose.

There's not just one Locust, Harlan. There are plagues of us now, and we are *hungry*. We are *pissed off*. And thanks to your own good offices, we do *not* suffer fools gladly. Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck, and thank you for never, ever, ever going gently into that good night.


"So some night there'll be a flash
you'll barely notice
you'll think it's distant lightning
perhaps
and I suppose, in a way, it is
It is heat lighning
from his grave,
a freeze frame of your virulent hypocrisy

which exposed
loses all immunity
in its systems
its censoring bureaucracy"

---Jim Carroll, 'To The National Endowment On The Arts'