The Harlan Ellison Hornbook Read online

  For first-timers, I would recommend the marvelous entraña, a charbroiled 12-14 ounce skirt steak. The skirt is something like a London Broil, the way Raquel Welch is like Kate Smith; they’re both women, even as both edibles are related cuts of meat. But after the name, all similarities cease.

  The skirt comes in a long, thinnish slab with a tender middle and a crunchy outer shell. It is one of the universe’s special gifts. It comes with french fries, which are absolutely correct and as crunchy as the steak itself. Consumed in company with an order of plantains, this delight offers the diner a range of tastes, sweet and pungent, that make the dinner hour a pleasure.

  For dessert, a cup of El Palenque’s excellent coffee (with refills that keep coming endlessly and without charge) laced with fresh milk; and “Toyi’s” incredible flan, a caramel custard pudding that will make your eyes roll up in your head.

  Then sit back and try to get your hands locked across your stomach. You will know what satisfaction is, at last.

  El Palenque has other things to recommend it, as if what has been set down already weren’t enough:

  A lively and variegated group called Rocky and The Latin Image, a five-piece percussion and piano operation, plays every night but Monday and Tuesday. With vocals by a gentleman announced as “the internationally famous Velasquez,” the mood of the restaurant is constantly one of life and exuberance. A small dance floor adjoins the bandstand and the clientele—a wild mixture of South and Central American-born residents of the Los Angeles barrio—move on and off the space with that willowy grace and zest for life that can only be captured in dances of Latin origin. On a recent evening, the hypnotic oneness of several couples swaying to the mambo almost drew our attention from the pursuit of stuffing our stomachs. Almost.

  But on Monday and Tuesday when The Latin Image is silent, El Palenque makes up for the short-changing by lowering its dinner prices. It is possible to sock away a meal for two, with wine, such as the one I’ve outlined here, for less than seven dollars. Similar dining bargains are few and far between in Los Angeles.

  El Palenque is open Sunday from 2:00 in the afternoon till 2:00 in the morning. Monday through Thursday: 11:30 A.M. till 2:00 A.M. Friday and Saturday: 11:30 A.M. till 4:00 A.M.

  And if the sheer improbability of those hours doesn’t bring you up short, just stop to think of how hard it was to find a restaurant open late enough after a movie to give you a good meal, the last time you were caught out in the city after eleven o’clock. El Palenque burns with life till well after the rest of provincial L.A. shuts down.

  So. Go have a good meal. But don’t tell your friends about the place unless they can be trusted. The only drawback to my sharing this wonderland with you is the fear that it will be invaded by the Strip rats, the talent agency phonies and the bores. It’s happened with other good, small restaurants. I’d hate to see it happen to El Palenque.

  But Rivera’s paradise is too special and too worthwhile a treasure to keep to myself. So I share it with you, in hopes your taste buds will return to life; I share it with you as an act of camaraderie; please don’t abuse the privilege.

  And tell Roberto Rivera that Harlan Ellison sent you. If you do, he might sit down a while and tell you what goes into the black sausage.

  INSTALLMENT 9 |

  Interim Memo

  After you’ve either cheered yourself hoarse over this one, or purged your outrage at my perfidious disrespect; after you’ve sighed with relief that the secret hatred you’ve had to keep to yourself for years is not idiopathic, or dropped to your knees in prayer that some malevolent deity pan-fry my innards for such loathsome heretical awfulness, carry away from this column (and its update in Installment 43) only one Jot of Accepted Wisdom:

  Send me an Xmas card and I will hunt you down.

  Flee to the jungles of Bolivia, I’ll hunt you down.

  And when I get you, I’ll nail your head to a coffee table.

  With dripping fangs I look forward to the consummate idiot who thinks s/he will be smartass clever by doing it. There’re always a few. Killing them slowly and painfully, gleefully and sloppily, is no act punishable under law.

  INSTALLMENT 9 | 28 DECEMBER 72

  NO OFFENSE INTENDED, BUT FUCK XMAS!

  First of all, let’s exclude the Prince of Peace. None of what I’m about this week has anything to do with him. From what I’ve read, he was an okay sort of guy on whom has been laid more superhero tripe than any one social malcontent should have to cope with.

  What I’m concerned with here is how much I, and most of you, whether you will cop to it or not, have come to hate, loathe, despise and revile Christmas.

  Not even the obvious cliché Scrooge anti-commercialized Christmas denigration that berates greedy shopkeepers for stringing plastic holly in the middle of August, that castigates even worthwhile charities for their shameless whipguilt hustling for funds, that chides average citizens for falling for the okeydoke and going in hock to BankAmericard to buy gifts they can’t afford for people they don’t give a damn about. That facet of the problem is so much all obviousness that everyone has learned to live with it, pays it lip-service the way lip-service is paid to horrors such as “everyone knows politicians are crooked,” and does nothing to revise the situation. Amazing how much shit folks can learn to eat.

  No, I’m finally going to come out of the closet and openly state in print how much the entire concept of the “holiday” horrifies me. If I touch a shuddering chord here that resonates in tone with what you’ve been concealing in your heart of hearts, then consider me only as the fatmouth willing to suffer the brickbats of Jesus Freaks, et al., who’ll surely burn a cross on my lawn for putting down their be-all/end-all’s natal day. I’m willing to stand the gaff, gentle readers, if you will merely turn to the East and say to the sunrise, “God forgive me, I’ve had the same thoughts.”

  Consider: the following items came over the news on December 24th and 25th: four men in San Francisco abducted two young girls off the streets in broad daylight; a young woman whose estranged husband showed up at her door with presents for their kids was shot to death by the wife, who then put the pistol in her mouth and blew her head off; a 63-year-old man in Manhattan threw himself off the Brooklyn Bridge with a note (apparently written with a ballpoint so it wouldn’t smudge in the water, which is really forethought of a high order) saying he couldn’t make it through another Christmas alone and unloved; a sniper in downtown Chicago knocked off four people on Christmas Eve, and was never located; a noted psychologist released a statement that suicide rates go up to triple normal during the holidays; police in Los Angeles and San Francisco agreed, with some consternation, that crime doubles during Christmas. There’s more, much more, but why belabor the point? The only good news during Christmas this year was that Harry Truman, that indefatigable old curmudgeon, was still holding on with filled lungs, failing kidneys, stuttering heart and deep in a death coma.

  Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665–66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artificial responsibilities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a “holiday” that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.

  Look: I dig my privacy. 364 days out of the year I can think of nothing more pleasant than being left alone of an evening, working at writing a story, watching some television, making a small meal, smoking my pipe, just swimming along softly behind an ambience of aloneness. There is nothing of loneliness in all that, but aloneness, which is something else altogether, something fine and rewarding, filled with restoking the internal fires, comi
ng to grips with myself, perceiving my directions and my place in the universe.

  But on Christmas Eve I was alone, and I wanted to slash my carotid artery. (And when I read the foregoing to the two young ladies who are secretarying for me, they stared at me with undisguised loathing for my rottenness and countered with the arguments that a lot of people like Christmas a bagful, and they offered as their reasons that many people dig it because they don’t have to work, and others adore it because they get bonuses.

  (Had I the sense of a maggot, I’d rest my case right there.

  (But for the sanctimonious few who would revile the ladies for their opinions, only slightly less than they will me for mine, I press forward, bearing in mind Dickens’s remark that “…every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

  (And did you ever notice, the only one in A CHRISTMAS CAROL with any character is Scrooge? Marley is a whiner who fucked over the world and then hadn’t the spine to pay his dues quietly; Belle, Scrooge’s ex-girl friend, deserted him when he needed her most; Bob Cratchit is a gutless toady without enough get-up-and-go to assert himself; and the less said about that little treacle-mouth, Tiny Tim, the better. No, Dickens knew what he was doing when he made Scrooge the focus of the story. My only disappointment in him is that he let himself be savaged by those three dumb Ghosts. God Bless Us, Every One indeed! Not even at Christmas would I God Bless Nixon or the terrorists who machine-gunned the Olympic athletes or the monkey-trial reactionary fundamentalists who bludgeoned the California State Board of Education into stating in all future textbooks that Darwin’s Theory is an “unproved theory” as valid as the “special creation” nonsense. Bless ’em? I’d like to boil them in their own pudding and bury them…but you know.)

  Christmas is constructed and promulgated in such a way that to defy it or ignore it makes one a monster. To refuse to send cards, to toss the ones received in the wastebasket, to refuse to accept gifts and refuse to give them, to walk untouched through the consumer-crowds and never feel the urge to buy Aunt Martha that lovely combination rotisserie-&-bidet, to maintain one’s sanity staunchly through the berserk days of year’s end makes one, in the eyes of those who lack the courage to eschew hypocrisy, an awful heretic, a slug, a vile and contemptible thug.

  But consider the millions who are alone on Christmas. All the divorcées, all the kids on the road, all the septuagenarians in the Fairfax retirement homes, all the parents who lost kids in ’Nam, all the truck drivers who take Christmas schedules so they won’t have to sit around and brood on how miserable they are. Think of the poor sonofabitch glimpsed through the front windows of an Automat, sitting there by himself eating the $1.79 Xmas Special w/giblet gravy.

  And don’t give me any of that bullshit about how we must take these poor unfortunates to our Christian bosoms and make them welcome at this wonderful time of the year.

  Half of them are rapists and ax murderers, and they’ll eat your dinner, knock you in the head with a candlestick and steal all the presents from under your tree.

  What they want, flat truth, is to be left well alone, to get through this horrendous sorrow-show as quickly as possible.

  And when I read all that to one of my secretaries—the other having resigned and stalked out of the house muttering Antichrist—she snottily advised me she didn’t mind anyone’s not liking Christmas, what she resented were loudmouths like me who talked about it. Which is a terrific Silent Majority attitude, paralleling the Administration’s attitudes about civil disobedience and vocal dissent. They don’t mind your thinking it (at the moment), but god forbid you should try to do something about it.

  It never occurs to her that the pro-Christmas lackeys bombard the rest of us through every possible medium of mass communication from Muzak wassail wassails in the elevators to White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street all over the tube for two weeks prior and a week post. That every nit one encounters in banks or bakeries, who snorted and snarled and dealt you inept service all the rest of the year suddenly blossoms forth with a phony “Merrrrry Christmas” in hopes of a Yuletide giftiepoo. That even the blasphemy blasphemy curse blasphemy telephone company answers its phones with, “Merry Christmas, may I help you?”

  “Yes, I’d like you to check out an address for me, please.”

  “Merry Christmas, we are not permitted to check addresses.”

  “Yes, but, er, I’m a paraplegic cancer victim in an iron lung and the house is on fire and I’d like you to check out my address because I’m blind and the fire department needs it to locate me before I’m incinerated.”

  “Merry Christmas, I’m sorry, sir, but you’d better fuck off.”

  “Thanks. And a Merry Christmas to you.”

  What I’m saying, in sum, dear friends, is that it is all hopelessly artificial. That people are no better at Xmas time than any other time, and by spouting platitudes in the name of a scrawny prophet who got hammered in place for saying stuff a lot more radical than what I’m saying here, none of those Yule-nuts become brighter or more sanctified or even a tot kinder.

  And weighed against the people who suicide out of loneliness and misery, all the sales of Timex watches don’t mean a goddam thing.

  So next year, to all my friends, and particularly to my enemies, take your pointless and money-wasting Hallmarks and jam them up your pantyhose.

  Next year, time and finances permitting, I will cause to have erected on the roof of my home, a ten foot high neon sign that blinks on and off in blood-red and cash-green, BAH! HUMBUG! and any little clown who comes caroling at my door is going to have boiling pitch dumped on him.

  And fuck you, Tiny Tim!

  INSTALLMENT 10 |

  Interim Memo

  Just foolin’ around, folks, not really morbid, just kinda streetcorner riffing on a theme. Most of the dates in this next column has come and went, and I’m still pulling oxygen. Well, you know: the good die young. Noriega will live forever. Nixon will haunt our great-great-grandchildren. And ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE actually got published in 1980, and I’m still waiting for the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club to accept anything I’ve written.

  INSTALLMENT 10 | 4 MARCH 73

  THE DAY I DIED

  Driving home from Norman Spinrad’s New Year’s Eve party at which I finally met Cass Elliot—as invigorating an experience as one could wish for the dawn of a new year—skimming the crusty ’67 Camaro with its 56,000+ miles of dead years in its metal bones through Beverly Hills. KFAC was working Ravel’s Bolero. Not tired, it was still early for a New Year’s Eve, something like one o’clock.

  Thinking.

  No. Woolgathering. (THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, p. 1473, col. 2: woolgathering n. Absent-minded indulgence in fanciful daydreams.) That’s what I was doing: woolgathering.

  Frequently, that’s how my writer’s mind conceives plots for stories, or more accurately, concepts for stories. The unconscious computer makes a storage bank search of idle thoughts looking for linkages, cross-references, points of similarity. When it finds something interesting, it checks it against all the muddle and mud swirling around in the cortex, and comes up with something that makes a story.

  The elements this time were these:

  1972 is gone. It’s a new year. 1973. Another year.

  One year older. Moving on up the road toward the grave just the way old Camaro is moving on up the road to Beverly Glen. Traveling the road.

  Harry Truman is gone. I miss him. Salty old Harry who told them all to go fuck themselves. Ten years ago he said he wouldn’t die for at least ten more because he had ten years work still to do in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Ten years later, all the work done, almost to the month, he died. Did he know?

  Could I know when I’m going to die?

  Will I get to finish all the stories I have to write?

  Will I suddenly get rammed by a Pontiac Grand Am
at the next light, centerpunched into an early oblivion?

  When will I die?

  New Year’s Eve is a good time to think about it.

  So. This column.

  Thinking about when I’ll die. Mortality is the subject.

  I will die in 1973. Here is how it happened.

  I went to New York to be guest of honor at a science fiction convention called the Lunacon. To amortize the cost of the trip I accepted several lecture gigs in surrounding areas. So I went into Manhattan two weeks before the convention. I had just returned from speaking at Dartmouth, and was staying with my friend Max Katz, the Sesame Street segment director, in his Penthouse G on East 65th Street. Max and Karen were out when I taxied in from Kennedy International, and after putting away my overnight case I found the note they’d left for me: We went to dinner at The Proof of the Pudding. If you get in by nine, join us. Love, M&K.

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:28. Still time to meet them for a piece of Key West lime pie. I left the apartment and took the elevator to the lobby. The street was quiet and pleasant with an April breeze. I started to walk down 65th to First Avenue, carefully avoiding the piles of dog shit.

  Two guys in Army field jackets were coming toward me, up the street. I instinctively tensed. I was in New York and could not forget that Karen had had her purse ripped off her shoulder in broad daylight in front of Bloomingdale’s, in front of hordes of people who would not help her as she struggled with the snatcher. New York was not what it had been when last I’d lived there, in 1961.

  As they came toward me they parted so I could walk between them. I guess I knew in my gut what was about to happen. They swung on me and jammed me against the brick wall of the poodle-clipping joint down the street from Max’s building. They both had knives.