PAING.o.d AND OTHER DELUSIONS.

HARLAN ELLISON.

New Introduction: Your Basic Crown of Thorns

ONE NIGHT, SOME YEARS AGO, maybe five or six, I woke up in the darkness and saw words burning bright-red on the ceiling of my bedroom.

ARE YOU AWARE OF HOW MUCH.

PAIN THERE IS IN THE WORLD?.

I crawled out of the rack and felt my way through the house to my office, sat down at the typewriter, put on the light and-still asleep-typed the words on paper. I went back to bed and forgot all about it. That night I had programmed my dreams for a Sergio Leone spaghetti western with score by Morricone. No cartoon, no short subjects.

The next morning, coffee cup in hand, I went to my typewriter and found the question waiting for me, all alone on a sheet of yellow foolscap. Rhetorical. Of course I knew how much pain there was in the world...is in the world.

But I couldn't quite bring myself to ripping the sheet off the roller and getting on with what I should have been working at. I sat and stared at it for the longest time.

Understand something: I am not a humanitarian. I distrust selfless philanthropists and doers of good deeds.

When you discover that the black natives of Lamborene hated Schweitzer, you begin to suspect n.o.ble individuals have some secret need in them to be loved, to look good in others' eyes, to succor themselves or dissipate their guilts with benevolent gestures. Rather than the sanctimonious bulls.h.i.t of politicians about "the good people of this fair state" I would joyously vote for any candidate who had the courage to stand Up and say, "Look, I'm going to steal from you. I'm going to line my pockets and those of my friends, but I'm not going to steal too much. But in the deal I'll give you better roads, safer schools, better education and a happier condition of life. I'm not going to do it out of compa.s.sion or dedication to the good people of this fair state; I'm going to do it because if I do these things, you'll elect me again and I can steal a little bit more." That joker has my vote, no arguments.

(Rule of thumb: whenever you hear a politician call it "the United States of America"' instead of simply..the U.S."-you know he's bulls.h.i.tting you. It's like the convoluted syntax of college textbooks. When they start writing in a prolix manner that makes you read a paragraph seven times to get the message See d.i.c.k and Jane run, oh oh oh! you know someone is trying to flummox you. Same for politicians; if they start running a fast ramadoolah past you, instead of speaking simply and directly, they're trying to weasel. This lesson in good government comes to you through the courtesy of a man who was snookered by Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.) So what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm last in the line of n.o.ble, unselfish, golden humanitarians. What I do for the commonweal I do for myself I am a selfish sonofab.i.t.c.h who contributes to "good causes" because I feel s.h.i.tty if I don't. But if the truth be told, I'm the same as you: the deaths of a hundred thousand flood victims in some banana republic doesn't touch me one one-millionth as much as the death of my dog did. If you get wiped out on a freeway somewhere and I don't know you personally, I may go tsk-tsk, but the fact that I haven't had a good bowel movement in two days is more painful to me.

So those words burning on my ceiling really threw me.

They really got to me.

I had them printed on big yellow cards so they'd pop, and I started giving them to friends. I had one framed for my office. It's up on the wall to the right of my typewriter as I sit here telling you about it.

But if I'm not this terrific concerned human being, what's it all in aid on Well, it's in aid of my coming to terms with my own mortality, something that'll happen to all of you if it hasn't already. And it speaks to what this collection of stories is all about, in a way. So we'll talk about pain.

Here are a few different kinds of pain I think are worthy of our attention.

The other night I had dinner with a good friend, a woman writer whom I've known for about ten years.

Though we've never had a romantic relationship, I love her dearly and care about her: she's a good person, and a talented writer, and those two qualities put her everlastingly on my list of When You Need Help, Even In The Dead Of Night, I'm On Call. Over dinner, we talked about an anguish she has been experiencing for a number of years. She's afraid of dying alone and unloved.

Some of you are nodding in understanding. A few of you are smiling. The former understand pain, the latter are a.s.sholes. Or very lucky. We've all dreaded that moment when we pack it in, get a fast rollback of days and nights, and realize we're about to go down the hole never having belonged to anyone. If you've never felt it, you're either an alien from far Arcturus or so insensitive your demise won't matter. Or very lucky.

Her problem is best summed up by something Theodore Sturgeon once said: "There's no absence of love in the world, only worthy places to put it." My friend gets involved with guys who do her in. Not all her fault. Some of it is-we're never wholly victims, we help construct the tiger traps filled with spikes-but not all of it. She's vulnerable.

While not naive, she is innocent. And that's a dangerous, but laudable capacity: to wander through a world that can be very uncaring and amorally cruel, and still be astonished at the way the sunlight catches the edge of a coleus leaf.

Anybody puts her down for that has to go through me first.

So she keeps trying, and the ones with long teeth sense her vulnerability and they move in for the slow kill.

(That's evil: only the human predator destroys slowly, any decent hunting animal rips out the throat and feeds, and that's that. The more I see of people, the better I like animals.)She is a woman who needs a man. There are men who need a good woman. There's nothing s.e.xist in saying that, it's a condition of the animal. (And just so I don't get picketed by Gay Lib, there are men who need a good man and women who need a good woman. There are also men who need a good chicken and women who need a big dog, and that's n.o.body's business but their own, you get my meaning, so let's cut the c.r.a.p and move on.) Everybody needs to belong to somebody. Sometime. For an hour, a day, a year, forever...it's all the same. And when you've paid dues on a bunch of decades without having made the proper linkup, you come to live with a pain that is a dull ache, unlocalized, suffusing every inch of your skin and throbbing like a bruise down on the bone.

What to tell her, what to say? There's nothing. I'll try to find her someone who cares, but it's a pain she'll have to either overcome by guerrilla attacks on the singles bars and young-marrieds' parties, or learn to love herself sufficiently well that she becomes more accessible to the men she's turning off by unspoken words and invisible vibes. People sense the pain, and they shy away from it, because they've felt it themselves, and they don't want to get contaminated. When you need a job and hunger for one openly, you never get hired because they smell desperation on you like panther sweat.

But it's a pain you can't ignore. I can't ignore.

Here's another one.

What follows is one of hundreds of letters I get from readers. I hate getting mail, because I don't have the time to answer it, and I get a lot of it-probably due to writing introductions like this where I expose my viscera-but more of that and what Avram Davidson says about it later on-and most of the time I send out a form letter, otherwise I wouldn't have time to write stories. But occasionally I get a letter that simply cannot be ignored: This is one of them.

I won't use the young woman's name for reasons of libel that will become clear as you read the letter. The story to which she makes reference is t.i.tled "Lonelyache" and it appears in my collection I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM [Pyramid Books, 1974]. It is about a man who comes to unhappy terms with his own overpowering guilt about being a loveless individual. The "Discon" reference is to the World SF Convention held on Labor Day 1974 in Washington D.C.

Dear Harlan: We spoke briefly at Discon concerning reading sf to the mentally ill-your sf among others'. Something happened the other day that I thought might interest you.

I am presently working in the one medical-surgical building that - - has. Since most of my patients are in here for only very short stays, there has not been much opportunity for me to continue the reading/therapy that I had been doing in another, quieter building. (Also, having IV bottles and bouncing E KG's to baby-sit leaves little time for other pastimes, however therapeutic). (And furthermore, I'm working midnight shift now-which cuts down somewhat on people interested in being read to).

Anyway. In this madhouse of a building we have, among wards intended to hold up to twenty-five, one which cannot house more than seven; Ward 6A; otherwise known as Wounded Knee (from a time when we had five fractured patellas up here at once). A fracture ward, as it were, which also houses diabetics being newly-regulated, and staph infections, and new heart attacks who're healing. Rather a quiet place as contrasted to most of this madhouse (pardon unintentional pun), and since I came back from Discon, my very own ward (on nights).

We have up here at present a patient who has put more employees of various sorts out on compensation for various injuries of various sorts than any other patient in the hospital.

The reason for this is hardly any fault of hers; the fault lies with the aforementioned employees, who worked constantly (maybe unwittingly, but that doesn't excuse them) to drive her a good deal more insane than she ever was to begin with. The syndrome is easily described: A) Some facet of our enlightened state hospital system (the Earth should only swallow it) enrages/tortures an already hurting mind to the point where it can no longer control itself and the person attacks the first thing that comes to hand. Eventually, an employee steps in to halt the mayhem, and gets mayhemmed himself B) The word goes around from staff to staff, from staff to patients, eventually is voiced right in front of the sick person involved: "That one is nuts, will kill you if you turn your back, goes bananas at the drop of a hat, etc. ad nauseam..." C) The person thinks, "I haven't been too well lately, these are attendants and nurses and such, they say I'm crazy; who am I to prove them wrong? So I'll be crazy, I'll attack everything in sight..." and so it goes, and the ugly circle turns on itself. Follows thereupon much Thorazine, many camisoles, long hours in seclusion which do no one any good. Things get worse.

As it was on the night of this past July 4th. The lady who is now one of "MY PEOPLE" was in seclusion-as usual-on a third-floor ward. It was hot. No one would bring her a drink of water. Also, her room stank-as might have been expected: no one would take her out to the john, she had long since stopped asking, and had used the floor.

The stench, and the heat, and her thirst all combined, and she rose up and determined to go OUT. Naturally, as she later explained it to me, they would not let her out. So she reached out, heaved at the screening that she had been yanking on for the past five years, managed to detach it, and went OUT. Three floors down.

Naturally, she had fractures. The right humerus, the right tibia and fibula, a re-fracture of the left tibia and a new one of the left ankle. (Amazingly, that was all-no pelvic or spinal involvement.) She was sent up to my ward. It was very interesting up here for a while: she insisted that she was fine, that her legs hurt a little but she wanted to take a walk, that was what she had come out for, anyway....What do you say to something like that? I cried a lot, and held her down. The next day I was transferred to another building, where they needed a nurse, so they said.

After much screaming and yelling at the chief of Nursing Services, I managed to get out of the nothing building where they sent me-a building in no need whatsoever of another nurse, where the only really worthwhilething to do was to read to the patients-and came back to the Med-Surg building. It took me a month.

When I got back, I found matters somewhat improved. The day nurse on this ward is a good friend of mine, a very highly skilled lady who got something like a 99 in her psychiatric nursing course, and deserved more. She was not afraid of this patient, and had been doing constant therapy on her. It was working. The patient was calmer than she had been, was being weaned off the 4000 mg/day of Thorazine that her building had her on (500 mg / day is enough to quiet just about anyone, but a tolerance had built up), she was beginning to look around and see things, to form relationships, with people (she was schizophrenic, and was actually reaching out...incredible). She still had relapses, incidents of going for people, of throwing things, but they were abortive. She was getting better.

Some time pa.s.sed...she continued to improve. I got taken off my job for awhile to go through the hospital's orientation program, came back again for a little while, found her doing well, took a few days' leave for Discon, came back, found her still getting better-and then everything fell in on me-on her-rather suddenly.

This requires a small digression. We have on this ward, on the evening shift, an idiot. It has the letters RN after its name, but don't let it fool you: a nurse it ain't. This person delights in tormenting the patients verbally, and not getting caught at it. G.o.d knows I've tried, but I must walk too heavy or something. On this particular night she told the patient that the day nurse (whom the patient loved dearly, and who was having her turn in orientation) was never, never coming back again. Are there words foul enough for such a person? Well...

I came on at 12, checked my ward, found things quiet: the patient in question resting in bed, awake. I went to her, checked her casts (arm and both legs), spoke to her: she didn't answer. This was par for the course, so I wished her good night and went away.

About 1:30 I heard something go crack! and then heard gla.s.s shatter on the floor. By the time I was standing up, something went thud! and by the time I reached the door of the office, so had my patient. She was out of her bed, teetering on her casts, with a big sharp piece of gla.s.s in her uncasted left hand. The hand was bleeding a little, but that was not what concerned me. This lady was no amateur, no wristslasher; she would bend her head back to cut her throat. She was faster than I was: also somewhat larger. (Picture it if you will, Harlan: 160 lbs. of her, about six feet tall: 104 lbs. of me, 5'6": and she has the gla.s.s. Who wins the wrestling match? You can't use aikido holds on someone with three casted extremities. I can't anyway.) (Not when the fourth is flailing gla.s.s-and it's my patient.) So we stood there, and I looked up (a mile or so, it seemed) and said, "What's the matter?" and she said, "Pat's not coming back, (the RN) said so, and I don't want to believe her: but if it's true, then I want to be dead. And if it's not true, look at me, look how easily someone made me go crazy! I ought to be dead."

Everything useful or therapeutic I had ever learned, heard or read went shoosh! out of my head, leaving me tabula rosa, as the saying goes, and feeling hopeless. And I opened my mouth, knowing full well that nothing worthwhile would come out, and the tail of my eye caught sight of an idea, sitting on top of a pile of books on calligraphy that I had brought with me: a copy of I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM. I said, "Come on in, sit down, let's talk about it. I have something here that may interest you." And we sat down, and I took my life in my hands and read her "Lonelyache."

You proclaimed the story to be therapy in the introduction, of course. I have often wondered after reading it just how far your won experience paralleled it. Merely clinical interest-all the wondering went out of me that night.

I was watching my lady.

About halfway through she put the gla.s.s aside and shut her eyes and listened. I shook and kept reading.

When it was nearly finished, I panicked: the ending was too downkey: the protagonist commits suicide! I didn't know if I could turn her mood upward again.

I finished it, and she looked at me hard for a few seconds, and I said, "Well, what does it do for you?" She was quiet for a moment and then said, "He wanted to be brave on the way out, didn't he?"

"I think so," I said.

She thought some more. "But he did go out."

I nodded. It was all that was left in me: I was getting the beginnings of Oh-G.o.d-I-Did-The-Wrong-Thing!

and I was holding hard to keep it from showing.

"Is that the only way to go, then?" she asked, and oh! The despair. I wanted to cry and couldn't. I said, "but consider first: why did he go?"

"Because he was all alone." And she looked at me, and fed me the straight line I had been praying for: "I'm all alone too, though-aren't I?"

"Do you think you're all alone?"

She looked at me, and at the gla.s.s, and at me again, and stood up rocking on her casts again. She tossed the answer off so casually: "No, I guess not." She clumped back to her room, got back in bed, and rolled herself up in the covers and went to sleep. So casually.

So even if you weren't here in the body, Harlan, you helped. No telling whether this will happen again, or how many times, or what might trigger it, but this time you helped. I thank you for having the guts to put your own fear and loneliness down on paper and then allowing it to be published: it takes courage. And has done someone some good.

Thought you might like to know.

That's another kind of pain, and it's real, and if that letter didn't hurt you where you hurt best, then nothingin 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 ripoff, I thought. Cynical and smarta.s.s like the other fifty people booked for that day. Seven and a half hours of bulls.h.i.t 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 a few months when Pyramid reissues 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 Bonnie and Clyde would have envied.

But the two California Highway Patrol officers who lectured the cla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 beads 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 peoople 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 G.o.d. 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 cannot block that scream from my mind. I never will. I now drive more slowly, I now fasten my safety belt, I now take no chances. I have always been a fast driver, some say a crazy driver; though I've never had an accident and used to race sports cars, I always thought I was a f.u.c.king Barney Oldfield. No more. Chuckle if you will, friends, but I'm on the wagon. And that wagon gonna move very carefully. I don't ever want to hear that scream outside my head.

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 G.o.ddam 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 funny, and they were intended so because I think the only things that get us through the pain are laughter and the promise of love to come. At least he possibility of it. But each one of them has some special pain in it, and I urge you to seek it out, through the chuckles and the bug-eyed aliens and the what-if furniture that makes these stories not sermons.

Because there's only one thing that links us as human beings: the universality of our pain and thecommonality of our need to go out bravely.

Harlan Ellison9 November 74

Introduction to First Edition: SPERO MELIORA: From the Vicinity of Alienation

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 const.i.tutionally capable of publishing, and which seems well on its way to becoming an "underground cla.s.sic" for those who have read it in ma.n.u.script 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 quant.i.ty. Wilde's life contradicts most of what he wrote. Shaw and d.i.c.kens and Stendahl 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.

There is no introduction this time. I'm tired.

This is my first hook 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 Bunny was only Welsh Rarebit misp.r.o.nounced; "good women" exist in their idyllic state mostly in weak novels by Irving Wallace, John O'Hara, Fannie Hurst and Leon Urine (my misspell, not the typesetter's); Marilyn Monroe, Camus and JFK got cut off in their prime, and the eggsucking monsters who buried those three Civil Rights workers twenty-one feet down are running loose; and the sense of wonder has been relegated to buying old comic books and catching The Shadow on Sunday radio, trying to find out where that innocence of childhood or nature went.

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 stunned by the hammers of deadlines, publishers, schedules and irresponsible authors. And seven times I came to a.s.s-grinding halts.

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 a.s.saying 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.dization 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-a.s.sed 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 gonna change the course of Western Civilization, and Orville Prescott is too busy simpering over Updike to find time for a paperback novelist, so what the h.e.l.l.

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 w.a.n.gle the s.p.a.ce 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 EllisonHollywood, 1965Late 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 t.i.tle to the designation, Montgomery is still no flowerbed of racial sanity) (but the myth of the "liberal" North sure got the h.e.l.l shot out of it by the Southies from Irish-redneck Boston).