That often draws a gasp from the assemblage.
Then I tell them what I’m about to tell you. My deep, dark secret of success in this life: you can have anything you want. Anything Everydamnthing! All you have to do is go and get it. All you can have in this life is what you grab and hold onto with both hands. But you got to go and do!
Some of them will stare at me with disbelief. They live behind their eyes and they suppose some fairy tale that I was born to wealth and indolence, that I use voodoo or murdered a wealthy relative to achieve my present position of relative financial comfort. So I tell them two short stories about HOW IT IS IN THE REAL WORLD. These two stories I tell you now:
When I got my tail thrown out of Ohio State University after a year and a half, and went to New York to try and make a career as a writer, I’d been on my own—pretty much—since I was thirteen. I’d worked at all kinds of jobs, eking out an existence on the road, moving toward goals only vaguely identifiable.
I had to get a job, to live. I got myself a ratty little room at 611 West 114th Street, off Broadway, uptown, across from Columbia University. It cost $13 a week, and the only thing that could be said in its favor was that Bob Silverberg—who was a year ahead of me in writing professionally—lived in the building. But even that $13 a week was rough to come up with. That was 1954.
My Mother, who was convinced at that point that I’d wind up either in jail or the gutter (and she had good cause to wonder such a wonder, I assure you), came to New York on her way to Europe. Before you draw any wild conclusions that my Mother was a frenetic jet-setter who spent all her time, like Auntie Mame, dashing hither and yon, permit me to disabuse you. For twenty-five years my Mother had lived in Cleveland and Painesville, Ohio, by the skin of her and my Father’s teeth, and when my Dad died in 1949, my Mother had to make do the best way she knew how. Now, five years later, she had scrimped and saved sufficient pennies to go for a couple of weeks to visit family she hadn’t seen in a quarter century, in England. It was a poor folks’ journey, I guarantee. But she had treated herself to two posh nights at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South before going abroad, and I went to see her. Even as hard up as she was, she had stretched her finances so she was able to give me five postdated checks for $13 each…my rent for the next month…postdated so I wouldn’t blow the money on books or something else less immediate than shelter. I took the gesture as an insult, of course. I was then, and frequently am now, an utter asshole about accepting compliments, largesse, kindness, charity or pity.
I stalked out of the St. Moritz—it was a Saturday afternoon—vowing I’d get a job immediately. I was not going to accept one of those checks!
(As it turned out, from what follows, I did use the checks to keep the rain off my head. Did you ever notice how we all try to appear as Pillars of Strength and Self-Sufficiency, only to rationalize our weakness when we do precisely what we said we wouldn’t do?)
I decided right then and there, on Seventh Avenue and Central Park South, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, that I was going to get a job that day. I started walking downtown on Seventh Avenue, and with no direction in mind, no destination at hand, I turned left into W. 57th Street, walking crosstown toward the East River. I walked for a long block and, between Sixth Avenue—known to all but tourists who call it the Avenue of the Americas as Sixth Avenue—and Fifth, I turned into an office building. For no damned good reason except it was the first one I turned into.
I checked the listing of residents in the building, on the lobby directory, and the one that caught my eye was Capitol Records. I walked through the narrow and dingy lobby to the elevator, in semi-darkness. It was a standard upper midtown sweatshop office building lobby, faintly redolent with the scent of dirty pushbrooms and Pine-Sol.
I took the elevator up to whatever floor it was (that’s almost twenty years ago, there are small details I don’t recall) and got out. There was a reception desk. A man was sitting behind the desk, reading a newspaper. It was a Saturday, the regular receptionist was off, and this was some minor office manager type who’d been assigned to keep the place on skeleton alert.
“Yeah?” he asked, lowering the paper an inch.
“I want a job,” I said, flat and direct. I knew he would say nothing doing, and I was ready to turn around and walk down to the next floor and try the next office, and the next, and the next, and the next, till I found someone who’d let me swab decks or clean toilets just so I wouldn’t have to take those checks.
“How the hell did you know about the job?” he asked. “The ad doesn’t run till tomorrow in the Times.”
Well, what had happened was, there was an opening—not a good opening, as you’ll see—but an opening nonetheless—and with the dumb luck that has sustained me all my life, I had by chance wandered into one of the few offices in New York that had a job. So he gave me the job, and said to report on Monday morning at 8:00, wearing a tie and jacket.
Two days later I showed up at the office building on W. 57th, and the line of applicants waiting for the job stretched from the elevator, through the lobby, and out onto the street. There was a lot of unemployment in New York during that period.
I shoved my way through, begging people’s pardon, with secretarial and layabout types snarling at me, and when I got to the elevator, the operator looked at the note I’d been given on Saturday, and announced to the people, “Okay, you people, you can take off now. The job’s filled.”
I have never, before or since, felt such massed hatred and desire to slash my throat. Except once, at a science fiction convention in St. Louis, but that’s another story.
The operator caged me and whipped me upstairs.
The office manager gave me over to a lady of sixty-five years, and told her to put me to work in the order room.
I was then taken into an enormous loft, about half the length of a football field, in which incredibly long zinc-top tables were lined up one after another, across the full distance from wall to wall. It was well-lit, by fluorescents hanging from the peeling ceiling. But the windows to the world outside were crusted over with filth, and were barred.
I was startled to see that even at a few minutes after eight in the ayem, the tables were being used by almost a hundred men and women, hunched over stacks of papers; their curved bodies were chaired a foot apart, like the visitors’ room at a penal institution. And everyone was working, bent over and no one talking.
The old lady took me to an open chair in the middle of one of the tables, sat me down, and explained that the stack of bills of lading on my left had to be tallied with the invoice sheet on my right, that all I had to do was verify the number in red on the lading bill on my left with its corresponding number in blue on the invoice sheet to my right. Just check them off, that was all.
And she went away.
I looked around for a moment, before starting work. The room was dismal, cold and without atmosphere, somehow devoid of even ghosts or the warmth of days through which humans had lived. It was the compleat sweatshop. It was the distribution center for Capitol Records. Orders would come in from dealers and wholesalers all over the country, in the form of bills of lading; then they would be verified, checked, authenticated, coordinated: and then they’d be sent out again to be filled by the various Capitol pressing plants such as the one in Gloversville, New York. My job was to paperwork that process by one small increment. Sighing, miserable…but working…holding down a steady, regular job…I set to my task.
It took me about six minutes to check off the numbers from the stack on the left with the invoice on the right.
I went quickly, it was monkeywork entailing no thought or imagination or even effort, really. The stack moved from my IN basket to my OUT basket.
I settled back for a moment of air, and—as if conjured up by the Demon God of Industry—a ferretlike little man popped out of nowhere, grabbed the stack from the OUT basket, and dumped another stack in my IN basket.
Then he was gone. Poof!
I shook my head, startled, and fell to the new batch of invoices and billings. Another six minutes.
IN basket empty, OUT basket full.
Poof! he reappeared, grabbed, dumped more stack, and Poof! was gone.
I did it again. Another six minutes.
Poof! grab dump Poof!
I did it again.
The process repeated itself about a dozen times in the first two hours. No variation, no break, no change, no thought. Then I realized the little old man sitting to my right was staring at me. I turned to him…covertly…I didn’t want the Demon God of Industry to think I was dogging it.
“If you work so fast, they’ll only dump more work on you, young man,” he said, in a thin, quavery voice. “And,” he added, a little sheepishly, “it will make the rest of us look very bad.”
He said it so gently, so meekly, so apologetically, I instantly perceived what the concept of “featherbedding” was all about, and why there are times when it isn’t necessarily an evil work-practice. I nodded to him, smiled, and worked much much more slowly.
Shortly thereafter, we were given a ten-minute break. Everyone else fled for coffee-and, but the little man sat there exhausted, so I sat with him. We talked.
He was a mouse of a creature: gray, balding, slump-shouldered, seemingly without visions or dreams or future. He told me his name but I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember his face. It was a face without hope, I remember that.
We talked about nothing in particular, until he asked me where I’d come from and what I’d done, and where I was going. He seemed almost unnaturally fascinated. When I asked him why his interest, he said it was because I seemed to be so alive, so filled with sharp cute moves and humor. I took it as one of the dearest, truest compliments I’ve ever received. And I told him about how I’d worked in a logging camp, and driven a dynamite truck, and gone to college briefly, and how I wanted to write. His eyes sparkled and a slow, shy grin came to sit on his lips. And when I paused for breath he said, “That’s what I’ve always wanted to do…just go with the wind and do whatever came to mind.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t. I’d lose my job here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Eleven years.”
I paused. I was afraid to ask the next questions.
But I did, and he answered as horribly as I’d expected. He had come to Capitol Records’s distribution center when he was thirty-seven, from an endless string of similar jobs, and he was now forty-eight. He looked seventy. He was making a terrific salary, though. Seventy-five bucks a week. I was making thirty-six bucks a week. Eleven years and he’d come to the magnificent stage of existence where he was making seventy-five dollars, before deductions. Shit, that wasn’t even enough to starve on, much less to derive any joy or enrichment from.
And I suddenly flashed on who he was, and what would happen to me if I sat there any longer. The terror that froze my soul cannot be put into words.
At that moment another stack of bills was dumped in my empty IN basket.
The rest of the room was back at work.
I looked at the withered little gray man beside me, divested of chances, stripped of dreams, flensed of hope or direction, set irrevocably on a cubicled routine of pointless chores making money for Gods on far mountaintops…and I saw what my future would be if I left my life in the hands of those prepared only to dole out thirty-six dollars a week for another human being’s existence.
Thirty years from that moment, I would be him!
With nothing to look forward to but a pension—if I were lucky and Capitol Records was feeling magnanimous—or old age compensation—if they weren’t. A testimonial luncheon, a turnip watch, a pat on the hairless, withered old head, and a twilight life reading Arizona Highways in a $13-a-week cockroach hostelry.
I grabbed up that stack of bills, leaped out of my chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and with all my strength and lungpower flung them into the air, screaming, “FUCK IT!” Amid the bills-of-lading snowstorm, I fled shrieking from that madhouse of boredom and dead dreams on West 57th Street, never to return.
As far as I know, to this day, Capitol Records has an unclaimed check for one-half day’s work, in the name of Harlan Ellison.
Which slides me right into story number two, a very quick, paradigmatic story that makes the point you may have missed in story number one:
Years later. I was already doing well as a writer. I was on my way to realizing all my dreams. I was in an expensive barber shop in Beverly Hills. I was talking to Manny, who was my barber at the time, about being on the road, about moving fast and experiencing life and taking great chunks out of the years so one didn’t die unmourned and unmoved by the universe.
Beside me, in the next chair, was a kid of about seventeen, also getting his hair styled. His eyes were big and round as he listened to me bullshit.
Finally, he said, “Boy! That’s the way I want to live!”
And a surge of joy leaped in my chest. Not all the kids were apathetic, deadass leeches. There were still kids like this one willing to risk, willing to go the distance. I grinned at him, and he finished his remark…
“Yeah, just give me my old man’s Corvette, those credit cards, and I’ll go!”
At that moment, I died a little death.
This commercial has come to you through the sponsorship of what used to be called the Puritan Work Ethic.
INSTALLMENT 32 |
Interim Memo
Mariana went on to better things, I’m told. Stopped using Maxim, went to Kava for emergencies; but basically I’ve been grinding fresh beans for the last, oh, decade or so.
Can you believe this column was written just as Watergate was breaking? Seems like another universe, doesn’t it?
Ah, where have the good times gone?
Pres. Bush is so different from Nixon and Reagan. As I write this, he’s in Poland promising them 1.5 billion in aid if they’ll allow us to put Kentucky Colonel and McDonald’s in Gdansk…immediately after gutting all programs to feed and house the homeless in America, after vetoing the minimum wage bill that would have given sub-subsistence pay to all those incipient capitalists shoveling up the shit at Kentucky Colonel and McDonald’s.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Or the Bush. Or something.
INSTALLMENT 32 | 23 AUGUST 73
IN WHICH THE IMP OF DELIGHT TRIES TO MAKE THE WORLD SMILE
In my never-waning efforts to keep you all sane and productive, I find periods in which the Antichrist attempts of the World-At-Large to drive you bananas press me to even greater efforts. This is one of those periods. You poor, sad things…they’re really trying to do you in, aren’t they? As if it weren’t enough that you’re barely healing from a 23-year involvement with the Vietnam War (it went on so long, most of you blissfully forgot that we entered the fray on 27 June 1950, when Harry sent in “a 35-man Military Assistance Advisory Group to advise the troops there in the use of American weapons”), they’re hitting you with skyrocketing prices on everything, the unnerving Watergate mess that’s guaranteed to make you so paranoid you think your Mother is on the take, a total absence of meat from the markets, the demise of Life magazine, a return of awful Fifties music, Dr. Atkins’s crazy new diet that pillories you for being comfortably overweight, a gas and energy crisis, higher personal and property taxes, a reeling sense that you’re spinning back in time with the reappearance on tv of the NEW Perry Mason and the NEW Dr. Kildare, rotten mail delivery but a greater flood of junk mail, another Jacqueline Susann novel, Egg McMuffin, ersatz Vernor’s ginger ale, the death of Bruce Lee, a tv Special starring Kate Smith doing rock music…
Now take it easy. Come on, now, stop whimpering like that. Uncle Harlan is here to soothe you. You remember, I told you I’d protect you, I wouldn’t let all dem nastie old mans hurt oo. All it takes is realizing there are still areas in which we are all human, all subject to the same vagaries of Fate.
Look: I’ll make it all better right now…
Think of this:
When you’re done making ka-ka, you know how you check the paper to make sure everything is spiffy back there? Well, just consider this: Richard M. Nixon checks the paper, too!
There! Now doesn’t that make it all a little easier to bear?
What’s that you say? Nixon is too anal retentive even to make a ka-ka? Come on, now, you don’t believe that, do you?
You do.
Well, then how about this:
Ehrlichman is up living in Seattle, right? Okay, so one night he’s out driving up toward Vancouver on some dumb errand or other, trying to find a roadside stand that sells fresh vegetables for a decent price, and it gets very late, and he’s miles from anywhere, and he blows his right front tire and manages to get the car stopped without hitting a tree, and he opens the trunk and finds the spare is soft, and he starts to cry. But he pulls himself together just as it begins to drizzle one of those hideous Washington state rains that soak through to your interbron-chial lymph nodes and, pulling his collar up and hunching his bullethead down into his sopping shirt, he starts trudging down the road, looking for a telephone. Well, this is a section of countryside that has been purchased on the sly by a dummy corporation owned, on the q.t., by Bebe Rebozo, because he’s gotten a tip from the Secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, that this whole stretch will soon be picked up by the Federal Government as the future site of a combination SST landing field and Chicano Internment Camp, and all the farmers have been badgered off their land, and all the farmhouses have been bulldozed into the ground like something out of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and there isn’t a lit window for six miles. By the time he finds a commune where there’s a dry spot to sit down, he’s already well on the way to pneumonia, dropping into pleurisy. And the dropouts don’t have a phone. But one of them kindly offers to take his bicycle and ride up the road to the next town, which is three miles off, and call the Automobile Club. So Ehrlichman sits down and waits, and while he’s waiting they offer him some navy bean soup which is laced with peyote, but he doesn’t know it, and he gets stoned out of his mind so that when the AAA truck finally arrives and picks him up, he’s bagged and doesn’t remember where the car is. But the AAA guy—who is pissed at having to come out in the rain, anyhow—figures he may make a buck or two selling this nerd a new spare tire, so he puts him in the truck and drives back up the road to the car, where a Washington State Highway Patrol car is stopped beside Ehrlichman’s vehicle. The Trooper is busy writing out a citation because Ehrlichman half-blocked the road when he skidded to a stop after the tire blew. And Ehrlichman is so miffed, he stumbles out of the AAA truck, slips on the muddy road, falls on his ass and ruins a $300 Savile Row suit, but gets up and tries to pillory the Trooper, who, sensing Ehrlichman is stoned, throws him in the back of the meat wagon to take him in for questioning. Ehrlichman, desperate, tosses his wallet through the window to the AAA guy, screaming, “Call that number on the ID card and tell Dick I’m in trouble!” The Highway Patrol car takes off, even as the wallet hits a mud puddle and sinks half out of sight. The AAA repairman lifts it out with two fingers, flips it open, sees Ehrlichman has no Auto Club card, and drops it back into the puddle…and drives away. Ehrlichman is tossed into a cell and, the next day, at his arraignment on dope charges, makes such a screaming ass of himself that the judge, a canny rustic type wholly out of touch with the world and its vices, remands him to the custody of the local insane asylum.