A lit fuse, p.3
A Lit Fuse, page 3
“She’d say, ‘like what?’
“ ‘With your skirt up like that, you can’t go out like that.’
“ ‘Yes I can. Come on, we’re going to the movies.’ And I would start to cry, and she would make me cry and sit me there until we were one minute shy of missing that bus down Mentor Avenue. She would do that to me over and over and over again. I didn’t know it was sibling rivalry till I was seventy-five. Out of the blue, a few years ago, I realized, holy shit, she had every reason to be mean to me. I deserved it.”
That epiphany was long in coming. Before that — in his July 10, 1970, television column for the Los Angeles Free Press — Ellison launched a fusillade against his sister. “I don’t hate her, I despise her,” he wrote. “There’s a big difference. Hate means you have affection somewhere in you; despising someone means they are so contemptible that they are beneath rational notice.” The triggering event for this column was a visit from Beverly and her husband, Jerold Rabnick, in March of that year during which she revealed “that [she] was not only prejudiced and a bigot, but she is essentially a stupid person (italics Ellison’s) … Were I a more devout Jew, I would sit shiva for my sister; for me, she is dead.”
Nevertheless, when Beverly Ellison Rabnick actually died in 2010 after a succession of illnesses, Ellison — according to Lisa, who had to break the news to him — “he took to the bed, and he still won’t say that’s what it was, but he went into mourning and didn’t leave the house, it seemed for months and months. Because there were such unresolved issues there.”
It was Lisa who tried for years to broker rapprochement between the siblings, but first she had to make headway herself. “He always thought that I was the JAP,” she says. “He didn’t give me a chance. I’m not just like my mom. I work; I travel; I’m into the arts. But for years he just didn’t want to talk to me or have anything to do with me because he thought I was just a little Bev. So, yeah, I did have the curse of Beverly on my back. That’s why I would pop up [on his speaking engagements] like we did in Atlanta, and then in Columbus, because I promised my grandmother I would always stay in touch, I would do whatever I can to keep in touch.”
As for Louis Ellison, Harlan had scant time to know him. “My father worked like a dog,” he says. “When he wasn’t working, he adored me. He loved me, but my parents were like a pair of pandas that gave birth to a catamount. They didn’t know what the hell to do with me. I drove them insane, but they loved me and they treated me better than I ever deserved. I was not as kind as I should’ve been. I was not as loving to my mother as I should’ve [been]. She was the authority figure. It wasn’t that they didn’t yell at me, because I was always being yelled at by everybody. My dad never raised his hand to me except once in his life. It cost him far more than it cost me.” In The Harlan Ellison Hornbook, he describes an occasion when as a child he had done something “outstandingly shitty”4 and was taken to the basement for a strapping. “I got over the stinging in about an hour,” he writes, but “my father became ill. He went upstairs into his bedroom and he cried. He wasn’t himself for several weeks after.”
For a kid who seemed one step above feral, young Ellison defied the “snails and puppy dog tails” description of boyhood by being obsessively neat about his bedroom. “I was not so much anal retentive as I was obsessive-compulsive,” he says. “I would put things in a place where they wouldn’t be fallen over, and, if I noticed dust in a place where something had been for five years, I would take everything down and clean. My mother never had to say, ‘Harlan, put your books away’ or ‘Harlan, make your bed’ because I did all those things as a matter of course. I couldn’t function if there were things out of place.” He remains so today.
Even so, Ellison admits that he got away with an awful lot. “I was like Huckleberry Finn. I pretty much raised myself. I ran away when I wanted to and ran back when I wanted to. I came home and stayed out and stayed in. They just kind of sighed and suffered along with me. They were not by any means lackadaisical or non-interested. If you’ve got a handful of sand, it’s gonna run. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to hold on to as much as you can.” He takes pride that he was the DBS (“Designated Bad Seed”) of his crowd, meaning that, if there was ever any trouble, it was probably his doing. “I was the kid that everybody was told not to play with,” he says with a flicker of pride.
It was here that he began storing memories that he would later roll into his fiction. He boasts of having “telephonic memory” in that he can remember “things I hear, but I see them better than they were.” It’s been an asset for him as a writer but a burden for him as a man, especially when emotions accompany the images. “The first thing I remember, my first memory in life,” he says, his piercing light blue eyes focusing on something nearly eight decades ago, “is my mother leaning over my crib and leaning down. I remember my mother’s perfume — Evening in Paris — any time I smell that perfume; even today, they still make it. My mother was going out. She must’ve been going out because I grabbed onto her pearls. I reached up and I grabbed them and started sucking on the pearls, and my momma had to take them out of my hand. I had to be under a year old because, by the time I was two, I could already read. I had taught myself to read from reading cereal boxes.” His first childhood book was Millions of Cats (1928) by Wada Gág, and the first one he borrowed from the public library — he got his library card at the age of three — was Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937). Ellison is emphatic that the name is pronounced “Soyce” instead of “Soose,” boasting that Geisel himself tutored him on how to say it.5 At the age of five, he sneaked into the public library and devoured the children’s section. “Then they wouldn’t let me in the adult section because I was a kid, so I laid down on my stomach like an eel, and I inched my way along the floorboards underneath the sight of the woman who checked in the books, and I managed to get my hand inside the adult section. The first book I could pull out was a hardcover, and it was Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, which is a dreary book.”
He learned other things, too, such as gin rummy. His mother was “one of the great gin rummy mavens of the world. My mother, when she was losing, would suddenly overturn the table and scream, ‘Earthquake!’ I would say, ‘Momma we’re in Cleveland.’
“I adored my father just because he was my father and because he was so handsome. He always treated me with a kind of, well, oddly enough, I can’t tell now whether it was respect or weariness. But I remember one day when I had a comic book that I wanted my dad to read for some reason, I stood behind his big easy chair. We read a comic together and that’s all that happened. That’s all there is to the story. We read a comic together. Captain Marvel, I believe. But I was in heaven because my father and I were participating. Because my dad didn’t play baseball, and I was too small for sports. So there was no way we did that together, but we did this together.
“We would go out on a Sunday. My mother, my dad, and I would drive out and go to Isaly’s and get ice cream. I always had to say, ‘Where are we going?’ and they would say, ‘We’re just driving.’ I would say, ‘You can’t just drive. You have to be going somewhere,’ so we would have to go somewhere.”
Though he loved his father, the two men were distant for reasons that Ellison has tried in his writing to comprehend. “I’m sure I’ve gone on walks with him,” he says, “but I don’t remember. When he would come home, he was exhausted from work, not just nine to five but eight to ten. No television, we’d turn on the radio. My dad would just want to sit down. He’d smoke his pipe, smoke his cigar, he’d read the newspaper, ask me about school. Other than that, there was none of that big type family union. He was a good father, and he paid attention to me, but not as much as he would’ve liked to and not as much as I would’ve liked him to. My mother was stuck with me. It brings back memories that I’m not happy about. I had no brothers. I had a sister who, for all intents and purposes, was no sister. So I was all alone.”
But not for long. By 1939 the Ellisons had relocated to 89 Harmon Drive in Painesville, Ohio, some thirty miles northeast of Cleveland, a few blocks from Lake Erie. As young Ellison would discover, Painesville was aptly named. At first, the diminutive boy (he would never exceed 5' 5", barely taller than his father6) made friends, finding that his gift of knowledge and ability to read others’ body language made him a natural leader.
“I was the one who ran the gang,” he says. “If I could get enough kids interested in something, then I was the gang leader. There were maybe three or four kids who ran with me, but they were all their own kids and I was the bad one among them. I would get them into trouble, so their parents were always nervous about them playing with me. Otherwise, I was reading. My childhood was eventful by the trouble that I got into all the time.”
At the age of eight, he was busted at the local A&P for opening a box of Kellogg’s Pep cereal to filch a Felix the Cat pin he was keen to add to his collection. His gambit might have escaped detection, but he opened (he says) 356 boxes before he found the one pin that would complete his set of thirty-six, and the evidence was too massive to miss. “I was taken to the Painesville pokey,” he says, “where the Cossack-in-charge ran me through a chamber of horrors guaranteed to traumatize a septuagenarian, much less an eight-year-old; I was hustled through the drunk tank and the corridors of cells, staring at local thugs and unfortunates who had been caged up for unnameable offenses, who leered and jeered and beckoned and puked in my direction. Well, sir, may I tell your face that when I got out of there, I was a candidate for a nursery school run by Rimbaud and de Sade. And though I am now aware of the misguided philosophy behind the cop’s actions — scare the little snotnose, and he’ll be a law-abiding citizen from this point on — it was my very first understanding of the limited humanity of many minions of the law.”
He wrote of the experience in “Free with This Box!” (1958) and has been skeptical of police, not to mention The Establishment, ever since.7
One particular incident burned into Ellison’s memory, and it involves a birthday party his parents held for him when he was nine or ten. “I knew no one would come to my party,” he says. “But I worked out all sorts of things. I laid out all my comics on the floor so that just the titles of the comics were showing. By about five o’clock, no one had showed up. My mother was home, my father was working, and my sister was away at college, I presume. So I ran away. I ran up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue, which was the east-west thoroughfare that ran into Euclid Avenue when it gets into Cleveland. Across the street was the old Colony Lumber company. There were stacks of lumber everywhere. Behind, it had grown to weeds and swamp. It was swampland and swale and mud and a pool in a pond with mosquitoes and reeds, and I sat there on the edge of that pond with my feet dangling in, throwing pebbles and stuff in, until nine o’clock when I had been bitten enough by mosquitoes and I went home. I walked in and my mother and father had prepared a cake for me. There was no one there, no kids, my comics were still in place on the floor. My mother and father were crying, and they wished me happy birthday. I had a piece of cake and I went to bed.” This memory of his peers’ rejection became a key image in “Count the Clock That Tells the Time” (1978), an apocalyptic tale about two people who find each other just as the world is ending.
Ellison’s overwhelming memory of Painesville is its anti-Semitism, though he may be amplifying it from actual experience. The name Ellison doesn’t suggest an obvious ethnicity even though it is derived from Eli’s son, referencing the Old Testament’s Book of Samuel. But God’s gentle people were more aware of his Judaism than he was.
“We were not very Jewish,” he says, though he does admit to being bar mitzvahed when he was thirteen. “I was a shabbas Jew. We were Jewish when it came to the high holy days. The rest of the time, the only time Jewishness was brought up was when somebody called somebody a kike and there had been a fight. And that was usually me.”
Beverly had a different religious experience: church. “Her friends were Catholic,” says her daughter, Lisa. “She went to church because there wasn’t a temple, there weren’t a lot of Jewish friends, so she grew up going to church. And then she got all Jewy-Jew later in life.”
Young Ellison, however, stood out. “I was the only Jewish kid in town for a long while until the Millers and the Rogats moved in,” he says. Significantly, the only teacher he remembers from grammar school was Mrs. O’Hara, who “picked me up and brought me back inside to the nurse’s station after they8 had beaten me up for being a Jew. I hugged her. I had enough resentment in me for the kids in the neighborhood who beat me up and for the anti-Semites. Of course, I didn’t know from anti-Semites; what I knew from was ‘dirty kike.’ ”
He was baffled when a grammar school classmate casually asked him, “If you’re Jewish, where are your horns?” He felt his head and told her in all innocence, “I don’t have horns.”
“Does your hair cover them?” she persisted.
“I don’t have horns,” he insisted. Even when another classmate told him he was going to hell because he wasn’t Christian, he didn’t catch on.
Not until the beatings started. And he fought back.
His parents could not have been unaware of their singular religious status in Painesville, but unlike their son they didn’t face it daily at the end of a schoolyard fist. “One time I came home after [other kids] had torn all my clothes off me, and my mother said, standing there at the sink with a washcloth in her hands, ‘What did you say to get them so angry?’ It was an icicle jammed into my chest. That my own mother would not understand. At that moment I had an epiphany: I cannot bear it when people laugh at me.” He pauses, then reflects somewhat distantly, “It’s hard now to know, short of psychiatry, what one’s feelings really were.”
Time and again, Ellison has cited anti-Semitism in Painesville and named grammar school classmates Ted Beckwith, David Jividen, Jack Wheeldon, and Ken Rogat as his personal antagonists, with Rogat being a particular disappointment because he was a fellow Jew. Rogat disagrees: “I grew up same place, same everything. I never had that experience.” But Rogat, who is now a financial advisor in Cleveland, does agree that Jack Wheeldon was bad news. “Wheeldon was a smart-ass, dumb, almost a redneck, not a nice guy,” he says, and he recalls learning from classmate Bob Reed, years later at a school reunion, that Wheeldon had referred to Ellison as a “dirty Jew.” Reed reported it to his mother, who told him that such language was unacceptable. “I have no idea that Harlan had any such incidents,” says Rogat, who also heard Wheeldon slight Ellison. “I hopped in front of him and said, ‘Wheeldon, you can say anything, you know I don’t like him any more than you do, but you can’t call him a dirty Jew,’ and we pushed each other around.” Because of this, Rogat believes, “Harlan interpreted, for the rest of his life, that Painesville was therefore anti-Semitic.”9 Ellison also recalls Wheeldon and Beckwith making anti-Semitic comments while sitting behind him at a school assembly. Finally Ellison turned around and punched Wheeldon in the face so hard it toppled him and everyone else in the row onto the floor. “Of course, I was dragged off to the principal’s office,” Ellison says. “I sat in that chair so much that the seat conformed to my rear end.”10
Battles were also triggered because, as Ellison readily admits, “I was a smartass. My childhood, apart from my family, was a horror.” As for his numerous bêtes noires, it’s beyond trite to say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Ellison managed to get even with many of his tormentors, not by sneaking into their homes and strangling them in their beds but by immortalizing them as antagonists in his stories. “But it’s really pointless because they did not recognize themselves. There was a guy who conned me into doing a construction job and … he screwed me and he screwed me badly. I got even with him in a story called ‘The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge.’ I settled the score by giving him the worst possible fate I could think of. I never heard a word from him. He never sued me. I didn’t mention his name. I twisted his name so that I wasn’t legally responsible. But yeah, I’ve gotten even in ‘Final Shtick.’ I’ve gotten even in ‘One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,’11 I’ve gotten even with all the kids who beat me up when I was a kid. I’ve used stories to get even, but it’s not really getting even. It’s not taking a two-by-four upside their head.”
“When you’ve been made an outsider,” he told filmmaker Erik Nelson, “you are always angry. You respond to it in a lot of ways. Some people get surly; some people get mean; a lot of people become serial killers. I got so smart that I could just kill them with their own logic or their own mouth.” He points to a photograph of his third grade class in which he is the shortest kid there, shorter even than the girls. Look closer and it shows that he is standing with his hands on his hips in a belligerent pose, and he has a Band-Aid on his face from a recent playground scrap. At the other end of the photo stands Bill Brown who has an even bigger bandage on his face, having lost the fight.12
Jack Wheeldon13 is named only once in “Final Shtick,” but his specter pervades the tale of an accomplished comedian, Marty Field (nee Morrie Feldman), who returns to his roots in Lainesville [sic], Ohio, for a tribute at his old high school. Within, the still-bitter Field plans to throw the award back in the faces of all the people who had made his childhood a living hell. When the moment finally comes, however, he realizes that he is a coward — or perhaps he understands that the pain of his past is what made him the success of today. Published in 1960, the story reads like a struggle between self-analysis and revenge, with revenge coming out ahead in the sense that just writing about Lainesville is already an indictment.
