Harlan would have been 90 years old today. I never got to meet him in person.
I read Harlan Ellison before I discovered his commentary on the Sci-Fi Channel. A freshly minted high school graduate in 1989, I flew to Los Angeles to attend a workshop at UCLA on film history and filmmaking. For that trip, I had a set of cassettes with Harlan reading “A Boy and His Dog” and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman” I admit, the stories just sounded good when I read the back of the package at my local Waldenbooks. I listened to those stories on the flight out and in my shared dorm room at Rieber Hall. That week was full of lectures by the likes of Eddie Milkis and Barbara Billingsley, visits to Warner and UA Studios where we mobbed Roger Rabbit voice actor Charles Fleisher and punched down the next summer movie “Young Einstein”. It was a weird week that I shared with friends from my high school arts program. I met some amazing people there. But none of that sticks with me as much as those stories on cassette.
My god. Those tapes had this angry, powerful rock and roll feeling in both word and performance. It knocked Hunter S. Thompson and Douglas Adams off my reading list for the summer because I needed to read more. “Ticktock” is a story that haunts me every time someone wastes my time with a stupid meeting. “ABaHD” is a story (and a movie) I bring out every so often just to remember how it stood out against the post-apoc tales I love. It was up there with the first time I heard “Dark Side of the Moon” or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” or witnessed Barack Obama crush it at the 2004 DNC convention.
Back in 1989, I had no idea that the guy reading me those stories was living less than 7 miles from the back of my head at that time in my life. I had no inspiration to drop everything and drive out to Pink’s for a hot dog or check out the comic shop he frequented.
That kid was not ready. Even if he knew that the mythical Ellison Wonderland in Sherman Oaks was just a run up Sunset to Beverly Glen Boulevard and into the winding way beyond Mulholland Drive, he would have chickened out at the opportunity to witness the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars for himself.
At that time I didn’t know the personality of Harlan Ellison. I just knew the mad jazz he played in prose. But I couldn’t find his books at my local B. Dalton because most were out of print. In the days before online bookstores, I had to journey into Philadelphia to find a bookstore with the taste and common sense to carry his books. More often than not when I found one, it was a limited edition well out of my price range, so I relied on trading cassette tapes and hoping to find something through inter-library loan.
A few years later, I saw THIS on the Sci-Fi Channel. This Gilly Barker on basic cable reminded me of what I felt when I read Adams and Thompson and listened to the comedy of Python and Lampoon or watched Belushi and Lenny Bruce perform. He, like all of them, was a manifestation of the spirit of Rock and Roll. Truth. Justice. And Fuck You if You Don’t Believe It.
I remember wanting to just give up and go into brush sales after reading “Soft Monkey”. I remember weeping openly after reading “Jeffty is Five” and AGAIN after hearing the man read it. I can still feel my frustration after coming away from “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and scouring all the gossip surrounding his involvement with the epic Star Trek story “The City on the Edge of Forever”. I still go back to “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and try to better understand it. I disagreed with him on several points, like the quality of the Star Wars movies and the idea that “the script is EVERYTHING” in film. But I learned from those essays I would later find online and in his collected criticism.
Further along, I found the website “Ellison Webderland” which hosted so many wonderful conversations among “F”riends “o”f “E”llison who became my friends in real life – many remain with me to this day despite my many character flaws. We were united in our appreciation of the author but shared so much that we created a community exclusive of that connection. Those conversations are long gone now and the website appears to be a memorial to a time when Harlan would log in, read, comment, and pretend he had no interest in that new and terrible technology.
I remember posting something that pissed Harlan off so much that he equated my existence to old cheese melting on the sidewalk. But I also recall his warm, personal message out of nowhere congratulating me on the birth of my son Colin. It is a great coincidence that I happened to know a great comic book creator that Harlan loved and was able to introduce them.
Any success I claim, I owe to the grace and kindness of those who chose to affirm my value. People like Lynn. Brian. Bernie. Doug. Peggy. Cindy. Chuck. Steve. Alex. Peter. Stacy. Those people and others, like Harlan’s stories, changed my life. When I started publishing and producing stories, Harlan’s kindness inspired me to overcome my personal issues and step up alongside professionals who knew and worked with him here on the East Coast. Many of those people have offered me great kindness and grace over the past 20 years. They, as much as his work, are his legacy.
Once, when I dared ask Harlan for advice on how to improve at selling what I was writing, he didn’t ignore me or just post a pithy answer to the website. He called me. We talked. He gifted me with a blurb to use like a wizard handing some anonymous goon a single-use WMD to use in their futile quest to destroy Dread Cthulhu. He told me a story. He scolded me for calling him “sir” — several times. And he refused to read my latest manuscript with a “no” that carried a knowing smile. There was none of that angry man who did not suffer fools. He understood. And somehow, he believed.
This guy who inspired Gaiman, Pratchett, Straczynski (who helped preserve my great love of a certain franchise and the Ellison estate itself), GRR Martin, as well as countless musicians, comics, artists, and literary contemporaries, was ready to launch the first edition of “Harlan Ellison’s Watching” and was working on who knows which less than a few miles away on top of a mountain from a kid who didn’t know any better than to sit in his dorm room and listen to those stories rather than head into Westwood with the rest of the kids to see Lethal Weapon Whatever and discover if streetwalkers really did exist.
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