It is time to put Harlan Ellison's 1961 collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation behind us by reading the four remaining stories. I had been thinking I had five left to read, but that is because I had forgotten I had read "The Late, Great Arnie Draper" in another publication like a year ago. Oops.
"The Late, Great Arnie Draper" (1961)
I read "The Late, Great Arnie Draper," which first appeared here in Gentleman Junkie, in a scan of a 1967 issue of the men's magazine Adam and blogged about it in 2021. Interestingly, there is a mistake on the Harlan Ellison website, which suggests "The Late, Great Arnie Draper" debuted in a 1961 issue of Adam. See, we all make mistakes!
"High Dice" (1961)
Another story that made its initial appearance in
Gentleman Junkie. It would be reprinted in the men's magazine
Knight in 1964, which promoted it on its cover with the description, "Fantastic World of Black Hate and Dope." Sounds controversial!
"High Dice" takes place in the restroom of a crappy restaurant! The restaurant's cook is Kurt, a big muscular black guy who carries a "gravity knife," cheats on his wife, and loves to gamble. Kurt is not a very good cook, but the boss is too scared of him to fire him and if a customer should complain about his cooking, Kurt beats said customer up. Talk about customer service! Look out, Karens, this guy Kurt is having none of your lip!
"High Dice" is all about the end of Kurt's reign of terror! Our narrator is an unlikely ogre slayer, Teddy, a college student and drug addict. Teddy needs "a fix" bad, is having all sorts of horrible withdrawal pains (these withdrawal pains are a recurring feature of Gentleman Junkie, I'm glad I'm a square and have no experiences like those described in this collection, because they sound terrible.) Teddy's dealer is asking thirty-five dollars for a hit, but Teddy has only twenty-five bucks to his name. So, Teddy and the dealer met in this crummy restaurant so Teddy could ask Kurt for the ten bucks the cook owes him. Kurt ushered Teddy into the filthy restroom, and the dealer sat down to drink a chocolate Coke and wait.
(I would like to see a recipe for these chocolate Cokes people in Gentleman Junkie drink--this is a Gentleman Junkie experience I think I might enjoy. Should I just start putting my Ovaltine in Coca-Cola instead of in milk?)
Instead of just forking it over like a gentleman, Kurt insists that Teddy give him a chance to win that ten dollars back, and so on the floor of a disgusting restroom they play craps and a game called "high dice" which is when you each roll a die and high roller wins. Kurt may be famous for cheating, but somehow Teddy wins again and again, and each time Kurt demands a rematch ("Come on, throw, double mah bet,") and if Teddy resists this demand Kurt just hits him. Teddy figures Kurt hates all white people and refuses to allow a white person to beat him, and has no money on him and is just going to browbeat Teddy into playing until he has won whatever money Teddy has on him.
Teddy suffers increasingly severe withdrawal pains and starts crying, while Kurt gets increasingly violent as Teddy wins throw after throw. Things climax when Teddy vomits and some of the vomit gets on Kurt. Kurt starts cutting Teddy with his gravity knife, but there is a "line wrench" in the restroom, and Teddy seizes it and beats Kurt to death, providing a welcome catharsis to those of us readers sitting in the anti-Kurt bleachers. But Teddy doesn't expect that the world will thank him for liberating the neighborhood from Kurt's physical, financial and culinary abuse; he figures he is going to get thrown in prison or the funny farm, and, even worse, his dealer will be spooked by the arrival of the cops and he'll be that much further from getting the fix he needs.
I like this one, despite (because of?) how sickening it is, what with Ellison describing in detail the dirty restroom and the vomit and all that. My copy of Gentleman Junkie has a list of controversial topics on the cover, and one is "Negro Prejudice;" maybe that refers to Kurt's hatred of the white man, a bad attitude that leads him to his doom.
"Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" (1961)
Like "The Late, Great Arnie Draper" and "High Dice," "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" debuted here in
Gentleman Junkie and would be reprinted in a men's magazine, in this case a 1966 issue of
Adam. That issue of
Adam actually reprinted two Ellison stories; the other, 1956's "Both Ends of the Candle," appeared in the 1966 magazine under a pen name. (It seems weird to publish a story in a book with your name plastered on the front of it, and then publish the story again in a nudie magazine under a pseudonym, but I guess life is weird.) In 1970 "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" appeared again in a collection put out by our friends at Belmont,
Over the Edge.
"Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" is a gimmicky filler story that I thought was sort of inconclusive and lacked focus. Issuing a negative judgement on this one.
A man with a beard comes to Prince, a town where nobody wears a beard. The stranger is an artist, and opens an art gallery where he shows his paintings in the shop window. These paintings reveal the dark secrets of the members of the community--this guy is an adulterer, that guy is biracial ("half-Negro,") these women are lesbians, the town beggar is secretly rich, that guy is impotent and leaves his wife unsatisfied, etc. These revelations lead to people losing their jobs, marriages collapsing, and violence, wrecking the previously orderly community. When somebody confronts the painter, the town wrecker says that he is the son of a German couple murdered by a mob during the war in a fit of anti-German hysteria. But then admits that is a lie. It is hinted that this bearded troublemaker is the Devil or a servant of Satan, but he also says "I am quite as human as you." The painter then murders his interlocutor, and then he leaves town, apparently to go destabilize some other town.
I guess this story is an expose of the hypocrisy and bigotry of small towns and religious people (the first scene features everybody coming out of church on Sunday, and the guy who confronts the painter in the final scene is a minister) but references to a poor section of town and to the painter taking "long, late night walks in obscure parts of town" make Prince feel like kind of a big place. I also thought it felt out of place for the painter to just blow away the minister in the end; he destroys the town in a way that is meant to be clever and expose people's self-destructive tendencies, but just blasting a guy with a gun is neither clever nor emblematic of the blastee's shortcomings. So the point of the story is a little muddy, and the characters and plot are not powerfully drawn but sort of vague; also the story feels long and tedious. Not good.
Finding "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" kind of limp and diffuse, I was a little surprised to learn it was the basis of a story in the 1995 Harlan Ellison comic book,
Dream Corridor. (The great tarbandu just recently
blogged about Dream Corridor.) This comic is available to read online for free (probably illegally, but I'm no lawyer) so I checked it out. In the framing device page before the story proper begins, Ellison tells us "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" is one of his "personal favorites," and that it was inspired by William Faulkner's "The Ears of Johnny Bear." (Ellison also suggests that what I have called "muddy" and "inconclusive" is in fact "enigmatic." Life is all about spin.) The comic version of "EF,SC" is revised a little: the black boys who beat somebody up are now white, and the murdered German couple are explicitly described as "immigrants;" in the 1961 story the word "immigrant" isn't used, though maybe you are expected to assume they are immigrants?
"No Fourth Commandment" (1956)
This one debuted as "Wandering Killer" in a magazine called
Murder! that it seems only endured for five issues. There's Harlan's name right there on the cover of the second issue, on the thigh of some poor woman suffering some dreadful abuse. In 1971, men who went to the magazine rack in their tireless quest for images of naked ladies had the opportunity to read "No Fourth Commandment" as a bonus after they had, er, taken care of business, as the tale was republished in
Pix ("Magazine for Men Who Like Action!")
under the pen name Jay Solo
.
Our narrator is an itinerant farm laborer, picking a field of strawberries in Louisiana. Picking alongside him is a teenaged boy whom we are told
looks lean and hungry. The narrator, who I suppose is middle-aged, takes a liking to this kid, even though he seems like he is about to explode and says stuff like that he is going to kill his father.
Eventually the boy explains that his father returned from the war in Europe with a German wife, even though his American wife, the kid's mother, was still alive. The mother was so broken up she repeatedly tried to destroy herself. Dad abandoned them, and now the son is crisscrossing the country, doing odd jobs, searching for his faithless father so he can murder him.
Eventually the horrible truth comes to light. The boy has already killed his father, and is totally insane, travelling around, killing men he finds almost at random that in his delusions he sees as his "Paw," immediately forgetting his murders and so thinking he still has to find and kill his father. He has already been caught by the police twice, and escaped twice. As the story ends, after the narrator has watched his little buddy chop up an innocent man with a scythe, the police have captured him again.
This story felt long and repetitive, as Ellison describes the kid's eyes and body and affect again and again, and the narrator tells us again and again that he is lonely and likes the kid and so forth. I guess the story is about loneliness and how love is irrational and can lead us to do stupid and even dangerous things, which is a good theme, but I was not moved, and in fact was rushing to finish this story, not caring a whit about who got killed or didn't get killed.
Thumbs down.
(It sounds to me like a better story could have been written about the German wife, who leaves war-torn Europe to learn she has married a guy who already has a wife and then sees her husband get massacred and is thus left alone in an alien land.)
 |
On the right, 1979 French edition of Gentleman Junkie, volume 2 of
Les Humaoides Associes' Harlan Ellison: Oeuvres, the cover of which
reliably makes me laugh |
"The Night of Delicate Terrors" (1961)
"The Night of Delicate Terrors" debuted in
The Paper: A Chicago Weekly and would be reprinted in a number of Ellison collections including
Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled and
The Essential Ellison. The
Harlan Ellison website suggests that "The Night of Delicate Terrors" also appears in
From the Land of Fear but when I dug out my copy from the shelf I couldn't find it in there. Looking on the sunny side, in my search I did discover that I actually own a paperback copy of
Over the Edge, not the edition with the Dillons cover, but the 1972 printing with the Bob Foster cover, something I had forgotten.
Over the Edge is dedicated to Hugo-award-winning cartoonist and pornographer William Rotsler, and includes a Rotsler cartoon, something all you Rotsler completists will want to be aware of.
Alright, back to "The Night of Delicate Terrors," a candidate for best story in this book. A Northern-born African-American man, apparently some kind of civil rights activist with a position of mid-level authority in a national group, is driving with his family to Chicago from Georgia in a snowstorm that has slowed traffic to a crawl and left many tractor trailers jack-knifed and many passenger cars in the ditch. Tired and hungry, they are desperate for a restaurant or motel to stop at, but they don't know of any establishments here in Kentucky that serve black customers. They go into a place and are angrily rejected by the ugly white staff. The big reveal at the end is that the protagonist's organization is calling for an uprising or a revolutionary war or something of that nature ("so many would be killed, so many, many, many who were innocent") and he, a man of peace, has been skeptical of this radical expedient, but his experience in the restaurant with the ugly white people ("thick neck supporting a crew-cut head...like some off-color, fleshy burr on the end of a toadstool stem") has convinced him of the rightness of setting off the cataclysm.
Ellison does a good job describing the experience of driving in a snowstorm, and generates tension as the black family enters the white establishment hoping to be treated decently but expecting to be abused; "The Night of Delicate Terrors" is pretty good.
**********
Time to mark our
Gentleman Junkie scorecard! Each story gets one of three marks: Good, Acceptable, or Not Good. I am counting the four components of "May We Also Speak?" each as an individual story.
Adding up the results, we see 11 Good marks, 5 Not Good marks, and 9 Acceptable marks, for a net total of 6 points. This book is better than I expected, as I feared the stories on "controversial issues" would be just harangues or manipulative slosh, but Ellison actually tries to make the plots of his stories about racism and other touchy issues surprising and to populate them with characters that are actually interesting, and sometimes he succeeds.
Sounds like this collection deserves a recommendation! Head on over to Amazon or Ebay and get your copy, but don't expect to pay the low low price I paid for mine at Second Story Books!
**********
Ohmigosh, we almost forgot to read Ellison's preface and Frank M. Robinson's intro to Gentleman Junkie!
Gentleman Junkie is dedicated to Robinson, writer of stories for Astounding and Galaxy, a column for Playboy and speeches for Harvey Milk, editor of Rogue and Cavalier, novelist and inductee to the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In his Introduction, Robinson returns the favor, gushing about how great Ellison is; worse, he engages in some embarrassing snobbery about how writers are a special breed, how they are better than most people, how they have talent other people don't and have suffered agonies other people haven't and make sacrifices other people don't and have an empathy other people don't and all that garbage. I am so glad I read this after reading all the stories, because it would have put me in a bad mood and left me primed to find fault with the stories!
In his Preface, Ellison advances his theory that there are four types of people in the world, and gives examples of each type from the stories here in Gentleman Junkie. The fourth category of person is "Those Who are Hung-up," and Ellison explains that these people cannot "get a handle on Life," apparently quoting some other writer whom he doesn't name. The "Hung-Up Ones" have been "boxed-in by Life," they are desperate, they are "hamstrung" by "neuroses" or their own poor decisions. I guess Ellison thinks there are more such people in the middle of the 20th century than there were in earlier times.
It seems that our pal Harlan believes the world is in real trouble, that the current time (this preface is dated March, 1961) is uniquely corrupt, that the people of his age--"our Decade In Degeneration" characterized by its "Crap-Game Culture"---have loose morals, that they are following false values and false gods, like listening to rock and roll, which is not real music, and reading confession magazines, which is just "keyhole-peeping." Ellison is frightened for the human race!
(The attack on rock music is amusing because Ellison would eventually graduate to wishing death on people who don't like rock music, as we saw when we read the introduction to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World back in the early days of this blog. The fanaticism of the convert!)
Let's pretend we didn't read these two overwrought and fundamentally lame pieces of introductory material and leave Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation with the good feelings we had when we finished "The Night of Delicate Terrors," shall we?
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