Harlan Ellison: "Gentleman Junkie," "Free with This Box!", "At the Mountains of Blindness," "The Time of the Eye" and "RFD#2"

The front cover of my copy of Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation has a list of the controversial topics addressed by the stories from men's magazines and detective magazines that are reproduced between its pages.  We've read a dozen stories from GJ, and I kind of think we've been served up helpings of all these topics already.

Anti-Semitism: "Final Shtick"

Juvenile Delinquency: "No Game for Children"

Negro Prejudice: I'm not 100% sure if this refers to racism suffered by black people, or prejudices held by black people, but if it means the former, "Daniel White For the Greater Good" and "May We Also Speak?" has it covered

Jazz Musicians: "Have Coolth," "May We Also Speak?"

Beatniks: "Memory of a Muted Trumpet," "Lady Bug, Lady Bug"  

Narcotics Addiction: Oh, right, we haven't really seen much of this yet.  Let's get on the case!

"Gentleman Junkie" (1960)

"Gentleman Junkie" first appeared in Rogue under the title "Night Fix," something isfdb and the Harlan Ellison webpage don't know but which philsp knows.  You gotta doublecheck everything!

(As I read more widely of genre fiction outside the SF realm, I find philsp.com increasingly valuable.)

This is actually a good story, and "Night Fix" is a better title for it than "Gentleman Junkie."  The cover of the 1983 edition of the collection shows a guy with a cane and lace cuffs and gives a totally wrong impression about the story and its main character.  This guy is no sophisticate, hipster, man of leisure or aristocrat, just a short middle-class college-educated guy with a responsible job who made some mistakes and is now living a total and absolute disaster, wrecking his own life and letting down all the people around him.

Walter Caulder is a psychiatrist...and a drug addict!  He has been trying to quit cold turkey since his girlfriend--his assistant--found out he was abusing his license to prescribe narcotics, but today the withdrawal symptoms are getting bad and his girlfriend is out of town and can't comfort him.  After his increasingly severe pains cause him to insult one of his patients (a rich woman who has sexual problems) he crisscrosses the city looking for a fix, one humiliating and dangerous thing happening to him after another.  

Ellison does a good job economically describing Caulder's agony and his humiliations; the story has no fat or filler, succeeding because it is direct.  I really felt bad for this guy as he rejected a jealous female junkie's sexual advances after ransacking her apartment and finding no drugs, as blacks urinated on him after beating him up because, due to his excruciating symptoms (as with the wealthy white woman) he stupidly insulted them (perhaps those pains are causing him to let down his guard and allow his normally hidden misogyny and racism peek out!)  

"Gentleman Junkie" is ripe for some kind of sex/race/class analysis, as it shows the complex web of relationships among the protagonist (a college-educated professional), his female patient (a representative of the idle rich!), the domineering law-abiding girlfriend and the lower-class junkie girlfriend, and the violent working-class blacks, a network characterized by desire and need, but also contempt, pity, envy, and jealousy, and which serves as an avenue for all kinds of exploitation and abuse.  

Thumbs up for "Gentleman Junkie!"  Economy and sincerity are what we like here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

"Free with This Box!" (1958)

This one debuted in The Saint Detective Magazine alongside a Solar Pons story by August Derleth.  After being reprinted here in GJ, it would go on to reappear in The Essential Ellison and in a 21st century collection entitled Troublemakers.

This is a well-written piece, evocative of childhood experiences.  An eight-year-old kid is collecting premiums that come from boxes of Kellogg's Pep cereal, little buttons with pictures of comic strip characters.  (These things are totally real; I have seen them in antique stores and you can find many photos of them online and there is no doubting how fun they are--Flash Gordon is my favorite, of course, but I can't deny that that Brenda Starr is looking pretty hubba hubba on her button.)  This cunning little kid has become so obsessed with getting the whole set that he starts stealing them from the grocery store by surreptitiously tearing open the cereal boxes to hunt for the buttons he needs, leaving behind a pile of damaged and looted boxes.  

A store employee finally catches the kid in the act, and he is taken to the police station to be scared straight--a cop yells at him, he is shown a wretched creep who has vomited in one cell, and a violent brute in another.  At the end of the brief story the kid has resolved not to steal from the cereal boxes again, but has also developed an antipathy to the police.

We can enjoy this story as an effective little slice of life thing, but it also could be seen as an indictment of our bourgeois society, a depiction of an America in which: parents lie to their children and neglect them; businesses seduce children (and everybody else!) with gaudy inexpensive goods, not only turning them into consumers but also tempting them to become thieves; and the government uses terror to maintain order.    

Effective, maybe doubly effective if you are some kind of commie.  Thumbs up!

"At the Mountains of Blindness" (1961)

Another story that first saw print alongside an August Derleth Solar Pons story in a The Saint property, this time a British edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine (a few months later it would be included in an American issue of the magazine.)  "At the Mountains of Blindness" is actually listed on the cover.  Very exciting.

"At the Mountains of Blindness" starts out well, but its central gimmick and its climax are eye-rollingly silly and quite boring.

Porky is a drug dealer.  He sees himself as a businessman, supplying the demands of others who have decided of their own free will to use drugs.  He has a comfortable apartment where he has nice books and listens to classical music, and he doesn't strongarm people or get involved in fights with other dealers.  But Ellison reminds us of the sordidness and violence of the drug using and drug dealing life by, among other things, having Porky start off the story waiting in an alley, watching a rat and biting his nails.

Many of Porky's customers are jazz musicians, and one today, Tomas, a Puerto Rican, is going through agonizing withdrawal symptoms but doesn't have the money to pay for the heroin he needs to get himself in good enough shape to play his bass fiddle.  When Porky refuses to offer him credit he attacks Porky, but another member of the band, another addict, saves Porky.  

Tomas goes on to try to rob a store to get the cash he needs to get high, and ends up getting killed by the police.  

All this is pretty good crime drama/life among the low lifes stuff, but then comes the extravagant and romantic and dumb resolution to the story.  The rest of the jazz band kidnaps Porky and they tie him to a chair.  They want him to know the sad kinds of lives drug addicts live, to bring him down from among the "mountains of blindness" to see the reality of the business he is in.  But the jazzmen don't just tell him in words that they have trouble sleeping nights, can't maintain a good relationship with a woman, feel lonely and deracinated and all that.  No, they play jazz for him, and Porky learns all this stuff from the sounds of the sax and the trumpet.  Porky realizes that they, and he as well, are victims of "circumstance," "life" and "need," and they are not to be blamed for their victimhood; another lesson: there is nothing anybody can do to improve their lot.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  

"The Time of the Eye" (1957)

This story is a big deal, apparently, and has been reprinted many times and is the title story of a 1981 collection.  In fact, "The Time of the Eye" appears in three books I own: GJ, From the Land of Fear from our friends at Belmont (I wrote about some of the stories in From the Land of Fear back in 2016) and Alone Against Tomorrow (my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow was signed by Ellison himself, and I presented the proof on twitter back in 2016.)  "The Time of the Eye" debuted in The Saint Mystery Magazine.

"The Time of the Eye" is a good horror story, so thumbs up!  Like "Gentleman Junkie" and "Free with This Box!" is is pretty direct, deals with real human desires, shortcomings and tragedies, and if it addresses social or political issues it does so in a natural way that is connected to the lives and decisions of the characters, to the plot, and you can appreciate the story on a human level without delving into those deeper issues.

Our narrator was hit by a mortar round in Korea, and while he has recovered physically, he is deeply depressed or suffering from PTSD or whatever.  For over two years he has been in a mental institution, and has not spoken to anyone since he was wounded.  He thinks of himself as a dead man, denoting the period of his silence since he was hit as death.

Today in a corridor he unexpectedly meets another inmate, a blind woman with a beautiful face.  She is so beautiful that he suddenly addresses her, and realizes the period of his death has ended, that he is alive again.  She explains she is escaping from her minder, who never lets her down on this floor.  The narrator helps her hide in a closet, and when the coast is clear, he guides her out to the garden.  Our narrator falls in love with her, she reveals her identity--she was a famous model and celebrity--and he makes plans to marry her and move with her to the country.  She seems to return his affection and sexual desire, but then comes our shocking twist ending.  The model is blind because she grew jaded with the high life, with the adventures of climbing mountains and being in films and hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, and joined a crazy cult, a cult which regularly demands a terrible sacrifice from one of its members.  She was chosen to offer the sacrifice, and while doing so ended up putting her in this booby hatch, she is still a loyal adherent to the cult, and she exerts all her cunning and strength to exact that same sacrifice from our narrator!

I like it! 

Shown is the 1974 printing of From the Land of Fear; I own the 1973 printing

"RFD#2" (with Henry Slesar) (1957)

I don't think I've ever read anything by Slesar before.  New territory!  This story first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

This is an epistolary story, a bunch of letters between a woman and a detective agency.  The plot is sort of standard; through transparent innuendo, the woman hires the private dicks to murder a book expert.  We learn that the letter writer and the bibliophile were both employed by a rich old lady, she as her nurse and he as her librarian.  They conspired together to murder their aged employer, but the nurse outmaneuvered the librarian, getting all the inheritance to herself instead of sharing and then moving away.  The librarian is searching America for her, and there is a sort of race--will the detective agency kill the librarian before he can find her and kill her?

Competent filler.  Short stories about evil people fighting each other have a problem--because both people are reprehensible, you don't care who wins.  In a longer form the author can make one or both of the antagonists somehow likable, so you have a stake in who lives and who dies, but in a short story, especially one consisting of letters, there isn't really room for that.

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"Gentleman Junkie," "Free with This Box!", and "The Time of the Eye" are among the best stories we have read from Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation, and are leaving me with a better attitude about Ellison's work than I had 24 hours ago.  Who knows, maybe when I'm done with GJ here, I'll take another crack at my copy of From the Land of Fear or start on my copy of Alone Against Tomorrow.