HARLAN ELLISON AND OUR BIG DATE

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by MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES, ©2024

~“People like you are the reason they find the dismembered bodies of young women buried in back yards.”~

BUT LET ME go back. It was the early 1970s. His award-winning writing was groundbreaking: unrestrained, brazen, and quirky. He told stories that the rest of us scarcely dared think about, much less put into print. His visions alternately filled me with dread and tantalized me. I became a fan.

I was particularly impressed by one morbid tale he wrote called “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman. It was about a rebel in a future society where punctuality was demanded of its citizens. Anyone who broke the law by being late for something would have his life shortened by exactly that amount of time. The worst offenders—people who were habitually late and ran out of minutes—were executed.

It was obvious that Harlequin was a play on words of his own name, Harlan. As in Harlan Ellison. I related to the statement his story made, for I was myself a chronically late person, one who had been judged unfairly for it all of my life. The rigidly punctual segment of our population has always self-righteously maintained that tardiness stems from a selfish lack of consideration. As one of the condemned, I’ve never been given the chance to protest that this is not true. I simply lacked and still lack any sense of time. In my older age, I have learned to curb my natural inclinations so that I’m now able to skid breathlessly and just barely on time into appointments and concerts and lunches, but doing so remains an oppressive burden.

Here is an aside that is part of this story:
Around the same time that I discovered Ellison’s books, because my own writing only pulled in pennies instead of the dreamed-of buckets of dollars, I got a job with a major technological company in a large, windowless, fluorescent-lit office building where I sat in a cubicle and fought off yawns as I scanned microfilm. Rather than walls, partitions divided our dreary work spaces. I was perpetually late to work (although in fairness to the company, this flaw also worked in the reverse: I was late going home as well).

After a bit, I devised a sneaky tactic to avoid being reprimanded. As soon as I entered the building, I would take off my coat, and when I reached the partition that separated the hallway from my particular cubicle, I would proceed to fling both it and my purse over the top. Then I would saunter casually into the department where I worked as though I’d been there for hours and had just taken a bathroom break.

I thought that I’d fooled everyone until one day when I accidentally arrived exactly on time. As I entered the office space, all of my co-workers stood up from their desks and applauded me.

You can see why the story about the Harlequin made me feel all warm and fuzzy. Ellison got me.

I proceeded to devour every book he wrote or edited. In some of them, interspersed between the tales, he rambled on about his personal life, loquaciously sharing his opinions about people, politics, and the world in general. Moderation was nonexistent. He was scathingly critical, even pugilistic, in his assessments of those who he believed had wrong ideas or had wronged him. I was impressed. In my 20s and with the imprudent arrogance of youth, I saw his contentious verbiage as courageous truth-telling.

Beyond all of that, he sometimes wrote in a horny way about sex and the women to whom he was attracted. I found that aspect of him especially titillating. Scrutinizing the photos of him on the back covers of his books, I came to the conclusion that he looked pretty good. I began to imagine myself as being one of those women he liked.

And this was how I developed a reader’s crush on Harlan Ellison.

At the time I didn’t even know how many awards he’d won, how incredibly prolific he was, or that he’d authored amazing scripts for TV shows like the original Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. And The Flying Nun. That last one still makes me scratch my head in wonder, although apparently Ellison claimed only to have written an episode for that inane show in hopes of getting a date with its then-youthful star, Sally Field. She and I are close in age, and in my younger years some people believed that I had a slight resemblance to the actress. Had I known about his attraction to her, it would have heightened my growing but ill-fated enthusiasm for the author.

Back to the windowless company with the partitions: I had suggested numerous times to my fellow employees—the ones who’d applauded me—that the company ought to give us regular coffee breaks, because back in the 70s in that east-coast state breaks were not yet legally required. I even taped onto a common wall a little cartoon I’d drawn of a grumpy girl with her fist raised and the caption, “We want coffee breaks!” It wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d only drawn it because I was bored.

The sign was angrily torn down the next day, a scowling underling shook her finger at me while using the word “inappropriate,” and I was then hauled into the office of the top boss, where he explained to me that they couldn’t give us coffee breaks because some people don’t like coffee. Shortly afterward I was laid off. I realize now that they must have been terrified of me, mistakenly believing that I was some kind of a union organizer. Which, if you watch old movies, is another sort-of connection with Sally Field. Yet a third is that years later I was a background actor on a short-lived TV show in which she starred, although we never spoke. I did have a nice chat with her look-alike stand-in, however. We background folk used to say that Sally Field’s stand-in looked more like the real Sally Field than Sally Field did. But I digress.

I didn’t mind losing that job one bit. The severance and unemployment checks I received permitted me to do something daring. I decided to attend my very first writer’s conference. It was going to be held in Santa Barbara, California. I had never been to California, so I had the added adventure of driving across the country in my Plymouth Barracuda. Immediately after the conference ended, I’d been invited to housesit for three weeks for a family in North Hollywood to take care of their dog while they were on vacation.

And here is where Ellison begins to re-enter the story. A lot of famous people spoke at that writer’s conference, perhaps the most impressive collection of authors ever gathered, from Ray Bradbury to Maya Angelou. I had the improbable fantasy that even though he was not a scheduled speaker, perhaps Harlan Ellison would drop by. He did not, but I wasn’t that far off. Several notables did, in fact, drop by, and I schmoozed with a few of them…but alas, no Ellison. During and immediately after the writer’s conference, I entered into a dating frenzy. H.E. could eat his heart out. I didn’t forget about my crush on him, though.

He’d written in one of his numerous rants that as far as women were concerned, he was “easy.” And guess what? When I was housesitting after the conference, I discovered that his phone number was actually listed in the local phone book! I decided that I would ask him out on a date.

In that year, 1975, it was still the norm for guys to do the asking, so this was going to be incredibly bold of me. I reasoned, however, that it was the only avenue left open for meeting him. I couldn’t wait to chat with him and probe that incredible mind of his. He was between marriages then, and once we connected, he would see that we had a great deal in common—heck, we were both writers—and he would certainly be just as fascinated by me as I was with him. Who knows? Our date might even wind up being romantic!

There was another strong leg to my fantasy. It seemed to me as though the best writers had their own network, a kind of secret club. The conference I’d attended did not disavow me of that impression. I felt that I belonged in that network; it was time for the world to take notice of my writing. Ellison could give me my badly needed foothold. It was a secondary but still powerful impetus to meet this man. Who was, incidentally, thirteen years older than me.

I took note of Ellison’s address, which was in the phone book along with his phone number. He did not live far from where I was staying. I didn’t want to be weird (the word “stalker” was not yet in use), so I scrupulously avoided driving past his house ahead of time, but I did scope out the neighborhood to find a suitable place for Our Big Date. I finally settled upon the perfect spot, a quaint German restaurant on a secluded wooded hill with a water wheel. I went inside to check out the menu and the ambiance. There were candlelit tables, dark panels, and a big fireplace. It was the perfect setting for my new friendship—and probable romance!—with Harlan Ellison. The menu was pricey, but hey, I still had some cash from my unemployment checks. The investment would be worth it, as I expected that this was going to be one life-changing night.

With the groundwork now established, the time came for me to make my call. I had nervously rehearsed what I would say. I was cute enough in those days and men seemed to like me. Still, any confidence I displayed was faked. I was not the least bit sophisticated or self-assured—quite the opposite—so it took me a longer time than most women would need to work up the courage to make the phone call. Even though I anticipated rejection, I finally dialed Ellison’s number. To my absolute amazement, he answered immediately.

“I’m a fan of yours,” I mumbled, “and I wonder if you would let me take you out to dinner.” He was friendly and, just as he’d said, easy. Our conversation went smoothly and we agreed to meet at his house a few days hence.

When the night of Our Big Date arrived, having made myself look as good as possible, I started to freak out. I’d assured Ellison that I wasn’t a wacko, but boy, I suddenly felt that way! My hands became super shaky, and worse, since I was already a blusher, I knew that in this acutely self-conscious state my face would turn an embarrassing scarlet the moment that I saw him. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but I realized in my panic that I needed to do something to calm down. My solution was to drink a glass of wine. To my relief, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and took away the jitters.

As I drove to his house in my Barracuda, I saw that I was going to be a little bit late. I blamed it on pausing for that glass of wine, but in truth, I probably would’ve been late regardless. I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t by much, and, I mean, he wrote that story about the Ticktockman, right?

With mounting joy, I turned onto his street, my dream ready to come true. Lo and behold, Harlan Ellison was actually standing on the curb in front of his house, waiting for me! Before my heart could start thumping, however, I saw that something was amiss. He was tapping his foot impatiently with his arms folded across his chest, and he was not smiling. I quickly parked and came out of my car to greet him.

“Hello,” I said jovially, introducing myself.

“You’re late,” he snapped. “I made restaurant reservations for us, but now we’re not going to make it in time.” Heaving an annoyed sigh, he turned away from me. “Come inside.” I followed meekly.

It got worse. Entering his house, I saw a nondescript younger couple. The man was introduced as another writer, someone I’d never heard of. He seemed to be an Ellison sycophant. The woman, who scarcely spoke, was the guy’s girlfriend. Or maybe his wife. Nobody explained to me why they were there, and they did not appear to be leaving.

I really hadn’t been that late, but Ellison continued to whine about missing the restaurant—an establishment of his choosing, even though I’d said in my phone call that I had a place I wanted to take him. My dreams of sitting in romantic candlelight across the table from this glamorous writer in the quaint restaurant that I’d so carefully scoped out burst into a sodden puddle.

Without consulting me, Ellison took command and decided that we would ride in his car to go to another restaurant. All four of us. The two men took the front seat, and I was left with no choice but to climb into the back with the quiet girlfriend. I looked dejectedly at my parked Barracuda as we drove past it. I had put a lot of effort into cleaning up my usually messy vehicle for Our Big Date.

On the ride, Ellison finally relaxed a little bit and, glancing at me over his shoulder, said, “Tell me about yourself.” Other than scolding me for being late, this was the first time that my dream date had actually addressed me. I said awkwardly, “Oh, gosh, where to begin,” and then froze. The audience of three waited coldly to assess me. Here was my big chance, an opening, the beginning I so desperately wanted, but I felt too flustered to think straight. I needed to say something, and quickly, so what was the first thing I told this unwelcoming, keenly observant, opinionated Jewish man? I started out biographically, stating with forced cheerfulness that I was the daughter of a Protestant minister. Why did I say that?! His response was a discouraging silence. From the back seat I continued to chatter in a fruitless attempt to rescue myself. The more I spoke, the worse it became.

Somewhere along the way, I did manage to mention rather proudly that I was also a writer. He remained mute, expressing no curiosity at all. Next I said how, at the recent writer’s conference I’d attended, I had met one of the top editors at Doubleday—the same group that published his stories!—and related buoyantly that said editor had invited me to send him my work. This was an anecdote that I had planned well in advance to reveal, imagining that it would boost my value to Ellison, who himself would inevitably ask to read some of the material I’d written, thus cementing my entry into the longed-for writer’s network. After a pause, Ellison finally responded. He stated in an unkind way that Doubleday was never going to publish me, and implied that the editor had only wanted to get laid. Okay, yes, said editor had imbibed a few drinks when he put forth his offer, and Ellison was doubtlessly correct, but pointing it out made me feel small and worthless. Conversation between us pretty much faded after that. It turned out to be the most I would get a chance to say for the remainder of the night.

When we finally arrived at the restaurant, I was dismayed to see that it was just a narrow, dismally-lit hole in the wall with smudged windows looking out at the traffic on the street, and a few decaying wooden booths. The four of us crowded into one of them. Even though it was dinnertime, we were the only customers.

Once we had settled into the booth, my date eased up a bit. This was to continue throughout the night: he’d be hard, then soft, then harder, then softer. He and I were sitting next to one another, and as we ate our nondescript dinner, Ellison did what men do when they are probing the possibilities of an encounter, and pressed his arm and hand suggestively against mine to test the waters.

I did not respond. Here’s why. My dreamboat had turned out to be much shorter and smaller in stature than I had imagined, and while that was not in itself cause for cancellation, nothing about him physically appealed to me. He was not anywhere as nice-looking as he’d appeared to be on his book covers, and, as I’ve mentioned, he was older than me. It showed. He had dark circles under his eyes, his complexion was paste-colored, I didn’t care for his build or his hair or his speaking voice, and beyond those superficial things, we had no vibe. None whatsoever. Zero. Naturally, our initial meeting and our subsequent lack of even slightly friendly conversation didn’t help. Any romantic interlude was out of the question. It astounded me that he was even bothering to make a pass at me. I remained polite, but I pulled away from his arm, ignoring his nudges.

After the meal, for which he at least had the decency to pay, he shepherded our quartet back to his house where—he had already decided—we would watch a movie on his TV. While the possibility of a romantic dalliance with Ellison had fizzled into the same puddle of futility into which my German-restaurant dreams had sunk, I still held faint hopes of creating a writer’s friendship with him and its imagined stimulating exchanges, even though by now that didn’t hold much promise either. So far Our Big Date had mainly consisted of a dull conversation between Ellison and the other guy about people and events that were unknown to me. I should have accepted defeat and left, but for some reason, I stubbornly persisted in believing that there might yet be a breakthrough. After all, I had glamorized this unfortunate man for quite a while, and the camaraderie portion of my fantasy, while badly injured, was not yet ready to die and join the romantic fantasies and the German restaurant in their sodden puddle.

Before starting the movie, our host asked me gallantly if I would like a glass of white wine. I said yes, he  fetched it, and then he pulled up a chair opposite the couch where I sat with the couple. Nobody else said yes to a drink. It was just me, and I felt awkward.

As the guys continued to converse about people and situations that excluded me, I waited for a break so that we could talk about Ellison’s writing, but it never came. During this exchange, he made enthusiastic references to a young woman to whom he was apparently attracted, seemingly swept away by the fact that she kept a knife hidden in her boot. From his description, she was no Sally Field. That he would talk this way about another female in front of me, his date, much less rave about her gangster tendencies, took me aback, but then I had rebuffed his advances, so I decided to let it be okay. Maybe he wanted me to see him as desirable.

As he continued, Ellison began to tease me. He did this by making a few snide jokes, such as roughly declaring that as an obvious goy, I must eat sandwiches made with Wonder Bread and a lot of mayonnaise. Worse, unknown to me, when I first arrived I’d apparently had wine on my breath from that initial bolstering drink, and because I had then accepted the glass of wine from him, he decided jovially that I was an alcoholic, and that my mother (my mother?) was probably one as well. I can laugh at a fair amount of teasing, but he crossed a line. None of his jests were quite offensive enough for me to storm out indignantly, but they came awfully close. I stayed. I didn’t want to seem rude, whereas he seemed to have no problem with that. At least he was finally acknowledging my presence, and he appeared to be a little more relaxed.

The bare coffee table in front of me was the kind that had been made out of one large piece of wood. After a while, tired of holding up the wine glass, I set it down on the table. Ellison was horrified! He leapt to his feet as if someone had poked him with a cattle prod. Realizing that I’d obviously made a mistake, I quickly picked the glass back up. Meanwhile, he rushed into another room and came running back with a bottle of polish and a cloth. There was absolutely no moisture and definitely no ring on the table, yet he rubbed more frantically than a housemaid on speed at the place where my glass had ever so briefly touched down. His unspoken reprimand was obvious.

As he ground away at his cleaning task, I turned to the others and said in a stage whisper, “And the truth is, there was nothing there at all.” This was the truth, and I was being merry. He’d made rough jokes about me; I was simply returning the banter. I did not realize that you didn’t do that with Harlan Ellison. He finished his job in hostile silence, stood, and then said with a snarl as he walked away, “People like you are the reason they find the dismembered bodies of young women buried in back yards.”

His nastiness was palpable. I sat paralyzed in shock. Yet, when he returned  to the room, he began to behave decently again. His Jekyll-Hyde character switches left me in a confused daze. Before I could make excuses to leave, Ellison proceeded to start the movie. At least I had the protection of the other couple, although they were tediously dull and neither of them had even once directed a comment my way. The movie we watched was a Woody Allen comedy. It was funny, but I was by now far too tense to laugh.

As soon as it was over, I was ready to leave, but the couple beat me to it. This left just Ellison and me standing next to the front door. Before I could say my goodbyes, he strode into his office, which was right off the entryway, and sat down in front of a prominent typewriter. “I’m going to write now,” he called out nonchalantly. “You can stay and watch me write if you want, or you can go home.”

I took the opportunity to escape, but it was strange. He did not even rise to see me to the door. Shaken and dismayed, I got into my Barracuda and drove only a few feet…and my engine died, just like that. I couldn’t re-start my car, and sat behind the steering wheel in a sick distress. Here I was, stuck right next to Ellison’s house, which was on a dark street in the hills with no businesses or phone booths within any kind of walking distance. In 1975 we didn’t have cell phones. The only thing to do in such an emergency would be to go to someone’s house and beg them to call a towing company. But should I return to knock on Harlan Ellison’s door? The thought was horrifying. And if I went to one of his neighbors instead, what if he were to look out the window and see that my car was still in front of his house?

To my enormous relief, after a few minutes I was able to get the Barracuda started again. As I drove home, increasingly feeling as though I had been assaulted, all of the stinging things that Ellison had said to me during our bewildering date melded into an obnoxious heap that spun relentlessly in my mind. This persisted throughout the night and into the following day. Other than offering me a glass of wine, I realized that he had not said one kind thing to me. It really bugged me that I had failed to stick up for myself. I concluded that the only way I could vindicate myself would be to write him a letter.

In this small way, I guess he and I were alike. We both possessed a stubborn need to defend ourselves when we felt wronged, although his truculence was accomplished, and I was only a meek amateur. Ellison was more than happy to punch people who bothered him. I preferred diplomacy. It took me a while to compose the letter. I thanked him graciously for his hospitality and the meal—but interspersed between the niceties, I defended myself against his slurs, stating emphatically that my mother and I were not alcoholics, nor did I lust after Wonder Bread and gulp down mayonnaise. As I mailed the letter, I felt pleased with myself. I’d made my points well, and had done so with reasonable tact. I had failed to realize, however, how dangerous it was to enter into the ring with Ellison, who had a need to win even the smallest battle, and in doing so would entirely disregard any rules of sportsmanship, like the prohibition of hitting below the belt.

A few days later I received a reply from him. Smiling with surprise, I opened the letter quickly, curious to see what he had to say. As I read, I began to shrivel in pain. It felt as though in his own way—through language—Ellison was chopping me up to bury in his back yard. I have never before or since encountered such venomous writing. He concluded by saying something like, “I don’t know what your fantasy is, but I never want to see or hear from you again! Stay away! I mean it!” The bloodied pieces that were left of me after reading the letter obeyed his request.

I’m not interested in delving into the reasons that Ellison was so pugnacious. Or why I was so inept. From all accounts that I read later, he’d been like that his entire life, even in childhood. I certainly wasn’t alone in being attacked by him; throughout his lifetime many others experienced the brunt of his nastiness, sometimes physically. Bewildered and butchered as I was for whatever my crimes had been, I cannot imagine how much more brutal the ending would have been if on that famous date we’d actually begun the friendship that I’d hoped for, or worse, become intimate.

The bottom line is that even though the late Harlan Ellison was a distressingly troubled man, and even though I was never able to connect with him, he was an absolutely brilliant and unique writer. Frankly, I haven’t had the desire to read any of his stories since receiving that jolting letter so many long years ago, but I imagine that if I did, I would still like them a lot.