Saturday's Storyteller: The Volatile Temper Of A Pissed Off God
The Volatile Temper Of A Pissed Off God
by Belinda Roddie
When I was thirty years old, I was convinced that one of the greatest storytellers of our time, one of the only storytellers who could catch my interest with such tenacity, such wit, and such intentionally peppered malice toward all things conventional and decorous and socially appropriate or acceptable, was Harlan Ellison. It was my opinion - a very well established opinion at that, a researched one, a well-read one - that no one could do better to jar, to horrify, to amuse, or to provoke thought than the wild hair shock of words that Ellison rattled from his go-to typewriter. No one could do it better.
I was first introduced to the man's work at the age of seventeen - in theater class, which was led by a teacher who looked more like a mad scientist than a thespian - which, looking back on it, makes me chuckle. To this day, I have no idea if Mr. Lushenko actually had the express permission of Ellison or his estate to stage his short story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman," with a bunch of juniors and seniors. Hell, I wasn't even in that adaptation - I had been cast in the valuable role of "part of the house" in my cast's version of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," from The Illustrated Man. But I remember watching my classmates, those of them who had been in theater arts for at least three years, dressed in white save for the boy playing the Harlequin, brilliantly expelling the lines that Ellison had laden rich on the crisp paper he had typed on, like sharp honey with a kick. Sweet, yet delightfully spicy.
After a few years of not reading anything else from the guy, I wound up running into the classic, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," which promptly gave me nightmares for about three days. Ultimately, this did give me the inspiration for a short story I wrote of my own, converted later into a mediocre two act play that I never had performed, but the brief saga of five people subjected to a massive and half-mad computer's customized Hell was quite the insane read. From there on out, I ate up everything the man wrote: "The Time of the Eye," "Grail," "Paladin of the Lost Hour," and one of my personal favorites, "Jeffty Is Five" - a tale so steeped in melodramatic nostalgia that you may as well throw in another metaphorical tea bag for good measure. I adored the candor, the ramblings, the retrospection, the forecasts, the diatribes, the delusions, the revelations, the mythos, and the gospels of Harlan Ellison.
Not that he was that great of a dude. No, Ellison was the epitome of a red-throated, fork-tongued, blood-from-eyeballs-spitting, crooked and age spotted jack-off. He was a contrarian, a nonconformist, a gadfly, and an abrasive, bellicose brawler - not that any of those are inherently bad, especially not by themselves, but he used those traits in ways that weren't always savory. The screaming about plagiarism and paying the writer (the latter of which I'll always support, of course), the public assaults, and the groping; yes, he groped a woman. None of those things would fly these days, not in this political climate. But Ellison was the antithesis of apologetic. He was a sunuvabitch, sure, but he was aware of how big of a sunuvabitch he was. And he loved himself for it, which is more than I think most of us can say about ourselves.
"You must never be afraid to go there," was what Ellison had to say about his writing. I would see this quotation and nod sagely, as if he had shuffled a backpack of wisdom off his shoulders and handed it to me. But it was too heavy for me to carry. As much as I respected him, looked up to him, even though he did a lot of shitty things, I could not be like him. I was too afraid to go there.
Oh, believe me, I had tried. I had tried mightily to be fully authentic in my own storytelling. Salty, sassy, sarcastic, gritty, real, raw: All those things I wanted to put in my work. But we lived in a different time. Utilizing a racial, sexist, or homophobic slur in a book was seen as a mortal sin, even when all the literary context was provided. Nitpicking at any social justice movement was a no-no. If you wrote about anything too dark, too brooding, too cynical, parents would swoon, the vapors trailing around them like the sticky saccharine fumes of a goddamn vape. Sex and violence made our world go 'round, or at least kept our televisions and computers lit for our entertainment, but God forbid - sweet, civil Lord of Heaven and Earth forbid, master of modesty, holder of humility, caretaker of correctness forbid - that the novels we read, the poetry, the short stories, revealed the universal psychotic breakdown of the society we were subjected to like lab rats on an hourly basis.
But I did what I could. I wrote what I wanted to write, told the stories I wanted to tell, the stories I loved and related to. Character-driven, all of them, just as Ellison would have wanted: "The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure." And that's what I did - build characters line by line and insight by insight. And they were their own individual, though admittedly, each of them had at least a streak of rainbow in them, like metaphorical neon in their hair, or symbolic sparkles on their lips. I had to make them gay; what the hell. It was who I was. Painted head to toe with rainbow, invisible to most, but glaringly obvious to me in front of a smudged mirror. Fucking fabulous, I was. Flaming. Like, dragon-level flaming. With neon in my hair and sparkles on my lips.
I had already published a book in 2019, a book that nobody read, one year and two months after Harlan Ellison unexpectedly kicked the bucket as hard as a mule would. The Internet lit up with his obituaries and eulogies for a moment, and then - poof - gone. Truth be told, I would forget he was dead sometimes. I'd be sitting at my desk at work, during my prep hour, listening to his short stories on YouTube (the man was fantastic at audiobooks, lemme tell you that - and of course he was the one who read them, they were his stories), and somehow, I would imagine he was still around, in Los Angeles, surrounded by memorabilia and wearing his Jiminy Cricket wristwatch. Cussing and bitching into a camera like a good little author for his publishers and agents, even though he loathed the word author.
Now I was working on...Christ, I don't even remember that well. It had been a novelette that had ballooned into a novella and was now trudging about with all the grace and cantor of a novel with swollen, pregnant feet. It was a bloated slog that could have been saved by editing, had I the patience or the willpower to do so. Perhaps this project now, too, had been altered into a "great soft jelly thing," incapable of doing itself in. It had no mouth, and it must scream.
I was looking at the latest incomplete chapter of the mess in my personal office at home. Not much of an office, really - just a spare bedroom, retrofitted to look like something professional and capable of getting me into the "zone," whatever the hell that meant. And I was about to crack open my last can of apple-flavored beer, having already formed a row of aluminum alongside the wall most adjacent to my desk. The February night was warm, unnaturally so, thanks to the meddling and willful ignorance of the overly evolved apes like me. Whatever wind came through the window was like a puff of breath settling on the nape of my neck: hot and stilted.
It had been only a matter of weeks since she had left. And she had taken the cat with her. So besides the clickety-clack of my technicolor dreamcoat mechanical keyboard, I was growing accustomed to being completely and utterly alone. I thought that a bit of revision would spurt out some creative juices, but with each clunky sentence I tried to fix or new detail I intended to add, I could tell that the lemon I was squeezing had already gone very dry. For every new line I wrote, I needed five minutes to decompress and shake off the mental exhaustion that crept in with the lactic acid tenacity of a physical muscular ache. I would get up, pace, jog up and down the stairs a few times, open up the refrigerator only to take nothing out of it, hobble back upstairs, stare at my screen for a bit, click to all the news sites I had already read...and then type another line. Which I hoped I wouldn't inevitably delete.
There were other ways I'd fritter away my time, of course. If I wanted longer than a few minutes of break, I'd play a computer game, or strum a guitar I hardly played anymore, or watch comedy specials on Netflix that I'd never laugh at. All in the name of distraction, procrastination, and the sweet, warm vanilla sugar smell of clinical depression.
And then, one night, right as I was giving up once again on writing more than just a measly sentence in a pitiful Google Doc on a worn down desktop computer in the middle of a sad California spring evening...he showed up.
And boy, was he the antithesis of thrilled about it.
I first heard the sound of an angry typewriter, its invisible keys jittering and jumping like chittering cold teeth, the rhythm awkward and off-kilter. At first, I thought it was just my mechanical keyboard, the one I had ordered online when the A key hadn't been fully cooperating on my old membrane one. But I had barely been typing. The pounding and pattering started again, and in the next moment, a soft, yet still sharp, tone - ding. And the scraping shuffle of a carriage pushed back into place with the help of its loyal return lever. A manual typewriter. Clicking and clacking. In my office.
I had not owned a typewriter in years. Not since I was thirteen and firmly believing I was hot shit for owning the damn thing, only to break the metal prong holding the ribbon in place and consequently rendering the whole hunk of metal and plastic useless. I had finally gotten rid of it when I was twenty-eight, when I moved to my current residence, where I was now listening to what must have been an imaginary writing machine confirming my descent into madness.
And then I saw it. A white Olympia typewriter. SG3. I recognized it from pictures. Pictures specifically of a man who had sworn by manual typewriters and refused the term Luddite out of both pride and spite for the misuse of modern technology:
It is not that I hate the technology. What I hate is them telling me that I am not entitled to work at the level of technology that best serves my purpose. Form follows function. If writing something creative is best served in your venue by using a quill pen, standing up at a lectern, then you do it. If it works best using a Pentium, then you do that. I operate at a level where I can best produce material using a manual typewriter. It fits my need. I get pleasure out of it. I get no pleasure from using a computer.
by Belinda Roddie
When I was thirty years old, I was convinced that one of the greatest storytellers of our time, one of the only storytellers who could catch my interest with such tenacity, such wit, and such intentionally peppered malice toward all things conventional and decorous and socially appropriate or acceptable, was Harlan Ellison. It was my opinion - a very well established opinion at that, a researched one, a well-read one - that no one could do better to jar, to horrify, to amuse, or to provoke thought than the wild hair shock of words that Ellison rattled from his go-to typewriter. No one could do it better.
I was first introduced to the man's work at the age of seventeen - in theater class, which was led by a teacher who looked more like a mad scientist than a thespian - which, looking back on it, makes me chuckle. To this day, I have no idea if Mr. Lushenko actually had the express permission of Ellison or his estate to stage his short story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman," with a bunch of juniors and seniors. Hell, I wasn't even in that adaptation - I had been cast in the valuable role of "part of the house" in my cast's version of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," from The Illustrated Man. But I remember watching my classmates, those of them who had been in theater arts for at least three years, dressed in white save for the boy playing the Harlequin, brilliantly expelling the lines that Ellison had laden rich on the crisp paper he had typed on, like sharp honey with a kick. Sweet, yet delightfully spicy.
After a few years of not reading anything else from the guy, I wound up running into the classic, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," which promptly gave me nightmares for about three days. Ultimately, this did give me the inspiration for a short story I wrote of my own, converted later into a mediocre two act play that I never had performed, but the brief saga of five people subjected to a massive and half-mad computer's customized Hell was quite the insane read. From there on out, I ate up everything the man wrote: "The Time of the Eye," "Grail," "Paladin of the Lost Hour," and one of my personal favorites, "Jeffty Is Five" - a tale so steeped in melodramatic nostalgia that you may as well throw in another metaphorical tea bag for good measure. I adored the candor, the ramblings, the retrospection, the forecasts, the diatribes, the delusions, the revelations, the mythos, and the gospels of Harlan Ellison.
Not that he was that great of a dude. No, Ellison was the epitome of a red-throated, fork-tongued, blood-from-eyeballs-spitting, crooked and age spotted jack-off. He was a contrarian, a nonconformist, a gadfly, and an abrasive, bellicose brawler - not that any of those are inherently bad, especially not by themselves, but he used those traits in ways that weren't always savory. The screaming about plagiarism and paying the writer (the latter of which I'll always support, of course), the public assaults, and the groping; yes, he groped a woman. None of those things would fly these days, not in this political climate. But Ellison was the antithesis of apologetic. He was a sunuvabitch, sure, but he was aware of how big of a sunuvabitch he was. And he loved himself for it, which is more than I think most of us can say about ourselves.
"You must never be afraid to go there," was what Ellison had to say about his writing. I would see this quotation and nod sagely, as if he had shuffled a backpack of wisdom off his shoulders and handed it to me. But it was too heavy for me to carry. As much as I respected him, looked up to him, even though he did a lot of shitty things, I could not be like him. I was too afraid to go there.
Oh, believe me, I had tried. I had tried mightily to be fully authentic in my own storytelling. Salty, sassy, sarcastic, gritty, real, raw: All those things I wanted to put in my work. But we lived in a different time. Utilizing a racial, sexist, or homophobic slur in a book was seen as a mortal sin, even when all the literary context was provided. Nitpicking at any social justice movement was a no-no. If you wrote about anything too dark, too brooding, too cynical, parents would swoon, the vapors trailing around them like the sticky saccharine fumes of a goddamn vape. Sex and violence made our world go 'round, or at least kept our televisions and computers lit for our entertainment, but God forbid - sweet, civil Lord of Heaven and Earth forbid, master of modesty, holder of humility, caretaker of correctness forbid - that the novels we read, the poetry, the short stories, revealed the universal psychotic breakdown of the society we were subjected to like lab rats on an hourly basis.
But I did what I could. I wrote what I wanted to write, told the stories I wanted to tell, the stories I loved and related to. Character-driven, all of them, just as Ellison would have wanted: "The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure." And that's what I did - build characters line by line and insight by insight. And they were their own individual, though admittedly, each of them had at least a streak of rainbow in them, like metaphorical neon in their hair, or symbolic sparkles on their lips. I had to make them gay; what the hell. It was who I was. Painted head to toe with rainbow, invisible to most, but glaringly obvious to me in front of a smudged mirror. Fucking fabulous, I was. Flaming. Like, dragon-level flaming. With neon in my hair and sparkles on my lips.
I had already published a book in 2019, a book that nobody read, one year and two months after Harlan Ellison unexpectedly kicked the bucket as hard as a mule would. The Internet lit up with his obituaries and eulogies for a moment, and then - poof - gone. Truth be told, I would forget he was dead sometimes. I'd be sitting at my desk at work, during my prep hour, listening to his short stories on YouTube (the man was fantastic at audiobooks, lemme tell you that - and of course he was the one who read them, they were his stories), and somehow, I would imagine he was still around, in Los Angeles, surrounded by memorabilia and wearing his Jiminy Cricket wristwatch. Cussing and bitching into a camera like a good little author for his publishers and agents, even though he loathed the word author.
Now I was working on...Christ, I don't even remember that well. It had been a novelette that had ballooned into a novella and was now trudging about with all the grace and cantor of a novel with swollen, pregnant feet. It was a bloated slog that could have been saved by editing, had I the patience or the willpower to do so. Perhaps this project now, too, had been altered into a "great soft jelly thing," incapable of doing itself in. It had no mouth, and it must scream.
I was looking at the latest incomplete chapter of the mess in my personal office at home. Not much of an office, really - just a spare bedroom, retrofitted to look like something professional and capable of getting me into the "zone," whatever the hell that meant. And I was about to crack open my last can of apple-flavored beer, having already formed a row of aluminum alongside the wall most adjacent to my desk. The February night was warm, unnaturally so, thanks to the meddling and willful ignorance of the overly evolved apes like me. Whatever wind came through the window was like a puff of breath settling on the nape of my neck: hot and stilted.
It had been only a matter of weeks since she had left. And she had taken the cat with her. So besides the clickety-clack of my technicolor dreamcoat mechanical keyboard, I was growing accustomed to being completely and utterly alone. I thought that a bit of revision would spurt out some creative juices, but with each clunky sentence I tried to fix or new detail I intended to add, I could tell that the lemon I was squeezing had already gone very dry. For every new line I wrote, I needed five minutes to decompress and shake off the mental exhaustion that crept in with the lactic acid tenacity of a physical muscular ache. I would get up, pace, jog up and down the stairs a few times, open up the refrigerator only to take nothing out of it, hobble back upstairs, stare at my screen for a bit, click to all the news sites I had already read...and then type another line. Which I hoped I wouldn't inevitably delete.
There were other ways I'd fritter away my time, of course. If I wanted longer than a few minutes of break, I'd play a computer game, or strum a guitar I hardly played anymore, or watch comedy specials on Netflix that I'd never laugh at. All in the name of distraction, procrastination, and the sweet, warm vanilla sugar smell of clinical depression.
And then, one night, right as I was giving up once again on writing more than just a measly sentence in a pitiful Google Doc on a worn down desktop computer in the middle of a sad California spring evening...he showed up.
And boy, was he the antithesis of thrilled about it.
I first heard the sound of an angry typewriter, its invisible keys jittering and jumping like chittering cold teeth, the rhythm awkward and off-kilter. At first, I thought it was just my mechanical keyboard, the one I had ordered online when the A key hadn't been fully cooperating on my old membrane one. But I had barely been typing. The pounding and pattering started again, and in the next moment, a soft, yet still sharp, tone - ding. And the scraping shuffle of a carriage pushed back into place with the help of its loyal return lever. A manual typewriter. Clicking and clacking. In my office.
I had not owned a typewriter in years. Not since I was thirteen and firmly believing I was hot shit for owning the damn thing, only to break the metal prong holding the ribbon in place and consequently rendering the whole hunk of metal and plastic useless. I had finally gotten rid of it when I was twenty-eight, when I moved to my current residence, where I was now listening to what must have been an imaginary writing machine confirming my descent into madness.
And then I saw it. A white Olympia typewriter. SG3. I recognized it from pictures. Pictures specifically of a man who had sworn by manual typewriters and refused the term Luddite out of both pride and spite for the misuse of modern technology:
It is not that I hate the technology. What I hate is them telling me that I am not entitled to work at the level of technology that best serves my purpose. Form follows function. If writing something creative is best served in your venue by using a quill pen, standing up at a lectern, then you do it. If it works best using a Pentium, then you do that. I operate at a level where I can best produce material using a manual typewriter. It fits my need. I get pleasure out of it. I get no pleasure from using a computer.
An Olympia typewriter, SG3 model, currently sitting on the desk that my wife had left bare and lonely. Clacking away. The keys moving as if by invisible hands - or perhaps, based on the energy and passion of the unseen typer, invisible fists. I thought, and I questioned, and I wondered, and I went, Oh, sweet Jesus, you've got to be shitting me a sundae. And then there he was - gray haired, watery blue eyed, wobbly and wrinkled, just like he had been back in 2018.
He wasn't smoking a pipe, though. And he was swearing.
"Goddamn putz! You'd think the motherfucker'd be smart enough to put me back in Los Angeles. Nope! Asshole's gotta send me off to some no man's land where I can't get a taxi...the fuck is this mess?"
He was referring to the jumble of letters he had likely unintentionally sprayed onto the limp sheet of paper in front of him. Or perhaps it was directed at the sad state of my office, which, while not untidy, certainly lacked a soul. Either way, he was there, sitting at my ex-wife's desk, wearing a worn down gray sweatshirt and cussing in that recognizable rasp. Yes, the man himself, the man "with the edge in his voice," as declared by Ian McDowell, irascible to the very end - Harlan Ellison was in the room, right with me.
But how could he be? The man was dead - had been dead for almost two years - and you would have thought that whatever afterlife he was stuck in would have given him a bit more care. Send him back with brown in his hair, for Christ's sake; make him at least a little younger. Or, considering he had been an atheist all his life despite being bullied for being Jewish in his youth, maybe this was God's way of poking fun at him, after all the years of snark and ridicule. Maybe the Lord and he had a mutual sense of humor. Or maybe this was Ellison's eternal punishment, his torture, subjected to a Deity in the Form of AM. Heh. Daddy the Deranged, indeed.
I had stood up from my desk at this point, haggard and pale, watching this belligerent spitting specter as if I had stumbled upon a haunted house. Despite the fact that he did, indeed, look exactly like Harlan Ellison - and, indeed, I could have very well gone completely insane from isolation in the past few hours - he certainly had a ghostly aspect to him. His hair, white and wispy it was, seemed to move of its own volition, like steam rising from a boiling pot, or dust kicked up from a solemn chalky road. Not only that, but his fingers, even after they had calmed down from their flurry of typing, still appeared blurry, or maybe even transparent. Like if you tried to shake his hand, your palm would just slide right through his wrist like waving water vapor. His skin was luminous, almost pearlescent, to an extent, as if he had just clawed his way out of a stubborn oyster's maw.
The words that now stained the loose leaf jammed into the Olympia's mouth were, in their current order, nonsensical, meaningless - but they were words. Spelled correctly, and in an impeccable font, too. Garamond, almost. But that didn't make sense; most Olympia SG3 used the font...well...Olympia. Obviously. And Garamond was a font I liked to use when I wanted my typeface to look pretty. So why was my favorite font on his typewriter?
Of course, that was a stupid question to ask, considering the bigger question was, what the fuck was the ghost of Harlan Ellison - or, at least, a spirit under the guise of Harlan Ellison - doing in my condo?!
This is a short story that has been in the works for months, and I just never got around to finishing it. So here it is. I might finish it. ...Maybe.
But how could he be? The man was dead - had been dead for almost two years - and you would have thought that whatever afterlife he was stuck in would have given him a bit more care. Send him back with brown in his hair, for Christ's sake; make him at least a little younger. Or, considering he had been an atheist all his life despite being bullied for being Jewish in his youth, maybe this was God's way of poking fun at him, after all the years of snark and ridicule. Maybe the Lord and he had a mutual sense of humor. Or maybe this was Ellison's eternal punishment, his torture, subjected to a Deity in the Form of AM. Heh. Daddy the Deranged, indeed.
I had stood up from my desk at this point, haggard and pale, watching this belligerent spitting specter as if I had stumbled upon a haunted house. Despite the fact that he did, indeed, look exactly like Harlan Ellison - and, indeed, I could have very well gone completely insane from isolation in the past few hours - he certainly had a ghostly aspect to him. His hair, white and wispy it was, seemed to move of its own volition, like steam rising from a boiling pot, or dust kicked up from a solemn chalky road. Not only that, but his fingers, even after they had calmed down from their flurry of typing, still appeared blurry, or maybe even transparent. Like if you tried to shake his hand, your palm would just slide right through his wrist like waving water vapor. His skin was luminous, almost pearlescent, to an extent, as if he had just clawed his way out of a stubborn oyster's maw.
The words that now stained the loose leaf jammed into the Olympia's mouth were, in their current order, nonsensical, meaningless - but they were words. Spelled correctly, and in an impeccable font, too. Garamond, almost. But that didn't make sense; most Olympia SG3 used the font...well...Olympia. Obviously. And Garamond was a font I liked to use when I wanted my typeface to look pretty. So why was my favorite font on his typewriter?
Of course, that was a stupid question to ask, considering the bigger question was, what the fuck was the ghost of Harlan Ellison - or, at least, a spirit under the guise of Harlan Ellison - doing in my condo?!
This is a short story that has been in the works for months, and I just never got around to finishing it. So here it is. I might finish it. ...Maybe.
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