Christopher Isherwood and Me at the Gym

 by Stephen J. Gertz

(Written five years ago, the following has the honor of being rejected by every literary journal in California secondary to length (and perhaps certain content). Time to get it out, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks).


“I’ve started going to the Physical Services gym at Westwood and Santa Monica, and already the exercise makes me feel good. I needed it so badly. That’s a good habit started. I must keep it up.” (Christopher Isherwood,  Diaries, January 12, 1954).

Chris stood at his locker with a towel wrapped around his waist and shower sandals on his feet. He was soaked. He usually set aside a couple of extra towels; they were too small for any one of them to completely dry a body. He seemed lost and said nothing but it was clear what the problem was: a jerk too lazy to walk to the locker room entrance and get his own had walked off with Chris’. His partner, Don Bachardy, wasn’t around; perhaps still in the shower, or not present at all; I don’t recall. I brought Chris (for that is how he asked to be addressed after my initial “Mr. Isherwood”) a few more. It was part of my job: gym instructor, physical therapy aide, towel boy. 

“The smog was so bad yesterday that Bruce Conners [sic] at the gym said one really shouldn’t go out jogging in it; making yourself breathe heavily and inhale all that stuff does you much more harm than the exercise does you good.” (October 3, 1970).

The gym was the Bruce Conner - Al Hinds Health Club, established in 1947 as Bruce Conner’s Physical Services by Bruce Conner (1919-2010), a physical therapist with roots in competitive gymnastics and weightlifting, and the original Muscle Beach. Unlike the franchise model established by his friends, Vic Tanny and Jack Lalanne, Bruce opened what was at the time the only gym in the U.S. for men and women offering physical therapy and massage services. It’s quite possible that every orthopod in the area referred patients to Bruce; because it was operated by a physical therapist and respected athlete it was legit, not strictly for health nuts and ironheads, a nice space (Chris thought the atmosphere at Vic Tanny’s in Santa Monica, “squalid”), and Bruce was quite likable. Word got around. 

It was located on Little Santa Monica Blvd. one block east of Westwood Blvd. on L.A.’s Westside. Because of its proximity to Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica and its canyon communities, the gym attracted wealthy celebrity and civilian patients and members, as well as the general, non-wealthy public. In 1964 Bruce trained eleven Olympic medal winners,   and the Russian Olympic weightlifting team once worked out at the gym. It was old-school—a small neighborhood spot with separate facilities for men and women, few machines, and little chrome, mostly for the ladies. I was a member for a few years before I worked there, 1976-78.

“I went to the gym, where [actor] Richard Egan works out in a hooded sweater with a mackintosh pair of pants over it, presumably to make him sweat that much extra”  (November 14, 1961).

It was where I became friendly with many appropriately dressed, overdressed, underdressed, and completely undressed film, television, and music personalities. 

Riccardo “Rick” Montalban didn’t bother with the graceful glide he had adopted to mask his pronounced limp and was thankfully amused when I once described a workout bench as being upholstered in rich Corinthian vinyl because I couldn’t resist. Richard “Dick” Jaeckel, a short, scrawny kid in his acting debut in Guadalcanal Diary (1943), had subsequently morphed into a mighty tree stump with blond hair, eternal tan, and solid chops (see Sometimes a Great Notion). Film director George Sidney, like me, grew up in Queens, NYC, and was a trove of vintage Hollywood lore and legend I could listen to at length and did because George liked to talk about the old days and dump on the new while exercising - or eating donuts he brought in and offered to all. A patient of Bruce and Al, Jan Berry, of Surf City’s Jan and Dean, never fully recovered from brain injuries after totaling his ’Vette ten years earlier near Dead Man’s Curve on Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills, two years after Jan and Dean’s Dead Man’s Curve became a top ten hit. Vito Scotti played Nazorine, the baker whose unwed daughter had a bun in the oven and boyfriend without green card in The Godfather. Password game-show host Allen Ludden was a good sport when I once asked for the password as he entered the steam room. 

There were many more, including screenwriter Bill Kerby, who, during pre-production for The Rose, his take on Janis Joplin starring Bette Midler, wrote Van Nuys Boulevard, mercifully unproduced to spare the public from a scene appearing on page 62:


INT. BRUCE CONNER - AL HINDS GYM - MORNING

With a searing CRASH! Man Mountain Wawrzeniak drops loaded dumbbells to the floor and looks at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He nods his head. Next to him, FRED DRYER (Defensive End for the L.A. Rams) and STEVE GERTZ, stand by and openly stare. They are both specimens, themselves, but now they’re in the presence of Greatness and they know it.

                          STEVE GERTZ

                                Good set.

                           MAN MOUNTAIN

                                  Yeah.

                            FRED DRYER

                       You should’ve gone 
                              t’the pros.

                            MAN MOUNTAIN

                               Football’s pussy.

And with that, he turns and walks into the locker room. Gertz and Dryer look at each other.

                             STEVE GERTZ

                               An intellectual…                                             

Yes, Fred was a member, too. “Kate the Great” Schmidt, a close friend who held the American (and soon World) record in women’s javelin, began to workout there, then Jane Frederick, American record holder in women’s heptathlon; Maren Seidler, who had a lock on the American record in women’s shot put; and Italian track star Giulia Montefiore. The Montreal games were on the horizon and the gym again became an unofficial Olympics weight-training site, at least for the Olympians I knew.

“At the gym I feel very strong” (September 12, 1962).

It’s where I reconnected with Lolo, a dear friend from high school who worked the front desk. It’s where I became friends with Levey, an instructor who, like me, was a former NYer, jazz drummer, and competitive boxer with a big, tough father sired by a tougher father, each of whom had been fighters; we shared issues as well as interests. 

It’s where I met “Schitzo Nitz-o,” who, prior to working at the gym, did time for manslaughter after a bar fight went bad; kept a copy of the Physicians Desk Reference at home so he could investigate whatever pharmaceutical he was considering for abuse then take it no matter what the PDR said; was my co-bouncer at a couple of Westside bars; and accompanied me on evictions I handled for a gym member with upscale rental properties but a few downscale tenants who required emphatic assistance to immediately vacate. 

It’s where I caught up with Lisa Lyon, another high school friend, who joined the gym to build strength while studying kendo, became Schitzo’s workout and otherwise partner, and later wound up as the first Women’s World Pro bodybuilding champion, and muse to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and philosopher, neuro-scientist, and psychedelicist John C. Lilly. 

It’s where I met Karl, an elderly, easily irritated and delight-to-incite staff masseur, he of the wandering hands and thankful distaff clientele. He, with fluffy gray-to-white hair on the loss, hard, ice-blue Nordic eyes, and Teutonic accent, we suspected had been Hitler’s personal masseur who fled the bunker after indiscreetly makin’ mit der shiatsu mit Eva, and whose delivery of Schatziputzi, a German term of endearment, remains the most obscenely creepy thing ever heard—just ask Lolo. 

It's where I met Abbye  (strictly ironic “Pudgy”) Stockton, a staff instructor and Muscle Beach alumnus who, during the ’50s health and fitness scene, was “America’s Foremost Bar-Belle." Her husband, Les, another Muscle Beach graduate and staff instructor, was a merry old philandering satyr with a twinkle in his eye and apparently a sparkle in his dick, judging from the effect on the women in the gym he sacked.
 
It’s where I met The Amazing Mary, a middle-aged, formerly miserably married, sexually repressed lady who, according to her liberator, Les, was a subject of study at a sex institute in Santa Monica where she earned the world record for most orgasms within a given brief period of time. It’s a feat I can vouch for, having been treated to a clinical demonstration while sitting in the passenger seat of her VW Beetle in the gym’s parking lot in broad daylight as she, at the behest of Les, digitally drove herself in the driver’s seat. Les and a few men from the gym kept an apartment nearby for entertainment purposes, the purpose being to entertain themselves with Mary, who enjoyed entertaining and being entertained.

The gym was where I met Mambo, the woman who would eventually become my ex-wife due to my instability, with stupidity a close second.

“153 1/2 [lbs.]. We went to the gym” (July 22, 1976).

And it was where I met Christopher Isherwood.

I became aware of him when I was fifteen years old. My mother took my sister and me to see the original Broadway production of Cabaret and I saw his name in the Playbill. I read Berlin Stories a few years later and it sparked an interest in Weimar culture. By the time I began working at the gym I was mindful of his larger literary reputation but hadn’t read any of his other books and was unaware that he had written screenplays. Berlin Stories was sufficient to make a profound impression. When Chris was in the gym I was in the presence of Greatness and I knew it.

But I didn’t do much about it. In fact, I did nothing. I’ve regretted it ever since.

Chris had been a member on and off for twenty-two years before I made his acquaintance, for some time also a member of Lyle Fox’s gym in Pacific Palisades, returning exclusively to Bruce’s when the Fox gym closed. He came in regularly, and stepped on the men’s locker room scale as if punching a time clock. Because I was either busy with a new member, PT patient, laundering towels, in the ladies gym where I spent half my workweek, or preoccupied with my own workouts, I never had many opportunities to talk to him. And Chris and Don kept to themselves, which I respected. But I could have engineered situations. The reality is that I was paralyzed by shyness. As a seasoned Hollywood veteran (I’d worked, after all, as a studio laborer, greensman, and propmaker) I had no trouble kibbitzing with the show biz set. But Chris, he was another matter. I was a precocious reader as a kid and, though I certainly loved movies and TV, accorded book writers with a degree of respect and awe reserved only for heroes. I’d placed him on a pedestal and was completely star-struck. That was not the case with Ray Bradbury, who I’d met a few years earlier while working in a Beverly Hills record shop. Ray was warm, open, and initiated conversation. Chris was not, and did not.

During this time I was also touring the East, reading the Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabarata. I was interested in Vedanta. I would have loved to talk to Chris about this stuff, as well as literature. I probably would have been intrusively annoying, or so I sensed otherwise I would not have been so pathetically timid. It’s not that Chris had some sort of force field that he deliberately turned on to keep people away from him, but he projected an element of self-possession and reserve that might be interpreted as aloof, distant, and/or cold which, as I’ve since learned, he was not. I know because, like him, I was (and remain) a Virgo, his birthday falling on the day after mine, though I hope the reaction he got when answering “what’s your sign?” was better than I’ve ever received: “oh,” the “I’m so sorry” tacitly expressed. Maybe Chris and Don, like most people, just wanted to get in, workout, and get out; the likely explanation.

“154 1/2 [lbs.] We saw Stay Hungry (with Jeff Bridges), went to the gym.”  (July 19, 1976).

For an instant in the continuum of human existence I had the most spectacular calves in the cosmos. With a pair of glorious gastrocnemius, solid gold soleus, peroneus longus and brevis to long for, and with each sharply cut and precisely defined, I was “Mr. Universe from the knees down,” a wry homage by former Mr. America, Mr. World, and 4-time Mr. Universe (as well as escort service mogul, organized crimester, and arm-wrestling hustler who often earned over $1,000 a week from that alone) Dennis Tinerino, yet another gym member. 

Support for that sterling epithet presented itself when, as a contestant in the 1977 Jr. Mr. Southern California competition, I was called out as the ideal against which all other contestants’ calves were to be judged, and the enthusiastically vocal audience, now awestruck at the appearance of my dogies, gasped before erupting into wild, unrestrained bravos as Also sprach Zarathustra heralded my ascension into the pantheon, the heavens opened up, a golden shaft of light bathed me in its numinous glow, I experienced ego death, everything was everything, I took my place on the Great Mandala and was at one with All, even the guy in the front row who for a moment looked like a hipster chimp with goatee and shades. On stage, posing before a packed auditorium, with an applied tan, shaved and greased-up from the neck down, and wearing only the suggestion of a Speedo that highlighted my religious heritage, things weren’t surreal enough so I’d dropped a cap of mescaline halfway through the event.

Afterward, I rendezvoused with Spin and Lolo and her sister in the lobby and waited for our chauffeur, Gibson, to bring his limo around. Spin (gym member, natch’), who I’d been with for a few months, dropped her cap. The plan was to go Dada post-contest; I just arrived early. Lolo and Gibby (gym member, of course) had been dating; the limo ride was his idea and it was refined after a committee was formed to consider the possibilities for pagan worship. And so The Golden Calves Revue hit the road.

“Good workout again at the gym today” (February 28, 1961).

Because of work, travel, and various ailments in 1964, Chris wasn’t going to the gym very much. If he’d observed the following he would have surely recorded it.

Photo courtesy of Royal Books.

That year the gym earned a footnote in modern American art history when painter, sculptor, assemblager, filmmaker, and art-provocateur Bruce Conner visited Bruce Conner’s Physical Services and demanded that Bruce remove his name from the building: there was only one, true Bruce Conner and the town wasn’t big enough for the both of ’em. Suffice it to say, Bruce Conner, physical therapist, gave Bruce Conner, artist, the heave-ho and don’t ‘cha come back no mo’. Incensed (mock or otherwise), Bruce Conner, artist, returned with actor-photographer Dennis Hopper, who documented artist Conner and a gaggle of models posed beneath the gym’s painted sign on the outside west wall. (Original prints of Hopper’s photograph now sell for upwards of $20,000). The visual pun was intended - and unintentionally appropriate: the place was Libidoland.  Afterward, Bruce Conner, artist, went inside and distributed buttons to the membership that read, “I am not Bruce Conner,” while sporting his own button, “I am Bruce Conner.” It was a happening, baby! The gym’s signage remained when, in 1971, Bruce retired and turned the business over to Alan Hinds, a physical therapist who had been his assistant. 

“The only achievement for me has been at the gym” (July 28, 1966).

The ladies gym was a garden. If I’d had the temperament for promiscuity I’d have needed a thirteen-month calendar to schedule dates. This is not ego; it was the same story for the other instructors. A member once told me she wanted to see what it was like with a big, built guy. Musicians looking like dental floss with legs may have been the ideal in the outside world during the mid-1970s but inside the gym muscle was exotic and, apparently, tempting, the apple on the tree. I had the astonishing opportunity to meet a lot of women, get to know them, become friends, and then and only then, ask them out if I was interested in something more. This was a first. Prior to that I didn’t meet many women so when one crossed my path discrimination tipped its hat to desperation and took a hike. Though I had a couple of escapades between them, prior to meeting Mambo I had two intense amours fous with women I met at the gym.

You could fit Spin in a tea cup and still have room for a tea bag and two lumps of sugar but she had big ideas. Most of them involved sex, many of which I enjoyed, others not so much. She held my testicles hostage to being “open-minded” and so I always said yes when my head was often screaming no. On one occasion she’d contrived I felt like a crash-test dummy at an orgy. She lived a few blocks away from the gym with her long-term boyfriend in an open relationship well on its way to closing up shop. She scared the hell out of me when she once lost consciousness after an orgasm and I thought I’d killed her, but she finally came to and wanted more. But I made excuses, afraid anxiety might kill me. During an evening shift, we once trysted in the gym’s ultrasound/hydrotherapy room, from within which on enchanted nights it was not unusual to hear ultra-sounds having nothing to do with standard therapeutic modalities. I was volunteered to pose for the boyfriend, a professional photographer with a scheme to broaden his portrait business with “fine art” erotic photography catering to sophisticated couples. His shot of me, however, looked like a porn bar mitzvah commemorative: naket boychick in full profile, head bowed and turned away in reverence with shadows for the sacred and solemn but head not turned and shadowed enough to mask the bar mitzvah boy’s punim. It was not a photograph I was keen on anybody ever seeing but people did when the weasel set up a display in The Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood without my consent. I had to pay him a social call to request all prints and negative, a visit I hope his recollection of stimulates the panic I witnessed when he opened the door and saw me looking nothing like happy. Macho has its appropriate moments.

Rima was smart, exotic, and pensive, with a face like a bright full moon with a dark cloud hovering over its surface. She was a successful business machine saleswoman six years my senior whose twisted on and off relationship with her demon shrink she hoped I’d be the cure for. She told me she loved me and I believed her but couldn’t say it back because I didn’t want to believe it even though I felt it; doomed if I do, damned if I don’t. A hothouse flower, she wore Jungle Gardenia, a scent so overpowering that I often swooned when we embraced, so I asked her to tone it down. She did, confining it to down below. She asked me to hurt her during sex but that was new to me and I was too scared; I couldn’t meet that need and felt that I had failed her in a fundamental way. She wanted me to run away with her, somewhere, anywhere but I didn’t have the guts or maybe it was just good sense because I felt something wrong inside her, like a dog can smell cancer. I raced to see her at 2AM when she called, drunk and in tears two months after she once again fell under Freudenstein’s spell, and begged me to come over and hold her and I did, rocking her in my arms on her couch for as long as she needed because you don’t leave a wounded and defenseless animal in the middle of the road, you just don’t. But I abandoned her without a note after carrying her to bed and tucking her in when she finally passed out, a careless act not meant to be so that has haunted me ever since.

“Today I did my first full day’s work at Fox. I have what seems to be a dream secretary, Eleanor Breese” (September 24, 1956).

I was anxious to move on from the gym; I was serious with Mambo and needed to demonstrate that I had a future. Lisa was a story analyst at American-International Pictures, and the knowledge that there was a job informally  called “reader” was a welcome revelation. Sometime later I was talking to Bill Kerby about this employment manna and he said that a friend of his might need some help. He arranged a meeting. I put together a few writing samples, met his friend and for the next four years worked as assistant to and reader for a dream employer, Eleanor Breese, executive story editor at Lorimar Productions, at the time the number one television production company. During that period Eleanor talked about working in the Scribner’s steno pool for Maxwell Perkins and assignments he sent her on, e.g. working at the kitchen table in Thomas Wolfe’s Brooklyn apartment, typing up manuscript pages as he threw them over his shoulder while using the refrigerator as a standing desk. She mentioned working at Fox, but Chris never came up, which is odd because as I’ve subsequently learned the two became friends and socialized outside of work. If she had talked about him I’d have remembered.

I asked Lolo what she remembers about Chris. Not much of anything, it turns out. Chris was gentle, Levey recalls. “He’d say ‘hi,’ when he came in. He fidgeted around; he didn’t sweat buckets.” Lisa, who was a friend of Don, doesn’t recall seeing Chris at the gym at all. Apparently, he possessed the power of invisibility when he wanted to move through the world unobserved.

I’d have asked Schitzo but restlessness consumed him and he went AWOL. For three years if my phone rang in the middle of the night—as it did around once a month; it was his metaphysical menses—I knew who was calling and what to expect: in the midst of an existential crisis and heavily drugged he would channel The Beach Boys. And I’d respond in kind to keep him on the line and away from the ledge. I’d pick-up the phone and without greeting he’d begin.

“I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same old strip. I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.”

“Don’t worry, Bobby, everything will turn out alright.”

“Now it’s dark and I’m alone, in my room. What good is the dawn that grows into day? The sunset at night, or livin’ this way?”
 
“At least you’ve got the warmth of the sun.”

“Yeah, but will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?”

He already wished that. Time to distract.

“Perhaps, but here’s a little peninsula, and over here’s a viaduct leading over to the mainland.”

“Why a duck?”

And we’d run that Marx Bros. scene.

Schitzo scrammed to Australia and worked in a health club in Sydney. When he got kicked out of kangaroo-land for lack of a work permit he wound up in Hong Kong, working in another health club. At one point in the mid-‘80s a mutual friend called to tell me that Schitzo was in town and wanted to get together. So I went over. I met his recent bride, a young Chinese girl who spoke no English. Schitzo didn’t speak Chinese. That can only have improved the marriage’s prospects for success. I would have asked him about it but he wasn’t around. Just before I arrived he announced to our friend that he was going out for a few minutes. I waited a few hours. He never showed.

“154 1/2 [lbs.]. Don in Santa Barbara. By myself at the gym today, old Dobbin puttering about. I don’t do very much but it makes me feel as if I am really trying, and I am in my old Dobbin way. I am so lazy and exercising is so boring but I must do it. I fear that I will be too consumed by sloth to attend my own funeral. (I must stop thinking about death. Courage. Onward!). After showering, I went to my locker and found that someone had walked off with my towels. But Stan, one of the instructors, was kind to get some more. The young man is nice, and seems to always be on the verge of asking me a question but never does. I sometimes find myself  staring at him, an Adonis from the knees down.”

I wish he’d written that entry, even if he got my name wrong. Most fans of anyone feel that they know the person. This is particularly true with authors, who foster one on one relationships, the writer and reader engaged in a pas de deux, a rendezvous of minds with a strong tactile element: the feel of a book in the hands, the touch of a page. There is a certain intimacy. People curl up with a book; no one curls up with a movie. Yet whatever the medium fans would like to be acknowledged and set apart from the crowd. It would have been very satisfying to have gained Chris’ attention in a diary aside however trivial, silly, or critical. I regularly saw the guy, I (sort of) knew the guy. I was someone special! It is a vanity I confess to, an egoism I accept, just as Chris accepted his own vanity and egotism. I struggle to find connections, however tenuous, between us, forcing synchronicity where it doesn’t exist. Perhaps Chris’ guru, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, could have made more of coincidence than I can. One of the few things I get out of it is the gnawing sense that crossing paths with him was an augury that I ignored; that a life with books was my fate but I wasn’t paying attention until decades later when I finally awoke from an unsettling sleep.

Taps has blown for the golden calves, and time hasn’t done me any favors from the knees up. The armor has fallen away and I feel lighter inside, though terribly vulnerable. Yet the world doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. As my body rides off into the sunset I watch from my homestead porch with amused irony. I have reverted to the tall, thin bookworm I began as, the intervening years as if a 45-year aberration, a strenuous journey essential to finding a place within my family, myself, and the world.

For three years the gym was the center of my life and a formative experience that influenced all that followed. It was to me what Weimar Berlin was to Christopher Isherwood: a way station and safe place to explore young manhood, pursue adventures in masculinity, and observe and experience a fascinating, decadent milieu, albeit from a different orientation, and certainly without Nazis in the background, unless you count Karl. I wasn’t a camera but my Kundalini was taking notes.

“Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this happened” (Goodbye to Berlin).


Nor can I. Memories are viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, so far away yet a nanometer nearby, trapped, stretched, and distorted between perspectives. The appearance of a golden age of youth is no more than that. When I woke up in the morning the days were dark and I’d hope they’d get light. The anger, confusion, and depression so well disguised that I fooled even myself remained veiled, their origins evaded until they could no longer be avoided. The past lies in wait, and it is patient. If you don’t deal with it, the past will deal with you. 


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A Book Shop Owner As Stuntman

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

At the Megalopolis Book Shop, Mickey Tsimmis was all about customer service. No matter how potentially catastrophic the request (i.e. pulling a book from the shelves), Mickey was ready to sacrifice his life to help out. Coolly insouciant (or idiotic), he ignored the peril that was routine while navigating through the thicket that was Megalopolis. Danger was his business and to satisfy a customer no obstacle was too great to overcome. Scaling the shelves was an Olympic event in his jungle jumble of books, where organization was overrated and safety was for sissies.

Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

"Screamingly funny" (Bookstore Memories). 

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.

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A Rare & Used Book Shop Owner's Lament

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

Poor Mickey Tsimmis, his innocence lost in cruel Hollywood, the burg without mercy, the hamlet of vulgarity, the city without a soul. It's Despairsville, man, a drag and a half. But relief and change you could believe in were routinely found at his Megalopolis Book Shop on Melrose Ave. east of La Brea, west of the moon, south of no north.

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Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.
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Apologies to Kay Nielsen and Charles Bukowski.
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A Legend in the Hollywood Book Trade

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following appears as the Preface to this just published collaboration of Poltroon Press and Booktryst.

 

 There are legends in the Los Angeles rare and used book trade.

In 1905, Ernest Dawson established L.A.’s first book shop exclusively devoted to rare books. Continued by his equally respected sons, Glen and Muir, the shop remained in business for 105 years. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Jake Zeitlin ran a rare book shop that became a locus for fine printing and local artists and typographers. A Texan by birth, Stanley Rose migrated to Los Angeles in the 1920s and began in the trade by peddling books on a push cart through the writers’ buildings at the movie studios  He opened a shop on Hollywood Blvd. that became a hangout for screenwriters and local and visiting novelists. Rose had a back room that after the shop closed in the evenings became an “art studies” salon that concentrated on studying the nude female form, comely models provided for the students’ edification and attention to detail. Rose was also notorious for selling clandestine erotica, and published a few one-handers written by starving screenwriters.  In the early 1960s, the Weinstein brothers established a junk store in Compton, CA that sold used books in addition to dross. Ultimately focusing exclusively on books, they developed their business into the most successful rare book firm in the world with final headquarters in a former mortuary to the stars in West Hollywood.

And then there was the late Eli Goodman (1925-2016) of Cosmopolitan Book Shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Established in 1958, Cosmopolitan was Hollywood’s oldest used bookstore. A luminary in the shade of the Los Angeles rare book trade, Eli Goodman was a legend based strictly on eccentric character. And he was a character, one too singularly colorful to have been invented; a novelist could not have dreamed-up the man.

Refusing to ever retire, he never did. His final promotion on the Cosmopolitan website was a calculated plea for mercy and desperate tug on the heartstrings: “I’M 91 YEARS OLD – PLEASE HELP ME!  TAKE MY WONDERFUL BOOKS FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!”

If Eli’s long-time assistant, amanuensis, and literary voice, Arnold Herr, is not exactly James Boswell, Eli Goodman will never be confused with Samuel Johnson - except for their pure love of books. Eli Goodman - within these pages “Mickey Tsimmis” - was passionate about them.

Parts of this book were originally published in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) newsletter and later episodes on my blog-site for rare books, Booktryst.com. They are collected here, as they were on Booktryst, in serial form but with additional material not found in the online edition [now offline]. The episodes are based on journal entries made by Mr. Herr over many years. Some end with a cliff-hanger. The dangler could be Eli or Arnold hanging onto a steep, flimsy bookshelf for dear life - or somebody trying to hang onto their sanity.

In the 19th century, color-plate books were often “heightened with gum arabic” (as described in bookseller catalogues) to intensify the colors and provide a light sheen. It’s fair to say that the stories herein have been heightened. But it would be misleading to characterize them as tall-tales. They are not. But Mr. Herr was clearly wearing lifts in his shoes while writing them down.

I could go on about Eli Goodman, who I only knew from experience, and Arnold Herr, who has been a friend for many years. But there’s a guy wedged in a truck tire rolling down the street in my direction frantically waving his arms and shouting, “Get out of the way!” And so, hello, I must be going.

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HERR, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Cover photo by Shelly Vogel. BUY NOW. 

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Super Copy Of William Burroughs' Scarce Digit Junkie $15,000 At New York Antiquarian Book Fair

by Stephen J. Gertz

A copy of the incredibly scarce first U.K. edition of William S. Burroughs' Junkie, published in London by Digit Books in 1957, is being offered at the upcoming New York Antiquarian Book Fair, April 3-6, 2014. Inscribed by Burroughs to his friend, Phoenix Bookshop owner Robert Wilson ("For Bob Wilson / With all best / wishes / William Burroughs / as William Lee") and in unusually wonderful condition, the asking price is $15,000.

Yes, that's $15,000 for a mass-market paperback book. But it is the most difficult Burroughs "A" item to acquire and one of the most collectible vintage paperbacks of all. It is definitely the most desirable drug-lit. paperback.

Banned by British censors immediately upon publication with all copies in retail circulation ordered returned to their distributors and then all copies in distributors' warehouses commanded to be destroyed, few copies have survived. I've only seen three copies in over thirty years of collecting and book selling, the last one in 2002. That copy, uninscribed, was owned by a friend who sold it to a British dealer for $5,000. What a difference twelve years and an inscribed copy with stunning association in excellent condition makes. This copy is likely the finest extant; if there's a better one it has yet to surface.

William S. Burroughs, c. late 1970s.
Photographer: David Sandell.
Provenance: Though not noted, from the collection of Tuli Kupferberg.

"For many struggling writers and poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, Robert A. Wilson [b. 1922] was a familiar and comforting presence. As the third proprietor of the Phoenix Bookshop in New York City from 1962 to 1988, Wilson provided both encouragement and financial support to beginning writers. A great lover of literature, Wilson specialized in rare books and manuscripts and shipped his material to enthusiastic readers in all parts of the world.

"Through the bookshop, Wilson published the work of many notable writers, including Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Wilbur. During his twenty-six year tenure as the proprietor of the Phoenix, Wilson oversaw the publication of no less than forty-three volumes.

"An avid collector of rare books and manuscripts for his own personal collection, Wilson himself is the author of more than a dozen volumes, many of which he published on a mimeograph machine in the back room of the Phoenix. Among these are Auden's Library (1975); Marianne Serves Lunch (1976); Robert Haggard's She (1977);  Faulkner on Fire Island (1979); and Tea With Alice (1978), an interview with his friend, Alice Toklas.

"In 1988, financial difficulties forced Wilson to close the doors forever, thereby ending the Phoenix's fifty-six year history" (University of Delaware, Special Collections, Robert A. Wilson Collection).

Wilson's memoir, Seeing Shelley Plain ( 2001), relates how he transformed a small, obscure book shop into a internationally renowned literary harbor. Within he writes of his close, long-standing friendships with some of the great figures of 20th century literature, including Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, and Burroughs, and provides mini-biographies of many famous "Beat Generation" poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, Gregory Corso, and Michael McClure. It also contains a previously unpublished piece by Burroughs.

When Junkie was originally published in the U.S. in 1953 by Ace Books it was issued in a two-fer edition inversely bound with a reprint of ex-Bureau of Narcotics agent Maurice Helbrant's 1941 Narcotics Agent. By doing so Ace exploited the contemporary craze for dope-themed literature but played it safe in a hostile environment that in 1952 had seen the United States Congress hold hearings on literature it considered morally repugnant for children and of dubious cultural or otherwise value to adults. Ace took no chances, correctly reasoning that Helbrant's tough anti-dope book would mitigate Junkie's unapologetic, outlaw romantic, almost positive view of heroin use.

The British edition - the first separate edition of Junkie - without the influence of Helbrant's book was a bit too much for British authorities. The back cover to the Digit edition, a masterpiece of sensational drug eroticism, didn't help. Falling firmly onto the censors' list of Yikes! its overt message of sex and drugs was not one the British wished to be delivered.

The front cover art to the Digit edition recreates rather than reproduces Al Rossi's original for the Ace edition and, strictly speaking, attribution should read, "after Al Rossi"; it is a repainting of the original with subtle differences in color, framing, the figures' hair, face, etc.

The book is being offered by Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, who, in celebration of Burroughs' centennial, is devoting an entire display case to Burroughs material, including the photos seen here, at the Fair, which will include another scarce gem, a precious copy of the 1957 off-print of Burroughs' Letter From a Master Drug Addict To Dangerous Drugs, which originally appeared in Vol. 53, No. 2 of The British Journal of Addiction (1956). A notorious Burroughs rarity, it was issued at his request in a print-run estimated at no more than fifty copies, tops. In excellent condition it is being offered for $3,000.

Letter From a Master Addict..., is, as critic Carol Loranger has written, "one of Burroughs' most subversive pieces of comic writing. The 'scientific' language and deadpan asides both anticipate and replicate...the 'scientific' language and asides of much of the narrative of Naked Lunch...The language of the article, together with Burroughs' heavy use of passive constructions and medical jargon, careful attention to definition of terms, and (for botanicals) use of Latin species names, combines with its encyclopedic organization and tabulations of data to effectively imitate science writing of the day - an imitation Burroughs then undermines with odd anecdotes" (Postmodern Culture, Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999).

William S.. Burroughs, c. 1962,
with Antony Balch in the Beat Hotel, Paris.
Photographer: Nicolas Tikhomiroff. $4,000.

The fact that this piece by Burroughs (whose Junkie pseudonym, William Lee, was blown by this time) appeared near simultaneous to the Digit edition of Junkie likely helped doom the book's appearance on the British welcome wagon of wholesome literature, William S. Burroughs a serious saboteur of mainstream cultural and moral values. 

So, go to the 2014 New York Antiquarian Book Fair, with over 200 expert dealers from nearly twenty countries around the world exhibiting, check your steely dan at the door, go to the booth of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, wish Burroughs a happy 100th birthday, and drool over a fine selection of his contributions to the decline of Western civilization.

Afterward, visit the offices of Dr. Benway, Burroughs' go-to medico, who doesn't give a bat's butt about a patient's state of mind but has some marvelously graphic things to say about how to remove a patient's brain with the sucker none the wiser and better off for its excision. In a brainless world the brainless are kings with the brainful at a distinct disadvantage.

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Images courtesy of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, with our thanks.
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It's about time and long overdue that a census be taken of all extant copies of the Digit edition of Junkie. Any volunteers?

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Charles Bukowski In High School

by Stephen J. Gertz

Los Angeles High School, 1917-1971.

Once upon a time - the late 1930s - Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), America's poet laureate of the depths, attended Los Angeles High School. His hard living years were ahead of him. His post-high school aspirations did not include writing. His ambition was to join the Navy. To that end he was a member of L.A. High's ROTC program.

A set of seven Los Angeles High School Blue & White semi-annual yearbooks - Summer 1936, Summer and Winter 1937, Winter 1938, Summer 1938 (in dust jacket, and a duplicate copy), and Winter 1939 - has recently appeared in the marketplace, offered by William Dailey Rare Books.

The provenance could not be more sterling; the copies of William Mullinax, Bukowski's closest boyhood friend and loyal high school buddy, who appeared in the novelist's Ham On Rye (1982) as Eli "Baldy" La Crosse. We know the provenance is solid because Bukowski inscribed two of the copies to Mullinax and other copies possess inscriptions to Mullinax.

Mullinax, the son of an alcoholic surgeon, was the person who introduced Bukowski to booze.

Bukowski has signed Mullinax's copy of the Winter 1939 yearbook on the front free endpaper. Whether he was aware of what he was doing or not, the line breaks suggest an eye and ear for poetry. And a sense of humor.

Best of Everything

to a good baseball

player and a swell

student.

Henry Bukowski

His inscription squeezed next to Mullinax's class photo is not so proto-literary; it's standard high school yearbook prose: "lots of Luck an old pal and truly great guy, 'Baldy' Bill Mullinax."

Bukowski's inscription in the Summer 1938 yearbook is found on the page devoted to ROTC Company A, and is another exercise in breaking the boundaries of standard Jahrbuch-Stil prose.

Best Wishes

to a good army 

man. I hope you

will be a Nevins

sergeant next

term. 

Navy

Hank Bukowski

1st Class

Seaman

Buk drew a line from the inscription to his ROTC Company A photo. He's fourth from the right in the second row down. You need a magnifying glass to see him with any clarity yet he stands out: deeply tanned between two snow-white boys, his cap with insignia at a rakish angle to the right and tipped down to  his  eyebrow. The attitude is already there.

The above page from Los Angeles High School Blue and White Summer 1938 is reproduced in Ben Pleasant's Visceral Bukowski (2004) and an enlargement of Bukowski within the group portrait is inset.

Of further value to collectors is that other classmates are found in the yearbooks who Bukowski later sandwiched into Ham On Rye, his semi-autobiographical novel recounting his youth in Los Angeles: Al Cole, Jimmy Newell; Jimmy Haddox, Jim Hatcher; and Harold Mortenson appears as Abe Mortenson. As a bonus, an autograph note is laid into the Winter 1939 yearbook, from Jim Haddox to Bill Mullinax, "Jim Hatcher" to "Baldy."

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Images courtesy of William Dailey Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Bukowski's First Appearance In Print, 1944

Charles Bukowski, Artist

Lost Original Drawings Of A Dirty Old Man

 Charles Bukowski's Last, Unpublished Poem

Charles Bukowski Bonanza At Auction

Dirty Old Man Exposed At The Huntington Library
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Henry Miller Loathed Salvador Dali (And Anais Nin Wasn't Crazy About Him, Either)

by Stephen J. Gertz

For a few months during late summer 1940, Henry Miller and Anais Nin visited their mutual friend from Paris, Caresse Crosby (1892-1970), for  an extended stay at Hampton Manor, a 486 acre estate  in Bowling Green, Virginia with a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion built in 1847 by John Hampton DeJarnette that Crosby had bought and renovated. At the same time Salvador Dali and his not-yet wife, Gala, were living at the estate.

Miller had met Dali years earlier in Paris. He was not impressed. Their relationship was antagonistic from the start. When Salvador and Gala, and Henry and Anais were thrown together at Hampton Manor Dali's antics and eccentricities, Miller's personality, and Gala's domineering nature led to a train wreck, when egos collide.

As Nin wrote in her dairies 1934-1944, "They hadn’t counted on Mrs. Dali’s talent for organization. Before anyone realized what was happening, the entire household was there for the sole purpose of making the Dalis happy. No one was allowed to set foot in the library because he wanted to work there. - Would [John] Dudley be so kind and drive to Richmond to pick up something or other that Dali needed for painting? Would she [Nin] mind translating an article for him? Was Caresse going to invite LIFE magazine for a visit? In other words, everyone performed the tasks assigned to them. All the while, Mrs. Dali never raised her voice, never tried to seduce or flatter them: it was implicitly assumed that all were there to serve Dali, the great, indisputable artist."

Amongst a laundry list of things the Dalis did to annoy Miller and Nin was the couple's incessant public displays of affection, pawing each other at every opportunity; it was a bit much. Dali's art projects at Hampton Manor proved tiresome; everything had to be subsumed to Dali's muse, Gala. Caresse Crosby was away in Reno, Nevada at this time and there was no one to serve as referee. Dali's sympathies for Franco in Spain were further reason for clashes; Miller and Nin were anti-Fascist.

Yes, Crosby invited it and in its April, 1941 issue Life magazine ran story on Dali, Gala, and the hubbub at Hampton Manor. "Their host, Mrs. Crosby…likes interesting guests," Life reported, "and does not object when her visitors linger on, but they must be as industrious as they are stimulating." Life said that Dali arose every morning at 7:30, put on dark trousers, a velvet jacket and a red vest, and "spent his days painting and 'enchanting' and his evenings writing" his autobiography.

According to Life, for one of the paintings Dali had black servants pose in ankle-deep snow in front of the mansion with a piano and a slaughtered deer. One of the photographs that accompanied the story depicted Dali, Gala, and Caresse Crosby having their afternoon coffee while a live Hereford bull kneeled on the floor between them.

"Here today," Life continued, "Dali busies himself from dawn to dusk 'enchanting' the grounds and gardens with such surrealistic fancies as floating pianos, multi-colored rabbits and spiders with the faces of girls."

"The Divine Dali," as he called himself, was not so divine to Miller, who, as many, considered the artist more a poseur-exhibitionist than genius, a talent flawed by his ego-centrism - a pitfall Miller, with no small ego himself managed to escape; his ego was central to his talent, a friend and not an enemy. What was enchanting to Dali  - who once grandly proclaimed, "I am Surrealism!" to the disdain of every other Surrealist in the world - was clap-trap to Miller, the realist who called a prick a prick in his work and knew one when he saw one.  

The visit ended in a wild shouting match at dinner when the man who Crosby was divorcing in Nevada showed-up in Virginia and raised a ruckus. Miller and Nin fled Hampton Manor, and Dali, already holding a place of prominence, zoomed to the top of Miller's Z-list and became persona non grata.

On two occasions, Miller expressed his feelings about Dali in books inscribed to Pierre Sicari,  Henry's barber in Southern California, friend, and confidant, as well as one of the foremost Miller collectors in the world.  On the front endpaper to a copy of Billy Rose's Dali-illustrrated Wine, Women and Words (1948) Miller wrote, "To me S.D. is a prick of the first water, I know, from intimate contact. May he live to screw himself!  Henry Miller  1/31/73  Especially inscribed for  Pierre Sicari  recently of Corsica."

On the front free endpaper to a copy of Dali (NY: Abrams, 1968), Miller, a month later, wrote "For Pierre - Dali is the biggest 'prick' of the 20th century! (Entre nous) Henry Miller 2/25/73."

From left: Dali, Gala, Miller, Barnet B, Ruder, Sept. 10, 1940.

There is a photograph of Miller, Dali and Gala, and New York bookseller Barnet B. Ruder (the NY agent for Ardmore, Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy M. Johnson, the man who anonymously commissioned, through Ruder, Miller, Nin, Crosby, etc., etc. to write clandestine porn manuscripts for his personal satisfaction) at Hampton Manor dated September 10, 1940. This was surely a calm moment before the Hereford bull hit the fan, a brief respite during the Hampton Manor tumult when two giant egos, one literary, the other, artistic, met on the field of battle and crossed swords as two big, sharp-edged pricks, one from Catalonia the other from Brooklyn. There is no record, as far as I've learned, of Dali's recollections of this affair; Miller, the writer, has the last word. Dali, like Boris in Tropic of Cancer, was lousy but without the lice.

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Photoprint of Henry Miller, Barnet B. Ruder, and Mr. & Mrs. Salvador Dali, Accession # 7022-h, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Inscription image from Wine, Women and Words courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.

In 2010, Joseph Kishton wrote and directed a documentary, Perceptions and Memories, about the contentious relationship between Miller and Dali.

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A Gravity's Rainbow Archive Screams Across The Sky

by Stephen J. Gertz

A screaming comes across the sky.
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

The most demanding novel anyone has ever written… [and] the most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer - Bruce Allen, Library Journal, March 1, 1973.

A small archive of correspondence between novelist Thomas Pynchon and Bruce Allen, whose review of Gravity's Rainbow in the March 1, 1973 issue of Library Journal emitted the sparks to Pynchon's genius that would ignite an incandescent shower of praise, has come to market.

The archive includes a 200-word signed typed letter (carbon) from Allen to Pynchon effusively praising Gravity's Rainbow and referring him to Allen's review.

Two additional carbons of letters to Pynchon from Allen, dated late 1975 and mid- 1976 are included, as well as Allen's heavily annotated proof copy of Gravity's Rainbow used for his review and his copy of the book's first edition.

The centerpiece of the archive is Pynchon's 260-word response to Allen's initial letter on the author’s trademark graph paper, dated March 25, 1973, along with its envelope.

Pynchon acknowledges Allen’s praise gratefully (“Thank you for that really extravagant review of Gravity’s Rainbow. It was a good ego trip for me, and I guess it must’ve cheered up Viking’s advertising people too”). He goes on to agree, in principle, with Allen’s point that at $15 the hardcover is expensive (“...my feeling was that the whole fucking thing ought to be paperback”) and suggests Allen take it up with Viking, although he feels that Viking wasn’t as able to subsidize a project like Gravity’s Rainbow, as easily as say, Random House would have (“...to be fair, Viking is trying to survive as a smaller independent publisher...and it costs them more to put out a book than the biggies like Random House...Thanks for caring enough to write to Viking, anyhow”).

Then, forty years before the publishing world would be fractured by the rise of digital technology, Pynchon writes of the current state of publishing and the writer's place at the shallow end of the income stream.

"But till writers get their own publishing and distribution operation together, this 19th century dispensation wherein the Man gets to make off with 85-95% of the writer's earnings will go on prevailing, and all the talk is sort of academic.

The letter also provides a glimpse of the author’s thoughts on his place in the literary continuum at a critical juncture in his career and in the publishing industry. "If the book sells lousy they'll call it Viking's Folly, and if it sells good it will be a great enlightened Watershed In Publishing History or something…if anybody can predict…"

Pynchon manuscript and autograph material is legendarily scarce. According to ABPC, the only such Pynchon material to yet come to auction was a one-page signed letter dated 1981 refusing permission to write about and anthologize some of his early stories. It sold at Swann Galleries for $12,000 on April 23, 2009. The cache under notice, however, is a much more important and significant catch, offered by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.

V., Pynchon's 1963 debut novel, showed things to come. George Plimpton, reviewing it in the New York Times declared Pynchon "a young writer of staggering promise."  The Crying of Lot 49, his 1966 short novel, received decent notices but was, as far as Pynchon was concerned, a failure. Ten years after V., Gravity's Rainbow delivered on the promise, elevating Pynchon to the modern pantheon of novelists.

Above, something you scarcely, if ever, see: the highly private and reclusive Pynchon's autograph signature, the earliest dated yet to appear in the market, as far as I've been able to determine. It closes his last paragraph, which ends with a four-word summary that is almost cosmically amusing in retrospect:

“We’ll see what happens.”

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All images courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Harlan Ellison Gets A Haircut

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hollywood haircut noir.

Harlan Ellison did a book signing in Hollywood last weekend. He got a haircut first.

I don't know how many haircuts Ellison gets each year but the media was alerted for this one. He's seventy-nine years old but not on death's door; this wasn't Harlan Ellison's Last Haircut. But it was a Harlan Ellison haircut, nonetheless. Stop the presses.

Considering that he got it at Sweeney Todd's Barber Shop on Hollywood Boulevard we're fortunate that it wasn't something more. Trader Joe's is not offering 100% All-Harlan Meat Pies this week.

Sweeney Todd's offers party services and will, upon request, screen vintage stag films for guests, a classic movie projector running the sin through its sprockets. This occurs at night, after hours. No stag films during Ellison's haircut: it was daytime and the clips were strictly of the scissors kind. Harlan merely needed a little taken off the top and around the ears with neckline cleaned up. But he wound up getting styled.

Prelude to a pompadour.
Photo credit: Miriam Linna.

I arrived late, Sweeney Todd's was packed inside, a crowd of Ellisoniacs piled outside, and the two bodyguards the publisher hired for the occasion (appropriately dressed  as '50s juvenile delinquents  because Ellison is the king of JD-lit. amongst other literary crowns he wears) blocked my entrance. Through the window I saw Harlan sitting in the barber's chair. He'd been regaling those inside with 100% pure Ellison, which is to say he was outrageous, funny, profane, provocative, acerbic, funnier still, insightful, and totally entertaining. I didn't hear any of it but it's a given that when Harlan Ellison opens his mouth to an audience pearls of all grades and colors fall out of it.

Haircut over, he made it to the front door, looked directly at me through its window, got walleyed, enthusiastically pointed, then spread his arms and mouthed "Oh, my God!" Somewhat puzzled by his effusive display I pantomimed my own greeting in return. A moment later he walked out the door with his wife, Susan, and bodyguards in tow. "Great to see you!" he said as if I was his long-lost best friend. I was touched. "Great to see you, too," I said, as if he was my long-lost best friend I never knew I had and lost.  Surrounded by the adoring he introduced me to Susan: "Tell her who you are!" I did while he was distracted by the press, which pressed close, the potential for sterling sound bites too overwhelming to let pass.

He was wearing a black t-shirt under an open button-down. The t-shirt read, "What if the Hokey-Pokey was really what it's all about?," existentialist despair with mordant pop-culture wit ala Ellison. So, we put our right foot in, we put our right foot out and pokey'ed down the street to La Luz de Jesus, the book, art, and pop-culture gallery where Harlan was giving a talk with Q&A followed by a signing for Pulling A Train and Getting in the Wind. These twin collections of Ellison JD short stories were recently published by Kicks Books and reprint those in Ellison's Sex Gang by Paul Merchant (Nightstand Books, NB 1503, 1959) with others from the late '50s - early '60s. Kicks is the wild paperback imprint out of Brooklyn and home to "Hip Pocket Books," the reflection of the all-consuming pulp-culture sensibility of their publisher, Miriam Linna. She's the reigning Queen of Cool whose irrepressibly enthusiastic, tongue-in-torrid-cheek happy-go-hard-boiled fanzine ad copy reads like a rush down a dark alley on a moonlit night in Pulpville in service to moving the merch with an irresistible pitch.

"All hail the first hip pocket volume of Ellison short stories culled
from the rarest of his titles, SEX GANG, which was issued under
the name of Paul Merchant in 1959. The wild set of psychosexual
gangland tales is finally available again, fifty years later, spanning
two volumes which collect all of the stories in the 1959 book plus
an unhealthy dose of lost fiction from the persistent pen of the
grand master of all things tainted, terrible, torrid and terrific."

The gallery was packed; there was no room to wriggle. A sardine would have been thankful to be in a can. Harlan moved through the crowd toward the front; I faded into the audience.

After an amusing introduction by comedian Patton Oswalt (whose recent Star Wars-themed filibuster on Parks and Recreation has gone YouTube viral due to its inspired high-insanity quotient) Harlan took the podium and for the next half-hour he took it for a ride.

Harlan mugs for Patton Oswalt's camera.

Don't get Harlan Ellison started on the stalkers, creeps, and miscreants that have plagued him over the years. Death threats have come his way like confetti at a convention. He doesn't shoot from the hip so much as bazooka from the shoulder and this bugs some people, particularly those with loose hinges. Ellison doesn't take kindly to loons in his yard at night with shotguns. It offends his street-sense of courtesy and he has no compunctions about dealing directly with such hazards. On one occasion he disarmed the intruder and nailed him to a tree. This may seem extreme but in Ellison's telling the episode was a dark Looney Tune™ and the only thing missing was an anvil falling on the bum's head; he got off easy with the nails, and Harlan, naturally, nailed the story's laugh lines.

I wouldn't interrupt Harlan Ellison in mid-sentence if I were you. He takes no prisoners. You'll be impaled but the audience will scream with delight. You may, however, float an inch off the ground with a beatific smile afterward, as did one guilty party I saw. To be cursed by Harlan Ellison is to be blessed; you have been anointed with his words. It's like getting ranked-out by Don Rickles: it's a badge of honor and only the humorless complain.

"Hot on the heels of PULLING A TRAIN comes its savage sister
GETTING IN THE WIND, whipping up more gritty street life odes
circa 1959! Perfect the pair with both volumes - together, they
pack the fervor of a genre too wild, too true, too traumatizing
for tepid tempers - this is the neckmeat for a new breed of reader,
a glittering illiterati channeling raw emotion and constant
visceral stimulation. Without this pair, friend, you are lost."

Harlan Ellison has been called contentious, abrasive, and argumentative. He knows he can be that way sometimes. Considering the many putzes he's had to contend with over the years you'd be contentious, abrasive, and argumentative, too. Robert Bloch once said that while other writers take infinite pains, "Harlan gives them."

He has a healthy ego. Some think it's too healthy. But a novelist without an ego solidly in the pink ain't much of a writer. So, when a young guy asked him what he thought of Philip K. Dick during the Q&A I froze. Uh, oh, I thought, this is a Harlan Ellison book event; Harlan Ellison is performing (because Harlan Ellison appearances are performance art); Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest science-fiction writers the world has ever produced; hell, it's Harlan-Time! and this chowderhead is asking about another author, one in the same genre? I thought the question steel to Ellison's flint and expected sparks to fly.

Harlan grew quiet. It was a two-part question, he carefully replied. What do I think of Philip K. Dick as a writer and what do I think of Philip K. Dick as a man?

Ellison adores 80% of Philip K. Dick's work, it's beyond compare. The other 20% he doesn't care for, Dick's theologically-themed novels. Ellison isn't into spirituality, he prefers gritty, he says. As for Philip K. Dick, the man, Harlan began then stopped himself, afraid that he might say something that would get him into trouble. He earlier expressed a strong aversion to computers, the Internet, social media and hand-held digital devices that can take a snippet and turn it into a tempest in ten minutes. After measured consideration he simply said that when Dick was in the mood he could be the most charming person in the world. When he wasn't in the mood, well..., and he let it go at that.

There was one area in which Ellison admitted satisfaction in besting Philip K. Dick. Dick was only married five times. Susan is Harlan's sixth wife, their marriage in its twenty-eighth year. "I finally got it right!" he said. This after he admitted to being a swordsman in youth, advancing with his sabre five, six times a day, starlets too enchanted to parry his lunges nor want to. You'd think that level of activity would affect his writing schedule but this is a man who used to make in-store appearances as writer-in-residence as window display, sitting at a desk with typewriter and banging out work in progress to draw passersby, mutli-tasking as silent, preoccupied barker.

As long as he was talking about sci-fi colleagues he expressed his grief over Richard Matheson's recent death. Matheson was a giant in Ellison's book and the world lost a master.

At this point the line for signing snaked out the door of La Luz de Jesus, the natives were getting restless, and it was time for Harlan to move into the adjoining space, sit at a desk and begin that part of the party, and this was, indeed, a party.

"EXCLUSIVE TO HARLAN ELLISON'S PULLING A TRAIN In step with all books
in the Kicks paperback line, a 'sidekick' perfume has been formulated,
street-tested, bottled and packaged. SEX GANG is the heady scent
that tells the world OFF! Exclusive, limited, and totally dangerous. With
miniature switchblade comb. Arrives bottled in authentic Italian half ounce
Baralan bottle, boxed in signature Kicks Books Co. gift box."

I had to leave before the signing began. I wedged through the crush, went up to him to say goodbye, and our farewell was as warm as our hello. I still didn't understand why but I enjoyed it. He seemed to enjoy it, too. We both enjoyed it and I saw no point in spoiling the enjoyment by questioning him in public, putting him in an awkward position, and blowing the good vibes. I noticed a few people checking me out, like who's this guy who seems to be such a good buddy of the Great Man?

I'd met Harlan Ellison exactly once, a while ago for a total of maybe thirty, forty minutes or so. What did I do right to earn a generous spot in his memory? Maybe he had me confused with someone else. When he earlier told me to tell Susan about myself it could have been a dodge to discover who I was but at that moment he was besieged and may have simply delegated the introduction for convenience.

Isaac Asimov once noted that "Harlan uses his gifts for colorful and variegated invective on those who irritate him - intrusive fans, obdurate editors, callous publishers, offensive strangers."

Harlan Ellison doesn't suffer fools gladly. In fact he doesn't suffer at all; he makes them suffer. I have the sense that he's annoyed by 99.9999% of the population. While he respects his fans and, up to a point, appreciates their attention, he has no use for flatterers. Perhaps, then, Harlan didn't think me a fool, was not annoyed, nor considered me a fawning supplicant, intrusive, irritating, or offensive  -  though I've been all those things with others, at times. I've been awestruck by a celebrity only once in my life and that was when I had lunch with Yoko Ono a few years back during a book fair in New York and interviewed her for Booktryst. I  felt like a blubbering idiot throughout the experience. Don't tell him but I'm in awe of Harlan Ellison. I just keep it under wraps and behave like a normal person, no matter how alien I actually am.

"EXCLUSIVE TO HARLAN ELLISON'S GETTING IN THE WIND, Like all
Kicks Books fragrances, SIN TIME is created from the world's
finest floral distillates. A scent can evoke the memory of a
stained satin bedsheet or the moonlit hair of a gang deb
teetering down the wet, cobblestone streets of Red Hook.
Extracted from lavender, this ancient scent is symbolic of
magic and mistrust, aiding one in seeing ghosts of gangland past.
A pair of exquisite miniature glass dice are inside each
Baralan bottle."

I wanted to reach out to him later to reinforce the friendship that was welcome news to me. Susan was kind to give me his secret contact info, which I'd lost, a mail drop located in [redacted] within L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. He doesn't do email and few get his phone number. It may have been more interesting but I feel lucky he didn't ask me to place a gladiolus under a garbage can at the corner of [redacted] and [redacted], wait two hours, return, and pick up a coded sandwich bag in the trash can containing his home address written in cuneiform Sumerian.

Cheech Beldone, delinquent, with toothpick.
Photo credit: Patton Oswalt.

I am pleased to report that Harlan and his haircut - "The Cheech Beldone," created by Sween Lahman of Sweeney Todd's and so-dubbed in homage to Harlan's street name when he joined a youth gang in 1954 to research the phenomenon - survived the afternoon, or at least as much as I experienced of it. At seventy-nine years, Harlan Ellison still has a full, lush head of hair. Long may it wave. I want this guy around forever. Make that a permanent wave.

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All images other than header courtesy of Miriam Linna, with our thanks.
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A case of Kicks perfumes was boosted from the Kicks Books trunk. Anyone with knowledge its whereabouts is encouraged to contact the publisher before Cheech Beldone hunts down the dirty dog and dissects it.
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