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Gentleman Junkie

And Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation

Harlan Ellison

An [e - reads ] Book

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage

retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the

author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First e-reads publication 1999

www.e-reads.com

ISBN 0-7592-2984-8

Author Biography

Harlan Ellison has been called “one of the great living American short story writers” by the Washington

Post. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he has won more awards for the 74 books he has written

or edited, the more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns, the two dozen teleplays

and a dozen motion pictures he has created, then any other living fantasist. He has won the Hugo award

eight and a half times (shared once); the Nebula award three times; the Bram Stoker award, presented

by the Horror Writers Association, five times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996); the

Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America twice; the Georges Melies fantasy film award

twice; two Audie Awards (for the best in audio recordings); and was awarded the Silver Pen for

Journalism by P.E.N., the international writer’s union. He was presented with the first Living Legend

award by the International Horror Critics at the 1995 World Horror Convention. He is also the only

author in Hollywood ever to win the Writers Guild of America award for Outstanding teleplay (solo

work) four times, most recently for “Paladin of the Lost Hour” his Twilight Zone episode that was Danny

Kaye’s final role, in 1987. In March (1998), the National Women’s Committee of Brandeis University

honored him with their 1998 “Words, Wit & Wisdom” award.

Other works by Harlan Ellison also available in e-reads editions

Web of the City

Memos from Purgatory

Spider Kiss

Ellison Wonderland

I have no Mouth and I must Scream

Approaching Oblivion

Deathbird Stories

Shatterday

Strange Wine

An Edge in My Voice

City on the Edge of Forever

Paingod and Other Delusions

Introduction

The Children of Nights

“Race of Abel, drink and be sleeping:

God shall smile on thee from the sky.

“Race of Cain, in thy filth be creeping

Where no seeds of the serpent die.

• • •

“Race of Abel, fear not pollution!

God begets the children of nights.

“Race of Cain, in thy heart’s solution

Extinguish thy cruel appetites.”

fromCain and Abel ;

Baudelaire: FLOWERS OF EVIL

WRITERS WITH THEIRbooks are like fickle daddies with their children. There are always favorites

and less-than-favorites and even (though daddies wouldnever cop to it) ones they hate. They love this

one because it sums up the totality of their worldview, and that one because it has the best stretch of

sustained good writing, and that one over there under the cabbage leaf because nobodyelse loves it …

the runt of the litter.

I love this book shamelessly because it was the book that was most pivotal in changing my life. Not once,

god bless it, butthree times. And having it back in print after fourteen years fills me with such good

feelings, I’d like to let them bubble over, to share them with you.

The first time this book turned me around, it wasn’t even a book; it was merely a random group of

stories, uncollected, published here and there in a variety of magazines that ranged from the

then-prestigiousAlfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to the sexually cornball men’s magazines of the

fifties, magazines likeKnave andCaper . You see, I started writing for a living in 1955 when I got booted

out of college for diverse reasons and went to New York. At that time, I wrote a lot, and I didn’t always

write very well. Learning one’s craft, in any occupations save writing and doctoring, permits a margin of

error. If you’re a plumber and you fuck up, the worst that can happen is that a pipe will break and you’ll

flood someone’s bathroom. But writing and doctoring leave the evidence behind. And a bad story is

liable to become as stinking a corpse as a surgeon’s slip of the knife. Both come back to haunt you years

later.

So among the hundreds — quite literally hundreds — of stories I wrote to keep my hand in the game —

detective yarns, science fiction, fantasies, westerns, true confessions, straight action-adventure stories —

there are only a handful that I can bear to face today. Every once in a while I’d write a piece that meant

something more to me than 10,000 words @ 1¢ a word = that month’s rent and groceries. (Yes, Gentle

Reader, there was a time in this land, not so far dimmed by memory, during which a normal unmarried

human being could live quite adequately on $100 a month.)

Of those random stories that still stand up well, I have included four in this book: “No Fourth

Commandment,” which was later freely (veryfreely) adapted as aRoute 66 segment and, while I can’t

prove it, seemed to form the basis for a very fine but sadly overlooked Robert Mitchum motion picture;

“The Silence of Infidelity,” which I wrote while married to my first wife, Charlotte … and while it never

actually happened to me, I can see it was a kind of wish fulfillment at the time; “Free with This Box!”

whichdid happen to me, and fictionalizes the first time I was ever inside a jail … a story that probably

sums up the core of my bad feelings about cops even to this day, though I have more substantive reasons

for my negativity in that area; and “RFD #2,” a collaboration I wrote with the talented, marvelous Henry

Slesar. Henry, incidentally, will be better known to readers as the man who created and wrote the

enormously successful daytime television dramasThe Edge of Night andSomerset .

There are others, of course. One cannot write three hundred stories in three years and not come golden

at least a few times. Some of them will be included in Pyramid’s edition of NO DOORS, NO

WINDOWS, a collection of previously uncollected stories. But up till 1957, I was strictly a money writer

who had not yet reached the pinnacle of egomania your humble author now dwells upon; a place that

would have permitted me to think that what I was doing to stay alive was anything nobler or more fit for

posterity than mere storytelling.

But I was drafted into the army in 1957, and time for writing was at a premium. So I wrote only stories

that Iwanted to write, not ones Ihad to write to support myself or a wife or a home. And from 1957

through 1959 I wrote “No Game for Children,” “Daniel White for the Greater Good,” “Lady Bug, Lady

Bug” and eight others in this book, most of which I sold toRogue Magazine, then based in Evanston,

Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

Writing those stories was the first time this book altered my life, even before they were formally a book.

They brought me an awareness of how concerned I was about social problems, the condition of life for

different minorities in this country, the depth of injustice that could exist in a supposedly free society, the

torment many different kinds of people suffered as a daily condition of life. It was to form the basis of my

involvement with the civil rights movement and antiwar protests of the sixties.

Those stories showed me that if I had any kind of a talent greater than that of a commercial hack, I had

damned well better get my ass in gear and start demonstrating it. So, when I was discharged from the

army, and went to Evanston to become an editor forRogue, I concentrated on writing the sort of stories

best typified by “Final Shtick” in this book.

Things didn’t go well for me in Evanston. The man I worked for atRogue was the sort of man who kills

souls without even realizing the purely evil nature of what he’s doing. My marriage had long since become

a shattered delusion and after the divorce I proceeded to flush myself down a toilet. That was when

Frank Robinson rescued me the first time.

Since Frank did the Foreword for the original edition of this book, and since it is reprinted in this edition,

I’ll digress for a moment to tell that story, as a demonstration to those of you who may not understand

the real meaning of the word, what constitutes genuinefriendship , the single most important rare-earth

commodity in life.

Having been married to Charlotte for four years of hell as sustained as the whine of a generator, I was in

rotten shape. I didn’t drink or do dope, but I started trying to wreck myself in as many other ways as I

could find. Endless parties, unfulfilling sexual liaisons with as many women as I could physically handle

every day, dumb friendships with leaners and moochers and phonies and emotional vampires,

middle-class materialism that manifested itself in buying sprees that clogged my Dempster Street

apartment with more accoutrements and sculpture and housewares than the goddam Furniture Mart

could hold.

And I wasn’t writing.

One night, I threw another of my monster parties … almost a hundred people … most of whom I had

never met till they waltzed in the door. A lot of beer, a lot of music, a lot of foxy coeds from

Northwestern, lights, laughter, and myself wandering around trying to find something without a name or

description in the flashy rubble of another pointless night.

Frank showed up. He was the only one who had thought to bring a contribution to the bash. A bottle of

wine. We walked into the kitchen, to put it in the pantry, to be drunk lots later by whatever few human

beings survived the animal rituals in the other rooms. We walked into the pantry and stood there talking

about nothing in particular, just rapping beside the shelves groaning under the weight of Rosenthal china,

service for a thousand.

At that moment, I heard a crash from the living room, and left Frank in midsentence. I dashed in, and

some drunken pithecanthropoid I’d met at a snack shop called The Hut was standing silently and

slope-browedly midst the ruins of a five-hundred-dollar piece of sculpture. He’d boogied into its pedestal

and knocked it into a million amber pieces. Not a sound could be heard in the room. Everyone waited to

see if I’d flip at the barbarian assault on my property rights.

“Chee,” he mumbled, “I’m sorry. I dint see it, I’ll pay ya for it.”

The lunacy of the remark from an impecunious college student scrounging off his parents just to keep him

out of the army and in a school he didn’t like, was infuriating. I flipped, as expected. “You asshole!” I

yowled. “Payme for it? If youcould pay for it — and you’ll never be able to save that much money even

if you get your pinhead out into the workpool — where the hell do you suppose you’d find another one,

schmuck? They don’t sell that statue in Woolworth’s, for chrissakes! Some artist labored a year to cut it

out of stone, you brain-damaged clown!”

And then I turned around and stomped back to the kitchen and Frank in the pantry, still waiting to finish

his sentence. I was burning. Frank took one look at me and started talking. Softly.

“Look at you,” he said. “Just take a look at what you’re turning into. You’re killing yourself. You’re all

hung up on owning things, crying over a broken statue, screaming at people you don’t even know.

You’re going to die if you don’t pack all this in, start writing a new book, and get the hell out of

Chicago!”

He talked for a long time. And I suppose it was time to listen. After a while, I flashed on the simple truth

that youcan change your life, if you make a sudden, violent commitment without stopping to rationalize

why you shouldn’t. And I reached past Frank, and took down a stack of Rosenthal plates, perhaps

twenty of them, ten dollars each. And I stepped out of the pantry and stood in the kitchen doorway

facing into the dining room, looking through into the living room, and without thinking about it I let out one

of the most lovely, full-throated, 180-decibel primal shrieks ever heard on this planet.…

And began skimming those lovely, expensive plates at the walls. The first one hit with a crash that brought

the whole party to a standstill. Everybody turned to stare at the nut. I kept flinging plates. Into the dining

room, into the living room, into the crowd, through the front windows with a smash and shattering joy that

could be heard all through the neighborhood. And when I ran out of plates I went and got more. People

were dodging the china, ducking and trying to decide whether they should bolt from the house or try and

restrain me. Frank was behind me as someone moved on me, and I heard him yell, “Leave him alone!”

They backed off, warily.

Each piece of crockery I kamikaze’d was like a link of a chain breaking. And when I’d had my fill of

throwing plates and anything else in that pantry that I could pull loose, I rampaged among the partygoers,

screaming wordless and senseless imprecations, ordering them out of the house. Now! Get out! Get your

fucking deadbeat asses out of here! Split! And Frank stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling.

I didn’t go to bed that night.

I began my first novel in years, ROCKABILLY (re-released just last month in a Pyramid edition as

SPIDER KISS). I wrote damn near five thousand words that night.

Next day I started selling my furniture.

That week I tendered my notice atRogue, sold off everything I couldn’t carry in a U-Haul trailer attached

to the back of my Austin-Healey, packed up my manuscripts and my clothes, kissed all the girls

goodbye, hugged Frank and showed him the letter from Knox Burger at Fawcett Gold Medal

paperbacks saying he wanted a look at the novel, and motored out of Chicago for New York and a

return to saying yes to life.

Well, that was the beginning of an uphill climb; a climb that took two years and had some backsliding but

finally took me out of the toilet; a climb that produced SPIDER KISS and MEMOS FROM

PURGATORY and, happily, GENTLEMAN JUNKIE.

Which brings me to the circumstances that produced thesecond time this book altered my life. And the

second time dear Frank Robinson saved my soul. I wrote about it in brief in the introduction to another

collection of my stories last year, but sequentially that segment comes right here in the story, so I’ll just

quote the part that fills the gap. Just remember these items: after being in New York for eight months, I

remarried and was offered another job by the same creep I’d worked for in Evanston; this time editing a

line of paperbacks. I took the job, though I loathed the man, because I had a wife and her son from a

previous marriage and Ithought I was whole and rational (but wasn’t), and a steady job seemed the

thing to go for. Friends, that isnever a good reason! Take it from me … I’vebeen in that nasty box.

Anyhow, here’s what happened:

It was September, 1961.

It was one of the worst times in my life. The one time I’d ever felt the need to go to a psychiatrist, that time in Chicago.

I had remarried in haste after the four-year anguish of Charlotte and the army and the hand-to-mouth days in

Greenwich Village; now I was living to repent in agonizing leisure.

I had been crazed for two years and hadn’t realized it. Now I was responsible for one of the nicest women in the world,

and her son, a winner byany standards, and I found I had messed their lives by entwining them with mine. There was

need for me to run, but I could not. Nice Jewish boys from Ohio don’t cut and abandon. So I began doing berserk

things. I committed personal acts of a demeaning and reprehensible nature, involved myself in liaisons that were

doomed and purposeless, went steadily more insane as the days wound tighter than a mainspring.

Part of it was money. Not really, but I thought it was the major part of the solution to the situation. And I’d banked on

selling GENTLEMAN JUNKIE to the very man for whom I was working. He took considerable pleasure in waiting till

we were at a business lunch, with several other people, to announce he was not buying the book. (The depth of his

sadism is obvious when one learns he subsequentlydid buy and publish the book.)

But at that moment, it was as though someone had split the earth under me and left me hanging by the ragged edge, by

my fingertips. I went back to the tiny, empty office he had set up in a downtown Evanston office building, and I sat at

my desk staring at the wall. There was a clock on the wall in front of me. When I sat down after that terrible lunch, it

was 1:00.…

When I looked at the clock a moment later, it was 3:15.…

The next time I looked, a moment later, it was 4:45.…

Then 5:45 …

Then 6:15 …

7:00 … 8:30 …

Somehow, I don’t know how, even today, I laid my head on the desk, and when I opened my eyes again I had taken

the phone off the hook. It was lying beside my mouth. A long time later, and again I don’t remember doing it, I dialed

Frank Robinson.

I heard Frank’s voice saying, “Hello … hello … is someone there …?”

“Frank … help me …”

And when my head was lifted off the desk, it was an hour later, the phone was whistling with a disconnect tone, and

Frank had made it all the way across from Chicago to Evanston to find me. He held me like a child, and I cried.

That was the second time for this book. It was the sorry little helpless weapon the human monster used

to send me right to the edge. But the book was published, to very little fanfare. Oh, notables like Steve

Allen and Charles Beaumont and Leslie Charteris praised the hell out of it, but those were in

prepublication comments that were used on the splash page of the book itself. There were virtually no

reviews.

Frank’s comment in the Foreword that this was the verge of the Big Time seemed a hollow bit of

reassurance from a friend. Nothing much happened with the paperback. It sold well, but made no stir

among theliterati . And my hopes sank that I’d ever be anything more than that commercial hack who’d

starved in New York in 1955. You can go on ego and self-hype only so long. Then you need something

concrete.

Which brings me to thethird time this book changed my life. In a way so blindingly clear and important

that it has colored everything since.

I left Evanston and Chicago and the human monster, and with my wife and her son began the long trek to the West

Coast. We had agreed to divorce, but she had said to me, with a very special wisdom that I never perceived till much

later, when I was whole again, “As long as you’re going to leave me, at least take me to where it’s warm.”

But we had no money. So we had to go to Los Angeles by way of New York from Chicago. If I could sell a book, I

would have the means to go West, young man, go West. (Andthat was the core of the problem, not money: I was a

young man. I was twenty-eight, but I had never become an adult.)

In a broken-down 1957 Ford we limped across to New York during the worst snowstorms in thirty years.

Nineteen hundred and sixty-one was the year the bottom fell out of a lot of lives, mine among them. And

when I walked into the New York editorial offices of Gold Medal Books, the paperback outfit to which

I’d sold SPIDER KISS, the outfit I was going to try flummoxing into buying a book I hadn’t written yet,

just so I could stay alive and try to salvage my sanity, it was with the sure sense of being only moments

away from the unincorporated limits of Tap City. I’d been writing short stories and stuff for maybe a

half-dozen years, and a writer — no matter how pouter-pigeon-puffed his ego — can go only so long on

self-esteem. He has to have someone with clout say, “Boy, you got a talent.” No one had said it to me,

though editors had given me money and published what I’d written.

When I walked into those offices, suddenly all the doors to the cubicles where galley slaves pored over

galley proofs slammed open, and I was surrounded by people slapping me on the back and shouting

things like, “Well done,” and “You lucky SOB,” and finally Knox Burger, the senior editor, ploughed

through and demanded to know, in his crusty but loveable manner, “How much did you pay her to write

that?”

Write what, I asked, looking more pixilated than usual. The Parker review, of course, he responded.

What Parker review? The one in the JanuaryEsquire , you lox, he said. A snake uncoiled in my stomach.

Ohmigod, I thought, Dorothy Parker has said something terrible about me in her book review column. It

was as close as I have ever come to fainting.

I dashed back into the corridor, and unable to wait for the elevator, took the stairs three at a time, down

the fourteen floors to the lobby, where I caromed off two patrons leaving the newsstand, and dragged a

copy ofEsquire from the stack.

There, on page 133, the great (and I do not use the adjective lightly) Dorothy Parker, the literary

colossus whose works were already legend, whose most pointedmots had long since become aphorisms

to be collected by Auden and Kronenberger, whose style and taste had helped make theNew Yorker

and the Algonquin Round Table focal points for the literarily aware, there, on page 133, Dorothy Parker

had taken 86 lines to devastate Fannie Hurst’s “God Must Be Sad” and 25 lines to praise an obscure

little book of short stories by a twenty-six-year-old paperback writer. (The review, in its entirety,

appears on the splash page of this book.)

“Mr. Ellison (she wrote) is a good, honest, clean writer, putting down what he has seen and known, and

no sensationalism about it.

“In the collection is a story called ’daniel White for the Greater Good.’ It is without exception the best

presentation I have ever seen of present racial conditions in the South and of those who try to alleviate

them. I cannot recommend it too vehemently … Incidentally, the other stories in Mr. Ellison’s book are

not so dusty, either.”

That, from the author of “Arrangement in Black and White,” one of the earliest and, even today, one of

the most perceptive fictional studies of racial prejudice.

Sometime later I came unfrozen, unstuck, and almost unglued. Can you understand what that kind of

praise does for a writer who (like Willy Loman) has till then been out there on only a smile and a

shoeshine? Ray Bradbury can tell you; he gothis from Christopher Isherwood, and itmade his reputation.

It’s like the first time a girl says yes. It’s like the first time a female realizes she doesn’t have to be some

guy’s kitchen slave to lead a fully-realized existence. It’s like Moses getting the tablets.

This book, through the medium of Dorothy Parker, a writer whose credentials were so unassailable, not

even the ugliest academic cynic could contest them, had altered my life. I was no longer all alone in my

opinion of my worth. I was no longer a writer ambivalently torn between the reality of being a commercial

hack and the secret hope that he was something greater, something that might produce work to be read

after the writer had been put down the hole. GENTLEMAN JUNKIE, for the third time, had worked a

kind of magic on my existence.

But there was more.

James Goldstone, a Hollywood director, read “Daniel White for the Greater Good” and took an option

on it for a film. The money helped get us out of New York, and start toward the West Coast.

Several months after the review appeared — and to this day I have no idea how that ineptly-distributed

paperback from a minor Chicago house, the only paperback she ever reviewed, came into her hands —

I came to H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D to live, if one can call Olympian poverty living. And several months

after that I met a chap who said he knew Charles MacArthur, who knew Alan Campbell, who was

married to Dorothy Parker, and I fell to my knees begging for an introduction. So the jungle telegraph

sent out the pitiful plea, and in short order the word came back that Mrs. Campbell would be delighted

to have me call at her residence on such-and-such a Sunday afternoon.

Was there ever a supplicant who trembled more in expectation of burning bushes ormene mene tekels

scrawled on a wall? Literally festooned with rustic bumpkinism (bumpkishness? bumpkoid? oh dear, how

he does go on!) I took along my copy of the Modern Library edition of her collected short stories. In a

probably vain attempt to save myself from thetotal appearance of a brain damage case bumbling down

the road of Life, I hasten to add that not even when I was in the presence of Troy Donahue or Jacqueline

Susann did I ever contemplate asking for an autograph.

But thiswas , after all, DorothyParker , for God’s sake!

I was received in the little house on Norma Place, just off Doheny, where Dorothy Parker and Alan

Campbell were entering (what no one had any way of knowing was) their last years together, with a

warmth and affection seldom found even in acquaintances of long standing.

Miss Parker was small and lovely and a trifle wan-looking. She engaged me in conversation that lasted

well into the evening. (She was also quick to point out that Norma Place had been named after Norma

Talmadge, and though it doesn’t bear much relevance to anything in this introduction, she seemed to want

me to know it, and I feel compelled to pass it on to you.)

I was certain her invitation and her friendliness were the sort of grand gestures offered by the great to the

nongreat and that she had surely forgotten what it was I’d written that had first set me onto her, but in the

course of discussion she remarked on my paperback at considerable length, quoting entire paragraphs

that had stuck with her. I was tangle-tongued and drunk with awe. She reallyhad liked the book. In a

burst of explodingchutzpah that (as Miss Parker would have put it) belonged on display in the

Smithsonian, I asked her if she would autograph her book. She smiled softly and said of course. And she

did. And it was not till I was all the way home later that night that I opened the flyleaf of the book and

read: “To Harlan Ellison — with admiration, envy, and heartfelt wishes that I could be as good a writer

as he is — ”

Dorothy Parker died a year later. I’m not sure. I think it was only a year; maybe it was a little more.

I can only remember that day on Norma Place, with the shadows deepening — for the day and for that

little woman — and think of how she took a moment out of her life to validate mine. Dorothy Parker and

this collection of stories. They have put their mark on me. We pass through numberless moments of life,

all but a few of them mere time-marking: and occasionally something happens, or something is said, or a

face turns toward you, and everything is different. The world is a strange and gorgeous realm you’ve

never seen before. This book has done that for me three times.

I owe this book a great deal. It came from me, it comes backinto me, it is my fiber and my courage and

the stamp of approval that carries me through bad reviews and shitty times and all the anguishes to which

we are heir.

And now it is back in print. I have removed the introduction I wrote to the first edition, because it simply

doesn’t hold any more. This introduction is the one that fits this dear little book now. (And I’ve removed

one story from the original. “The Time of the Eye,” because it’s available in another collection and I don’t

want you to feel gypped in even the smallest particular. But I’ve substituted “Turnpike,” which is a nice

little yarn, and you can’t find it anywhere else, so you don’t even lose the wordage.)

Like my other books — butespecially with this one that means so much to me — I offer the thoughts

and dreams for your pleasure. These stories are my children of the nights. The nights all alone at the

typewriter. I love them, each and every one, as I love each book, each and every one; but like a fickle

daddy … I love this one most of all.

HARLAN ELLISON

Los Angeles

Acknowledgments

FINAL SHTICK; GENTLEMAN JUNKIE (under the title “Night Fix”); MAY WE ALSO SPEAK?;

DANIEL WHITE FOR THE GREATER GOOD; THERE’S ONE ON EVERY CAMPUS; THIS IS

JACKIE SPINNING; NO GAME FOR CHILDREN; and MEMORY OF A MUTED TRUMPET

SOMEONE IS HUNGRIER appeared inRogue Magazine under the pseudonym “Pat Roeder,”

by Harlan Ellison.

Publications, Inc.

1961 by Saint Magazines, Limited.

THE LATE, GREAT ARNIE DRAPER; ENTER THE FANATIC, STAGE CENTER; and HIGH

Company.

Co., Inc.

RFD #2 appeared inAlfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine under the byline “Harlan Ellison and Henry

NO FOURTH COMMANDMENT appeared inMurder! Magazine under the title “Wandering Killer,”

1961 by The Paper, Inc.

Aside from naming a child after someone, dedicating a book is the purest way of sayingthank you and

you’ve been important in my life. I never do it lightly. The first edition of this book was dedicated:

For FRANK M. ROBINSON, who has helped, rescued, and even cried sad, dark tears;

in friendship.

But years pass, and while the debt a dedication pays does not diminish in value, time separates friends;

and the time machine that is a book permits the correction of oversights and omissions. So this new

edition refurbishes thethank you to Frank and adds:

For RACHEL, with love.

“There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our

time has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, 1936

“Society and man are mutually dependent enemies and the writer’s job [is] to go on forever defining and

defending the paradox —lest, God forbid, it be resolved. ”

ARTHUR MILLER, 1974

“The purpose of fiction is the creation of a small furry object that will break your heart.”

DONALD BARTHELME

Foreword

by Frank M. Robinson

HARLANELLISON IS ATALENT. He could, if he desired, be a fairly hilarious stand-up comedian, a

more-than-decent balladeer, a respectable jazz musician, or what-have-you.

He makes his living at none of these.

He’s a Writer.

This is an easy thing to say, and a very difficult thing to be. You have to have a certain talent to begin

with, and then you have to develop it.

You develop it by first giving up your regular job because, as you quickly find out, serious writing is a

full-time proposition and steady employment saps your strength and enthusiasm — so you take part-time

jobs in bookstores, libraries, and beaneries, and you write in the early morning hours when the rest of the

city is sound asleep (few people in the rest of the city have talents they want to develop).

You develop your talent by living on crackers and beans, by washing your own clothes and stringing

them up on a wire in the john, by wearing the same shirt for a week and sleeping on your pants to give

them a crease, and by living in a roach-ridden third-floor walk-up where there’s only one water tap and

the water’s the same temperature come summer or winter — cold.

You develop that talent by writing like mad every free moment you have; by stealing away a few of those

moments to read what’s been written by other people; by submitting material to every magazine you

know of, even if they only pay in packets of birdseed, and by being thrown bodily out of publishers’

offices as well as agents’.

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GentlemanJunkieAndOtherStoriesoftheHung-UpGenerationHarlanEllisonAn[e-reads]BookNopartofthispublicationmaybereproducedortransmittedinanyformorbyanymeans,electronic,ormechanical,includingphotocopy,recording,scanningoranyinformationstorageretrievalsystem,withoutexplicitpermissioninwritingfromtheAuthor...

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Harlan Ellison - Gentleman Junkie

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