Harlan Ellison
May We Also Speak? Four Statements from the Hung-Up Generation
1. Now You’re in the Box
THE PAIN OF IT WAS NOT Knowing what they were thinking. Hank had tried writing it from many angles, including such exotic views as first person present and omnipotent author intrusive, but the book would not jell.
The title was perfect: “Now You’re in the Box!” and he had a vague idea what the title meant to him; it was intended to show that everyone is born boxed-in, and the hero had to realize that before he could truly become a man.
But somehow, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t right
He shoved back from the kitchen table and slammed his palm against the stack of originals and carbons. “Oh, damn,” he muttered, and snubbed the fortieth cigarette of the day. He stood up and rubbed the grainy feeling from his eyes.
He had started writing at five-thirty that morning, hoping to cork off a solid five thousand words that day, but the problems had been the same ones of the past month: restlessness, anger at himself, frustration. He just could not get inside his people. It was painful.
He walked about the tiny apartment, picking up dust on his fingertips from first this piece of furniture, then that. The image of the caged animal came to him and he chucked it away forcibly, grimacing at his own cliché.
He wandered back to the kitchen table and the silently accusing strange face of the portable, the unsullied stack of white bond, the jaundiced stack of second sheets. “Henry Willits Jefferson,” he spoke to the stove, “you are not doing one damned thing to justify the title of Great White Hope of American Letters. No, you are not.”
He reached for another cigarette. Number forty-one.
But there were only two packs available that morning, twenty to a pack, and he had smoked them all. That’s right, he said to himself,stunt the creative process with a nicotine fit.
He chuckled and walked through the apartment to the front door. The hall smelled even worse today; Mrs. Killingsworth was cooking something even more vile than her beans and sauerkraut of the day before. A miasma of cloying proportions hung in the dim second-floor hall. He fled down the stairs quickly.
Mr. Brenner was behind the meat counter when Hank walked into the little one-arm grocery, and the heavy-bodied grocer wiped his big, wide, blocky hands free of blood when he saw Hank.
“What’ll it be, Mr. Jefferson?” Brenner asked, strolling quickly around the checkout counter where Hank waited.
The words Three packs of Marlboros were ready at his lips, but never made their debut. The Negro came up close beside him and shoved the gun out in front of Hank, almost directly into Brenner’s ample stomach.
“Open that registuh and hand me out whut you got in theah,” he mouthed with a faint Southern accent.
It was so sudden, Hank did not realize a holdup was taking place. Peculiarly, all he could think at the moment was:He must have just come from down South somewhere, and can’t find work; he’s desperate, this is so foolish!
Brenner was hesitating, staring at the colored boy oddly. Hank shot a long glance at the boy, and the fine, high forehead and alert, dark eyes registered clearly. Still Brenner did not move.
“Ah said please open that registuh and hand ovuh what’s there,” the boy said again. “Ah’m bein’ poh-lite now, Mistuh. Dohn’t make me get nasty.”
Brenner chuckled, then. It was a rotten, unclean chuckle. “Who the hell you think you’re scarin’ with that water pistol, kid?” he snapped. His hand shot out.
Gunless, the boy realized he had failed miserably, and suddenly bolted, jarring Hank as he ran away.
“Black sonofabitch!” Mr. Brenner mouthed, his cheeks suffusing with blood. “I’ll show that lousy nigger!”
He banged down a button on the cash register and the little bell rang as the drawer slammed open. He pulled the drawer forward and from a compartment behind the change shelf drew a small revolver. No water pistol; real; death.
“No!” Hank heard himself say.
Mr. Brenner gave him a peculiar, lingering glance that took a quarter-instant, before he threw himself around the checkout counter, and pounded out the front door.
Hank stood there only a moment, then followed, feeling foolish, finding himself running also.
The colored boy had cut across the street, dodging cars, and Hank could see Mr. Brenner only fifteen or twenty feet behind him as they raced down the street. Hank barely missed being hit by a car as he gained the opposite sidewalk, and ran after them.
The Negro was throwing his head back and forth wildly, looking for a certain area of escape. No alley or fence presented itself, and in desperation the boy turned into the shallow hallway of an apartment building set close to the sidewalk. He was inside, and Hank could hear him pulling at the door.
It was locked.
The colored boy fell down on his knees, then turned back facing the street. His hands were wide away from his body, and his eyes shined wet-white in his face.
“I’m unahmed,I’m unahmed!”he screamed as Mr. Brenner ground to a halt before him, aiming the tiny revolver at the boy’s head. The boy’s mouth was wide-open to scream again when Mr. Brenner pulled the trigger.
It knocked every tooth loose from the Negro’s head, and it tore a gigantic clot from the back of his head as it ripped through his mouth. The boy fell back against the glass door, the locked door, and stained it as he slipped sidewise.
“I worked twelve years in that store,” Mr. Brenner said to the corpse, unnecessarily; and abruptly, Hank knew precisely what the title of his book meant.
2. The Rocks of Gogroth
SO IT HAD COME DOWN TO THIS, finally, as Spence had known it would. All along he had known he would have to make a decision, and every time he thought of it, he went cold inside.
F. J. Gogroth was a man who would find it anathema to accept someone’s disliking his beer. “The best goddam malt processing in the game,” he often said. Gogroth Beer was more than a firm to F. J. Gogroth; it was a way of life.
And to participate in the rewards of that way of life — even in the secular capacity of advertising account executive — every member of the firm had to believe
So how could Spence tell F. J. Gogroth that his plans for the new advertising campaign were ludicrous, misrepresentative and, worst of all, God forbid, doomed to failure? How could he tell him, when it meant doubting the Way of Life?
That would mean dissatisfaction on Gogroth’s part; more, it would mean fury and retaliation. The sort of retaliation that would force Spence’s bosses at HHC&M regretfully to release him. Gogroth was too big an account to chance losing. It was easier to dump the blame on Spence and lose him
Spence took another cone of water from the cooler, and eyed the advertising presentation in its leather case, lying on the reception room couch. In that case — the size of a card-table top — was an advertising campaign that had been constructed along the lines F. J. Gogroth had suggested. Suggested, in this case, being synonymous with ordered A campaign that would cost his firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales losses.
Emotionally annoying; subliminally repugnant; subconsciously negative-thought producing … the catch-phrases popped into Spence’s mind, but he knew they would never fit into Mr. Gogroth’s view of the universe.
He sat down, praying the receptionist would not receive that buzz from within. The buzz that would tell her Mr. Gogroth’s current supplicator had gone and she could send in the next visitor with his oblation.