So we stood there, and I looked up (a mile or so, it seemed) and said, “What’s the matter?” and she said, “Pat’s not coming back, (the RN) said so, and I don’t want to believe her: but if it’s true, then I want to be dead. And if it’s not true, look at me, look how easily someone made me go crazy! I ought to be dead.”
Everything useful or therapeutic I had ever learned, heard or read went shoosh! out of my head, leaving me tabula rosa, as the saying goes, and feeling hopeless. And I opened my mouth, knowing full well that nothing worthwhile would come out, and the tail of my eye caught sight of an idea, sitting on top of a pile of books on calligraphy that I had brought with me: a copy of I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM. I said, “Come on in, sit down, let’s talk about it. I have something here that may interest you.” And we sat down, and I took my life in my hands and read her “Lonelyache.”
You proclaimed the story to be therapy in the introduction, of course. I have often wondered after reading it just how far your own experience paralleled it. Merely clinical interest—all the wondering went out of me that night. I was watching my lady.
About halfway through she put the glass aside and shut her eyes and listened. I shook and kept reading.
When it was nearly finished, I panicked: the ending was too downkey: the protagonist commits suicide! I didn’t know if I could turn her mood upward again.
I finished it, and she looked at me hard for a few seconds, and I said, “Well, what does it do for you?” She was quiet a moment, and then said, “He wanted to be brave on the way out, didn’t he?”
“I think so,” I said.
She thought some more. “But he did go out.”
I nodded. It was all that was left in me: I was getting the beginnings of Oh-God-I-Did-the-Wrong-Thing! and I was holding hard to keep it from showing.
“Is that the only way to go, then?” she asked, and oh! the despair. I wanted to cry and couldn’t. I said, “But consider first: why did he go?”
“Because he was all alone.” And she looked at me, and fed me the straight line I had been praying for: “I’m all alone too, though—aren’t I?”
“Do you think you’re all alone?”
She looked at me, and at the glass, and at me again, and stood up rocking on her casts again. She tossed the answer off so casually: “No, I guess not.” She clumped back to her room, got back in bed, and rolled herself up in the covers and went to sleep. So casually.
So even if you weren’t here in the body, Harlan, you helped. No telling whether this will happen again, or how many times, or what might trigger it, but this time you helped. I thank you for having the guts to put your own fear and loneliness down on paper and then allowing it to be published: it takes courage. And has done someone some good.
Thought you might like to know.
That’s another kind of pain, and it’s real, and if that letter didn’t hurt you where you hurt best, then nothing in this book will touch you, and maybe you ought to be volunteering for something like the Genocide Corps in Brazil.
Here’s another pain that crushes.
I went to Driver Survival School last Saturday. I’d gotten a ticket I didn’t deserve (are there any other kinds?) and the judge at my trial suggested if I wanted to take a day’s worth of traffic school the ticket would be dismissed. So I did the deed.
Traffic Survival School, what a rip-off, I thought. Cynical and smart-ass like the other fifty people booked for that day. Seven and a half hours of bullshit from some redneck cop.
Sure.
But something happened. Something that turned me around. You’ve got to know, I don’t like cops. It’s a gut reaction I’ve had since I was a tiny tot. My first encounter with the Man is recorded in a story called “Free with This Box” and you’ll be able to read it in GENTLEMAN JUNKIE. The story was written a long time ago, and the event happened even longer ago, but the reaction is as fresh in me as if it had happened yesterday. So I went with a snarl on my lips and a loathing for the Laws that Bonnie and Clyde would have envied.
But the two California Highway Patrol officers who lectured the class were sharp and open and knew they had a captive audience, and course-corrected for it. But still everyone in the room was cynical, taking it all as a lark, dragged by the waste of having to spend a dynamite Saturday in a small room in the Sportsmen’s Lodge, sitting on a hard chair and learning the whys&wherefores of the new California U-turn law.
Until they showed the obligatory highway safety horror film.
I’ve seen them before, so have you. Endless scenes of maimed and crushed men and women being crowbarred out of burning wrecks; women with their heads split open like pomegranates, their brains on the Tarmac; guys who’d been hit by trains at crossings, legs over here, arms over there; shots of cars that demonstrate the simple truth that the human body is only a baggie filled with fluid—the tuck&roll interiors evenly coated with blood and meat. And it sickens you, and you turn your head away, and sensitive stomachs heave, and no one makes clever remarks, and you want to puke. But it somehow has no more effect in totality than the 7:00 News with film of burned Vietnamese babies. You never think it’ll happen to you.
Until they came to the final scene of the film, and it was so hairy even the Cal Highway officers grew weak: a six-year-old black kid had been hit by a car. Black ghetto neighborhood. Hundreds of people lining the street rubbernecking. Small shape covered by a blanket in the middle of the street. Cops all over the place. According to the film it wasn’t the driver’s fault, kid had run out from between parked cars, driver hadn’t had time to stop, centerpunched the kid doing 35.
Shot of the car. A tiny dent. Not enough to even Earl Scheib it. Small shape under a blanket.
Then they brought the mother out to identify the kid. Two men supporting her between them. They staggered forward with her and a cop lifted the edge of the blanket.
They must have had someone there with a directional mike. I got every breath, every moan, every whisper of air. Oh my God. The sound of that woman’s scream. The pain. From out of the center of the earth. No human throat was ever meant to produce such a terrible sound. She collapsed, just sank away like limp meat between the supporting men. And the film ended. And I still heard that scream.
It’s five days later as I write this. I cannot block that scream from my mind. I never will. I now drive more slowly, I now fasten my safety belt, I now take no chances. I have always been a fast driver, some say a crazy driver; though I’ve never had an accident and used to race sports cars, I always thought I was a fucking Barney Oldfield. No more. Chuckle if you will, friends, but I’m on the wagon. And that wagon gonna move very carefully. I don’t ever want to hear that scream outside my head.
Are you aware of how much pain there is in the world?
Yeah, I’m aware. Now. Because I’ve been writing for years and years and I keep getting these letters; and I keep listening to people; and at times it’s too much to handle. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read Nathanael West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS.
And so I write these introductions, what my friend and the brilliant writer, the late Avram Davidson called “going naked in the world.” Avram wrote me recently and, in the course of taking me to task for something he believed I had done wrong, he more-than-mildly castigated me for dumping it all on paper. Well, he’s not the first, and from time to time I’ve considered never writing another of these self-examinations. But Irwin Shaw said, “A man does not write one novel at a time or one play at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’”