That’s what we’re talking about here, not a minor incident in Dayton, Ohio…good will to men…
Meanwhile, back at the story…
My duties during the three days at the Living Arts Center were as follows: four meetings with the science fiction workshop, under the direction of John Baskin, who turned out to be a hero in more ways than one; an adult lecture; three lectures for specially selected students of local high schools, brought to the Center for that purpose. The tab for the three days was fourteen hundred dollars, including expenses.
I arrived by TWA on the evening of Sunday, December 14th. Dayton looked like all the rest of Ohio…a state in which I’d been born…a state I’d left many years before, perhaps with that sense of premonition known only to the young who sense this land in which they stand will never change, will never yield up treasures great enough for them. I had left and gone other places and found now, upon returning, that my heart and mind retained images of mid-America that were part childhood pains and joys, part cultural myth, part sadness at seeing smog and pollution and Big Boy hamburger stands…and part triumph at returning to execute AN EVENING WITH HARLAN ELLISON.
It was a dream. If you basket-case a dream, it flops over as nightmare. Peace on earth…
John Baskin and Barbara Benham picked me up at the airport and took me to the apartment she had vacated for my use while in town. She was staying elsewhere. It was a gesture of considerable hospitality, intended to save me the cost and loneliness of a hotel room. It was to be used later, against her, by the Administration, to whose eyes propriety is easily set awry.
The next morning they came for me, and I was taken to the Center. It was a converted warehouse, the facility having been handsomely renovated to accommodate work shops and a large theater and a dance studio and talk areas and god knows what all else. It was very impressive, very real, and held within its walls (even early in the day, childless) the sense and scent of life. Young minds came here to find direction, came here to taste joy and beauty. It looked lived in. I wanted very much to do for them.
What I did not know was that the following had occurred in Dayton:
1) There was a concerted program afoot to quash “freaks” in the city.
2) The school finance levy had been soundly defeated a few days before I’d arrived. This forced the Center to have to scramble for a quarter of a million dollars to keep running. So the Center could not afford to offend anyone. (Why Mr. DeVelbiss had not used the three years gravy time, during which the Center had been running on Federal funds, to make provisions for such an eventuality, was a question I heard asked many times during my brief stay in Dayton.)
3) A black educator named Art Thomas was in the process of losing his job because, in the course of averting a riot, he had used the word “pig” when speaking to a cop. It was a railroad kangaroo court scene, with every “liberal” in Dayton up-in-arms because his hearing was being held before the very people who had relieved him of his position—and everyone knew he was going to be set down. The case was big news and promised to go to the Supreme Court.
4) The Center had had mild troubles with other “Guest Artists” in the recent past. Pianist Lorin Hollander (who had charmed everyone during his first appearance at the Center) upset the Administration by returning with long hair and sideburns, hip clothing, and a program that was divided between music and political opinion. Square, suited and silent his first time there, Hollander had become “involved” in the world in the interim, and his frankly expressed concern for America and the world unsettled the Program Director, Glenn Ray. I was given to believe, in no uncertain terms, that Mr. Hollander would not be invited to return.
5) An appearance of a puppet theater at the Center had brought—for some inexplicable reason—shrieks of protest from parents who had attended an evening performance. Something about, “What are you liberals teaching our kids down there at that freak palace?”
6) Fear of “making waves” was high in the Administration of the Center, in the school board, in the city.
And here came I.
Innocent, starry-eyed, dew-bedazzled little me. Set to be cast in the role of insurgent dissident revolutionary. Ready to be typed outside agitator, corrupter of the young, agent provocateur, trouble-making wave-creator.
This has been the background. The cast of characters, the action, the incredible denouement—all of this in the next two week’s blistering, scathing, uncompromising installments.
Can you bear to wait!?! The suspense is killing!
You know, sometimes my life flashes before my eyes…and frankly, it ain’t worth living a second time.
51: 9 JANUARY 70
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: PART II
If you think the hope for tomorrow lies solely in the young—as did I—be advised the poison has seeped down through the veins of the society to them as well. If you keep reassuring yourself that as soon as the present generation of bigots, morons, haters and blue star mothers (who take open pride in having sent their sons off to die) kick off things will be better…start worrying again. Because they’ve already gotten to the mass of kids, out there in the Great American Heartland. Even as they’ve been planted, those good mommies and daddies have reached skeletal hands out of the graves to clutch their children and intone, “If you want to honor my memory, if you don’t want me to have died in vain, remember: niggers are evil, they all want to rape your women; Jews secretly run the world and they’ll steal everything you have; Communists roam everywhere; sex is dirty; don’t let them Ivory Tower liberals corrupt you; trust in hate!” And then the dirt is shoveled in on them and they go to that big Klavern in the sky, leaving behind them the butchered minds and closed-off potentialities of the next generation.
I went to Dayton to talk writing, to talk science fiction, to talk about what I felt should be the role of the committed writer in Our Times, what he could do to reshape the world through his writing. My first encounter was with a class of seniors from Wilbur Wright High School. I’d been briefed that they were “white Appalachian kids.” Whatever that was supposed to mean, or to tell me. I figured they were like San Fernando Valley kids, middle-class, somewhat sleepy but wakeable if you prodded them and started them questioning. I was wrong. Lord, I was wrong. They were touched by the grave-bone hands of their parents. And they had been poisoned by the fangs of Spiro.
They were marched in by two pleasant-enough-looking little old ladies with white hair tightly iron-curled (they looked like an advertisement out of a 1930s issue of Liberty Magazine, reading time: 1 minute 32 seconds).
It was cold in Dayton, in the mid-twenties, and they were bundled in heavy jackets or overcoats. Perhaps thirty of them, sitting terribly erect in four rows of straight-back chairs. Barbara Benham introduced me, and against a backdrop of two enormous posters (one of me, the other of the Eniwetok mushroom) I climbed up onto a tall stool. I grinned at them and said, “My name’s Ellison. I’m a writer. How many of you have ever read anything I’ve written?”
Glenn Ray sat in the back of the room, arms folded, watching me carefully.
There was silence from the audience.
It wasn’t unusual. I’m under no illusions about the minority of Americans who read anything, much less me. But it’s a hook with which to begin.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s try it this way: how many of you are interested in writing, about a career in writing, about what it’s like to be a writer, his life
…that sort of thing?”
Nothing. An oil painting. Mount Rushmore. Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln. Dead eyes. Slack jaws. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. Not a tremble.
“Oh boy,” I murmured sotto voce, “I really am in the Great American Heartland, aren’t I?” Glenn Ray crossed his legs uncomfortably. Big Brother was watching. “Well look, troops, you got hauled out of your class and drug over here to listen to some dude you never met before rap about a lot of dull stuff. So what should we talk about? The world situation? How about the
Art Thomas case?”
Nothing. But off to the left, in the rear, someone said, “Art Who?” (In the first installment of this Dayton Diatribe I mentioned that Art Thomas had been making headlines in Dayton. A black educator who had been railroaded out of his job because he had avoided a cops-and-kids confrontation by relating to the kids and getting them to back off, but in the process he had called a cop a pig.)
I couldn’t believe they didn’t know about it. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I said. “This is the biggest thing to happen in Dayton in years. It may go to the Supreme Court as a test case…and you people haven’t even heard about it? Okay, how about the My Lai massacre? You’ve been reading about that, haven’t you?”
Television faces stared back at me. No, gentle readers, they had not heard about it. Or if they had, they didn’t remember. Or if they remembered, they weren’t sufficiently involved to even nod a yes at me. I was looking at the result of hours before the glass teat, passively suckling the distant images of dead bodies piled on top each other.
What do you do?
I did something.
What I did was wrong or right, depending on what you conceive to be the role of a guest artist brought in to impart information about a scene of the world different from that through which they move. I freely cop to culpability in what I did next. I could have accepted my intuition about those kids and where they were at. I could have said to myself, Ellison…back off. Let them continue the way they’re going. Let them think it’s all somewhere off in the distance, has nothing to do with them. Let them think you’re a sweet guy, kind of dumb, and kind of boring, and let them go back at the end of the hour to Wilbur Wright High School, having heard nothing more visceral than the nonsense those two little old ladies feed them every day. I could have said that.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I raised my tone of voice considerably and demanded, “What the hell is with you, people? What are you learning in school? My generation and all the ones that went before have left you a garbage dump, a cesspool: you’re the ones who have to clean it up. Do you want another fifty years of war? Do you want the land and the air and the water to become so intolerably polluted they won’t support life of any kind? Not just for your great-grandchildren, but for you and me? Chances are good if they don’t slaughter us all first, we won’t live for another fifty years. You see, there are these things in the ocean called diatoms, and they produce seventy per cent of our oxygen, and we’ve polluted the water so much the plankton that feeds on the diatoms is vanishing, and that means—”
And I was off. Running fast. Up and down and around. “What the hell are you people training yourselves to be? Redemption stamp center clerks?”
Then I read them one of my stories, Shattered Like A Glass Goblin, which—depending where your head is at—is either a pro- or an anti-dope story. I wrote it as an anti. And when I got finished, Glenn Ray was even unhappier. It had some sex in it, and some cursing, and some dope, and some violence.
Then one of the kids raised his hand. It was the first sign of mobility in the crowd. I wanted to rush over and play Monty Hall: for raising your hand, sir, I will make a deal with you! You can have your choice of a revolution, an all-expense-paid rejuvenated America, or a six-pack of groupies. But I’d forgotten for a moment that I was in Dayton.
“Are you telling us to smoke marijuana?” he asked. “Don’t you know that it’s against God’s Covenant? Don’t you know that marijuana leads to Hard Stuff that makes people want to go out and rob and kill to get the Hard Stuff?”
“Hold it, hold it,” I said, dazed. “That was an anti-dope story I just read to you. But I think you’re old enough to know the difference between Hard Stuff and marijuana. Either way, it’s your life. I don’t use, and if anyone asks me my opinion, I’d say forget it. But it’s your life, baby, and if you want to mess it over with drugs, that’s your prerogative. Kindly don’t try and push me into a corner where I have to defend pot, because that doesn’t happen to be my crusade.”
It went on that way for the better part of an hour. Punching, punching, trying to get through, trying to tell them they were our last, best hope, and if they sat there with prognathous jaws and Little Orphan Annie eyeballs the whole country was doomed.
I’m afraid I said Spiro Agnew was an asshole.
And when the hour was up, the two little old ladies rose, and said, in their best Louisa May Alcott manner, “We’d like to thank you, Mr. Ellison, for your—uh—enthusiasm. But our bus driver is waiting for us to hurry back to school, so—uh—thank you and goodbye.”
The kids, a mite dazed by the mixmaster into which they’d stumbled, were led docilely back to the Halls of Academe where they would be told to ignore that strangely garbed hippie with the decadent ideas and the inexcusable profanity.
They were given “evaluation sheets” on which they were to record their opinions of the hour.
Glenn Ray looked like a man who has just learned Santa Claus takes bribes.
Barbara Benham looked disturbed. She didn’t say anything. But an hour later, we got word Mr. Ray wanted to see us. He came down to Miss Benham’s classroom, and he said, “You’d better stick to talking about writing.”
I asked him pointedly if that meant I was not allowed to talk about the world or politics or any of the other subjects on which I’d dwelled in the Wilbur Wright class. He hurriedly assured me he meant no such thing…just that I was a writer and should deal with these topics from that position. It seemed a reasonable request, and I said I would. When he left, Barbara Benham looked even more disturbed.
“Anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said, and bit her thumb.
Later that day I had a get-together with students from the Living Arts Center itself, rather than a specially bussed-in crowd. It was called the “Let’s Talk” session, and these were an entirely different breed of kids than the Wilbur Wright zombies. These kids—ages 12 to 17—were sharp, inquisitive, irreverent, uncompromising, alert. We got to rapping about all sorts of things love/hate, war/peace, truth/shucks, power/subservience—and the only bad moment I can recall was when a boy in the back asked, non sequitur, “What’s Barbra Streisand like?” Everyone did a take. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything that had gone down in the dialogue, but I said simply that I didn’t know her, but from what I’d heard around the studios, she was a royal pain in the ass to work with. The kid burst into tears later, I learned, telling Mr. Ray and others, “Why’d he have to say that about a great star like Miss Streisand?”
I won’t say it was the greatest rapport in the history of Western Man, that afternoon session, but there is a photo on page 23 of the December 16th edition of the Dayton Daily News showing me surrounded by kids, laying an anecdote on them, and their heads are thrown back in laughter, their mouths open with joy; they are having a good time.
You see, we related. Remember that…it comes up later.
But: in the back of the group, Glenn Ray sat watching. This is a Watchbird watching you. He particularly didn’t like my reading of the two Glass Teat columns dealing with The Common Man—a hobby horse I’m currently riding. He didn’t like me saying the greatest danger to freedom and liberty in our country was the stupidity of the masses, the passive acceptance of all the poison spurted from the fangs of Spiro.
Later that night I had my first meeting with the science fiction workshop kids. And we grooved. They were like the other Living Arts kids: bright, into it, curious.
Things were going well. I thought.
(What I did not know was that calls were coming in from the parents of those Wilbur Wright students. One man showed up at the Center and wanted to “look around” and see what this here now Center was all about. Glenn Ray was being drawn uptight. Waves were appearing on the placid surface of his little frog pond.)
Next morning came the pivotal scene, I feel. I was to meet my second bussed-in group. Black journalism students from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School.
The instant I walked into the classroom, I felt it. A difference. The biggest difference. Life surged in that room. Thirty-some kids, all black, with a male, white teacher. They were slumped in the seats, eyes watching. Yeah. That’s where it’s at, friends. None of that “here I sit, docilely waiting for your effulgent intelligence, great white teacher” jive. These kids had had all the shit thrown at them. They were wide awake and wanted the dude up in front to prove he was worth listening to.
And that, Establishment, is the attitude all school kids should have. They should demand their teachers be interesting and on top of it and stimulating.
The difference was like, uh, black and white.
Glenn Ray sat in the back, watching.
We started out, and for the first ten minutes I was being tested. There was no hype possible with these kids. I was white, and that was a strike or two right there. And I was fancied-up with what looked (to them) like new clothes, and that was another couple of strikes. And I was in a position of authority, and that was strikes five and six. So I proceeded to put what I had in front of them. And that entailed doing precisely what Art Thomas had done: talk to them the way they talked to each other. And that meant the words motherfucker and dumbshit and pile of crap were exchanged. Broke through. Read them a fantasy I’d written about an extraterrestrial who was passing as a human to illuminate the arid emotionalism of a black girl passing as white. They dug it. And we got to really rapping. Good things. Truths and fears and humor and some mutual affection were passed around. (“You know,” I said to one black kid who’d asked a dumb question, “you are a dumb shit, man.” And he replied, “Thass okay. You just an envious Jew, baby.”)