Read Online Shatterday by Harlan Ellison - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Harlan Ellison
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sixty-year-old Viennese violinist who has been having a love affair with a woman who comes to the seedy club where he has played for the past forty-five years since he was a young man, every year, but only once a year, on the anniversary of their first liaison. And he continues to age and wither … but she has stayed twenty years old," yeah, had she said that, I'd've whistled all the way to the studio that night.
Had she even said, "Disprove the existence of ghosts, or God, or Ronald Reagan," I'd have had something to sink my fangs into. "Tell me a story of the ancient spirit ghosts of the Mohawks, come again to bedevil those modern-day Amerind high-steel workers on Manhattan towers," okay, that's a story beginning. "Do me a story that explains why such a high percentage of big business crooks are practicing attorneys," not bad, a bit nebulous, but a workable basic concept; sure, I could have handled that.
But she said none of those. Nor anything else that might have made my life easier. What she said was:
"Write a story about a female talk show host."
I think I groaned.
A female talk show host wanted me to write a story about a female talk show host. If true love could ever possibly have blossomed between Carole Hemingway and me, it was brutally crippled in that moment. And it had been so many years since I'd done any radio interviewing myself, I wasn't sure I could write it with any degree of verisimilitude.
Nonetheless, undaunted, I accepted the challenge, sat down and started plotting. I had 6½ hours to devise and write a coherent story that wouldn't get me laughed off the air. In a few minutes I had the basic idea and started typing "Flop Sweat."
In the course of typing as fast as I could (I do about 120 words a minute on an Olympia office manual; never an electric, yucchhh; two fingers only), I found I needed some data I didn't have in my library. So I called her assistant at the station, Fred Harris, and asked him to describe the physical setup of the broadcast booth, how many and what kinds of telephone lines they had (it's a call-in show), and how many commercials per minute. And more. And more. That kind of stuff.
The dominant news story during that period, here in Los Angeles, was the mystery of the Hillside Strangler. I decided to use that as one of the basic elements in the piece, and I sat here writing the story with Ms. Hemingway's station blasting away so I'd get the proper cadence of talk-to-commercials that would make the story read realistically.
I wrote all day, and by 7:30 that night had completed the 4500 words . . . wasting myself in the process. But I then had to shower, get dressed (I'd been working in a bathrobe all day and I was, er, um, a bit fragrant), get in the car, and drive all the way across Los Angeles to KABC-AM.
The show went on the air at eight.
Fortunately, the top of the hour is given over to a five minute news roundup that's fed from ABC New York. That was all the slack time I needed. In the car, speeding down the Santa Monica Freeway at 80 m.p.h., I heard Carole Hemingway on my radio, saying, "Harlan Ellison isn't here yet, but as you listeners know, he's a most unusual person, and I'm sure he'll rush into the control booth at any moment."
"I'm coming, godammit, I'm coming!" I screamed back at her, pounding the padded dashboard.
I hurtled into KABC-AM at 8:16 P.M., took a few minutes for salutations and the catching of breath … and proceeded—if one can judge from the subsequent phone calls to the program—to scare the shit out of thousands of radio listeners with the story you're about to read.
This story has not been revised. It comes to you precisely and exactly as it was written between the hours of 1:00 and 7:30 P.M. on December 21, 1977, the day it was performed over KABC TalkRadio.
Why does he tell me all this? Well, I tell it to you to prove that writers are not mythical creatures that live on crystal mountaintops. They are laborers working with
Had she even said, "Disprove the existence of ghosts, or God, or Ronald Reagan," I'd have had something to sink my fangs into. "Tell me a story of the ancient spirit ghosts of the Mohawks, come again to bedevil those modern-day Amerind high-steel workers on Manhattan towers," okay, that's a story beginning. "Do me a story that explains why such a high percentage of big business crooks are practicing attorneys," not bad, a bit nebulous, but a workable basic concept; sure, I could have handled that.
But she said none of those. Nor anything else that might have made my life easier. What she said was:
"Write a story about a female talk show host."
I think I groaned.
A female talk show host wanted me to write a story about a female talk show host. If true love could ever possibly have blossomed between Carole Hemingway and me, it was brutally crippled in that moment. And it had been so many years since I'd done any radio interviewing myself, I wasn't sure I could write it with any degree of verisimilitude.
Nonetheless, undaunted, I accepted the challenge, sat down and started plotting. I had 6½ hours to devise and write a coherent story that wouldn't get me laughed off the air. In a few minutes I had the basic idea and started typing "Flop Sweat."
In the course of typing as fast as I could (I do about 120 words a minute on an Olympia office manual; never an electric, yucchhh; two fingers only), I found I needed some data I didn't have in my library. So I called her assistant at the station, Fred Harris, and asked him to describe the physical setup of the broadcast booth, how many and what kinds of telephone lines they had (it's a call-in show), and how many commercials per minute. And more. And more. That kind of stuff.
The dominant news story during that period, here in Los Angeles, was the mystery of the Hillside Strangler. I decided to use that as one of the basic elements in the piece, and I sat here writing the story with Ms. Hemingway's station blasting away so I'd get the proper cadence of talk-to-commercials that would make the story read realistically.
I wrote all day, and by 7:30 that night had completed the 4500 words . . . wasting myself in the process. But I then had to shower, get dressed (I'd been working in a bathrobe all day and I was, er, um, a bit fragrant), get in the car, and drive all the way across Los Angeles to KABC-AM.
The show went on the air at eight.
Fortunately, the top of the hour is given over to a five minute news roundup that's fed from ABC New York. That was all the slack time I needed. In the car, speeding down the Santa Monica Freeway at 80 m.p.h., I heard Carole Hemingway on my radio, saying, "Harlan Ellison isn't here yet, but as you listeners know, he's a most unusual person, and I'm sure he'll rush into the control booth at any moment."
"I'm coming, godammit, I'm coming!" I screamed back at her, pounding the padded dashboard.
I hurtled into KABC-AM at 8:16 P.M., took a few minutes for salutations and the catching of breath … and proceeded—if one can judge from the subsequent phone calls to the program—to scare the shit out of thousands of radio listeners with the story you're about to read.
This story has not been revised. It comes to you precisely and exactly as it was written between the hours of 1:00 and 7:30 P.M. on December 21, 1977, the day it was performed over KABC TalkRadio.
Why does he tell me all this? Well, I tell it to you to prove that writers are not mythical creatures that live on crystal mountaintops. They are laborers working with
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