Try a Dull Knife

HARLAN ELLISON

In my late teens I became an avid Ellison reader. I remember reading “Try a Dull Knife” in 1969 and the chill it gave me. It was one of the stories that helped formulate the concept behind this book. So here it appears, happily, in Blood Is Not Enough.

oOo

It was pachanga night at The Cave. Three spick bands all going at once, each with a fat momma shaking her meat and screaming ¡Vaya! The sound was something visible, an assault in silver lame and screamhorn. Sound hung dense as smog-cloud, redolent as skunk-scent from a thousand roaches of the best shit, no stems or seeds. Darkness shot through with the quicksilver flashes of mouths open to show gold bridgework and dirty words. Eddie Burma staggered in, leaned against a wall and felt the sickness as thick as cotton wool in his throat.

The deep scar-burn of pain was bleeding slowly down his right side. The blood had started coagulating, his shirt stuck to his flesh, but he dug it: it wasn’t pumping any more. But he was in trouble, that was the righteous truth. Nobody can get cut the way Eddie Burma’d been cut and not be in deep trouble.

And somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him. He had to get through to—who? Somebody. Somebody who could help him; because only now, after fifteen years of what had been happening to him, did Eddie Burma finally know what it was he had been through, what had been done to him… what was being done to him… what they would certainly do to him.

He stumbled down the short flight of steps into The Cave and was instantly lost in the smoke and smell and twisting shadows. Ethnic smoke, Puerto Rican smells, lush shadows from another land. He dug it, even with his strength ebbing, he dug it.

That was Eddie Burma’s problem. He was an empath. He felt Deep inside himself, on a level most people never even know exists, he felt for the world. Involvement was what motivated him. Even here, in this slum nightclub where intensity of enjoyment substituted for the shallow glamour and gaucherie of the uptown boîtes, here where no one knew him and therefore could not harm him, he felt the pulse of the world’s life surging through him. And the blood started pumping again.

He pressed his way back through the crowd, looking for a phone booth, looking for a toilet, looking for an empty booth where he could hide, looking for the person or persons unknown who could save him from the dark night of the soul slipping toward him inexorably.

He caromed off a waiter, Pancho Villa moustache, dirty white apron, tray of draft beers. “Hey, where’s the gabinetto?” he slurred the request. His words were slipping in their own blood.

The Puerto Rican waiter stared at him. Uncomprehending. “Perdon?”

“The toilet, the pissoir, the can, the head, the crapper. I’m bleeding to death, where’s the potty?”

“Ohhh!” Meaning dawned on the waiter. “Excusado . . atavio!” He pointed. Eddie Burma patted him on the arm and slumped past, almost falling into a booth where a man and two women were groping one another darkly.

He found the door to the toilet and pushed it open. A reject from a Cuban Superman film was slicking back his long, oiled hair in an elaborate pompadour before the foggy mirror. He gave Eddie Burma a passing glance and went back to the topography of his coiffure. Burma moved past him in the tiny room and slipped into the first stall.

Once inside, he bolted the door, and sat down heavily on the lidless toilet. He pulled his shirt up out of his pants, and unbuttoned it. It stuck to his skin. He pulled, gently, and it came away with the sound of mud squished underfoot. The knife wound ran from just below the right nipple to the middle of his waist. It was deep. He was in trouble.

He stood up, hanging the shirt on the hook behind the door, and pulled hanks of toilet paper from the gray, crackly roll. He dipped the paper in a wad, into the toilet bowl, and swabbed at the wound. Oh, God, really deep.

Then nausea washed over him, and he sat down again. Strange thoughts came to him, and he let them work him over:

This morning, when I stepped out the front door, there were yellow roses growing on the bushes. It surprised me; I’d neglected to cut them back last fall, and I was certain the gnarled, blighted knobs at the ends of the branches—still there, silently dead in reproach of my negligence—would stunt any further beauty. But when I stepped out to pick up the newspaper, there they were. Full and light yellow, barely a canary yellow. Breathing moistly, softly. It made me smile, and I went down the steps to the first landing, to get the paper. The parking lot had filled with leaves from the Eucalyptus again, but somehow, particularly this morning, it gave the private little area surrounding and below my secluded home in the hills a more lived-in, festive look. For the second time, for no sensible reason, I found myself smiling It was going to be a good day, and I had the feeling that all the problems I’d taken on—all the social cases I took unto myself—Alice and Burt and Linda down the hill—all the emotional cripples who came to me for succor—would shape up, and we’d all be smiling by end of day. And if not today, then certainly by Monday. Friday, the latest.

I picked up the paper and snapped the rubber band off it. I dropped the rubber band into the big metal trash basket at the foot of the stairs, and started climbing back up to the house, smelling the orange blossoms and the fine, chill morning air I opened the paper as I climbed, and with all the suddenness of a freeway collision, the morning calm vanished from around me. I was stopped in mid-step, one leg raised for the next riser, and my eyes felt suddenly grainy, as though I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. But I had.

The headline read: EDWARD BURMA FOUND MURDERED.

But … I was Eddie Burma

He came back from memories of yellow roses and twisted metal on freeways to find himself slumped against the side of the toilet stall, his head pressed to the wooden wall, his arms hanging down, the blood running into his pants top. His head throbbed, and the pain in his side was beating, hammering, pounding with a regularity that made him shiver with fear. He could not sit there, and wait.

Wait to die, or wait for them to find him.

He knew they would find him. He knew it.

The phone He could call . .

He didn’t know whom he could call. But there had to be someone Someone out there who would understand, who would come quickly and save him. Someone who wouldn’t take what was left of him, the way the others would.

They didn’t need knives.

How strange that that one, the little blonde with the Raggedy Ann shoebutton eyes, had not known that. Or perhaps she had. But perhaps also the frenzy of the moment had overcome her, and she could not simply feed leisurely as the others did. She had cut him. Had done what they all did, but directly, without subtlety.

Her blade had been sharp. The others used much more devious weapons, subtler weapons. He wanted to say to her, “Try a dull knife”. But she was too needing, too eager. She would not have heard him.

He struggled to his feet, and put on his shirt. It hurt to do it. The shirt was stained the color of teak with his blood. He could barely stand now.

Pulling foot after foot, he left the toilet, and wandered out into The Cave. The sound of “Mamacita Lisa” beat at him like gloved hands on a plate glass window. He leaned against the wall, and saw only shapes moving moving moving in the darkness. Were they out there? No, not yet, they would never look here first. He wasn’t known here And his essence was weaker now, weaker as he died, so no one in the crowd would come to him with a quivering need. No one would feel it possible to drink from this weak man, lying up against a wall.

He saw a pay phone, near the entrance to the kitchen, and he struggled toward it. A girl with long dark hair and haunted eyes stared at him as he passed, started to say something, then he summoned up strength to hurry past her before she could tell him she was pregnant and didn’t know who the father was, or she was in pain from emphysema and didn’t have doctor money, or she missed her mother who was still in San Juan. He could handle no more pains, could absorb no more anguish, could let no others drink from him. He didn’t have that much left for his own survival.

My fingertips (he thought, moving) are covered with the scars of people I’ve touched. The flesh remembers those touches. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing heavy woolen gloves, so thick are the memories of all those touches. It seems to insulate me, to separate me from mankind. Not mankind from me, God knows, for they get through without pause or difficulty—but me, from mankind. I very often refrain from washing my hands for days and days, just to preserve whatever layers of touches might be washed away by the soap.

Faces and voices and smells of people I’ve known have passed away, but still my hands carry the memories on them. Layer after layer of the laying-on of hands. Is that altogether sane? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a very long time, when I have the time.

If I ever have the time.

He reached the pay phone, after a very long time he was able to bring a coin up out of his pocket. It was a quarter. All he needed was a dime He could not go back down there, he might not make it back again. He used the quarter, and dialed the number of a man he could trust, a man who could help him. He remembered the man now, knew the man was his only salvation.

He remembered seeing him in Georgia, at a revival meeting, a rural stump religion circus of screaming and Hallelujahs that sounded like !H!A!L!L!E!L!U!J!A!H! with dark black faces or red necks all straining toward the seat of God on the platform. He remembered the man in his white shirtsleeves, exhorting the crowd, and he heard again the man’s spirit message.

“Get right with the Lord, before he gets right with you! Suffer your silent sins no longer! Take out your truth, carry it in your hands, give it to me, all the ugliness and cesspool filth of your souls! I’ll wash you clean in the blood of the lamb, in the blood of the Lord, in the blood of the truth of the word! There’s no other way, there’s no great day coming without purging yourself, without cleansing your spirit! I can handle all the pain you’ve got boiling around down in the black lightless pit of your souls! Hear me, dear God hear me… I am your mouth, your tongue, your throat, the horn that will proclaim your deliverance to the Heavens above! Evil and good and worry and sorrow, all of it is mine, I can carry it, I can handle it, I can lift it from out of your mind and your soul and your body! The place is here, the place is me, give me your woe! Christ knew it, God knows it, I know it, and now you have to know it! Mortar and trowel and brick and cement make the wall of your need! Let me tear down that wall, let me hear all of it, let me into your mind and let me take your burdens! I’m the strength, I’m the watering place come drink from my strength!”

And the people had rushed to him. All over him, like ants feeding on a dead beast. And then the memory dissolved. The image of the tent revival meeting dissolved into images of wild animals tearing at meat, of hordes of carrion birds descending on fallen meat, of small fish leaping with sharp teeth at helpless meat, of hands and more hands, and teeth that sank into meat.

The number was busy.

It was busy again.

He had been dialing the same number for nearly an hour, and the number was always busy. Dancers with sweating faces had wanted to use the phone, but Eddie Burma had snarled at them that it was a matter of life and death that he reach the number he was calling, and the dancers had gone back to their partners with curses for him. But the line was still busy. Then he looked at the number on the pay phone, and knew he had been dialing himself all that time. That the line would always always be busy, and his furious hatred of the man on the other end who would not answer was hatred for the man who was calling. He was calling himself, and in that instant he remembered who the man had been at the revival meeting. He remembered leaping up out of the audience and taking the platform to beg all the stricken suffering ones to end their pain by drinking of his essence. He remembered, and the fear was greater than he could believe. He fled back to the toilet, to wait for them to find him.

oOo

Eddie Burma, hiding in the refuse room of a sightless dark spot in the netherworld of a universe that had singled him out for reality. Eddie Burma was an individual. He had substance. He had corporeality. In a world of walking shadows, of zombie breath and staring eyes like the cold dead flesh of the moon, Eddie Burma was a real person. He had been born with the ability to belong to his times; with the electricity of nature that some called charisma and others called warmth. He felt deeply; he moved through the world and touched; and was touched.

His was a doomed existence, because he was not only an extrovert and gregarious, but he was truly clever, vastly inventive, suffused with humor, and endowed with the power to listen. For these reasons he had passed through the stages of exhibitionism and praise-seeking to a state where his reality was assured. Was very much his own. When he came into a room, people knew it. He had a face. Not an image, or a substitute life that he could slip on when dealing with people, but a genuine reality.

He was Eddie Burma, only Eddie Burma, and could not be confused with anyone else. He went his way, and he was identified as Eddie Burma in the eyes of anyone who ever met him. He was one of those memorable people. The kind other people who have no lives of their own talk about. He cropped up in conversations: “Do you know what Eddie said… ?” or “Guess what happened to Eddie?” And there was never any confusion as to who was the subject under discussion.

Eddie Burma was a figure no larger than life, for life itself was large enough, in a world where most of those he met had no individuality, no personality, no reality, no existence of their own.

But the price he paid was the price of doom. For those who had nothing came to him and, like creatures of darkness, amorally fed off him. They drank from him. They were the succubi, draining his psychic energies. And Eddie Burma always had more to give. Seemingly a bottomless well, the bottom had been reached. Finally. All the people whose woes he handled, all the losers whose lives he tried to organize, all the preying crawlers who slinked in through the ashes of their non-existence to sup at his board, to slake the thirsts of their emptiness… all of them had taken their toll.

Now Eddie Burma stumbled through the last moments of his reality, with the wellsprings of himself almost totally drained. Waiting for them, for all his social cases, all his problem children, to come and finish him off.

I live in a hungry world, Eddie Burma now realized.

“Hey, man! C’mon outta th’crapper!” The booming voice and the pounding on the stall door came as one.

Eddie trembled to his feet and unbolted the door, expecting it to be one of them. But it was only a dancer from The Cave, wanting to rid himself of cheap wine and cheap beer. Eddie stumbled out of the stall, almost falling into the man’s arms. When the beefy Puerto Rican saw the blood, saw the dead pale look of flesh and eyes, his manner softened.

“Hey… you okay, man?”

Eddie smiled at him, thanked him softly, and left the toilet. The nightclub was still high, still screaming, and Eddie suddenly knew he could not let them find this good place, where all these good people were plugged into life and living. Because for them it would be a godsend, and they would drain The Cave as they had drained him.

He found a rear exit, and emerged into the moonless city night, as alien as a cavern five miles down or the weird curvature of another dimension. This alley, this city, this night, could as easily have been Transylvania or the dark side of the moon or the bottom of the thrashing sea. He stumbled down the alley, thinking…

They have no lives of their own. Oh, this poisoned world I now see so clearly. They have only the shadowy images of other lives, and not even real other lives—the lives of movie stars, fictional heroes, cultural cliches. So they borrow from me, and never intend to pay back. They borrow, at the highest rate of interest. My life. They lap at me, and break off pieces of me. I’m the mushroom that Alice found with the words EAT ME in blood-red on my id. They’re succubi, draining at me, draining my soul. Sometimes I feel I should go to some mystical well and get poured full of personality again I’m tired. So tired.

There are people walking around this city who are running on Eddie Burma’s drained energies, Eddie Burma’s life-force. They’re putt-putting around with smiles just like mine, with thoughts I’ve second-handed like old clothes passed on to poor relatives, with hand-movements and expressions and little cute sayings that were mine, Scotch-taped over their own. I’m a jigsaw puzzle and they keep stealing little pieces. Now I make no scene at all, I’m incomplete, I’m unable to keep the picture coherent, they’ve taken so much already.

They had come to his party, all of the ones he knew. The ones he called his friends, and the ones who were merely acquaintances, and the ones who were using him as their wizard, as their guru, their psychiatrist, their wailing wall, their father confessor, their repository of personal ills and woes and inadequacies. Alice, who was afraid of men and found in Eddie Burma a last vestige of belief that males were not all beasts Burt, the box-boy from the supermarket, who stuttered when he spoke, and felt rejected even before the rejection. Linda, from down the hill, who had seen in Eddie Burma an intellectual, one to whom she could relate all her theories of the universe. Sid, who was a failure, at fifty-three. Nancy, whose husband cheated on her. John, who wanted to be a lawyer, but would never make it because he thought too much about his clubfoot. And all the others. And the new ones they always seemed to bring with them. There were always so many new ones he never knew. Particularly the pretty little blonde with the Raggedy Ann shoebutton eyes, who stared at him hungrily.

And from the first, earlier that night, he had known something was wrong. There were too many of them at the party. More than he could handle . . and all listening to him tell a story of something that had happened to him when he had driven to New Orleans in 1960 with Tony in the Corvette and they’d both gotten pleurisy because the top hadn’t been bolted down properly and they’d passed through a snowstorm in Illinois.

All of them hung to his words, like drying wash on a line, like festoons of ivy. They sucked at each word and every expression like hungry things pulling at the marrow in beef bones. They laughed, and they watched, and their eyes glittered…

Eddie Burma had slowly felt the strength ebbing from him. He grew weary even as he spoke. It had happened before, at other parties, other gatherings, when he had held the attention of the group, and gone home later, feeling drained. He had never known what it was.

But tonight the strength did not come back. They kept watching him, seemed to be feeding at him, and it went on and on, till finally he’d said he had to go to sleep, and they should go home. But they had pleaded for one more anecdote, one more joke told with perfect dialect and elaborate gesticulation. Eddie Burma had begun to cry, quietly. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his body felt as though the bones and musculature had been removed, leaving only a soft rubbery coating that might at any moment cave in on itself.

He had tried to get up, to go and lie down, but they’d gotten more insistent, had demanded, had ordered, had grown nasty. And then the blonde had come at him, and cut him, and the others were only a step behind. Somehow . . in the thrashing tangle that had followed, with his friends and acquaintances now tearing at one another to get at him, he had escaped. He had fled, he did not know how, the pain of his knifed side crawling inside him. He had made it into the trees of the little glen where his house was hidden, and through the forest, over the watershed, down to the highway, where he had hailed a cab. Then into the city.

See me! See me, please! Just don’t always come and take. Don’t bathe in my reality and then go away feeling clean. Stay and let some of the dirt of you rub off on me. I feel like an invisible man, like a drinking trough, like a sideboard dripping with sweetmeats . . Oh God, is this a play, and myself unwillingly the star? How the hell do I get off stage? When do they ring down the curtain? Is there, please God, a man with a hook… ?

I make my rounds, like a faith healer. Each day I spend a little time with each one of them. With Alice and with Burt and with Linda down the hill; and they take from me. They don’t leave anything in exchange, though. It’s not barter, it’s theft. And the worst part of it is I always needed that, I always let them rob me. What sick need was it that gave them entrance to my soul? Even the pack rat leaves some worthless object when it steals a worthless object I’d take any thing from them: the smallest anecdote, the most used-up thought, the most stagnant concept, the puniest pun, the most obnoxious personal revelation… anything! But all they do is sit there and stare at me, their mouths open, their ears hearing me so completely they empty my words of color and scent… I feel as though they’re crawling into me. I can’t stand any more . . really I can’t.

The mouth of the alley was blocked.

Shadows moved there.

Burt, the box-boy. Nancy and Alice and Linda. Sid, the failure. John, who walked with a rolling motion. And the doctor, the jukebox repairman, the pizza cook, the used-car salesman, the swinging couple who swapped partners, the discotheque dancer… all of them.

They came for him.

And for the first time he noticed their teeth.

The moment before they reached him stretched out as silent and timeless as the decay that ate at his world. He had no time for self-pity. It was not merely that Eddie Burma had been cannibalized every day of the year, every hour of the day, every minute of every hour of every day of every year. The awareness dawned unhappily—in that moment of timeless time—that he had let them do it to him. That he was no better than they, only different. They were the feeders—and he was the food. But no nobility could be attached to one or the other. He needed to have people worship and admire him. He needed the love and attention of the masses, the worship of monkeys. And for Eddie Burma that was a kind of beginning to death. It was the death of his unself-consciousness, the slaughter of his innocence. From that moment forward, he had been aware of the clever things he said and did, on a cellular level below consciousness. He was aware. Aware, aware, aware!

And awareness brought them to him, where they fed. It led to self-consciousness, petty pretensions, ostentation. And that was a thing devoid of substance, of reality. And if there was anything on which his acolytes could not nourish, it was a posturing, phony, empty human being.

They would drain him.

The moment came to a timeless climax, and they carried him down under their weight, and began to feed.

When it was over, they left him in the alley. They went to look elsewhere.

With the vessel drained, the vampires moved to other pulsing arteries.

_____________________________________________________

Though I have worked assiduously at living my life by Pasteur’s dictum, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and consider it ludicrous and horrifying that the guy in the White House (as I sit writing this in May of 1988) is so loopy that he consults astrologers—a craziness we associate with utter derangement cases like Hitler, who maintained a staff stargazer—I nonetheless amuse myself with the harmless conceit that each of us possesses different kinds of “luck.”

(Because I truly believe there is no such thing as “luck,” but cannot deny both synchronicity and serendipity in the insensate universe, this is my childlike way of taking into account sheer randomness of circumstance that redounds to our benefit. And I’m not for a second truly serious about it.)

There are people who are “lucky” in love and people who are “lucky” in business and people who are “lucky” when they survive accidents. The kinds of “luck” that I possess are far less significant measured against the totality of my life. They are: parking-space luck; restaurant luck; bad-companion luck. My friends (and ex-Executive Assistants) Linda Steele and Sarah Wood used to rage at my parking-space luck. It wouldn’t matter if the destination was in the heaviest-traffic section of West wood or Downtown L.A. As I neared the building in which I needed to transact my business, a parking place would open… usually smack in front of the entrance. There could be entire armadas of parked cars at my place of arrival… and someone would drive away just as we neared the most convenient spot Linda and Sarah would revile me with splenic fervor, going so far as to bet me a buck it wouldn’t happen this time.

I made a few dollars off that one.

Then there’s restaurant luck Trust me on this, I am systemically incapable of picking a bad eatery Joints that look as though they’ve been selected for this year’s Cockroach Party Conclave from the outside, invariably become secret dining treasures, to be whispered about only among my closest friends lest the word leak out and they invade the place, making it impossible for me to get a seat when I’m hungry. (We all know who they are the uptown folks in Gucci loafers, with their rebuilt noses and friends who are big in debentures and real estate. You know the ones. They always need to push two tables together so they can scream at each other more conveniently). I can be driving down an Interstate in a part of the country I’ve never visited before, and my head will come up and my nose (unrebuilt) will begin to twitch like a setter on point, and I’ll say to my passengers, “If we take the next exit, turn right and go off in that direction, we’ll find a sensational rib joint”. They look at me with proper disbelief. So I do it, and we find a five-stool counter joint run by an ancient black man whose arcane abilities with baby-backs is strictly imperial. Never fails. Ask Silverberg. Ask Len. Wein Trust me on this.

But the most efficacious luck I command is the luck that keeps me away from deadbeats. Time-wasters, arrivistes, bums and mooches. The mooks of the world

Now, I suppose, dealing with this pragmatically, it is only what Hemingway called “a built-in, shock-proof shit detector”. The flawless functioning of the onboard computer that has been programmed with decades of experience and insight and body-language and tonal inflection and the behavior of sociopaths Sherlock Holmes employed this methodology to scope a visitor to 221B Baker Street within moments of his/her arrival deductive logic. That’s what this “luck” must be, I’m certain of it.

Whatever the rationale, it works for me I’m not about to say I’ve never been flummoxed—there was this lady I once married for 45 days, but that’s another novel, for another time—yet the wool has been pulled very rarely I can spot a twisto with the first sentence uttered. Lames and leaners and hustlers don’t do very well with me I seem to be creep-proof.

And so, almost all of the vast amount of trouble I’ve gotten myself into, has been no one’s fault but my own I cannot plead that I was “led astray by the wickedness of others’ I am, in the Amerind sense of the phrase, absolutely responsible for my life and all the actions that have gone to construct that life. No accessory after the fact, I am precisely who I made me.

Yet in 1963-65, I “went Hollywood” for a while. Not so seriously that you might confuse me with William Holden’s corpse floating in Gloria Swansea’s swimming pool, but off-direction enough that I spent more time than I had to fritter away, in the company of people who drifted on the tide like diatoms. Some actors, some blue-sky entrepreneurs, some starlets, some taproots-in-Hell users and manipulators I knew they were wrong the moment I opened the packages, but I’m no different from you we all go to the zoo to watch the peculiar animals from faraway lands. Temporary fascination is not self-abuse, as long as one retains a sense of perspective, tip-toeing through the minefield satisfies our need for diversion and danger, as long as one doesn’t lease a burrow and start buying furniture for permanent residency. As sheepish apologia, I offer the only explanation that ever seems acceptable for the peculiar things we do it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And so, cute as a bug, I waded hip-deep in a social scene that bore as much relation to Living a Proper Life as Narnia bears to Ashtabula, Ohio. Which is to say, not a whole lot.

I was living in an actual treehouse at that time. A small, charming structure up a steep private road that ended in a parking lot below the house, a flat space surrounded by eucalyptus trees that totally hid the house from casual sight. It cost one hundred and thirty-five bucks a month, and had a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom, a decent-sized living room with a wood-burning fireplace, high beamed ceilings and paneled walls, and a “captain’s cabin” bedroom that was, in truth, only a triangular-shaped walled-off section with old-fashioned bay windows all around. I loved that little place on Bushrod Lane.

To that eyrie, 1962-66, came an unending stream of odd types and casual liaisons. The house lay in the bosom of Beverly Glen, at that time a rich enclave of artistic and (what used to be called) bohemian intellects. Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall and Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Blake and Lenny Bruce… I knew them all, and a few of them became friends. The parties were intimate, because the house was so small; the fun was constant because it was poor folks fun, pizza and alla that smart chat, unimpaired by dope or booze because I don’t do neither, and had no room for it in my environs.

In that venue, I stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia boss and two of his pistoleros with a Remington XP-100 pistol-rifle that fires enormous .221 Fireball cartridges, while I was ridiculously attired only in a bath towel around my waist. In that venue, I met and made friends with the dog Ahbhu, who still lives as Blood in “A Boy and His Dog.” In that venue, I managed so fully to fulfill all my adolescent sex-fantasies that I was able to proceed with my life having flensed myself of the dopey dream-hungers that pursue men into middle-age.

And in that venue I wrote “Paingod” and “‘Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” and “Lonelyache” and “Soldier” and “Punky and the Yale Men” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and a great many other stories. It was in that venue that I conceived and began editing DANGEROUS VISIONS.

I partied, and I dissipated, and I screwed like a mad thing, but I always worked. Which is why I can look back on that time with pleasure and a smile. But were it not for having done the writing—the thing that has always saved me from becoming a bum—the years of my having “gone Hollywood” would reside in memory draped with a sense of loss, a coating of wasted time, a terror at how easily we can all be led astray.

“Try a Dull Knife” came out of that period.

It was the story that marked the end of my sojourn among the bad companions. What had been going on, had been going on for several years; and during that time I went from one bunch of gargoyles to another, with them mooching and leaning, wasting my nights and borrowing my money (of which there was damned little, despite my working steadily in TV, writing Outer Limits and Burke’s Law and Route 66 and dozens of other shows). I was constantly having to put people up in the tiny treehouse because they were being hunted by even deadlier types. When Bobby Blake needed a place to hide out so his producer couldn’t find him, to force him to do retakes on a segment of The Richard Boone Show that Bobby had starred in, he went to ground in my living room. We shot a lot of pool in those days. A mountain lion leaped off the jungly hill that loomed over the treehouse and damned near ripped off my arm, right in the middle of a late night party.

And then, like drawing a deep breath, I sat down and wrote “Try a Dull Knife,” and it was all over.

For me, the work has always been therapy. Writing and taking showers provides the spark of insight that informs my awareness of what the hell I’m doing in the Real World.

And the oddest part about “Try a Dull Knife” is that I had written the first two paragraphs sometime in 1963, had written those lines without any idea how they would proceed into a story, and had shoved the yellow second-sheet with those words on it into a drawer, and never went near it, never even remembered it, till 1965. Two years after the opening had been written, I was writing another story entirely. It started with the words “Somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him.” And as I wrote along, the story taking shape slowly, as slowly as was taking shape the realization that I was surrounded by, and being used by, a glittery species of emotional vampires… I realized that I had started the story in the wrong place. I’d begun the yarn at least one beat too late.

And I stopped writing, and without knowing why, I started rooting through that drawer full of odd pieces of snippets for stories that might never be written, that trash-bin of words and ideas that had foundered on the shoals of my lack of craft or insight. I found that yellow second-sheet, and I read what I had written, and I added the word “and” at the beginning of my current project, and the pieces fit exactly.

The onboard computer was just beginning to learn what it needed to know, back in 1963. But the connection had been made, in 1965, and I learned a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

I trust my talent. Implicitly.

I may be a dolt, subject to all the idiocies and false beliefs and false starts to which we are all heir, but the talent knows what the hell it’s doing. The talent protects itself. It knows it has to exist in this precarious liaison with a dolt, and it makes damned sure the envelope containing the message doesn’t get postmarked to the Dead Letter Office.

“Try a Dull Knife” didn’t get finished till 1968, but the writing of the first pages exploded the scene through which I was sloughing. It freed me, and within a week or so I was out in the open again, moving away from the blasted, creepy world in which I had spent my uneasy days and nights, locked in useless embrace with the vampires who abound in unknowing, innocent society.

“Try a Dull Knife” is a story about bloodsuckers. It is also a story about “luck “.

Harlan Ellison