New Introduction

MEMO '75

What goes around…comes around.

What happens in this book happened to me in 1954 and 1960. The world was a certain way then. Let's call it Situation A. By the time this book was published the first time, the 1954 portion of Situation A was fast fading, almost gone. The 1960 portion still obtained; the book was done in 1961. By the time the second edition was released through a tiny West Coast publisher in a very limited edition in 1969, Situation A was long-gone and, in the introduction to that second edition (which follows this new preface), the world had become another kind of place. Situation B.

It is now six years later. 1975. My observations about street gangs in 1969 no longer hold. Not even remotely. In fact, I was dead-ass wrong. Or, as Santayana put it, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Situation B, as described inMemo '69 , never reached fruition. It was all wishful thinking on my part. I won't go any further on that line: readMemo '69 and you'll see the pathetic wish-fulfillment of my statements just six years ago. (Current, cynical observations can be found in my collection APPROACHING OBLIVION.)

But the point that needs to be made here,especially here, is that we didn't go into a Situation C, for Gods sake, we wound up back at square one, in Situation A.

Not only didn't I learn from the past, I didn't even see it come barreling back at me from the opposite direction. Butthis time, I think, I hope—I'd damned well better had—I got that truck's number when it hit me.

There's no need to write an extensive new description of street gangs in the 1970's, of violence and death, kids invading schoolyards and even schoolrooms to shoot down members of rival clubs…because it's all in the book as it happened in 1954.

What goes around has come around.

In Chicago the black gangs Back O' The Yards are locked in constant, deadly combat. In Manhattan's Chinatown and out in San Francisco, the Oriental clubs restage the Tong Wars. In East L.A. the Chicano gangs are so tough not even the hardiest newspaper reporters can get in to report the machinations of warfare. In South Boston…well, tohell with the white assholes of South Boston.

MEMOS FROM PURGATORY has suddenly, sadly, become relevant again.

You can'tbelieve how sad that makes me.

As for the second part of this book, about jail, well, things ain't much different now than they were then. Yeah, they're closing down Manhattan's Tombs, but they've still got to stick people away somewhere, and, we've got the bitter aftertaste of Attica to heighten our appetite for the slam. And in state and federal joints all across this nation the white and hispanic and black gangs proliferate; and if you don't join, you walk a tightrope over doom.

I don't know where else to go with this introduction. It all seems so damnably inevitable, so helpless-making. I should have seen it, and I didn't, and I feel like a jerk. Leo Dillon, who did the cover for the first edition—a portrait of me behind bars—and who did the cover for this new edition, said just the other night that I keep fooling myself, that I keep murmuringspero meliora , I hope for better things, but that in my gut, in the outer layers of my skin, in my non-sentimental sections of brain, Iknow it's all the same, always the same, always going tobe the same. Maybe Leo's right; I don't know.

All I know is that in 1963 when Hitchcock did MEMOS as the first of his hour-long tv shows, he had James Caan (in his first major Hollywood role) playing Harlan Ellison, and I wasn't hip enough to know that some day he'd be a star, having climbed to fame and glory in the role of Sonny Corleone inThe Godfather . And if I couldn't even see that one day they'd be totemizing the slug creatures of the Mafia as charming, home-loving businessmen who only kill occasionally to protect the family business, then how the hell could I be expected to understand that the conditions of life and the pressures of desperation that made the kids and the jails what they were in the first place would come full-circle—because they've never been gone—to send the kids out in the streets, again?

Listen: it's twenty-one years since I went out into the swamp to get the background that resulted in this book and three others. It's fourteen years since the book you hold came out the first time. And six since the second edition with its starry-eyed preface filled with bullshit and wish-fulfillment. Maybe in another five years, if this book has a continued life…and at this point it looks likenothing can kill it…short of universal brother/sister-hood, which I think is highly unlikely…I'll be back at this typewriter, saying something different.

Maybe I'll be smiling and reporting back that we've reached Situation C at last. Maybe we'll be back at B. And probably we'll still be mired down at Situation A.

Maybe not. But I doubt it.

Santayana was right, I now believe. What goes around…comes around.

Hey, why don't you all make a liar out of me again. Be nice to each other and watch the Ellison look like ashmuck . If that isn't impetus enough, then think about some kid, lying face-down in an empty parking lot with his bead blown open by a $35 piece he bought off the street; and whilethat one's still burning, think about the kid who pulled the trigger, growing old and maggoty in some jail cell.

That's right, Billy Graham, it's a terrific world. Where do I go for a refund on my ticket?

HARLAN ELLISON
11 December 74
New York City