In 2002 Michael Chabon solicited a story from me for a special edition of an anthology entitled McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Stories. Chabon wanted to reinvigorate contemporary literature by bringing his beloved genre tales to the attention of readers. I agreed to contribute and wrote “Chuck’s Bucket,” a time-travel story based on string theory that explained the existence of ghosts while exploring the possibility of parallel realities. One alternate reality recounted Dad’s feud with Ellison.
When the magazine came out, I was in Colorado, preparing to present my work at a writers’ conference. I carefully planned my remarks and was attending to my appearance in the mirror when the phone rang in my hotel room. The caller was Harlan Ellison. He’d just read my story and wanted me to know that he had nothing against my father. Stunned, I told him that Dad didn’t get along with a lot of people, me included, and Ellison didn’t need to sugarcoat things. Ellison said he never sugarcoated anything, you can ask around, but insisted that no feud ever existed. He told me he had the utmost respect for my father, whom he considered an excellent writer. He asked me to visit when I was in California, and hung up.
The conversation shocked me, and I thought about it for a long time. Ellison had put forth a degree of effort to track me down at a hotel and make the call. He was known to be rude and irascible, a street fighter in his youth, litigious, a provocateur, and short-tempered. I couldn’t summon a reason for him to lie about the feud or about his sincere regard for my father. In short, I believed him. That meant the decades-long conflict was one-sided on my father’s part.
I wondered how many other altercations were products of Dad’s immense imagination bundled with rage. I’d grown up hearing tales of his disputes, the firing of agents, editors, and collaborators. He had discord with everyone—his mother, his sister, and me. Perhaps he needed foes as much as he needed to talk.
As Dad aged, he outlived the older writers he admired. He had alienated most of his contemporaries, and neglected to befriend the newcomers. All his books were out of print. Invitations to cons dwindled, but Dad told me that he quit fandom due to vanity. He didn’t want to be remembered as old and infirm. He was afraid that younger fans wouldn’t know who he was, a prospect he couldn’t bear.
My brother blamed cons for the erosion of our home life. His reasoning made sense, but I recognized that our parents needed a countermeasure to life in Haldeman. The majority of fans used cons as a replacement for an absent family, and my parents did the same. They preferred cons to their children’s high school and college graduations, or my sister’s appearance on the homecoming court. On one occasion Dad returned from a con proud of having cried in public because he felt comfortable among his “family.” I believe that telling his children this was an attempt to communicate that he was capable of weeping, despite never doing so in front of us. But what came across was the notion that fans were more deserving of his emotional vulnerability than we were.
Dad seldom left the house over which he held utter dominion. When he did leave, he went to cons, an environment that assuaged his ego in every way. He grew accustomed to these two extremes and became resentful when his family failed to treat him like fans did. We disappointed him with our need for a father.
Chapter Twenty-six
WITH JOHN Cleve in official retirement, Turk Winter surged forth as my father’s last persona, publishing more than 250 titles. Dad referred to him as “a perverse, kinky devil born for one book; reinpsychelated in 1975.” Before his final trip to New York, Dad had written a fan letter to Eric Stanton, an underground fetish artist who drew On a Kinky Hook. Dad thought he’d recognized the artistic influence of Steve Ditko, the mysterious genius who created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Stanton responded with an appreciative phone call. Impressed by Dad’s visual sense, he explained that Ditko had been his studio mate for several years. They talked for an hour, and Stanton invited Dad to visit on his business trip to Manhattan.