The Essential Ellison Part 36

It is a big business. It is run for profit. That seems to distress some people. (One such troubled soul is John Ettinger, an independent television doc.u.mentary producer who did a segment of Channel 7' s Eyewitness Los Angeles on Great Expectations recently, and who seemed hideously distressed that the service wasn't run like the Midnight Mission. More on Mr. Ettinger, and the hypnotic effect Great Expectations has on the weak-willed, later. Stay tuned.) Nonetheless, it is difficult for the average person contemplating a " dating service" to get past the stigmatized mythos of "paying" for the search for True Love. If one considers how much is paid in emotional coin, in the wear-and-tear give-and-take of most social liaisons embodying the Search, the cost of a membership in Great Expectations' service seems reasonable. But trying to explain the price structure in coherent terms is about as easy as filling out an IRS "short form."

But I'll try. Just not yet, please. It takes some working up to. For the nonce, let me tell you of the scene, and how I was embroiled in same at the behest of Los Angeles magazine, may its circulation increase.

Jeffrey Ullman is twenty-seven, happily married, and finds himself precariously poised on the precipice of financial success. He was twenty-five, happily married and impecunious when he had the moment of satori in which Great Expectations was born.

Ullman graduated from Berkeley in 1972 with a B.A. in Independent Journalism. His senior thesis was t.i.tled, Getting on TV: If Not You...Then Whom? For the two years following his graduation he was a Video Doc.u.mentarian. What that means-in a time when garbage collectors throw dreck as Sanitation Removal Consultants-is that he produced, wrote and directed low-energy-level doc.u.mentaries for schools: over thirty in five years. But when an NEA grant came to an end in 1974, Ullman found himself back in Los Angeles without a pot.

At a dinner party thrown by his parents in September of 1975, Ullman overheard a conversation between his mother and a friend of the family, an attractive, successful, 28-year-old female record company executive, recently come to Los Angeles from New York. She was lamenting the sorry state of dating here in the City of the Angels. Though she had met many men and had no lag-time in her social life, she could not find " that certain someone." Because she was an exceptionally attractive woman, she was constantly being hustled; but there was no click, no knight on a white charger; she had not been, in the words of Mario Puzo, "struck by the thunderbolt." Ullman listened to this not unfamiliar lament, and its coda, from his mother, who observed that an inability to find suitable companions afflicted her older friends who were recently widowed.

Later that night, driving home from the dinner party on the Santa Monica Freeway, wracking his brain for a way to put his video experience to work profitably here in Los Angeles, the conversation of earlier kept intruding.

Not even Aristotle could codify the nature of the creative act, and so it escapes both Ullman and me precisely what synaptic relay was suddenly closed, that produced the circuit linkage. But in that moment, on the Santa Monica Freeway, Ullman perceived the natural extrapolation of using videotape as a device for bringing people together. That the linkage was produced out of a need to make an honest living should in no way demean its importance.

I mean, who knows what venal impetus directed Albert Einstein's thoughts toward the s.p.a.ce-time equations?

Ullman began researching the possibilities of a service that would employ video technology in aid of this most basic human need. Fifty to sixty hours a week were spent hip-deep in sociology texts, magazine articles about singles, books on social anthropology, psychology, telecommunications and, fruitlessly as it turned out, source material on how to run a dating service.

Funding was obtained from his parents and from a darkly mysterious background figure whose name I have sworn to keep to myself on pain of having the "1" key broken off my typewriter. Mr. Mysterious doesn't matter, anyhow, because he was bought out three months later, to the vast relief of Ullman and his parents.

And so, on Leap Year Day, February 29th, 1976, Great Expectations opened shop.

Almost two years later, the membership is nearing 600 (52% male, 48% female) and what the Ullmans call "the relationship store" has a backlog of over one hundred and fifty videotape ca.s.settes, each holding the life-essence of four or five seekers. Five highly-sophisticated Sony Betamax SLO-320s flicker from noon till eight Mondays through Fridays, and twelve to five Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. Through the 1550 feet of office s.p.a.ce that were private apartments in the Karno Building twenty years ago, pa.s.s seekers after the Ultimate Truth, the Holy Grail, AKA True Love.

To this Valhalla of unanswered needs and unfulfilled dreams I came, wide-eyed and as close to innocent as four marriages and a lifetime of brutalization permitted.

There are over two million stories in the City of the Naked Angels. Mine is one of them.

To begin with, Randy Newman notwithstanding, tall people get me very cranky. Because of their insecurity at their yeti-like monstrousness, they have long engaged in a dire conspiracy to inconvenience those of us who are normal height, that is, five foot five or under. This conspiracy manifests itself in the height at which kitchen cabinets are built, the dispatching of six footers with enormous naturals who sit in front of us at movies, the inability to get a decent suit of clothes without shopping in the cadet section of C&R Clothiers, and other such indignities.

Jeff Ullman is six foot two.

I walked up the stairs at Great Expectations and was met by this great shambling hairy creature, who introduced himself as the gentleman who had sent me the come-on letter.

Maybe not cranky. Let's just say I was underwhelmed.

In case you've lost the thread, I was on Westwood Boulevard, having an hour to kill, sorta, kinda, and thought I'd check out this weird dating service my friend Sherry had obviously touted onto me. "Oh, so you're the famous writer I've heard so much about," Ullman said, winning me to his cause instantly by striking at my weakest point: cheap appeal to vanity.

We sat down and he managed to outline the program at Great Expectations in between long bouts on the telephone with members who were calling in to exclaim jubilantly about their dates of the night before. To a man who had not had a date in six weeks, it was enormously depressing.

We talked for a while, and I was bemused. The odd mating rituals of the natives have always intrigued me. Despite his height, I rather liked Ullman. He did not try to con me into believing he was ramrodding Great Expectations out of a selfless dedication to the betterment of the human race. It was clear he was a businessman who had come up with an interesting, very likely workable way to deal with one of the most basic of human hungers: the need for companionship and love. But he had verve and enthusiasm, and a warped sense of humor that reminded me of my own, except taller.

So I thought I'd write an article about videotape dating. I write a lot of fantasy, in the general course of things, and surely this was a recent, fantastic phenomenon in the uses to which technology could be put in service of the commonweal. Jeff Ullman thought that was a peachy idea.

But the nature of my romantic life is so complex that I felt I should divorce myself from the actual dating process at Great Expectations; I felt a detached view, written with a wry manner, winsome but puckish, would be the most truthful. I mean, what if I got embroiled in dating Great Expectations' members and, because I'm such a wimp, they all turned out badly? Then I'd be writing about me and not about the service, which might be a little bit of sensational for everybody else who's normal. No, I decided, this was going to be straight reportage. No Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson personal gonzo journalism. The unadorned reality. Sure.

Ullman was having none of it. Nor was the other Geoff-Miller, who edits Los Angeles magazine. They both insisted I actually memberize myself; actually put my face and mouth on a videotape; actually fill out a member profile; actually solicit dates with all those numbered women in the profile books; actually allow female persons to see my tape, read my profile and, if they were the sort of people who had taken leave of their senses, request dates with me.

They insisted that was the only honest way really to do a solid piece of investigative journalism. Ullman kept speaking of involvement and commitment; Miller kept hinting about the need for more and better consumer protection, the need to make certain we weren't sending the love-starved Los Angeles hordes-pathetic lemmings of l.u.s.t h.e.l.lbent on hurling themselves over the precipice of romance-to a shuck-and-jive operation. He also said he' d pay me a decent rate for the article, rather than the parsimonious sums usually doled out to the beanfield hands who traditionally write for Miller.

Naturally, public service and a dedication to the tenets of foursquare honest journalism swayed me. Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, "Each day I journey to the market place where lies are bought; hopefully, I take my place among the sellers."

And so, dear friends, once more into the breach, if you can keep your minds out of the gutter, thank you.

First I filled out the member profile. Reproduced somewhere around here is the form as I filled it out.

Ca.s.sette # 43 Member Profile Facts About Myself: First Name: Harlan Code #: H-666Date of Birth: 27 May 1934 Color of eyes: Blue Color of Hair: Brown Height: 5'5" Weight: 139 Occupation: Writer (books, films & TV) Where born: Cleveland, Ohio Marital Status: Divorced x 4 Smoke? Pipe Drink? Nope Number of dependents at home: None Religious dating preference (if any) I'd rather not go out with flesh-eating cannibals, devil-worshipers or Born Again Christians, please.Other than the above, no prejudice.

Racial dating preference (if any) None.

What I Like to Do: Far traveling; reading; writing; having extremely long and elegant meats in exotic restaurants with good company; arguing; seeing endless movies; cuddling; shooting pool; visiting art exhibitions and trying to restrain myself from buying; buying; laughing at myself; laughing at others; but most of all, loafing around with friends and interesting strangers, talking about the world, which is filled with a great many things. I must confess I find golf and tennis and suchlike activities a thundering bore. Chess is pleasant, because conversations can be carried on while playing...but backgammon and going to hockey games fills me with a vast ennui. I find that the only thing worth the time and energy is the company of others; people are my business and I cannot conceive of ever having discovered all there is to disover about the human heart in conflict with itself (as Faulkner put it). I would much rather sit and talk to someone than alienate myself by watching a ballgame.

Social Interests: All the usual good things: music, art, sociology, literature. But, again, people. One evening in the company of a Carl Sagan or a Buckminster Fuller or a Louise Nevelson is worth 10,000 years of running around a handball court. Because I'm a writer, my curiosity about all manner of minutiae has led me to learn about such diverse subjects as cartography, Latin American literature, Jack the Ripper, top security in toy factories, Egyptian s.e.xual mores, quasars as manifestations of giant Black Holes, art deco of the Thirties, jazz, the psychopathology of bigotry, H.L. Mencken, geology...there isn't nearly enough time in the day to learn all I want to know. I've written books of mystery stories, science fiction, fantasy, tv criticism, juvenile delinquency; books about the world of rock music, jails, kid gangs, high society, the underworld. I've been to Brazil and England, Austraila and France, Scotland and Canada's frozen north, all across the States, and into far, strange lands where no one else has ever been. Special enough?

What I'm Looking For: Something I've never known before.

Then Jeff Ullman took me into the "interview room." Very chummy, very comfortable, very put-you-at-you-ease, even though everyone looks ten pounds heavier on videotape. The camera is hidden. The setting is a book-lined room (crummy selection of book club editions, random studies of the sewer system of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few Harold Robbins potboilers with obscene remarks scrawled functional-illiterately in the margins; a selection distinguished solely by the presence of Leo Rosten's THE JOYS OF YIDDISH). A pair of comfortable leather and wood chairs, knockoff imitations of a saarinen design. Plants. Soft light. An okay room.

Jeff scrawls "Harlan" on a square of paper in block letters and pins it to the wall behind my head as I sit in the interviewee chair. It will be omnipresent on the tape so any woman running my ca.s.sette will remember and know to ask for me by my trade name. I can understand that: Redford and I are so often mistook for one another.

Then he interviews me. I don't even hear the tape begin to run. All very easy and comfortable.

The questions are humorous and searching and quite intelligent. None of this, "What's your favorite food" or "Do you like to do it with whips and chains, wet towels and coat hangers" kind of interrogation. Not even "What's your sign?" Jeff asks me what I want to be when I grow up. I say William Randolph Hearst. Jeff asks me what my secret dream is. I tell him owning San Simeon. Jeff asks me why I've been married and divorced four times. I fwow up.

No, really.

Ullman is good. He could always put in a few years of lay a.n.a.lyst training and become a creditable therapist, in the event the Federal Trade Commission runs him out of business. He is gentle and easygoing, no stress and no feeling you're being grilled by Kojak. But he probes and works instinctively with body language, reticences and facial illumination revealed by the subject being questioned. And as I've seen from evidence of many interviews in the ca.s.sette files, he gets men and women to come out of hiding naturally. Jeff's mother also does interviews, and while there is a somewhat noticeable tendency on the part of interviewees to respond to Estelle as one would to a kindly aunt or to the supervisor of the complaint department at the May Co., she has the touch, too.

I had decided that I would set up some ground rules for myself in this matter. First, I would be utterly candid and open when cutting the tape. No" putting on my party manners." I would expose myself as the arrogant elitist swine I truly am. Second, I would not request women for dates because that would merely be to reflect my tastes and inclinations. Third, I would accept any and all dates for which I had been chosen, G.o.d willing. Fourth, I would advise any woman requesting me that I was doing this article, so they'd know it upfront and wouldn't feel as if they had been duped to the ends of journalism under the guise of romance.

But even though I cut a very blunt and arrogant tape, Jeff Ullman was able to bring out the jellylike core of my being. All unknowing, I revealed the soft, sweet p.u.s.s.ycat that slumbers beneath this wretched, obnoxious, contentious, anthracite facade. It wasn't a bad tape. I'd have dated me if I'd been an extremely intelligent woman. With a death wish.

The taped interview took about seven to ten minutes. I've never timed it, but the Great Expectations flyer says the actual length of a taped interview is from three to five minutes. If that's accurate, and if mine was no longer than the average, then Oilman is even better at this little prying game than I thought: my tape seems to be much longer than that. But then, how time drags when you're in the company of a bore.

And when it was done, Jeff ran it for me, so I could see what it looked like. One take. No reshooting. I'm a quick study; but then, I've got being me down pat. Type casting. For good or bad, I said, "Put it on the line."

(It should be noted that a member can, in fact, retape if dissatisfied with the initial result. During the first week of membership the tape can be viewed an unlimited number of times by the subject him/herself...and friends and relatives can be brought in to a.s.say the effectiveness...random polls among people on the street can be taken...one can satisfy one's paranoid needs ceaselessly for the first week, and the tape can be re-cut free. It can be re-cut at the member's option any time thereafter, but Ullman charges a fifteen dollar time and nuisance charge; which seems reasonable when one considers how many people want to cut new tapes after having their hair or nose bobbed, their mustache shaved off, their consciousness raised by some good dope on the weekend or have reached a state of cosmic wonderfulness through est or Scientology or by sitting naked in -37 F., cross-legged, doing Indian chants and breathing deeply. At the member's option...new tape. That'll be $15, please.) My member profile went into the book containing men whose first names began with "H," my tape went back into the ca.s.sette cabinet, and I was a.s.signed the member number "666."

"Uh, Jeff," I said, huckleberrily, trying to seem frivolous and not a pain in the a.s.s, " did you know, just as a matter of incidental intelligence, heh heh, that the biblical symbol for the antichrist is six sixty-six? I mean, ha ha, the number of the beast is 666...did you know that? Just thought I'd mention it; nothing serious you know: just heh heh ha ha...did you know that?"

The pudding laughter congealed in my throat. Oilman wasn't laughing. "Yeah," he said offhandedly, printing "666" on my member profile, "I've heard that. Fascinating coincidence, isn't it?" And I was a member of Great Expectations, just like that. Fascinating coincidence. In the light of subsequent events, did Jeff Oilman-numerically speaking-know something I didn't?

Let us pause for a moment and speak of love. Not even True Love. Just plain old gra.s.s roots common variety love. Theodore Sturgeon ventured the opinion, "There's no absence of love in the world; only worthy places to put it." Since each of us is a place to put it, and since each of us from time to time is less than 100% worthy, I guess Ted had it down right.

Some day soon I'm going to write a fantasy about the search for True Love. About this guy who knows such a thing exists. Not the idealized, gothic novel gobbledy-bibble idea of it, but an actual, literal, real-life thing that is True Love. And he searches allover the world, goes to the top of Mt. Everest to consult the mysterious guru, dabbles in the black arts, consults ancient texts, and finally gets on to a trail that promises to lead to True Love. And when he finally finds it, what it turns out to be is a big bowling trophy, a huge, tacky loving cup thing with T*R*U*E L*O*V*E*! engraved on it in florid, incredibly gauche lettering, all caps and curlicues and exclamation points.

I just haven't figured out what he does with it. [Those who have read this volume sequentially will have discovered Harlan did figure it out; for others, see "Grail."]

And that's the problem with love. Once you have it, and you know you have it...what the h.e.l.l do you do with it?

It seems to me (he said, stroking his solomonic beard) that all but a fraction of the time we spend concerned with love is dissipated in the search; and very little thought is expended in consideration of how to use it, or let it use us, once we've got it. Thus, the search becomes easier and more involving. Idealized candy is infinitely sweeter than actual candy eaten. Diabetes, tooth decay, the mid-gut carbohydrate spread...actualized love can do it to you.

And so, while I don't really think it's easier to find love in, say, Samoa or Lapland than it is in Los Angeles, we do have the reputation here for chasing the Holy Grail more frenetically than they do in the provinces.

If this is so, then I don't think it merely a fascinating coincidence that Great Expectations has flowered here in what a bad musician has cheaply dubbed "The City of the One Night Stands." I think L.A. is the cutting edge of American social mores, and I think that Great Expectations is a solid manifestation of our need to find a new way to cut through the fetid jungle growth of Calvinist barriers that has always impeded us in the search for love. I found, to my pleasure-and in contradiction of my basically cynical, misanthropic view of the human race-that Great Expectations and what it says about the bold spirit of Los Angeles is a very positive and humanistic enterprise.

I continue to hold that belief, despite what happened to me when the job-lot called Harlan Ellison went on the market at Great Expectations. Call me hopeful; call me naive; call me Pollyanna; call me a poor benighted sailor on the seas of romance, tossed by the turbulent tides of l.u.s.t and human frailty. Call me verbose and let's get on with it.

In the mail, less than a week later, were three postcards.

Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by G.Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by K.Please come in for a viewing. You have been requested by D.

That isn't quite the way the cards read, but it's close enough. Initials weren't used; the cards had first names on them. I won't even tell you the first names. Look: no matter how flippant I may seem here, these were all nice women who took a chance with me; and while some or all or none of them were right for me, or I for them, they made their move toward liaison with open hands and honest intentions. And while I'll play for chuckles in these anecdotes, I'll not gossip or hold them up to public ridicule. We are all weird, every one of us, in small and usually harmless ways. But in a court of law there isn't one of us whose minor quirks wouldn't seem sly and kinky and possibly perverse. So when you're ready to reveal that secret thing you have hidden in the back of your underwear drawer, back there under the rolled socks or the pantyhose, that secret thing you'd rather burn in h.e.l.l forever than let anyone know is there, when you're ready to have it published with a big picture on the front page of the Times, at that time I'll tell you who the women were, the women I'll refer to only by bogus initials. If you want cheap thrills go stick your thumb in a light socket.

Where was I?

So I went in to view the tapes of the women who had requested me. On a sunny afternoon I drove down to Westwood and climbed the stairs to the cheery offices of Great Expectations. Estelle was there, and as I walked in I was greeted by a look on her face I've come to know very well. It's Estelle's "Have I got a girl for you!" look. I have come to know and fear that look.

She sat me down in one of the armchairs, plonked one of the fat notebooks containing female members' profiles on my lap and said, "G. is at the back of the book. She's only been a member for a month. Very intelligent."

How she knew which one I'd check out first, and more improbably, how she was able to remember who had asked for a date with me, among the hundreds of selections pa.s.sing over her desk in a week, is something I've never fathomed. But the clue to how Estelle can do it-and she's done it many times, I've seen her-and why she does it, lies in the response I give to people who ask me, "How can you be so high on such a dehumanized, mechanical way of meeting people?" That reply, and that clue, a little farther on. Right now I want to maintain the narrative flow.

I flipped through the loose-leaf pages. Rachel 5-64, Denise 5-117, Betty 5-286. Past woman after woman; younger women, older women; stouter women, thinner women; innocent looking women, bold looking women; chic women, reserved women. And I understood that, much as we feel compelled to play the "person in his/her own right" lip-service game, in the first burning instants that we meet someone who is a potential vessel of True Love, we are as one with the naked ape. It is always, in those first trembling moments, the aesthetic of line and curve and hollow and solid flesh that widens our eyes and raises our temperature. The subliminal message of certain body-heats, the flush of health, the movement of a slim hand through certain-colored hair, the horizon line of a smile that speaks of far lands ready for exploration. What culturally-hip hypocrites we are: talking of wit and wisdom, of good deeds and similar interests, when our chimes ring first and loudest for the high cheekbone, the tight little a.s.s, the strong chin or the quick flash of crossed leg. It's nice to delude ourselves that we move in the stately pavane of the social contract, but if we listen carefully, we can hear the murmurs of the veldt and the jungle near at hand.

I am no n.o.bler than you: G. was an attractive woman. I looked at her photo on the back of the sheet before I turned it over and read the member profile.

She liked books, wasn't too interested in sports, enjoyed far traveling; there were oblique references to a delight in word-play and hard work; she was in her middle thirties; she was divorced with children. Intimations of strong character and a pragmatic view of the world. The portents were good.

I ran her tape.

Attractive, a trifle hyper in a nervous way (but that might be attributed to the setting, the interview), easy to smile, charmingly cynical sometimes; and the body language and facial giveaways spoke to a promising sensuality.

All this, from the profile and a seven minute tape. Not an unlikely weight of evidence if one spends any part of one's life watching people, checking out the somatotypes, cataloguing the secret messages our bodies send.

I read the other two member profiles; the one for K. and the one for D. I studied the photographs.

In the course of preparing to write the article, I had scanned many hours of taped interviews, both men's and women's. Not just women I found personally attractive by those undefined and secret jungle messages; but older women who were widowed or divorced, who were clearly seeking older men for companionship; younger women whom I knew would be outside my range of interests because of their youth; black women who probably wouldn't want a honk; overweight women and women whom I didn't respond to at all physically. And a lot of men's tapes, to get a sense of balance, to find out whether the myth that only losers signed up for dating services had any substance. My finding: if there were losers in that group I viewed, they certainly didn't reveal it on tape. I saw women who were poised and charming, vivacious and coquettish, intelligent and witty. And though I prefer the company of women, the men I viewed were equally as interesting. There were weaker and stronger men, of course; men I suppose women could find handsome and men whose characters were more attractive than their faces; but very very few of them had that gray Kirlian Aura of desperation and doom.

My finding: it was probably as statistically average a group of winners and losers as one would get if one scooped a hundred men and women off any Los Angeles suburb's streets.

The three women whose tapes and profiles I scrutinized were no more nor less than the others. They seemed rational and together. The only thing that made me suspect they might be odd in the head was their selection of the man who had cut that arrogant, off-putting tape.

So now I had come down to the crunch point.

Here was where all the objectivity of my research into Great Expectations could go wrong. Understand: I am like the pessimistic kid in the old story, the one they put in a room filled with toys, who is observed an hour later, crying like crazy because he's sure someone will come and take them away; while in the next room the optimistic kid, who was put in with a giant mound of horse puckey, is burrowing through the s.h.i.t and laughing and yelling, "There has to be a pony!" I do not really believe in True Love. I am a cynic. And you can take me at my word when I say that I extrapolated in every possible direction to find a negative aspect of videotape dating.

I could find none.

Therefore, if things went less than sensationally, the fault had to lie in me, or in people who would be attracted to someone like me. Which, of course, was the case.

So as I launch into the denouement of this escapade, understand that what you get from this point on is highly subjective Ellisonian vision. Caveat emptor.

I ran K.'s tape. She was a set designer at one of the major studios. I was not drawn to her physically, but her manner was so gracious, as were her responses to the questions the interviewer put to her, that I felt I would very much like to meet her, to get to know her as a friend.

I ran D.'s tape. An absolutely stunning young woman. I was smitten with her looks. But as her tape rolled, I realized she was all wrong for me. She was too nice.

Do I detect the raised eyebrow? Do I perceive the hum of confusion? Let me explain.

D. was a sweet woman. Not simpy, saccharine sweet, with that cloying, phony manner that conceals another personality altogether, but nice, a good person who, because of her innocence (not naivete, innocence, something quite different) was terribly vulnerable. It has been truly said of me that anything that gets in my way gets a Harlansized hole through it. It's happened in personal relationships. I suppose it could be called strength; it can also justly be called insensitivity or ruthlessness or unbridled self-interest.

Whatever it's called, I'm aware of it, I despise it in myself, and I try to be responsible as best I can force myself to be, by not getting mixed up with people whom I'm going to clobber.

By the time the tape ended, I knew that if I were to get involved with D., in short order I would chew her up and cause her grief. So I decided, no matter what I'd set as the ground rules, I was not going to see this woman whose decency and kindness radiated from the videotape playback machine.

I said okay to K. and G., got their home and work numbers from Estelle and then, as I was turning away, having said, " Advise D. I'm unavailable," I said, "Let me have D.'s number and I'll call her and thank her, tell her I'm doing an article, and let her know my not accepting a date with her has nothing to do with her."

Estelle smiled that knowing smile, and I went in the other room and called G. and made a date. K. did not answer her home phone, and locating her at the studio was difficult. I put her numbers away for later. Then I called D.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi, this is Harlan Ellison. You ran my tape at Great Expectations?"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo. That was just the other day. I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon." A sweet, warm voice. My heart melted. I kicked myself in the a.s.s intellectually and warned myself, don't let your gonads rule your brain, turkey!

"Well, listen, I, uh, I came in today and ran your tape..."

Silence at the other end. Expectant silence.

(Hold it a minute. Dammit, I hate to break up the flow right at "the good part," but here's something that should be pointed out. Great Expectations is terrific in one respect, if no other. The way the system has been set up, there is virtually no rejection. If someone runs a tape and decides he or she doesn't want to respond to that person's request, no one says, "He didn't want to go out with you." Instead, if you turn down a request, the other person is advised you " are not available." No more is said. Not Available really does mean the person requested is dated up, is seeing someone regularly, is going inactive, is out of town, has come out of the closet...whatever. For all but those too paranoid even to sign up for Great Expectations, a " not available" means no points lost, means you're still acceptable, means no one has looked upon you and found you unworthy. It wholly and totally eliminates the crushing aspects of swimming in the dating pool.) "...I ran your tape, and uh I thought you were very nice, and G.o.d knows you're beautiful, but uh er I don't think you really want to go out with me."

"I don't?"

"No, I'm sure you wouldn't like it."

"Why do you say that?"

And I realized my tricky, duplicitous, sly and treacherous nature had outwitted me again. Of course she would be intrigued by such remarks. Which shows you what a swine can lie so close beneath the surface of even those who want to be responsible. Instead of simply having Estelle tell D. I was "not available," I'd set up a situation where I had to go out with her or make her feel rejected, thereby defeating the sane and sensible Great Expectations system. I had used my privileged relationship with Estelle and Jeff-a journalist gathering material-to get a phone number I should, by all rights, have been denied.

"I say that because I can see from your tape that you're just too nice a woman."

"I don't know what you mean."

G.o.d, this was impossible! I was trying to ride two horses at the same time.

"Look: I don't know you very well, just what I got from the profile and the tape, but I can tell from my past that a woman as nice as you would only be miserable going out with me."