"Harlan Ellison - Approaching Oblivion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

going to parties where you don't know anyone as someone who was an outsider. If you had religion
pounded into your head when you were young, chances are pretty good even if you've renounced formal
church ties, you still carry the guilts and fears around in your gut. Or maybe you've come full-circle and
have become a Jesus Person, if you've been disillusioned enough by the world.
 No one escapes.
Our childhoods are sowing the wind, our adulthoods are reaping the whirlwind.
As true of me as you. No better, no nobler, no stronger, no freer of the past. Just like you.
In Painesville, I was a card-carrying outcast. тАЬCome on, Harlan!тАЭ the kids would yell across
Harmon Drive. тАЬCome on, let's play at Leon's!тАЭ And like a sap, I'd clamber up from between the huge roots
of the maple tree in our front yard, drop my copy of Lorna Doone or Lord Jim (or whatever other alternate
universe I'd fled to because I hated the one I was in) and run after the gang of kids streaking for Leon
Miller's house. I was a little kid, smaller than any other kid my age, and I couldn't run nearly as fast. That
was always part of their equation, of course. And just as I'd reach the front steps, they'd all dash inside
Leon's house, slam and latch the screen door, bang shut the front door with its big glass panes and crowd
behind the front window, sticking their tongues out at me and laughing. How I longed to enter that cool and
dim front room where they would soon be playing Chinese Checkers and Pick-Up-Sticks.
Instead, their rejection always drove me to fury.I would slam my hands against the wooden frames
of the screen windows and kick the glider on the front porch, always being careful not to tear the screens or
damage the glider for fear of the wrath of Leon's grandmother. Then, when they tired of baiting me, and
retreated into the dimness beyond to play, I would return to my book, where I could be brave and loved and
capable of dueling Athos, Porthos and Aramis all in one afternoon.
On the schoolyard at Lathrop, I fared considerably worse than D' Artagnan. There I was the
accepted punching bag of bullies-in-training, whose names appear every now and then in my stories as
characters who come to ugly ends.
I won't go into the reasons; they're all thirty years out-of-date and relevance. Suffice it that a gang
of them would pound me into the dirt. And with a pre-Cool Hand Luke persistence, I would pull myself up
and jump one of them, bury my teeth in his wrist and wrestle him to the ground. The others would kick me
till I let loose. Up again, more slowly a second time, with a wild roundhouse at a thick, stupid face.
Sometimes I'd connect and savor the eloquent vocabulary of a bloody nose. But they'd converge and plant
me again. And it would go that way till I was unconscious or until Miss O'Hara from the third grade would
dash out to scatter them.
But it wasn't the beatings that most dismayed me. It was having to go home after school with my
clothes ripped and bloodied beyond repair. You see, I was grade school age only a few years after the
Depression, and my family was anything but wealthy. We weren't destitute, far from it; but things were as
tight for us as for most families in the Midwest at that time, and my parents could not afford new clothes all
the time.
When I walked home from school, I would take the longest way around, often going to sit in the
woods on the corner of Mentor Avenue and Lincoln Drive till it grew dark. I was ashamed and filled with
guilt. And when, at last, I could stay away no longer, I'd go home and my Mother-who was a kind woman
suffering with a troublesome child-would see me, she would cry and clean me up with mercurochrome and
Band-Aids, and she would say (not every time, but even once was enough to make an indelible
impression), тАЬWhat did you say to get them mad?тАЭ
How could I tell her it was not only that I was a smart aleck? How could I tell her it was because I
was a Jew and they had been taught Jews were something loathsome? How could I tell her it was easier for
me to carry a broken nose and bruises than for me to act cowardly and deny that I was a Jew? The few
times she had heard their anti-Semitic remarks, she had gone to school, and that had only made it worse. So
I let her think I had started it. And swallowed the guilt. And built a reaction to bearing the blame that grew
as I grew.
Now, as an adult, my reaction to being blamed for something I did not do is almost pathological.
Now, as an adult, I don't give a damn if I do tear the screens or damage the glider. I can think of