The Essential Ellison Part 34

You never know you're a coward until it happens. No. You never know your character is weak until it snaps. You never know how thin the tensile cord of your sanity can be until it breaks. I would have cried, right then, sat down on the floor and wept, I was so scared and lost and lonely and desperate to get OUT!

Out!

OUT! I didn't care how, just get me OUT OF HERE!

I made my move. All the other men were being put into the temporary cell, till they could be taken away to their regular residences, when I stalked past the hack who was locking them up. I walked past him, and he turned around to say something to me, and I just gave him a peremptory wave with my hand and mumbled something about having the Captain's permission and blah blah blah. He stared at me for a second, but since he knew I couldn't get out of that processing room, and since I was striding toward the front desk and the Captain bent over his papers-as though I actually knew where I was going and what I was doing-he a.s.sumed I had been ordered to the desk, and he let me go.

I had perhaps forty feet to cross before I could get to the Captain (and even then I had no idea what I would say to the man), when I saw Tooley coming after me. He knew I wasn't supposed to be out of that line.

"Hey! Hey, you, c'mon back here!"

I stopped dead in my tracks. He came up behind me, and I'll never forget the feeling of that meathook on my collar as big Tooley literally grabbed me off the floor. He swung me around as though I was a sack of meal, and propelled me before him, back to the cell, midway in the line. He snapped his fingers and the hack opened the cell door, and Tooley cuffed me alongside the head as he booted me forward with his foot. "Now getcha a.s.s in there, and don't try nothin' again or I'll give you a real kickina a.s.s!"

Tooley, wherever you are today, know this: I wanted to injure you. I wanted to hurt you. Every boot in the a.s.s I'd ever gotten, since I was a kid, every cuff in the ear I'd ever taken, since I was old enough to recognize pain, every hurt and every confinement and every inability to strike back was caught up in my fist then, Tooley. You are a fat, s.a.d.i.s.tic sonofab.i.t.c.h, Officer Tooley. You are the reason so many guys try to break out of jail. You are the reason, in this culture, for violence and striking back and murder. You are everything lousy and egotistical and crummy, Tooley. And when you gave me that kick in the slats I felt every anti-Semitic b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd kicked me when I was in grade school, and I felt every warped Sergeant in the Army who got his jollies booting troopers around, and I felt every snotty cop who uses his badge to vent his spleen...and right then, Tooley, you were close to having me on you. You'd have gone to your grave with my teeth embedded in your throat, Tooley, you rotten sonofab.i.t.c.h!

But...

I went flailing across the cell, impelled by Tooley's foot, and brought up short against the opposite wall. I hit it and went sliding, landing in a heap, my raincoat wrapped around my legs. One of the winos helped me up. Tooley had walked away already. The cell was locked. I was trapped again. It was a hopeless cycle. There was no way out.

I was still filled with thoughts of violence toward big Tooley, fat Tooley, sonofab.i.t.c.h Tooley. I tried to be rational about it, tried to tell myself, h.e.l.l, take it easy, he's just doing his job. Don't take out all the bitterness you've ever known on him. Was I speaking for myself, or was I projecting Tooley's kick in the a.s.s as the hob-nailed boot of authority on the neck of every poor slob in the world?

And I knew at once that I was speaking only for myself, but that there was truth in what I'd thought. It was men like Tooley who corrupted, men like Tooley, hidden behind a badge or a diploma or a white collar, whose personalities came before the responsibilities of their position. Aw, h.e.l.l, I said to myself, you're just bitter. Everybody gets booted around in a lifetime.

Which was true, of course. But it didn't make me feel any better, I still wanted to kill that mother-!

Rationality is the first thing to go.

I could see them marching in a new batch of men, across the room, into the cell we'd first occupied. They were a bunch very similar to our group (I'd already established rapport with my confined compatriots; it was "our" group).

It was more of the grimy group I'd shared the big cell upstairs with, waiting to go to court. I saw my pal the hammer-killer in the ranks, trotting alongside a kid who couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen. Every once in a while, the kid would look up from under guarded eyes at his traveling companion. That kid was out of his nut with fright. That was the crime of the Tombs, right there, all neatly packaged for anyone who wanted to look at it.

The hack unlocked the door, left it standing ajar, and walked back toward the printing bench, instructing a group of men which cell to enter when they'd been blacked on the hands. I was off the bench, out of the cell and crossing that fifty feet from the cell, past the spot where Tooley had caught me, right up to the Captain behind the counter.

I started talking, and I talked faster than I ever had before, in a life singularly noted for fast talking and rapidly-employed angles. I'm not sure what I said, but it was something like: "Captain my name's Harlan Ellison, Ellison, I'm expecting my agent and my mother and some friends to get my bail money and get it down here fast in a very few minutes just a little while and honestoG.o.d I can't stand being in that cell I've got claustrophobia and if I stay in that d.a.m.ned cell another minute I'll flip and the money'll be here in a few minutes in fact you may have the papers for my release now and if you'll let me sit out here on this bench I swear to G.o.d I won't be any trouble and you won't have to worry about looking for me when they come with the papers so why don't you blah and blah and blah..."

Either my innocent, ingenuous expression won him, or my babble wore him down, or he knew I was going to be released soon, because he raised both hands to his ears and shook them gently, as if to say all right, all right, you can sit on the bench, just shut up and let me get back to work.

He pointed to the end of the bench and said, "Go ahead." I made for that bench as though it were a raft in a stormy sea. I sat right on the edge of it, and at the very end of it, so no one could confuse me with a prisoner about to go into a cell.

Tooley came past, right about then, and took one look at my white, terrified kisser, and made a move toward me. I stopped him fast by gibbering: "The Captain said I could sit here the Captain the Captain! Ask the Captain!"

He walked up to the Captain and spoke to him in a low tone for a moment. The Captain said something short and brusque, and Tooley noodled it out and said something else, and the Captain dismissed him peremptorily. Tooley walked away, giving me a hateful stare.

I was home free, for a while, anyhow.

Time does not move in jail. That is one of the most overwhelming truths I realized. It does not crawl, it does not slither, it does not budge. There are no watches, no clocks, no ways to tell the pa.s.sage of the minutes, and no guard will tell you if you ask him. So you have no way of knowing whether it is high noon, three and tea time, five just before dinner, or eight o'clock with darkness on its way. The time-sense becomes atrophied quickly, under the ground, in the Tombs. One finds oneself dozing, only to awaken a moment later with the impression three or four hours have pa.s.sed. After the first few hours, in which the novelty of being shunted about here and there has worn off, I began to feel that I had been down in the cells for a week, not just a few hours. Subjectively, I spent much longer than twenty-four hours in jail...it was more like twenty-four months.

And more than any other effect, this pale, trembling timelessness, this experience out of time and s.p.a.ce, leaves a person feeling disembodied, prey to any physical ill that happens along, prey to weird schemes and images of the mind. I can see why men go " stir-crazy" in a short time; to them, it's a long time.

While I sat there, disembodied and expectant, breathing once out of every three times (I imagined), another line of men was brought in.

Now that I had nothing to do but sit and stare, I examined them closely. Minutely. There were the vags, the b.u.ms, the wineheads and the wetbrains from the Bowery, the Sneaky Pete drinkers and the Sweet Lucy lovers, the ones who filtered bottles of after-shave lotion down through a loaf of pumpernickel, the ones who drank canned heat and panther sweat, the ones who had left too many pieces of themselves in too many bars for too many years. These were even lower than the felons and the thieves and the boost artists. These were the absolute dregs of humanity. Men to whom life had lost its meaning, thought had lost its verve, existence had lost its color. Men with newspaper serving as soles for their shoes, with ragged clothes and ragged faces, with dull eyes and runny noses, with unshaved jowls and uncut hair. Faceless men, into the wrinkles of whose cheeks had been weatherground the dirt and grit and soot and degradation of half-lifetimes spent on knees, in gutters, in doorways and alleys. These were the men our wildly compa.s.sionate society had dumped out its backside.

These were the men they spoke about when they asked: "Are we fulfilling our obligations to our citizens?"

No good to say they could work if they wanted to work. No good to say they were lazy, dirty, stupid, unable to keep a job, irresponsible, s.h.i.+ftless, belligerent. No good.

These were the men who had pa.s.sed through the mill of our culture, been unable to fit any molds, been unable or unwilling to discover themselves, and been flushed out the rear end of the System. Here was the dung we called the deadbeats.

In the Tombs they are called the " skids."

See them, then. See the truly lost ones. How easy it is to condemn them, when you pa.s.s them lying in an alcove, the stench of sour rye on them, their clothes fouled with their own waste. How b.l.o.o.d.y easy it is to laugh at them and let the kids mug and roll them and cast them out. And the fury of it all is that the outer darkness into which they cast themselves is so much more terrible, so much more final than any social darkness we could use.

All of this went through my mind as they stopped right beside my bench. I was close enough to touch four of them-but I didn't.

Old men, they were. Even the young ones. Old men, very tanned, even in September. Tanned from spending their days in the park, in the sun. Old men, their pants baggy and their hair white and their jowls stippled...almost a dirty uniform. Vests and pin-striped suits with wide, wide lapels, gifts of the benevolent and pretentious, doles from a too-busy citizenry. And the shoes...the rotting, falling-apart shoes, with the friction tape wrapped around the toes to keep sole and leather together. The rags for stuffing.

And their pallor. Their white, blue-veined, bulbous red pallor that comes right through the tanned, leathery skin. Brown on the surface, and so horribly fish-belly white underneath. Sick old men, lost old men, decent and starving and frightened old men turned off by luck, turned off by time, turned off by life. Gone to ground, finally, in the Tombs.

For a big Thirty w /3-a-day.

The stench of dead whiskey was almost too pervasive an odor to bear. But I could not move, and would not move, and let them stare at me with their dead, unfeeling eyes, with the sparks gone and just anyoldthing there.

It sounds strange, now, to say it, but I think the most honest emotion I've ever had was while staring at those poor saucehounds and winos. I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to tell them they could have a piece of my life, if it would help end their misery. Anything to stop the hopelessness of what they had become. They looked back at me without curiosity, seeing a young guy with the world by the tail, and their world was not my world.

They had been lost for a very long time.

And all the good wishes or self-conscious duty-s.h.i.+rkers could not find them. The work should have been done many years before.

A hack, standing nearby, snapped a half-inch cigarette b.u.t.t onto the floor near the line of vags, and four of them dove for it; the one who came up with it was shaking so badly he burned his lips getting it re-lit for one puff before his spastic movements confounded him.

The lank hair. The unshaved faces. The twitches and starts and odors and s.h.i.+ftings of feet. The very smell of death about them. And the absence of desperation. These men had long since forgotten what desperation was.

Watching them, feeling the humanity draining out of me as the full import of what these ex-human beings had been turned into rose in me, I felt more trapped than ever before by the System.

Because this was the reward you got for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g-up in the Glorious System. This was the ax that fell. And here was a manifestation of the lost, who seemed to be the guilty.

The waiting. The nothing-to-do. The putting my hands before me so I could see the black stains. (And then it dawned on me, why I had been constantly putting my hands through the bars while in a cell. Why everyone did it. Putting my hands through the bars so just a little of me could be free.) The feeling I was no longer a human being. The absolute loss of all humanity. The penultimate agony of realizing my life was in someone else's hands completely, subject to his whim or fancy.

And I couldn't yell: "The game is off. I don't want to play any more!"

It's their game, their rules.

"Okay, Ellison, let's go."

I stared at the old men, and inside somewhere I honest to G.o.d cried for them. They were me, I was them, we were all brothers, and they were down here for keeps.

"C'mon, Author, let's get goin', your bail came through."

Tooley lifted me off the bench, cleared me with the Captain, and hustled me out of the Processing Room, taking me upstairs to be turned loose at last.

I was free.

But I didn't realize it till I was in the reception room. Because the last thing I had seen was all I could still see, all I could remember, what I'd never forget.

The old men.

The ones who could be anyone, who could be me, if I ever lost the drive to keep living, if I ever let the System and Life in all its Mechanized Modern Majesty grind me into the ground.

The old men, and the young men, and the queers, and the winos, and the junkies, and the poor sonofab.i.t.c.h whose life had somehow been warped about the time he should have had his first woman, who had wound up using a hammer on a chick. The teenager who was scared and Tooley who was just crummy. All of them were back down there, like creatures without souls, waiting to see and be seen.

Waiting down there in h.e.l.l, in Purgatory, in the Tombs.

Yeah, I was out. I was free. But who would cry for the old men?

"Our Little Miss"

The Catholic Church is, I believe, generally credited with immortalizing the directive, "Give me your children till they are six-and they are mine forever." That's pretty heady stuff, when you stop to think how many kinder there are growing up in the shadow of the Holy Trinity. But it is nothing compared to the scale on which American Society debases its female population when it says, "Give me your girl-children till they are old enough to enter the World's 'Our Little Miss' Variety Pageant-and they'll be doomed forever to be either hookers or consumers, or both."

How it came to pa.s.s that I was provided with the knowledge that informs this week's installment is a small trip, so I'll take you on it, as I was taken. It was a week ago Wednesday, August 19th. About eight o'clock. I was getting ready to go out to a screening, when the phone rang, and a voice said, "You don't know me, man, and it isn't important, but you ought to turn to Channel 11 right now. You are not going to believe what's going on, on that channel!" I asked what it was, and the guy on the other end just repeated, "Turn it on for one second. If ever there was a column, that's it, man."

So he hung up after I'd thanked him, and out of wild curiosity I turned it on, and there-about three-quarters over-was something called the WORLD'S "OUR LITTLE MISS" VARIETY PAGEANT. I was only able to watch five minutes of it, and then had to split, but I was so intrigued and horrified that when Mary Reinholz called me the next morning-to inform me this week's Freep would be a Women's Lib edition, staffed and prepared by the ladies-to ask me if I'd slant my column toward Women's Lib, I was able to tell her, "Dear heart, I was gonna do it anyhow. I've got myself a doozy this week." (Just so you don't think I'm pandering. ) And I called KTTV and asked them if they'd screen me a tape of the live telecast of the pageant, and they said yes, and so it was that last Monday I went down to the KTTV studios and sat for ninety minutes as the Universal Broadcasting Company (of Baton Rouge, Louisiana) piped a replay through its Dallas affiliate to a color TV at Channel 11. Ninety minutes of unrelenting bad taste, petty hok.u.m, deadly degradation of innocent children. Ninety teeth-clenching, stomach-bubbling minutes of ghastliness as a clique of dirty old men and their exploiting a.s.sociates debased and corrupted a dozen little girls between the ages of three and twelve.

Thereby keynoting, most appropriately for this edition dedicated to the enn.o.blement of the female image, one of the most insidious maneuvers utilized by our snake-twisted society to f.u.c.k up the minds of its female population.

Uh, Hef, that's about 53% of the crowd. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, makes the Catholic Church look like really inept small potatoes.

The "Our Little Miss" Pageant (we are told by a publicity release) is more than a beauty pageant! It is a youth development program designed to give young ladies early goals in good grooming, social graces, talent training, and scholars.h.i.+p! It is the only outlet of this kind for deserving youngsters!

The brochure goes on to tell us that OLM (as I'll refer to it hereafter) has 1200 local preliminaries sponsored by civic and service organizations throughout the nation (as opposed to a mere 54 local pageants for Miss Teenage America). Are you hanging in there?

There are over 100,000 local contestants (second only to the Miss America Pageant, whoop whoop!). There are 32 state pageants. And in 1969 there were 177 international contestants. And there is even a motto: THERE IS NOTHING SWEETER THAN A LITTLE GIRL!

That all of this bulls.h.i.+t serves the major purpose of hyping children's clothes and toys and (G.o.d save us) cosmetics, is something that seems to escape the attention of all save the venal swine who cobble up this monstrosity from, well, from whole cloth. ("The La Pet.i.te winner will appear on one million Martha's Miniature Dress hangtags during 1970.") But, why linger any longer on the background? Why not come with me now to the Great Hall of the Dallas Apparel Mart ("The fact that the Pageant is emanating from the Dallas Apparel Mart gives it a fas.h.i.+on connotation-a world-wide glimpse into the children's sphere of fas.h.i.+on.") for the 1970 World's "Our Little Miss" Variety Pageant.

There's no business like snow business...!

Frankie Avalon and Shari Lewis were the guest stars, and the show opened with Frankie singing (naturally) "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," a song which has abominable lyrics and is difficult to sing by anyone but Maurice Chevalier, and even he looks a trifle embarra.s.sed. As for Frankie, I've known him slightly better than casually for many years, and while he is a lovely guy and I don't want he should take offense, he still only has one note in his repertoire. It was not an auspicious opening. Followed by Shari Lewis and her s.e.x-crazed hand-puppet, Lambchop.

Announcer: "Live! From the Great Hall in Dallas, Texas [home of hyperthyroid provincialism], the 1970 World's 'Our Little Miss' Variety Pageant...hosts Frankie Avalon and Shari Lewis...featuring 250 of the cutest, most talented little girls in the world! Brought to us by Royalty Toys!" And they run a commercial for this blatant tie-in, the "Our Little Miss Toy Doll," a strangely grotesque little bland-eyed mannequin wearing a princess tiara and a cape with a train.

Commercial over, the announcer informs us there are two divisions: 7-12 years old, the Our Little Miss finalists; ages 3-6, the La Pet.i.te finalists. They will compete in sportswear, party dresses, and talent.

Frankie and Shari came down, then, to be introduced, and they virtually had to sprint the 146 miles across the polo-field-sized stage to the cameras. And oddly, there was no audience. Just a bleacher section set up with hundreds of little girls ranked one after the other.

They were introduced by two superannuated elves named Bob Something and Chuck Something, who sat in a kind of sportcasters box and spouted treacly aphorisms at one another: "Isn't this a marvelous pageant, Chuck?" Chuck bobbled his head like a puppet minus its puppet master. "Well, it certainly is, Bob!" "And aren't these little girls just marvelous, Chuck?" "They really are fantastic, Bob!" It went on that way for minutes, entire minutes.

Then came someone named Mr. Lynn, a gentleman of questionable demeanor (I'm avoiding lawsuits in my phraseology, friends) who is variously referred to in the publicity brochure as "the 'Bert Parks' of the OLM pageant," "nationally famous personality," "Prince Charming of the Children's Pageant World," "In the words of Mister Lynn, the international master of ceremonies, 'When Little Miss. .h.i.ts national television it will steal the hearts of all America,"' " a kaleidoscope personality," and in an advertis.e.m.e.nt he obviously took for himself in the brochure (check the spelling of this international personality), "One of America's foremost authorities of femenine [sic] beauty."

Mister Lynn, who looked to my jaundiced eye like the sort of failed hairdresser who lures little children into the bas.e.m.e.nts of churches with M&Ms, simpered his way through a saccharine introduction in praise of Shari and Frankie. At this point I called for a shot of insulin. One could get diabetes just watching this abomination.

But this was all preamble to the very genuine horrors about to be unveiled. In party dresses, out came the six finalists in the OLM division. They marched out as a cadre and all stood there with right foot extended and twisted in that improbable model's stance seen ad nauseam at fas.h.i.+on shows and being held by women at parties, the kind of women who feel uncomfortable at parties. And art gallery openings. All six had ghastly Miss America smiles on their little faces. That wholly unearthly rictus that denotes neither joy nor warmth. All teeth and cheeks stretched back like papyrus; smiles as if painted on, or as though Mister Lynn and his fas.h.i.+on thugs had held by the head each of the children just prior to emergence onstage, and attached clothes-pins at the back of the neck, under the hairline, to stretch the faces into that monstrous sardonicus. I had visions of the ballet The Red Shoes, of the ballerina dancing till she danced all time away and finally died. I had a vision of these unfortunate little moppets smiling like that through all the days of their lives, till they were put in the final box, smile still strictured.

Then they brought out the half-dozen La Pet.i.te division children. Ages three to six. Tiny. My G.o.d, small. Innocent. And...oh, Jesus Jesus...they had blue eyeliner and lipstick and that awful model's pose...three to six years old...Oh Christ! They look twenty-five!

How can they do it? How can they turn kids under six into jaded strumpets of twenty-five? Mother of G.o.d, they all looked like hookers!

It's been years since I've felt the need to cry.

My lady, Cindy, watching the pageant with me, said in a stunned voice, "The producers of this thing must be ex-convicts who've served time for child molestation!"

On it went, without respite. The 1969 OLM winner, Miss Lauri Lynn Huffaker of Dallas, Texas, came on with " the world famous Riley dance troupe" (?) and did a cheap-jack production number cavorting to "March of the Wooden Soldiers." Meaning no disrespect, but for a big-time national winner of a big-time national talent pageant like this, Miss Huffaker struck me as a rather ungainly little girl with no visible talent.

Into another commercial, surfeited with sloppy sweet sentimentality about little girls, pus.h.i.+ng that G.o.ddam OLM doll that "comes complete with crown, robes, and beautiful clothes." It bulks obvious: beautiful clothes are one of the cornerstones of this entire vomitous operation. Not only is it bad enough to portray little girls as vapid creatures fit only to sit around and play momma to their dolls-an image our society reinforces from cradle to dishpan, thereby a.s.suring itself of generation after generation of unpaid, highly skilled day-care and kitchen help-but in preparing these prep.u.b.escent Lolitas to be good consumers, devourers of the Grossest National Product, in preparing them to be mindless automatons who will buy every midi-length superfluity economists and Women's Wear Daily feel are necessities to save a sagging economy, they are infected by cynical and demented hypes like the OLM pageant with the virus of believing if one does not have good grooming and the latest clothes, one simply is out of it, unfit not merely to be Our Little Miss, but disallowed from having any feelings of ego strength, any intrinsic worth, any right to the bounties of life. It is, quite literally, the corruption of the young.

And for all his lisping sentimentality about the wonders of little girls, they held the camera just a few beats too long on the Prince Charming of the Children's Pageant World and Mister Lynn, with a monstrously sinister smile carved on his face, exposed his inner nature with one look. It was like looking out of the mad eyes of Vincent van Gogh at The Starry Night. It was one of those inexplicable, unpredicted moments when one sees straight to the core of another human being, and in that glance was all the cynical exploitive rapacity of a man in no way above using children to further his own sick needs. The man caught unaware in that camera glare was not a man I would leave to baby-sit with my children.

Frankie was cut in quickly on camera, sitting with the La Pet.i.te finalists, reading some loathsome Edgar Guestian rodomontade about "What Is a Little Girl?" I reproduce just a snippet here. More would be to dare safety: "G.o.d borrows from many creatures to make a little girl: he uses the song of the bird, the squeal of the pig, the stubbornness of a mule, the antics of a monkey, the spryness of a gra.s.shopper, the curiosity of a cat...The little girl likes: new shoes and party dresses, small animals, first grade, noisemakers, the girl next door, dolls, make believe, dancing lessons, ice cream, kitchens, coloring books, make-up..."

It went on for some time, painting a pastel picture of prewomanhood consigned to its place: in the boutiques and the kitchen. The little girls sat there and arranged their skirts about them, ensuring the exquisiteness of their appearance every moment, all of them terribly involved with themselves, already poisoned by their parents into thinking superficial attractiveness, the right image, the way they look to the rest of the world...are the only matters of consequence a properly brought-up young lady should worry about.

Then the OLM finalists came out, one by one, in their sports clothes and Mister Lynn quavered minute descriptions of their ensembles. The children pirouetted and did that model's slouch, and when they finally stood all in a row, it was terribly sad-making to realize that, for all but one of them, from this moment on, everything in their lives would be downhill. In the bleachers, the little girls who had already been weeded out clapped on cue. They all wore little white gloves, and when they applauded it looked like a pigeon freakout in a dirndl shoppe.

Commercial: "Little child, with your eyes s.h.i.+ning and dimpled cheeks, you will lead us along the pathway to the more abundant life. We blundering grown-ups need in our lives the virtue that you have in yours. The joys and enthusiasm of looking forward to a routine day, with glorious expectation of wonderful things to come. The vision that sees the world as a splendid place...Challenge that forgets differences as quickly as your childish quarrels are done, and holds no grudges, that hates pretense and empty show. That loves people for what they are; the genuineness of being oneself; to be simple, natural, and sincere. Oh, little child, may we become more like you. And now, from Royalty Toys, the Little Miss Doll: the doll that epitomizes the beautiful, talented, and poised little girls of the world. Little girls: curious, inventive, playing pageant with their Little Miss Dolls. Little girls who, in these times of stark reality, can escape into a world of gumdrops and lollipops. There is nothing sweeter than a little girl, and no finer playmate than a Little Miss Doll. The Little Miss Doll, coming soon to leading toy and department stores. By Royalty, of course."

The Little Miss Doll, symbol of white America. Tell the ghetto kid playing among the stripped-down sh.e.l.ls of discarded cars in an empty lot that there is no better playmate than a Little Miss Doll. Tell the little black girl raped first at ten and pregnant by gang bang at thirteen that she needs poise so she can escape into a world of gumdrops and lollipops. White little doll, blonde little doll, sweet little doll. In these times of stark reality we know you are the answer.

Pure cornball, but corrupt cornball. Straight out of the antediluvian Forties. Dallas, Texas, for G.o.d and home and country and escapism. With kids in high schools, grade schools radicalizing themselves, with kids in colleges getting their brains blown out, it defies belief to sit and watch this sort of madness and know that there are people who really believe it matters, that it has some relevance to what our world is really like. This exploitation of the young, this brainwas.h.i.+ng of the female, is part and parcel of the conceptual inability of most of our society to realize that all the senseless persiflage over which they've cooed for fifty years is invalid, harmful, criminal.

Invalid? You tell me: the reigning OLM came out with an introduction from Mister Lynn (now wearing a sequined jacket and looking exactly like an overaged Jim Nabors with that incredible Alfred E. Neuman "What, Me Worry?" grin) and did her pouter-pigeon walk before the throng. All she did was walk across the stage, and the look the poor child sported was one of expectation, of waiting for the applause, merely because she was there, as though her mere appearance should spark ovations. Invalid? You tell me how relevant to an enn.o.bling life-style can be an orientation that says because you are lovely, you deserve approbation and riches.

But even this congeries of evils did not plumb the bottom. Yet to come was the talent division and the final selections of winners.

The first little girl in the talent division of the OLM came out and sang "I Believe." You know-I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows...you know the one. The poor little thing trembled and shook so badly her voice had a ghastly tremolo. She was petrified out of her mind. Her parents and the pageant coordinators, putting so much emphasis on what is little better than an inadequate version of the Original Amateur Hour, had invested success, in this child's mind, with such portents, that she flubbed and twitched terribly. The torment of the young; dance for our guests, honey. Sing your song. Say da-da.

As Cindy commented, the really sick ones are the parents. Feeding their own failed dreams on the flesh of their children. How much money, how many grueling hours of training go into battering a child to perform like a monkey? How much surrogate pleasure do the manipulators vampirically enjoy molding a child to dance and spin and raise her hands to G.o.d in song, so she can tremble like a pneumonia victim for an audience of clothing merchants?

And oh, G.o.ddam G.o.ddam the shadow of s.h.i.+rley Temple still sprawled across those children. Jennifer Childers, eight years old, from Satellite Beach, Florida, singing and dancing to the old-time Temple favorite, "Animal Crackers in My Soup." One more little girl in the image of cute s.h.i.+rley...long blonde locks, crackly voice, ineffable coyness, old before her years. I would send their mothers and fathers through meat grinders with their shoes on.

What have these children by way of natural resources? At that age, plastic, still opening, they have only innocence that they can perfect. And that being stolen from them in the Dallas Apparel Mart- they have nothing, they are perverted at the touch.

Mae Rusan, from Fort Worth, belting like Sophie Tucker, rolling her hips, gutter-voicing her "Happiness Medley." So anti-child, so anti-innocence, I had to turn away. Ninety minutes of prime time on Channel 11 while the universe burns.

There was more, much much more. But why belabor it? Women wonder why men wage war, why they think of women as empty-headed totems to accouter their evenings out, why Gold Star Mothers take pride in the corpses of their sons blasted to bits in the Nam. Why wonder?