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As prelude I will note that I have said a number of "dangerous" things to Harlan. I have told him he was full of shit. I told him something he was enthusing about was stupid. At a convention, once, I had one of those terrible moments where an opportunity for a devastating and potentially hurtful zinger presented itself, and I took it, and I saw genuine shock cross his face before he relaxed and said, Castro, you're giving an old man a hard time.
But this one left 'em all behind.
This was immediately after the Worldcon where a certain overblown incident took place, and Harlan was getting far too much shit from the uninvolved, and was pretty down in the dumps about it. Judi and I visited the Ellisons in their home, had lunch, and -- I gotta say -- whatever that gathering did to the friendship between Harlan and myself, it absolutely fuckin' cemented his love for my wife.
So the wife and I spent a few more days in LA and environs and boarded a plane home.
And here's an important item of exposition: my wife's cute button nose is made out of tissue paper. It was once a respectable Jewish honker, but she broke it in childhood and it became the beautiful nubbin it is now. It is extremely fragile, and she has broken it a grand total of fourteentimes in her life, most of them in childhood, three times since I've met her, two of them -- including the following incident -- my fault.
So on the plane back from LA, she said something I couldn't quite hear over the hum of the engines. I asked her to repeat herself. She did. I still couldn't hear her. I leaned my head closer at the exact moment she did. My cranium impacted the bridge of her nose at precisely the right angle. The crack was loud enough to be heard throughout the cabin.
She screamed.
It was a terrible moment. I felt like a terrible person. She knew it was an accident. But I can pull up that crack even now.
So. A few days passed. Life went on. And then Harlan had to call me for some reason I no longer recall. We dealt with that business, and he asked, "How's Judi?"
I said, "Fine. But, you know, a couple of days after we saw you last, I broke her nose."
He was shocked. I mean, really shocked. "What? WHY!?"
And I dunno what imp of the perverse made me do it, but I made my voice very low and sociopathic and intoned, "Because. She wouldn't MIND me."
The next second or so, before I rushed to explain, was a cold silence.
I still honestly believe that if I'd tried to maintain the fiction, or hadn't gotten the words out in time, a plane ticket would have been purchased...!
December 11 2010
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