I once attended a sci-fi convention where Harlan Ellison was a featured speaker. I observed strange behavior by the adoring staff who were hovering around him and praising him. One of the staff members approvingly compared Ellison’s ego to a running buzzsaw that could injure or kill casual people who walked into it.

There were a couple levels of neurotypical flattery going on there that I was too autistic to interpret.

“In 1959, Fantastic Universe was sold to a man named Henry Scharf, who had a publishing company called Great American Publications. Scharf was stiffing everybody, including poor Hans Stefan Santesson, who was near the end of his life and near the end of his career. Hans was a great man, a great man, and a very good editor indeed. They were doing a magazine, a pulp magazine, for a while, called Tightrope!, which was based on the television series that starred Mike Conners. They did a few issues of that and they were buying mystery stories. So Hans solicited me and he bought a terrible story, absolutely terrible, probably the worst story I ever wrote, “Only Death Can Stop It.” It was about 2300 or 2400 words and it was a penny a word, and I was supposed to be paid. Hans wanted to pay me out of his own pocket, but he didn’t have the money because Scharf was stiffing him. So I went up to collect it myself. And I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get in to see Scharf unless I managed somehow to finagle my way in.

“So I put on my one good suit, a gray flannel suit, and I wore a hat, and I had my umbrella, and I looked like a businessman. And I came in and I said to the receptionist, ‘Henry Scharf, please.’

“And she said, ‘Whom should I say is calling?’

“I said, ‘tell him it’s Mr. Dieterle from the Internal Revenue Service, Manhattan branch.’ And I was inside in about three seconds. And when I got inside, he reached across and grabbed my hand to shake my hand, and I grabbed him and I said, ‘I ain’t Dieterle, my name’s Ellison. You owe me thirty-two dollars, motherfucker. Give me my money.’

“And he started screaming and yelling and hollering. There was a huge bullpen outside with all kinds of secretaries typing away madly on things, and I went dashing out one door of his office on one side, as everybody came running in the main door of the office around the other side. By the time I got around to the bullpen area, there was nobody left. Everybody had run in the other direction. So I grabbed the typewriter, one of those great big ones. It was the Mosler Safe Building on Fifth Avenue downtown, right around 37th Street, something like that. And I ran down, I don’t know, ten or twelve flights, because I couldn’t take the elevator. I ran down the stairs, then I ran up to Ninth Avenue, and I found a hockshop and I pawned it for fifty-something dollars, and I made a clear profit of thirteen, fourteen bucks.”