He stalked smiling to the kitchen, where he appreciatively ladled and spooned and stirred things, smelling, gasping, tasting everything. “Shepherd’s pie!” he cried, opening the oven and peering in, gloriously. “My God! My favorite dish. It’s been since last June we had that!”
“I thought you’d like it!”
He ate with relish, he told jokes, they ate by candlelight, the pink carnations filled the immediate vicinity with a cinnamon scent, the food was splendid, and, topping it off, there was black-bottom pie fresh from the refrigerator.
“Black-bottom pie! It takes hours and genius to make a really good black-bottom pie.”
“I’m glad you like it, dear.”
After dinner he helped her with the dishes. Then they sat on the living-room floor and played a number of favorite symphonies together, they even waltzed a bit to the Rosenkavalier pieces. He kissed her at the end of the dance and whispered in her ear, patting her behind, “Tonight, so help me God, cricket or no cricket.”
The music started over. They swayed together.
“Have you found it yet?” he whispered.
“I think so. It’s near the fireplace and the window.”
They walked over to the fireplace. The music was very loud as he bent and shifted a drape, and there it was, a beady black little eye, not much bigger than a thumbnail. They both stared at it and backed away. He went and opened a bottle of champagne and they had a nice drink.
The music was loud in their heads, in their bones, in the walls of the house. He danced with his mouth up close to her ear.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
“The studio said to sit tight. Those damn fools are after everyone. They’ll be tapping the zoo telephone next.”
“Everything’s all right?”
“Just sit tight, the studio said. Don’t break any equipment, they said. You can be sued for breaking government property.”
They went to bed early, smiling at each other.
On Wednesday night he brought roses and kissed her a full minute at the front door. They called up some brilliant and witty friends and had them over for an evening’s discussion, having decided, in going over their phone list, that these two friends would stun the cricket with their repertoire and make the very air shimmer with their brilliance. On Thursday afternoon he called her from the studio for the first time in months, and on Thursday night he brought her an orchid, some more roses, a scarf he had seen in a shop window at lunchtime, and two tickets for a fine play. She in turn had baked him a chocolate cake from his mother’s recipe, on Wednesday, and on Thursday had made Toll House cookies and lemon chiffon pie, as well as darning his socks and pressing his pants and sending everything to the cleaners that had been neglected previous times. They rambled about the town Thursday night after the play, came home late, read Euripides to one another out loud, went to bed late, smiling again, and got up late, having to call the studio and claim sickness until noon, when the husband, tiredly, on the way out of the house, thought to himself, This can’t go on. He turned and came back in. He walked over to the cricket near the fireplace and bent down to it and said:
“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Testing.”
“What’re you doing?” cried his wife in the doorway.
“Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said the husband, lines under his eyes, face pale. “This is me speaking. We know you’re there, friends. Go away. Go away. Take your microphone and get out. You won’t hear anything from us. That is all. That is all. Give my regards to J. Edgar. Signing off.”
His wife was standing with a white and aghast look in the door as he marched by her, nodding, and thumped out the door.
She phoned him at three o’clock.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s gone!”
“The cricket?”
“Yes, they came and took it away. A man rapped very politely at the door and I let him in and in a minute he had unscrewed the cricket and taken it with him. He just walked off and didn’t say boo.”
“Thank God,” said the husband. “Oh, thank God.”
“He tipped his hat at me and said thanks.”
“Awfully decent of him. See you later,” said the husband.
This was Friday. He came home that night about six-thirty, having stopped off to have a quick one with the boys. He came in the front door reading his newspaper, passed his wife, taking off his coat and automatically putting it in the closet, went on past the kitchen without twitching his nose, sat in the living room and read the sports page until supper, when she served him plain roast beef and string beans, with apple juice to start and sliced oranges for dessert. On his way home he had turned in the theater tickets for tonight and tomorrow, he informed her; she could go with the girls to the fashion show, he intended to bake in the backyard.
“Well,” he said, about ten o’clock. “The old house seems different tonight, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Good to have the cricket gone. Really had us going there.”
“Yes,” she said.
They sat awhile. “You know,” she said later, “I sort of miss it, though, I really sort of miss it. I think I’ll do something subversive so they’ll put it back.”
“I beg your pardon?” he said, twisting a piece of twine around a fly he was preparing from his fishing box.
“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
She went on ahead. Ten minutes later, yawning, he followed after her, putting out the lights. Her eyes were closed as he undressed in the semi-moonlit darkness. She’s already asleep, he thought.
AFTERWORD: METAPHORS, THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
Every year in Paris, coming from the airport I have my driver pause at the Trocadero, a vast esplanade that overlooks the entire city with a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.
I run out on this plaza, spread my arms, and cry, silently, “Paris, I’m home!”
When I leave, weeks later, I return to the plaza and, somewhat tearfully, say, “Paris, goodbye.”
A few years ago when I crossed that twilight esplanade, it was raining.
My driver ran, shielding me with his umbrella. I fended him off with: “You don’t understand, I want to get wet!”
So it is with these stories. Late in life I find I have been running a gauntlet downpour of metaphors. People try to shield me from this surprising storm, but my cry continues: “Don’t! I want to drown!”
So, I’ve never worked a single hour in my life. For years metaphors bombarded me, but I never knew what they were, never having learned the word.
The recognition of metaphors came late when I found that ninety-nine percent of my stories were pure image, impacted by movies, the Sunday funnies, poetry, essays, and the detonations of Oz, Tarzan, Jules Verne, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, and their attendant illustrations.
In scanning this book I again realize how fortunate I was to live catching metaphors on the run.
The old question is repeated: Where do you get your ideas? Or rather, How do ideas run you down?
Many years ago I was successful in starting a film society for screenwriters. One of the first films we screened was the avant-garde Last Year at Marienbad, a somewhat bewildering production. During the viewing of the film the projectionist somehow reversed the reels and ran reel number ten after reel number five. No one noticed. Some in the audience even claimed that the picture was better than when first seen two weeks before! Need I say that I ran to my typewriter within hours to write the splendid film mix-up of “The Dragon Danced at Midnight?”
“Quid Pro Quo” is an almost true story. Forty years after my first encounter with a handsome young writer of immense talent, he shambled into my life, a derelict madman, empty of talent, lost to his promise and dreams. I was so brutalized by his self-destruction that “Quid Pro Quo” poured from my fingertips within hours.
A while back, I wrote a poem titled “I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives,” touching on
the fact that all of their past boyfriends, lovers, and fiancés stayed in touch with me long after being abandoned. I wrote “Leftovers” to fit the poem.
“The Nineteenth” is one more love offering to my father, who retired to play golf five days a week. One twilight I encountered him by the side of a golf-course path with a bucket, retrieving lost golf balls. The scene haunted me for years. My dad’s fine ghost returned last year and I had to put him to rest.
In 1946 I often rode the Venice trolley Saturday midnights when the celebrants from Myron’s Ballroom climbed on the streetcar to ride toward the sea. They were old white-haired men and women in tuxes and evening gowns. Some stepped off the trolley alone. Some strolled off into the dark in couples. Fifty-five years later, grown somewhat old and white myself, I had to step off the trolley to discover the rest of one couple’s night journey with “After the Ball.”
In high school, when copies of the neo-Renaissance magazine Coronet fell into my hands (I couldn’t afford to buy it), I tore out photographs by Stieglitz, Karsh, and others and wrote poems to them. I didn’t name what I did, just collected to worship pure image.
Lon Chaney dominated my life at three with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Viewing it again when I was seventeen, I told friends I recalled the entire film. My friends scoffed. Okay, I said, there’s this scene and that scene and this scene. Go see. We went, we saw. All the scenes were there as I remembered from my third year.
Much the same happened with Phantom of the Opera and The Lost World. Chaney’s Phantom and Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs haunted my childhood.
Chaney died in my tenth year and Death as a symbol fell into his grave. When his Phantom was re-released that year, I attended in agony, thinking that an abdominal pain was appendicitis. Weeping, I had to see the film even if I died. I lived, to dine on Chaney’s metaphors for the rest of my life.
Some years later I formed a lifelong friendship with Ray Harryhausen, who ran dinosaur metaphors in his garage to become the greatest stop-motion animator of our age. My God, the persistence of metaphor in our incredible friendship!
Laurel and Hardy have shaped three of my fictions. I arrived in Dublin in October 1953, and there in the Irish Times saw this:
Today Only
In Person
Olympia Theatre
Laurel and Hardy
“My God,” I cried, “we’ve got to go!”
My wife said, “Go!”
One ticket remained, front row, center.
I sat, tears streaming, as Stan and Ollie performed scenes from all the years of my life.
Outside their dressing-room door I watched Stan and Ollie greet friends. I didn’t intrude, relishing their ambience, then went away.
Their ghosts went with me. I wrote two stories about Stan and Ollie. And, now, a third for this book.
In other words, once a metaphor, always a metaphor.
I learned more of my inner self from film director Sam Peckinpah, who loved to pour vodka in my beer. He wanted to film my novels.
“Sam,” I said, “how will you do it?”
“Rip the pages out of your books,” Sam said, “and stuff them in the camera!”
So I found that by a lifetime of mad film attendance the mad paragraphs of my novels were close-ups and long shots.
With my Ray Bradbury Theater on television, I learned I could type my stories straight from the book into teleplays.
“Stuff your pages,” echoed Sam, “in the camera!”
Thus I had digested cinema metaphors, in ignorant bliss, to deliver forth films.
Then again, simply put, I have never been jealous of other writers, only wanted to protect them. So many of my most beloved authors have suffered unhappy lives or incredibly unhappy endings. I had to invent machines to travel in time to protect them, or at least say I love you. Those machines are here.
And here, finally, is that downpour of images from photos, films, cartoons, encounters that have tracked through life without an umbrella.
How fortunate I’ve been to pace such storms and emerge wonderfully drenched and alive to finish this book.
Ray Bradbury
Los Angeles, April 2001
The World of Ray Bradbury …
… is a marvelous, magical place, full of awesome wonders, delicious terrors, and the simplest of pleasures. We invite you to experience the storytelling genius of Ray Bradbury in the following selection of excerpts from some of his best known works. All you have to do is turn the page …
Dandelion Wine
Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town. At night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse in all directions over swarming seas of elm and oak and maple. Now …
“Boy,” whispered Douglas.
A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoar-frosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandma’s kitchen.
But now—a familiar task awaited him.
One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.
He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled.
The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.
Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger.
There, and there. Now over here, and here …
Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.
“Everyone yawn. Everyone up.”
The great house stirred below.
“Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!” He waited a decent interval. “Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes!”
The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.
“Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around!”
The bleak mansions across the town ravine opened baleful dragon eyes. Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. “Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn!” Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets.
“Ready John
Huff, Charlie Woodman?” whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. “Ready!” to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees.
“Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.”
Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.
The sun began to rise.
He folded his arms and smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It’ll be a fine season.
He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.
Doors slammed open; people stepped out.
Summer 1928 began.
The Illustrated Man
Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin—visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster’s premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.
“Hey, the Illustrated Man!”
A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.
He was an entire civilization. In the Main Country, his chest, the Vasties lived—nipple-eyed dragons swirling over his fleshpot, his almost feminine breasts. His navel was the mouth of a slit-eyed monster—an obscene, in-sucked mouth, toothless as a witch. And there were secret caves where Darklings lurked, his armpits, adrip with slow subterranean liquors, where the Darklings, eyes jealously ablaze, peered out through rank creeper and hanging vine.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps leered down from his freak platform with a thousand peacock eyes. Across the sawdust meadow he saw his wife, Lisabeth, far away, ripping tickets in half, staring at the silver belt buckles of passing men.