Ellison Wonderland

Harlan Ellison

The original edition bore this dedication:

This random group of leftovet dreams and wry conspiracies I offer to Wednesday's Child . . .

KENNY

with love and pride, and more than just a touch of sorrow.

Fourteen years later, and links of the broken chain have been joined once more, not welded shut, but merely joined. And so, with fourteen years' more love and pride, and with that touch of sorrow removed, once again I offer this ragbag of illusions to His Own Man . . .

KENNY

Introduction: The Man on the Mushroom

Commuter's Problem

Do–It–Yourself

The Silver Corridor

All the Sounds of Fear

Gnomebody

The Sky Is Burning

Mealtime

The Very Last Day of a Good Woman

Battlefield

Deal From The Bottom

The Wind Beyond the Mountains

Back to the Drawing Boards

Nothing For My Noon Meal

Hadj

Rain, Rain, Go Away

In Lonely Lands

The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious. It was February, 1962, and I had broken free of the human monster for whom I'd been editing in Chicago. It was one of the worst times in my life. The one time I'd ever felt the need to go to a psychiatrist, that time in Chicago. I had remarried in haste after the four–year anguish of Charlotte and the Army and the hand–to–mouth days in Greenwich Village; now I was living to repent in agonizing leisure.

I had been crazed for two years and hadn't realized it. Now I was responsible for one of the nicest women in the world, and her son, a winner by
any
standards, and I found I had messed their lives by entwining them with mine. There was need for me to run, but I could not. Nice Jewish boys from Ohio don't cut and abandon. So I began doing berserk things. I committed personal acts of a demeaning and reprehensible nature, involved myself in liaisons that were doomed and purposeless, went steadily more insane as the days wound tighter than a mainspring.

Part of it was money. Not really, but I thought it was the major part of the solution to the situation. And I'd banked on selling a book of stories to the very man for whom I was working. He took considerable pleasure in waiting till we were at a business lunch, with several other people, to announce he was not buying the book. (The depth of his sadism is obvious when one learns he subsequently
did
buy and publish the book.)

But at that moment, it was as though someone had split the earth under me and left me hanging by the ragged edge, by my fingertips. I went back to the tiny, empty office he had set up in a downtown Evanston office building, and I sat at my desk staring at the wall. There was a clock on the wall in front of me. When I sat down after that terrible lunch, it was 1:00 …

When I looked at the clock a moment later, it was 3:15 . . .

The next time I looked, a moment later, it was 4:45 . . .

Then 5:45 . . .

Then 6:15 . . .

7:00 . . . 8:30 . . .

Somehow, I don't know how, even today, I laid my head on the desk, and when I opened my eyes again I had taken the phone off the hook. It was lying beside my mouth. A long time later, and again I don't remember doing it, I dialed a friend, Frank M. Robinson, a dear writer friend of many years.

I heard Frank's voice saying, “Hello . . . hello . . . is someone there . . . ?”

“Frank . . . help me . . . ”

And when my head was lifted off the desk, it was an hour later, the phone was whistling with a disconnect tone, and Frank had made it all the way across from Chicago to Evanston to find me. He held me like a child, and I cried.

Soon after, I left Evanston and Chicago and the human monster, and with my wife and her son began the long trek to the West Coast. We had agreed to divorce, but she had said to me, with a very special wisdom that I never perceived till much later, when I was whole again, “As long as you're going to leave me, at least take me to where it's warm.”

But we had no money. So we had to go to Los Angeles by way of New York from Chicago. If I could sell a book, I would have the means to go West, young man, go West. (And
that
was the core of the problem, not money: I was a
young
man. I was twenty–eight, but I had never become an adult.)

In a broken–down 1957 Ford we limped across to New York during the worst snowstorms in thirty years. My wife and her son stayed with a friend I'd known in the Village, and I slept on the sofa at the home of Leo & Diane Dillon, the two finest artists I know. Leo & Diane slept on the floor. They are more than merely friends.

It was December of 1961, and amid the tensions and horrors of that eight–week stay in New York, two things happened that brought momentary light, and helped me keep hold:

The first was a review by Dorothy Parker in
Esquire
of a small-printing paperback collection of my stories. How she had obtained it I do not know. (When I met her, later, in Hollywood, she was unable to remember where the book had come from.) But she raved about it, and said I had talent, and it was the first really substantial affirmative notice from a major critic. It altered the course of my writing career, and provided my ego — which had been nourishing itself cannibalistically on itself — with reason for feeling I could write.

The second happening of light was the sale of this book. Gerry Gross bought it for short money, mostly because he knew I was in a bad way. But it provided the funds to start out for Los Angeles.

We traveled a hard road down through the Southwest, and in Fort Worth we were staved in by a drunken cowboy in a pickup. Rear–ended. He had a carhop on one arm, and a fifth of Teacher's in the free hand. Rammed us on an icy bridge, smashed the car, crushed the rear–end trunk containing our luggage and my typewriter, and I suppose it was that typewriter that saved our lives. The typewriter has paid the rent and put food on the table many times, but that time it physically gave up its life to save me.

We were laid up in Fort Worth for a week, with our money running out. Had it not been for the help of the then–police chief, a man whose name I'll never forget — Cato Hightower — we would never have gotten out of Texas. He got me a new typewriter, had the car repaired for a fraction of what the garage would have stiffed a tourist just passing through and he paid off the motel.

I arrived in Los Angeles in January of 1962 with exactly ten cents in my pocket. For the last three hundred miles we had not eaten. There wasn't enough money for gas
and
food. All we'd had to keep us alive was a box of pecan pralines we'd bought before the accident and had in the rear seat.

The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious.

My almost–ex–wife and her son moved into an apartment, and I took up residence in a fourteen–dollar–a–week room in a bungalow complex that is now an empty lot on Wilshire Boulevard. I tried to get work in television, got some assignments that paid the various rents, and bombed out on all of them. Nobody had bothered to show me how to write a script. And when it looked as though I'd hit the very bottom, ELLISON WONDERLAND was published in June of 1962, the publisher sent me a copy, and the check for the balance of monies due on publication. It was enough to pull me through till I got another assignment — writing
Burke's Law
for the Four Star Studios and ABC. It was the very moment my luck changed.

I remember the morning the mail arrived, with the book in its little manila envelope. I ripped open the package, and out fell the check. But I didn't even look at it. I sat in that room smelling of mildew and stared at the cover of
Ellison Wonderland
. The artist, Sandy Kossin, had taken a photo of me, and he'd drawn me in sitting cross–legged atop a giant mushroom, while all around me danced and capered the characters from the stories in this book. Skidoop and Ithk and Helgorth Labbula and the crocodile–headed woman from “The Silver Corrider” and that little jazzbo gnome with the patois now long–outdated and
so
unhip.

There I was. And Hollywood became, for the first time since I'd arrived, not a grungy, lonely, frustrating town whose tinsel could strangle you . . . but a magic town whose sidewalks
were
paved with gold; a yellow brick road leading to a giant mushroom where I could perch if I simply hung in there.

And just to show that fairy tales sometimes
do
have happy endings, dear readers be advised I'm really okay now. There
is
a mushroom, and I'm sitting on it, and I've been writing better here in magic town than I ever did anywhere else, and I'll keep on doing it till I run out of mushroom or magic (and that is
not
a reference to dope, which I don't, so I ain't), and here, like a good penny, is ELLISON WONDERLAND again.

Welcome to
my
world.

Harlan Ellison

Los Angeles

March, 1974 and November, 1983

The trouble with Miniver Cheery (child of scorn who cursed the day that he was born) was that — aside from the fact he was a bit of a fink, with no understanding of the contemporary image he projected — he was always building dream castles, and then trying to move into them. It's muddy thinking, youth, to expect to do any better in another epoch than the one you're in. A guy who is a foul ball in one time, must assuredly be so in another . . . unless his name is da Vinci or Hieronymous Bosch. And the poor soul in this little epic is named neither, which may be the reason he suffers a

“Thing” was all I could call it, and it had a million tentacles.

It was growing in Da Campo's garden, and it kept
staring
at me.

“How's
your
garden, John,” said Da Campo behind me, and I spun, afraid he'd see my face was chalk–white and terrified.

“Oh — pretty, pretty good. I was just looking for Jamie's baseball. It rolled in here.” I tried to laugh gaily, but it got stuck on my pylorus. “Afraid the lad's getting too strong an arm for his old man. Can't keep up these days.”

I pretended to be looking for the ball, trying not to catch DaCampo's eyes. They were steel–gray and disturbing. He pointed to the hardball in my hand, “That it?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah! I was just going back to the boy. Well, take it easy. I'll — uh — I'll see you — uh — at the Civic Center, won't I?”

“You suspect, don't you, John?”

“Suspect? Uh — suspect? Suspect what?”

I didn't wait to let him clarify the comment. I'm afraid I left hurriedly. I crushed some of his rhododendrons.

When I got back to my own front yard I did something I've never had occasion to do before. I mopped my brow with my handkerchief. The good monogrammed hankie from my lapel pocket, not the all–purpose one in my hip pocket; the one I use on my glasses. That shows you how unnerved I was.

The hankie came away wet.

“Hey, Dad!”

I jumped four feet, but by the time I came down I realized it was my son, Jamie, not Clark Da Campo coming after me. “Here, Jamie, go on over to the schoolyard and shag a few with the other kids. I have to do some work in the house.”

I tossed him the ball and went up the front steps. Charlotte was running one of those hideous claw–like attachments over the drapes, and the vacuum cleaner was howling at itself. I had a vague urge to run out of the house and go into the woods somewhere to hide — where there weren't any drapes, or vacuum cleaners, or staring tentacled plants.

“I'm going into the den. I don't want to be disturbed for about two hours, Char — ” She didn't turn.

I stepped over and kicked the switch on the floor unit. The howling died off and she smiled at me over her shoulder, “Now you're a saboteur?”

I couldn't help chuckling, even worried as I was; Charlotte's like that. “Look, Poison, I've got some deep thought to slosh around in for a while. Make sure the kid and the bill collectors don't get to me, will you.”

She nodded, and added as an afterthought, “Still have to go into the city today?”

“Umm. 'Fraid so. There's something burning in the Gillings Mills account and they dumped the whole brief on my desk.”

She made a face that said, “Another Saturday shot,” and shrugged.

I gave her a rush–kiss and went into the den, closing and locking the big double doors behind me.

Symmetry and order are tools for me, so I decided to put down on paper my assets and liabilities in this matter. Or, more accurately, just what I was sure of, and what I wasn't.

In the asset column went things like:

Name: John Weiler. I work for a trade association. In this case the trade association is made up of paper manufacturers. I'm a commuter — a man in the gray flannel suit, if you would. A family man. One wife, Charlotte; one son, Jamie; one vacuum cleaner, noisy.

I own my own home, I have a car and enough money to go up to Grossingers once each summer mainly on the prodding of Charlotte, who feels I should broaden myself more. We keep up with the Joneses, without too much trouble.

I do my job well, I'm a climbing executive type, and I'm well-
adjustedly happy. I'm a steady sort of fellow and I keep my nose out of other people's business, primarily because I have enough annoying, average, commonplace small problems of my own. I vote regularly, not just talk about it, and I gab a lot with my fellow suburbanites about our gardens — sort of a universal hobby in the sticks.

Forty–seven minutes into town on the train five days a week (and sometimes Saturday, which was happening all too frequently lately) and Lexington Avenue greets me. My health and the family's is good, except for an occasional twinge in my stomach, so most of the agony in the world stays away from me. I don't get worried easily, because I stay out of other people's closets.

But this time I was worried worse than just badly.

I drew a line and started writing in the liabilities column:

Item: Clark Da Campo has a million–tentacled staring plant in his garden that is definitely
not
of normal botanical origin.

Item: There has never been a wisp of smoke from the Da Campo chimney, even during the coldest days of the winter.

Item: Though they have been living here for six months, the Da Campos have never made a social call, attended a local function, shown up at a public place.

Item: Charlotte has told me she has never seen Mrs. Da Campo buy any groceries or return any empty bottles or hang out any wash.

Item: There are no lights in the Da Campo household after six o'clock every night, and full–length drapes are drawn at the same time.

Item: I am scared witless.

Then I looked at the sheet. There was a great deal more on the asset side than the other, but somehow, after all the value I'd placed on the entries in that first column, those in the second had suddenly become more impressive, overpowering, alarming. And they were so nebulous, so inconclusive, I didn't know what it was about them that scared me.

But it looked like I was in Da Campo's closets whether I wanted to be or not.

Three hours later the house had assumed the dead sogginess of a quiet Saturday afternoon, three pages of notepaper were covered with obscure but vaguely ominous doodles, and I was no nearer an answer that made sense than when I'd gone into the den.

I sighed and threw down my pencil.

My back was stiff from sitting at the desk, and I got up to find the pain multiplied along every inch of my spinal cord. I slid the asset–liability evaluation under my blotter and cleaned the cigarette ashes off the desk where I'd missed the ashtray.

Then I dumped the ashtray in the waste basket. It was Saturday and Charlotte frowned on dirty ashtrays left about, even in my private territory.

When I came out the place was still as a tomb, and I imagined Charlotte had gone into the downtown section of our hamlet to gawk at the exclusive shops and their exclusive contents.

I went into the kitchen and looked through the window. The car was gone, bearing out my suspicions. My eyes turned themselves heavenward and my mind reeled out bank balances without prompting.

“Want to talk now, John?”

I could have sworn my legs were made of ice and they were melting me down to the kitchen linoleum. I turned around and — that's right — Da Campo was in the doorway to the dining room.

“What do you want?” I bluffed, stepping forward threateningly.

“I came over to borrow a cup of sugar and talk a little, John,” said Da Campo, smiling.

The utter incongruity of it! Borrowing a cup of sugar! It was too funny to equate with weird plants and odd goings–on in the house across the street. It took the edge off my belligerence quite effectively.

“S–sure, I suppose I can find the wife's sugar.” Then it occurred to me: “How do you know my name?”

“How do you know mine?”

“Why I — I asked the neighbors. Like to know who's living across the street, that's all.”

“Well, that's how I know yours, John. I asked my neighbors.”

“Which ones? The Schwachters? Heffman? Brown?”

He waved his hand absently, “Oh . . . just the neighbors, that's all. How about that sugar?”

I opened one of the cabinets and took out the sugar bowl. DaCampo didn't have a cup, so I took one down — one of the old blue set — and filled it for him.

“Thanks,” he said. “Feel like that talk now?”

Somehow, I wasn't frightened of him, as I was by that sheet of items. It was easy to feel friendly toward the big, gray–eyed, gray–haired man in the sport shirt and slacks. Just another typical suburban neighbor.

“Sure, come on into the living room,” I answered, moving past him.

When Da Campo had found a reasonably comfortable position in one of Charlotte's doubly–damned modern chairs, I tried to make small conversation. “I've never noticed a TV antenna on your house. Don't tell me an inside one works over there. No one this far out seems to be able to make one of those gadgets bring in anything decently.”

“We don't have television.”

“Oh,” I said.

The silence hauled itself around the room several times, and I tried again. “Uh — how come we never see you at the new Civic Center? Got some sweet bowling alleys down there and the little theatre group is pretty decent. Like to see — ”

“Look, John, I thought I might come over and try to explain about myself, about us — Ellie and me.” He seemed so intent, so earnest, I leaned forward.

“What do you mean? You don't have to — ”

“No, no, I mean it,” he cut me off. “I know everyone in the neighborhood has been wondering about us. Why we don't go out much, why we don't invite you over, everything like that.” He held up his hands in fumbling motions, as though he were looking for the words. Then he let his hands fall, as though he knew he would never find the words.

“No, I don't think anyone has — ”

He stopped me again with a shake of the head. His eyes were very deep and very sad and I didn't quite know what to say. I suddenly realized how far out of touch with real people I'd gotten in my years of commuting. There's something cold and impersonal about a nine–to–five job and a ride home with total strangers. Even total strangers that live in the same town. I just looked at Da Campo.

“It's simple, really,” he said, rubbing his hands together, looking down at them as though they had just grown from the ends of his arms.

“I got mixed up with some pretty strange people a few years ago, and well, I went to jail for a while. When I came out I couldn't get a job and we had to move. By then Ellie had drawn into a shell and . . . well, it just hasn't been easy.”

I didn't know why he was telling me all this and I found myself embarrassed. I looked around for something to break the tension, and then pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I held them out to him and he looked up from his hands for a second, shaking his head. He went back to staring at them as I lit a cigarette. I was hoping he wouldn't go on, but he did.

“Reason I'm telling you this is that you must have thought me pretty odd this afternoon. The only thing I have is my garden, and Ellie, and we don't like living as alone as we do, but it's better this way. That's the way we have to do it. At least for a while.”

For a second I got the impression he had skimmed the top of my mind and picked off my wonderment at his telling me the story. Then I shook off the feeling and said, “That's understandable. If I ever
did
wonder about you and Mrs. Da Campo, well, it's something I won't do any more. And feel free to drop over any time you get the urge.”

He looked thankful, as though I'd offered him the Northern Hemisphere, and stood up.

“Thanks a lot, John. I was hoping you'd understand.”

We shook hands, I asked him if he wanted to call up the Missus and come over for dinner, but he said no thanks and we'd certainly get together again soon.

He left, and I wasn't surprised to see the cup of sugar sitting on an end table where he'd set it down.

Nice guy
, I thought to myself.

Then I thought of that staring plant, which he hadn't explained at all, and some of the worry returned.

I shrugged it off. After three weeks I forgot it entirely. But Da Campo and I never got together as he'd suggested.

At least not at the Civic Center.

Da Campo kept going to the City on the 7:40 and coming back on the 5:35 every day. But somehow, we never sat together, and never spoke to one another. I made tentative gestures once or twice, but he indicated disinterest, so I stopped.

Ellie Da Campo would always be waiting at the station, parked a few cars down from Charlotte in her station wagon, and Clark Da Campo would pop into it and they'd be off before most of the rest of us were off the train.

I stopped wondering about the absence of light or life or smoke or anything else around the Da Campo household, figuring the guy knew what he was doing. I also took pains to caution Jamie to stay strictly off–limits, with or without baseball.

I also stopped wondering because I had enough headaches from the office to take full–time precedence on my brain–strain.

Then one morning, something changed my careful hands–off policies.

They had to change. My fingers were pushed into the pie forcibly.

I was worried sick over the Gillings business.

The Gillings Mills were trying to branch over into territory held by another of our Association's members, trying to buy timber land out from under the other. It looked like a drastic shake–up was in the near offing.

The whole miserable mess had been heaped on me, and I'd not only been losing my Saturdays — and a few Sundays to boot — but my hair was, so help me God, whitening, and the oculist said all the paperwork had played hell with my eyes. I was sick to tears of the thing, but it was me all the way, and if I didn't play it right, mergers might not merge, commitments might not be committed, and John Weiler might find himself on the outside.

Mornings on the train were a headache and a nightmare. Faces blurred into one runny gray smear, and the clickety–clack didn't carry me back. It made my head throb and my bones ache and it made me hate the universe. Not just the world — the
universe
! All of it.

I unzipped my briefcase and opened it on my lap. The balding $125,000–a–year man sharing the seat harrumphed once and gathered the folds of his Harris tweed about his paunch. He went back to the
Times
with a nasty side glance at me.