Harlan Ellison's Watching (3 page)

Nonetheless, with the sensitivity all parents demonstrate when their kids threaten to eat worms or hold their breath till they turn blue, I was schlepped to Cleveland regularly from Painesville and, when my parents went out for the evening, I was put to bed at the residence of The Ancient Jews from Hell, feigning sleep but lying alert for a sudden dive through a window at the first scent of beaks and feet.

In that neighborhood a mere forty-eight years ago, just seven months before Pearl Harbor, there existed now-lost and barely recalled establishments whose names alone send a thrill through me even today: Coventry Drugs (where I bought my first issue of Street & Smith's
Shadow
magazine), Uberstine's Drug Store (where one could get three scoops of sherbet, all different flavors, in a cup cone, for 11¢), Benkowitz's Deli (in the days when the corn rye they used to make a combination corned beef and pastrami was so festooned with caraway seeds that one picked at one's teeth for six weeks thereafter) and . . .

The Heights Theater.

It was one of those small neighborhood cinemas built during the moviegoing explosion of the late Twenties/early Thirties. In retrospect, I know it was a modest house of movies, but it was glorious and gigantic to me at age seven. Out front the display windows held not only one-sheets and lobby cards in full color, but at least four scene cards in black and white from each and every film showing or coming. The ticket booth resembled a private stateroom on Cleopatra's barge, tenanted (as I recall) by a young woman so gorgeous and platinum blonde that merely laying down a dime for a ducat became an act of sexual congress intense enough to send the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to the eighth and innermost circle of Dante's inferno. The candy counter traded in ambrosia and nectar, Chuckles and Forever Yours, popcorn freshly erupted every half hour and slathered with real butter. The scent of it could have distracted warring armies.

And the seats . . . and the usherettes . . . and the screen . . . and the ceiling mural . . . oh, how I loved that movie house, as I loved the Lyric and the Utopia and the RKO Palace . . .

Going to the movies was all the books in the library at once. It was an event. Even having to go in the company of one's parents was something Halliburton would chronicle. And going
alone . . .
! To be permitted to venture forth toward that mystic shrine all alone, pocket jingling with dime for ticket and three nickels for candy and popcorn; to know one could go into the Men's Room and not have to accompany one's mother into the Women's (oh god the humiliation); to select a seat way down front that produced a headache and neck-strain guaranteed to keep the Mayo Clinic solvent for three generations, a seat so far down front that one's parents would threaten you with having to cut the grass for a month if one didn't sit back in the middle "where any normal person can see."

Going to the movies alone was exciting; it was dangerous; it was, aw hell, it was Grown Up! And that was only for the Saturday matinee. But to go to a movie alone at night . . . !

Herman Kahn tagged it.
Thinking about the Unthinkable
.

Thus it came to pass, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, that my parents hied me to Cleveland. On my birthday! On my bloody canyoubelieveit goddam
birthday
!. Of all days to have to go to Cleveland. But wait! Can it be? Could the universe have taken a nanoinstant from its rigorous schedule of creating galaxies and hedgehogs, pulsars and pips in oranges, to say, "Aw, what the hell," and to proffer a respite in the pissrain that is s.o.p. for little kids? Could it be that I would find myself only three blocks away from the mysterious and glamorous Heights Theater on the exact specific day of my birthday?

For this was the jewel, my friends:

It was the policy of the beloved Heights Theater to provide free admission (let me rephrase that: FREE!!!ADMISSION!!!) for any child previously signed up on that date as his natal designation.

It had never happened before. I'd always been in Painesville on May 27th. I'd often thought wistfully of being in Cleveland on my birthday, of sauntering up to the Heights Theater and saying, "Ellison's the name, birthday's m'game." And they would lift up the big register wherein were listed all the fortunate kiddies who lived within a reasonable distance of the Heights, whose birthdays entitled them to a free movie, and they would smile and say, "Harlan Ellison. Yes, here you are. Do, please enter, as our guest; and would you like a complimentary bag of our finest popcorn, it's the fragrant 5:30 pressing, from the sunny side of the machine." And the assistant manager in his impeccable tux, and a coltish gamine of an usherette in her livery, would march me down to the seat right up under the screen, and bid me enjoy myself in extremis.

I could not believe my good fortune.

So when we hit that Slough of Despond called Gramma's House (formerly tenanted by the Ushers), I rummaged about till I found a newspaper, and checked what was playing at the Heights.

Be still my heart!

It might have been a grownup's movie. It might have been
A Woman's Face
, with a script by Donald Ogden Stewart, directed by George Cukor, starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas and Conrad Veidt; it might have been
Tobacco Road
, written by Nunnally Johnson from Erskine Caldwell's novel, directed by John Ford, and starring Gene Tierney, Marjorie Rambeau, Charley Grapewin and Dana Andrews; it might have been
Ziegfeld Girl
with that great Busby Berkeley "You Stepped Out of a Dream" dance number, and Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland and Jimmy Stewart; it might have been
Citizen Kane
or Shaw's
Major Barbara
with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison; or Mary Astor and Bette Davis in
The Great Lie
; or
Meet John Doe or Singapore Woman
or
The Lady Eve
. And I wouldn't have been doing too badly with any of those—except maybe
Singapore Woman
which, though it featured Heather Angel, starred Brenda Marshall, whom I never could stand—because they are all films I came to love in later years. But they were grownups' movies. I was seven. Sitting through the antics of Edward Arnold or Henry Daniell or Eve Arden or Barbara Stanwyck at age seven would've been something I'd do—because it was a movie, because it was my birthday, because I'd be seeing a movie at night—but the worm would certainly have gnawed my apple. It might have been a forgettable night. But . . .

Be still my heart!

The film that was showing at the Heights Theater on my seventh birthday, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, was a full-length animated feature,
Mr. Bug Goes to Town
, produced by Max Fleischer, who had earlier dazzled me with
Gulliver's Travels
and three double-length Popeye cartoons in which that greatest of all salts had met Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, directed by his brother, Dave Fleischer who would, within the year, knock my socks off with
Superman
cartoons that are spectacular even today, close on half a century later. The perfect movie for a birthday boy who, in that time of greater innocence, had seen the three Disney feature-lengths,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia
, and
Pinocchio
, and the Fleischer Bros.'s
Gulliver's Travels
, who was yet five months away from seeing
Dumbo
, who was living through the Golden Age of Animation, first-run, but didn't know it. The universe had selected the absolutely best choice for a movie to be seen at that special moment in my life. A nexus, a linch pin, a watershed; a turbid moment through which the dim future could be seen only vaguely; a branching of the path.

We're talking here about an
important
moment, y'know?

So I asked my parents, since they were going off to have dinner with friends, if they would drive me the few blocks to the Heights Theater, onaccounta it was my birthday and the Heights would let me in free onaccounta it was my birthday and they had this extra-special thing for kids who were having a birthday and once a year on their birthday they could see a movie for free and it was a
cartoon
movie, a special birthday coincidence treat that would mean a lot onaccounta it's my birth . . .

It was dark outside already. It was evening. Which preceded night. I was seven years old. Go out at
night
, all alone, to sit in a movie theater by
yourself
, and how do you manage to come home those three deadly blocks, who'll come to get you, and what happens if you're kidnapped?

I would have received a more kindly reception had I asked permission to go join the British forces defending the Suez Canal from Lieut. General Erwin Rommel's
panzer
Afrika Corps.

It was decided on the spot, among my parents, grandparents and assorted relatives including Uncle Morrie, Aunt Babe, Aunt Alice and whoever Aunt Alice was dating at the time, that I would spend my birthday not in the animated embrace of the Fleischers and their gavotting grasshopper, but 'neath the sheets of the spare bedroom, trembling in expectation of the Lovecraftian horrors of beaks and feet.

And so it came to pass that I was stripped to my underwear and placed in the bed, kissed goodnight at the fucking ridiculous hour of 6:00 (showtime was 7:00 at the Heights, the newspaper had advised), and urged to sleep tight with the usual admonition not to let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs, hell, I thought: beaks and feet, beaks and feet! The door was closed, I was left in darkness in a house whose only other inhabitants were a pair of Russian immigrants whose grand-parently bodies had been taken over by Aliens from the Kid-Hating Planet.

It was then, in that half hour between being relegated to my bed of pain, and the leavetaking of my parents, that I Went Wrong.

Previously, I had been the very model of a Horatio Alger child. Goodhearted, free-spirited, clean and neat; the only kid of my acquaintance who did not step on anthills or tie tin cans to puppy dog tails. But at that instant, lying there musing on the nature of the child-adult liaison, considering the state of the universe and only dimly beginning to understand the concept
injustice . . .
I was driven to a burgeoning sense of Self, and was stripped of my innocence, flensed of my trust in the omnipotence of adults. I Went Wrong.

In the dark I slipped out of bed, found my clothes, got dressed, opened the bedroom window, climbed out and hung by my fingertips from the sill, dropped to the ground, and ran off into the night. It was my
birthday
, goddammit, and I was
entitled
to the free movie I'd been promised. It would be wasteful not to take advantage of the prize.
Mr. Harlan Goes to Town
!*

*The aphorist Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." In the course of writing this bit of memoir, reference to the noted film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, and to a book on the Fleischers by Leslie Cabarga, made it clear that since Mr. Bug Goes to Town was not released till December 4th 1941, I could not possibly have seen it one hundred and ninety-two days earlier on May 27th. Nonetheless, memories of this pivotal incident in my otherwise stale, dull, and flatly uneventful life are blazingly clear. This happened before we went to war with Japan following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Don't tell me I'm getting senile, I don't want to hear it. The simple explanation that I saw the movie in May of 1942, on my eighth birthday, rather than my seventh, is ridiculous, Maltin! A first-run feature being shown five months after initial release in a time when they were making five hundred films a year and they had to change the bill at least three times a week?!? Not to mention, Leonard, that it's highly unlikely they'd be showing a cartoon feature, no matter how "adult," at an evening performance on a Wednesday night five months later! No, I think not. Rather, it falls to me—however reluctantly and with apologies to all those whose historical writings must now be cast into question—to reveal a hitherto-undiscovered conspiracy on the part of Maltin, Cabarga, Time magazine, The New York Times, Walt Lee, Paramount Pictures, Photoplay and your mother and father to wipe out an entire year in the early Forties, for what nefarious reason I cannot even guess. I find this all terribly disturbing, of course, but if it comes to a point of doubting What I Know To Be True, from the source of flawless recollection, as opposed to the alleged "evidence" of recorded history, well, my example is set by all those Fundamentalist and Charismatic Christians who know damned well that the time and date of The Creation by God was 4004 B.C., on the 26th of October, at exactly 9:00 A.M., as calculated by Archbishop Ussher in 1654, despite all the bogus "evidence" of geology, astronomy, paleontology, zoology, DNA-tracing, archaeology, radiocarbon dating, uranium and thorium soil-decay calculations, not to mention X-ray microscopy in 3-D, all of which implacably attest to the age of the Earth as 4.55 billion years, not to mention the thousands of rational men and women who come forward each week to attest to having been kidnapped by aliens who sucked out their brains and replaced the gray matter with crunchy peanut butter (pant! gasp!), yet . . . in the face of all that do you think I'm going to believe I've made a mistake? Not on your tintype. Besides, I slept late on the 26th and didn't start the job till almost ten o'clock.

 

I was enthralled by the animated efforts of the insectile tenants in that weedy patch of earth "just 45 inches from Broadway" as they struggled to escape the skyscraper-erecting encroachments of Man, when the flashlight beam hit me in the face.