Ellison Wonderland

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 be 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Labbula and the crocodile-headed woman from “The Silver Corridor” and that little jazzbo gnome with the patois now long-outdated and so unhip.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.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and ELLISON WONDERLAND is back in print, thanks to the good offices of Michael Seidman and Olga Vezeris of New American Library.

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

Commuter’s Problem

The trouble with Miniver Cheevy (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

Commuter’s Problem

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

“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 Da Campo’s eyes. They were steel-grey 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 0f 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.”