Free Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison, Leonard Maltin Page B

and . . . well, uh, er . . . "
     
    And I'll lapse into an awkward silence, because he'll smile, knowing all the shadows and mirages behind those inadequate words. He knew what he was all about when he was making those B shudderflicks in the Forties.
     
    But he could not have known, like pebbles tossed into a pool to produce ever-widening circles of impact, how important he was to me. But I know, and I'll tell you; and when you've been told, you'll know why all those martinet pedants of the New York Literary Establishment who still put down moviegoing live zombie lives of half-light. And you'll even understand why auteurs like Bogdanovich can't smell the flowers because they're too busy dissecting them.
     
    You see, I was the only Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland, and you wouldn't think that in Ohio—the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland—one would encounter much bigotry. You'd be wrong. They used to beat the shit out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anybody else in town, but that humble greatness wasn't what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business. They actually believed Jews ground up Seventh Day Adventist babies to make matzohs at Channukah. They called me a kike. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't care for the tone of voice. So I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.
     
    So I made my own worlds.
     
    Worlds cobbled up from the dreams and visions to be found in comic books with Plastic Man and Airboy and the Heap and Hawkman and the Boy Commandos and the Spirit; worlds found in the radio programs I devoured so avidly my ears grew mouths: I Love a Mystery, The Shadow , Lux . . . presents Hollywood, Quiet, Please, The Land of the Lost, Grand Central Station, Let's Pretend . Worlds in the pulp magazines: Startling Stories, Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces, The Spider, Black Mask .
     
    But most of all . . . the movies.
     
    Oh, God, the movies. For four hours every Saturday afternoon I was taken away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood and was permitted to ride beside Don "Red" Barry, swashbuckle beside Jon Hall, sleuth beside Sidney Toler, drool over Ann Rutherford and June Preisser, know fear as Kent Smith knew it and shudder helplessly as Rondo Hatton stalked the streets as The Creeper.
     
    I was a child of the Forties. In a time before the word "alienation" slipped from everyone's lips as easily as a rolling stone gathers no moss, I was a thoroughly, hopelessly, totally alienated kid who could not exist in the real world. And though the studio money-grubbers who churned out those wonderfully awful potboilers could never have known what succor they were bringing to my parched soul, they provided me the only world to which I cared to belong. The world of dreams, of celluloid escapes, of glorious moviegoing.
     
    (You know one reason I hate my sister, Beverly? She is eight years older than I am, see. And when my Mom and Dad would be at the store, downtown, working on Saturday, I was entrusted to her care. She had to get me downtown on the bus, to see the movie. Then she could go off and do whatever dull dumb things girls did in Painesville on Saturday afternoons. Had to be dumb, didn't it? She wasn't at the movie , fer chrissakes! But she used to torment me. She'd dawdle, and chivvy me, and tell me she wasn't going to take me, and then she'd put her dress up in back so her slip showed, and say, come on, let's go. And I'd say, we can't go with you like that, and she'd torment me with, sure we can, come on. And I'd sit down on my bed and start to cry, because I knew damned well we couldn't walk up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue and get on that bus and go