Stephen McGinty: Taking a trip to Ray’s home

While looking for the Hertz car rental on a hot summer afternoon in Los Angeles I stumbled upon the former home of Ray Bradbury. I was walking, which, as Ray Bradbury knew so well, no-one ever does in that futuristic city that so worships the automobile that they even created the drive-through church, which, like a car-wash for the soul, allowed the penitent to coast in, listen to a preacher’s sermon then coast out, cleansed by the eternal sudsy love of the Lord.

I was staying at a friend’s house in Venice and knew that the Hertz site was on a junction, a mile or so, up the road, so, instead of waiting an age for one of the few taxis to arrive (in a city of cars, where even the drunks drive, who needs them?) I set off on foot.

The sidewalk was long and straight, the concrete cracked with tufts of grass craning up through the gaps between the slabs and, of course, empty. As I said, no-one walks in LA. Each house I passed was the same as its neighbour, a simple single-storey wooden frame with a raised porch and a short front yard.

The air was warm, almost heavy, and tingled your nostrils as you breathed it in. It was that drowsy, heavy heat, somewhere in the mid-Eighties, that you, or at least I, associate with childhood summers. There may have only been one that warm, but its golden glow colours them all.

As I strolled on up the sidewalk I noticed that the next house had a little plaque on the front. I can’t remember the wording, and can’t find it on the web, but it announced that this humble abode was, for a while, the home of Mr Ray Bradbury. I stopped outside the chain fence and looked at the windows, which were shuttered with blinds and wondered which stories did he tap out on his clickity word machine while living in this house.

Was it The Fog Horn, in which a lonely dinosaur submerged in the crushing depths of the Pacific hears a distant sound drift down through the fathoms and, convinced that it is the cry of a mate, slowly ascends only to die on the beach, broken-hearted?

Or Rocket Summer, in which the incredible heat from a launched rocket ship melts winter away from a neighbouring town.

Or A Sound of Thunder where the crushing underfoot of a single butterfly by a time traveller on a paid safari to the Jurassic Period, ripples through the thousands of millenniums and radically changes history?

Looking across the road at the fleet of speeding cars, I figured that he had to have written The Pedestrian here, in which the police, in a futuristic city, arrest a man on the grounds of his extremely suspicious behaviour. The criminal act? Taking an evening stroll.

I knew Ray Bradbury would have written many stories during his residence in this particular house for, as a professional writer, he set himself the task of writing a short story each and every week. As few of them were longer than 5,000 words, it was an achievable feat and one that allowed him to support himself on a diet of hotdogs and streetcar tokens.

For instance, in 1944 he wrote 40 stories, which earned him the grand total of $800 from the popular science fiction publications of the day such as Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. A clever child with a productive imagination, his career was set after a visit, in 1932, to a travelling carnival that arrived in his home town of Waukegan, Illinois.

There he met “Mr Electrico”, a defrocked Presbyterian minister turned fairground act who channelled the new fangled power of electricity and who told the 12-year-old boy that he was surely the reincarnation of his friend who died in his arms during the Battle of Ardennes forest during the First World War. He then touched him with his electrified excalibur and commanded him to: “Live Forever.” Which, as a child prematurely concerned by the eventual prospect of death, seemed, to Bradbury, to be a rather splendid idea.

Like many of his legion of fans, I first met Ray Bradbury while at school. I can still remember the lavish illustrations of the dinosaur in the school library copy of The Sound of Thunder, but it was while reading on my own that he became a particular favourite.

I still have on my book shelves: The Stories of Ray Bradbury Volume 1 (in red) and Volume 2 (in yellow) published, 29 years ago by Grafton books. The Martian Chronicles, his inter-linked collection of short stories, documenting the colonisaton of the Red Planet was the first time I remember recognising the supremacy of the written word over the rather ropy television adaptation.

Although he moved to Los Angeles with his parents as a teenager, Ray Bradbury never truly left the small mid-western town of Waukegan which would thread through much of his work. Long before David Lynch’s Blue Velvet showed us the severed ear in the green grass behind the white picket fence, Bradbury illustrated the darkness at the edge of town in the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes as well as in so many of his short stories where a warm and welcoming surface of normality screens a hidden horror. He was adept at hiding a razor blade in a milkshake. Or, in The Small Assassin, a scalpel in a baby’s hand.

Yet there was a warm, poignancy in so many of his stories. Like Calling Mexico, in which an old man calls home and asks his friend to leave the phone on a window ledge so he can hear the sounds of the city he will never again see. Or Picasso Summer whose art historian follows Picasso down on to the beach and watches him create, with a wooden stick, artistic wonders in the wet sand only to watch them be washed away. In Gotcha, he wrote, for my money, the greatest tribute to love’s first flush:

“They were incredibly in love. They said it. They knew it. They lived it. When they weren’t staring at each other they were hugging. When they weren’t hugging they were kissing. When they weren’t kissing they were a dozen scrambled eggs in bed. When they were finished with the amazing omelette they went back to staring and making noises. Theirs, in sum, was a Love Affair. Print it out in capitals. Underline it. Find some italics. Add exclamation marks. Put up the fireworks. Tear down the clouds. Send out for adrenaline. Roustabout at 3 am. Sleep till noon.”

Although I knew Bradbury intimately through his short stories and novels, I missed meeting him in person by just 24 hours. A few years ago, I visited Palm Springs and wandered into a little book shop and saw that the previous day, he had conducted a signing. Pity, I thought. I’ll catch him yet.

So imagine my delight when I read a few months ago that, in tribute to Bradbury’s longevity, (he was then 91) and influence, Gauntlet Press planned to publish a collection of short stories written by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill and Harlan Ellison, with an introduction by the great man himself and plans for a personal appearance and launch at Comic-Con in San Diego in August. That, I thought, might be worth the trip.

I must have lingered outside the little wooden house in Venice, California, for ten minutes, thinking about all those short stories, particularly the ones that set off a little emotional charge. He wrote so well of the pleasures and cruelties of childhood.

There is one story, the name of which I have long forgotten, in which, on a planet where a single summer’s day comes but once every seven years, a boy is locked in the school cupboard by his classmates on the day the rain finally stops. He finally frees himself as the first drips begin to fall again.

For some reason, probably to do with a writer’s icy heart and a columnist’s constant search for a subject, I remember looking at the house and thinking: “I will write about this when Ray Bradbury dies.” And then I turned and walked off into the baking heat, a sole pedestrian in the city where no-one walks.