The Bradbury Chronicles (7 page)

The first time Ray told this carnival story in print was in the pages of William F. Nolan's self-published 1952 booklet
The Ray Bradbury Review
. Ray recalled that the next day, Labor Day, Saturday, September 3, 1932, the family buried Lester Moberg. “Driving back from the graveyard with my family in our old Buick,” Ray remembered, “I looked out of the car, down the slope toward the lake and saw the tents and the flags of the Dill Brothers carnival and I said to my father, ‘Stop the car!' and he said, ‘What do you mean?' and I said, ‘I have to get out!'” Leo Bradbury protested, but the independently minded boy, dressed in his Sunday best, insisted. The Buick came to a halt along Sheridan Road, and Ray clambered out of the car with his parents in the front and Skip still seated in the back. Ray galloped down the grassy incline toward the Dill Brothers carnival and found Mr. Electrico sitting outside a tent. As an excuse to chat with the mysterious magician, Ray told him he couldn't figure out a nickel magic trick that he had in his pocket; Mr. Electrico took the small toy, and showed Ray how it worked. Then the magician asked Ray if he would like to meet some of the carnival freaks. Without hesitation, Ray agreed and Mr. Electrico brought him to another tent and peered inside the doorway.

“Clean up your language,” Mr. Electrico yelled. “Clean up your language!” What Ray Bradbury saw next would bolster his passion for all things big-top, freaks, midway rides, carousels, acrobats, and magic. There, behind the scenes of the Dill Brothers Combined Shows, Mr. Electrico introduced Ray to the dwarf, the giant, the trapeze people, the seal boy, the fat lady, and the illustrated man. It was an experience that would not only solidify his lifelong infatuation with carnival and circus culture, but, as Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce point out in their scholarly treatise
Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction,
it helped provide a foundation for the “carnivalization” that would be a thematic touchstone throughout Bradbury's canon. Carnivalization, the authors point out, was “first coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to designate the transportation of carnival images and themes into literature.” Eller and Touponce posit that carnival imagery and themes, in their myriad forms, comprise the bedrock of Ray Bradbury's writing.

After the meeting with the freaks within the dusty canvas tents, Mr. Electrico walked Ray toward the rocky shoreline of Lake Michigan and they sat down. The magician shared with Ray that he lived in Cairo, Illinois, and that he was a defrocked Presbyterian minister. He gave Ray his address and told him to write any time. “He spoke his small philosophies and I spoke my big ones,” Ray often said of that fateful long-ago conversation. Most important to young Ray Bradbury, he felt as if Mr. Electrico treated him as an equal. “We've met before,” Mr. Electrico said, surprising Ray. “You were my best friend in France in 1918, and you died in my arms in the battle of the Ardennes forest that year. And here you are, born again, in a new body, with a new name. Welcome back.”

Ray was stunned. “I staggered away from that encounter with Mr. Electrico wonderfully uplifted by two gifts: the gift of having lived once before (and of being told about it) … and the gift of trying to somehow live forever,” he said.

On his way home that night, Ray walked back through the carnival grounds. It had rained on and off that day and it started to rain again. Ray stood next to the spinning carousel and began crying as the calliope played “Beautiful Ohio.” “I knew something important had happened that day, I just wasn't sure what it was,” Ray said.

Ray Bradbury told this story many, many times over the decades and, more often than not—including the first time it was recited in print in the pages of
The Ray Bradbury Review
—he included the detail about his uncle Lester Moberg's funeral. In leaving the funeral and rushing down the hillside, Ray would explain, he was “running away from death and running toward life.”

Ray's memory of the date of his uncle's death and county records and newspaper reports do not match up. Lester Moberg's death certificate, the coroner's inquest, and published reports in the local papers list the date of his death, not during the week before Labor Day, but seven weeks later, on October 24, 1932. But Ray Bradbury was certain it was Labor Day, as were Ray's brother, Skip, and cousin Vivian. Even Lester Moberg's daughter, Carol Moberg Treklis, who was seven at the time, remembered that her father's funeral was on that holiday weekend. “I'm certain of it,” she said, and added that her mother, Lester's ex-wife, Lucy Carroll, always said that her father's funeral was on Labor Day weekend. Though Skip, Vivian, Lester's daughter Carol, all children at the time, agree with Ray, the headline on the October 24, 1932, edition of the
Waukegan News-Sun
proclaims:
MOBERG DIES FROM BANDIT SHOT
. His death certificate lists the cause of death as a “gun shot wound in body,” on October 17 due to a “hold up by parties unknown.” His date of death on the certificate was October 24, 1932.

Ray had simply and inadvertently combined the long-ago events of magic and murder—the story of his uncle Lester's death with the arrival of the Dill Brothers carnival and the fateful tap of Mr. Electrico's charged sword. The symbolism of the two events, death and life, occurring concurrently in Ray's story may be trampled by the facts, but the mystery of Lester Moberg's murder is not diminished and neither is the enigma of the man known only as Mr. Electrico. Lester Moberg's killer was never captured and, to this day, the case remains unsolved, and Mr. Electrico's identity, his true secret, remains a mystery, as well.

After the magician had given Ray his address, Ray wrote a letter to him in Cairo, Illinois. Mr. Electrico even wrote back. But over the decades, Ray lost the letter. In 1983, during the production of the Disney film
Something Wicked This Way Comes,
the producers attempted to locate the man who had turned Ray's life around, told him to live forever, and set him on the path toward literary eternity, but they were unable to locate him. There was also no record found of The Dill Brothers Combined Shows or the carnival performer named Mr. Electrico.

The most important short story in my life as a writer is Ray Bradbury's “The Rocket Man.” I read it for the first time when I was ten. In one scene, a family traveling by car stops along a rural road to rest, and the young son notices bright butterflies, dozens of them, trapped and dying in the grille of the car. When I got to that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death, and technology, the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language, systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor. I have never since looked quite the same way at fathers, butterflies, science fiction, language, short stories, or the sun.

—
MICHAEL CHABON
,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author

W
HETHER
L
ESTER
Moberg was laid to rest on Labor Day weekend, as Ray and his brother, Skip, recalled, or in late October, as the official documents attested, Ray insisted that the day after the funeral, Leo Bradbury moved his family. He was without work and needed new prospects. He still had friends in Tucson, Arizona; and, an adventurer at heart, he loved the desert. “My dad had the travel bug ever since he ran away from home when he was sixteen,” Ray said.

The Bradburys packed their possessions and piled into the 1928 family Buick and headed west. In fourteen years, Esther Bradbury had lost two babies, both of her parents, and now her younger brother. It must have been terribly painful for this woman who always managed, somehow, to conceal her feelings from her two boys. “She was a strong, stoic Swede,” Ray said.

Cutting down through Illinois and through St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, the Bradburys rumbled west along old Route 66, with little money, but much hope. “We'd pull up to a place to stay for the night, cheap motels with tiny bungalows,” said Ray. “We'd pull up in front of those motels and the owner would come running out and tell us it was a dollar fifty a night to stay, and my dad would say, ‘We won't pay a dollar fifty.' The owners would lower the price to a dollar a night and my dad always said, ‘No.' And he'd step on the accelerator and we'd start to drive away. The owner of the place would jump on the running board of our Buick and say, ‘Seventy-five cents!' And my dad would say, ‘Okay, yeah.'”

The road trip, averaging at most, as Ray remembered, two or three hundred miles a day, snaked through Oklahoma. With so few resources, traveling through the barren dust bowl of Oklahoma with two boys sitting in the backseat bickering and jabbing each other with elbows must have been difficult for Ray's parents. It was hot, and red dust covered the roads through most of the state. After it rained, the dust turned to red sludge. Abandoned cars, whose drivers had traveled too fast and lost control and rolled or turned or skidded, littered the muddy embankments of the highway.

Leo Bradbury's knuckles wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. He was focused on making it through the slick mess, keeping the Buick's speed at five miles per hour. It was a painful journey, bleak and desperate, and while he never said it, Leo must have wondered if moving his family west with so little money and no employment was wise. But the Bradburys motored on, with little Ray and burly Skip in the back of the automobile, blissfully unaware of the despair gripping their father. As they neared Amarillo, Texas, Leo decided it was time to stop for the night. It was ungodly hot, and Leo was exhausted. The family stayed at a small, dilapidated motor lodge. “That motel was fantastic,” Ray said. “It was built over a chicken ranch and the chickens ran under each little bungalow so all the rooms smelled to high heaven. You can't have a thousand chickens wandering around without it smelling bad.”

This motel later sparked Ray's 1969 story “The Inspired Chicken Motel,” from the collection
I Sing the Body Electric!
“The Inspired Chicken Motel” was one of those tales Ray insisted was thoroughly true. The story illuminated the Bradbury family dynamics at that time, as well as the long cross-country trip toward what they all hoped was a new beginning. Ray wrote the story, as he said, exactly as it happened. “Little did we know,” the story goes, “that long autumn of 1932, as we blew tires and flung fan belts like lost garters down Highway 66, that somewhere ahead that motel, and that most peculiar chicken, were waiting.”

The Bradburys paid fifty cents for a night at the motor lodge. The room, as Ray wrote, “was a beaut, not only did all the springs give injections wherever you put flesh down, but the entire bungalow suffered from an oft-rehearsed palsy.” The motel's proprietor was a friendly woman who, Ray surmised, had seen travelers crushed by the dust bowl and Great Depression. Leo Bradbury was one of those people; tired and downtrodden, he just wanted work so he could feed his family. They had enough money to take them west for six months; if Leo failed to make a living for his family, they would return to Waukegan and live with Grandmother Bradbury. But he determined not to fail. The proprietor must have seen the despair in Leo Bradbury's eyes and recognized it.

In the short story, she produced two eggs that she claimed had been laid by one precocious chicken. The eggs had cracks and raised calcium lines that somehow, amazingly, formed shapes. One particular chicken, among the thousands clucking around the ranch, was, like young Ray, an aspiring artist—a curious, wondrous freak of nature. The proprietor showed the eggs to the Bradburys. The first eggshell had a raised shape of a longhorn steer skull and horns. The second egg, placed on a bed of cotton inside a small box, had the words inscribed on the shell:
REST IN PEACE. PROSPERITY IS NEAR
. The Bradburys were thoroughly amazed. The words also gave them a brief sense of comfort.

The next day, the family hit the road once more and headed for New Mexico. In the town of Gallup, one of the Buick's tires blew, forcing Leo Bradbury to steer the road-hiccuping vehicle to the shoulder. The bright desert sun pressed down upon Leo as he removed the jack, tire irons, and repair kit from the back of the car. As Ray, Skip, and Esther sat inside, Leo began jacking up the car. Across the street, a Mexican woman sat on her front porch and watched Leo Bradbury's irritation grow as he tried to fix the flat. Changing a tire in those days was tricky; one had to work the tube out to repair it and take the rims on and off with tire irons. “In the middle of all this, nothing worked right and my dad just jumped up, screamed, ‘Goddammit to hell!' and he took all the tire irons and all the tools and threw them into an empty lot of weeds right near where we were parked and then, of course, we had to go try to find the tools,” said Ray.

The boys climbed out into the heat and scoured the vacant lot for their father's tools. Seeing this, the woman from across the street offered Esther and the boys lemonade on her shady porch. As for the flat, Ray recalled with a laugh, his father “gave up trying to fix the tire and Skip rolled it further into town and found a gas station where they repaired it for a dollar.”

After nine days on Route 66, the Bradbury Buick finally rumbled into Tucson, Arizona. Leo had an old friend who, as Ray remembered, had tuberculosis and had moved from Waukegan to Arizona for the warm weather. The friend had a small bungalow behind his house, which was on the outskirts of town on Stone Avenue. The bungalow, modestly furnished, had a single room and a bathroom; this was the new Bradbury home. Ray's parents slept on one side of the room in a bed, while Ray and Skip slept on a foldout bed as they had done in Waukegan.

School had already begun, so the boys were hurriedly enrolled; Ray in seventh grade at Amphitheater Junior High and Skip in eleventh. It was a mile walk each way for them. “That was great. I would walk through cacti and I would see snakes and Gila monsters and horny toads,” said Ray. “I loved it.” Ray befriended a classmate, John Huff, who soon became his best pal. The two were about the same height; Ray was stockier than his friend, but John was more athletic and played baseball. Ray's hair shone white blond under the Arizona sunshine; John had a full head of dark hair. On school days, the two twelve-year-olds sat under the shade of a tree outside their classroom during lunch, eating their sack lunches and talking about the
Tarzan
comic strip. Ray often spent weekends at the Huff house, with its menagerie of goats, dogs, and cats running amok. Besides his aunt Neva, Ray had never met anyone else who so understood him. “We both wanted to be magicians,” remembered John Huff. “Ray would come over to the house on the weekends, and we tried magic tricks—not very successfully. Then we wanted to make movies. Western movies were real popular at the time so we drew them all on long strips of paper and that was our film reel.”

While Ray had found a soul mate of sorts, Ray's father, Leo, had not found a job. He tried the railroad, but there was nothing. Ray was unaware of his family's economic straits, for his father never spoke of it. John Huff's family was struggling, too; his father made little through his automobile upholstering business. “It was Depression years,” said John Huff. “We didn't have much, we just made do with what we had.”

For cheap entertainment during the Depression, everyone listened to the radio. Ray soon discovered that a local station, KGAR, broadcast the program
Chandu the Magician
in the evenings and he tuned in religiously. He also amused himself by writing short stories; he had decided that not only would he be the world's greatest magician, he would also be a writer. And he could act. One day his school music teacher asked him to audition for the upcoming Christmas operetta,
A Wooden Shoe Christmas
. At first, he was reluctant because he would have to sing, but the teacher persuaded him to audition. The next day, when he arrived at school, a classmate called him “Hans,” the lead character's name in the play. Ray had landed the role. Acting was addicting for the boy, and he soon discovered that getting up onstage in front of an audience was exhilarating. “I felt bathed in attention and love,” Ray said of his first acting experience.

But Ray had not abandoned writing and talked incessantly about becoming a writer. It was all his parents heard that fall and winter of 1932. For Christmas, though they had barely the means, Leo and Esther bought their son a tin toy-dial typewriter. What a joyful surprise it was for Ray! The first assignment he gave himself was to write a sequel to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a slow and laborious process to peck on the small toy typewriter, but he was determined and wrote virtually every day. He finished the Burroughs sequel and moved on to writing original
Buck Rogers
scripts. Though many credit Waukegan, Illinois, as the place that was most influential on Ray Bradbury's imagination, Tucson, Arizona, was where he discovered this creative side. On his small typewriter, he pecked fiercely, producing stories and letters to his cousin Vivian and Aunt Neva in Waukegan.

In 1933, Leo Bradbury found a more spacious house for the family in downtown Tucson at 417 South Fourth Street. Sharing the big brick house with several other tenants, the Bradburys were given the back of the home. Leo and Esther had a bedroom of their own (still without a door, as Ray recalled), and Ray and Skip slept on yet another foldout bed on the screened-in porch. Next door, about a hundred feet from the Bradburys' new home, lived two brothers, twins, Austin and Jaustin, whom Ray befriended (in 2002, Ray wrote a short story, yet unpublished, about them—“Austin and Jaustin”—in which one boy was convinced he would live forever while the other knew with certainty that he would die an early death). Ray found his new house quite magical, with a rambling junkyard in an adjacent lot (which became the inspiration for the setting in the short story “The Rocket,” in which Fiorello Bodoni builds a mock rocket from scrap to take his children on pretend voyages around Mars). Six blocks away was a railroad graveyard, packed with corroding locomotives that had long been retired; when they wanted an adventure, Ray and Skip came here.

While Ray was busy exploring this new wonderland, and spending weekends at John Huff's house across town, Leo Bradbury, still unemployed, decided to sell homemade “chili-bricks,” dried chili that could be cooked in boiling water. Meanwhile, Ray discovered that the radio station broadcasting the
Chandu the Magician
serials was located two blocks from his house, and he began telling his schoolmates that he would work at the station, an odd, brassy proclamation for a twelve-year-old to make. But it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was a habit that he would continue indulging for the rest of his life—verbalizing his dreams and then, assuredly, attaining them.

Early in 1933, Ray Bradbury began to visit the KGAR studio—boldly bargaining his way inside by offering to empty ashtrays, run for Cokes, and throw out trash. The engineers and producers at the radio station were impressed with the boy's tenacity. Ray was hardly shy. Each night, he showed up at the radio station to act as a gofer, and when he was not working, he had his nose pressed against the thick audiobooth glass. After two weeks spent relentlessly shadowing the station workers, Ray was asked if he would like to be on air. Ecstatic, Ray accepted immediately. With several other children, Ray read bit parts of various Sunday comic strip characters and supplied sound effects for the live programs of
Tailspin Tommy,
The Katzenjammer Kids,
and
Bringing Up Father
. In the spring of 1933, just twelve years old, Ray Bradbury was reading the funny pages, which he often did at home anyway, on air for children all across southern Arizona, and working in one of his favorite fields of popular culture, radio. He was even paid for this terrific job—with movie tickets. Now, though the Bradburys could barely afford tickets to the movies, thanks to his job, Ray was able to attend the movies regularly. Voraciously, he watched
The Mummy,
Murders in the Wax Museum,
and, an influential film for his storytelling development,
King Kong
. As a writer, Ray Bradbury ascribed to a Hitchcockian form of storytelling, building suspense slowly. “A good story,” Ray maintained, “should be told like Chinese water torture. You drop one drop at a time, slowly, painfully building suspense.”
King Kong,
he thought, followed this method beautifully. And it also featured a sympathetic antagonist in Kong, a tragic creature not unlike the Hunchback in Ray's early favorite,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
.