And the older I got, the more I felt that I was obliged to love him simply because he was my town’s most famous son. But my tastes at that age ran more toward Christopher Pike and R.L. I’d never get very far, but I gave it a great many tries I must have read the opening line “It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man” a half dozen times at least. I would pick one, often The Illustrated Man, and take it back upstairs to the velour armchair and settle in. Among these were a few volumes of Bradbury’s short stories. Most of the books were yellowed and falling apart, their covers marked with their original prices: fifteen cents. One room was floor to ceiling bookshelves and by the time I was in junior high school, I would go down there regularly and pick something out to read. My father’s old room was part of that basement, still set up the way it had been when he lived there, commuting to college and working part-time at a bookstore. It wouldn’t be a bad premise for a Bradbury story: a young girl, bookish and morbid, discovers an author living in her grandmother’s musty basement. But I, at age seven, thought she meant here, here in the house we sat in, that he had grown up in the house, perhaps even still lived in the basement which resembled, in its murk and books and clutter, the same office Bradbury sat down to write in during the opening credits of his tv show. One night, watching these credits, my grandmother said to me, “You know, he’s from here.” She meant, of course, from Waukegan, “that small Illinois town” where he grew up and where we sat now in her neighborhood of tiny homes called The Gardens. He sits at a typewriter and the keys clatter. Beyond that, the small Illinois town where I grew up. As the camera pans, Bradbury says, Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. It’s Bradbury, intoning gravely over shots of the artefacts: People ask, Where do you get your ideas? Well, right here.
The opening credits of Ray Bradbury Theater gave me a particular thrill: like some sort of eerie X-Files precursor, synth-drenched music plays while a shadowy figure climbs out of an clanging old elevator and makes his way through a series of cluttered rooms. I’d sit on the carpet at my grandmother’s feet, a child too small to be watching shows so scary, even if they were on network television.
The misunderstanding was born over the opening credits of Ray Bradbury Theater, a half-hour horror anthology heavily indebted to the Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents (both of which based episodes on stories by Bradbury.) Most Saturday nights in the 80s, my parents and I would head to my grandmother’s for dinner and after pot roast and potatoes, we’d sit and watch Saturday Nightmares on the USA Network. When I was a child, I thought Ray Bradbury lived in my grandmother’s basement.
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