Instant Classics: Harlan Ellison - The Pale Silver Dollar ...

The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon Pays Its Way and Makes Change

By Harlan Ellison

1934

Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. No one had come to my birthday party the year before, not one kid of all the kids from my grade school who had received a personal invitation done in multiple colors with the sixteen crayons in my Crayola box. This year, I knew there wouldn't even be a party, it was too embarrassing.

So after school I never went home. I ran away. I crossed Mentor Avenue against the wishes of my mother and father, and I trudged down through the high weeds and sumac woods of the empty lots behind the Colony Lumber Company, and I sat down on the edge of the bank that surrounded the dirty green water of the nameless pond, and I tossed stones into the thick dirty water, and I watched the skeeter bugs skimming the surface across the circular ripples, and I tried to catch one of the nasty fish that lived in the pond, using a string and a piece of bread and a stick I broke off a bush.

When it got dark, I still sat there. For hours after it got dark. Until it got so cold that I finally trudged back out of that minor wilderness, and recrossed Mentor Avenue, and went home. My mother and father were beside themselves. They had called out the police. I came into the house, muddy and cold, and still crying. And I saw that they had left most of the cake with the candles unlit still on the table, along with the birthday presents they'd bought me, and if there had been any kids there, they were now gone. But I still knew my mom and dad would have had to call parents to get the kids to come. Mao Tse-tung began his impossible 6000-mile march of retreat with his 90,000-man Red Army from Kiangsi to the Shensi province with Chiang Kai-shek nipping at his heels.

1947

Chairman J. Parnell Thomas called his first witness in the preliminary hearings to establish loyalty or seditious behavior on the part of Communists or Fellow Travelers in Hollywood. Just outside King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, I accepted a ride from a man in a Hudson touring car. I'd been hitching my way east and hadn't eaten in a day and a half. At a farmhouse in the outlying north of Smokestown, near Lancaster, I had gotten a dinner from a nice woman and her family by knocking on their door and telling them I could repair the old washing machine and mangle rusting away in the side yard.

She had looked at me with skepticism, but I said if I couldn't fix it, it wouldn't cost her nothing. But if I got it working, could she spare something to eat? So she asked her husband, who was working in the barn, and he came out just beyond the big barn doors, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to look at me with the setting sun behind me, and he told her what've we got to lose, so she let me go ahead.

I didn't know any more about fixing a washing machine or a mangle than the man in the moon, but I'd done this kind of thing about twenty times before, and once in a while I'd spot something simple that I could twist back into shape or hook up, and it'd work, and I'd eat. So I labored over them both, the washing machine and the mangle, and I sweated for a couple of hours, but couldn't get either of them to going. And it was dark, then, and the lady came out and asked if I'd done any good, and I said no ma'am; and I started putting my windbreaker back on, so I could take off down the road again; and she said well, c'mon in, then, and have a bite with us, which was very kind of her because she probably knew I was faking it all along, but I'd sweated for a couple of hours, so she fed me.

And that had been a day and a half ago. I got into the Hudson, and the man put it in gear, and he put his hand on my lap and asked me how old I was, and I yanked down the door handle as hard as I could, and I grabbed my stuff wrapped up in a shirt, and I jumped out of the car before he could get it into second, and I ran away into the woods. Great Britain proposed the partition of Palestine, and there were tremendous protests from Arabs and Jews.

1959

Fidel Castro swept down out of the Sierra Maestra and drove Batista from Cuba with the invasion of Havana. I was serving with the U.S. Army in the capacity of reporter for the Fort Knox newspaper, Inside the Turret. I was living in a trailer in Elizabethtown, Kentucky because I was married, even though they didn't know I was separated. I hated the barracks and had taken the trailer under what they called separate maintenance. But she was back in New York, and we'd probably never see each other again, which was fine by me.

One night I went to a record store in Elizabethtown to buy a jazz record, and I met up with a bunch of teen-aged kids from the high school who knew me because they'd seen me around, and they asked me if I wanted to come to a sock hop that night.

So I went to the high school and paid a dollar to come into the dance, and I hung around and had some punch, but nothing much was happening. And then I saw a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a leg brace on. I think it was polio. And she was sitting watching everyone dance, but no one asked her. So I went over and smiled and asked her if she'd like to dance, and at first she was very shy, but after I asked a couple more times she said okay, and we got up and I was careful not to be too tricky with the steps, and we had a nice dance. It was Danny and the Juniors doing "At the Hop." She thanked me when I took her back to her seat, and during the evening we danced again half a dozen times. The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Ochoa and Kornberg for their synthesis of DNA and RNA.

1962

Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem as the United States Supreme Court ruled against official prayers in public schools. How I met Carl Sandburg was this: Bill was married to Lelia, and I'd met them at somebody's party, and I was staying in a small apartment down on Wilshire near Beverly Glen, and they invited me to visit their house way up in the Glen, at the end of a small street called Beverly Glen Place, and it was so beautiful up there, all private and quiet, that I rented a funny little treehouse up a steep driveway called Bushrod Lane, and that was how I came to be living just about next door (and above) Bill and Lelia's when Bill was hired for second unit work on The Greatest Story Ever Told. Or maybe he was an assistant director.

One Sunday Bill called and said there was a party going on at George Stevens's mansion up in the Hollywood Hills, and did I want to come for a while? I asked if it was okay, and he said yes, it was fine, Mr. Stevens had told him to ask anyone he thought would be interesting. So I took the directions to Mr. Stevens's house, and I dressed up in the best suit I had, which was too big on me because I hadn't been working and I'd lost a lot of weight, and I had to pin the pants tight across my waist, and I was ashamed the way the pants bagged, but I put on the jacket and it covered the excess, flapping fabric.

I was driving an old Ford I'd bought in Chicago, and it was a wreck, but it got me up into the Hills, where I took a wrong turn and got lost. Finally, I thought I'd found the private road that led up to Mr. Stevens's big house, and there was a gate with an intercom on it, and I buzzed through, and a voice asked who I was, so I said who, and I said I'd been invited to the party by Bill, and there was a moment of silence and then the voice said okay, and told me how to get up the road to the parking lot, and the gate gave a crackling noise and opened, and I drove through.

But I must have taken a wrong turn again, because I could see the big circular house above me, but I couldn't get to it; and finally I did come into an empty lot with one or two cars in it, below the house, and I figured that had to be where I was supposed to be. So I parked, and hitched up my pants, and climbed a stairway to the house.

But I couldn't find a door to go in.

The house was marvelous. Apparently, parts of it turned like a sundial to catch the sun, and the front door was somewhere on the other side. What I didn't know was that I had come up a service road, not the front entranceway, and I was lost again. So I walked around and around the back of the house till I found a door, and I went in. But it was on the second floor, and I wandered through the bedroom level till I came out on a balcony that went halfway around the central court, and I looked down into an enormous white living room, all bathed in sunshine, and down there sitting on a huge sectional sofa was Carl Sandburg. I recognized him immediately. I was thrilled.

He had been hired by Mr. Stevens to write narration for The Greatest Story Ever Told, and he was staying there. I could now see, through the big picture windows, that the party was actually out on the sloping lawn in front of the house. But the living room was empty except for Carl Sandburg, who sat on the sofa doing the most peculiar thing.

Propped up on one of those plastic book-holder devices used to hold open a cookbook when making something intricate for dinner, was a large book. Lying on the big coffee table that held the propped-open book, in front of Carl Sandburg, was a roll of brown butcher's paper, the kind meat markets use to wrap up lamb chops. It was partially unrolled, and Carl Sandburg was writing on the open section with a quill pen that he would dip into an inkpot. He would look at the book for a moment, and then write something on the butcher's paper. I watched him for a long time. He would look at the book, dip the quill, write a line on the paper, and then repeat the process until he'd filled the paper handily. Then he would rip off a big chunk of the paper and toss it onto a hurly-burly haymow of butcher's paper on the floor beyond the coffee table.

I watched till I couldn't contain myself any longer; then I walked around the balcony over the living room till I found a staircase that descended to the big room. I went down and walked daintily toward Carl Sandburg, because I didn't want to disturb or interrupt him. But I had to find out what he was doing. I stood there for a few minutes till he saw me, and he smiled, and he said hello young man, and I came over to him, and he patted the sofa and told me to sit down and take a load off. So I sat down, and watched a while; and then I asked him, Mr. Sandburg, what in the world are you doing?

And he said, "Did you know the typewriter was invented in 1873?"

I said no, I didn't know that. He chuckled. "Well, son, I always travelled around with a little portable typewriter in my pack. I wrote almost all of my poems on that typewriter. On cheap yellow paper. Dollar a ream. So now it seems they want to preserve all my originals in a museum or a library or something, and I'm just too embarrassed to send them all those typed yellow pages. They just don't look important enough."

And he looked into that copy of The Collected Poetry of Carl Sandburg, published by Harcourt Brace, that had been bought for him a few days earlier at a bookstore in Westwood Village, and he memorized a line, and dipped his quill in the inkpot, and copied the line on brown, important-looking, butcher's paper, and he tore off the poem he had copied, the poem he had written years before, and tossed it onto the ever-growing mound of elegant forgeries. I stayed sitting there for a long while, and was very impressed. Aboard the Friendship VII, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose and President Kennedy sent federal troops to protect James Meredith as the first black student seeking admission to the University of Mississippi.

1975

The Vietnam War ended and Francisco Franco died. There was a serious water leak through the wall of the bedroom in my house, caused by ivy that had been growing up the outside wall and penetrating the stucco. Dozens of excellent books in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase were stained and waterlogged and mildewed. I had to throw them out, and some of them have never been replaced. One of them was a book I'd first read in junior high school about people living in the mountains of West Virginia who had never seen an airplane or a radio, and who still spoke in something like old Chaucerian English. An earthquake destroyed the beautiful Great Temples of Pagan in Burma.
1980

Ex-California governor Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 40th, and oldest, President of the United States in a landslide victory in which he won 483 electoral votes. A dear friend of mine was bludgeoned to death in her apartment in Santa Monica and I spoke at her funeral. A friend I'd known for almost thirty years revealed himself to be a terrible, cold person, and I could speak to him only distantly ever after. My nephew went to work in his father's store in Cleveland; and I don't think that's what he had intended for his life's work. Zimbabwe emerged as an independent state.
1992

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics vanished, and a menace that had clouded the mind of the world for a century, something they had called Communism, dissipated like morning fog, almost without anyone noticing. Doves have built a nest in a tree just outside the front door of my home. When I go out to put garbage in the cans, the mother bird sits among the cactus, watching me. I smile and try to reassure her that she's safe. Thousands of people are dying of a terrible plague called AIDS.

Berlioz wrote, "Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils."

The pale silver dollar of the moon pays its way and makes change.
© 1992 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation

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