Harlan Ellison's Watching Read Online Free PDF Page A

the voice of authority, and not yet completely the scofflaw I was to become through this escapade, I began to tremble. "Come out here this instant , little boy!" The usherette was not to be trifled with. This young woman would no doubt grow up to be the head nurse in a maximum security nuthouse dedicated to straightening out guys like Jack Nicholson. "Harlan," my Grandmother said helpfully. "His name is Harlan Ellison."
     
    ( Yes, Officer , my dear old sweet Granny would say to the Secret Police when they came for me, he's the one you want. And the evidence is buried under all his dirty socks and underwear at the back of the clothes closet . Swell old lady.)
     
    "Herman; you come out here, Herman Nelson."
     
    Gramma: "Harlan."
     
    Usherette: "What?"
     
    Gramma: "Harlan, not Herman. Harlan Ellison, not Herman Nelson."
     
    Patron: "Shhhh!"
     
    Usherette: "Harmon, I don't want to have to come in there to get you!"
     
    Gramma: "It's not Harmon, it's Harlan."
     
    Usherette: "What ever ! Get out here, little boy!"
     
    I got out there . . . before my darling Grandmother began handing out Wanted leaflets to the audience.
     
    By the ear, like something from an Our Gang comedy, I was dragged up the aisle. What an ignominious reverse-path from my entrance to the Heights Theater.
     
    I had run like a mad thing through the streets of Coventry-Mayfield, reaching the theater ten minutes before Mr. Bug was to begin. I'd given my name to the ethereal vision in the ticket booth, and she had looked it up and, smiling wonderfully, had told me to go right in, as she handed me a "birthday pass" that entitled me to free popcorn.
     
    The young woman at the door had waved me in with another of those smiles that made the spine deliquescent, I'd bought a Tootsie Roll and accepted my free popcorn, and had allowed the charming usherette to show me to my seat, right in the middle of the third row. The theater had been pretty well filled, but even under such exacting circumstances the theater's staff had treated me properly as visiting royalty. It was , after all, as I told each person in my row as I shoved my way to my seat, my birthday !
     
    And now, to be usherhandled up the aisle, my ear pincered excruciatingly, my dear sweet Granny kvetching along behind, intoning half-Yiddish gardyloos about my certain future as either a demented hunchbacked bell-ringer, or a Cossack love-slave . . . how ignominious!
     
    I was, of course, dragged the three blocks back to the House of Pain, my wrist caught in a lobster-grip so maliciously tight that it would have drawn clucks of admiration from SWAT teams and Argentinian death squads. I was thrust through the front door into the presence of Grampa Harry, who was reading the Jewish Daily Forward , probably "A Bintel Brief," as he reminisced about the happy-go-lucky past in Russia filled with kasha and the grinding of the faces of the poor under the boots of the Tsar's kulaks. He looked up only long enough to spit the word oysvorf ! And went back to the newspaper.
     
    Brandishing a Swingline Stapler with which she threatened to attach me permanently to the mattress, I was once again divested of my clothing, and condemned to a state of supine anguish with threats of a "k-nok in the kopf "if I so much as hyperventilated too loudly.
     
    I waited all of three minutes. Then I crept to the bedroom door, cracked it a sliver and listened. They were in the living room, and had just tuned in to Fibber McGee and Molly . I could hear Harlow Wilcox extolling the virtues of Johnson's Wax.
     
    I located the contraband skeleton key where I'd hidden it a year or more earlier, under the rug beneath the bed, and unlocked the closet where my Grandmother (on whom Dickens had modeled his character Madame Defarge) had thrown my clothes in a heap on the floor. I dressed quickly, made it out through the window again, and raced back to the Heights Theater.
     
    How I explained to the woman at the door that I was supposed