Harlan Ellison's Watching Read Online Free Page A

Daniell or Eve Arden or Barbara Stanwyck at age seven would've been something I'd do—because it was a movie, because it was my birthday, because I'd be seeing a movie at night—but the worm would certainly have gnawed my apple. It might have been a forgettable night. But . . .
     
    Be still my heart!
     
    The film that was showing at the Heights Theater on my seventh birthday, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, was a full-length animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town , produced by Max Fleischer, who had earlier dazzled me with Gulliver's Travels and three double-length Popeye cartoons in which that greatest of all salts had met Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, directed by his brother, Dave Fleischer who would, within the year, knock my socks off with Superman cartoons that are spectacular even today, close on half a century later. The perfect movie for a birthday boy who, in that time of greater innocence, had seen the three Disney feature-lengths, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia , and Pinocchio , and the Fleischer Bros.'s Gulliver's Travels , who was yet five months away from seeing Dumbo , who was living through the Golden Age of Animation, first-run, but didn't know it. The universe had selected the absolutely best choice for a movie to be seen at that special moment in my life. A nexus, a linch pin, a watershed; a turbid moment through which the dim future could be seen only vaguely; a branching of the path.
     
    We're talking here about an important moment, y'know?
     
    So I asked my parents, since they were going off to have dinner with friends, if they would drive me the few blocks to the Heights Theater, onaccounta it was my birthday and the Heights would let me in free onaccounta it was my birthday and they had this extra-special thing for kids who were having a birthday and once a year on their birthday they could see a movie for free and it was a cartoon movie, a special birthday coincidence treat that would mean a lot onaccounta it's my birth . . .
     
    It was dark outside already. It was evening. Which preceded night. I was seven years old. Go out at night , all alone, to sit in a movie theater by yourself , and how do you manage to come home those three deadly blocks, who'll come to get you, and what happens if you're kidnapped?
     
    I would have received a more kindly reception had I asked permission to go join the British forces defending the Suez Canal from Lieut. General Erwin Rommel's panzer Afrika Corps.
     
    It was decided on the spot, among my parents, grandparents and assorted relatives including Uncle Morrie, Aunt Babe, Aunt Alice and whoever Aunt Alice was dating at the time, that I would spend my birthday not in the animated embrace of the Fleischers and their gavotting grasshopper, but 'neath the sheets of the spare bedroom, trembling in expectation of the Lovecraftian horrors of beaks and feet.
     
    And so it came to pass that I was stripped to my underwear and placed in the bed, kissed goodnight at the fucking ridiculous hour of 6:00 (showtime was 7:00 at the Heights, the newspaper had advised), and urged to sleep tight with the usual admonition not to let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs, hell, I thought: beaks and feet, beaks and feet! The door was closed, I was left in darkness in a house whose only other inhabitants were a pair of Russian immigrants whose grand-parently bodies had been taken over by Aliens from the Kid-Hating Planet.
     
    It was then, in that half hour between being relegated to my bed of pain, and the leavetaking of my parents, that I Went Wrong.
     
    Previously, I had been the very model of a Horatio Alger child. Goodhearted, free-spirited, clean and neat; the only kid of my acquaintance who did not step on anthills or tie tin cans to puppy dog tails. But at that instant, lying there musing on the nature of the child-adult liaison, considering the state of the universe and only dimly beginning to understand the concept injustice . . . I was driven to a burgeoning sense