Read Online One More for the Road by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page B

Internationally famed? That ain’t enough, you got to be sober , too?”
    â€œWe’re all so famous now,” said Willis, “and loved and accepted, it has filled me up. I’m so full of fame there’s no room for drink.”
    â€œ Make room!” yelled Aaron. “ Make room!”
    â€œIronic, huh?” said Willis. “Once I drank because I felt I was nobody. Now, if I quit, the whole studio falls down. I’m sorry.”
    â€œYou can’t break your contract!” I said.
    Willis looked as if I had stabbed him.
    â€œI wouldn’t dream of breaking my word. But where does it say in plain English in the contract I got to be a drunk to work for you?”
    My tiny shoulders sagged. Aaron’s tiny shoulders sagged.
    Willis finished gently.
    â€œI’ll go on working for you, always. But you know, and I know, sober it won’t be the same.”
    â€œWillis.” Aaron sank into a chair and, after a long and private agony, went on. “Just one night a year?”
    â€œThe Pledge, Mr. Stollitz. Not a drop, not once a year, even for dear and beloved friends.”
    â€œHoly Moses,” said Aaron.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “We’re halfway across the Red Sea. And here come the waves.”
    When we glanced up again, Willis Hornbeck was gone.
    It was indeed the twilight of the gods. We had been turned back into mice. We sat awhile, squeaking gently. Then Aaron got up and circled the liquor cabinet. He put out his hand to touch it.
    â€œAaron,” I said. “You’re not going to …?”
    â€œWhat?” said Aaron. “Cut and edit our next avant-garde epic, Sweet Beds of Revenge ?” He seized and opened a bottle. He swigged. “All by myself? Yes!”
    No.
    The dead rocket fell out of the sky. The gods knew not only twilight but also that awful sleepless three o’clock in the morn when death improves on circumstance.
    Aaron tried drinking. I tried drinking. Aaron’s brother-in-law tried drinking.
    But, look, none of us had the euphoric muse which once walked with Willis Hornbeck. In none of us did the small worm of intuition stir when alcohol hit our blood. Bums sober, we were bums drunk. But Willis Hornbeck drunk was almost everything the critics claimed, a wildman who blind-wrestled creativity in a snake pit, who fought an inspired alligator in a crystal tank for all to see, and sublimely won.
    Oh, sure, Aaron and I bulled our way through a few more film festivals. We sank all our profits in three more epics, but you smelled the change when the titles hit the screen. Hasurai Films folded. We sold our whole package to educational TV.
    Willis Hornbeck? He lives in a Monterey Park tract house, goes to Sunday school with his kids, and only occasionally is reminded of the maggot of genius buried in him when a critic from Glasgow or Paris strays by to chat for an hour, finds Willis a kindly but sober bore, and departs in haste.
    Aaron and me? We got this little shoe-box studio thirty feet closer to that graveyard wall. We make little pictures and profits to match and still edit them in twenty-four reels and hit previews around greater California and Mexico, smash and grab. There are three hundred theaters within striking distance. That’s three hundred projectionists. So far, we have previewed our monsters in 120 of them. And still, on warm nights like tonight, we sweat and wait and pray for things like this to happen: The phone rings. Aaron answers and yells: “Quick! The Arcadia Barcelona Theater needs a preview. Jump!”
    And down the stairs and past the graveyard we trot, our little arms full of film, always laughing, always running toward that future where somewhere another projectionist waits behind some locked projection-room door, bottle in hand, a look of unraveled genius in his red eye, a great blind worm in his soul waiting to be kissed awake.
    â€œWait!” I cry, as our car rockets down the