"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

tasting instead of pure chocolate, the thing is soft and soggy, it costs fifteen or twenty cents
instead of a decent, correct nickel, and they wrap it so you think it’s the same size it was
twenty years ago, only it isn’t; it’s slim and ugly and nasty-tasting and not worth a penny,
much less fifteen or twenty cents.
When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in
Buffalo, New York for two years. My father was going through “bad times” and Aunt Patricia
was very beautiful, and had married a stockbroker. They took care of me for two years. When
I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.

I was seven. Jeffty was still five. I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was
only seven.
When I was seven years old I used to lie on my stomach in front of our Atwater-Kent
radio and listen to swell stuff. I had tied the ground wire to the radiator, and I would lie there
with my coloring books and my Crayolas (when there were only sixteen colors in the big
box), and listen to the NBC red network: Jack Benny on the Jell-O Program, Amos ‘n’ Andy,
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the Chase and Sanborn Program, One Man’s
Family, First Nighter; the NBC blue network: Easy Aces, the Jergens Program with Walter
Winchell, Information Please, Death Valley Days; and best of all, the Mutual Network with
The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow and Quiet Please. Today, I turn on my car
radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal
housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show
hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and
they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
When I was fourteen years old, I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons and
a matinee was ten cents and they used real butter on the popcorn and I could always be sure
of seeing a western like Lash LaRue, or Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder with Bobby Blake as
Little Beaver, or Roy Rogers, or Johnny Mack Brown; a scary picture like House of Horrors
with Rondo Hat ton as the Strangler, or The Cat People, or The Mummy, or I Married a Witch
with Fredric March and Veronica Lake; plus an episode of a great serial like The Shadow with
Victor Jory, or Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon; and three cartoons; a James Fitzpatrick
TravelTalk; Movietone News; a sing-along and, if I stayed on till evening, Bingo or Keeno;
and free dishes. Today, I go to movies and see Clint Eastwood blowing people’s heads apart
like ripe cantaloupes.
At eighteen, I went to college. Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers,
to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was
something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years
old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town,
the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.
Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any
more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and
silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used
to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I
still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more,
only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again
smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last
thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to
throw their furniture out and bring in all new, color-coded borax every seven years. Records