Drunk on writing

Very, very sad news of the death of Ray Bradbury Tuesday. He was 91.

Of course all the headlines refer to him as a science fiction writer, but to me he was much more. He was a writer, a wonderful spinner of tales, a word magician. A lot of his stories were set in the future or on other planets, but at their core, they were quintessentially human fables.

Every few years I haul out my copy of Zen and the Art of Writing and am inspired all over again. Bradbury had a way of making you feel connected. He told the story about writing Fahrenheit 451: he did it in the basement of the UCLA library, where you could rent a typewriter for $.10 per half-hour. It cost him $9.80 and took him nine days.

I met him twice.

Well—perhaps met is too strong a term.

He spoke at a science symposium I attended in high school—we were bussed across LA to a TRW campus to hear all sorts of speakers. I don’t recall exactly what his topic was, but I’ll never forget him telling us about being picked up by Beverley Hills cops for engaging in very suspicious activity: he’d been walking in his neighborhood. At night.

Then again, in the 1980s, he attended a screening of a Chuck Fries film (Terror at London Bridge, if you have to know; starring David Hasselhoff. LA’s a strange place, and the film industry is even stranger). My friend and I saw him after the show and introduced ourselves because, well, he was there, and we could. He was waiting for someone to give him a ride home.

I wanted to smack myself later, because we could have offered to give him a lift; he’d probably have accepted. He was that kind of guy—gentle, generous and amiable.

Here’s the true memorial for Bradbury: go to any publication’s obit for him and trawl through the comments. You won’t find anyone who wasn’t touched by his magic, or who has anything but respect, admiration and affection for him as a writer or a human.

I'll let Ray Bradbury have the last words on this:

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."