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Los Angeles, California The wizard is old. Maybe eternal is a better word. Eighty-seven is only a chronological number. He mostly sits now, solidly built, his hair thick and white and shaggy framing his sorcerer's face. To look at Ray Bradbury now is to peer into the eyes of Merlin, Ray's brother wizard. Not really human Merlin but something else again. Is that also Bradbury? The two magicians have a piercing, almost preternatural vision into the future, the human soul. A vision wizards share. Bradbury views his suitors from a throne that only seems a wheelchair and sees into them to the very essence that makes up their bones and that easily bartered soul. The diabetes has gone to Ray's feet, and that makes it tough for him to walk or stand. His wizard's chair on wheels is convenient in crowds, but when he needs to stand, he does so and moves about. It takes a walker, but Bradbury is the pilot. Eighty-seven, and there's a new novel and two new plays. He is stronger than you know. He is a force. Then there are the tattoos, the illustrations. In The Illustrated Man," Bradbury weaves his stories around a central story. A wayfarer, and we are all wayfarers, comes at evening, upon a man completely covered by tattoos all done in a single, enchanted night by a gnarled old woman who, on second sight, becomes a fatally beautiful, beguiling, irresistible witch. A witch from the future who could travel through time. The buzzing and hum of her needles as they danced, across his skin making him something else again. And through the night the wayfarer sits transfixed, the images comprising the tattoos quivering, shimmering, springing to life and, in telling their tales, tell the future. Fearfully and inevitably so. And there is indeed an Illustrated Man, and he is Bradbury and always has been.  The tattooed Rod Steiger starred in The Illustrated Man. Ray Bradbury came to be on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He would – by way of Tucson – come to California and Los Angeles, science fictions of their own. But not until Mr. Electrico told him who he was. There was a dark moment. Ray's uncle was murdered in a mugging. Bradbury, 12 at the time, was driving with his father to the wake when, down the slope of the road, the boy spotted a carnival sideshow on the outskirts of Waukegan. He burst from the car careening down the slope. Although they had never met, "I knew Mr. Electrico was waiting for me," says Bradbury today. Mr. Electrico could tolerate strong surges of electricity through his body, throwing lightning like bolts from finger to finger, hand to hand, ear to ear even, bouncing a few off his tongue. And what Electrico told the young and still latent warlock would set the course of his life. He informed the boy that he, the boy, was a presence, and that they had known each other in a previous time and had been fast friends. Electrico's best friend fell at the Battle Of Verdun in 1918. The electric man told the boy to live forever creating images of truth, dark and light, and, always, endless possibilities. Then Electrico introduced the boy to the unusual ones, those that were something else. The little people, dwarfs as it were, the fat lady and behold, the tattooed man. And as the young Ray walked home through the now dark, shuttered side show, he saw into the shadowy images. Saw them live and move. The young wizard had begun to cogitate. The following Christmas, in Tucson, Ray was given a typewriter on which he wrote his first stories. He would, thereafter, write everyday of his life. And his body of work seems as endless as the horizon. Fifty books from Martian Chronicles, which first got everyone's attention, to Illustrated Man, which established Bradbury among the greats of his genre, to Fahrenheit 451, which many consider Bradbury's seminal work utterly condemning censorship and fascism and predicting the mass hypnosis television would bring. There's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which came from Dark Carnival the first published collection in 1947. Dandelion Wine and its sequel, the new book, Farewell Summer with yet another new novel, Somewhere A Band Is Playing, came next. This one, coming in July, was originally intended for Ray's great friend, the late Katherine Hepburn. He wrote short stories so numerous they could ring the planet. There's Bradbury's work in the sci-fi comic books of the 1950s. There are screenplays he doctored anonymously for half the horror films you could name –the studios, all the while, telling Bradbury he did not know how to write for the screen. John Huston muscled Ray and the Writers Guild for co writer's credit for Moby Dick. But it was the prestidigitator on his own, and Bradbury will tell you this, who morphed himself into Melville, and perceiving the connection between the novel and Shakespeare's Richard III, bestowed life upon the whale, The Pequod, and her crew. The grizzly scene of the dead, destroyed Ahab, lashed by harpoon ropes to the whale, his flailing, unbound arm beckoning the doomed crew to follow is nowhere to be found in the novel. It was Bradbury's conception and melding with Melville, together they found more.
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