AFTER THE BOMB, the last man on Earth wandered through the rubble of Cleveland, Ohio. It had never been a particularly jaunty town, nor even remotely appealing to esthetes. But now, like Detroit and Rangoon and Minsk and Yokohama, it had been reduced to a petulantly shattered tinkertoy of lathe and brickwork, twisted steel girders and melted glass.
As he picked his way around the dust heaps that had been the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in what had been Public Square, his eyes red-rimmed from crying at the loss of mankind, he saw something he had not seen in Beirut or Venice or London. He saw the movement of another human being.
Celestial choruses sang in his head as he broke into a run across the pitted and blasted remnants of Euclid Avenue. It was a woman!
She saw him, and in the very posture of her body, he knew she was filled with the same glory he felt. She knew! She began running toward him, her arms outstretched. They seemed to swim toward one another in a ballet of slow motion. He stumbled once, but got to his feet quickly and went on. They detoured around the crumpled tin of tortured metal that had once been automobiles, and met in front of the shattered carcass that was, in a time seemingly eons before, The May Co.
“I’m the last man!” he blurted. He could not keep the words inside, they frothed to emerge. “I’m the last, the very last. They’re all dead, everyone but us. I’m the last man, and you’re the last woman, and we’ll have to mate and start the race again, and this time we’ll do it right. No war, no hate, no bigotry, nothing but goodness…we’ll do it, you’ll see, it’ll be fine, a bright new shining world from all this death and terror.”
Her face lighted with an ethereal beauty, even beneath the soot and deprivation. “Yes, yes,” she said. “It’ll be just like that. I love you, because we’re all there is left to love, one another.”
He touched her hand. “I love you. What is your name?”
She flushed slightly. “Eve,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“George,” he said.
Two versions of the same story. One as the printed page, the other as shadow images across a television screen. When I first came out to The Coast in 1962, many of my friends mourned, “That’s the last we see of him in print.” They had swallowed the cliche myths hook, line and stinker. But as anyone can tell, from the 120,000 words I’ve written in just short stories alone in the past five years, it is not the town, nor its opulence, nor living well, nor working in a different medium, that ruins a writer. It is his own inability to get a handle on life. It killed Fitzgerald and Horace McCoy out here, but the town had very little to do with it. In fact, Hollywood offers some very special and invaluable assistance for a writer who works in the marketplace. It provides sufficient funds so he can live not merely well, but very well. (I do not think there is anything particularly noble, uplifiting or artistically enriching about being dirt-poor past a certain point. At first, it helps, because it brings a writer into close contact with his subject matter, with the world, and with the exigencies of reality. But by the time you hit thirty, you had better damned well be living like a mensch or you cannot in all good conscience call yourself a Bohemian. You are merely a seedy bum. As a corollary, it goes hand in hand: the better a writer gets at his craft, the more he sells; the more he sells, the better-known his name becomes; the better-known he becomes, the more money they give you, and the better you live. It isn’t always a yardstick for quality, but it helps.) Hollywood also brings recognition. I co-scripted a dreadful motion picture whose name I will not mention here, and if you saw it and were as nauseated as I was, then I extend my sincerest apologies for having contributed to something as dishonest and cheapjack as the epic in question. But even when the work is bad, the Great Unwashed learns about it, and a writer may find himself confronted—as I was—by the singular spectacle of his name ten feet high in Times Square. It is a heady wine. But the most important benefit Hollywood offers is an association with the visual medium, as exciting and demanding an arena as any open to a writer in our times. Many of my stories in magazines have been translated into scripts. Some of them work very nicely. The one that follows is an example. It was a statement of anti-war sentiments on my part, and when Hans Stefan Santesson originally bought it for Fantastic Universe in 1957, he gave me ninety-one dollars for it. That was a pile of money for me at the time. In 1964 when I rewrote and adapted the story for television, I received five thousand dollars. Times change, media change, but my beliefs about the senseless stupidity of war remain unchanged. Though I served my two years in the Army, were I to be called up now, I would refuse to serve. I’m afraid I would have to go to jail like Tommy Rodd, a boy I’ve never met, but for whom I feel great brotherhood. He literally follows the philosophy of Thoreau that “he serves the State best who opposes it the most.” Were I in his position, I would try to be as heroic, as brave. But as I am not, the best I can do is sit on my fat ass, write my stories, take their five grand, and hope that out there in Knobtwiddlesville The Great Unwashed who would shriek in horror if two lovely people fornicated with pleasure on their TV screen, but who purr with patriotic delight when their sons are decorated in Viet Nam for miscalculating and dropping “a little defoliation” on US troops or amber-skinned babies in schoolyards, will one day soon come to their senses, rise up in their wrath, and send all the face-saving politicians scuttling to their holes rather than allow them to continue senseless warfare in remote corners of a globe that has come to think of us in terms of atrocities and aggression. Some of this I tried to say in the story and teleplay that follow. But for those who need ready categorizations to ignore the unsettling remarks of others, I am not now nor have I ever been anything Robert Welch and his Birchies would consider subversive. I’m just a guy like many out there, who has come to maturity realizing God ain’t necessarily on our side. In point of fact, I don’t think he can ever be on the side of the