LARRY TRITTEN

PAINBIRD, PAINBIRD, FLY AWAY HOME

a Harlan Ellison parody

We surveyed a number of experts to see whether they could tell the difference
between this parody and the real thing. Four out of five of them said, "What are
you, crazy?" The fifth one said, "Do you really think this story' s funny? It
doesn't sound at all like me." With such overwhelming survey results, we simply
couldn't resist.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING was written either while I was taking a shower in a
Holiday Inn in Milford, Pennsylvania, or in an attempt to top a memorably
original fortune cookie after dinner at the Shanghai Winter Garden on Wilshire;
I can't remember which -- my mind was a little muddled from a hectic week that 
had included writing a Hollywood horror story for Buzz Magazine (I Have No
Residuals and I Must Scream); finishing the novellength introduction to my 55th
collection of short stories (The Saltimbanque Who Shouted, "Love Ain't Nothing
but a Term from Tennis Meaning a Score of Zero," at the Heart of the Universe);
making an appearance as a heckler at a Star Trek convention; and revising my
epitaph (namely cutting three thousand admittedly extraneous words and changing
it from the third to the first person for a greater sense of immediacy). In any
case, someone had either bet me that I couldn't write a story in the shower
before the hot water ran out or in a Chinese restaurant before the tea got cold,
and my memory is that I won the bet by several degrees. An interesting footnote
is that the story has been optioned by L.Q. Jones, who plans on turning it into
a commercial for Hartz Mountain.
Harlan Ellison

Grossiter, though he was in the purest and most precise sense the cause of it
all, should perhaps not be blamed. At least there was no malice in Grossiter,
that much must be conceded. Call him a scuttlefish, wouldbe macher, blind
scrabbler after the world's softest velvets and thickest gravies, neo-Barmecide,
dollar-digging money mole. Grossiter was a flack, with a flack's nose for the
fragrance of gelt. A shuffling hustler with one eye always on the ground on the
lookout for the purse of Fortunatus, the other canted toward the horizon in
search of Eldorado. Nobody blames a fish for being wet or a wolf for bolting 
carrion or a shadow for tagging along. Grossiter was a flack, and as such would
have been right at home in the middle of a squadron of B- 17s over Regensburg in
1944. Like Charley said at Willy Loman's funeral, "Nobody dast blame this man."
Grossiter had to hustle, it came with the psychic territory.

Three miles from Palm Springs, in the desert, on a night as clear as the
cellophane candy cigarettes used to come in, stars as bright as cheap costume
jewelry lighting the inky skydepths, Grossiter, high on a mix of sensimilla and
Johnnie Walker Red, parked his Drambuie-colored Audi Cabriolet, wandered off
into the chilly roadside wastes to pay his respect to Undine, and found it.

IT.

That was prologue.

It was madder scarlet in color, as pleasantly resilient as the inner thigh of
the most mesmeric odalisque in a suhan's seraglio, and made a sound like a sick
horse's whinny played backwards on a lopsided antique Akai.

And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them all around him in
the desert.

It was...weird. It wasn't a rock. Wasn't animal, vegetable, or mineral, as
nearly as Grossiter could perceive. But he knew he had something. Some...thing.

He took it back to his bachelor pad bungalow off the Strip, put it on a copy of
The Hollywood Reporter on a table between an empty tequila bottle and a detritus
of grease-sheened Jack-in-the-Box fries bags. And struck a pose like Rodin' s
Thinker.

The thing looked good, made him smile. He had a deep dish hunch it would sell.

Grossiter asked himself why it would sell, and came up with the answer. Pet
Rocks. Or, to put it another way, as the Blonde Beast of Baltimore, Henry Louis
Mencken, once aptly observed, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the
intelligence of the American public." Grossiter sensed that it would sell. And
would line the pockets of his Ralph Lauren sport coat with portraits of Benjamin
Franklin.

What he didn't know was: that's the way They had planned it. 

Grossiter returned to the desert with six vans and a work crew, gathered up
thousands of the things, and took them back to L.A. He made several more trips.
He kept the things in a warehouse in the Valley while he developed his plan:
hired an artist who used to work for Big Daddy Roth to design an eyesnaring logo
for the product (one with the words Astral Egg in fat pink letters, a design as
enticing as that of a vintage Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies box); swung a deal to
have them distributed in 1,345 novelty shops and toy stores, 839 head shops, and
649 pomo stores between Malibu and Jones Beach. The wheels were turning.

Grossiter didn't know, of course, that he was being watched.

By eyes on stalks from a bialy-shaped spacecraft just beyond the ionosphere.

One of the creatures, who looked like a cross between Michigan J. Frog and a
Shih-Tzu, said, "Zug Z'ag zoomar bryn mawr, snafu xx[2]?" Meaning, "Is it all
going according to the plan?

Another assured it that everything was ducky, they were just a hop, shtup, and
slither from total success.

And: an America that had grown up loving the trivial and the faddish and the
whimsical, gimcrackery and fol de rol, trinkets and trumpery, an America with an
aberrant sense of wonder, that had been primed for decades by vegetable-dye
tattoos, ever-dipping birds, magnetic Scotties, 3D films and Slinkies, that had
been conditioned by generations of Crackerjack prizes, magic eight bails and
Rubik's Cubes, breakfast cereal gewgaws, Pet Rocks and happy faces, Big MACs and
Whoppers, a junk-conscious America bought Astral Eggs as if they were the
hottest thing since sliced challah.

The country was titillated, captivated, mystified, and enthralled by the Astral 
Egg. Touch it, it rocked, oscillated, chittered, whumpffed, chortled, changed
shape, seemed to emanate a subliminal sound of music --A Brahms lullaby, The
Spice Girls, or Johnny Pulleo and the Harmonicats depending on who was
listening. It was more fun than the silliest Putty. No scientist or
phenomenologist or mystic could figure out what it was, or why, where it had
originated, or how -- but nobody seemed to mind, since it was more fun than a
barrel of monkeys wearing baseball caps backward.

The President had one on his desk in the Oval Office. Larry Flynt bought one for
every judge in Ohio. Paloma Picasso had one and said it reminded her of Man With
a Lollipop. Both the Mayo Clinic and Andrew Weil prescribed them
therapeutically.. Stephen Hawking had two. The Reverend Horton Heat gave them
out free at concerts. Letterman gave them to audience members instead of canned
hams. Barney touted them. Paul Prudhomme tried to eat his.

They sold out. Making Grossiter rich beyond his wildest dreams. And he had once
dreamed that he was so wealthy he had a money bin whose depth gauge topped
Scrooge McDuck's.

Grossiter made the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Roiling Stone, and was invited
to dinner by Donald Trump, whose hesitation when the check arrived made it clear
that he expected Grossiter to pick it up. Women followed him at a lope. He went
around feeling like the Babe after that time he'd pointed to the outfield and
slammed one out of the park.

And, finally, the eggs started to hatch. And the painbirds emerged.

Swarms and flocks of painbirds everywhere. From the Golden Gate to Ellis Island 
the painbirds soared en masse over the country, disseminating pain. And death.
They looked a little like blood-red Fokker triplanes, with bright bituminous
eyes like Iron Crosses, talons as sharp as a Rodney Dangerfield one-liner.
Soaring. In squadrons. Oil-bright birds with lucent vermilion feathers and
fierce little beaks harboring rows of teeth like amber glass. And they had a
temper like a pit bull with a thom in its paw.

The last to die were two winos coming up from the sewer tunnels of L.A. after a
weekend with a case of cinnamon schnapps. More birds than Audubon or Hitchcock
could have imagined descended, dark clouds of them, teeth like razors, flashing
eyes aglint. Blackness. Finality.

The ship landed the next day in front of the Frederick's of Hollywood on
Hollywood Boulevard and the aliens called off the birds, which were taken to
thousands of golden cages inside the craft where they trilled with carnivorous
contentment with blood dripping from their beaks while teams went forth and
pillaged the city, taking all of the cigarettes and ash trays, cans of shaving
cream, packages of condoms and chewing gum, jigsaw puzzles and cubes of pool cue 

chalk they could find. They were just beginning and would work their way
eastward.

It promised to be the best haul they'd ever made.

Thanks to Grossiter. Flack. Klutz. Schlemiel.