Ray Bradbury was a peculiar soul, as well as a brilliant writer. I remember sitting in the hospital with Melissa, just after Will was born in April of 1990, and the television there was on some obscure channel showing an interview with Bradbury. The noted author made an incredible claim: he had a perfect photographic memory...he even remembered being born! Whether he was just joking or not, I'll never know...but I wonder what life would be like for someone like that. In any event, I've read a lot of his works, notably Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and a plethora of short stories. One of them, The Man Upstairs, from 1947, appeared in the 1955 collection titled The October Country (Ballantine Books). In it, the reader is once again drawn to Bradbury's familiar Midwestern small town setting in the late 1920s with the protagonist being a little boy...
The story's title refers to a mysterious, exacting, and sullen man who arrives to rent out a room at the boarding house run by young Douglas's grandparents. The boy takes an instant disliking to this new interloper in his life and goes out of his way to antagonize him as much as possible. Douglas never was squeamish by any stretch of the imagination, so he was delighted to watch his grandmother work on preparing a chicken for roasting, first by reaching in and removing its internal organs, and then putting in the bread stuffing. Now what does a mysterious new resident in town have to do with the innards of a chicken? Leave it to Ray Bradbury to provide the pretty disturbing answer...
There were two main reactions I got from this story: one was that each of us is at a particular spot on the "squeamishness" scale, on one end impervious to any kind of gore or exposure to biological waste or decay...and on the other end prone to nausea just thinking or reading about these types of things. I'm a little on the side of being too sensitive...and even writing or speaking about this subject makes me a bit uneasy. On the other hand, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King seem to have no problem at all with it, easily conjuring up all sorts of distasteful images in their stories. My second reaction to The Man Upstairs is how easy it is to feel alienation and unacceptance within one's society...both in a general sense as well as in various specific situations. When you're the odd man out, as was the antagonist in this story...well, you're "strange", like in that old Doors hit single. It seems that one of the needs of social groups is to have a convenient outcast at hand, someone to berate and ostracize for being "different", serving in a perverse way to bond the others within the group closer...it makes it all the easier if the scapegoat has no interest in being accepted by anyone else...
The Man Upstairs is available for you to read...just click on the following link: [link]
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