BLOOD'S A ROVER (2018) by Harlan Ellison

I waited 43 years for Harlan Ellison's final story set in the post-apocalyptic America on his award-winning novella A BOY AND HIS DOG, prequel EGGSUCKER, and third installment, RUN, SPOT, RUN, and now that I have finally read BLOOD'S A ROVER, I have to say that in no way was it worth the wait. Since the book was published in two pricey versions, the expense of which renders it out of reach to most (I got mine for relatively cheap after years of waiting for it to come down considerably in price in eBay), I will tell you what happens in that final story.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT FORWARD

When last we saw our protagonists, in RUN, SPOT, RUN, 15-year-old human Vic, guilt-ridden over what he chose to do to save his telepathic dog Blood's life, loses his mind and wanders into a nest of giant mutant spiders. When the spiders wrap Vic in webbing for a future meal, Blood has no chance of fighting them off and saving Vic, so, realist that he is, the dog runs off and leaves Vic to be devoured, his heart broken over abandoning his best friend. BLOOD'S A ROVER opens with a female solo — the term for unaffiliated survivors in the post-apocalyptic landscape — named Spike meeting Blood, with whom she can communicate mind-to-mind, and the hungry dog offers to partner with her and teach her his wise survival lessons and strategies in exchange for food and companionship. Striking up a wary alliance, the pair encounters another solo who tells them of a legendary facility unearthed when the burying sands of WWIV subsided, a place of seemingly limited food and all manner of useful goods. A fabled place called... Walmart. Skeptical at first, Blood notes that everyone thought Atlantis was a myth until its ruins rose after the nuclear wars, so why not see if the random solo's tale of the fabled Walmart is true?

Blood and Spike head off in the direction indicated by the solo, and they soon find that Walmart does exist. The problem is that its existence is known to several camped-out packs of Rovers, vicious survivors who all want to claim the store's cornucopia for themselves, and they won't hesitate to kill anyone who tries to cross the no man's land between their encampments and the super-store. As Blood and Spike try to figure out how to get past the Rovers and help themselves to the store's bounty, another solo arrives behind them. It's Vic, who has somehow escaped ending up as tomorrow's spider shit, and he is none too pleased to find that he has spent the past two months looking for Blood and happening to find him staking out the Walmart. Vic and Spike hate each other on sight and Vic immediately tries to rape her, assuming "You're a chick. You musta been passed around." However, he swiftly finds out that Spike has survived on her own as a female in a world where women are mercilessly preyed upon and usually murdered after they have been "used," staying alive and maintaining her virginity by having a mean streak a mile wide, being a dab hand with weapons, and possessing savage hand-to-hand combat skills. She outclasses Vic by a wide margin, so after getting his ass handed to him by her in no uncertain terms, Vic, though hurt by what he sees as betrayal by Blood, agrees to play nice. The three team up and, acting on a plan of Blood's, plot how to obtain their mutual objective and get past the trigger-happy Roverpacks. And among the Roverpacks is one headed by the cruel, aging, flamboyant pedophile Fellini, whose hatred for Vic stems from encounters chronicled in previous stories.

All of that could be a workable idea, but rather than really flesh it out as a prose novella, Ellison instead crafted it as a screenplay for a TV series pilot. BLOOD'S A ROVER is that script, complete with standard script notes on shots and descriptions of characters and locations. It reads like a dumbed-down version of the previously seen setting, which makes sense as it would have initially been pitched for network television back when there were only three major networks, and while the familiar style of the snarky banter between the learned and erudite Blood and the impulsive and hormone-driven Vic is present, it comes off as little better than something one would see in a standard sitcom. Spike is not much of a character, though there was potential for her to be better developed as the series that never was progressed, but here she's just a survival gal with a pilfered laser rifle with a dying power source.

My biggest gripe about it how Vic just shows up with zero explanation of how he managed to break free of the giant spiders' web wrapping, escape, regain his shattered sanity, and track Blood. Harlan was a great writer, but the way the return of Vic was handled is incredibly sloppy. I don't know if the contract for the book stipulated Ellison having final edit or zero editorial oversight whatsoever, but that aspect and, if I'm being honest, the rest of the story were in sore need of perhaps one or two more drafts. I'm glad I finally got to read it, but BLOOD'S A ROVER is a majorly disappointing way to receive one final dose of Vic and Blood. And the story remains un-resolved, leaving things wide open for further adventures in a weekly TV format.

That said, at least the book is a nice edition (featuring a cover by the legendary Richard Corben) that includes the previous Vic and Blood stories, which vary in quality though all are solid. EGGSUCKER is an hilarious day-in-the-life yarn, and the award-winning novella, A BOY AND HIS DOG, is a bona fide classic, perhaps Ellison's biggest hit and most accessible work to the general readership, and it deserved the superb (and controversial) film adaptation it received in 1975, starring a young Don Johnson as Vic, and Tiger, late of THE BRADY BUNCH, as Blood, and voiced by Tim McIntyre. RUN, SPOT, RUN is the lesser of the original three, but still a good tale that leaves off with a hell of a cliffhanger. Too bad the wait of over four decades to find out what happened next was clearly naught but a cash grab from a great author who sadly phoned it in toward the end of his illustrious career.

A COLLECTION GOAL ACHIEVED

After first hearing about its imminent publication some 43 years ago, I eagerly awaited the release of Harlan Ellison's BLOOD'S A ROVER, which would collect all of the existing post-apocalyptic stories of A Boy and His Dog, plus a screenplay that takes up where the last of the previous three tales left off. Well, it took until 2018 for the book to finally come out, perhaps due to Harlan holding out in hope of selling the script for a TV series or a movie, and when it finally came out it was issued as an expensive limited edition that I could not afford. Nonetheless, I diligently checked eBay for six years in hope of lucking into an affordable copy, and just last week my patience finally paid off. I snagged a library copy for considerably less than the book usually lists for — for a long while the average price for a copy was between $100-$150, and sometimes a lot higher — and it just arrived in today's mail.

Though I have read the first three stories many, many times over the past four decades, even getting my copy of the the book containing the original novella signed by Harlan himself, I will approach this complete edition as though I had never read any of the Vic and Blood yarns, so my first reading of the final story, the screenplay "Blood's A Rover," will be that much sweeter. The third story, "Run, Spot, Run," ends on a particularly bleak cliffhanger, and I have waited 43 years to discover what becomes of Blood, the brilliant telepathic dog, now that he's on his own. I just hope the screenplay is worth the wait.

CHICKEN WITH A SIDE ORDER OF BLEAKNESS

                                                       The site of this afternoon's incident.

An unfortunate aspect of the fast food restaurants in Sunset Park is that many of them are used as convenient shelter where the local homeless/junkies/hardcore alcoholics go to sleep it off or beg. Nearly every time I’ve dined in one, I have either been accosted for money or found myself seated next to some poor bastard who’s fighting a losing battle with consciousness and gravity. 

Today I went to Texas Chicken and Burgers (aka Tex's) for lunch and ended up catty-cornered to a Latin guy who was clearly passed out, and he was slowly oozing off of his seat. 

 

I took his picture to provide an example for my ongoing NYC life document, but not ten seconds after I snapped the pic, he fell face first to the floor with a heavy thud. 

 

There were only two other customers present and only one other witness, and I was the first to make it to the counter to alert the staff. Unfortunately the staff mostly doesn’t speak English (the only English that most of them know is what’s on the menu), so I had to coax out staffers using gestures. Two of them came out and immediately got what was going on, so they called for emergency assistance and then carried on like nothing had happened, probably because this kind of thing is a common occurrence during their average work day. Meanwhile, the guy just lay there on the floor and the other patrons simply ignored him. 

After about ten minutes an ambulance arrived and out stepped two bored-looking EMTs, an Asian woman and a Latino man. While the woman took notes, the man attempted to rouse the guy who was passed out on the floor. Speaking to him in Spanish and rolling him over twice did nothing, so the male EMT asked me if the guy was drunk or high. I told him he had been doing the classic junkie nod-and-lean, so I’d bet good money that he was smacked-out. With that information in mind, the EMT lightly slapped the guy around while continuing to address him in Spanish. The guy slowly roused and was groggily helped to his feet, where he wobbled and nearly fell on top of me. Once more or less steady on his feet, the guy was asked a series of simple questions before he was determined to be okay, and once cleared the staff ushered him outside and back into the streets of Sunset Park.

A FORMER DOMICILE

As seen on the convoluted route home from dialysis on Friday: 50 Ocean Parkway, the building where Glenn Greenberg and I shared an apartment between 1995 and 1997. I pass it on the highway every morning and can see it, but it's always too far away to photograph. This was taken from inside the Masada car as we passed by it. I was the only person of color in the building and maybe even the neighborhood, and I often got the suspicious side-eye from the locals.

Worst of all were the Russians who lived in the building. One day when I was coming home loaded down with groceries, I waited for the lobby's elevator, and when it opened a Russian woman and her daughter stepped out. The mother's eyes went wide when she saw me, she covered her child's eyes as she hastily herded her out into the lobby. All the while she dressed me down in Russian, which I could not understand. Upon making it into out apartment, as I put the groceries away I told Glenn of what had occurred. Suddenly, our doorbell rang and Glenn went to answer it. He called to me and said "It's for you" with a note of confusion in his voice. I went to the door and it was the Russian woman, only this time she had brought several people whom I assume were several members of her family. She pointed at me and again let fly with a torrent of Russian, and from the context I gathered that she was a neighbor on our floor and that she was pointing out both me and where I lived for the benefit of her kinfolk. It was a stretch to think that she had some sort of magical Russian negro-detecting sense, because she did not follow me in the elevator, so I guess she must have previously observed me coming and going through her apartment's peephole. Anyway, I never saw her again, which was no loss whatsoever.

I wonder what the neighborhood is like now. It was the kind of neighborhood where everything closed by 9pm, even the local conveniences stores/bodegas, so there was pretty much nothing to do there after the sun went down And from the look of it, I think the old video rental place is long gone, which leads me to wonder what became of its owner. He was a stereotypically flaming older guy who attempted to cruise me whenever I was in there. Good VHS rental place, though. It had a lot of hard-to-find out-of-print items, and it. was where I first saw and fell in love with SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975).

AS SEEN DURING LUNCH AT THE POPEYE'S CHICKEN AND BISCUITS IN SUNSET PARK

The esteemed Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn's sunset Park. My fast food chicken joint of choice for the past couple of years.

Today I had a craving for my first lunch at the Chinese-run Popeyes in Sunset Park, so I hauled my ass down there via the B63 MTA bus. As I enjoyed my meal, I looked around the eatery's interior, as I always do, and today I saw two times of interest. First was this sign on the wall.

 What incident prompted the need for this placard?

And then, as I readied to leave, I noticed this on the floor beneath the table where I had enjoyed my lunch. 

 

Please pardon my ignorance, but is that a crack pipe?

MORE RECORD ARCHAEOLOGY

To give you an idea of what I as being programmed with during my formative years, at age 5 my mother gave me not the Pufnstuf soundtrack, but a knockoff cover album by a Christian group. The content is no different from that on the original soundtrack, and some filler material is added to pad out the run time, but there's nothing in the original that would be considered offensive or blasphemous, so why re-record it? My guess is that they did it so they could tone down the more agressive/psychedelic sounds of the relatively far more heavy-sounding musicianship on the original. This album is an example of white people white-a-tizing their own music, and the result is as bland as skim milk diluted with tap water.

When I pointed out that this was not the real Pufnstuf album but rather a "fake," my mother dug her heels in and insisted "It's better for you." After enduring it one time too many, I managed to trade my copy for the real thing. The older sister of a neighborhood playmate collected bad albums and needed a copy, so she traded me for the real one. The real one has Mama Cass's "Different," which was an early anthem for me. Anyway, this album displays all the worst elements found in children's records, and it preserved, track-by-track, on YouTube. I had not heard it since early 1972, and it was just as weak as I remembered.

A SHOW OF LOVE FROM DOWN UNDER

Upon arriving home from treatment — over two hours after I was released — the day's mail contained this unexpected show of love from my niece Indira, Indi for short, and it made my entire week. She lives in Australia, so I only get to see her face-to-face once every few years, and she is growing into a teenager who inherited her New Yorker mother's sweetness and beauty. She's terrific and I wish I could see her (and her brothers and mother) more often. That said, this letter was a tonic, and I will cherish it forever. 

 

 

NOT TONIGHT, I'M ON MY PYRAMID

Once again I cannot sleep, a state brought about by general anxiety over my nearly 91-year-old mother's dwindling health and the endlessness of kidney failure/dialysis and by the fact that insomnia is just one of the many possible side-effects of the illness. I tried using Melatonin tonight but it did not work, so I lay awake staring at the ceiling, alone in my head with my thoughts. I finally gave up trying to sleep and instead sought a long, boring movie to hopefully lull me to sleep. I chose CLEOPATRA (1963), the legendary ultra-expensive Liz Taylor epic whose box office failure nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. 

I saw CLEOPATRA in bits and pieces during my adolescence, when it used to run divided into parts over five days on The 4:30 Movie in the '70's, but I had never watched it from start to finish, and without commercials. Seeing it while under the thumb of insomnia as I have several hours to go until I must get out of bed, dress, and await pickup for dialysis affords me a new and interesting perspective on it. Yes, it's ridiculously bloated at over four hours, but it's not as dull nor as camp as its infamy suggests or as I remembered it being. It's lavish to the point where the budget practically pours off of the screen, and that extravagance makes it a festival of eye candy. Sure, the dialogue is often stilted, but that was, and frankly still is, par for the course with Hollywood historical epics, and at least it has a huge cast of top-shelf actors to deliver it. With that taken into consideration, I don't buy Liz Taylor as the very Ptolemaic Cleopatra from a visual standpoint (translation: she does not work as an inbred ethnic Greek; way too white), but she wears the gorgeous costumes quite fetchingly and delivers the queen's unflappable arrogance as easy as breathing. (Perhaps expressing more than a little of her own personality.) 

Anyway, I do not find CLEOPATRA to be anywhere near as bad as contemporary reviews and most opinions of it popularly espouse. It's simply the last huge Hollywood epic of the classic era, bigger than most, but also no worse than many. If you ask me, its only real crime was being an exorbitant flop, and critics and the audience always love to dog pile on a loser when it's down. For me the bottom line is that it's saving my sanity during my latest bout of inability to sleep, and for that I am most grateful to it. 

That said, it's back to ancient times with Liz and Dick...

OPEN CHANNEL D

 

It’s time for POP CULTURE ARCHAEOLOGY WITH GRANDPA BUNCHE!

While making today’s breakfast, I watched a YouTube article where a mother who’s a bit older than me watches classic TV shows with her 30-something son and they discuss them from the perspective of seeing them during original air versus watching them from the perspective of someone born well after the fact. Today’s subject for examination was THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E, which was easily the biggest ’60’s super-spy item this side of 007 at the time, and definitely the most popular of the wave of Bond imitators that flooded the airwaves during that era (though most of the other Bond wannabes crashed and burned quickly, even U.N.C.L.E.’s terrible spinoff, THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E, starring a young Stephanie Powers). (It should also be noted that the only other spy shows of the ’60’s that did as well in the ratings were THE AVENGERS, an imprt that was picked up by ABC, and IT TAKES A THIEF, which was terrific but for some reason is all but forgotten today.)

So, inspired by the discussion of U.N.C.L.E. and my clear memories of it — I had dodgy bootlegs of it via the Union Square Nazi maybe a decade ago, so it’s fresh in my mind —  thinking of snagging the boxed set of Season 2 of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (hands down the best that series had to offer) but it was only available as individual seasons on Region 2.  I personally have no problem with foreign discs, as I have an all-regions player, but I like to own as much as possible on Region 1 so I can lend to my friends. 

Anyway, I remembered that the only way the show was available on home video in the States was as either a handful of VHS tapes that cherry-picked two episodes per tape (I had a couple of them during my VHS phase) or as a fancy complete series set that came in a metal briefcase. The latter was great for completists, but what most don't recall about THE MAN FROM U..N.C.L.E. is that though it lasted for four seasons (and a terrible reunion TV movie fifteen years later) and had two memorable protagonists, the overall series simply wasn't that good. 

The first season was decent, as it was American TV's first attempt at aping the James Bond formula (the series debuted after the release of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and just a few months before GOLDFINGER, with the latter being where the '60's super-spy mania was ignited), but the show was still little more than an obvious Bond knockoff with the sex and violence toned down for primetime viewing. Season 2 saw the show moving to color, which truly brought it to life, but the showrunners also made the series' tongue-in-cheek aspects more overt, but that was okay because it worked. For my money, Season 2 is all that the casual viewer with an interest in '60's spy pop culture needs to bother with.

Then, halfway through Season 2, BATMAN premiered and instantly became a pop culture phenomenon that ushered in “camp” as the new big thing. Without any real understanding of what camp actually is, network honchos scrambled to create shows with what they thought was a camp sensibility, and also tried to shoehorn it into already existing series, much to the detriment of the existing shows in question. That’s why LOST IN SPACE became so aggressively idiotic during its second and third years (though that idiocy arguably made that show more fun and memorable), and why THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. went full-tilt comedy for Season 3. Those of us who have clear memories of U.N.C.L.E. will tell you in no uncertain terms that Season 3 was ruinous for the show, as its plot veered directly into the outright ridiculous, absurd, and silly, with the emphasis on making everything look as intentionally cheap and bad as possible. Look up “The My Friend the Gorilla Affair” as my go-to example of the absolute nadir of the series. Just appalling in every possible way. There is nothing that fails harder than unfunny comedy, and by that yardstick Season 3 was a massive and embarrassing failure. In one season they managed to undo all of the progress and quality of the previous seasons offerings. And it should be noted that the BATMAN-inspired camp wave was a fad that lasted maybe a year, and ddamned near every American TV series that jumped on the camp bandwagon was dead by the end of a season, or less, and pretty much all of them except for BATMAN, LOST IN SPACE, and U.N.C.L.E. are forgotten today. (Though MY MOTHER THE CAR deservedly lives in infamy.) And super-popular though it was, even BATMAN was dead at the end of its third year, largely because its novelty was over. (The show would have been given a fourth season on NBC, provided that all of the sets like the Batcave and such could still be used, but ABC had all of the sets torn down when they got the cancellation notice.)

Realizing the shift to camp was a terrible idea, the U.N.C.L.E. showrunners again changed gears for Season 4, returning the program to its more grounded roots and even giving it a bit more of a darker adult edge, but by that point the damage was done and it was only a matter of time before cancellation. It was the end of the 1960’s and the spy boom was petering out anyway, so the plug was pulled on U.N.C.L.E. halfway through its final season.

U.N.C.L.E. was fondly remembered for the next 30+ years, enshrined mostly by those who were kids when it first aired and who were too young for the more adult thrills of the Bond franchise, though it surprisingly did not turn up much in sydication in the major U.S. markets. (It mostly aired in regions like the Midwest, for some reason.) But then the home video boom happened and lavish DVD sets of classic TV shows became a thing. It took a while but THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. eventually saw relase in a fancy metal briefcase that collected the entire series rather than putting it out in individual season sets. That edition was released at around a hundred bucks, and despite my avid interest in ’60’s spy pop culture, I had no interest in owning the whole series, and certainly not for a hundred bucks. Apparently the general audience shared my sentiment, thus leading the briefcase set to tank to such a degree that it was seen as lack of interest in the property, so no further relases of the series were forthcoming, not even as individual seasons. 

I like having “comfort programming” close at hand, and the closest I could get for THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. is a set of the theatrical films spliced together from episodes of the series for release in Europe, where they spiced things up for the movie audience by adding levels of sex and violence that would never have been allowed in the original TV versions. 

 

 

Those films sometimes showed up on American TV as filler for afternoon and weekend movie showcases on local TV stations, and that was how I first saw THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., as it never ran in syndication on the East Coast in my youth. I saw ONE SPY TOO MANY (1966), which was the show’s only 2-part story, “The Alexander the Greater Affair," one afternoon on Channel 9 when I was around 11 or 12, and found it a lot of fun, so from then on I kept my eyes open for more. Little did I realize that the much ballyhooed actual series would turn out to mostly be another item that was bigged-up the nostalgia of now-grown children.

And the failed briefcase set now starts at over $200 when encountered on eBay and other collector’s resources. Absolutely NOT worth it.

(MY BETTER) HOME FOR THE HOLIDAY

What a difference three solid hours of sleep makes!

I am quite refreshed and in a good mood, so I just accepted Tracey's offer to join her family for Christmas dinner. My attendance was contingent upon how I felt after today's dialysis, and thanks to treatment occurring two hours early (my session started at 8am, so I was back here before noon), thus granting me early dismissal and some decent time to nap upon getting home, I was able to enjoy more hours of rest than I would have if I had gotten home at my usual 3-ish or later.

I was still feeling the malaise of my time observing my mother's decline for a week when I started my day, so I was gearing up for spending Christmas night alone, with a humble feast of bangers and mash with some of my favorite country sausages from the schmancy artisanal butcher shop in place of traditional British bangers — I enjoy proper bangers, but the country sausages are a whole other level — but that would only have served to allow my brain to ruminate on my mom's situation.

That is NOT what I need to be doing today.

Christmas Day is for spending time with friends and loved ones, and Tracey and I have been the tightest of family since we met 18 years ago, so much so that I had a major hand in helping raise her daughter, my niece Aurora, from age two or three, so I am quite entrenched. And Tracey struck relationship gold with Matt, her second husband, as he treats her like the living, breathing treasure that she is, plus he's amazing with the very-much-a-teenager Aurora. They are only a little over a mile away, and it gives me comfort to know that the door to this artsy nuclear family is always open to Uncle Bunche. And the icing on the cake is the presence of a huge, sloppy Great Dane who barks at me at first — he's doing his job, so good on him — but once that reminder of his guardian presence is made, he's all up on me, leaning into me for pets and scratches in his favorite spots.

In short, what could have been a miserable Yule will instead be one of welcoming and nurture. No judgement. No infantilization. No dysfunction. For the first time in quite a while, I feel happy.