We were laid up in Fort Worth for a week, with our money running out. Had it not been for the help of thethen-police chief, a man whose name I’ll never forget—Cato Hightower—we would never have gotten out of Texas.He got me a new typewriter, had the car repaired for a fraction of what the garage would have stiffed a tourist justPassing through and be paid off the motel.

I arrived in Los Angeles in January of 1962 with exactly ten cents in my pocket. For the last three hundredmiles we had not eaten. There wasn’t enough money for gas and food. All we’d had to keep us alive was a box ofpecan pralines we’d bought before the accident and had in the rear seat.The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious.

My almost-ex-wife and her son moved into an apartment, and I took up residence in a fourteen-dollar-a-week room in a bungalow complex that is now an empty lot on Wilshire Boulevard. I tried to get work in television,got some assignments that paid the various rents, and bombed out on all of them. Nobody had bothered to show mehow to write a script. And when it looked as though I’d hit the very bottom, ELLISON WONDERLAND waspublished in June of 1962, the publisher sent me a copy, and the check for the balance of monies due on publication.It was enough to pull me through till I got another assignment—writing Burke’s Law for the Four Star Studios andABC. It was the very moment my luck changed.

I remember the morning the mail arrived, with the book in its little manila envelope. I ripped open thepackage, and out fell the check. But I didn’t even look at it. I sat in that room smelling of mildew and stared at thecover of Ellison Wonderland. The artist, Sandy Kossin, had taken a photo of me, and he’d drawn me in sitting cross-legged atop a giant mushroom, while all around me danced and capered the characters from the stories in this book.Skidoop and Ithk and Helgorth Labbula and the crocodile-headed woman from “The Silver Corridor” and that littlejazzbo gnome with the patois now long-outdated and so unhip.