Jonathan was invited as Guest of Honor to something called a Con. It was a convention for fans of what was described as dark fantasy. Darkcon it was called.
Darkcon was held in Baltimore. Jonathan had never seen Baltimore. He spent three days in the city and still didn't see it. He saw the inside of the convention hotel instead.
It was a large, modern facility, with polished corridors and carpets and polite young women in orange jackets wearing name-tags. They smiled behind desks. The smiles grew uneasy as men in long hair, beards and black T-shirts began to take over the hotel.
Jonathan was welcomed by the Con committee and given a pack of publications-program books, more magazines. A plump, fresh-faced young man called Karl had been assigned to him. Karl was in charge of Guest Relations. He took Jonathan on a tour.
The Con had a bookroom, full of paperbacks in black jackets. Just inside the entrance there was a row of realistic, severed heads, caked in blood. Outside the bookroom, a little child was screaming, being pulled inside by her mother. Behind the severed heads, the book dealers were chuckling.
The Con had an art show. Its largest piece consisted of five realistically re-created nude corpses, hanging from hooks over a fan of rusted, bloodstained buzz saws.
Jonathan stood before it, with an expression of rapt and dazzled wonder.
"Toto," he said, in a little girl's voice. "We must be over the rainbow!"
As a Canadian, Jonathan seemed to spend half his life signaling Americans that he had told them a joke. He wiggled his eyebrows and leered at Karl. Karl suddenly grinned and covered one eye with a hand. "Oh, I get it!" he said. Karl's skin was brown, but his cheeks were very pink and his thick eyebrows almost met. Jonathan found himself feeling tender toward him.
A tall, thin woman approached them, all angles. Her hair flew everywhere, and her eyes were bright, and she was the same age as Jonathan. He placed her perhaps a bit too quickly. An ex-hippie, he judged, one of his own kind, a kindred spirit.
"I did the metalwork," she announced, pointing to the buzz saws.
"I'm… impressed," said Jonathan, choosing his words carefully. "You've put a lot of effort into it." Looking again, he had to admit that the metalwork was beautifully done. He suddenly saw the woman in his mind, slim in overalls, with a blowtorch.
"This is Moonflower," said Karl, coughing, shuffling. "She's famous," he added. "She does my fanzine."
"How… This is a strange question. You're obviously talented."
"I usually draw elves," Moonflower said. "And seagulls and stars. Stuff like that."
"Right. So where do the corpses fit in?"
"You're asking me that?" Moonflower seemed surprised. "The elves and this. They're the flip side of the same thing."
Karl and Jonathan had lunch together in the Con buffet. Eye of Newt was on the menu. Karl was obviously starstruck by Jonathan. Jonathan found this charming. To please Karl, Jonathan found himself becoming Mortimer.
"So charming to have lunch with you," he said in Mortimer's voice. "Are you often on the menu?"
"Uh-oh," said Karl, in something not unlike real fear.
"Joke," cooed Mortimer and batted his eyelashes. "People do say my humor slays them."
Mort was a pastiche of different acting styles. Mostly he spoke like a slightly camped-up Boris Karloff.
"Yup, really kills me," said Karl, wincing with anticipation.
"Is that an invitation?" said Mort.
"Ew!" said Karl in delicious discomfort. "Ew! He's doing it! He's doing it!"
The fans didn't know Jonathan's face, but they recognized the voice. They looked up from the tables. They put down their trays and began to gather around.
Jonathan played with Karl's hair. Karl stood, eyes closed, bearing up like a child determined to resist a tickling.
"My little baby," said Mortimer in a greasy, singsong voice. "He's rigid with embarrassment. You might say Mort'ified. Shall we play a nice little game?"
"Eeek," said Karl in a tiny voice. There was an appreciative murmur of laughter. Laugh at me, will you? Mortimer thought. Laugh? Then listen to this.
And Mortimer threw himself from side to side in the chair, possessed by laughter, shrieking with it, loud and piercing as a knife.
"Ooooooooo!" breathed out the audience in fear. It was the laugh of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Later that night, Karl came and drank whisky in Jonathan's room, and slept with him, even though, as far as Jonathan could determine, he was heterosexual. Karl's last name was Rodriguez. Karl Rodriguez. Jonathan kept saying the name. Could you fancy someone for their teeth? Karl had a huge grin full of large bright teeth. Karl's parents had come to the north from Mexico.
The next day, Jonathan was interviewed in front of five hundred people. He sat behind a folding table, next to a scholarly looking woman with plain, pulled-back hair and glasses.
"What's your worst nightmare?" she asked.
"Waking up to find I'm in Child Minder Fifteen." There was laughter. The laughter was uneasy.
"Do you sometimes find the violence hard to take?" the interviewer asked.
"Oh no. I can't see all that meat and blood," said Jonathan. "I can't see red. I'm color-blind."
And he thought: I've got, I've got to find something else to do.
There was to be a charity performance of The Wizard of Oz in the Hollywood Bowl. Dorothy was going to be played by Cher. Nick Nolte was the Tin Man. Sam Shepard was going to play the Scarecrow, but had to pull out.
For the first time in his life, Jonathan hustled. Ambition alone could not have made him do it. Only an overwhelming urge to play the part could have driven him.
He went straight from reading Variety to Aaron Spelling's office. Aaron was producing; Jonathan had appeared in "Dynasty," another one of his tormented character roles, a priest in love with Joan Collins. The character had not been popular with audiences and was speedily dropped-but Spelling still had some time for Jonathan.
Jonathan simply told him the truth. He was the only man in L.A. who could still play the Scarecrow. To prove it, he sang "If I Only Had a Brain" right in the office. He ran full speed at the wall and did a backward somersault from it. Jonathan shook his head like a salt-shaker and knew that he was sprinkling from it something he could only name but not describe. The something was Ozziness, the quality of Oz.
Spelling chuckled and shook his head. "Okay, okay, you sold me." Maybe he needed to fill the part quickly, maybe it didn't matter with all the star names on the bill. There were a lot of maybes.
But word soon went around town that some horror-movie star was playing the Scarecrow. The buzz was that the horror-movie star was wonderful.
"Well, he's always been a brilliant actor," said those who cared to remember the little theaters, his TV psychos, his TV academics.
Jonathan found himself having lunch with Cher. She seemed to take a kind of rueful, maternal interest in him. He told her about his researches into Baum, into Kansas, into Oz. He told her about his visit to Lancaster, California. She changed the subject.
"This show could do you a lot of good," she said. "This show could really break you."