No Place Like Home

“And I’ll tell you one more thing,” the figure growled, swivelling his bar stool and putting what probably passed for a mouth only inches from my face. “Dorothy never really cared too much for any of us.” "

The smell of light machine oil was almost overpowering, undercut as it was with something more intoxicating. The Tin Man sensed my unease and moved back to face the bar. “Look, kid, I’m sorry if I’m ruining some childhood dream of yours. But no-one ever asks what happens when the fairy tale ends. ‘Happily Ever After’ covers a multitude of sins.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised. My investigations hadn’t been going to plan for several weeks. And being upbraided by an alcoholic man of metal was par for the course.

It had started months earlier, when my publisher commissioned me to do another ‘After the Story’ piece. I’d made these my trademark; here, the characters from some well-loved TV show of the ‘70s, there, the warring factions of a long broken-up rock band. What happens when the cameras stop rolling? What’s it like when the musical differences prove to be too great? Our readers wanted to know.

“This is the big one,” my agent had claimed, “the ultimate buddy-story. Four individuals, from different backgrounds, fighting against the odds. They achieve their dreams. Then what?”

I didn’t have many leads. A man of straw, some animal character, the metallic one, and then her. The one with the red shoes. This wasn’t going to be easy. There are some places even Continental Airlines won’t fly.

Eventually I saw some progress. The man of straw, my contacts told me, had given up his previous existence. The acquisition of a brain had changed his view; he’d moved into research science, they told me. But he refused to meet me in person, preferring to correspond at arm’s length. It was at this point that the first cracks appeared in the myth.

“Yeah, well, it goes to prove that getting what you dream for doesn’t solve everything,” intoned the voice over the crackling phone line. “I mean, I’m alright, I suppose. I’ve got this gig at CalTech, and we’re doing some really cool things with subatomic particles right now.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

He paused before replying, “We-ell, I suppose so. But there are times when I miss the fields. And I don’t get to scare too many birds these days. My fellow professors tend to frown at that sort of behaviour.”

“What about the others?” I asked.

“Hmm, let me think. Well, the Lion’s no longer with us, I’m afraid.”

This came as a genuine shock to me. My contacts hadn’t mentioned this at all. “Dead? Are you sure?”

“Sorry, should I have broken that to you a little more gently? That’s me being blunt again. I’m afraid it’s one of the things we all learned when we had our wishes granted. We got what we dreamed of alright, but none of us realised that we needed something else to balance things out. I got all the brains a scarecrow could ask for, but didn’t get the tact and diplomacy that should go with them. I’m socially inept, you could say.”

“But what about the Lion? He’s really dead?”

“Oh yes, as a doornail. It’s one thing to be given courage, but if you haven’t the sense to realise that you can’t catch flying monkeys by jumping off the top of Emerald City, you’re very quickly going to be a brave, but dead, lion.”
I didn’t know what to do. What would my readers think? What about my publisher? It was one thing to be writing about the ex-members of a team, but a leonine obituary was a little out of my comfort zone.

“The Tin Man? Is he with us?”

“Well, in a way, I suppose. If you’re looking for him, there are some places you can go hunting.” He proceeded to read out a list of addresses. I noted that many of them sounded like bars.

I eventually found him in the third place on the list, which is where we came in at the start of my tale. It was early in the day – before noon – but he seemed to be at home there, amongst the barflies and other gentlemen of the bottle. I bought him a rum and WD-40 and sat on the next stool.

The hours passed. As the empties piled up, he talked more about his past. About how getting a heart was the turning point. “You see, being able to feel, for the first time. All those emotions, no longer bottled up - you humans learn how to deal with them. Well, mainly,” he waved his glass at the other patrons and burped metallically. “But I had to deal with all these feelings in one go. Sometimes you need to be able to straighten them out a bit. I still get Munchkin flashbacks, y’know?”

“And this is helping?” I asked.

“Listen pal, if they’d thought to give me a liver at the same time then it might have mattered a little.”

I changed tack. “You mentioned Dorothy earlier. Whatever happened to her?”

The bitterness returned to his voice, if not his face. “Pah! She couldn’t wait to get out of here as soon as she could. No place like home, she said. Last I heard she had some place over in Florida.”

“Florida? Not Kansas?”

He shrugged. Or at least, it was as close to a shrug as a being with aluminium joints could muster. “She has her reasons.”

And that’s what led me, two days later, to the gates of the Gage residence in downtown Jacksonville. I was several streets back from the beachfront, and several decades away from good times, or so it seemed as I surveyed the weeds and litter. I pressed a button to the side of the gate, and a harsh buzzer sounded. After a pause, the speaker burst into life.

“Who’s there?” barked a voice. Female, late thirties, I’d guess. Bitter.

“Ma’am , I’m looking for Miss Dorothy Gage. I’m a writer.”

“Did that Tin Man send you here? Damn his stupid drunken steel hide...”

“Miss Gage, I’m writing a story about you and your old friends, 20 years on.”

“You want a story? Here’s your story.”

And as I stood there on the sidewalk, she told me everything. About how all she’d ever wanted was to return home to Kansas. How everyone had listened to her tales of Oz. The fame that followed on. The recognition. And then the lows.

“Everyone wants you to be the same Dorothy. ‘Click your heels, Dorothy!’ they’d go, ‘Sing us a song!’ Imagine it – 35 years old, still wearing gingham and pigtails? No sir, Mr Writer, not me. That’s why I moved on.”

“Miss Gage, can’t I come in?”

“No you may not. You’ll deal with my disembodied voice. If it was good enough for us and the Wizard, it’s good enough for you and me.”

“I see.”

“And I’ll tell you something. If I hear ‘Over the Frickin’ Rainbow’ one more time, I’ll spit. That lion was best out of it, from what I hear. ‘Dreams that you care to dream?’ He found out the hard way – getting your dreams answered isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“So is there anything you’ve learned, Miss Gage.”

“Oh yes. You can go reaching for that rainbow all you like. But don’t you go bitchin’ if that pot of gold turns out to be a curse. That’s all I’m saying.” The speaker clicked off.

I put away my notebook and walked on. The sidewalk stretched into the distance. It was dusty and windswept, but there were no yellow bricks to be seen.