Planet of the Grapes

Re-reading Pierre Boulle’s book brought to mind my third attempt at writing my own novel. I was twelve years old, if I’m remembering correctly. This time the fire lasted until I had a complete page, single-spaced, front and back, hand-written.

This was during my family’s famous two-week vacation down at Lavalette, New Jersey. About a dozen of us – my parents, my grandparents, aunts and uncles – rented a tiny cottage three blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. Days were spent on the beach, nights barbecuing and going into Seaside Heights for ice cream and to play the games on the boardwalk. I won a prize for the first time ever on those spinning wheels – Billy Joel’s The Stranger and Glass Houses. My brother and I would rent those dual bicycle buggies every afternoon and pedal endlessly up and down the streets adjacent to the beach.

This was also the time I struggled unsuccessfully through The Silmarillion, and successfully through The Spinner. I must have read Boulle’s book earlier that spring because it was on my mind, particularly writing a story based on a pun on the title.

Or maybe my prime inspiration was a very popular joke going around the grammar school at the time:

What’s purple, dangerous, and lives in a bush?

A grape with a machine gun.



Now, I remember setting up shop on the picnic table in the tiny backyard one evening, pencil and paper at hand. I hadn’t decided whether everyone was going to be a grape – good guys as well as bad guys – but I knew at least the bad guys were going to be grapes. Little grapes, or maybe larger, like the size of basketballs, but with little white hands, arms and legs. Their faces would be on the round part of the body. Now I’m envisioning either those M&M animorphic characters, or possibly the California Raisins, though I think my Planet of the Grapes predates both by seven or eight years.

Was the Charlton Heston figure a man, macho like Chuck, or were the human astronauts to be represented as grapish? Hmmm. I figured that would come when I got there.

So I spent maybe an hour or so scratching out my setting on the lined notebook paper, tongue probably hanging out the corner of my mouth. I recall describing the plush jungle world where the grapes lived. Suddenly – movement! A grape, armed to the bone, comes crashing out of the brush, and stumbles upon a strange spacecraft. It’s the crashed pod that brought our hero(es) to this nightmare world, where Grapes rule and mankind suffers under their cruel leash.

And that’s all I got, forgotten now to the ages. One handwritten page, maybe three hundred words. Forgotten to the ages, as is my first attempt at novel-writing, Star Rats, and its follow-up, my parody of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Oh well. Perhaps as a reward in the Great Hereafter I may be allowed a glimpse at what I wrote over three decades ago.