The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  There was a long silence. Dodger held his breath. He heard the sound of a chair scraping across a wooden floor, then a creaking sound. Someone just sat down in the chair, Dodger guessed.

  "What you just done to that boy is a crime, John. You don't need me to tell you that, you know it already. But knowin' how you feel about laws, and the power of the state, and such, I'm going to tell you something else. What you done to that boy is a sin."

  There was an even longer pause, then a sound that Dodger at first didn't recognize but which still froze his heart. It came again, and suddenly Dodger knew his father was weeping.

  "Ah, shit, John. Let me try to drop the cornpone, here. I've been living here so long now the accent's hardly an act anymore. But you remember me. It's Henry Wauk talking to you, John. The guy who used to understudy you in half the stuff you ever acted in. I'm the fellow who would have given anything to be half as good as you are, and if I couldn't do that, at least I could hang around you and hope some of the brilliance would rub off. It never did. All we really had in common was a propensity for the bottle. I don't know if you ever thought of me as a friend—"

  "I did," John Valentine sobbed. "I still do."

  "...well, that may be. I don't know if it's really friendship when one admires the other as much as I admired you. I owe you a lot. I still do owe you a lot, but I'm telling you now, I don't owe you this. This is the third time you've brought that little boy in to me so I could fix him up. I didn't really think much about it the first time. Fixed his busted eardrum, dived back into the bottle. But after the second time I couldn't seem to get it out of my mind. Not what you'd done to his body, John, but what you were doing to his... I don't even know what the word is. His soul, maybe. There's a part of him's always going to be frightened. Scared of you, maybe. Scared of everything."

  Dodger bit his lip and frowned. What the hell was the damn quack talking about? He wasn't afraid of his father. He loved his father.

  "I don't know why I do these things," Valentine said, miserably.

  "That's something I don't even want to think about. I don't care why. What I'm telling you now is, it ends here. You bring him back to me all bloody and swollen up like that again, I'm going straight to the cops."

  "That's exactly what you should do," Valentine said.

  "I ought to call 'em right now," Wauk went on. "Shit, John, that poor kid was... well, you know how he was."

  Dodger almost missed his father's next words, which were barely above a whisper.

  "It was an accident. Oh, god, don't look at me like that, Henry, I know it's my responsibility. I know if he'd died it would have been exactly like I'd murdered him. Killed by my stupidity. I'm just trying to tell you... it didn't happen like I thought it would."

  "I guess not," the doctor snorted.

  "I don't know what happened. I guess the blast of air was just enough this time to dislodge that goddamn Caterpillar machine, and it came rolling down those tracks and I saw it coming, watching him, I was watching through the window beside the lock, I saw what was about to happen and I almost died right there, there was no way to make the lock go any faster, and the next lock was half a mile away and I didn't have a suit anyway, and—"

  "Really thought it all through, didn't you?"

  "Henry, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I do these things."

  "That's between you and your therapist, or your God, or whoever it is you listen to, if you listen to anybody."

  "I was so stupid."

  "The stupid part I can forgive, John. It's the evil part that scares me. It was evil to do what you did." There was another long silence, then the doctor spoke again, with more curiosity than anger in his voice.

  "That's what the Dywoo Caterpillar business was? That he was screaming about when you brought him in?"

  "Daewoo/Caterpillar," Valentine said. "You know, the heavy equipment company. Earthmovers, tunneling equipment, asteroid relocation. It was written right on the front of that boring machine. One of the grinder arms or something wedged in the door and I thought... I thought it would never move away." He began sobbing again, great racking spasms that hurt Dodger to hear.

  But the boy was already consumed by a hot burst of shame. He sat back on his heels and pounded his fist on his thigh.

  "Stupid! Stupid!" he whispered. The one thing in the world he'd been the most frightened of, and it turned out to be nothing but... a machine? Stupid! Biting back tears, he put the stethoscope back against the door.

  "There must have been a small gradient there," his father was saying. "The thing rocked back just enough on its tracks, enough so the lock could keep turning. Nothing but sheer, dumb luck. More luck than I deserve, certainly. It must be the boy's luck. Somebody's watching over him."

  Dodger had long understood that his father couldn't see Elwood. In fact, he was pretty sure no one could see Elwood but himself. In fact, he'd been wondering, not being completely stupid, if Elwood was just a figurehead of his imagination, a hellishination. A bee in his bonnet, a bat in his belfry. If he was, in a word, crazy. Now he didn't think so. Elwood had shoved that Caterpillar back in its tracks. There was no other explanation for it. Which meant that Elwood was a bona fide ghost, like Hamlet's old man. The only thing he wasn't sure of was if he was the ghost of Elwood P. Dowd, a fictional character, or the ghost of Jimmy Stewart, who had just gone crazy and thought he was Elwood P. Dowd. But from that moment on he knew Elwood was his guardian angel.

  "Can I go in and see him now?" Dodger was about to leap back into bed, but held out just long enough to hear the doctor's reply.

  "Let the lad rest," said Wauk. "He ought to be out another hour or so, with the dose I gave him. Right now, why don't you take me down to the saloon and buy me a drink or three."

  Damn drunk, Dodger thought as he heard the outside door open and close, and the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. Can't even dope me up properly. It's a good thing I'm still alive.

  That bastard! Make my father cry, will you?

  Dodger started poking around in cupboards and cabinets.

  He quickly found a gallon stoneware jug labeled CORN LIQUOR. He pulled out the stopper and smelled it. Booze, all right. Okay, what have we got here?

  He spent the next hour reading definitions in an old leather-bound book called Saunders's Comprehensive Medical Encyclopedia, publication date 1898, looking up the words he found printed on bottles and jars that lined the shelves and cabinets in the examining room. "Paregoric," he discovered, was camphorated tincture of opium. It smelled nasty, so he dumped some of it in the jug of corn liquor. "Calomel" was mercurous chloride. That sounded nasty; wasn't mercury poisonous? Into the bottle went a teaspoon of calomel. "Aunt Lydia's Pink Tonic" was said, by the label, to possess excellent emetic properties. After looking up "emetic," Dodger poured in a generous dose. "Nicotine" was a poisonous alkaloid, C10H14N2. In it went. A "sialogogue" was something that increased the flow of saliva. Why not? "Arecane" was a proprietary remedy and efficacious as a purgative. A "parturifacient" was used to speed up childbirth, while an "abortifacient" produced an abortion. Dodger wondered what a mixture of the two would do to a drunken doctor? "Formalin," "cryptomenorrheal," "Salvarsan," "arnicin," "myxorrheal," "leptuntic"...so many new words, so many definitions, so little time.

  After a while he grew tired of reading, and felt a little hungry. In the next room, by the dentist chair, he found the remains of a Mexican lunch: chips and salsa and a cold taco. He took a bite of the taco, and in a moment was searching frantically for a drink of water. After he'd put out the fire in his mouth, he examined the bottle of Pancho's Habanero Hell (WARNING: Do not use near open flame!), then took it into the doctor's office and dumped half the bottle into the jug. He smeared a little sauce around the earpieces of the stethoscope.

  He jammed in the cork and shook the jug vigorously, then opened it again and sniffed cautiously. It still smelled like booze.

  For good measure, he pissed in the jug before going downstairs to join his
father.

  * * *

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

  From: First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints

  Subject: November Audience Ratings

  Category: Children's (age 2 to 12) periodical (weekly/fortnightly/monthly)

  December 1 (King City Temple)

  The November "Flack" numbers as compiled by the Trends Research Department of the Latitudinarian Church are as follows:

  TITLE AAS Last Month Last Year

  1. The Gideon Peppy Show 93.1 1 1

  2. Admiral Platypus 84.4 2 3

  3. Skunk Cabbage 80.2 5 -

  4. Barney's Boulevard 78.7 3 14

  5. What the Fuck? 70.3 4 2

  * * *

  Admiral Platypus seems to have solidified its hold on the number-two slot in the Adjusted Audience Share rating. Barney's Boulevard, benefiting from a new writing staff, has made its way from number fourteen to number four in the past year. The top two stories continue to be the steepening decline of What the Fuck?, the once-dominant Q A offering from NLF-TV3, and the meteoric rise of Skunk Cabbage, the critically panned actioner about a tribe of zombie children. SC seems poised to make a run on those two old reliable warhorses, Peppy and Platy.

  Spokespersons for NLF and the Children's Educational Workshop, producers of WTF?, had no comment when asked if the declining numbers of educational programming across the board in the past three years reflected a growing anti-intellectualism or merely a stagnation of fresh new ideas in the presentation of loftier kid-vid. Oskar Bigbird III, chairman of CEW, promised a news conference later in the week, announcing staffing changes on WTF?

  It seems nothing the pundits can say will have any effects on the soaring prospects of Skunk Cabbage. Introduced a mere eight months ago, the "Li'l Stinkers" have stormed the imaginations of a huge number of Lunarian children, and are now ready for a system-wide release. Reports from retailers confirm that for the first time in many a year, sales of Gideon Peppy products were eclipsed by the SC Kids during the month of October. Full figures for November are not yet available. But it seems a safe bet that Li'l Stinkers toys, clothing, software, and other tie-ins will be the hot items this Xmas season. Quote from Gideon Peppy (with a chuckle): "It don't have me chewin' on my lollipop." He pointed to growing cries of outrage from Mars to the Cometary Zone from concerned parents' groups worried about the coming onslaught of SC Kids. Peppy refused to comment on rumors that he himself had been behind some of those protests.

  More likely to put toothmarks on his Tootsieroll is the continuing failure to soar of his much-touted new series Sparky and His Gang. Ballyhooed on the Peppy Show for three months before its August launch, Sparky remains mired in the mid-forties, with a dismal 12.4 share. With the fifteenth episode currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational, rumors are that the sixteenth stanza is on hold, while (guess what?) staff changes are contemplated. Say, there's a bunch of WTF? scribes soon to be pounding the pavement, G.P. They'll work cheap.

  (For daily show and theatrical numbers, key MORE)

  * * *

  from The Straight Shit Starpage:

  Year in Review: sub-Kid-vid

  "Anybody Wanna Buy a Sparky Action Mug?"

  by Bermuda Schwartz

  I've been telling you for two hundred years now, so why do I think you'll all of a sudden start to listen? Ever since those old phosphor dots began to chase each other across the magic glass of the kinescope in the dear departed 1940s, two things are the only things that sell on TV: good stuff, and crap. Neither one is a guarantee of success. Plenty of shows have aspired to be good, but were kidding themselves. They've all long since vanished. And some actually were good, and they're gone, too. As for crap... who can fucking tell with crap? Myghty Mytes shambled onto the screen midsummer, stinking of crap, and by the end of the month it was in the crapper. Skunk Cabbage smelled just as rank, and by Yuletide the Komical Korpses had trailed their slime into every third-rate geraldo's studio on the planet. Kids were sleeping in "Li'l Stinker" coffins, at a thousand dollars a pop, gluing trademarked live worms to their cheeks.

  Who can figure it? Not me, not the pundits nor the critics nor the reviewers nor the scholars shaking their heads with dismay. Crap is crap. Some will turn out to be popular crap, and if I knew how to tell the difference I wouldn't be here writing about it, I'd be fucking rich.

  But oh dear, I hear the pundits say. One of the few quality shows getting regular viewings—and of course I'm referring to CEW's What the Fuck?—is taking a nose-dive in the ratings. Woe is us! Civilization is darn sure to perish any day now.

  Crap. WTF? used to be quality, but have any of you over twelve years old actually looked at the thing lately? I'm telling you, this old ragbag is starting to make Zippy the Zombie look animated. Folks, WTF? is over the hill. It is stale. Look for it at your local mortuary. Sure, it used to be good, but there's another cardinal rule in TV-land, and it is that nothing lasts forever. WTF? is pushing thirty years old. Bye-bye. Adios.

  Quality? Well, like it or not (and I don't, much) the Peppy Show will do for an example. What Peppy does, he does well. The characters are funny, the writing is sharp. Kids love him. What can you say? English teachers aside, most educators give Peppy good marks—and how long's it been since anybody listened to an English teacher?

  What's that? You say Peppy's show is only ten years old? And he's where in the ratings? Gosh, maybe civilization has a few more months to live.

  But that brings us to the topic of today's lesson, children, and that is, what happens to shows that can't seem to decide whether they want to be trashy, or terrific? That brings us to a disastrous effort from the Peppy mill called Sparky and His Gang.

  What are we to make of a gobbler like S G? To think of it as an actual turkey is an insult to flightless barnyard poultry everywhere. A genuine turkey knows that it is a turkey, and can therefore work at being the best darn turkey in the coop. S G arrives at your television like a gift-wrapped dead mackerel. You try to figure out, is this fish, or fishwrap? All you know at first is that it smells, vaguely, fishy. And at least part of it is garbage.

  It would be pointless to devote a lot of time to a feather-by-feather analysis of this albatross around Gideon Peppy's neck, and I won't subject you to one. Just a short comment, then, and a brief explanation.

  Comment: PRESS HERE for HyperText SoundByte©

  "Whooooooo fuckiiiiiiing caaaaaaares?"

  Explanation: the key to caring about what happens in a show, and I'm talking any show here, from Hamlet to Skunk Cabbage, is believable characters. Characters that bear some resemblance to humans we have known, who display some known human traits. (Exception: the birth-to-five audience, who will watch anything brightly colored and moving; viz. Barney's Boulevard.) Of all the brightly colored, loud, frenetically moving clusters of phosphor dots that call themselves Sparky's Gang, only Sparky himself seems to have anybody at home where a heartbeat should be. Sparky is so good, in fact, so appealing and funny and touching, that I went right out and bought myself a Sparky souvenir coffee mug. But by the time the coffee was cold, so was everything else. I don't think the mug is going to be collectible—even though it is almost certain to be rare—because we buy and treasure these nostalgic bits of pop culture to remind us of something. Something that mattered to us. And I must report to you that, five minutes after the show went off the air, I couldn't remember anything about any of the amorphous collection of rug weasels known as Sparky's Gang, not even their names.

  And that is really too bad. Because it is obvious that somebody put a lot of thought into the character of Sparky himself. As played by young Ken Valentine, Sparky is at the same time wonderfully carefree and charming, smart and stalwart. He is the sort of child we all would like to have been, or failing that, to have been friends with. He makes us eager to join his gang, which makes it all the more appalling that his actual band is such a bunch of radishes. He should have been the core of a group of similarly smart, resourceful moppets, united by his unden
iable charisma.

  But even if Gideon Peppy hires some writers who can do character, Sparky would not yet be out of the woods. Or into the woods, for that matter. The fact is, nobody on this show has a fucking clue as to where the woods is, or if in fact there are any fucking woods. By that I mean, characters need a milieu. A story must happen in a time and a place. There must be a background.

  I've watched four episodes of Sparky so far. One show per month, like the curse. In the first one the Gang was battling pirates on the open seas, for no reason that I can fathom other than that there was a full-scale pirate ship available on the Sensational back lot. In the next show the gang was in present time, and in the third, in no universe I could identify. Some pitiful gallimaufry was advanced to explain these temporal and spatial dislocations, but by then I'm afraid I was far advanced in a diabetic coma.

  See, that sort of crap can work for Skunk Cabbage, because Skunk is a crap show. I know it, you know it. The producers know it. The kids don't give a possum's posterior because it's full of violence and very noisy and it smells offensive, and mostly because Mom and Dad hate the sonuvabitch.

  That won't work for Sparky and His Gang because Sparky aspires to be more, and that is why it is worse than a skunk.

  Go ahead, ask your kids. Why aren't you watching Sparky, little Ambrose and Abigail?

  PRESS HERE for HyperText SoundByte©

  "Aw, mom. I dunno. It just suuucks."

  Kids won't be fooled. They'll watch quality, or they'll watch crap. But you better be one or the other, and you better know which that is.

  * * *

  * * *

  from Hebephrenia, "The Youthpad"

  column of 4/10/58

  "Spark Plug"

  by D. Mentua Precox

  So I was hanging out over at the Sen/Sen Studios like hoping to get an interview with the Man Himself, G. Peppy, y'know? When who should like come blitzing by but Velveeta Creemcheese in like a true hurry to ease herself from like point A to point B, y'know? Well, comma, Vel and your totally humble narrator go back to like the last ice age, can you load it? So I was like all "Vel! Exclamation Point! Heard you got 87ed from the inner realms of Peppydom," comma, because the skin was she'd like been fired from her completely powerful job as Czarina of Production at Pep-Pep-Pep-piprod, load it? Then she was all "Aw contrary, Manny, comma comma," and the bitch like knows that D. M. Precox your Humble etc. gets the squints when she hears that name so I was all What's this twist in her shorts? but refrained from verbing it into the etheric, comma, discretion being the better part of something or other period! Exclamation point! So then she goes "Mere haberdashery," and I go "Hats? Hats? Question Mark?" and she goes "Change of. The new hat belongs to hyperster-in-chief of 'The New Improved Sparky and His Gang," and I go "Whoozat?" and she goes "It's G.P.'s new kidvid extravaganzoid," comma, and I'm all "?kraM noitseuQ Why wasn't I informed? Question Mark?" and all snitty she's going "Your office was wired all pronto," comma quothation mark parenthesis (but my Faithful Readers will know that their humble narrator is totally up on all comma ALL things worth knowing in the land of hebephilia, comma, and D.M. and H.N. had never heard of it dot. dot. dot. well, okay, I've heard of it okay?, comma QM, but not because it was shaking on any celeb Richter scale, can you load? sisehtneraP) Period! Be that as it were neither here nor there, soon yrs truly was mustered in to the very like innermost cabals of the Great Giddy Pepperoni himself! E!X!C!L!A!M!A!T!I!O!N! P!O!I!N!T! When what to my wondering orbs do I vid but the Pepman curled in a huddle of scriptsters, comma, nine in number or even a dozen at the powerful end of a table of such like enormous proportions that the King of Kong coulda used it for a surfboard. Yea, verily, comma, oh my breathrin and sisterin. Words were like heated and floated and launched and puncturated. Hair was being torn and shorn. Spittle like flew! Peppy goes "Can't anybody in this overpaid gaggle of hacks goose me up an original concept?" The quacksters hawked excitedly and treatments were waved with terrifying gay abandon, heedless! EP! So I viddy no easy access to the Peppy ear—emdash not in the near recent, anyway—dash, and my questing gaze shambled to the other end of the table, where wire-haired moppets presided, two in census. This must be like the Sparks, of whom things were heedlessly spoken in many a flacky promo in the previous months elapsed. And already, is he nothing but all two-weeks-ago? That was the shake I had downloaded, and yrs. t. feels everything that's shakin'. Apostropheperiod. Vel goes "This is Sparky, the star of our show," and I go "Howja Dew?" and Vel goes "And this is little Polly, sidekickstress," and I go, comma, "Watcha doin' apostrophe?" and little Polly goes "Drawing," which Yours can see with her own lamps that a drawing is indeed being committed, only it's much too much like of a quality for such a youthful inkster so I go "Drawing what?" Well faithful reader D. M. Precox has her good days and her days when eaten by weasels and this wasn't my shining moment, because comma my lenses could clearly see she was drawing a... thing dot dot dot period. And who should quickly validate this you know insight but pretty Polly herself by yodelling "A thing," she goes comma, and elaborating "It's a sort of a guy me and Sparky made up," and Sparky goes "I made it up. She drew it." I go does the thing have a name cue you ee ess tee eye oh en mark? and she goes "Inky Tagger." Well much more transpired that day but your short attention span has spun, it's time for DMP to trill a fond aloha with this on her lips colon: "?kraM noitseuQ Who is Inky Tagger Question Mark?" More later. Remember, you heard it here first.