Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  “Time ain’t started over, Rudy,” said a kid. “This is Tuesday. It’s June. This is the year 2000 A.D.”

  “Sure, sure. On the outside,” said Rudy. “I’m talkin’ ’bout the inside. We can do it all over again. Or not. Look, people took a week to find out what still worked, when what juice there was gonna be came back on. See, up till then they all thought them EMP pulses would just knock out everything, everywhere that was electronic, solid state stuff, transistors. That’s without takin’ into account all that other crap that was zoomin’ around, and people tryin’ to jam stuff, and all that false target shit they put up cause at first they thought it was a sneak attack on cities and stuff, and they just went, you know, apeshit for about ten minutes.

  “So what was left was arbitrary. Like nobody could figure why Betamax players sometimes was okay and no Beta III VCR was. Your CDs are fine; you just can’t play ’em. Then why none of them laserdiscs are okay, even if you had a machine that would play ’em? It don’t make a fuckin’ bit o’ sense. Why icemaker refrigerators sometimes work and most others don’t? You can’t get no fancy embroidery on your fishing shirt: It all come out lookin’ like Jackson Pollock. No kind of damn broadcast TV for a week, none of that satellite TV shit, for sure. Ain’t no computers work but them damn Osbornes they been usin’ to build artificial reefs in lakes for twenty years. Cars? You seen anything newer than a 1974 Subaru on the street, movin’? Them ’49 Plymouths and ’63 Fords still goin’, cause they ain’t got nothin’ in them that don’t move you can’t fix with a pair o’ Vise Grips . . .

  “Look at the damn mail we was talking about! Ain’t nobody in the Post Office actually had to read a damn address in ten years; you bet your ass they gotta read writin’ now! Everybody was freaked out. No e-mail, no phone, no fax, ain’t no more Click On This, kids. People all goin’ crazy till they start gettin’ them letters from Visa and Mastercard and such sayin’ ‘Hey, we hear you got an account with us? Why doncha tell us what you owe us, and we’ll start sendin’ you bills again?’ Well, that was one thing they liked sure as shit. They still waitin’ for their new cards with them raised-up letters you run through a big ol’ machine, but you know what? They think about sixty to seventy percent o’ them people told them what they owed them. Can you beat that? People’s mostly honest, ’ceptin’ the ones that ain’t. . . .

  “That’s why you gettin’ mail twice a week now, not at your house but on the block, see? You gonna have to have some smart people now; that’s why I’m tellin’ you all this.”

  “Thanks, Rudy,” said a kid.

  “Now that they ain’t but four million people in this popsicle town, you got room to learn, room to move around some. All them scaredy cats took off for them wild places, like Montana, Utah, New Jersey. Now you got room to breathe, maybe one o’ you gonna figure everything out someday, kid. That’ll be thanks enough for old Rudy. But this time, don’t mess up. Keep us fuckin’ human— Morning, Bill—”

  “Morning, Rudy.”

  “—and another thing. No damn cell phones. No damn baby joggers or double fuckin’ wide baby strollers. No car alarms!”

  Opening night

  The dancers are finishing the Harvest Dinner dance, like Oklahoma! or “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” on speed. It ends with a blackout. The packed house goes crazy.

  Spotlight comes up on center stage.

  Bill stands beside Shirlene. He’s dressed in bib overalls and a black jacket and holds a pitchfork. She’s in a simple farm dress. Bill wears thick glasses. He looks just like the dentist B.H. McKeeby, who posed as the farmer, and Shirlene looks just like Nan Wood, Grant’s sister, who posed as the farmer’s spinster daughter, down to the pulled-back hair, and the cameo brooch on the dress.

  Then the lights come up on stage, and Bill and Shirlene turn to face the carpenter-gothic farmhouse, with the big arched window over the porch.

  Instead of it, the backdrop is a painting from one of the Mars Lander photos of a rocky surface.

  Bill just stopped.

  There was dead silence in the theater, then a buzz, then sort of a louder sound; then some applause started, and grew and grew, and people came to their feet, and the sound rose and rose.

  Bill looked over. Shirlene was smiling, and tears ran down her cheeks. Then the house set dropped in, with a working windmill off to the side, and the dancers ran on from each wing, and they did, along with Bill, the Pitchfork Number.

  The lights went down, Bill came off the stage, and the chorus ran on for the Birthplace of Herbert Hoover routine.

  Bill put his arms around Fossman’s shoulders.

  “You . . . you . . . asshole,” said Bill.

  “If you would have known about it, you would have fucked it up,” said Arnold.

  “But . . . how . . . the audience . . . ?”

  “We slipped a notice in the programs, just for the opening, which is why you didn’t see one. Might I say your dancing was superb tonight?”

  “No. No,” said Bill, crying. “Kirk Alyn, the guy who played Superman in the serials in the Forties, now there was a dancer . . .”

  On his way home that night, he saw that a kid had put up a new graffiti on the official site, and had run out of paint at the end, so the message read “What do we have left they could hate us” and then the faded letters, from the thinning and upside-down spray can, “f o r ?”

  Right on, thought Bill. Fab. Gear. Groovy.

  At work the next day, he found himself setting the galleys of the rave review of Glorifying the American Gothic, by the Times’ drama critic.

  And on a day two months later:

  “And now!” said the off-pixievision-camera announcer, “Live! On Television! Major Spacer in the 21st Century!”

  * * *

  “. . . tune in tomorrow, when you’ll hear Major Spacer say:

  WE’LL GET BACK TO THE MOON IF WE HAVE TO RETROFIT EVERY ICBM IN THE JUNKPILE WITH DUCT TAPE AND SUPERGLUE.

  “Don’t miss it. And now, for today’s science segment, we go to the Space Postal Joint, with Cadet Rudy!” said the announcer.

  Rudy: “Hey, kids. Listen to ol’ Rudy. Your folks tried hard but they didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground when it came to some things. They didn’t mean to mess your world up; they just backed into one that could be brought down in thirty seconds ’cause it was the easiest thing to do. Remember the words of Artoo Deetoo Clarke: ‘With increasin’ technology, you headin’ for a fall.’ Now listen how it could be in this excitin’ world of the future . . .”

  A few years later, after Bill and the show and Rudy were gone, some kid, who’d watched it every day, figured everything out.

  And kept us human.

  AFTERWORD

  I’d always wanted to write a story with a fifty-year space-break in the middle of it, and now I have.

  What I was trying to do here, among other things, was to show the changes in technology in that time; the ones we all now take for granted.

  In 1950, long-playing records and 45 rpm singles had only been around a couple of years (1948). Everything before then had been Edison cylinders or shellac 78 rpms. TV had been started in the 1920s (see my “Hoover’s Men” and “Mr. Goober’s Show” in Dream-Factories and Radio-Pictures) but had only become a household actuality in 1946; the co-axial cable hadn’t been laid coast-to-coast yet, so networks were in their infancy (and there was a freeze from 1948 to 1952 on issuing new television broadcast licenses by the FCC while they tried to work out a color television system: luckily RCA-NBC won out with an electronic color-compatible system, or else we’d now be watching stuff on a bastard half-mechanical, half-electronic non-compatible system backed by CBS). Even when the cable had been laid, shows were done twice (like on radio before it) because the broadcasts were live; so you did the show twice, like once at 8 p.m. Thursday
for Eastern and Central, and again at 11 p.m. for the West Coast, and you gave the cowboys on Mountain Time kinescopes (film off a studio monitor) next week, in fuzzyvision. [To paraphrase Sullivan’s Travels: “It won’t play in Albuquerque.” “What do they know in Albu-querque?” “They know what they like.” “If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t be in Albuquerque.”].

  It was Desi Arnaz, of all people, who came up with the now-universal 5-cameras-before-a-live-studio-audience system (with his director of photography Karl Freund—director of The Mummy 1932 and Mad Love 1935—who came out of retirement to do so) and who realized you needed to film television series for broadcast anytime anywhere, and thereby caused the center of TV production to move to California (where the film production centers were) from New York City (where the actors for live drama were), when he did I Love Lucy.

  Videotape was unknown as yet (though as I say, Bing Crosby was working on it. How come it was a Cuban conga-drum player and a crooner from Spokane who brought about what we watch on TV today?)

  Remotes in those days were wired to a big mechanical motor that clamped to your channel knob; when you pushed the buttons on the big battery-pack in your hand, the motor actually turned the channel knob—whirr-click. Otherwise you got up, walked to the TV and twisted the knob with your hand. (Remotes were to make cable and satellite TV possible.)

  Cable was a gleam in someone’s eye. (There were experiments with pay-TV, as it was called, as early as the late 1940s . . .) The movies, hit hard by television, had big signs up in theaters: “Stop Pay-TV”— because they knew that’s what was going to kill them. The studios, except for a few small independents, would not release even their 1930s movies to TV. Warner Bros. with production way down, started leasing their stages to television producers; when they made a fortune without having spent any money, other studios jumped in. One maxim’s always held true in Hollywood: Money talks.

  Eventually Universal (where Karl Freund had worked) let loose its Shock Theater package to TV (another fortune) and Columbia put out all 160-something Stooges shorts (ditto). Eventually, all the studios broke down and went the route of Free Money and released all their backlog to television (at first with the proviso for new movies: it will be at least seven years before this shows up on television).

  Most of this was way in the future as the story starts. And by 2000 a.d., oh my!

  I got the idea for this too late (May 1999), because of all the talk about Y2K, when everything would supposedly quit working—computers, electronics etc.—because their programs had all originally been done in COBOL or other program languages in the 1970s—and there was no room on them for year digits starting with 2 rather than 1. . . and everything was supposed to quit at midnight, New Year’s Eve, in what would become Year Zero.

  I wrote the story hoping Kim Mohan, editor of Amazing, could take it and get it into print before Y2K (he was only working a few months ahead.) He wanted some revisions (he was wrong). So I wrote “London, Paris, Banana . . .” instead and sent it to him, which, when he printed it, killed Amazing the second, and so far final time; I’d killed it first in 1993, when he’d printed “Household Words, or: The Powers-That-Be”— both stories are in volume one of Selected Fiction. Anyway, I sent “Major Spacer . . .” off to editors just leaving for the Worldcon in Australia, who also when they got back a month later, also wanted revisions (they were wrong, too). It was Gordon van Gelder (then of Fantasy & Science Fiction) who suggested the present, much better title for the story (he was right.) Anyway, one thing led to another, we’re into Y2K and NOTHING HAPPENED—and the story had gone from being a piece of cutting-edge speculative fiction to being an alternate history, without me doing a damn thing. I published it as an original in Dream-Factories and Radio-Pictures. (I’d always put a new story in each of my original collections in case some deluded soul had already read all the stories in them— and I can’t do that for a couple of books subtitled Selected Fiction, can I?)

  You surely saw Monty Clift as he staggered on in the story. I hope you also noticed James Dean’s walk-on (he bummed around early live TV in New York City before going west and becoming the most famous 24-year old dead man in history) and Zachary, or Zooey, Glass who was also an early-TV actor, when not helping his sister over nervous breakdowns and spiritual crises. They were put in to give the story verisimilitude. And the production methods (and political tenor of the times) are pretty much as I describe them.

  I read this just after finishing it, on May 27, 1999 in Kane Hall (a swell auditorium) at the University of Washington, with a Tom Corbett, Space Cadet lunchbox beside me, a Senor Wences cigar-box Pedro, and in a paper-bag space helmet (in appropriate spots) to rousing applause, as we say.

  Vonda McIntyre stood up in the audience as soon as I finished and said “I’m going home and firing up my Osborne!”

  Score another one for retro-science.

  THE OTHER REAL WORLD

  SUNDAY. “Stranger on the Shore”

  Bobby sat in the small beachside park watching the waves come in from Japan.

  It was a park put up by the WPA twenty-five years before, probably nice once, that had been allowed to run down. There were a few picnic tables, some missing slats from the tops, three firepits and a poured concrete bench overlooking the ocean.

  An old lady there once told him that it had once been quite popular with families just after the war. Then bodybuilders had started using it, and the kinds of crowds they attracted, she’d said, arching her eyebrows, and then the Colored had moved into the area, and now look at it.

  Now, looking at it, he saw a couple of surfer guys paddling around out there, and their girlfriends lying on towels on the beach, even though it was October, and a guy walking a dog back and forth, eyeballing the girls’ butts.

  Bobby came here because he usually wasn’t bothered. There were two orders of french fries from the In-and-Out Burger a mile away beside him.

  He heard a car pull into the parking lot, a door slam, and the sound of a tinny transistor radio playing “Fly Me to the Moon (Bossa Nova)” getting closer.

  “You gonna eat all those fries?”

  “No, I was hoping some dork grad-school physicist would come along and want some.”

  “Hello, Bobby. Swell mood.”

  “Hello, Stewart. Plenty to make me this way. Sorry. What’s up?”

  “Went by the place, you weren’t there, you weren’t at the pool hall, figured you were here.”

  “Turn that thing down.”

  Stewart fiddled with his shirt pocket, turned off the brown and silver radio, took his Chesterfields out of the other pocket and lit one up.

  Bobby moved away from him on the bench, coughing. “What’s up?”

  “Saw Gadge at your apartments,” he said. “Pomphret’s busting his chops again at j.c. Making him think and stuff. The bastard.”

  “He was making everybody think when we were there; why should he quit now?”

  “Yeah, but you know how Gadge is. He says when he first saw the prof, six or seven years ago, he was a science reporter named Johnson; now he’s at the junior college teaching English and his name is Pomphret.”

  “Maybe he’s got a half-twin brother or something? Anyway, what’s on Gadge’s mind?”

  “You know, since he discovered girls, he wants to be called Brian?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Well, he said he talked to Dobie, and Dobie’s worried about his dad again.”

  “From what I hear,” said Bobby, “His dad ain’t been the same since he had to go up into the hills and identify his brother Joe’s body in the swimming pool at that crazy old bat’s house. That was before my time, though.”

  “Well, there’s that. There’s also trouble with Dobie’s uncles. His dad’s a triplet, you know; Joe was a younger brother. Anyway, there’s him, Herbert T., the
n there’s his brother Norbert E. who used to be the taxi service in some podunk town, and then there’s Elbert P., who everybody used to call Pinky and worked in a male psycho ward in New York.”

  “Okay. Triplets. What’s the deal?”

  “Well, Pinky—that’s Elbert P.—got to looking through some state records and ran across their birth certificates. Pinky was always told he was born last. But the records say that was Norbert E. He can’t be Pinky—he’s Herbert T. or he’s Norbert E. but he can’t be Elbert P. So Norbert’s Pinky, or Dobie’s father is—”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “Well, now Herbert T. thinks he may be Pinky. And Norbert doesn’t know who he is.”

  “I think Dobie’s runnin’ his dad crazy, hanging around with beatniks, chasing after girls who only want rich guys when he ain’t got two nickels to rub together—”

  They were interrupted by singing from below the rise at the edge of the park: “Medea—I just met a girl named—Medea—” off key, very off key.

  Stewart walked to the edge of the park and looked down. “Go somewhere else, squirts!” he yelled. He walked back.

  “It’s just that Opie and young Theodore,” he said. “Go on.”

  “I said, Dobie’s running his father as crazy as his dad’s worrying about which triplet he is. How did we get off on this?”

  “You asked me what Gadge said. I’m telling you the truth, Ruth. He’s worried about Dobie’s—”