Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Read online

  Cheap liquor is a magic potion than can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.

  He insisted we called him “Dan the Manager”—not “Dan.”

  “I always carry a gun, and it’s impossible to get the drop on me,” Dan the Manager would say as we’d open the snack bar for the twelve thirty matinee. Then he’d round the corner to the projection booths. Gary Jay, an usher and steroid abuser (he wasn’t ever going to grow taller than the four foot nine God gave him, so why not?), would hop out like a demented gnome, brandish a Goody comb like a pistol, and scream, “Bang-you’re-dead-Dan!”

  Dan would chuckle through clenched molars, mutter something that sounded like “Y’tried that in T’xs you’d git a winder in yer head”* and then vanish into his “office”—a lawn chair behind one of the platter projectors. The he’d crack the cap on another bottle of liver eraser and we’d get to work bringing the magic of Hollywood to Northern Virginia.

  The first matinee would end. The afternoon crowd, sunblind from swimming or footsore from shopping, would be gathering at the upstairs box office. Dan the Manager had long ago drifted into whatever slushy Chuck Norris dreamscape the vodka took him to. Gary Jay and I couldn’t handle the swelling masses alone. Who would rise to take the reins at the Towncenter 3? Who would push through the double glass doors of the street-level entrance and stomp his way down the stairs, like Gene Simmons and Wilt Chamberlain about to set a basement full of uppity pussy straight?

  No one. No one came from street level. Help was already in the Towncenter 3. Its name was Roddy, and it lived there.

  Roddy the assistant manager lived in the theater. He’d emptied out one of the supply closets. He’d installed an inflatable mattress, a Shower Anywhere portable shower, and a wee television. He slept amid the powdered-butter fumes and empty drink-syrup tanks. He had grub-white skin and Goth circles under his eyes that, unlike those of Goths, came from really, truly existing half in the world of the dead. He smelled like carpeting, Scotch tape, and steak sauce. He was almost forty but had one of those half mustaches that thirteen-year-olds have. He was the closest thing to a zombie I’ve yet encountered in this world.

  But even zombies have basic drives—see, move, kill, eat. Roddy had those, with an occasional command to bathe. He also had an overriding drive to get everyone in the concession line “snacked and soda’ed,” as he’d say. It was the one time he had grace and beauty. If only a woman of patience could have been down there during that fifteen-minute window when he was dispensing Sno-Caps and buttering popcorn,* maybe she’d have taken him by his velour sleeve, walked him up into the sunlight and away from his rickety shower and pool-raft bed, and rescued her zombie husband. Alas. Alas!

  So once the crowds had dispersed and the platter projectors were humming, it was time for a weekly game called What Benign Thing Will Make Roddy Explode?

  Gary Jay and I and the two other ushers who came on for the afternoon shift—Bryan and Trace—would quietly do our jobs and engage Roddy in pleasant chitchat. However, our chitchat was the opening gambit in our ongoing social experiment:

  “Hey, Roddy, I heard only homos come from Carlisle, Pennsylvania.” (Roddy was from Carlisle, as he often told us.)

  Roddy would grin as he inventoried Junior Mints. “People say that because we’ve got the Redskins training camp.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting. You know what else is interesting? The way only homos listen to Deep Purple.” (Deep Purple was Roddy’s favorite band, and he was fond of cranking “Perfect Strangers” on the tape deck of his perpetually outof-commission car in the parking lot late at night.)

  Roddy would crack open a roll of nickels into the nickel well of the register and say, “Actually, Deep Purple’s about the only non-homo music left in the world.”

  “Roddy, you smell like a corpse fart, you have no penis, and you should kill yourself. And you’re a homo.”

  Roddy would wink and say, “Sticks and stones.”

  “Hey, Roddy, I had a banana for breakfast.”

  Roddy would slam the counter with his pasty forearms and shriek, “A ba-NANA? They’re for monkeys to eat! You saying I want to eat a BANANA? What are you saying? You think I can’t walk it? Huh? Ol’ Roddy, living at the Towncenter 3? YOU THINK I CAN’T WALK IT, MR. CREAM SODA?”

  Then we’d descend to theater level and corral the matinee audience out and the afternoon audience in while Roddy continued screaming. If any of the patrons asked what the noise was, we’d say it was the Jaws movie, that the shark was eating an old hobo. More than one kid, waiting to see Benji the Hunted or Adventures in Babysitting, would turn to their parents and say, “I want to go see a shark eat a hobo!”

  The early evening shows saw me in the ticket booth, scamming half stubs. Scamming half stubs was a wonderful, entry-level criminal activity wherein you’d sell a ticket, tear it in half (the Towncenter 3 couldn’t afford to pay a separate ticket taker) and then sell the other half to the next customer. You’d pocket the second customer’s admission money.

  You couldn’t do this with something no one was coming to see, like Who’s That Girl? or Summer School. But if we got something like The Living Daylights or Coming to America? Those movies provided enough half stubs to purchase a few cases of beer, plus a bottle or two of Mad Dog 20/20—Bryan and Trace’s favorite. On days when they wouldn’t work, and we had some random “floater” filling in or training on the platters, I’d pocket all the half-stub money. I was a thief. I spent the money on books and music. I stole from a struggling three-plex movie theater to expand my cultural horizons.*

  So once the early evening tickets were sold—or, better yet, the weekend matinee tickets—I’d curl up on the floor and put R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction† on my cassette player and read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

  Called the fool and the company

  On his own where he’d rather be

  —R.E.M., “Maps and Legends”

  The Man in the High Castle is an alternate-history SF novel about an America where the Axis powers have won World War ii. And Fables of the Reconstruction is an album with songs about falling asleep while reading, trains and locomotion, and movement—and, by implication, escape and transformation—plus cryptic, advisory screeds. Also eccentrics, weirdos, loners, and failing romances charted by passing comets.*

  So, while Michael Stipe’s voice soared through “Kohoutek” or “Good Advices” and the setting sun knifed through the cracks in the pulled ticket-window shade, I read. I read about a North American continent sliced up by the victorious Germans, Japanese, and Italians. I read about the shell-shocked Americans, inhabiting the gloomy, tense, unfeeling, and defeated country.

  The hills ringing hear the words in time

  Listen to the holler, listen to my walls within my tongue

  Can’t you see you made my ears go tin?

  The air quicken tension building inference suddenly

  Life and how to live it

  —R.E.M., “Life and How to live it”

  And now I saw Sterling differently. Now, with the sterile, pitiless prose of Philip K. Dick and the oblique, teasing music and lyrics of Fables of the Reconstruction clanging around the too-tight tent of my mind and its limited experiences, I saw how beautiful my suburb was, like an accidental poem.

  (I’ve been there I know the way)

  Can’t get there from here

  —R.E.M., “Can’t Get There from Here”

  If I could finally see, at the right angles (or during magic hour or in the summer moonlight), that even the strip mall that held the Towncenter 3 had majesty in it, how would I feel if I ever reached San Francisco, London, the Hebrides? My frustration and hatred of Sterling got me nowhere. It wasn’t until I started loving it that I was on the way to leaving. And it wasn’t until I relaxed with a good book and terrific music that I got the first buzz of restlessness.

  Pay for your freedom, find another gate

  Guilt by associate, the rushes
wilted a long time ago

  Guilty as you go

  —R.E.M., “Green Grow the Rushes”

  I couldn’t see any of this then. It’s only now, as I write it, on another coast, that I see what the time in the echo chamber of a ticket booth did. There were future musicians standing at the back of Fugazi shows, watching the band and the crowd and drinking in the pulsing thrum. They galvanized their identities while, at the same time, they bled faceless into the crowd, the band, the walls, and the memory of the evening.

  The book and the cassette tape—they did the same thing for me. People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they’ve got. Come to think of it, I bet I’d be a better writer if my portal had been a hash brown. Oh well. Don’t look back.

  Before the Towncenter 3, I imagined I would get married and stay in Sterling and try to become a Writer there, the way Stephen King never left Maine and wrote his novels on a washing machine in the trailer he shared with his growing family. Or John Waters, changing cinema forever without leaving Baltimore. It had been done before. I had my examples. I could justify my immobility.

  At least it’s something you’ve left behind

  Like Kohoutek you were gone

  —R.E.M., “Kohoutek”

  Of course, “justify my immobility” was just “fool myself” with exactly triple the syllables. Listening to Fables of the Reconstruction got me close to this realization only for as long as I listened to the album. Eventually I’d wander downstairs and watch five minutes of Michael Caine fighting a giant rubber shark and wondering why, after Blame It on Rio, he’d returned to the tropics. At least the last time there’d been underage sex dangled in front of him. Now there was an inert fish prop and Mario Van Peebles. Then again, to do a classic like Get Carter he had to endure the gray grime gut-punch of Newcastle. Fuck it—I’d probably opt for the shitty shark film in the sunshine over . . . and by that point, the memory of whatever I’d gotten close to, up in the ticket booth? Gone.

  At the end of the day

  I’ll forget your name . . .

  —R.E.M., “Good Advices”

  In a few years all of these certainties would be burned to useless wicks, and I’d be making my way out and over. First into Washington, DC, doing punishing open mikes as a comedian, and then west west west as the standup scene crumbled. It was all part of my plan (I said to myself) to eventually end up a writer. If writing for Gent magazine led Stephen King to The Stand, then emceeing a weekend at Sir Laffs a Lot would lead to my writing this boss novel I had in my head about a dude who battles mutants in a wasteland. At least my time at Sir Laffs a Lot, Quackers, and the Comedy Factory outlet* would provide the shotgun-wielding hero of my wasteland epic some kick-ass quips as he blew slippery chunks out of scabrous mutants. See? I had it all worked out.

  He was reared to give respect

  But somewhere down the line he chose

  To whistle as the wind blows

  —R.E.M., “Wendell Gee”

  I was an idiot. It was my first attempt at a Plan. For Life. And How to Live It. I refined it in the coming years. Until then, it would be self-contradicting confusion and an adherence to the routines and safety of the suburbs.

  The walls are built up, stone by stone

  The fields divided one by one

  —R.E.M, “Driver 8”

  “Feeling Gravitys Pull” started up—I still remember this so clearly—at the moment in The Man in the High Castle when Mr. Tagomi is looking at that little pin—the Frank Frink artifact with the “satori” form on it—and he hallucinates an alternate reality where the Germans lost World War ii, and he’s in San Francisco. Michael Stipe was singing about falling asleep but still reading every paragraph. Perfect immersion in a book.

  I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I’d lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I’d been doing up to this point hadn’t enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it. I’m describing it better than the half lick I tasted in the gloom of the ticket booth.

  If I see myself I see you

  —R.E.M., “Old Man Kensey”

  And then it was gone. I tried to make it come back—not by shutting off the tape and bursting out of the booth to walk around and watch people interact with each other. I replayed the song and reread the passage. Nothing. You can’t stage an epiphany. All I got were random pieces and half-complete ideas.

  I looked up at the glowing rectangle of the pulled shade and tried to become pure mind.

  And that’s when Bryan barged into the booth, excited, huffing from flying up the flight of stairs from the snack bar.

  “Roddy’s out of his room, somewhere. It’s . . . come see what’s under his mattress!”

  I ran downstairs to see.

  “Well, I want the throwing stars,” said Gary Jay before anyone else spoke.

  Trace was standing, holding the air mattress like a Surf-board. On the floor, where it once lay, were three air pistols, five throwing stars, two throwing knives, and a pair of nunchakus. I subconsciously panned my eyes along the weapons, left to right, like the scene in Escape from New York where the camera pans along the equipment Kurt Russell’s going to take into the New York City Penal Colony to save the president.

  After Gary spoke, no one else did. We all, Wordlessly, bent down and took things. I took an air pistol (it looked like a revolver). Bryan took another air pistol—it looked like a 1911 Colt .45—and the nunchakus. Gary Jay swooped up the throwing stars and Trace took the third pistol. It wasn’t modeled after any existing gun. It just looked like a generic air pistol—vaguely ray gun–y, brown grips and black barrel. Trace laid the air mattress down and we all left.

  I rushed back up to the ticket booth and lifted the shade. Now we were in the magic hour, when the evening customers would start drifting up. They’d appear in groups of two or three, then in a brief, chaotic mass, which would quickly form a line. I put the air pistol in the drawer and got the three spools of tickets ready in their dispensers for the evening’s shows.

  Huh. Thick crowd early for The Living Daylights. I prepared, mentally, to start selling half stubs when I saw, over the heads of the people in line, Roddy.

  He was standing in the parking lot, leaning against the primer-paint derelict of his car, holding court in front of some prepubescent metalheads. He was trying hard to act bored, rolling his eyes and shaking his head in that sad, “You poor, uncultured idiot” way, where you want to assert dominance without saying anything startling or original. Roddy could only do this with twelve-year-olds. Anyone who’d experienced real heartache, traveled outside of the Sterling city limits, or read any book above the Young Adult genre never doled out more than fifteen seconds of regard for Roddy. This was where he got to wear his “old sage” costume. In the parking lot of a strip mall, lit by mustardy streetlamps, bracketed by the Giant Foods, Hunan Garden, a real estate office, karate and pizza and Waxie Maxie’s and the Towncenter 3—forever dropping vague hints about buying cigarettes or booze for kids who dreamed of someday, somehow, becoming Roddy. Soon they’d be the withholders of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Camels. They imagined pimple-ringed eyes looking up at them in wonder and imagined that Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” would play whenever they walked.

  But then Roddy nodded and pointed at one of the kids, and the kid produced a Camel hard pack and let Roddy bum a cig. Roddy stuck it in his mouth and then gestured—two more? Can I get two more for later? But the kid closed the pack. No dice. Maybe if we get some beer going later, he seemed to say.
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br />   And it hit me—I stole this poor bastard’s BB pistol. The dude owned an air mattress, a bottle of shampoo, and three shirts. Hell, I’d want weapons, however useless, if I slept in the closet of a movie theater.

  I looked in the doorway and Trace was standing there, looking as stricken as I felt. We didn’t say anything to each other, but there it was, hanging in the air between us. Why had we stolen nine of the maybe sixteen possessions that Roddy owned?

  “You wanna put ’em back?”

  I said, “I do,” almost before he could finish. I slipped the BB pistol into his hands, out of range of a woman’s gaze, waiting to buy her ticket to see Timothy Dalton take on the ultimate Bond villain—Joe Don Baker.

  “See you downstairs later.”

  I said, “Is Bryan putting his back?”

  “He already did,” said Trace. “I’m going to go talk to Gary Jay.”

  The first customers pressed against the ticket booth, and I mentally calculated how many half tickets I could sell.

  The last show of the night was at nine thirty. Once I bagged the receipts and wrote the gross in ballpoint pen in the separate brown paper bags, I closed the booth. I had $80 in my pocket from half stubs. I headed downstairs, to where Roddy was Windexing the glass top of the snack bar.

  “You wanna go on a beer run?” I asked.

  “What’s everyone want?”

  Trace came out of the projection booth. He’d probably just rolled Dan onto his belly so he wouldn’t choke on vomit. He said, “Get the one bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Or something strong like that. And then a case of beer? Pabst Blue Ribbon?”

  “I don’t want to carry a case back by myself. Someone come with me,” said Roddy. “Gary Jay.”