Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (31 page)

“So are we, Rudy; we’re glad they can’t do that even though we never heard of it.”

“You just wait your young ass,” said Rudy. “Some devious yahoo in Baltimore workin’ on that right now; they had that knowledge once, it don’t just go away, it just mutates, you know. They’ll find a way to do that with vacuum tubes and such . . .”

Rudy’s voice faded as Bill walked on down toward the corner. Rudy gave some version of that talk, somewhere in the neighborhood, every day. Taking the place of Rudy was the voice from the low-power radio station speakerbox on the corner.

“ . . . that the person was dressed in green pants, a yellow Joe Camel tyvek jacket, and a black T-shirt. The wallet grab occurred four minutes ago at the corner of Lincoln and Jackson, neighbors are asked to be on the lookout for this person, and to use the nearest call-box to report a sighting. Now back to music, from a V-disk transcription, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with “In the Mood.”

Music filled the air. Coming down the street was a 1961 armored car, the Wells-Fargo logo spray-painted over, and a cardboard sign saying
TAXI
over the high windshield. On the front bumper was a sticker that said
SCREW THE CITY TAXI COMMISSION
.

Bill held up his hand. The car rumbled over to the curb.

“Where to, kindly old geezer?”

Bill said the
Times
Building, which was about thirty blocks away.

“What’s it worth to you, Pops?”

“How about a buck?” said Bill.

“Real money?”

“Sure.”

“Hop in, then. Gotta take somebody up here a couple blocks, and there’ll be one stop on the way, so far.”

Bill went around back, opened the door and got in, nodding to the other two passengers. He was at work in fifteen minutes.

* * *

It was a nice afternoon, so when Bill got off work he took the omnibus to the edge of the commercial district, got off there and started walking home. Since it was summer, there seemed to be a street fair every other block. He could tell when he passed from one neighborhood to another by the difference in the announcer voices on the low-power stations.

He passed Ned Ludd’s Store #23, and the line, as usual, was backed out the door onto the sidewalk, and around the corner of the building. In the display window were stereo phonographs and records, transistor radios, batteries, toaster ovens, and none-cable-ready TVs, including an old Philco with the picture tube supported above the console like a dresser mirror.

Some kids were in line, talking, melancholy looks on their faces, about something. “It was called
Cargo Cult
,” said one. “You were on an island, with a native culture, and then WWII came, and the people tried to get cargo, you know, trade goods, and other people were trying to get them to keep their native ways . . .”

“Plus,” said the second kid, “you got to blow up a lotta Japanese soldiers and eat them!”

“Sounds neat,” said the third, “but I never heard of it.”

A guy came out of the tavern next door, a little unsteady, and stopped momentarily, like Bill, like everyone else who passed, to watch the pixievision soap opera playing in black and white.

The guy swayed a little, listening to the kids’ conversation; then a determined smile came across his face.

“Hey, kids,” he said.

They stopped talking and looked at him. One said “Yeah?”

The man leaned forward. “Triple picture-in-picture,” he said.

Their faces fell.

He threw back his head and laughed, then put his hands in his pockets and weaved away.

On TV, there was a blank screen while they changed the pixievision tapes by hand, something they did every eight-and-a-half minutes.

Bill headed on home.

* * *

He neared his block, tired from the walk and his five-hour shift at the paper. He almost forgot Tuesday was mail day until he was in sight of the apartments, then walked back to the Postal Joint. For him there was a union meeting notice, in case he hadn’t read the bulletin board at work, and that guy from Ohio was bothering him again with letters asking him questions for the biography of James Dean he’d been researching since 1989, most of which Bill had answered in 1989.

He was halfway back to the apartments, just past the low-power speaker, when six men dragged a guy, in ripped green pants and what was left of a Joe Camel jacket, out onto the corner, pushed the police button, and stood on the guy’s hands and feet, their arms crossed, talking about a neighborhood fast-pitch softball game coming up that night.

Bill looked back as he crossed the street. A squad car pulled up and the guys all greeted the policemen.

* * *

“Today was mail day, right kids?” said Rudy. “Well in the old days the Feds set up Postal Joint-type places, you know, The Stamp Act, Box Me In, stuff like that, to scam the scammers that was scammin’ you. That shoulda been fine, but they was readin’ like everybody’s mail, like Aunt Gracie’s to you, and yours to her, and you know, your girlfriend’s and boyfriend’s to you, and lookin’ at the Polaroids and stuff, which you sometimes wouldn’t get, you dig? See, when they’s evil to be fought, you can’t be doin’ evil to get at it. Don’t be lettin’ nobody get your mail—there’s a man to see you in the lobby, Bill—”

“Thanks, Rudy.”

“—and don’t be readin’ none that ain’t yours. It’s a fool that gets scammed; you honest, you don’t be fallin’ for none o’ that stuff like free boats and cars and beautiful diamond-studded watches, you know?”

“Sure, Rudy,” said the kids.

* * *

The guy looked at something in his hand, then back at Bill, squinted and said: “Are you Major Spacer?”

“Nobody but a guy in Ohio’s called me that for fifty years,” said Bill.

“Arnold Fossman,” said the guy, holding out his hand. Bill shook it.

“Who you researching? Monty Clift?”

“Huh? No,” said Fossman. He seemed perplexed, then brightened. “I want to offer you a job, doesn’t pay much.”

“Son, I got a good-payin’ job that’ll last me way to the end of my time. Came out of what I laughingly call retirement to do it.”

“Yeah, somebody told me about you being at the
Times
, with all the old people with the old skills they called back. I don’t think this’ll interfere with
that
.”

“I’m old and I’m tired and I been setting a galley and a quarter an hour for five hours. Get to it.”

“I want to offer you an acting job.”

“I haven’t acted in fifty years, either.”

“They tell me it’s just like riding a bicycle. You . . . you might think—wait. Hold on. Indulge me just a second.” He reached up and took Bill’s rimless Trotsky glasses from his face.

“Whup!”
said Bill.

Fossman took off his own thick black-rimmed glasses and put them over Bill’s ears. The world was skewed up and to the left and down to the right and Fossman was a tiny figure in the distance.

“I ain’t doin’
anything
with these glasses on!” said Bill. “I’m afraid to move.”

The dim fuzzy world came back, then the sharp normal one as Fossman put Bill’s glasses back on him.

“I was getting a look at you with thick frames. You’ll be great.”

“I’m a nice guy,” said Bill. “You don’t get to the point, I’ll do my feeble best to pound you into this floor here like a tent peg.”

“Okay.” Fossman held up his hand. “But hear me out completely. Don’t say a
word
till I’m through. Here goes.

“I want to offer you a job in a play, a musical. Everybody says I’m crazy to do it; I’ve had the idea for years, and now’s the time to do it, with everything like it is. I’ve got the place to do it in, and you know there’s an audience for anything that moves. Then I found out a couple of weeks ago my idea ain’t so original, that somebody tried to do it a long time ago; it closed out of town in Bristol, CT, big flop. But your name came up in connection with it; I thought maybe you had done the show originally, and then they told me
why
your name always came up in connection with it—the more I heard, and found out you were still around, the more I knew you had to be in it, as some sort of, well, call it what you want—homage, reparation, I don’t know. I’m the producer-guy, not very good with words. Anyway. I’m doing a musical based on the paintings of Grant Wood. I want you to be in it. Will you?”

“Sure,” said Bill.

* * *

It was a theater not far from work, a 500-seater.

“Thank God it’s not the Ziegfeld Roof,” said Bill. He and Fossman were sitting, legs draped into the orchestra pit, at the stage apron.

“Yeah, well, that’s been gone a long time.”

“They put it under the wrecking ball while I was a drunk, or so they told me,” said Bill.

“And might I ask how long that was?” asked Fossman.

“Eight years, three months, and two days,” said Bill. “God, I sound like a reformed alcoholic. Geez, they’re boring.”

“Most people don’t have what it really takes to be an alcoholic,” said Fossman. “I was the son of one, a great one, and I know how
hard
you’ve got to work at it.”

“I had what it takes,” said Bill. “I just got tired of it.”

* * *

He heard on the neighborhood radio there had been a battery riot in the Battery.

Bill stretched himself, and did some slow exercises. Fifty years of moving any old which way didn’t cure itself in a few days.

He went over to the mirror and looked at himself.

The good-looking fair-haired youth had been taken over by a balding old man.

* * *

“Hello,” said Marion.

“Hello yourself,” said Bill, as he passed her on his way to work. She was getting ready to leave for her job at the library, where every day she took down books, went through the information on the copyright page, and typed it up on two 4x6 cards, one of which was put in a big series of drawers in the entryway, where patrons could find what books were there without looking on all the shelves, and one of which was sent to the central library system.

She lived in one of the apartments downstairs from Bill. She once said the job would probably take herself, and three others, more than a year, just at her branch. She was a youngster in her forties.

* * *

Bill found rehearsals the same mixture of joy and boredom they had been a half-century before, with the same smells of paint and turpentine coming from the scene shop. The cast had convinced Arnold to direct the play, rather than hiring some
schmuck
, as he’d originally wanted to do. He’d conceived it; it was
his
vision.

During a break one night, Bill lay on the floor; Arnold slumped in a chair, and Shirlene, the lead dancer, lay face down on the sofa with a migraine. Bill chuckled, he thought, to himself.

“What’s up?” asked Fossman.

“It was probably just like this in rehearsals when Plautus was sitting where you are.”

“Guess so.”

“Were there headaches then?” asked Shirlene.

“Well, there were in
my
day, and that wasn’t too long after the Romans,” said Bill. “One of our cameramen had them.” He looked around. “Thanks, Arnold.”

“For what?”

“For showing me how much I didn’t remember I missed this stuff.”

“Well, sure,” said Fossman. “OK, folks, let’s get back to the grind. Shirlene, lie there till you feel better.”

She got to her feet. “I’ll never feel better,” she said.

* * *

“See—” said Rudy—“it was on January third, and everybody was congratulatin’ themselves on beatin’ that ol’ Y2K monster, and was throwin’ out them ham and lima bean MREs into the dumpsters. Joyful, you know—another Kohoutek, that was a comet that didn’t amount to a bird fart back in them way old ’70s. Anyway, it was exactly at 10:02 
A.M. EST
right here, when them three old surplus Russian-made diesel submarines that somebody—and nobody’s still sure just who—bought up back in the 1990s surfaced in three places around the world—and fired off them surplus NASA booster rockets, nine or ten of ’em—”

“Why ’cause we know that, Rudy, if we don’t know who did it?”

“ ’Cause everybody had electric stuff back then could tell what kind of damn watch you was wearin’ from two hundred miles out in space by how fast it was draggin’ down that 1.5-volt battery in it. They knew the subs was old Russian surplus as soon as they surfaced, and knew they was NASA boosters as soon as the fuses was lit—’cause that’s the kind of world your folks let happen for you to live in—that’s why ’cause.”

“Oh.”

“As old Rudy was sayin’, them nine or ten missiles, some went to the top of the atmosphere, and some went further out where all them ATT and HBO and them satellites that could read your watch was, and they all went off and meanwhile everybody everywhere was firin’ off all they stuff to try to stop whatever was gonna happen—well, when all that kind of stuff went off, and it turns out them sub missiles was big pulse explosions, what they used to call EMP stuff, and all the other crap went off that was tryin’ to stop the missiles, well then, kids, Time started over as far as ol’ Rudy’s concerned. Not just for the US of A and Yooropeans, but for everybody everywhere, even down to them gentle Tasaday and every witchety grub-eatin’ sonofagun down under.”

“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 . . .