Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (6 page)

Please see my attached list of alternate last lines and appropriate songs to follow them with. I met Kid Rock at an MTV gifting suite last week, and he’s excited about getting a song in the movie.

I couldn’t be farther away from all of the snow in my life, geographically or mentally, than I am right now, as I write this.

I’m in Burbank, California—in the hot, yellow yolk of summer. July bakes the town like a corpse on desert asphalt. But it’s Burbank asphalt, which means there’s a Baskin-Robbins nearby.

The first memory I can remember as a memory is of snow. Looking out through the balcony window of my family’s tiny Norfolk, Virginia, apartment in 1970 and seeing snow falling from the sky.

Except that’s not how I saw it.

My fresh-from-the-oven toddler’s eyes were fixed on the frame of the glass balcony door. And they must’ve thought the snow was stationary and the building was rising through the morning air into the sky.

My first coherent thought about life was that apartment houses could levitate in the snow. Decades later, when I took LSD in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, I had a realization. Most narcotics are designed to approximate the nonjudgmental, magically incorrect way we see
the world before we can speak. Thus, the whorls in the wood on the cheap kitchen table swirled like tiny maelstroms. Of course—each of them was a twirly doorway into Tableland.

A row of action figures on a shelf subtly nodded their heads in time to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” They never got around to actually dancing—and how could they? The Fleetwood Mac song was playing from the television, where Bill Clinton and Al Gore and their wives danced woodenly, having just won the ’92 election. Those poor action figures were embarrassed by the cut-string puppets on television. They could be posed to appear like they were fighting, riding motorcycles, firing fearsome weapons. And there, within plain sight—four humans with ten times the range of motion and strength, and they couldn’t even dance to a Fleetwood Mac song.

Finally, I sat staring a row of books on a shelf while the dawn turned the room gray/gray-blue/blue/harsh/dry/ tired. I saw the books as books, and then as distant vats of pulp waiting for pressing and ink, and farther back as a forest and then as scattered atoms, and the universe was a cold forest of cooling fire, waiting to become wood and pulp and books.

But I never even got close to thinking, during those twelve melty hours of hallucinating, that my apartment building could levitate. Only babies hallucinate at that level.

I’m eleven years old and my two friends are ten years old except for one other friend I have who is also eleven years old but is only twenty-two days older than me. And this is how cool our snow fort is:

First off, the back wall we didn’t even have to build. The snowplows scraped their way through the streets early early early this morning and piled up big, packed walls of snow. So that became the back wall of the fort. It’s probably fifty feet high, maybe. I can’t jump over it, so that’s probably fifty feet. Numbers are how you understand the world. Like, a dad makes a million dollars a year. Gum stays in your stomach for seven years. Only grandparents are allowed to buy special shirts that always have five pieces of candy in the pocket. And anything I can’t jump over is fifty feet.

The snowfall, starting early in the evening the night before, stayed strong and did not weaken. The clock radio with the red glowing numbers (red numbers tell parents to go out and make money) next to our parents’ bed emitted the Chuckling Voices and Fart Sounds. The Chuckling Voices said the schools of Loudoun County bowed in fear when faced with the strength and steadfastness of the snowfall. The schools would close, out of respect for the icy onslaught from the sky. When they said our school’s name,
two
fart sounds. Because we always close. Because the Mighty Snow must be respected.

We must be like the snowfall.

The Mighty Snow, which made our parents, so sure of our schedules and destinies, shake their heads and mutter, “Just great,” when faced with the reality that the sky and snow and cold can decide a new path for our day. Somewhere, our teachers are crying and kicking things because they don’t get to make us learn numbers and books full of dead people. And the principal is going, “Boo hoo hoo.” Mighty Snow—you are more real a god than Jesus and the Hercules gods from school and whatever the Bergs, Steinbergs, and Axelrods say thanks to during their holidays. Those gods never show up. But the temperature gets cold and that’s Mighty Snow’s way of saying, “Soon, my minions. Soon, I will show you real strength and also you’ll get a day off ’cause I’m so strong.”

So we’ll be strong like the snow. We’ll be stronger than Trey and Paul from the far end of Crescent Court. We’ll be stronger than Mike’s older brother, who plays soccer but is fat and mean. And we will definitely be stronger than Mrs. Jeskyne, who yells and yells from her screen door. In the sunlight reflected off this new snow, wearing a nightshirt that says
BORN TO SHOP
and holding one of those weensy barbells she stomp-walks with, it is clear how slim and weak she is. Blond hair and tan skin like hers may have power on a beach somewhere. But here in the Northern Virginia snow? She is like if an aerobics lady tried to fight the big metal walkers on the planet Hoth, which Mike says are called AT-ATs, and then he’ll tell you what each letter means like he’s going to win a prize. Today, if Mrs. Jeskyne wants to yell at us, it will have to be over the fifty-foot front wall of the snow fort.

Around this we built the three other walls of the fort, growing out of the big, packed ice wall. So the fort faces my house, which is across from Mrs. Jeskyne’s. If Trey and Paul and Mike’s older brother and anyone else want to attack, they’re going to have to come around the sides of my house. All they’d have to hide behind would be the hedges, which are so unleafy now because of the winter that we can throw the bigger snowballs right through them and
boom!
snow all over their faces, which is a total skeeze-mo.

The two side walls are high enough to climb over but not jump. Mike built a slide against the one wall, the one facing the driveway. Mike thinks everything should have an “escape hatch” or “escape pod” or something ever since seeing
Star Wars,
and that’s how he broke his finger, trying to say that skateboard taped to his bike was an “escape pod” when we were racing down Tyler Street, which is steep. Thistle isn’t something to escape into.

We’ve piled up enough snowballs to probably totally destroy anyone who comes our way. Like, if Mike’s older brother took his sled and outfitted it with some cool kind of snow engine, and also some sort of robot cannon that could whirl around and fire like a million snowballs like a laser gun, we’d still take him out. It’d be totally cool if he were to come zooming along the street, banking on the piled-up snow like a James Bond car, and then suddenly jumped the wall with the sled, but we’d dodge him in slow motion and karate-throw snowballs at him while jumping and flipping to the side, still in slow motion like Steve Austin, and he’d be blown off the sled and we’d stand there, victorious, and then a snow yeti would attack and we’d save the neighborhood with our snowball skills and the cool rocket sled, which we’d now have through beating Mike’s older brother, which is a rule of snowball fights. Mike says that probably won’t happen but that we can definitely build a smaller version of the snow sled out of Legos and have it fight his action figures of the dudes in the bar in
Star Wars
. At least, the ones we didn’t blow up with firecrackers out by the public pool last summer.

Trey and Paul are suddenly in the distance, shin-deep in the snow and looping toward us. They’ve got a paper bag and I’m sure it’s full of some super ice ball and I tell Mike, “We’ve got company,” like I saw Han Solo do once, and we get ready with a snowball in each hand and our stash of extra ammo on these cool shelves we cut out of the walls of the snow fort.

Now they’re closer, and what looked like them coming toward us in the snow was really them walking right by us, looking over at the fort and our heads peeping over the side. They look confused and happy and tired. Trey gives Paul the paper bag and now I can see that they spray-painted their mouths silver, like they have only robot mouths. It’s a cyborg attack!

“Halt, cyborg!” I yell.

They laugh but then they look scared and look down, as if to see if they’re really cyborgs, for a second. Then they laugh again and all the laughing makes them have to stop and catch their breath. They each take a breath from the bag, which, maybe, since they’re pretending to be cyborgs, holds special cyborg air.

“No cyborgs in our fort!” yells Mike.

Trey and Paul stare at us and don’t say anything, and then Paul goes, “Boop beep beep,” and they totally crack up. They each take another breath of cyborg air and start walking away.

That’s when I see it—Mike’s dad, creeping along the breezeway of Mrs. Jeskyne’s house.

Mike’s dad is really really cool. He’s like a much bigger kid and not like a dad at all. He showed us how you can type numbers onto a calculator and then turn it upside down to form words. What would Dolly Parton be like if she were flat-chested? And he typed in 55378008 and turned it upside down and everyone was cracking up. Mike explained it to me later and I got it and when I tried to do it in music class I typed in 2s instead of 5s and it didn’t work.

And Mike’s dad is always helping us build with Legos and sometimes comes out and plays hide-and-seek and man he’s the best hider. So I figure, he’s taking the day off of work, and he’s planning a cool frontal attack. I have to remember, after we totally blast him with snowballs, to have him show me the calculator trick again.

I look over and Mike isn’t even holding a snowball. He’s staring at his dad.

“Arm yourself!” I say. “This could be a trick.”

Then Mrs. Jeskyne opens her front door, and Mike’s dad shoves his way in, before she can look over his shoulder, looking back at us nervously before shutting the door behind him.

“You think he’s going to go up on her roof, try to attack us from there?”

Mike says, “He’s not going on the roof.”

And then he starts
wrecking the fort
.

I can’t think of anything to say. It’s the greatest fort we’ve ever built and he’s tearing it apart. I sit in one of the two command chairs we made out of snow and watch him kick the walls outward in pieces, saving the escape slide for last.

I realize he’s under the control of the cyborgs and I let him run out his destructo program. When he’s done he starts laughing and since we know Mike’s brother isn’t home we go to Mike’s house and steal his VHS of
The Warriors
and watch it on the VCR. Mike’s dad comes in when the Warriors are fighting the roller-skating guys in the subway, but he doesn’t come in to say hi or tell us a joke. And when we get to the part where the guy says, “Warriors, come out to plaaaaa-aaaay!” Mike doesn’t talk along with the movie like he usually does, which is weird ’cause it’s his favorite part of any movie. Then I get out the huge box where Mike’s got all these different Legos from different sets, and we start working on the snow sled. Mike starts working on the escape pod first and then gets frustrated because he makes it huge, bigger than the snow sled’s ever going to be, ’cause he’s using up all the pieces, and he says, “I want a huge escape pod.” I say fine, but we’d better get the
Warriors
tape back to his brother’s room, but Mike says who cares. And I say, “Well, when he comes home he’ll start a fight and then your mom and dad’ll get pissed,” and Mike says fine. And he’s acting really weird, and so I say I’m going to go and I go walking in the snow, but now everyone’s been out and there’s less and less places where I can leave fresh footprints and break a smooth surface. So then I go home and draw cyborgs.

Later, in the summer, Mike and I are at the pool. My dad dropped us off and on the way there was an Eagles song on the radio, where the singer said, “They had one thing in common, they were good in bed . . . ,” which didn’t make sense to me. And my dad laughed and said, “There’s things you don’t understand yet.”

Mike’s mom told him Mrs. Jeskyne is getting divorced from her husband.

“Some of the water in this pool was probably part of our snow fort,” says Mike. But we’re playing Shark Hunters now, and I don’t understand what he’s trying to say until much later in my life.