Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building, then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to get stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what used to be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.

  That was the reunion Barb was talking about.

  ***

  “I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so existential that I offered to help out,” I said. “Olin Sweetwater called me a couple of months ago—”

  “Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater!” said Penny. “Geez! I haven’t heard that name in the whole damn twenty years.” She held onto the table with both hands. “I think I’m having a drug flashback!”

  “Yeah, Olin. Lives in Dallas now. Runs an insurance agency. He got my name from somebody I built some bookcases for a couple of years ago. Anyway, asked if I'd be one of the guides on the tour Saturday morning—you know, point out stuff to husbands and wives and kids, people who weren't there.”

  I didn’t know if I should go on.

  Bob was looking at me, waiting.

  “Well, Olin got me in touch with Jamie Lee Johnson—Jamie Lee Something hyphen Something now, none of them Johnson. She’s the entertainment chairman, in charge of the dance. I made a couple of tapes for her.”

  I don't have much, but I do have a huge bunch of Original Oldies, Greatest Hits albums and other garage sale wonders. Lots of people know it and call me once or twice a year to make dance tapes for their parties.

  “Oh, you’ll like this,” I said, waving to Carole to bring me another Ballantine Ale. “She said ‘Spring for some Maxell tapes, not the usual four for eighty-nine cents kind I hear you buy at Revco.’ Where you think she could have heard about that?”

  “From me,” said Barb. “She called me a month ago, too.” She smiled a little.

  “Come on. Barb.” I said. “Spill it.”

  “Well, I wanted to—”

  “I’m not going,” said Penny.

  We all looked at her.

  “Okay. Your protest has been noted and filed. Now start looking for your granny dress and your walnut shell beads,” I said.

  “Why should I go back?” said Penny. “High school was shit. None of us had any fun there, we were all toads. Sure, things got a little exciting, but you could have been on top of Mount Baldy in Colorado in the late ’60s and it would have been exciting. Why should I go see a bunch of jerks making fools of themselves trying to recapture some, some image of themselves another whole time and place?”

  “Oh,” said Bob, readjusting his gimme hat, “You really should hang around jerks more often ”

  “And why’s that. Bob?” asked Penny, peeling the label from her Lone Star.

  “ ’Cause if you watch them long enough.” said Bob, “you’ll realize that jerks are capable of anything.”

  ***

  Bob's the kind of guy w ho holds people’s destinies in his hands and they never realize it. When someone does something especially stupid and life-threatening in traffic. Bob doesn’t honk his horn or scream or shake his fist.

  He follows them. Either to where they’re going, or the city limits, whichever comes first. If they go to work, or shopping, he makes his move then. If they go to a residence, he jots down the make, model and license plate of the car on a notepad he keeps on his dashboard, and comes back later that night.

  Bob has two stacks of bumper stickers in the glove compartment of his truck. He takes one from each.

  He goes to the vehicle of the person who has put his life personally in jeopardy, and he slaps one of the stickers on the left front bumper and one on the right rear.

  The one on the back says SPICS AND NIGGERS OUT OF THE U.S.!

  The one he puts on the front reads KILL A COP TODAY!

  He goes through about fifty pairs of stickers a year. He’s self-employed, so he writes the printing costs off on his Schedule A as “Depreciation.”

  ***

  Penny looked at Bob a little longer. “Okay. You’ve convinced me,” she said. “Are you happy?”

  “No,” said Bob, turning in his chair. “Tell us whatever it is that’ll make us happy, Barb.”

  “The guys are going to play.”

  Just the guys. No names. No what guys? We all knew. I had never before in my life seen Bob’s jaw drop. Now I have.

  The guys.

  ***

  Craig Beausoliel. Morey Morkheim. Abram Cassuth. Andru Esposito. Or, taking them in order of their various band names from junior high on: Four Guys in a Dodge. Two Jews, A Wop, and A Frog. The Hurtz Bros. (Pervo, Devo, Sado, and Twisto). The Bug-Eyed Weasels. Those were when they were local, when they played Yud’s, the Vulcan Gas Company, Tod’s Hi-Spot. Then they got a record label and went national just after high school.

  You knew them as Distressed Flag Sale.

  That was the title of their first album (subtitled For Sale Cheap One Country Inquire 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). You probably knew it as the “blue-cake-with-the-white-stars-on-the-table-with-the-red-stripes-formed-on-the-white-floor-by-the-blood-running- in-seven-rivulets-from-the-dead-G.I.” album.

  Their second and last was NEXT! with the famous photo of the Saigon police chief blowing the brains out of the suspected VC in the checked shirt during the Tet Offensive of 1968, only over the general’s face they’d substituted Nixon’s, and over the VC’s, Howdy Doody’s.

  Then of course came the seclusion for six months, then the famous concert/riot/bust in Miami in 1970 that put an end to the band pretty much as a functioning human organization.

  Morey Morkhein tried a comeback after his time in the jusgado, in the mid-70s, as Moe in Moe and the Meanies’ Suck My Buttons, but it wasn’t a very good album and the times were already wrong.

  ***

  “I can’t believe it,” said Penny. “None of them have played in what, fifteen years? They probably ’ll sound like shit.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I know,” said Barb. “Jamie Lee— Younts-Fulton is the name, Frank—said after his jail term and the try at the comeback, Morey threw it all over and moved down to Corpus where his aunt was in the hotel business or something, and he opened a souvenir shop, a whole bunch of ’em eventually, called Morey’s Mementoes. Got pretty rich at ’ it supposedly, though you can never tell, especially from Jamie Lee—I mean, anyone, anyone who'd take as part of her second married name a hyphenated name from her first husband that was later convicted of mail fraud just because Younts is more sophisticated than Johnson—Johnson Fulton sounds like an 1830 politician from Tennessee, know what I mean?—you just can’t trust about things like who’s rich and who’s not. Anyway, Morey was at some convention for seashell brokers or something—Jamie says about half the shells and junk sold in Corpus come from Japan and Taiwan—he ran into Andru, of all people, who was in the freight business! Like, Morey had been getting shells from this shipping company for ten years and it turns out to belong to Andru’s uncle or brother-in-law or something! So they start writing to each other, then somehow (maybe it was from Bridget, you remember Bridget? from UT? Yeah.) she knew where Abram was, and about that time the people putting all this reunion together got a hold of Andru. So the only thing left to do was find Craig.”

  She looked around. It was the longest I'd ever heard Barb talk in my life.

  “You know where he was?”

  “No. Where?” we all three said.

  “Ever eat any Dr. Healthy’s Nut-Crunch Bread?”

  “A loaf a day,” said Bob, patting his stomach.

  “Craig is Dr. Healthy.”

  “Shit!” said Bob. “Isn’t that stuff baked in Georgetown?”

  “Yeah. He’s been like thirty miles away for fifteen years, baking bread and sweet rolls. Jamie said, like some modern-day Cactus Jack Gamer, he vowed never to go south of the San Gabriel River again.”

  “But now he is?”

  “Yep. Supposedly, Andru’s gonna fly down to Morey’s in Corpus this wee
k and they’re going to practice before they come up here. Abram always was the quickest study and the only real musical genius, so he’ll be okay.”

  “That only leaves one question,” said Penny, speaking for us all. “Can Craig still sing? Can Craig still play? I mean, look what happened after the Miami thing.”

  “Good question,” said Bob. “I suppose we’ll all find out in a big hurry Saturday night. Besides,” he said, looking over at me, “we always got your tapes.”

  ***

  The name’s Frank Bledsoe. I'm pushing forty, which is exercise enough.

  I do lots of odd stuff for a living—a little woodwork and carpentry, mostly speakers and bookcases. I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.

  What I mostly do is build flyrods. I make two kinds—a 7' one for a #5 line and an 8'2" one for a #6 line. I get the fiberglass blanks from a place in Ohio, and the components like cork grips, reel seats, guides, tips and ferrules, from whoever’s having a sale around the country.

  I sell a few to a fishing tackle store downtown. The sevenfooter retails for $22, the other for $27.50. Each rod takes about three hours of work, a day for the drying time on the varnish on the wraps. So you can see my hourly rate isn’t too swell.

  I live in a place about the size of your average bathroom in a real person’s house. But it’s quiet, it’s on a cul-de-sac, and there’s a converted horse stable out back I use for my workshop.

  What keeps me in business is that people around the country order a few custom-made rods each year, for which I charge a little more.

  Here’s a dichotomy: as flyfishing becomes more popular, my business falls off.

  That’s because, like everything else in these post-modernist times, the Yups ruined it. As with every other recreation, they confuse the sport with the equipment.

  Flyfishing is growing with them because it’s a very status thing. When the Yups found it, all they wanted to do was be seen on the rivers and lakes with a six-hundred-dollar split-bamboo rod, a pair of two-hundred-dollar waders, a hundred-dollar vest, shirts with a million zippers on them, a seventy-five-dollar tweed hat, and a patch from a flyfishing school that showed they’d paid one thousand dollars to learn how to put out enough fly line to reach across the average K-Mart parking lot.

  What I make is cheap fiberglass rods, not even boron or graphite. No glamor. And the real fact is that in flyfishing, most fish are caught within twenty feet of your boots. No glory there, either.

  So the sport grows, and money comes in more and more slowly.

  ***

  All this talk about the reunion has made me positively reflective. So let me put 1969 in perspective for you.

  Richard Milhous Nixon was in his first year in office. He'd inherited all the good things from Lyndon Johnson—the social programs—and was dismantling them, and going ahead with all the bad ones, like the War in Nam. The Viet Cong and NVA were killing one hundred Americans a week, and according to the Pentagon, we were killing two thousand of them, regular as clockwork, as announced at the five P.M. press briefing in Saigon every Friday. The draft call was fifty thousand a month.

  The Beatles released Abbey Road late in the year. At the end of the summer we graduated there was something called the Woodstock Festival of Peace and Music; in December there would be the disaster at the Altamont racetrack (in which, if you saw the movie that came out the next year, you could see a Hell's Angel with a knife kill a black man with a gun on camera while all around people were freaking out on bad acid and Mick Jagger, up there trying to sing, was saying “Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting each other?”). On the nights of August 8 and 9 were the Tate-LaBianca murders in L.A. (Charles Manson had said to his people “Kill everybody at Terry Melcher’s house,” not knowing Terry had moved. Terry Melcher was Doris Day’s son. Chuck thought Terry owed him some money or had reneged on a recording deal or something. When he realized what he’d done, he had them go out and kill some total strangers to make the murders at the Tate household look like the work of a kill-the-rich cult.) On December 17, Tiny Tim married Miss Vickie on the Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson as best man.

  The Weathermen, the Black Panthers and, according to agents’ reports, “frizzy-haired women of a radical organization called NOW,” were disturbing the increasingly senile sleep of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He longed for the days when you could shoot criminals down in the streets like dogs and have them buried in handcuffs, when all the issues were clear-cut. Spirotis T. Agnew, the vice-president, was gearing up to make his “nattering nabobs of negativism” speech, and to coin the term Silent Majority. This was four years before he made the most moving and eloquent speech in his, life, which went: “Nolo contendere."

  We were reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or rereading The Hobbit for the zillionth time, or Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. And on everybody’s lips were the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nixon was working on that, too.)

  There were weeks when you thought nothing was ever going to change, there was no wonderment anymore, just new horrors about the War, government repression, drugs. (They were handing out life sentences for the possession of a single joint in some places that year.)

  Then, in three days, from three total strangers, you'd hear the Alaska vacation—flannel shirt—last man killed by an active volcano story, all the people swearing they’d heard the story from the kid in the flannel shirt himself, and you’d say, yeah, the world is still magic . . .

  ***

  I’ll really put 1969 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing a three-bedroom house that fall, and you’re splitting rent you think is exorbitant, $89.75 a month. Minimum wage was $1.35 an hour, and none of you even has any of that.

  Somebody gets some money from somewhere, God knows, and you’re all going to pile into the VW Microbus which is painted green, orange, and fuchsia, and going to the H.E.B. to score some food. But first, since there are usually hassles, you all decide to smoke all the grass in the house, about three lids’ worth.

  When you get to the store you split up to get food, and are to meet at checkout lane Number Three in twenty minutes. An hour later you pool the five shopping carts and here’s what you have:

  Seven two-pound bags of lemon drops. Three bags of orange marshmallow goobers. A Hostess Ding-Dong assortment pack. A twelve-pound bag of Kokuho Rose New Variety Rice. A two-pound can of Beer-Nuts. A fifty-foot length of black shoestring licorice. Three six-packs of Barq’s Root Beer. Two quarts of fresh strawberries and a pint of Half and Half. A Kellog’s Snak-Pak (heavy on the Frosted Flakes). A five-pound bag of turbinado sugar. Two one-pound bags of Bazooka Joe bubble gum (with double comics). A blue 75-watt light bulb.

  It fills up three dubl/bags and the bill comes to $8.39, the last seventy-four cents of which you pay the clerk in pennies.

  Later, when somebody finally cooks, everybody yells, “Shit! Rice again? Didn’t we just go to the grocery store?”

  PS: On July 20 that year we landed on the Moon.

  ***

  Now I’ll tell you about this year, 1989.

  The Republicans are in the tenth month of their new Presidency, naturally. After Cuomo and lacocca refused to run, the Democrats, like always, ran two old warhorses who quit thinking along about 1962. (“If nominated, I refuse to run,” said lacocca, “if elected, I refuse to serve. And that’s a promise.”)

  We have six thousand military advisors in Honduras and Costa Rica. All those guys who went down to the post office and signed their Selective Service postcards are beginning to look a little grey around the gills.

  There are 1,800,000 cases of AIDS in America, and 120,000 have died of it.

  On Wall Street the Dow Jones just passed the 3000 mark after its near-suicide in ’87. ‘Things are looking just great!” says the new president.

  Congress is voting on the new two-trillion-dollar debt ceiling limit.

  Thin
gs are much like they have been forever. The rich are richer, the poor poorer, the middle class has no choices. The cities are taxing them to death, the suburbs can’t hold them. Every state but those in the Bible-belt South has horse and dog racing, a lottery, legalized pari-mutuel Bingo and a state income tax, and they’re still going broke.

  Everything is wrong everywhere. The only good thing I’ve noticed is that MTV is off the air.

  You go to the grocery store and .get a pound of bananas, a six-foot electric extension cord, a can of powder scent air freshener, a tube of store-brand toothpaste and a loaf of bread. It fits in the smallest plastic sack they have and costs $7.82.

  Let me put 1989 in another nutshell for you:

  A friend of mine keeps his record albums (his CDs are elsewhere) in what looks like a haphazard stack of orange crates in one corner of his living room.

  They’re not orange crates. What he did was get a sculptor friend of his to make them. He got some lengths of stainless steel, welded and shaped them to look like a haphazard stack of crates. Then with punches and chisels and embossing tools the sculptor made the metal look like grained unseasoned wood, and then painted them, labels and all, to look like crates.

  You can’t tell them from the real things, and my friend only paid three thousand dollars for them.

  Or to put it another way: And Zarathustra came down from the hills unto the cities of men. And Zarathustra spake unto them, and what he said to them was: “Yo!”

  PS: Nobody’s been to the Moon in sixteen years.

  * * *

  MY TRIP TO THE POST OFFICE by FRANK BLEDSOE AGE 38

  I'd finished three rods for a guy in Colorado the day before. I put the clothes back on I’d worn working on them, all dotted with varnish. I was building a bookcase, too, so I hit it a few licks with a block plane to get my blood going in the early morning.

  It was a nice crisp fall day, so I decided to ride my bike to the post office substation to mail the rods. I was probably so covered with wood shavings I looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been hit with a slug from a .45.

  I brushed myself off. put the rods in their cloth bags, put the bags in the tubes with the packing paper, and put the tubes in the carrier I have on the bike. Then I rode off to the branch post office.