“Did Clement really say, ‘On this church I will get my rocks off’?” she asked.
“I think it was the beer talking,” I said, my gaze alighting on Our Lady of Pompeii School, its neo-Renaissance façade commanding the corner of Bleecker Street and Leroy.
“He wasn’t drinking,” Connie noted.
Pompeii. The supreme seismic disaster of the First Century A.D. Squalls of fiery ash descending from on high, promiscuously incinerating multitudes. If Our Lady was helpless to prevent Vesuvius from carbonizing a Roman city, what made me think I could defeat the Qualimosans?
“Connie, I can’t do it,” I moaned. Setting down my valise, I embraced a NO PARKING sign.
“Do what?”
“I can’t think on that scale. Nobody can. Two million innocent viewers. The human mind wasn’t built for such statistics.”
“I thought you were a science-fiction writer. You deal routinely in nuclear holocausts and Martians wiping out Manhattan.”
“That’s all fantasy,” I said. “It’s all Buck Rogers stuff.”
“Don’t you remember what Mr. Silver told me today? Even Buck Rogers stuff is not Buck Rogers stuff.”
Connie’s words proved peculiarly comforting. I broke free of the NO PARKING sign and stood erect. Buck Rogers was fantasy, and I couldn’t answer for Our Lady, but good old Saul was real, and so was Uncle Wyatt, chief priest of the church of cosmic astonishment. The show must go on.
“Taxi!” Connie shouted.
Naturally I assumed Connie would instruct the Yellow Cab driver to take us to our respective apartments, so we might try for a full night’s sleep before raising the curtain on our teleplay. Instead she specified Rockefeller Center. “After this evening’s broadcast of The Original Amateur Hour,” she explained, squeezing my hand, “we can appropriate Studio Two at nine o’clock, aim the cameras at the Bread Alone set, and do a slapdash tech rehearsal.”
“Isn’t Sid Caesar in Studio Two at nine?” I asked, dandling the Zorningorg Prize on my knee.
“Nope, One—and then comes Your Hit Parade in Three,” said Connie. “This will be fun, Kurt. You’ll get to play all the parts, and I’ll get to pretend I’m Ida Lupino.”
By the time we’d gone through a security check and made our way to Studio Two, The Original Amateur Hour had wrapped: lights off, control room dark, cameras inert. We hurried to the Bread Alone set. As conceived by the network’s art director, Lazarus’s dining room boasted an elegant simplicity: white stucco walls, brown amphorae, potted palm tree, wooden table holding a bowl filled with plastic grapes and wax figs, picture window opening onto Jesus’s tomb. A somber young man in a goatee and black turtleneck darted about, gripping a six-pigment palette and touching up the décor. He paused in his labors long enough to introduce himself as Marshall Crompton, then added, “I don’t dig workin’ for such a square show, but I gotta buy groceries.”
“You’re an atheist?” I suggested.
“More of an agnostic anarchist gadfly,” Marshall explained. “My path in life was blazed by Pablo Picasso, Allen Ginsberg, and Ernie Kovacs.”
“You’ll enjoy tonight’s tech rehearsal,” I said. “We’re preparing for our annual tribute to blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy?”
“Think Saturnalia. Once a year on this show, we worship the Lord of Misrule.”
“Smooth.”
Come Sunday morning, of course, Connie would compose each image by relaying orders to the cameramen through their headsets, but for now she and I had to wheel the rigs around ourselves, positioning camera one to deliver a longshot of the set, camera two to cover Jesus’s tomb, and three to focus on Mary seated at the table. After passing me a script and stationing the boom mike above the fruit bowl, Connie retreated to the control room, where she fired up the console, drenched the set in klieg illumination, and cued me over the public-address system. Teleplay in hand, I launched into the opening speeches, taking the parts of both Mary and Peter. Marshall seemed amused by the dialogue, especially the apostle explaining how he and his confrère had rescued Jesus with an opiate, and when the time came for the stone to roll away from the tomb, he was happy to show me which off-stage lever to push.
“Here’s an idea,” I told Marshall. “For the rest of the tech rehearsal, let’s have you be Jesus.”
“Crazy, man,” he replied, then proceeded to enact the teleplay’s first big visual moment: the buried-alive Galilean rabbi escaping his crypt.
“A word of friendly advice,” I said. “Don’t watch the broadcast tomorrow.”
“But I’m diggin’ it,” said Marshall.
“We have reason to believe the navigator of an orbiting alien spaceship intends to retrofit a death-ray onto the Bread Alone carrier wave.”
“Cool.”
For the next three hours, Marshall and I ran through the script (variously incarnating the perplexed Mary, the conniving Peter, the mad Jesus, the bitter leper, the chivalrous Brock, the facetious Ducky, the unflappable robot, and the philosophical gorilla), while Connie stayed in the control room and jotted down ideas for lighting effects, dolly moves, and camera angles. Bringing “The Madonna and the Starship” to its jeopardized audience would be less like directing a teleplay than covering a Dodgers game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I sensed that Connie was unwilling to settle for tedious longshots and bland midshots. When a given moment called for a close-up, she would by-God deliver the goods.
The rehearsal ended shortly after 11:00 P.M. I bid Marshall good night, gave him ten bucks for his troubles, and, taking hold of my valise, climbed the stairs to Connie’s sanctum. I entered quietly, knowing she might be in the midst of a creative meditation, but instead I found her talking on the phone.
With a wary eye I surveyed the console, a science-fictional installation comprising the switching device, the audio mixing board, and a bank of small monitors labeled camera 1, camera 2, camera 3, preview, air, and film chain. Everything seemed fully functional. Connie cradled the handset. Having discarded Lenny’s motorcycle jacket, which now hung over the back of the technical director’s chair, she presented herself to me in the same maroon silk blouse she’d been wearing since we left the studio on Friday afternoon.
“I just told Donna Dain that under no circumstances should anyone at the Saint Francis House watch tomorrow’s Bread Alone broadcast,” she explained.
“I’m too tired to know if I had fun tonight or not,” I said. “Was it fun for you?”
A rapturous expression lit Connie’s face, and for an instant she radiated the same caliber of sensuality as our Demivirgin Mary. “This is going to work, Kurt! Our masquerade will save the world—I can feel it!” She gestured toward my trophy. “Hey, friend, don’t you think it’s high time I got a good look at that thing?”
I opened my valise, removed the award, and yanked away the cardigan. Connie donned the goggles, then contemplated the nearest facet, breathing deeply as the artifact romanced her gray matter. She reported seeing a lambent river swirling around a crystalline palace, a fire-breathing gryphon wheeling above an active volcano, and a fountain spouting “the primordial juices of multicellular life.”
“And now we can go home and sleep,” I said, cloaking the trophy.
“Vita brevis, ars longa!” Connie pulled off the goggles and tapped me on the shoulder. “Home? I have a better idea. Instead of rushing back to Rockefeller Center at the crack of dawn, let’s spend the night here. On Thursday they did The Fourposter on Producers Showcase. The bed’s still in Studio Three, and I’m sure we can scare up a cot for you. Ogden keeps an alarm clock in his office.”
“I’ll sleep better in my own bed.”
“What I meant, Kurt Jastrow, is that I have a really better idea.” She crossed to the technical director’s chair, reached inside Lenny’s jacket, and removed a cardboard container no larger than a cigarette pack. “Look what your roommate left in his pocket. At first I thought it was his Chesterfields.”
I stared at the
box in question, with its famous logo of a plumed Trojan helmet against a red background. My pulse performed a paradiddle. “I taught him how to buy those things,” I said, inanely.
“Then you must be familiar with their application.”
“I suppose so,” I croaked—though not as familiar as I might have wished, my experience with rubbers being limited to the actress who’d played the villainous lady botanist in “She Demons of Io,” plus a nymphomaniac who worked as a receptionist at Planet Stories and twice lured me to the office after hours for a roll in the slush.
“I am likewise prophylactically literate. At Barnard I fell head over heels for a Columbia grad student who understood Spinoza.” Connie slipped on the visor once more. “Look at this! It’s better than an Andromeda cover!”
She passed me the goggles, and I put them on in time to behold a pasture vibrating with iridescent dragonflies and carpeted with coruscating crimson poppies.
“‘O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more,’” I said, quoting Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters but thinking of Connie’s secondary sex characteristics.
“‘They’re side by side, they’re glorified, where the underworld can meet the elite’!” she sang. “Take me to the fourposter, Kurt. Stay me with flagons. Comfort me with apples. Buck Roger me.”
Mesmerized by alien dragonflies, extraterrestrial poppies, and the primordial juices of multicellular life, to say nothing of the imminent masquerade, I careened into Studio Three, Connie at my side, my valise weighed down with my award plus Ogden’s alarm clock and the four remaining scripts. Zipped back into Lenny’s motorcycle jacket, still muttering song lyrics, Connie headed for the curtain. She pulled it away to reveal the promised bed. Your Hit Parade had wrapped a half-hour earlier. The airwaves belonged to local stations. We had the place to ourselves.
“What will your analyst say about this?” I asked.
“‘Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street,’” Connie sang.
Until that night my favorite twentieth-century drama had been Death of a Salesman, but now it was The Fourposter by Jan de Hartog. We scrambled aboard the mattress. The zippers of Connie’s jacket parted melodiously. The buttons of her maroon blouse yielded to my trembling fingers. Briefly her bra-clasps challenged my dexterity, but at last the silken chrysalises dropped away.
“‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,’” Connie recited, undressing me in turn, “‘because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night.’”
“Tomorrow we fork the lightning!” I exclaimed, though I had no idea what it meant to treat an electrical discharge in that fashion. (If I tried it on Uncle Wonder’s Attic, I would probably burn down Rockefeller Center.) “Tomorrow we cleave the sun!”
The woman with no use for pulp fiction had a pulp fiction sort of body, Amazing Stories hips, Astounding thighs, Fantastic breasts. My appreciation manifested itself as a boner that could sink an eight ball. Inhaling the sharp medicinal scent, I sheathed my lust in latex. Would I live to see the day when these sublime commodities were advertised on TV? Buy Trojan condoms, with the lubrication already on ’em?
Not surprisingly, I came in less time than it took Buffalo Bob to do a Colgate commercial. Connie proved understanding. Things went better the second time around. Although for us the phenomenon of simultaneous orgasm belonged to some distant Brock Barton future, we managed to serve that ideal through successive approximations, whereupon, satiated at last, we fumbled for Ogden’s alarm clock.
Connie found it first. She wound it up, setting the bell for seven-thirty. We interlaced our limbs and closed our eyes. Man did not live by bread alone, and neither did woman, but at that moment it seemed as if we might sustain ourselves forever on eros.
But sleep, that fickle physician, refused to visit my side of the bed. Dr. Hypnos paid no house calls to Studio Three. Like a machine shorn of its flywheel, my mind raced uncontrollably. Evidently I’d entered a zone beyond exhaustion, a realm where weariness stimulates a person’s brain even as it numbs his flesh.
Monday would mark the beginning of the Brock Barton adventure called “The Space Pirates of Callisto,” each chapter followed by an Uncle Wonder’s Attic installment for which I was reasonably well prepared. The subsequent week would bring “The Phantom Asteroid,” the teleplay I’d workshopped on Tuesday morning with the Underwood Milkers. I remained fond of the basic conceit: Prince Nihil, the last Nonextant, imprisoning the Triton’s crew inside the nightmares of his ethereal ancestors. Nihil. Nihilism. Nothingness. The jejune glamour of the void. The adolescent allure of the abyss.
And suddenly I understood how we might give our visiting invertebrates some ethical backbone.
I rolled over, kissed Connie awake, and cried, “I’ve got it!”
“Jesus, Kurt, I just fell asleep.”
“I see what has to happen in the second half-hour!”
“What has to happen is Corporal Rex,” said Connie dryly.
“No, that whole series is on celluloid,” I noted. “Tomorrow morning we’ll tamper with the film chain. They’ll repair it later in the week and run the preempted episode next Sunday.”
“Corporal Rex is a sponsored show,” Connie protested. “Ralston Purina will not go gentle into that good night.”
“I don’t want to talk about dog food. I want to talk about philosophy.” Climbing off the fourposter, I retrieved my boxer shorts. “Remember my script about the Nonextants? You’re the expert, but it seems to me our crustaceans aren’t really logical positivists at all. Nor are they atheists, Darwinists, doubters, rationalists, skeptics, sages, or atomists. They’re simply—”
“Good God, you’re right,” said Connie. “They’re nihilists.”
“It’s all clear to me now!” I babbled, strapping on my wristwatch. 2:00 A.M. “Our script is missing two crucial characters. When Saul and his guests tune in ‘The Madonna and the Starship’ today, Wulawand and Volavont must see themselves on the screen. That is, they must see, er, let me think—”
“They must see Zontac and Korkhan, the rayguntoting nihilists from Planet Voidovia!” exclaimed Connie. “The invertebrates who’ve replaced God with their own megalomania!”
“Perfect!”
“The present draft pits metaphysics against materialism.” Connie slid off the fourposter and started getting dressed. “But unless you’re an ancient Greek, dialectic is not enough. The rewrite must turn on—”
“Trialectic?”
“Good!” She raised her hand, made a fist, extended the index finger. “Worldview number one: the Judeans—Mary, Jesus, Peter, and the leper, connoisseurs of the supernatural.” Her middle finger emerged. “Worldview number two: our Voidovians—Zontac and Korkhan, acolytes of the abyss.” Her ring finger appeared. “And hovering above these incompatible persuasions, worldview number three: the scientific humanists of the space schooner Triton—Brock, Ducky, Cotter Pin, and Sylvester, at odds with both the numinous and the nihilistic.”
“I knew that Buck Rogers stuff would come in handy one day.”
“Shut up,” said Connie affectionately, tucking her maroon blouse into her pleated skirt. “So where the hell do we get actors to play Zontac and Korkhan at the eleventh hour?”
“Search me. What a minute. Saul’s poker table. Manny used to do stand-up comedy. Terry once appeared off-Broadway in R.U.R.”
“What about their dialogue? Improvisation?”
“Cue cards. Like we do with those uppity radio actors who refuse to learn their lines.”
“We’ll need costumes.”
“I’m thinking of an early Tell Me a Ghost Story,” I said. “‘Revenge of the Gargoyles,’ ‘Curse of the Gargoyles,’ ‘Gargoyles of Sunnybrook Farm,’ something like that.”
“‘Night of the Gargoyles,’” said Connie. “Script by brother Howard. He hated how Sonny Glover directed it.”
“But the masks were terrific. As for Ralston Purina, the Corporal Rex commercial is always
done live. We’ll simply drop it into our show at ten forty-five.”
“Brilliant!”
An instant later I deactivated the alarm clock and tossed it into my valise. Fully clothed now, Connie and I slipped out of Studio Three and dashed to the miniscule office she commanded as Bread Alone’s producer. I placed a call to 59 West 82nd Street. Saul answered with a chipper, “Bathsheba’s Cathouse, King David speaking.”
“Hi, Saul. It’s me. How’s it going?”
“That Volavont is one stud-poker-playing sonofabitch.”
“Question. Did Manny and Terry look at the teleplay?”
“Furtively, like foxes,” said Saul. “They like the idea of saving two million Christians, but they noticed the Weltanschauung problem.”
“I think we’ve solved it, a matter of getting the lobsters to realize they’re trafficking in nihilism. We’re adding a whole half-hour, including roman-à-clef characters based on Wulawand and Volavont. Listen, Saul, you gotta convince Manny and Terry to show up here in a few hours. They were born to play Zontac and Korkhan.”
“I don’t understand—will they be ad-libbing? Isn’t that risky?”
“Cue cards. Tell ’em that, if they come through for Connie and me, you’ll publish their next stories sight unseen.”
“Bribery is against my principles.”
“Hey, Saul, we’ve got a chance to stop nihilism from infecting the whole goddamn Milky Way! Tell ’em you’ll publish their next goddamn stories!”
“If I know Manny and Terry, they’ll join your troupe for the fun of it.”
“I want you to equip ’em with a couple of toy rayguns from your collection. Conference room C. Eight o’clock. They should use the employees’ entrance. Can you remember all that?”
“You can trust me, Kurt. Bye, now. I’m sitting on a full house.”
As I cradled the handset, Connie opened her desk drawer and grabbed a metal ring from which a dozen keys dangled like jellyfish tentacles. I followed her down the stairs to the basement wardrobe department. The door yielded to a brass key. A nude male mannequin, gelded like a choirboy, mutely greeted us. For the next half-hour we alternately scoured the shelves (which held scads of masks, wigs, hats, helmets, and crowns fitted over disembodied faceless heads) and pawed through the racks (where scores of coats, capes, gowns, suits, and zippered costumes hung like gibbeted prisoners). Our efforts were rewarded with a pair of latex gargoyle masks—bulging eyes, flared nostrils, pointed ears, bulbous tongues—and matching slate-gray jumpsuits.
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