Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220)

by Morrow, James

  “I’m Hank Griswold,” the dog handler told me, then gestured toward the protestors. “Who the hell are they?” He led his four-legged actors toward the back of the studio, evidently the locus of the live Ralston Purina commercial around which every Corporal Rex episode revolved. “In five minutes the gang and I are on the air.” Without being told, the dogs lined up before the gold curtain. “I’m fine with your Brock Barton rehearsal, but that pro-McCarthy demonstration has got to go.”

  “I imagine your canine friends share that opinion,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I see what you’re getting at.” Hank extended an index finger, touching each dog on its nose, then pointed to the demonstrators. “Sadie, Liam, Charlie, Spike, Duchess—repel prowlers!”

  With an exuberant howl, Sadie the poodle lunged at Ogden, even as Liam the setter, Charlie the spaniel, Spike the boxer, and Duchess the collie selected one protester apiece and menaced them with snarls and snapping jaws. Cotter Pin and Sylvester Simian singled out the remaining intruders, the robot intimidating his Methodist by shifting his eyeballs into flashing-pinwheel mode, the gorilla rattling his nemesis with the most bloodcurdling roar ever to issue from a vegetarian vertebrate.

  Sputtering, moaning, and tripping over cables, Ogden and his entourage ran pell-mell out of the studio. The dogs issued a final chorus of barks, then turned and pranced back to their marks.

  I remained on the floor, my mind still awhirl from our apparent victory over the death-ray. The rest of “The Madonna and the Starship” rushed by in a delirious swish-pan blur. I retain no connected memories of that frenzied interval, only discrete vignettes: the live commercial, the script of which required the dogs to turn up their noses at “the other two leading brands,” then eagerly devour their Purina kibble, “the chow that makes Corporal Rex the Wonder Dog he is,” as Hank put it (though I later learned that the other two leading brands were chunks of gravel) ... Brock arguing, per the script for act two, that if God was a bad idea, then playing God was an even worse idea ... Zontac and Korkhan in midshot, the former saying, “O Brock Barton, we now see that our worldview partakes of a toxic nihilism,” the latter pleading, “O Ducky Malloy, help us to outgrow our puerile preoccupation with the void”... Jesus casually mentioning to Peter that he intended to start feeding Purina to his sheepdog ... Hollis rushing into the announcer’s booth and declaring, “Tune in next Sunday for another iconoclastic installment of Not By Bread Alone! Our forthcoming presentation is an original teleplay by Robert Ingersoll, ‘If God Created the Universe, Then Who Created God?’”

  At long last—could it be? was it possible?—the whole mad circus was over, and there stood Connie, leaning against the floor monitor, dazed and haggard, a tiara of sweat speckling her brow, and over there slouched our tired but magnificent cast, still in their costumes—Madonna, robot, leper, Messiah, apostle, ape, spaceship captain, sidekick, Voidovians—fidgeting amid the ruins of Lazarus’s dining room, and farther still sat Walter Spalding, recently sprung from his gaffer-tape prison, wearing the trinocular goggles and staring into the iridescent depths of a Zorningorg Prize kaleidoscope. Connie switched on the floor monitor. NBC’s normal

  11:00 A.M. live broadcast of Meet the Press came streaming out of Studio One. So far, at least, the network had survived our heterodox teleplay. Phosphor dots danced across the picture tube, limning the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. God was in his heaven. Eisenhower was in his White House. Life went on.

  “According to the Motorola in Studio One,” Connie told the cast and crew in a hoarse voice, “there’s every reason to believe we’ve prevented a pancontinental atrocity.”

  “We may have even purged nihilism from the Milky Way,” I added.

  “Connie, you’re a genius,” said Wilma.

  “Kurt, we love you,” declared Joel.

  “Mission accomplished,” proclaimed Gully.

  “With the sweetenin’ already on it,” added Hollis.

  “See you in the unemployment line,” said Ezra.

  “Now take your scripts home and burn ’em!” cried Connie. “As far as we’re concerned, this broadcast never happened!”

  Although exhausted, famished, and much in need of a nap followed by a shower, Manny and Terry nevertheless heroically ministered to Connie and myself—for we were obviously even wearier, hungrier, and grimier. After descending to the sub-basement and incinerating the cue cards in the NBC furnace, my Andromeda colleagues ferried us by Yellow Cab east across the river to Brooklyn, the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Fenimore Street. Wheezing and groaning, Connie and I followed the pulp-meisters up five flights of stairs to Terry’s apartment.

  I staggered into the kitchen, grabbed the telephone, and called Saul Silver.

  “Planet Mongo, Ming the Merciless speaking,” he answered.

  “Glad you’re feeling better, Saul. Hey, I think we did it. Did we do it?”

  “The lobsters returned a half-hour ago. I asked Wulawand, ‘So, my dear, when you contacted your orbiting friend, what did you tell him: thumbs up or thumbs down?’ And Wulawand said, ‘O Saul Silver, I am not yet ready to discuss this matter with you.’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘The program was not at all what Volavont and I expected.’”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, not one bit, but then I described my mannequin-cum-Motorola experiment. Relating the outcome made me feel better, and Saul proceeded to corroborate my optimism. “Such a brilliant test you devised, Uncle Wonder,” he told me. “Evidently no Christians were cremated this morning.”

  “Put Wulawand on the line.”

  Twenty seconds elapsed. Thirty seconds. Saul retrieved the handset and said, “She’s not ready to talk to you either.”

  “Listen, we ended up at Terry’s place. We need sleep and a square meal. Expect us around eight o’clock tonight, okay?”

  “Sure, Kurt. And now it’s back to the slush pile for me and the lobsters. Wulawand has a real knack for separating the gold from the dross.”

  I wandered into the living room and reported what I’d just learned to Connie and the pulp-meisters.

  “The show wasn’t what the lobsters expected?” said Connie. “What could that mean?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

  “Me, I’m feeling terrific,” said Manny. “If North America were on fire, we’d have heard by now.”

  After gathering together every quilt, blanket, spread, and comforter in the apartment, Terry assembled a quartet of sleeping bags on his living-room floor. At noon the conversation phase of our pajama party ended, and the four of us collapsed. My dreams took me to Studio One, where the Brock Barton troupe was rehearsing a script of mine that everyone found infuriating, largely because all the characters came from Hedda Gabler.

  Six hours later I awoke. Connie and the pulp-meisters were already up and about, gorging themselves on a home-delivered deli order: bagels, lox, cheese blintzes, pastrami sandwiches, potato salad. A recent shower had left Connie looking pristine and dewy. She wore a Maid Marian outfit that Terry had thoughtfully stolen while returning his gargoyle costume to the wardrobe department. I took a shower, then eagerly joined the feast.

  Terry reported that he’d telephoned a friend in the Bronx, who had in turn called his sister, a devotee of Not By Bread Alone. Although she’d found “The Madonna and the Starship” distressing, the broadcast had done her no physical harm.

  “I’m ready to declare victory,” said Manny.

  As darkness cloaked the five boroughs, we descended to street level, hailed a cab, and returned to Manhattan. At my request the driver deposited us on the corner of Amsterdam and West 82nd Street. I proceeded to Saul’s favorite bodega, a twenty-four-hour establishment that reputedly had an arrangement with the local cops concerning the Sunday blue laws. After borrowing a twenty from Connie, I bought two packages of brie and three bottles of Chianti. In vino veritas, I figured, applied no less to extraterrestrials than to Earthlings.

  Once again
Gladys admitted us to Saul’s sanctum. His busted Admiral TV now functioned as a credenza holding a pile of Andromeda submissions. The great man and the lobsters were absorbed in their work, navigating the slush, but they all proved amenable to attending an impromptu wine-and-cheese party. The festivities began with Saul proposing a toast.

  “L’Chaim!” he declared. “To life!”

  “L’Chaim!” everyone echoed, pulp-meisters and TV writers and invertebrates alike, clicking their glasses together.

  The first two bottles of vino went down quickly, and then came the veritas, while Ira the fox terrier worked the room, begging for brie.

  “We spent the first two hours following the broadcast in a state of utter perplexity,” Wulawand informed Connie and myself. “At the last minute, they changed the name of the program from Not By Bread Alone to Lamp Unto My Feet—but that is not why we became confused. You had told us to expect a satiric show, and it was nothing of the kind.”

  “No, you saw Not By Bread Alone,” I said. “Connie and I watched the broadcast in Terry’s apartment. We thought ‘The Madonna and the Starship’ was deliciously satiric.”

  “No, we saw Lamp Unto My Feet,” Wulawand insisted. “Today’s presentation was a one-hour drama called ‘Brother to the Earth,’ very treacly and pious, all about a man named Saint Francis of Assisi.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, turning to Saul. “You told me you’d tuned in a puppet show on channel four, Locky the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “Which always comes on right before Not By Bread Alone,” added Connie.

  “Channel four?” said Saul, uncorking the third bottle of Chianti. “No, Kurt, I told you channel two, the NBC affiliate.”

  “Channel two is the CBS affiliate,” noted Manny.

  “Really?” said Saul. “I thought NBC was two. Do I look like an expert? Mostly I watch professional wrestling on ABC.”

  “God damn it,” I said.

  “Okay, so I screwed up,” said Saul. “You might remember I was having a bad morning. But I never told you the puppet show was about any Loch Ness Monster.”

  “The program in question was called Zooabaloo,” said Volavont.

  “Which always precedes Lamp Unto My Feet,” said Connie, wincing.

  “Right before the broadcast in question, we suspended the impervious veil three feet in front of the Zenith,” said Wulawand. “At ten minutes after ten, having decided that ‘Brother to the Earth’ was as malevolently metaphysical as a drama could be, I contacted Yaxquid and told him Mr. Jastrow and Miss Osborne had deceived us, so he should piggyback the death-ray onto the carrier wave as planned. Our navigator said, ‘I shall pull the trigger in thirty seconds.’”

  “But Yaxquid failed to carry out the command,” said Volavont. “Ten-eleven came and went. Peering around the veil, we kept watching ‘Brother to the Earth.’ Ten-twelve. Ten-thirteen. Ten-fourteen. And still we watched. No death-ray emerged from the Zenith, which forced us to infer that the hive of irrationalist vermin had not been exterminated.”

  “Naturally I tried reaching Yaxquid, but he would not answer,” said Wulawand, fingering his Prometheus pendant. “Again I called the spaceship. Our navigator ignored us. By now it was ten twenty-five. Evidently Yaxquid had overridden the automatic firing of the X-13.”

  The Earthlings in the room exchanged freighted glances. We were in the pulp zone—something amazing, astounding, and fantastic had occurred. Only one hypothetical chain of events could account for what the lobsters were telling us. Obviously the orbiting navigator, monitoring “The Madonna and the Starship” on channel four, had determined that it was irreverent to a fare-thee-well. When Wulawand and Volavont contacted him at 10:10 A,M. and ordered him to annihilate the show’s viewers, he’d concluded that his fellow Qualimosans had lost their minds, or at least their senses of humor. And thus it was that, acting on his own initiative, Yaxquid disabled the death-ray.

  “Remember the conversation we had about cultural crosstalk?” I asked the lobsters. “That show you saw, ‘Brother to the Earth,’ was intended to be sacrilegious.”

  “A jamboree of blasphemy,” said Connie. “A circus of irreverence.”

  “Horse manure,” said Wulawand.

  “Bull feathers,” said Volavont.

  “So NBC is channel four and CBS is channel two,” said Saul, replenishing everyone’s wine glass. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

  “When you get back to Qualimosa,” said Manny to the lobsters, “I guess you’ll be tracking down Yaxquid and prosecuting him for insubordination.”

  “We are not returning to Qualimosa,” said Volavont, sipping Chianti. “We are staying right here on your little blue planet.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “O Kurt Jastrow, for reasons we cannot fathom, ‘Brother to the Earth’ impinged upon our affective nervous systems,” said Wulawand. “Did you know that Saint Francis hugged lepers and gave away all his possessions to the poor? By the time the drama was over, we felt glad that Yaxquid had disobeyed us.”

  “Glad?” I said.

  “‘The heart has reasons that reason knows not of,’” Connie quoted. “Pascal.”

  “O Connie Osborne, let me tell you about the time Saint Francis entered a deep wood, seeking an audience with a wolf who’d been attacking the residents of Gubbio.” Wulawand took a substantial swallow of wine. “‘Your actions are those of a criminal, and in that regard you deserve to be hanged,’ Saint Francis told the beast. ‘However, I know you are driven by hunger, not spite. If the townspeople give you food every day, will you stop preying upon them?’ The wolf lifted his right paw and laid it on Francis’s open palm, thus making a pact with the saint and by extension the citizens of Gubbio. Week after week, month after month, the bargain held, and in time the townspeople canceled their plans to hunt down the wolf and slay him.”

  Volavont said, “Evidently Francis was influenced by the Galilean sage we learned about on Friday, back when Lamp Unto My Feet was called Not By Bread Alone and ‘Brother to the Earth’ was called ‘Sitting Shivah for Jesus.’”

  “And CBS was called NBC,” said Manny.

  “In our opinion,” said Wulawand, “someone should expand the Lamp Unto My Feet cult into a worldwide organization dedicated to spreading the Galilean’s selfless philosophy.”

  “It’s been tried,” said Terry, “but it didn’t work out very well.”

  “And yet the spirit of Saint Francis endures,” said Wulawand. “While Mr. Silver took his afternoon nap, Volavont and I put on our sandwich boards, rode the D train to Rockefeller Center, and consulted the computer in our shuttle. We soon acquired much data about the Saint Francis of Assisi House in the Bowery.”

  “Enough to decide we wish to spend the rest of our lives working for that institution,” said Volavont.

  “The rest of your lives?” I said.

  “Quite so,” said Wulawand.

  “We intend to become Assisians,” said Volavont. “Logical positivist Assisians.”

  “Amazing,” said Manny.

  “Astounding,” said Terry.

  “Donna Dain will be delighted,” said Connie. “I guess you Qualimosans know about ethics after all.”

  “What is ethics?” said Wulawand.

  “Never mind,” said Connie.

  “The manuscripts beckon,” said Saul. “My slush runneth over. Let’s get back to work.”

  Although we didn’t know it at the time, the single smartest thing Connie and I did on the morning of the big broadcast was to call off the kinescoping. When ardent journalists and enraged viewers—the latter led by a Newark Baptist minister called Jerome Snavely—demanded to see the celluloid version of the notorious Bread Alone episode, the NBC brass could reply, in all honesty, that no such record existed. One executive even summoned the chutzpah to declare that Reverend Snavely and his followers had “woefully misinterpreted” the presentation and were “filtering it through faulty memories and stunted imaginations.”<
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  Of course, the press and Snavely’s flock insisted on seeing the mimeographed text of “The Madonna and the Starship.” In every instance the network responded with a copy of Connie’s original “Sitting Shivah for Jesus” script. Undaunted, Snavely spearheaded a letter-writing campaign. For three weeks angry epistles flooded the studio, but again the network refused to acknowledge that anything untoward had occurred, a policy that solidified into a doctrine after Floyd Cox’s secretary noticed that over a third of the written protests focused less on the content of the broadcast than on its preemption of Corporal Rex.

  As for Walter Spalding, the only network executive in the building when our psychotic Jesus took to the airwaves, he assumed the most radical stance of all. On the Sunday in question, he averred, a mysterious mass hallucination had afflicted thousands of Christians, and viewers who remembered the show as anything but reverent must be counted as victims of that syndrome. Walter’s belligerence was easily explained. After gazing repeatedly into the alien prism and hearing my account of the Qualimosans, he’d become convinced that our rewrite had indeed saved two million lives.

  The relevant sponsors were actually pleased with the fallout from “The Madonna and the Starship.” As it happened, sales of Sugar Corn Pops and Ovaltine rose significantly after the broadcast. Connie and I speculated that the stodgier sort of Bread Alone devotee had never consumed these products in the first place, whereas the show’s more open-minded viewers had found a bracing ecumenism in the replacement of the two traditional Eucharist species with a breakfast cereal and a malt beverage, and so they added these commodities to their shopping lists. Ralston Purina fared even better. Within hours of Jesus’s declaration that he intended to feed their kibble to his sheepdog, the product began flying off supermarket shelves everywhere.

  Thus did “The Madonna and the Starship” pass from scandal to anecdote, anecdote to legend, legend to oblivion. Defying the expectations of Connie and myself, Not By Bread Alone, Brock Barton, and Uncle Wonder’s Attic remained on the air. When all three shows disappeared in the mid-sixties, the culprit was not sacrilege but low ratings. By this time, however, we were otherwise employed—Connie had become the chief administrator of the Saint Francis of Assisi House (Donna Dain having officially retired on her eightieth birthday), and I was working for NBC’s latest experiment in SF television, Star Trek—and so we greeted the programs’ passing with yearning rather than bitterness. Even as I pen this memoir, the Zorningorg Prize sits on my desk, inspiring me to complete another Kirk-and-Spock adventure.