by Jim Krusoe
Or, returning to the next-door-neighbor metaphor, they want the action to take place next door to their own house, not in it, because, frankly, if it were in their own house that would mean they were responsible for everything that happened afterward: for putting things back where they used to be, for keeping up with the mortgage payments, cutting the lawn, emptying the gutters, fixing the pipes. And so when they call and Heather picks up the phone, in truth she’s just opening the front door of the house they’ve always fantasized about owning, and for a little while they can pretend they live there, like those people who visit Open Houses on weekends, never intending to buy. So they ring the bell, and when Heather opens the door for them, even over the phone she can feel the heat from the explosion of their fake happiness driving itself straight into the ceiling of her brain vault like exploding popcorn, or Pop-Tarts, or possibly popovers. Hooray for us—hooray for you and me—we did it, honey, sometimes the pervs will tell her, but instead, Heather thinks, what they are saying is: Hooray for me. I got off. I got it on. I got it up. I got down, and all the crap she hears on the other end of her line—the panting, pleading, whining—doesn’t it all come down to WYASBIWYCIM? You bet. Anyway, what kind of a man, she wonders, could possibly imagine that somewhere out in the world might be a woman who, having talked on the phone about nothing but sex for eight or ten hours straight, would still be excited to get his call, still crave more, still be game, a woman who hears his voice and instantly, just by the sound of his voice alone, is able to measure his cock, even though, truth to tell, she might overestimate the size just a teeny bit? Hey, remember me? Are you kidding?
Heather can’t imagine any woman who could possibly live up to this, unless it’s a woman so deep into OCD that she would be incapable of any other action whatsoever, would have to be fed, a bib around her neck to keep the hot gruel, or whatever they are giving her, from spilling onto her chest while she is humping 24/7, after first having been tied down to slow her humping enough for whoever is doing her feeding—attendants maybe—to get enough nourishment in to keep her alive.
Which is a whole other idea, come to think of it: What about those people, women in this case, who’ve had a stroke, or sometimes a brain tumor of the kind that mysteriously activates their libidos (IWYCIM)? Not such a bad idea, truly, to let them take calls instead of her. Let them work off some of their hospital bills, maybe even turn a profit, like those rats she’s heard about in laboratories that, between experiments, are hooked up to wheels in cages so their running generates enough electricity to pay not only for their own torture but also for an occasional weekend in the country for the torturers.
Heather looks at herself in the mirror above her bed. Not so beautiful as she once had wanted to be. Not so smart as she wanted to be. Not as young. Not as special. Not as sexy. But every bit as tired as she feels.
Maybe if she went to a library she could find a book that would tell her how to make Raymond notice her, but all the man seems to care about is ducks, and maybe Madeline. He’s nice to Madeline, she’s noticed.
Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe first thing in the morning, before the phone calls start, she’ll get out and find a library.
And the fact is not only does having a high Death Quotient make killing other people—especially twilight souls—a whole lot easier, but it also makes a person feel less guilty afterward. A lot less guilty. At least in the Captain’s opinion.
In the fourth episode of Mellow Valley, “Junior Falls into a Hole,” Junior, preoccupied with passing the state real estate exam in order to become the youngest realtor in the county, takes a mock exam while walking in the woods behind the backyard of an Open House. It’s the sort of event he’s been attending more or less for practice, but on that particular day he falls into a hole that had been dug by several of the local children as a prank. It is not particularly deep—six or seven feet—but he can’t get out because not only has he sprained both his ankles, but the fall has left him seriously disoriented, triggering a near-psychotic moment that may have originated back in the days when Norm, before he got his rage under control through the use of recreational drugs to become the mellow parent-figure he is today, used to punish Junior for the least transgression by burying him up to his neck in the backyard and leaving him there overnight. Nor, back then, did it help Junior’s future mental health that his mother would sneak out every two or three hours to bring him his favorite cookies, oatmeal, interrupting any sleep he may otherwise have gotten. (All this was to be revealed in a subsequent episode of the show called “A Day in Therapy,” which, though filmed, was never actually aired.)
In the end, Junior is discovered by a wandering group of Boy Scouts engaged in a project that involves clearing the woods of infestations of the notorious death cap mushroom. They find Junior’s plight to be humorous and pelt him with acorns and other woodland detritus until they are told to cease by their scoutmaster who, moments earlier, had been off somewhere returning a baby bird to its nest.
For some reason Jeffery can’t let the thought go: Life after death. Well, okay, it’s not technically a thought, but is there, or is there not, anything that follows?
And if there were, of what would it consist?
Well, what does his present life consist of?
Not that much, probably.
And so what would it mean then, to return?
A darkness punctuated by a sliver of light is the way that Junior thinks of his life these days. The light being his life, as shitty as it was, before he got the gig on Mellow Valley, but then the darkness that followed that light was darker than the dark that used to come before. Because before Mellow Valley he was nobody, but at least he had a name, but when the television series took his name and gave it to a character, that meant when the character disappeared it took him, Junior, with it. It sucked dry the original unhappy, but still hopeful, Junior, and left him with just the Junior from the show: in other words, a hopeless buffoon, a fool, and a clown. So much for celebrity. And the more Junior tried to explain that he was only pretending to be a helpless fool in his role in the series, the funnier people thought he was, the more a fool. In other words, he had tried to explain things, but the world, with the possible exception of his therapist, Tammy, refused to listen. So was it his fault that finally the dam would have to give way and the water would have to come streaming out in a powerful, endless flood? That Junior would be forced to show those people who laughed at him that he wasn’t helpless? And then, wouldn’t these very same people be the sorry ones?
The really, really sorry ones.
Soon.
The fact is that the Captain’s celebrity doubtless began some years earlier when a group of starving pirates climbed aboard the Valhalla Queen by means of crude but ingenious rope ladders to capture and hold as hostages the entire deck shuffleboard contingent. These ancient sportsmen they threatened to kill unless the Captain agreed to their demands: namely, the contents of two premium tables at the ship’s buffet. As disgusted as the buffets personally made him, and no matter how much he sympathized with the truly appalling condition of the pirates who, although twilight souls, were after all fellow seamen, the Captain believed that to capitulate would set a bad precedent for fellow captains everywhere.
As a counteroffer, the Captain proposed what he called “a sporting proposition.” He told the marauding seamen that they could have all the food on all the tables of every buffet, loaded onto their craft by ten of his best crew members, if they were able to beat their hostages, currently wheezing in a Bovril-sweating knot beneath a nearby awning, in a game of shuffleboard. “You talk big,” the Captain addressed the pirate chief, “but let’s see how tough you are, my friend.”
A gauntlet had been hurled and the pirates accepted. After a brief explanation of the rules of the game and a strategy session among the pirate crew, the pirates, superbly conditioned by months at sea in an open boat, proved unnervingly quick learners, pulling to an early lead. And yet, little by little, experience proved i
tself, and the doddering group of seniors who, in the nearly two weeks of the cruise, had done little else but shuffle their weighted pucks from one end of the court to the other, triumphed by a single point.
The embarrassed pirates climbed back down their ladders of woven rope, and the passengers adjourned to yet another buffet in the dining room. But in no time this story, complete with pictures snapped on cell phones, was sent around the world, the result being that the Captain made a bundle from fish-product and sea-related endorsements.
So the snowball of celebrity rolled on for him, and the more often the Captain gave his opinion on such things as International Law and Maritime Policy, the more he was perceived to be, if not an expert, at least a familiar face.
“What would the Captain say?” became a phrase heard across certain think tanks and boardrooms of the land. In other words, the Captain’s ship had finally come in. He retired from the sea, bought a comfortable house in St. Nils, and spent his time gazing out on his lawn. And so, over the past several years, his Death Quotient has stayed, with an occasional run into the twenties, mostly in the low teens.
Next comes the hilarious episode of Mellow Valley in which Norm decides to supplement the cash intake of the struggling commune by learning to repair watches in his spare time.
“How hard can it be,” he asks Sergeant Moody, who is busy nursing a sick duck back to health, “considering what a small space there is for things to go wrong in?”
So Norm sends away for a mail-order introductory course in horology, complete with a set of tools, and begins to practice on the clocks and watches on the farm, with the predictable result being that soon every clock on the farm is running at a different speed. In a matter of days, no one has the slightest idea of the time, mixing day for night, afternoons for mornings, all of which leads not only to several missed connections but also to the embarrassing scene—still talked about in certain circles—where Judy accidentally bursts in on Grandpa Stoner as he is in the process of deworming one of the commune’s two pigs.
Unaware that she is not the only person with no idea of time, Judy takes it personally. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days,” Judy apologizes to Grandpa Stoner.
“Well then, if you don’t know, you had better find somebody who does,” Grandpa Stoner replies, and so Judy decides to take his advice and goes to the town doctor, a befuddled GP named Dr. Whittaker.
But in Dr. Whittaker’s office, Judy, who has nothing at all wrong with her besides a simple urinary tract infection, gets her lab work accidentally switched with another patient who has terminal lymphoma. The result is that everyone on the farm, in the belief that Judy is going to die any minute, runs around trying to make her ridiculously comfortable, as meanwhile Judy appears healthier than ever. Nor have they worked out the clock problem, so getting meals to Judy, let alone the right medications at the right time, is nearly impossible.
Finally, just as they have decided to take Judy to hospice in order to get their lives back on schedule without being distracted by the fatal nature of her illness, they discover that the lethal message of the lab work was not meant for Judy at all, but for the town’s librarian, Mrs. Bachhaus, who, outside of feeling tired more often of late, hadn’t noticed anything at all wrong. Once she does find out, however, she sinks rapidly, so quickly in fact that Grandpa Stoner, who once in the past had a brief fling with the lady, takes to blaming Judy for the whole business. “She was a sweet woman,” he tells Judy, “and if you hadn’t stolen her results, chances are that she would still be in a loving mood today.”
And now, on the very evening of the same day that began with his discovery of the giant hole in his lawn, the Captain, wearing his dress uniform and peaked officer’s cap, stands before a crowd of roughly two hundred members of the New Prosperity Group (rich degenerates, the Captain thinks) in the library auditorium. Suddenly, smack in the middle of that night’s story (it’s getting hard to keep them straight), the word Myrmidons blows into his mind with the force of a gale at sea.
He stops the story he is in the middle of telling to drink a glass of water. That’s it, the Captain thinks. Myrmidons is the very word he’s been trying to think of since he first saw the hole in his front lawn. But who were the Myrmidons, anyway? He remembers reading about them in school, possibly in the classics, but which classic was it, and what were they doing in it? Out of the blue he can feel his Death Quotient jerk upward to about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and why would a little thing like thinking about a Myrmidon cause that to happen? He has no idea.
ADVISORY TO THE TECHNICAL STAFF
Upon receipt of this advisory the revised schedule for the Force of Flow shall be as follows: Between the hours of 1200 to 1700, 3.5; between the hours of 1700 to 2100, 3.1; between the hours of 2100 to 2400, 4.1; between the hours of 2400 to 0002, 4.2; between the hours of 0002 and 0004, 4.8; between the hours of 0004 and 0008, 4.2; between the hours of 0008 to 1200, 4.0, unless during any of these segments obstacles are encountered, in which case the Flow may be increased by a maximum of 10 percent of its Rate at the time the obstacles were first encountered, reminding all operators once again of the importance of close monitoring. Should these measures prove inadequate, the operators will then make a report to the Central Desk and await further orders from same.
Tech #1: Do you understand any of that?
Tech #2: As I read it, they want us to keep an eye on the Pressure Plate as usual, but now we are also supposed to apply a different Flow of Force at different times of the day and night.
Tech #1: Don’t we do that already? I thought that’s what we were doing. Don’t they know it depends on the resistance?
Tech #2: For some reason or another they seem to be ignoring the resistance completely.
Tech #1: Well, in my humble opinion, that’s the kind of thing that comes from not being in the field. You know what I think?
Tech #2: No, what do you think?
Tech #1: I think we should just keep on doing exactly what we’ve been doing and not change anything. It’s worked well enough so far—not perfect—and you never know what’s going to happen once you start tinkering with tradition.
Tech #2: Tinkering, yes, that’s more or less the word for it, all right, and I’m with you.
The sixth episode of Mellow Valley takes a turn toward the serious as, enraged by the commune’s refusal to join in a Memorial Day parade to support this country’s pointless military incursion into an impoverished foreign country (Vietnam), the local white supremacist neo-Nazi group plans to burn down the main house of the farm where most members of the commune, except for Grandpa Stoner, sleep.
Their plans, however, are thwarted. With a large can of gasoline on the ground next to them, two of the neo-Nazis peer into the house’s small living room window, only to discover that Heather (not the Heather who lives in the Burrow, but the other Heather, the semi-successful actress who could be Heather’s double except that the TV one is prettier) is not just not asleep, but in full yoga posture, wearing only a bra and panties. Then follows a mind-bending eighteen minutes for both the Nazis and the television audience who witness this ancient Hindu discipline aimed at perfect spiritual insight and tranquility. At its conclusion, the bewitched neo-Nazi duo decides to allow the commune to exist, if only to allow the two of them—and possibly a few friends as well—to sneak back to the window at some future date and learn more about the threefold path of action, knowledge, and devotion that lies at the heart of this increasingly popular and health-oriented practice.
But the surprise revelation of this episode comes at the very end, when it turns out that Heather knew the whole time that the two fascists were there. So it was Heather, and not the intruders, who was in control of this situation, and her nonchalance translated into the words (which the characters of Mellow Valley will come to use in later episodes whenever they wish to indicate that something isn’t as bad as it seems): “It’s only the Nazis at the window.” Which is exactly the sort of line th
at one can tell its creators hoped would become a national catchphrase, something similar to Make my day, or You talking to me? But, sadly, it became nothing of the sort.
Never sin tocarse: not touching.
His lecture concluded, the limo at last stopped in the driveway of his house, the Captain is relieved to see that his gardener has filled the hole and that the sod he chose to lay across the top is an almost perfect blend with the grass already there. If a person didn’t know what he was looking for, that person wouldn’t notice anything at all.
It’s been a long day, but it’s over, and he can feel his Death Quotient slide back down to about twelve.
Fresh stalks, pushing their way up through the grasses and the dirt, into the light and the air.
The final episode of Mellow Valley, called “People, Let’s Come Together,” is still described by those few who remember the show as something of a Hail Mary pass at an attempt for relevance, and also to entice its ever-shrinking television audience to follow the show’s creators in a bold experiment that was meant to herald a whole new sensibility, one whose strategy was to combine gentle humor with an analysis of some of the most profound questions of life in order to make a better world for all of us.
This legendary twenty-six-minute sequence (with time taken out for commercials) contains virtually no action at all, or at least “action” as it is usually spoken of. Instead, it features the entire cast, including neo-Nazis, townsfolk, and fellow farmers, sitting in a large circle, all puffing away on the reefers handed out by members of the commune, as they describe to each other (and to the television audience) what insights about their hitherto unexamined lives—thanks to their mildly psychoactive condition—they have arrived at.