Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Page 1
ALSO BY
PATTON OSWALT
NOVELS
The Brannock Doom, Devil’s Brain-Collector Series
The Forgotten Tomb of the Worm-Serpent
The Remembered Citadel of Screeching Victory
The Lost Mage-Pit
The Discovered Witch-Keep
The Falsely Recovered Troll-Bog Memory
The Thane Star-Mind Series
The Nothing Ray
Song of the Cyrus-5 Dream Hunters
Sand-Riders of the Fifth Sigil
Andro-Borg-Bot
Solar Star
Galactic Universe
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Candy Van
A Ewe Named Udo Who Does Judo and Other Poems
Everyone Resents
SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed,
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Copyright © 2011 by Dagonet, Inc.
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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2011
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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010025144
ISBN 978-1-4391-4908-9
ISBN 978-1-4391-5627-8 (ebook)
Credits can be found on p. 193.
For Alice and Michelle
my spaceships away
from the zombie wasteland
She cries black tears!
—Cindy Brady, The Brady Bunch
“We’re trying to survive a nuclear war here!”
“Yes, but we can do it in style . . .”
—Howard and Marion Cunningham, Happy Days
There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light.
—Major Frank Burns, M*A*S*H
Contents
Preface Foreword Intro
Ticket Booth
Punch-Up Notes
We’re Playing Snow Fort
Prelude to “The Song of Ulvaak”
The Song of Ulvaak
On a Street in New Orleans
Peter Runfola
Wines by the Glass
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Chamomile Kitten Greeting Cards
A History of America from 1988 to 1996: As Recounted by the Three Types of Comedians I Opened for While Working Clubs on the Road
The Victory Tour
Those Old Hobo Songs, They Still Speak to Us
I Went to an MTV Gifting Suite and All I Got Was This Lousy Awareness of My Own Shallowness
Mary C. Runfola Explains Her Gifts
Thanks Props Kudos
ZOMBIE
SPACESHIP
WASTELAND
Preface Foreword Intro
In middle school, I started reading.
I’d been “reading” since kindergarten. It was dutiful and orderly. Point B followed Point A.
But something happened in middle school—a perfect alignment of parental support and benign neglect. The parental “support” came from keeping me stocked in Beverly Cleary, John Bellairs, The Great Brain books, and Daniel Pinkwater. Also Bridge to Terabithia, The Pushcart War, How to Eat Fried Worms—and the parallel-universe, one-two mind-crack of The Bully of Barkham Street and A Dog on Barkham Street.
And then there was the blessed, benign neglect.
The “neglect” grew out of the same “support.” My mom and dad were both busy, working jobs and trying to raise two kids during uncertain times. In the rush of trying to find something new for me to read, they’d grab something off the shelf at Waldenbooks after only glancing at the copy on the back.
Whoever did a lousy job writing copy for books like Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, H. P. Love-craft’s At the Mountains of Madness, Harlan Ellison’s TheBeast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (“It’s about a teenager in the future!” said my mom)—thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. You gave me some tangy, roiling stew under the golden crust of the Young Adult literature I was gobbling up.
So yes, I still love Bellairs’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, but I always imagine the two bounty killers from The Hawkline Monster in its basement, armed for bear and fucking the Magic Child on a rug. And somewhere beyond John Christopher’s White Mountains are Vic and Blood, hunting for canned food and pussy. And who prowled the outer woods of Terabithia? Yog-Sothoth, that’s who.
It’s a gift and an affliction at the same time—constantly wondering how the mundane world I’m living in (or reading about) links to the darker impulses I’m having (or imagining I have). The gift-affliction followed me (or was it guiding me?) through my teens, in 1980s suburban Virginia. The local TV station still showed The Wolfman on Saturday mornings—but I’d already read Gary Brandner’s The Howling. So I couldn’t watch Lon Chaney, Jr., lurch around the Scottish countryside without wondering if he craved sex as much as murder. I would recontextualize lines of sitcom dialogue to suit darker needs, the way the Surrealists would obsess over a single title card— “When he crossed the bridge, the shadows came out to meet him”—in the 1922 silent movie Nosferatu.*
Then the local TV station gave way to the early years of cable TV. My parents’ working hours were such that it was impossible to police my viewing habits. Scooby-Doo and his friends unmasked the Sea Demon and found bitter Old Man Trevers, trying to scare people away from his harbor. But they missed, under the dock, the Humanoids from the Deep, raping sunbathers. Did Harriet the Spy and the Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear run afoul of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, Paul Kersey from Death Wish, or the Baseball Furies from Walter Hill’s The Warriors? The Pushcart War took place on the same New York streets where Travis Bickle piloted his taxi. And it sure was cool how the Great Brain could swindle Parley Benson out of his repeating air rifle by pretending to make a magnetic stick. You know what was better? Knowing that, one state over, the bloody slaughter of Heaven’s Gate was swallowing up John Hurt and Christopher Walken.
Maybe that makes my generation unique—the one that remembers before MTV and after . . . and then before the Internet and after. The generation I see solidifying itself now? They were born connected—plopped out into the late nineties, into the land of Everything That Ever Was is Available from Now on. What crass acronym will we slap On the thumb-sore texting multitudes of the twenty-first century? The Waifnos? The Wireds? Anything’s better than “Gen X,” which is what we got. Thanks, Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigilantes with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually, that’s not completely horrible.
And neither was being “Gen X.” We’ll always cherish the stark, before-and-after culture shift of our adolescence. We had isolation . . . and then access. Drought and then deluge. Three channels and then fifty. CBs and t
hen chat rooms. And our parents didn’t have time, in the beginning, to sift through the “Where is all of this new stimulus coming from?” and decide what was beyond our emotional grasp. Thus, the mishmash. Six-color cartoons, but with an edge of gray and maroon. YA literature laced with sex and violence. A generation gifted with confusion, unease, and then revelation.
Not anymore, I guess. It seems that every TV show, movie, song, and website for the generation following me involves protagonists who’ve been fucking, killing, and cracking wise about fucking and killing since before anyone even showed up to watch them. I’m sure that will yield some bizarre new films, books, and music—stuff I can’t even imagine. Doesn’t matter. By the time that comes around, I’ll have long had my consciousness downloaded into a hovering Wolf Husbandry Bot. I’ll glide over the Russian steppes, playing Roxy Music’s Avalon, setting the mood for a lusty canine rutting. I don’t care how high my shrink increases my Lexapro dosage—I WANT TO BE A ROBOT THAT HELPS WOLVES HAVE SEX. Otherwise, my parents threw away the money they spent on my college education.
So thank you, Mom and Dad. Thank you, League of Lazy Copywriters. Thank you, reader, for buying this book. I apologize ahead of time for not even trying to aim at Point B, or even starting from Point A. Comedy and terror and autobiography and comics and literature— they’re all the same thing.
To me.
FULL DISCLOSURE
Stuff I did on the Internet while writing this introduction:
Looked up the lyrics to Toto’s song “99”
Played two “Armor” battles of Gemcraft Chapter 0
Checked the Facebook status of two people I hate
Technorati’d myself
*Nosferatu looms over and lurks under everything I’m writing about here, and in this book.
I was five years old and living in Tustin Meadows, California—a point on the arc of my dad’s military career postings, tracing a backward word balloon over the United states, starting in Virginia, up through Ohio, out to California, and back to Virginia.
It was Halloween, and the local library had one of those “kids’ activity days,” where we made cookies and cut out jack-o’-lanterns and heard ghost stories. And one of the librarians—with nothing but good intentions, I’m sure—decided to show an 8 mm print of Nosferatu against a wall. They blacked out the curtains and the projector clattered to life and spit out what I’m sure the adults thought would be a harmless, old spook show.
That movie—F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu—burst and spread out and filled that little room with jagged, discordant fever-mares from across continents and decades. The scariest vampire any of us had seen up to that point was the Count on Sesame Street. We were screaming and balling our fists up to our chests and wondering how we’d gone from cookies and crafts to a wrinkly rat-man spreading contagion across an already-blasted landscape like a plague that kills plagues. No one in that room ever escaped Max Schreck’s curly, cursed talons. least of all me. I saw how that flat square of sepia light replaced the hard dimensions around us. I wanted to get on the other side of it.
Ticket Booth
I fell asleep and read
Just about every paragraph
—R.E.M., “Feeling Gravitys Pull”
I still dream about them. The three screens and the ticket booth.
I spent my high school years twenty minutes from Washington, DC, in a suburb called Sterling, Virginia. Actually, in a sub-suburb of Sterling called Sugarland Run. But our mailing address was “Sterling.” We were, postage-wise, suburban feudal subjects.
And no, we’re not going back to high school here, to reminisce, balance ledger sheets, or admit failings. I know that high school is the central American experience,* but my memories of what I did in high school are drowned out by what I missed. And I missed it by twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes from Washington, DC, was twenty minutes from eternal hipster cred—“Oh, I was at that Fugazi show when I was fifteen . . .” “Yeah, well, I stole my parents’ credit card and caught Bad Brains at WUST Hall . . .” “The Minor Threat bassist punched me outside of Piccolo’s in Georgetown on my birthday . . .”
To give you an idea of how wide a mark I missed this explosive time by, I had to look up most of those bands on Wikipedia. I had no car. I had no money. There was one bus in and out of Sugarland Run, and it stopped running at seven p.m. All the older kids who could’ve given me a ride into DC had just discovered the Doors, whippets, and doing whippets in their garage while listening to the Doors. My throat still feels floaty and burned whenever I hear “The Crystal Ship.” “Strange Days” still tastes like cheap beer in someone’s town house when their parents were vacationing.
There was also a plague of divorces among my friends and acquaintances when I was in high school—fallout from the suburban swinging that finally reached Sterling as the seventies were flickering away. We were too young, too gobsmacked by Star Wars and Saturday Night Live and snow forts and thunderstorms to notice the dalliances that led to the rifts. But we wasted no time taking advantage of the suddenly empty houses on the weekends. And now, one floor below the heartbroken half of a shattered marriage brooding in an upstairs bedroom, we were free to bray along with Zeppelin or the Who or whatever decades-old band we believed we were discovering. I know a lot of people associate the eighties with MTV, post-punk, New Wave, and the second birth of hiphop, but not us suburban kids. We were broke-ass white boys, plundering our parents’ LPs from when they were young and horny. The bands we followed were the ones savvy enough to survive suddenly being filmed—thus, Springsteen pumped iron, Genesis got teddy-bear cute, and Aerosmith hooked up with the cool new black kids. REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Grand Funk Railroad were not so lucky. Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors, and the Who were safe in their aeries. The importance of adaptation and luck were the first things I learned about music.
But not creation. I wasn’t there for it. No one will ever spot my dopey face in a crowd shot from a coffee-table book about the DC hardcore scene. There will be no fleeting glimpses of my underage self in the inevitable documentary about Fugazi. Now that I think of it, I’m sure there is a documentary about Fugazi. I know I’m not in it. Maybe my initials are still in the “high score” top 5 on the Galaga machine at Dominion Skating Rink. Someone tell Ken Burns.
I did manage to see Genesis twice on their Invisible Touch tour. The second time I saw them, opening act Paul Young knocked himself unconscious twirling his mike stand around, singing “Everytime You Go Away.” No one in the stadium seemed to notice. The lines at the pretzel stands were hella long.
I was trapped, stuck in the syrup of the suburbs. And there, among houses built one year after I was born (I had more history than the streets I wandered), I found an underground scene.
Literally, underground.
Subterranean but unheralded. Gone forever and unmourned. Pungent and vibrant but Unchronicled. No one involved brags about it. None of us will be portrayed by Kevin Corrigan, Peter Sarsgaard, or Chloë Sevigny in a brilliant indie biopic about the movers and shakers of said scene.
The Towncenter 3 Movie Theater, in the Sterling Town-center Shopping Mall of Sterling, Virginia. Right at the intersection of Route 7 and Dranesville Road.
That was my Lapin Agile. My Factory. My Elaine’s. My CBGB. My Studio 54.
Most of those places are gone.* So is the Towncenter 3. I think. Sort of. Until recently, it still existed as a movie theater, under the clubfooted name of the Sterling Cinema Drafthouse and the Hollywood Café, Cinema 3 Nite-Club. Now their website says, simply, The Sterling Cinema Draft is closed forever!
Not to me. Never. And in my mind, it will always be, simply, the Towncenter 3.Three screens. Five employees. One manager. At least, as long as I was there.
I got a job as an usher there in the summer of 1987. You entered at street level, in between a karate studio and a pizza joint. But, due to some weird, Escher-like construction I still don’t understand, you descended three flights of stairs into a mur
ky, fluorescent-lit lobby and snack area that looked like it should have been in a Nik Ker-Shaw video. Then, once you bought snacks and drinks, you descended another flight of stairs to an even dimmer, grimmer lobby where you’d choose one of three theaters. It was a theater designed like an artless logic problem— which door leads to freedom, which to death, and which to Adventures in Babysitting?
The day I was hired was the last day they were showing RoboCop. After that, we showed a procession of unanswerable trivia questions like Jaws: The Revenge, Who’s That Girl?,The Living Daylights, and Summer School.
I’d had some really good times in the Towncenter 3 when I went there as a teen. Return of the Living Dead, Beverly Hills Cop, and Richard Pryor: Here and Now. Now that I could watch anything I wanted, they showed nothing I wanted to see. My fellow employees felt the same way. We were rats locked in a lightless underground warren, toiling under bright, loud distractions beamed onto soda-splattered screens. Now we found ourselves facing a summer where the distractions weren’t distracting. Our fancies slowly turned to the . . . unfanciful.
This growing discontent was overseen by Dan the Manager.*
Dan claimed he was an ex–Texas Ranger. Do the Texas Rangers make their members drink a quart of Vladimir vodka every day? If so, Dan was keeping their frontier spirit alive. His face was scorched craggy by fermented potatoes and not the punishing Laredo sun. He had a swaggering, bowlegged walk that came from personally insulting, every waking second, gravity and inertia—not from sitting astride a noble steed on the prairie. His ten-gallon hat hid his bald, psoriasis-ravaged skull dome.