Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

by Patton Oswalt

  “He should usher Adventures in Babysitting,” said Trace, a little too quickly. “There’s a bunch of middle school douchebags got dropped off by their parents down there.”

  “Well shit, you’re still on cleanup.” Roddy turned to me. “You come. You wait outside the Giant Foods. I’ll get two twelve-packs; we’ll carry those back”.

  I looked at Trace. He was trying to look bland and nonchalant and he was burning a lot of calories doing it.

  “Yeah, I’ll go. Okay.” Roddy and I started toward the stairs leading to the street. Right before I turned the corner to follow Roddy, I saw Trace pivot and bolt downstairs, to the theaters.

  * * *

  “I’m being cool about it, but one of you assholes stole some of my shit,” said Roddy abruptly. We were passing by the big, carved wooden lions in front of the Hunan Garden. The lions’ scoop-jawed, toothy grins seemed to mock Roddy, who, even now, speaking through clenched teeth, looked like his droopy lower lip would slide and puddle onto the front of his shirt.

  “Someone in the theater?”

  “No, someone in the Pentagon, fuck-neck,” said Roddy. “I went in for a second, to get some Freshen-up gum I’d stashed in my Back to the Future vest, and some of my shit was gone.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  I said, “I don’t. Really. I don’t know what you keep in there.”

  Roddy didn’t say anything for a second. We were at the automatic doors for the Giant Foods.

  “You almost slipped up there. See, if you’d said, ‘i didn’t take any of your throwing stars,’ I’d know you were lying.”

  “Someone took—you have throwing stars?”

  “Five of ’em. And I’m a dead shot throwing them. I’ve got air pistols, and Bruce Lee sticks, but no one took any of them,” said Roddy, half to the air around us, like he was putting together a puzzle. “So I’m looking for someone with quick arms. Which you don’t have.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  “See, I’m better’n Columbo at figuring this stuff out.” And then he stepped backward through the hissing-open doors, unable to suppress a girlish half chuckle as the doors opened as he’d hoped they would and he didn’t bounce his ass on glass after uttering his exit line.

  On our way back, Roddy expounded on Columbo, which was his favorite show. I realized, just before we reached the theater, that Roddy believed Columbo had a trained owl.

  The last patrons climbed the stairs to the surface and home. Now it was us and Roddy.

  Deep Purple’s Perfect Strangers album was blasting through the sound system. Usually, before we started drinking, one of us would run to the tape machine, to try to slap a Van Halen or Hüsker Dü cassette in before Roddy could put in his beloved Deep Purple and claim the soundtrack for the evening. Now, in a misguided attempt to placate Roddy, someone had put in Deep Purple. But the Deep Purple cassette was in Roddy’s room, nestled in its slot in his cassette carrier, among his .38 Special and Eagles and Jimmy Buffett tapes. So already, he knew that, again, someone had ransacked his stuff.

  At least, Columbo would have guessed that.

  Roddy placed his twelve-pack on the snack counter. I hurried downstairs, to hide the other one behind the last row of seats in theater one, our designated drinking area. Roddy would use his twelve-pack to entice his court of paint huffers and skate rats down into the theater, so we’d learned to stash our own. Roddy made friends with thirsty burnouts.

  When I arrived back at the snack bar, Trace and Bryan were shotgunning beers. Roddy was slowly sipping his, still holding the bottle of MD 20/20.

  “Where’s Gary Jay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, where is that strong-armed little fucker?” asked Roddy. “You’d think he’d—”

  And then Melinda came around the corner, from the stairs leading up to the street.

  Melinda restocked the salad bar at the Giant Foods and was currently having a sloppy romance with Bryan. She was still in high school but heading toward senior year. She was gap-toothed and apple-cheeked, but it all hung together as “cute.” Bryan, vaguely dropping hints that he’d someday join the army and maybe become a Green Beret, hid his blazing, doomed passion for Melinda with a gruff nonchalance.

  “Hey, guys,” said Melinda.

  “Yeah, what’s up? Huh,” said Bryan, sipping his beer to hide the smile that cracked his face.

  Roddy looked pissed. You could tell he’d had something sinister and threatening in the breech, and Melinda had queered his pitch with her dopey cheerfulness. Melinda slid her shoulder under Bryan’s free arm and tickled his stomach.

  This was dark territory for Roddy. Two obviously innocent fellow employees—my stammering and buddy-buddy eagerness on the beer run had crossed me off the suspect list, and Trace’s big, open face was a window into his crammed-with-facts, college-bound brain. My love of R.E.M. and science fiction were two more strikes against me. Roddy couldn’t conceive I possessed the boldness of thievery with such mama’s-boy tastes.

  And, worst of all, there was Bryan, sharing the warmth of a female.

  “Yyyyyyeah. Well, I’m going up, get my buds.” Roddy grimaced as he killed his beer, placed the MD 20/20 on the counter, and mounted the stairs, off to collect his low-protein minions.

  “Naw, I’m not giving them back,” said Gary Jay. “He can’t even prove I’ve got ’em.”

  Trace said, “Who else would steal ’em? Someone came in to see a movie, and then they went into his room . . . ?”

  “Maybe.” Gary Jay, Trace, and I were in the projection booth. The muffled sound of Deep Purple’s “Wasted Sunsets” thrummed through the walls. Dan’s carpeted snoring was louder.

  “Man, the dude’s such a psycho. He’s up there with his dickhead friends; you can go put ’em back now,” I said. Maybe I whined.

  “He acts like a psycho.”

  I said, “What difference does that make?”

  My guts were gnarled with this unpleasant feeling of fear, and then anger at myself for being afraid, and then guilt. If Gary Jay went down, it would be only because he got caught. I had a sneaking suspicion that Bryan, Trace, and I—compared to Gary Jay—were pussies. If he’d put the throwing stars back, I could erase some of that. An hour ago I was boring a hole through my limited suburban existence, catching a glimpse of the larger world. Now I was begging my friend to preserve the lame-ass status quo. The next few years of my life—all through college, actually—would be a cursive progression: a huge loop forward and then a frantic, straight line back.

  “Well, I tried,” said Trace, like he’d carved it on a fresh tombstone. He walked away, defiantly, out of the projection booth and down the stairs into theater one for a fresh beer.

  I took two seconds too long in thinking of something equally final and self-absolving to say. Roddy kicked the door open.

  Behind him I could see four of his runty associates. It was as if Roddy were Dr. Moreau but, instead of trying to turn animals into men, he’d tried growing new versions of himself out of trimmings from his wispy mustache. Each of his burnout satellites was attempting to grow the same piebald caterpillar under his nose. The experiment wasn’t a success, however—none of the runts had Roddy’s dark circles under their eyes.

  “Where’s my fucking throwing stars?” Roddy was jutting his jaw as far forward as he could. The rerouting of energy made his belly sag. He only had so much to go around.

  “In my pocket, next to my dick,” said Gary Jay. One of the runts went, “Whoop!” You could tell Roddy couldn’t figure out if Gary Jay was questioning his manhood. Was this a twisted, homophobic Labor of Hercules—recover your weapons by sucking my cock?

  “Why’d you take ’em?”

  Gary Jay said, “’Cause I wanted ’em. They’re badass.”

  “You’re right,” said Roddy, as if conceding a point in an argument. “Why didn’t you take the air pistols? Or the nunchakus?”

  Then he turned on me, as quick and close to an add
er striking as his starchy constitution could muster. “Were you gonna take my guns?”

  “We were all in there,” said Gary Jay. “But he and those other guys pussed out.”

  Roddy turned back to Gary Jay.

  Somewhere, in that moment, there was a historic concert happening for two hundred people in a tiny room. Somewhere a band like Fugazi or Minor Threat was building its legacy. Somewhere a young filmmaker was sitting in a rep theater, watching The Fallen Idol or The Red Shoes and deciding, in their mind, to be an artist. Above me, in the ticket booth, was a book and a cassette of music I was trying to lash together as some sort of life raft to my future.

  But right then, I only wanted one thing in the world. I wanted a guy to return five throwing stars to a guy he’d stolen them from, and avoid seeing something ugly, so I could go drink cheap beer and listen to mid-career Deep Purple.

  Finally, Roddy turned back to me. “Ha! Yeah! You did puss out!”

  Then, as if illustrating to his Acne Legion that true power lies in giving it away, he swiveled his gaze back to Gary Jay and said, “Keep ’em, I don’t give a fart. They’re not balanced right anyway.”

  Holy shit, I had to get out of Virginia.

  Hours later, wrapped in a tingly overcoat of beer and sweet wine, I sat in theater one. Perfect Strangers had been playing, nonstop, the entire time, but we were beyond caring. We’d broken out the BB pistols and, in a ritual we repeated almost every night from that point on, we shot at Roddy’s minions. That was the price they paid for the alcohol they drank. They’d stand down in front of the screen and let us ding them with metal BBs.

  Trace and Gary Jay sat together, aiming each shot. I was firing the 1911-style gun one-handed and missing. The booze wasn’t helping. Out of a dimly remembered mercy we aimed only for the torso.

  Roddy sat next to me, explaining in detail how he’d solved the mystery of the throwing stars. Normally I’d have been annoyed, but the sheer level of bullshit in his story—he actively disremembered conceding the throwing stars to Gary Jay and was planning on ambushing him with nunchakus later—delighted me.

  Bryan and Melinda were behind us, doing the kind of frantic tongue-kissing that made it look like they were each eating a peach* The scruffy punks, air-guitaring— badly—to “Under the Gun,” were now absorbing head shots. But, armored with bellies full of fortified wine, they were beyond sense or concern. Another night at the Town-center 3—a night that never really started—was about to not really end.

  I still think about the Towncenter 3, some nights before sleep. I imagine floating above an all-ages show at the Birchmere in Washington, DC. Fugazi is cutting a swath of gut-bucket fury through space and time. I was never there. But like Roddy, I can re-remember things to suit my regret.

  Then, in my memory, I float northwest to the suburbs, to Sterling, and over the Towncenter 3.

  And then I begin descending down, down, underground. Past Gary Jay, painting the men’s room with regal purple MD 20/20 vomit. Past Dan, sleeping on his side and muttering about riding the high country. Past Bryan and Melinda, sharing Junior Mints at the snack bar, outlined by a heart they couldn’t see was already broken. Then over to Roddy’s office, where Trace restole the nunchakus.

  And finally, down to theater one, where a cocky corpse named Roddy shot skate punks with a BB gun.

  Where’s our coffee-table book? Oh, wait. No one took pictures. And we were all ugly.

  *At least, that’s what Kurt Vonnegut said. Go with your ’gut, always.

  *The lapin Agile and Elaine’s, as of this writing, are still going strong. The Factory—and the building that held it—gone. CBGB is a John Varvatos store. studio 54 is now a theater, with “franchises” all over the world, including a location dropped inside the MGM Grand in Vegas like a core sample of the seventies dropped into a museum of glittery loss.

  *I’m changing everyone’s name in this, and some other things. But if any of the people I worked with at the Towncenter 3 are still alive and continued making the choices they made when we drew paychecks together, then they’re beyond consequence or remorse and will kill me.

  *I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. But maybe he was saying, “You pry that princess faggot grin off of your head.” or maybe he was a secret film scholar and was saying, “Dwight Frye was a nexus for wilder cinema.” if the third is correct, then I had a hand in tormenting a quiet genius.

  *Fill it halfway, two squirts of butter-flavored oil, fill it the rest of the way, three more squirts.

  * I’d purchase my music two doors down from the Towncenter 3 at a record store called Waxie Maxie’s, at which I used to work; they justifiably fired me after I mouthed off to a customer who berated me for not finding the energizer battery refund coupons fast enough for his liking. By that point, I was cool with it—i couldn’t take listening to another spin of Jean Beauvoir’s Drums Along the Mohawk or Tears for Fears’s Songs from the Big Chair, abiding staff favorites.

  My books I’d purchase at a hobby store where I used to get my D&D books and lead figurines. I stopped going when, my senior year of high school, I casually mentioned to the kindly proprietor that I was going to college. His eyes went stony and he said, “You going to go learn how to wipe your ass without getting shit on your pants?” “What?” I asked, and then he bent down over his painted orcs and umberhulks and muttered, “Don’t ever come back here again.” And I never did.

  † Yeah, I know, music snob. That’s what I call it, so there.

  * The guys in R.E.M. don’t have a lot of good things to say about Fables. Too bad, guys—it changed my life. And I know I misinterpreted a lot of these lyrics to suit my purposes at the time, but it ceased being your album the minute I “bought” it. empires have been built on Electric Youth, I bet.

  * All real names, all real places.

  * oh man, but did Melinda ever break poor Bryan’s heart. He proposed a few years later, after washing out of the army, and she called it off a week before the nuptials. I ran into her, years later, at college, at an R.E.M. concert. They were touring on the Document album. I guess she took a lyric from “Auctioneer,” off of Fables of the Reconstruction, to heart—“she didn’t want to get pinned down by her prior town.”

  Punch-Up Notes

  Scott—

  I’m going to start with three big, overall

  ideas for the movie, and then go through scene by scene. And these notes are based on the fourth draft, which Kyle and Kaitlin wrote after Interrupt-ials came out, and they had to change the third act location from a water park to a go-kart track.

  Patton

  3/11/2011

  YOU MAY MISS THE BRIDE

  Fourth draft notes

  First off, I think the character of Tracey, the bride, is wildly inconsistent. It almost seems like her condition changes to fit the joke needed for each scene.

  Once we establish that she gets amnesia from eating the bad sushi at the bachelorette party in the opening scene, we need to stick to that. She wouldn’t remember that her mom queefs whenever she hears a saxophone playing, so there’s no reason for her to get nervous when the jazz combo gets ready to play at the bridal shower. I know there’s a series of laughs that follow from her kicking the sax player in the scrotum to stop him coming in on that jazzy version of “The Lady in Red”—the band mistaking his screams as a signal to play “It’s Raining Men,” and then his vomiting in the trumpet, and then Tracey’s dog shitting all over itself when the trumpet player plays his first note and sprays vomit all over the dog. it’s a funny, quirky, captivating sequence, but we need to find a less sweaty way for Tracey to suddenly and without warning attack a musician’s nutsack. Also, “The Lady in Red” might be expensive.

  But that’s just one example of how we need consistency in her amnesia. I like how the neurosurgeon explains how even though she doesn’t remember that she’s getting married, or who’s she’s getting married to, the fact that she wants to be married, in a general sense, still holds up. Make sure
to indicate in the script that the neurosurgeon should be sitting in front of one of those light-box displays of Tracey’s brain, so it looks more authentic to the audience.

  But let’s make sure there are enough reasons for her to shrug those adorable shoulders and soldier ahead with the big day. The fact that the groom is good-looking and is sweet and smart and truly cares for her certainly helps. And when he shows her that he’s running that halfway house for rehabilitated criminals, and she can see from the picture in her locket that her dad was once in prison, because there she is visiting him as a little girl.

  Which brings me to the father character. I don’t think he should have been sent to prison for burning all those people alive and then masturbating when the cops showed up. Yes, it was the late seventies, and it was a disco, but I think the whole “disco sucks” thing is completely played out at this point—does anyone even care and, what’s more, does today’s audience even remember when disco was? It puts such a pall over the proceedings. You’ve got this series of funny scenes, and then each one gets spoiled by the mention of the father’s crime. For instance:

  The karaoke scene, where the CD gets stuck, and Tracey and Paul, the groom, have to sing “Knock Three Times” like twenty times. The smash cut, when we realize they’ve been singing for so long, is funny. But then when the CD is finally fixed, and they walk offstage, the mom (who’s now drunk; it’s always funny when an old lady gets drunk) says, “That sounded worse than the screams of all those people being burned slowly alive while your dad masturbated in the moonlight of that parking lot.”

  The scene where Paul’s friend bumps up against the wedding cake, and instead of collapsing it gets smooshed to the side and ends up looking like a gigantic penis. I like the Aerosmith “Big Ten Inch Record” music cue, but then Tracey says that weird line, “I wonder if my father’s penis looked like that while he tugged on it maniacally while all of those people died in agony.”