Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  The Conelrad warning came on the radio. Sirens started up all over the city.

  Bobby slammed the wrecker to a stop. He fiddled with the levers. His Ford dropped to the ground.

  Gadge, Miz Jones, Sarah and Roger ran out of the house carrying blankets and food. Bobby undid the hooks, fished around for his keys, cranked the wagon.

  Gadge and Miz Jones jumped in the car with him. Stewart and Sarah got in the admiral’s sedan. All over the neighborhood people were running around like crazy.

  “Get in, Roger!” yelled Stewart.

  Roger stood facing north, looking far up into the sky.

  He turned back and looked over his shoulder at the two waiting cars.

  He did a little clumsy dance.

  “Oh boy, oh boy!” he said. “Now you’re really gonna see something!”

  * * *

  Over the Conelrad warble, over the sirens and crashes and car horns, over the Pole, the missiles came down, passing some going the other way.

  For Bill Warren, Joe Dante, David J. Skal, and William Schallert:

  keep watching the skies, guys.

  And for Aunt Ethel Simpson, 1914-2000.

  Glossary

  1) “Stranger On The Shore”—by Mr. Acker Bilk. The first pre-Beatle British record to make #1 in America, the week of May 26, 1962. It was used in the film The Flamingo Kid, which was set in 1962. If you’re an alto sax or B-flat clarinet player, and can play this, you’ll have all the girls (or boys) you want hanging around the bandstand. . . .

  2) In-and-Out Burger: for real and true.

  3) “Fly Me to the Moon (Bossa Nova)”: just making its way onto the charts.

  4) Bobby (Benson): see The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Hereafter DTESS.

  5) Stewart (Cronyn): see Red Planet Mars (1952). Hereafter RPM.

  6) Gadge: Brian “Gadge” Roberts. See Tobor The Great (1954). Hereafter TTG.

  7) Pomphret (Also spelled Pomfrett, Pomfritt): English teacher, at first, in high school, then Peter Piper Junior College (j.c.). See the television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963). Played by William Schallert, one of the dedicatees of this story.

  8) Johnson: see TTG. Played by Schallert, too. See also some of the many books around on the CIA’s use of journalists, teachers, etc. as “covers” during the 50s through the 70s.

  9) Dobie: Dobie Gillis, of the novel by Max Schulman and the TV series. Played by Dwayne Hickman. Blonde the first season, brunette afterwards.

  10) Dad: Herbert T. Gillis. Played by Frank Faylen.

  11) Brother Joe’s body: see Sunset Boulevard (1950).

  12) Norbert E.: taxi driver from Bedford Falls. See It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Bert and Ernie are the taxi driver and cop there. Since neither I nor anyone else remembers which is which, I made up the name Norbert E. so it could stand for either Bert or Ernie. (You have to watch me every minute.) Played of course by Frank Faylen. (Yes, Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street are named for the pair.)

  13) Elbert P., “Pinky”: see Lost Weekend (1945). Played of course by Frank Faylen.

  14) “Medea”: a standard kids’ goof-off version of “Maria” from West Side Story.

  15) Opie and young Theodore: either it’s Opie Taylor (played by Ron Howard) of The Andy Griffith Show and Theodore Cleaver (played by Jerry Mathers) of Leave It To Beaver, or Stewart is just using his Eddy-Haskell-type (Ken Osmond) sarcastic voice (as LITB would have it “to give some squirt the business”) about a couple of nondescripts.

  16) Running his father crazy: the Frank Faylen catchline on TMLODG was “I gotta kill that boy! I just gotta!”

  17) Roger was Stewart’s: see RPM. The six years started where RPM ends.

  18) Krebs, Maynard G.: The first beatnik on television. Played by Bob Denver, later Gilligan (no first or middle name) on Gilligan’s Island.

  19) Bobby’s car: it’s a woodie, a wood-panelled station wagon, as described. Surfing was just starting big. Woodies were status symbols, and utilitarian, for carrying (as then called) surfing-boards to and from the beach.

  20) Gremmie: short for gremlin. Ho-dad wannabees. They had everything they needed for surfing except a board and a car …

  21) Ho-dad.: hotshot surfers who knew how to hang ten, shoot the pier, run a pipe, etc.

  22) “I Remember You” by Frank Ifeild: the second British song to bust the top 5, at #3 in the fall of 1962.

  23) Lawrence 6-1212: the number Helen Benson and Mr. Carpenter must have called to get a cab. See DTESS.

  24) H0012: the license plate of the cab Helen and Carpenter took. See DTESS.

  25) When he was eleven: okay—we’ve got to do this sooner or later. The chronology: DTESS is the only one of the three movies that takes place the year it was made, i.e. 1951. TTG, made in 1954, is set in 1957 or 1958, as Gadge’s dad was “killed in Korea seven years ago.” Unless he was killed in a peacetime accident in 1947, he died sometime after June 25, 1950, which puts the movie in 1957, at the earliest. RPM was made in 1952, but takes place “at the next closest opposition of Mars,” which would have been in 1956. This is why everybody is the ages they are in the story . . .

  26) Sammy: Sammy blabbed about the cab to the Army and FBI men at the boarding house. Most people forget Bobby is never seen in the movie again after the scene where his tennis shoes are wet from the dew at the Mall.

  27) “Sea of Heartbreak”: as it says (#21, 1961).

  28) Rabbit ears and the tinfoil: remember broadcast television?

  29) The admiral: Admiral William “Bill” Carey. Played by Walter Sande, an actor you instantly believed in any role. See RPM.

  30) “Wonderland By Night” as it says (#1, 1960).

  31) The First Family: Album of the Year Grammy. Comedy record by Ken-nedy imitator Vaughn Meader. Events made this album sound very strange in later years.

  32) “Wheels”: instrumental by the String-A-Longs (#3, 1961).

  33) Date it: once you could go to any junkyard in America and pry off anything you wanted and pay something for it and take it home. As in so many things, California led the nation in fear-of-lawsuit.

  34) Time for the nature lecture: He just gave one. This junkyard owner in 1962 understood ecology better than most people still do.

  35) Mu-tants: as it was pronounced in so many 1950s sf films, including The Day The World Ended (1955).

  36) Steal and kill and rob you: see Panic in Year Zero (1963).

  37) “Hit the Road, Jack” (#1, 1961): I heard this, from a DJ, in 1961, over the air.

  38) “West of the Wall”: Miss Toni Fisher (#37, 1962). About lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, which went up in 1961. August, to be precise.

  39) Model of the Frankenstein monster: hot off the mold in 1962.

  40) Miz Jones, Sarah: I made them up. This is fiction, and you have to do some of that, you know?

  41) After the lab explosion: for this paragraph, see RPM.

  42) Aunt Jessica and Uncle Hume: Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn.

  43) I figured if I needed a wife . . . : old Navy/Marine saying.

  44) Famous Monsters of Filmland #12: there are three movies (now four, but 13 Days doesn’t count and I don’t include Missiles of October, which was made for TV) set during the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Steagle (1971), Joe Dante’s (-another dedicatee) Matinee (1992), both set in the US; and The Butcher Boy (1995), set in Ireland, Kennedy’s spiritual homeland. It was David J. Skal (another dedicatee) who pointed out that 1962 was the height of monster-worship, in his book The Monster Show (1993).

  45) “Because They’re Young”: Duane Eddy instrumental (#4, 1960). Theme music to the movie of the same name, starring Dick Clark.

  46) Fighting over groceries: this is in Matinee. This is also for real, too. People sta
yed home from work, got in their fallout shelters, etc. Leigh Kennedy wrote about it in her novel, Saint Hiroshima.

  47) All the Russian ships: the news stuff I give for the bulk of the story is accurate. Up to a point . . .

  48) Veronica and Angela Cartwright: hubba-hubba 12- and 13-year-old sister actresses (Make Room for Daddy, The Birds) in 1962 and hubba-hubba actress sisters now, too.

  49) Hayley Mills: daughter of Sir John, sister of Juliet. Hubba-hubba at 12 in 1962, even more so now. Started with Disney. Tore a hole in the screen.

  50) Six bits: that’s 75¢ to you young whippersnappers. That was on a regular night. On “carload nights,” usually Monday and Tuesday, as many people as you could cram in or on a car got in for 50¢ for the whole load.

  51) “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”: as it says (#21, 1962).

  52) “Quiet Village”: instrumental by Martin Denny (#4, 1959).

  53) Give me 50¢: about what half this stuff would cost in 1962, without the box of Dots.

  54) Bride of the Gorilla (1951), Poor White Trash (1957), High School Confi-dential (1958): this is a pretty spavined lineup even for a 1962 triple feature at a drive-in.

  55) Guy in a black hat: this is from The Big Chill (1983).

  56) Peter Graves: Graves played Chris Cronyn, Stewart’s dad, in RPM. (You have to watch me every minute.)

  57) “Gazachstahagen”: instrumental by the Wild-Cats (#57, 1959).

  58) Always having trouble with gorillas: Bride of the Gorilla (1951); Gorilla At Large (3-D, 1953).

  59) Larry Verne, “Please Mr. Custer (I Don’t Wanna Go)” (#1, 1960).

  60) Ben Colder, “Don’t Go Near the Eskimoes” (#62, 1962). Ben Colder was Sheb Wooley, who had a hit in 1958 with “Purple People Eater” (#1). He was supposed to record “Don’t Go Near The Indians,” which became a hit for Rex Allen (#17). This song was a parody of the one he should have recorded. Sheb Wooley’s the second person you see in High Noon (1952) after Jack Elam. He’s Frank Miller’s brother, Ben.

  61) Oog-sook-mook: phonetic equivalent of the Eskimo chorus in this song.

  62) 50¢ a gallon: gasoline was @ 22.9¢ a gallon in 1962.

  63) “What in the World’s Come Over You?”: as it says (#5, 1960).

  64) Okay, Mr. Philosophical: see DTESS, RPM, TTG for details.

  65) Roller skates: it was true. Also in American Graffitti (1973).

  66) “The Girl of My Best Friend”: Ral Donner (#19, 1961).

  67) He thought of Gramps: see TTG.

  68) A bunch of teenagers in a circle: that would be Jim and Buzz with the knives. See Rebel Without A Cause (1955). The Griffith Planetarium is used again at the climax of that movie; in TTG (1954), Phantom From Space (1953), Invaders From Mars (3-D, 1953); War of the Colossal Beast (1958), and is the nightclub in Earth Girls Are Easy (1989).

  69) “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”: as it says (#6, 1961).

  70) “Midnight in Moscow”: instrumental, Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen (#2, 1962). An even better version was by the Village Stompers in 1965.

  71) Macaroni: I’m not making this up. Millions of people were worried about what would happen to this horsie if WWIII started.

  72) “Asia Minor” by Kokomo (#8, 1961): rock version of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A (get it?) Minor.

  73) “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin (#6, 1960): this is Darin’s version of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” in 1945.

  74) “Guided Missile (Aimed At My Heart): 1961.

  75) ♂ ♀ Z = ∞: The symbols drawn on the blackboard at the opening of every episode of Ben Casey. “Man. Woman. Birth. Death. Infinity.” would intone Dr. Zorba, head of neurosurgery. Dr. Zorba was played by Sam Jaffe. Jaffe also played Professor Barnhardt in DTESS. (You have to watch me every minute.)

  76) Kim-chee: only Koreans, or people in California, would know what kim-chee was in 1962.

  77) “Monster Mash”: Bobby “Boris” Pickett, #1 the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis. See Skal’s The Monster Show.

  78) “I Remember You”: as it says.

  79) “He’s Not A Rebel”: as it says. We’re doing the top 5 of the Cuban Missile Crisis Week 1962. Also next two songs.

  80) “Last Date”: instrumental, Floyd Cramer (#2, 1960).

  81) Video portum: “I see the port/home.”

  * * *

  Helpful in the writing of this story: That Old Time Rock and Roll: the chronicle of an era 1954-1963 by Richard Aquilla (1989); The Billboard Book of #1 Hits by Fred Bronson (1985 ed.); The Golden Age of Novelty Songs by Steve Otfinoski (1999). And of course dedicatee Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the 1950s: Vol. one: 1950-1957 (1982) and Vol. two: 1958-1962 (1986).

  AFTERWORD

  I was sitting on a rock above the Highway 530 bridge on the Sauk River in Washington state, changing flies. Dave Myers (not the Dave Myers the disc-jockey who’s married to SF writer Sydney van Scyoc, nor the Dave Myers who writes for the Post-Intelligencer, but my friend David E. Myers) was out in the middle of the Sauk, tied into some monster salmon. (Dave has a theory about winter steelhead flies: dark day, Brad’s Brat. Bright day, Brad’s Brat. Today he couldn’t keep those pesky 20 lb. coho salmon off it.)

  Anyway, I’d been thinking about a story.

  “Who’s your favorite kid’s part in 1950s SF movies?” I asked him, real loud.

  “The kid from Day the Earth Stood Still,” he yelled back.

  “Mine too,” I yelled. “But he’s already in there. I need a couple of others.”

  Dave got the coho in finally, released it (the Sauk is never open for salmon) and then tied into either another coho or a giant Dolly Varden, I forget which—those days are all a blur—you remember the good days; the ones you forget are the 18º F. ones with a 15 mile an hour wind when you have to hold your rod under water between casts to melt the ice off your line guides, are out the only seven hours of daylight and catch nothing.

  Anyway, once we got back to the cabin attached to the Oso Store, and I’d cooked some supper, and Dave had taken back off to Seattle, I sat down and really started working on this story.

  I wanted to write about what the lives of SF movie kids of the 1950s would have been like later.

  The story had a different direction at first, based on something told by Bill Warren in his two-volume definitive work of SF movies of the 1950s Keep Watching The Skies; having to do with the theft by someone in the 60s of the original robot from Tobor the Great (1954). The original concept was to be trying to get the junked Tobor for “Gadge.”

  The story wasn’t working right, telling me this wasn’t the story it wanted me to write about 50s SF kids. It began to change, getting fuller and deeper.

  I’d known from the first it would be set (like Joe Dante’s movie Matinee) during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which for those of you not born at the time, was pretty much just like I describe it (except for the last few pages) here.

  I hoped I was doing something swell.

  When I finished typing the final draft on December 9, 2000 out in Oso, WA, I sent it to Eileen Gunn, who at the time was running the webzine InfiniteMatrix.net and complaining that Ellen Datlow was getting all my good stuff. She kept it as long as she decently could (without sending me a contract or money) but sent it back on Feb. 28, 2001, explaining that her backers were getting antsy about the site (“That’s why they’re called backers, Eileen,” I said, “because they back out.”) I sent it to Ellen Datlow anyway at Sci-Fiction.com; she wrote back taking it but wanting the glossary at the end of the story so whippersnappers wouldn’t get lost. I sent that off, got contracts and money later, and it went up July 18, 2001.

  This got some strange reviews (including one by a guy who admitted from the outset that the only 2 SF films he’d seen, made before Star
Wars, were 2001 and Metropolis . . .) and was pretty much ignored worldwide.

  A footnote: When I was writing this, no one knew about it but Dave.

  Just after I finished it, I wrote to Steven Utley and told him I’d just finished a story called “The Other Real World.”

  “Strange,” Steven wrote back. “I just finished a story called ‘The Real World,’” (one of his many Silurian Tales, forthcoming from PS Publishing in two volumes). Coincidence, or what?

  A BETTER WORLD’S IN BIRTH!

  “The Past ain’t dead. It ain’t even past.”

  –William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

  1

  Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation!

  The whole thing began, I am told, with the sound of falling books in the Peoples’ Department of Culture.

  In my initial inquiry, I pieced together the following:

  Comrade Dichter, the chief clerk, was at her desk when she heard the books fall—one, two, three—inside the office of the Peoples’ Minister of Culture. There was the sound of a chair scraping on the floor and a muted cry.

  Comrade Dichter rose from her desk, knocked once, and opened the door to the inner office. The Minister of Culture was an old man nearing retirement (he had fought on the barricades of the Revolution as a man of thirty-five) and had not been in the best of health for a few years, though still a tireless worker. Dichter feared to see him slumped over his desk or lying on the floor, victim of a stroke or seizure.

  She was more surprised to see him standing, backed to the leftward wall of his office, staring toward his private bookcase on the right wall, an excited look in his eyes.

  His chair was overturned near his desk where he had risen quickly. Several books and the right-hand bookend, which had held them on the corner of his iron desk, lay on the floor.