Harsh Oases (10 page)

“We must stop to smite the infidels!” said the mullah-preacher.

“You’re, you’re—” I began.

“God Is On Our Side!” he screamed.

“Right,” I sighed.

Not far from the foot of the exit ramp was a gas station. We pulled in and filled several of the empties with gasoline, then corked them with some of the windshield-cleaning rags. Then we went looking for churches.

Luckily it was a weekday, and most churches these days remained empty anyway, tainted with Bad Belief connotations. We torched a synagogue, a mosque, a storefront mission and an RC church—God Is On Our Side was strictly nondenominational—leaving plumes of smoke and leaping flames and screaming sirens in our wake.

As we screeched down the city streets, taking turns seemingly at random, I wondered if I would ever live to see the safety of the ghetto. Had I been right to trust Santa, what seemed like an eternity ago? Was this escapade really going to lead to my personal growth? Would the Bad Beliefs lead me through hell and out the other side, or just leave me stranded mid-inferno?

In any case, it could not be said that I was continuing to stagnate.

We took one final spine-snapping curve and the walls of the ghetto loomed up. The street terminated in a massive gate. And in front of the gate was a six-story-high dragon.

All the Bad Beliefs shrieked in terror, and Drunk Driving stood on the brakes.

“Who—what—is that?”

One of the Bad Beliefs said in a whisper, “That’s Failure Is Inevitable.”

The dragon leered and breathed forth a jet of steam. Each of Failure’s scales was big as a manhole cover.

A small voice piped up. “We can do it. Just try.”

It was Hope Springs Eternal, looking just like Tinkerbelle.

Drunk Driving took a stiff belt from his pint. “Who the fuck wants to live forever anyhow?”

He peeled out.

We made it within fifty yards of the gate. Then Failure raised a paw big as a tugboat and slammed our car.

We tumbled over and over before we came to a stop, upside down on our roof. The Bad Beliefs had cushioned me from serious harm, and we spilled out the windows, rumpled and bruised.

Failure had lowered its head to our level and glared at us with gemstone eyes the size of cathedral windows. It opened its mouth, revealing fangs and a split tongue. Its breath smelled swampy.

Winged Hope was hovering right by me.

“Never fear, don’t worry, there’s always a way, just give it one more shot, don’t hold back, pick yourself up off the ground—”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed the sprite, crushing her wings, and threw her into Failure’s mouth, which instinctively clamped shut.

There was a brilliant flash of light, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

When I opened them, Failure was gone. Hope Springs Eternal and Failure Is Inevitable had cancelled each other out of existence.

The remaining Bad Beliefs let out a lusty cheer. Lifting me to their shoulders, they dashed for the gate, which was swinging open.

Then we were inside, and I was standing. The gates closed behind me.

The Bad Beliefs all shook my hand and dispersed, home at last. I found myself alone, except for two women.

One of them seemed human enough. She was gazing shyly at the ground, so I couldn’t really see her face, but she seemed rather pretty, like the nurse at the DOM clinic.

The other figure was definitely a Bad Belief. She looked kind of like a combination of Guinevere, Venus and Mae West. Alluring as she was, I knew at once that she was even more dangerous than God Is On Our Side.

“And you are—?” I said.

The Bad Belief smiled. “I’m Romantic Love Solves Everything. And this is your bride.”

And you know what?

I believed her.

As a Boomer whose formative years occurred during a Captain Kangaroo era of enforced “innocence” over the airwaves, I still during moment of retrogressive forgetfulness retain the capacity to be shocked at hearing, say, Homer Simpson utter the words “pissed off” or “ass” and not get bleeped. Never mind the degenerate filth sent over the cable stations! Shocking! (I don’t actually subscribe to a cable service, but I am sure I would be absolutely appalled by a steady stream of curse words that every five-year-old today knows, and the lovely bare bottoms of actresses.)

Yes, the past is a different country.

But what if the past were to experience immigration from its future?

LEAKAGE

I was in the kitchen, fixing supper. the TV was on in the other room, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. You know how that is. But then I heard the unmistakeable voice of Lucille Ball saying, in a tone of mixed hysteria and anger, “Ricky, I want an abortion.”

Putting down the potato peeler very carefully, I went into the other room.

There on the set was the familiar Ricardo living room, in perfect, immutable, timeless black and white. The sofa, the fireplace, the mantlepiece, the doors to the bedroom, kitchen and hall, the Populuxe ’Fifties décor .… It was all as I had seen it a hundred times—a thousand times—before, since that very first episode glimpsed on the verge of being sent late to bed, when I was a kid. Everything about the set stamped it as the original, no re-creation. Of that I was sure.

And Lucy and Ricky were—well, Lucy and Ricky. These were no second-rate imposters, no off-Broadway mimics or
Saturday Night Live
comedians. They were the original two actors, forever youthful in their celluloid stasis.

Everything, in short, was as it should have been.

Except for the script.

Now Lucy was crying in that famous way of hers, only it wasn’t funny. She was blubbering something about having cheated on Ricky, to get back at him for not letting her perform her stripper’s act at the club. The baby she was carrying—Little Ricky, of course—wasn’t his, and she wanted it destroyed.

Big Ricky did not react well to this news. He began to pace around the couch, letting loose with a flood of that inimitable goofy Cuban invective.

“
Puta!
Bitch! I wish I had died fighting Castro than ever live to see
esta dia
!”

Now Ricky took out several vials of crack and a pipe and began to smoke his brains out, while Lucy downed shot after shot out of a Chivas bottle.

My wife had entered the room.

“How’s supper coming?’’

I couldn’t speak. All I could do was gesture dumbly at the television.

Quickly grasping the improbable scene, my wife sat down beside me, transfixed.

The next fifteen minutes of the show were excruciating, like all the worst arguments you ever had with your spouse rolled up into one ugly package. Lucy and Ricky got drunker and more stoned and abused each other horribly. It was only words at first, but then Ricky began to cuff Lucy around.

“Tell me, who is the
maricon
who did this to you! Tell me so I can keel him!”

Lucy held out as long as she could. But after a particularly savage blow, she blurted out, “Fred! It was Fred Mertz!”

Of course, Fred and Ethel chose that exact moment to barge in unannounced.

Some things about Hollywood plotting were inevitable.

Dropping Lucy to the couch, Ricky jumped up and, drawing a stubby pistol from his waistband, shot Fred dead, spraying a screaming Ethel in blood and gore.

Then the credits rolled up, jaunty theme music and all.

My wife and I sat stunned for a moment. Then she spoke.

“That was sick. Sick, sick, sick! Who would ever show such a thing?”

“Good question. But what I want to know is how. How could they possibly have made a new episode, with all the actors old or dead?”

“Well, find out which channel we’re watching first. Then we’ll call them.”

I looked at the red digits on the cable box, then consulted the cable guide.

It was the Zeiterion Channel. They specialized in the broadcasting of old sitcoms. Their spokesman was a loveable greying actor from one of the very same old shows which they featured.

I picked up the phone and called my local cable company. When I got the customer service rep on the line, I didn’t try to explain the exact nature of my complaint, but simply said that I’d like to register one, and that it was specifically about the content of some of the programming.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we only deliver your cable service. Unless you have a complaint about the quality of the reception, I suggest you call or write the headquarters of the appropriate company.”

“Do you have an address, or an eight-hundred number?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and gave me both.

I was mildly surprised to hear that the Zeiterion Channel’s corporate headquarters was just over the state line, in Jersey. Then my wife called me back to the set.

“Look at this one before you call.”

It was
Leave It To Beaver
.

The Beve was entering his school through the arch of a metal-detector. The kid behind him set it off. Frisking revealed that he was carrying only a beeper, but the authorities confiscated it anyway.

The inside of the Beve’s school was utterly decrepit: leaking roofs, missing tiles, broken desks, cardboard-patched windows. At one point I thought I saw a rat run across a corridor. There were about fifty incorrigible kids in the class, and the teacher was not the sweet elderly woman I remembered, but a harassed harridan plainly unable to manage even half of her charges. The kids blared hip-hop from a boombox and ignored her.

Suddenly there came a squeal of tires from outside the school, along with the fluid popping of Uzi fire. “Driveby!” squealed one of the kids, and they all dropped to the floor. Beaver was the first one up and at the windows. The camera POV switched to his eyes, and we the audience saw what Beaver saw:

Wally, pulling his head and gun back into the getaway car as it sped away from the bodies arrayed in front of the school.

Of course, the rest of the episode would be about whether the Beve would fink on Wally to their Dad.

Or, I supposed now, to a rival gang.

I stood up. “This has gone too far. I can’t imagine what kind of marketing strategy they think they’ve hit on here, but I don’t like it one bit. This is my past—our past—they’re messing with! I’m going to give them a piece of my mind.”

Naturally, the eight-hundred number was busy, busy, busy. But finally, I got through.

The man on the other end of the line sounded incredibly sad and weary. I felt sorry for him, but let him have it nonetheless.

“Yes, sir,” he said when I was done, “we’re aware of the problem. But I want to assure you that it’s strictly unintentional on our part. The technical staff is working on fixing it even as we speak. They suspect a simple mixup in the tape library, but they’re investigating every possible trouble-spot in the system.”

“But who could have created such tapes in the first place?” I demanded. “And how did they end up in your studios?”

“That I couldn’t say, sir. But once again, I apologize. Now, if you don’t mind, there are other calls .…”

I hung up and went back to the set.

We never ate supper that night.

Instead, we watched one show after another, our disbelief mounting to a bone-deep numbness.

The cops from
Car 54, Where Are You?
precipitated a race riot with the savage beating of a suspect.

FBI agents burst in on
The Addams Family
and discovered a Dahmeresque cellarful of human bones.

The entire Clampett family was arrested for welfare fraud. They had been collecting state checks while living in their mansion. As I recall, Mister Drysdale’s bank went under, once auditors came in to assess penalties and discovered he had been embezzling.

Father Knows Best
was hauled away for molesting his daughter.

Rob and Laura, in the throes of a divorce, had a bitter custody fight over Richie, which ended up with Rob kidnapping him.

That Girl
was laid off and started a phone-sex service.

Maynard G. Krebs died of an overdose.

The Flying Nun
was sent to Central America, where she was raped and tortured by government-backed rightists.

Cannibalism broke out on
Gilligan’s Island
. The Skipper was the obvious first victim.

Endora turned Darren into a mouse, and a cat ate him! But it was okay, because Samantha revealed that all witches were actually lesbians anyway.

And
Hogan’s Heroes
—well, to this day, I still have nightmares about that episode. That look on the face of Sergeant Schultz—

It was well after midnight when we finally dragged ourselves to bed. When we woke it felt as if we had never slept. All thoughts of leading a normal day had vanished. Instead of getting ready for work, I went straight to the television.