Little Green Men (19 page)

"Good morning, everyone, and welcome to
Saturday.
My guest today - Fina Delmar."

Washington gasped.

"Miss Delmar is of course best known as the Academy Award-winning actress. Her films include
The Lobsterman's Wife
and
Wetly, My Darling.
She is less well known as a multiple alien abductee. It is both a pleasure and an honor to have her on this show. Welcome to
Saturday."

"Thank you, John." Fina Delmar looked quite dazzling, no less so for a woman of her certain age. If they expected her to be encrusted with New Age crystals, they were mistaken. She wore a flattering, jewel-toned shantung silk pantsuit and simple gold earrings.

"How many times is it now?" Banion asked.

"Six."

‘
All by Tall Nordics?"

Fina Delmar sm
iled coyly. "Darling, I don't go
with Short Uglies." A star is a star, whatever the firmament.

"
I
want to talk about that. But first, I want to ask you if you've picked up anything from your captors about their motives, plans for increasing abductions, invading the earth, and such. What intelligence can you share with us on this?"

"You're trying to get me in trouble, aren't you?" She smiled.

"No, I'm trying to find out what you know."

"What I know. Where do I
begin!"

"How about at the beginning?"

"There was this map. It was the time before last. No - it wasn't. It was
three
times ago." "Yes?"

"They came for me at the Golden Door.* I'd just finished shooting
Going Postal,
with Burt Reynolds. My God. that was an interminable shoot. Burt kept -"

"Tell us about the abduction."

'After they got me inside, and I was strapped down - and you know what that's like, these freezing cold tables, you'd think they'd at least cover them - and, so, they're doing their little things that they do, down there. Maybe after it's all over, we'll find out it was all training for alien proctologists and gynecologists. I mean.
Who knows!
I was trying to distract myself by singing show tunes - maybe Ethel Merman would get their attention. Can you imagine abducting
her!
That would have been one short abduction, let me tell you."

"Yes? And?"

"I look up and I see this map over the control panel and it was of the United States of America, and I'm thinking, This isn't random. This is all part of a
plan."

Nathan Scrubbs was watching from his room in the Hotel Majestic, in a part of Washington that politicians periodically denounced as a national scandal, situated as it is only a few blocks from the White House. He had been living in various cheap locales for several months now, having decided that it would be unwise to continue living at his apartment until he received some kind of communication from MJ-12 as to his status, such as it was.

The room smelled of a half century of cigarette smoke, loneliness, and bad karma. It was the kind of room one read about in the newspapers following a terrible crime: the lair of the perpetrator, where he had lived in wanky squalor, eating only cat food or other vile nourishment while hatching his outrage. The bed sagged like a sinkhole; the

*
A fashionable spa in Arizona.

porcelain on the sink was rusted through - what horrible things that sink had endured, Scrubbs did not want to think about - the faucet dripped, and emitted chthonic rumbling from the hotel's no doubt hellish bowels; the fluorescent light buzzed like a bug zapper; and lately he had begun to hear nocturnal scratchings that sounded like rodent quality time with the whole family. But the room was seventeen dollars a day and came with cable TV to while away his long, bleak hours.

Miserably, he viewed his Frankenstein creation. Fina Delmar was now elaborating on her insight that
aliens traveled "interdimension
ally" rather than, "you know, vertically." This would explain, she said, why they did not appear on military radar screens. Assuming the military wasn't lying through its teeth, of course. Scrubbs thought he detected the beginning of glaze starting to gel on Banion's eyeballs.

Scrubbs calculated. Had the moment of maximum danger passed? Banion's
bracing J
'Accuse.'
at the Texas UFO convention had not resulted in the hoped-for Senate hearings. Indeed, the U.S. government had not collapsed from exposure and embarrassment. The Russians had not admitted to possessing alien death technology. (Plasma Beam Device? Where did they
gee
this stuff?) Indeed, the only Russian reaction at all was conveyed by a junior embassy press officer, who publicly and somewhat humiliatingly dismissed Banion's allegations as "intellectual hooliganism" and "brazen hysterics." The Revolt of the Mushrooms had wilted, and now Banion, the former lion king of Washington punditry, was reduced to Saturday morning with an over-the-hill Hollywood diva who seemed genuinely to have convinced herself she had had sex with aliens as well as eighteenth-century French nobles. Under these circumstances, it was possible that his superiors at MJ-12 might incline to letting bygones be bygones. He had kept his MJ-12 pager, having dismantled it to check for explosives. Yet MJ-12 had made no effort to su
mmon him electronically. It was, as John Wayne used to say,
quiet out there - too quiet.

He bit on another Cheezo. Really, he had to watch the junk food. He'd put on almost ten pounds since going into hiding. He brushed yellow chemical crumbs from his lips and watched.

"Let's take some calls," Banion said. "Elbo, Texas, you're on the line."

"Yeah, I'd like to ask Miss Fina - hello?
Hello?
I can't hear nothing." "Yes, you're on."

"Okay. Is it
true
that you and Tony Curtis had a thing on?" "I didn't ask Miss Delmar on to talk about that," Banion said stiffly. "This is a public affairs program." Washington choked on its brunch.

"She said she'd slept with aliens and that two-hundred-year-old French duke or whatever he was. I don't see how it's different asking what it was like having sex with Tony Curtis. And I
admire
Tony Curtis."

"Let's take a call from someone with a substantive question for Miss Delmar. Sump, Arkansas, you're on the air."

"I have a question for Miz Del
mar. I have been kidnapped many,
many
times by aliens. I don't
use
the word
abducting
because kidnapping is what it is, and they ought to be hung or fried in the electric chair for what they done to me. It's shameful. My husband, Euple, he won't have sex with me no more. He says -"

"What is your question, madam?"

Scrubbs shut his eyes. It was too painful. Banion might be a pompous asshole, but Scrubbs couldn't help but feel a wring of sympathy for the man. He had, after all, destroyed his life. A copy of that morning's Style section of the
Post
lay inside the sagging bed crater, open to the headline

BITSEY BANION, COPING, PINCH BY PINCH

"I'm taking things as they come,"
Bitsey Banion
said at last night's "Salute to Rich People" at the Fripps Gallery. If she didn't arrive on the arm of curator Tyler Pinch, she certainly spent a lot of time holding on to it during the festivities. The two of them have been spending a lot of quality time together since she separated from her TV-host-turned-UFO-abductee husband, former
Sunday
big
John O. Banion
.
During the dinner. Pinch told the 500 attendees, each of whom had given $5,000, that they were "the best human beings who have ever lived."

Scrubbs wondered if it would cheer Banion to know that Scrubbs's own life, too, had taken a grim turn.

He gazed out his window, with its panoramic view of the back of Uncle Big Busy's Fried Chicken and twenty-four-hour xxx
adult videos.
Last night he had gone to sleep to the sound of gunfire and police sirens.

So, he mused, what shall we do today? Stay in and lidocaine the brain with daytime TV or will it be another fucking museum? He felt safe in museums, since they had guards who might, in the event he screamed, prevent MJ-12 agents from kidnapping him. At least if they got him. he would know more than before about the Bronze Age, the Dawn of Steam, and Fra Angelico, which up to now he'd thought was a liqueur.

How long would his cash last him? He had cleaned out his bank account when he went on the lam. He was reluctant to use his credit cards, since they could use those to trace him in a flash.

Suddenly he felt sticky and claustrophobic inside his squalid cell. He forlornly checked the newspaper for his entertainment alternatives, a Hobson's choice between the only unexplored aesthetic experiences left to him in town: a Jean-Michel Basquiat* retrospective on the artist's "Middle Period" or thirteenth-century Korean porcelain. MJ-12 wouldn't have to bother killing him. At this rate, they'd find him dead on a park bench, of boredom.

Scrubbs peeled off twenty dollars for food, stuffed his diminishing wad of cash underneath an ancient floorboard that he had pried loose beneath his bed, and ventured blinkingly into the unartificial light.

"Mr. Crocanelli on the line, from gooey-lube," Renira announced. Renira, who had once told a president of the United States that Banion was not available at the moment, was now fielding calls from the president of Gooey-Lube, his new TV sponsor. Banion wondered why she had stayed on through his career transition. Brits could be magnificently stubborn when they wanted. Just look at how they held on to India and all the other pink bits on the map for so long. For all her apparent disdain for this brave new world of his, he suspected that she might actually, deep down, believe in UFO's, though as a correct Englishwoman she would never admit to it. There was this, too: she was from Devonshire, scene of the infamous "Devil's Footprints" in 1855. when mysterious unhuman tracks were found in the snow extending forty miles. Or perhaps it was her new friendship with Fina Delmar that kept her here. The two spoke on the phone incessantly.

"Jackieeeee! Have you
seen
these numbers? They're fucking incredible!"

Despite the man's deplorable vocabulary, it was, Banion reflected, a pleasure to have such an earthy and straightforward sponsor. Andy Crocanelli, president of Gooey-Lube, the national chain of automotive

*
Andy Warhol protege
^-
who died of embarrassment at the age of twenty-seven when his paintings began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

lubricating centers, was not one to bore you witless with brayed insincerities about the excellence of your golf game. The man came to the point like a lathe drill.

"1 wanna expand the show to two hours."

"it's not that sort of program, Andy."

'Are you kidding? A fuckin' twelve, with a sixteen share?* I wanna run this show twenty-four hours a day!" "It's very gratifying."

"You fucking WASPs, you get some good news and you go,
'Oo, oo, I am so graaaatified. Maybe I will have another cup of teeee.'
Jesus Christ, Jackie, you oughta be celebrating in Atlantic City inna fuckin' penthouse suite, Jacuzzi filled with Dom Perignon, smokin" pre-Castros and gettin' a blow job from a five-hundred-dollar hooker. From
two
five-hundred-dollar hookers. You want? It's on me."

Coarse as it sounded, it was certainly more alluring than the kind of blandishments Ample Ampere used to offer him, such as celebrity golf tournaments at Bel Mellow.

"Thank you, Andy. Let me get back to you on that."

"We're turning people away! Coast to coast, we got
lines
outside, customers killing themselves, for a lube job. I'm gonna have to start buying my own tankers."

"I'm very pleased. The important part is, we're getting the message out."

"I want this show on network television. Next
week
I want this show on network TV I already called Shick Farber at VBS. I told him, 'You got dick on your Sunday morning lineup. Bible thumpers - all of em' fuckin' ex-cons on parole. I got a hot show for you.' By the way, Jackie, I wanna move you
back to your old Sunday slot.

*
A Nielsen rating point equals about 980.000 households. Share indicates the percentage of homes with television in use.

‘I
want
Saturday
on Sunday. I guess we better change the name, huh?"

"Let's take this a step at a time. But I really do appreciate your support and enthusiasm -"

"There you
go again with that WASP shit!
I
really
f
ucking appreciate your enthuuuuusiasm.
Pull that fuckin' tea bag outta your ass. Talk to me!
We got a hit show!"

True enough.
Saturday
had had a huge debut. Banion was vindicated in his decision - over the growls from Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit - to have had Fina Delmar on the first show, instead of someone of more, well, scientific background. Renira, whose loathing of the two had increased to the point that she now treated them with open, dripping contempt, said they were obviously jealous of Miss Delmar.
Miss
Delmar, she called her.