Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

BOOK: Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales
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ALSO BY MARK O’DONNELL

          Elementary Education

     
Plays:

   Tots in Tinseltown

  Fables for Friends

That’s It, Folks!

The Nice and the Nasty

  
Plays in translation:

    
A Tower Near Paris
by Copi

       
The Best of Schools
by Jean Marie Besset

COPYRIGHT
© 1993
BY MARK O

DONNELL

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Two cartoons, “The Solar Yearbook” and “Extinction of the Dinosaurs Fully Explained,” and one story, “Diary of a Fan,” were originally published in
The New Yorker.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Donnell, Mark.
Vertigo Park : and other tall tales / by Mark O’Donnell. — 1st ed.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82917-7
I. Title.
PS3565.D594V47   1993
818’.5402—dc20               92-20673

Published April 19, 1993

v3.1

Contents
PROLOG
 

It was called Vertigo Park by accident, because Curtis Wills Booney, its founder, was mistakenly advised that vertigo meant green. His wife was a fanciful but dangerously half-educated woman who admired culture but didn’t pay close attention to it, so when he solicited her suggestions for his planned Utopian community, she turned off the player piano (having long since despaired of lessons) just long enough to offer two options—Mount Olympus Valley and Vertigo Park. In those days women were deferred to in matters of civic aesthetics, since aesthetics had no apparent effect on anything. In any case, his
gesture helped her feel more like his muse and less like his nurse, though his nurse is what she was, especially at the end, with his project a doomed folly and him raving in his bathrobe about Tomorrow being late. Mount Olympus Valley he rejected as too pagan (also, the acreage was completely level), and, as pundits were to observe repeatedly later, calling the place Vertigo Park was probably the most appropriate choice.

It had been Booney’s vision to build what would have been the very first shopping mall, in an undeveloped outskirt of St. Louis, just outside Pompey, the rubber tire town. Inspired by the isolationist purity of the glass-domed cities of thirties science fiction, Booney imagined an indoor town square complete with a verdant if not vertiginous small park. In his mind a greenhouse roof would keep out the Depression blight and world tension that were raining debilitation like soot on the farms and factories of what was later called the Rust Belt. If St. Louis had been the Gateway to the West, Vertigo Park was to be the Gateway to Tomorrow, but its unfinished shell was already abandoned and corroding when Booney died, in 1939, the year of the New York World’s Fair, a more famous version of the same mistaken future.

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