Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕

Berry and Elvis Presley were great, C. said, but they were great because they were different and wild. (I didn’t tell him that I thought Bill Haley was just plain ugly; with all that grease on his forehead curl, it looks like a sow’s tail). Buddy, though, was special because he wasn’t so different. He was like us. And if he was sometimes a little wild, like with “Oh, Boy!” …well, that meant that maybe we could be that way sometimes too. Which I guess is how I wound up carrying C.‘s little bastard, come to think of it. Not that I mind, since with C. dead I might as well have something around to remember him by.

Buddy began strumming his Strat and singing “Well All Right” in a voice that was low and quiet. He had spoken to “Mr. Sullivan,” but he and the Crickets had never performed that song on The Ed Sullivan Show.

I bolted from the recliner, throwing the afghan at the Sony, and grabbed the crescent wrench from the coffee table again. Thirty-year anniversary or not, this wasn’t the show my SkyVue was supposed to be bringing me tonight. If I wanted to go crazy, I could do it without any help from a phantom in a picture tube.

Oblivious to the cold, I charged out to the earth station, climbed the ladder, and whanged on the converter forty, fifty, sixty times, then lost count and whanged some more. The sound bounced back from the dish and pounded at me as if my head were in a bucket being pelted with rocks, and the dog at the nearest neighbor’s house began barking as if he were cursing me: “Knock off the noise! Asshole! Have some respect! Buddy Holly died tonight! Cat lover! Shut up! I’ll mangle you! You dope!”

Finally, exhausted, numb, and afraid that the dog—a Doberman pinscher the size of a Guernsey—was coming to get me, I dropped from the ladder, scraping my shins on the rungs, and stumbled back to the house. By now, John Wayne was probably shooting the eyes out of a dead Comanche warrior (so the warrior couldn’t find his way to the Spirit Land), and I was missing it.

I paused in the utility room and listened. I heard neither music nor gunshots from the living room, and I feared that in my zeal for insanity-free reception, I had whanged the block converter into electronics heaven. I was beginning to consider the benefits of spending the money for cable.

I paused again in the kitchen. From here, the Sony’s static should have been as loud as hail on the roof, but I heard nothing. The whole house was quiet… too quiet. So to kill some time, and as long as I was in the kitchen anyway, I took a bag of microwave popcorn from the cabinet and tossed it into the Sanyo, which I call the Meltdown Machine because I can feel it trying to cook my eyes if I stand too close. Once, I tried to heat a Velveeta-on-generic-white using one of Mother’s gilt-edged china plates, and the light show was something to behold.

I waited until the bagged kernels began to pop, and then, with that reassuring noise at my back, I proceeded into the dining area and through to the living room. The orange afghan was draped over the Sony, hiding all but one gray corner of the picture tube. The television was silent.

I approached as though the Sony were a dozing wildebeest, and when I was close enough, I snagged the afghan with the crescent wrench. Then, as the noise from the kitchen became as furious as machine-gun fire, I jerked the afghan away—

—and once again stared into the face of Buddy Holly.

I walked backward, banged the side of my right knee on a corner of the coffee table, dropped the wrench, and collapsed into the recliner. I tried to decide whether I should immediately call my group-therapy leader, Sharon Sharpston, or whether I should wait until a decent hour.

My therapy group, by the way, is for Disturbed Adult Children of Dead Rockers and Hippies. (This is my own title. Sharon calls us “Post-Traumatic Victims of Popular Culture,” or something like that.) Neither of my parents played in a band, but they both died for love of rock ‘n’ roll, and I figure that qualifies me. I have always been disappointed, though, that both Mother and my father C. passed through their crucial years before they could have tried to qualify as hippies. I would have much preferred the name “Wheatfield in the Sun” to “Oliver.”

Buddy cleared his throat and began to speak, sounding nervous. “Well, folks, don’t ask me how I got here, ‘cause it beats the heck out of me. It’s only been four or five minutes since I figured out that I ain’t dreamin’ again about what a pain old man Sullivan was.” He frowned, thinking hard. “Last thing I remember, the pilot’s cussin’, and the next thing I know, here I am lookin’ at a TV camera. There’s a sign hangin’ on it that says ‘Welcome to…’ “

His voice trailed off, and he pushed up his glasses with one finger against the bridge. “Sorry, it might take me a minute to get this word. Gan—Ganil—no, that ain’t right….”

“Ganymede,” I said. I had seen some of the Voyager photos in an Introductory Astronomy course before dropping out of Kansas State University, and I recognized Jupiter in the sky behind Buddy. Whenever he tilted his head, the Great Red Spot became visible. “Ganymede, you dumb-ass Texan. And pardon me for being redundant.” I had decided to call Sharon just as soon as the hallucination was over.

“Gaineemeedee,” Buddy said, looking proud of himself.

The noises from the kitchen had stopped, so I went to retrieve my bag of popcorn before it scorched. I figured that the hallucination would wait for me, but when I returned, munching hot popcorn, Buddy was saying, “…and at the bottom of the sign, there’s some smaller print that says, ‘For assistance, contact Oliver Vale, 10146 Southwest 163rd Street, Topeka, Kansas, U.S.A.’ So would someone out there please get in touch with that fellow for me? Thanks.”

I began applauding, scattering popcorn all over the room. “Yes!” I shouted. “Oliver, you impress me! Inflated self-esteem is a major breakthrough! Sharon Sharpston will be most pleased as she ships you off to the state hospital at Osawatomie!”

Buddy took a few steps back from the camera and shifted the Strat into playing position. “That’s all the sign says, but I’ll repeat the address in a while in case nobody’s listening right now.” He looked up and around, as if watching an airplane cross the sky. “Seems like I’m in a big glass bubble, and I can’t tell where the light’s coming from. It’s a little chilly, and I sure hope I don’t have to be here long. In the meantime, here’s one for your family audience, Mr. Sullivan.” He struck a hard chord and began singing “Oh, Boy!” in a wild shout.

I remote-controlled the Sony into blank-screened silence. Poor Buddy. He had seemed to be surrounded by nothing worse than stars and shadows, but I remembered enough from my Introductory Astronomy course to know better. Ganymede was an immense ice ball strewn with occasional patches of meteoric rock, and its surface was constantly bombarded by vicious streams of protons and other cosmic crap whipped up by Jupiter’s hyperactive magnetic field. It was no place for a picker from Lubbock.

The cordless Hitachi telephone on the coffee table blooped. Wondering who could be calling at this time of night, I leaned forward and picked up the receiver before the built-in answering machine could interrupt. “Oliver Vale, Electronic Appliance Salesman and Messiah,” I said. I thought that was terrifically witty, which goes to show the state of mind I was in.

“Oliver, what are you trying to pull?” The voice was female. I had parted from my long-term Relationship, Julie “Eat shit and die, Oliver” Calloway, a month before, so this had to be Sharon Sharpston.

“Is that a Freudian question?” I asked.

“This isn’t funny,” she said. It was the first time I had ever heard her sound angry, and it startled me. “At first I thought you were only playing a trick on me, but WIBW radio just said that the TV interruption is statewide, and maybe even nationwide. Didn’t you stop to think that it was against the law?”

Deep inside the damp caverns of my brain, I realized that what she was saying could only mean that what I had seen on the Sony had not been the product of my fruit-looped imagination after all. Primarily, though, I was perplexed by the bizarre thought that a humanistic individual like Sharon might be a John Wayne fan. “Were you trying to watch The Searchers too?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? Bruce and I were looking at a tape of Olympic highlights when the VCR shut down and Buddy Holly showed up on the screen. Who else but you would choose that figure as your video persona? How did you do it, anyway? More importantly, why did you do it? I mean, why do you think you did it?”

Bruce Werter was Sharon’s person-of-opposite-sex-sharing-living-quarters, a young partner in a downtown Topeka law firm. I had first met him two years ago when he’d come to pick up Sharon after a group therapy session held at my house. He’d had one brown eyebrow and one blond, and not much else to recommend him as far as I could see. He had shown no appreciation for my collection of classic rock ‘n’ roll recordings, but he had clapped me on the shoulder and told me to “hang in there and whip those mental difficulties.” I had wanted to take up voodoo so that I could make a doll of him and stick pins in it.

“How is Bruce these days, anyway?” I asked. “Has he gotten that eyebrow thing cleared up yet?”

“Bruce is fine,” Sharon told me. “He says that you’re probably in enormous trouble with the FCC.”

“I can’t be,” I said. “I didn’t do anything. I was just sitting here trying to watch John Wayne shoot the eyes out of dead Comanche warriors and save Natalie Wood from having sex with non-Christians when Buddy came on. I thought I was imagining the whole thing since, as you know, I have sort of an obsession with him.”

“Yes, I know.” Sharon’s voice was calmer now, closer to the there-there-you’re-as-normal-as-the-next-person voice she uses during therapy. “You’ve taken him as your father icon because you resemble him slightly. That’s why I know you did this TV thing even if you’ve convinced yourself that you didn’t. You made yourself up to look like Buddy Holly, and you converted your basement or bedroom into a set resembling a distant planet.”

“Actually, a satellite of Jupiter,” I said. “Ganymede.”

“Whatever.” In my mind’s eye I saw Sharon’s lips purse, and I wanted to kiss them, Bruce or no Bruce. I wouldn’t even ask her for a blood test.

“Well, it couldn’t have been Io,” I said. “I didn’t see any sulfur volcanoes.”

“It doesn’t matter where you meant it to be,” Sharon said. “It doesn’t even matter whether you actually built a background set or programmed a computer-imaged one. All that matters is that you taped yourself and broadcasted the result. You gave out your name and address, for God’s sake—clearly a cry for help—although you slipped and forgot your zip code.”

“66666-6666 is hard to forget,” I said. For the first time, I realized that my zip code is probably the reason why so many Jehovah’s Witnesses come around. I have a full run of The Watchtower dating back to 1982. “It wasn’t