Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (9 page)

If I correctly recalled the
Daily Variety
coverage,
The Phantom of Flatbush
had indeed opened recently—on Halloween, appropriately, and to sluggish business, predictably. But Lenny had certainly received no Lugosi assignment from the
Brooklynite
. My journalist roommate, God bless him, was prevaricating for the greater good.

Within fifteen minutes of Eliot's return from the bodega, the ice cream had disappeared, most of it into alien alimentary canals, Wulawand expressing a preference for the vanilla, Volavont favoring the strawberry. But they were utterly ecstatic about the candy Eliot had impulsively purchased. Consuming their 3 Musketeers bars, the crustaceans declared that nougat was as delectable as logic.

Not long after our guests had savored their final morsels of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—the chocolate component evidently gave them no offense—I announced that Connie and I were facing a deadline as severe as Lenny's. We'd be spending the rest of the evening back at NBC, collaborating on a teleplay.

“We are not familiar with Miss Osborne's TV credits,” said Wulawand.

“My pen is for hire to the highest bidder,” said Connie. “Sometimes they pay me to rehabilitate one of Kurt's scripts.”

“But not often,” I said.

“I also do crime thrillers, soap operas, westerns, and even religious satires of the sort featured on
Not By Bread Alone
,” said Connie.

Lenny headed for the kitchen, declaring that he planned to make a batch of Quickie-Bang popcorn for the imminent Lugosi festival. As the staccato reports of his culinary efforts filled the air,
pop
,
pop
,
pop
,
pop
, I slipped into my bedroom, hoping to find my
NBC Radio and Television Personnel Directory
as well as Connie's original “Sitting Shivah for Jesus” script. Upon locating both documents—the directory lay under my bed like an orphan shoe, the teleplay was sandwiched between the July and August issues of
Andromeda
—I secured them in a satchel and returned in time to see Lenny slice open an aluminum-foil dome rising from the Quickie-Bang skillet.

“Positivism always goes better with popcorn,” he said, pouring the steaming kernels into a wooden salad bowl.

Just then a buzzing noise resounded throughout the apartment. Lenny pushed the intercom button and leaned toward the microphone. “That you, Marvin?”

“You owe me three bucks for the taxi,” came the electronically enhanced voice of Lenny's cousin, crackling up from the front stoop. “I suggest we start with
The Black Cat
. It's Lugosi's best performance after Ygor.”

“
The Black Cat
?” said Wulawand. “That does not sound like a rationalist drama to me. In our pangalactic travels Volavont and I have noticed that black domesticated tetrapods typically occasion crude superstitions.”

“Give it a chance,” said Lenny, his finger still on the button. “In the final reel, Lugosi's Dr. Werdegast shuts down a foolish devil-worshiping cult by skinning the leader alive.”

Once again Marvin's voice poured from the speaker. “Somebody get the hell down here and help me with these goddamn film cans!”

As Lenny and Eliot headed for the stairwell, Volavont rested a claw on my shoulder and said, “
The Black Cat
must be one of your favorite motion pictures.”

“Oh, I simply
adore
it,” I said, even though I'd never seen the thing. “I would screen the climax on
Uncle Wonder's Attic
, but the children might find it too intense.”

“You are a soft-hearted creature, O Kurt Jastrow,” said Wulawand. “Be careful. One never knows down what dark valleys tenderness may lead.”

Before Connie and I left the apartment that night, Lenny engaged in an act of chivalry. Having judged her cloth coat inadequate to the bitter November wind, he lent Connie his black leather motorcycle jacket. The garment looked smashing on her, though in my lovelorn state I would have appreciated her in a potato sack. Still huffing and puffing from the exertion of hauling his share of Lugosi films up four flights of stairs, Lenny's cousin—a pleasant if gnomish young man—lost no time feeding her a line from
The Wild One
.

“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” asked Marvin.

“Whaddaya got?” Connie replied, doing a passable Brando.

Despite my colleague's assurances that all four
Catholic Anarchist
typewriters were functional, I decided to bring my own machine along. Shortly after nine o'clock we hailed a cab, then traveled from the Village to the Bowery, the Underwood sitting on my lap as I'd earlier borne my Zorningorg Prize. Arriving at the Saint Francis House, we descended to the basement and made our way to the newspaper office through the hobos, winos, and lost souls, some of them sleeping on the floor, others eating hot chili at the picnic tables, still others watching
Our Miss Brooks
on CBS. I soon apprehended, to my immense relief, that both telephones were free, likewise the mimeo machine.

Connie draped the back of a chair in Lenny's motorcycle jacket and yanked the NBC personnel directory from my satchel. “I need to get the worst part over with. Wish I could talk to my analyst first, but he never gives advice after hours.”

She dialed Ogden Lynx's number, pausing a full second between digits, then pointed toward the second telephone and invited me to eavesdrop.

“Hello, Ogden. Connie here. Listen, something's come up. My ‘Sitting Shivah' script—I'm just not happy with it.”

“Not happy?” said Ogden. “What're you talking about?”

“The tone's all wrong. I was trying for poignancy, but it came out sentimental. I'll never forgive myself if it's broadcast on Sunday.”

“You wrote a masterpiece,” Ogden protested. “It made me cry.”

“It made me cry, too, but for different reasons. The new draft is almost finished. Fewer characters, more eschatological resonance. Tomorrow I'll track down the actors—the ones I still need—and give 'em their new lines.”

“AFTRA will never abide an emergency rehearsal—not unless we pay everybody overtime,” said Ogden, “and you know Walter won't stand for that.”

“Then we'll have to make do without a rehearsal.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“No, I've lost faith in my script.”

“When do I get to see the rewrite? Can you drop it off tonight?”

“That's the thing, Ogden. You won't be directing this episode. I've got some stylistic flourishes in mind, the sort of stuff I always put in the stage directions and you always ignore.”

“Connie, this is madness. Come over here right now, and we'll pray together.”

“No time for that. Enjoy your day off. Next week I'll show you a brand new script, ‘The Three Wishes of Jenny O'Keefe.' Buckets of tears. Bye-bye.”

“No!”

Connie restored the handset to its cradle. “I never want to fire anybody again.”

“You acquitted yourself well,” I said. “Your analyst would've been proud of you.”

We plugged in the Silex, brewed some coffee, and threw ourselves into our first task, chasing down the cast of “Sitting Shivah” and the crew of the space schooner
Triton
. Constrained by the clock—we still had a half-hour teleplay to write—we could offer each actor only a thumbnail account of the crisis: invading rationalists, impending massacre, ethically essential rewrite. After much to-and-froing, back-and-forthing, begging, wheedling, entreating, and cajoling, our Saturday schedule was fixed.

At noon we would go to the Chock Full O' Nuts in Herald Square and meet with Jesus Christ—that is, we'd drink coffee with stage, screen, and picture-tube stalwart Ezra Heifetz—along with Calder Bolling, who played Cotter Pin, and Joel Seddok, a former wrestling champion who regularly zipped himself into Sylvester Simian's gorilla costume. Come 6:00 P.M. our itinerary would take us to the White Horse Tavern, where Hollis Wright, the
Triton
's fearless captain, would receive his new script, likewise Jimmy Breeze, who brought such brio to the role of Ducky Malloy, plus the actors Ogden had cast as the apostle Peter, the cleansed leper, and the not-quite-Virgin Mary. As for the other characters who might have graced the rewrite, we reluctantly consigned them to oblivion, for the corresponding actors had either failed to answer the phone (the ingénue who incarnated Wendy Evans), pleaded unbreakable commitments (the
alter egos
of the cured blind man, the rehabilitated cripple, and Lieutenant Rawlings), or simply refused to countenance a parody of “Sitting Shivah” on the off-chance it might deter an extraterrestrial death-ray (the response we received from the talent contracted to play Lazarus, Joseph, the apostle Matthew, and Jesus's non-divine brothers).

“And now we conjure the ghosts of Bertrand Russell and Mark Twain,” said Connie, pointing to my Underwood. “I'd much rather be feeding soup to bums.”

Being the better typist, I volunteered to transcribe the evening's brainstorms. For the next four hours, like auctioneers conducting parallel fire sales, Connie and I shouted out potential dialogue, stage directions, and plot twists, even as I committed our most viable notions to paper. I'd never collaborated on a writing project before, and I happily observed that the process got my creative juices flowing. My partner, I sensed, was likewise galvanized—or would have been were our goal not to make her divine Creator look ridiculous.

We decided to lead with the ace of trumps: an impudent reworking of the announcer's opening pitch, so that it now read, “NBC proudly presents stories alerting viewers to the ways that people of faith, whether living in ancient Judea or modern America, have impoverished their intellects with supernatural explanations of reality, for a mind cannot thrive on self-delusion any more than a body can live by bread alone. Stay tuned for ‘The Madonna and the Starship'!”

Absently stroking the fruit bowl on Lazarus's dining table, sitting shivah alone, Mary faces the camera and tells the audience how on Friday her firstborn son, a rabbi given to spreading incendiary political ideas, was tortured and killed by the Romans. Alas, no one came to see her on Saturday, the Sabbath, but she hopes that a comforter or two might appear this morning.

No sooner has Mary voiced her desire than Peter enters, explaining that he and Matthew have conspired to save Jesus's life. The nexus of their plot is the sponge from which the rabbi drank during his crucifixion. Although the Roman executioners believed the sponge held mere vinegar, it actually contained an opiate that reliably produces the symptoms of death. And so it happened that Jesus was removed from the cross while his heart still beat, taken to Joseph of Arimathea's crypt, and interred alive.

Cut to the rear window with its view of the sealed tomb. The stone rotates free of the portal. Much to Mary's wonderment, her son comes forth, staggers toward Lazarus's house, and enters the dining room. Having been driven mad by his ordeal of premature burial, Jesus insists that he is none other than God himself.

Mary is taken aback by her son's lunacy, but before she can articulate her bewilderment, Brock Barton, Ducky Malloy, Cotter Pin, and Sylvester Simian come charging onto the set. We learn that Galaxy Central has ordered Brock to pilot the
Triton
backwards through time to ancient Palestine. The best data suggest that Jerusalem is about to spawn a potentially obnoxious religion, and the Rocket Rangers have come to cancel it. A scowling Jesus, an indignant Peter, and a curious Mary listen as Brock trumpets the virtues of scientific rationality, whereupon the insane Messiah invites everyone to share a meal of bread and wine, explaining that the former will transmogrify into his body and the latter into his blood.

The instant the Eucharist ends, a diseased and handicapped beggar enters, scissoring forward on crutches and brimming with hope that the renowned faith-healer from Galilee will rehabilitate him. Jesus lays his hands on the blind and crippled leper. Nothing happens. “Miracles are like the gods,” Cotter Pin remarks, “capricious, cruel, and wholly unreliable.”

While Jesus ponders the failed healing, Sylvester Simian scratches his hairy armpits and outlines “a famous materialist account of human origins, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.” Jesus and Peter take exception to this irritating conjecture, and they vent their frustration by breaking apart Lazarus's furniture, improvising cudgels from the wreckage, and menacing the Rocket Rangers. A theological donnybrook follows, with the Galilean and his disciple banging on the impervious torsos of the robot and the gorilla. Suddenly a female voice rises above the brawl. The Demivirgin Mary confesses that, while her heart remains pledged to “the God of my Fathers and the Supreme Being of my Mothers,” she doubts that metaphysical accounts of the universe have a future.

“Tune in next Sunday for another iconoclastic installment of
Not By Bread Alone
,” the announcer declares. “Our forthcoming presentation is an original drama by Robert Ingersoll, ‘If God Created the Universe, Then Who Created God?'”