Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium (5 page)

Anyway, again. We got in the car after the rehearsal, me, Martha and her dad, and…You know what? None of this part matters. Shit, maybe I should have left the tape thing until later, because now I’ve brought it up, I kind of want to get back to it. I can’t just keep it back for suspense purposes. And if you think about it, that’s how you know most stories aren’t true. I mean, I read a lot of horror writers, and those guys are always delaying the action to build it up a little. As in, I don’t know, ‘She ran down the path and slammed the front door with a sigh of relief. Little did she know that the Vampire Zombie was in her bathroom.

‘MEANWHILE, two thousand miles away, Frank Miller of the NYPD was frowning. There was something about this case that was troubling him…’

See, if that shit with the Vampire Zombie was real–REAL AND HAPPENING TO YOU–you wouldn’t care whether Frank Miller was frowning or not. You’ve got a zombie in your apartment with a fucking chain-saw or a blowtorch or something, so what does it matter what a cop does with his eyebrows on the other side of the country? Therefore, if you’ll permit me to point something out that may ruin your reading pleasure forever, you know that the story has been made up.

But you know this story, the one I’m telling you, hasn’t been made up. You know it a) because I told you that thing about the tape straight away, when it happened, rather than trying to get a little zinger going later, and b) because I’m not going to go into who said what to who on a car ride, just to bump up the page numbers, or to make you forget about the tape thing. You just need to hear this much: Martha and I didn’t say an awful lot, but we did some smiling and whatever, so at the end of the ride we maybe both knew we liked each other. And then I got out of the car, said ‘Hi’ to Mom, and went upstairs to watch the game.

Well, you know now that there wasn’t a tape in the machine, but I didn’t. I sat down on the bed and turned on the TV. Letterman was just starting. He was doing one of those dumb list things that everyone pretends is funny but which really no one understands. I pressed the rewind on the remote: nothing. Not surprising, right? And then I pressed the fast-forward button, I guess because I thought the timer recording hadn’t worked, and I wanted to check that there was a tape in there.

This is what happened: I started fast-forwarding through Letterman. I was pretty confused. How could I do that? The show wasn’t even finished, so how could I have taped it? I pressed the eject, and finally I found out what you’ve known for a while: that there was no cassette in there. With no cassette, I can’t be fast-forwarding. But my TV doesn’t seem to know that, because meanwhile, Letterman’s waving his hands in the air really really fast, and then we’re racing through the ads, and then it’s the closing credits, and then it’s
The Late Late Show
, and then more ads…And that’s when I realize what’s going on: I’m fast-forwarding through network fucking television.

I mean, obviously I checked this theory out. I checked it out by keeping my finger on the remote until I got to the next morning’s breakfast news, which took maybe an hour. But I got there in the end: they showed the next day’s weather, and the best plays from what they said was last night’s Lakers game–even though it wasn’t last night to me–and, a little later, a big pile-up on the freeway near Candlestick Park that had happened in the early morning fog. I could have stopped it, if I’d known any of the drivers. I got bored after a while, and put the remote down; but it took me a long time to get to sleep.

I woke up late, and I had to rush the next morning, so I didn’t get to move any further through the day’s TV schedule. On my way to school, I tried to think about it all–what I could do with it, whether I’d show it to anyone, whatever. Like I said, I’m not as quick as I’d like to be. Mentally speaking, I’m not Maurice Greene. I’m more like one of those Kenyan long-distance runners. I get there in the end, but it takes like two hours and an awful lot of sweat. And to tell you the absolute truth, when I went to school that morning, I didn’t see it was such a big deal. I was, like, I saw this morning’s weather forecast last night; well, so what? Everyone knew what the weather was now. Same with the pile-up. And I’d seen a few of the best plays from the Lakers game, but everyone who didn’t rehearse in a stupid jazz band had seen the whole game anyway. Like, I was supposed to boast to people that I’d seen stuff they saw before I did?

Imaginary conversation:

‘I saw the best plays from the Lakers game.’

‘So did we. We watched the game.’

‘Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show.’

‘So did we.’

‘Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show last night.’

‘You’re a jerk. You need to have your ass kicked.’ What’s fun about that? Watching breakfast news seven hours early didn’t seem like such a big deal to me.

It took me a while longer than it should have done to get the whole picture: If I just kept fast-forwarding, I could see all kinds of stuff. The rest of the playoffs. The next episodes of
Buffy
, or
Friends
. The next season of
Buffy
or
Friends
. Next month’s weather, whatever that’s worth. Some news stuff, like, maybe, a psycho with a gun coming into our school one day next year, so I could warn the people I liked. (In other words not Brian O’Hagan. Or Mrs Fleming.) It took me longer than it should have, but I began to see that fast-forwarding through network TV could be awesome.

And for the next two days, that’s all I did: I sat in my bedroom with the remote, watching the TV of the future. I watched the Lakers destroy the Pacers in the NBA finals. I watched the A’s get smashed by the Yankees. I watched The One Where Phoebe and Joey Get Married. I fast-forwarded until I got blisters. I watched TV until even my dreams got played out on a 14" screen. I was in my bedroom so often that Mom thought I had just discovered jerking off, and wanted me to call my father and talk. (Like, hello, Mom? I’m fifteen?) I could rewind, too; I could watch reruns of the TV of the future if I wanted.

And none of it was any use to me. Who wants to know stuff before it happens? People might think they do, but believe me, they don’t, because if you know stuff before it happens, there’s nothing to talk about. A lot of school conversation is about TV and sports; and what people like to talk about is what just happened (which I now can’t remember, because it was three games back, or the episode before last) or what might happen. And when people talk about what might happen, they like to argue, or make dumb jokes; they don’t want someone coming in and squashing it all flat. It’s all, ‘No, man, Shaq’s not looking so young any more, I think the Pacers can take them.’ ‘No way! The Pacers have no defense. Shaq’s going to destroy them.’ Now, what do you say if you know the score? You tell them? Of course not. It sounds too weird, and there’s nothing to bounce off anyway. So all I ever did was agree with the guy whose prediction was closest to the truth, to what I knew, and it was like I hadn’t seen anything, because the knowledge I had was no fucking good to anyone. One thing I learned: School life is all about anticipation. We’re fifteen, and nothing’s happened to us yet, so we spend an awful lot of time imagining what things will be like. No one’s interested in some jerk who says he knows. That’s not what it’s about.

But of course I kept going with the remote. I couldn’t stop myself. I’d come back from school and watch, I’d wake up in the morning and watch, I’d come back from rehearsals and watch. I was a month, maybe five weeks, into the future–time enough to know that Frazier gets engaged to some writer, that there’s a dumb new sitcom starting soon about a rock star who accidentally becomes three inches tall, and that half the Midwest gets flooded in a freak storm.

And then…Well, OK, maybe I should say that I had noticed something: The news programs were becoming really fucking long. It took a whole lot of fast-forwarding to get through them. And then one night I came back from school and picked up the remote, and all I could find was news. As far as I could tell, in about six weeks’ time, all of network TV–every channel–is just like one long fucking news show. No
Buffy
, no sports, no nothing; just guys in suits with maps, and people in weird countries you’ve never heard of talking into those crappy video things which make them go all jerky and fuzzy. It was like that for a couple days after 9/11, if you remember that long ago, but sooner or later everything went back to normal; I was trying to find that part, but I couldn’t get there.

Now and again I stopped to watch the people talking, but I didn’t really understand it; there was stuff about India and Pakistan, and Russia, and China, and Iraq and Iran, and Israel and Palestine. There were maps, and pictures of people packing up all their shit in all these places and getting the hell out. The usual stuff, but worse, I guess.

And then, a few days’ TV-time later, I found the President. I watched some of that–it was on every channel at the same time. She was sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the American people, with this really intense expression on her face. She was so serious it was scary. And she was telling us that these were the darkest days in our history, and that we were all to face them with courage and determination. She said that freedom came at a price, but that price had to be worth paying, otherwise we had no identity or value as a nation. And then she asked God to bless us all. Straight after the show they cut to live pictures of more people getting the hell out of their homes, carrying bundles of their possessions under one arm and small children under another. These people were walking down the steps of a subway station, trying to get underground. The pictures weren’t fuzzy or jerky, though. These people lived in New York City.

I didn’t want to watch it anymore, so I picked up the remote; never in my life have I wanted to see the opening credits of
Sabrina
so bad. But after a couple of hours of news stuff there was nothing. The TV just stops. Network TV cancelled. I’ve spent most of my time since then trying to see if I can get beyond the static, but I’m not there yet.

Now, all this time, I haven’t spoken to anyone about any of this shit. Not to Mom, not to anyone at school, not to Martha. That’s one thing they get right in stories, even though I didn’t use to think so: You don’t want to talk about spooky stuff. In the stories, there’s always some reason for it, like, I don’t know, the words don’t come out when they try to speak, or the magic thing only works for the guy who’s telling the story, something like that, but the real reason is, it just sounds dumb. When it finally clicked that I could watch NBA games before they happened, then obviously I thought I was going to ask a bunch of guys to come over to watch. But how do you say it? How do you say, I’ve got a video recorder that lets me fast-forward through the whole of TV? You don’t, is the answer, unless you’re a complete jerk. Can you imagine? The only quicker way to get a pounding would be to wear a STA-COOL T-shirt to school. (I just thought of something: If you’re reading this, you might not know about STA-COOL. Because if you’re reading this, it’s way off in the future, after the static, and you might have forgotten about STA-COOL, where you are. Maybe it’s a better world where people only listen to good music, not stupid pussy boy-band shit, because the world understands that life is too short for boy bands. Well, good. I’m glad. We did not die in vain.) And I was going to tell Mom, but not yet, and then when I got to the static…People should be allowed to enjoy their lives, is my view. Sometimes when she gives me a hard time about my clothes or playing my music loud, I want to say something. Like, ‘Don’t stress out, Mom, because in a month or so someone’s going to drop the big one.’ But most of the time I just want her to enjoy her painting, and living in Berkeley. She’s happy here.

When I remembered the guy I bought the machine from, though, I wanted to speak to him. He’d seen the static too; that’s what that conversation in his shop had been all about, except I didn’t know it. He realized why I’d come as soon as I walked in. I didn’t even say anything. He just saw it in my face.

‘Oh, man,’ he said after a little while. ‘Oh, man. I never even started my novel.’ Which I couldn’t believe. I mean, Jesus. What else did this guy need to help him understand that time is running out? He’d seen the end of the fucking world on live TV, and he still hadn’t gotten off his stoned ass. Although maybe he’d figured he wasn’t going to find a publisher in time. And he certainly wasn’t going to get too many readers.

‘Maybe we’re both crazy,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’re getting it all wrong.’

‘You think network TV would stop for any other reason? Like, to encourage us to get more exercise or something?’

‘Maybe the thing just stopped working.’

‘Yeah, and all those people were going into the subway with their kids because they couldn’t find any childcare. No, we’re fucked, man. I never voted for that bitch, and now she’s killed me. Shit.’

At least you’ve had a life, I wanted to say. I haven’t done anything yet. And that was when I decided to ask Martha out.

(OK. That was the weird middle. Now I’m going to give you the happy ending: the story of how I got to sleep with the hottest girl in the Little Berkeley Big Band, even though I’m only fifteen, and even though she doesn’t look like the sort of girl who gives it up for anybody.)

One thing about knowing the world is going to end: It makes you a lot less nervous about the whole dating thing. So that’s a plus. And she made it easy, anyway. We were talking in her dad’s car about movies we’d seen, and movies we wanted to see, and it turned out we both wanted to see this Vin Diesel movie about a guy who can turn himself into like a bacteria any time he feels like it and hang out in people and kill them if necessary. (Although to tell you the truth, I used to want to see it more than I do now. There are a lot of things I used to want to do more than I do now. Like, I don’t know, buying stuff. It sounds kind of dumb, I guess, but if you see a cool T-shirt, you’re thinking about the future, aren’t you? You’re thinking, hey, I could wear that to Sarah Steiner’s party. There are so many things connected to the future–school, eating vegetables, cleaning your teeth…In my position, it’d be pretty easy to let things slide.) So it seemed like the logical next step to say, hey, why don’t we go together?