Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (2 page)

Stuff I did on the Internet while writing this introduction:

Looked up the lyrics to Toto’s song “99”

Played two “Armor” battles of Gemcraft Chapter 0

Checked the Facebook status of two people I hate

Technorati’d myself

^*
Nosferatu
looms over and lurks under everything I’m writing about here, and in this book.

I was five years old and living in Tustin Meadows, California—a point on the arc of my dad’s military career postings, tracing a backward word balloon over the United states, starting in Virginia, up through Ohio, out to California, and back to Virginia.

It was Halloween, and the local library had one of those “kids’ activity days,” where we made cookies and cut out jack-o’-lanterns and heard ghost stories. And one of the librarians—with nothing but good intentions, I’m sure—decided to show an 8 mm print of
Nosferatu
against a wall. They blacked out the curtains and the projector clattered to life and spit out what I’m sure the adults thought would be a harmless, old spook show.

That movie—F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu
—burst and spread out and filled that little room with jagged, discordant fever-mares from across continents and decades. The scariest vampire any of us had seen up to that point was the Count on
Sesame Street
. We were screaming and balling our fists up to our chests and wondering how we’d gone from cookies and crafts to a wrinkly rat-man spreading contagion across an already-blasted landscape like a plague that kills plagues. No one in that room ever escaped Max Schreck’s curly, cursed talons. least of all me. I saw how that flat square of sepia light replaced the hard dimensions around us. I wanted to get on the other side of it.

I still dream about them. The three screens and the ticket booth.

I spent my high school years twenty minutes from Washington, DC, in a suburb called Sterling, Virginia. Actually, in a sub-suburb of Sterling called Sugarland Run. But our mailing address was “Sterling.” We were, postage-wise, suburban feudal subjects.

And no, we’re not going
back
to high school here, to reminisce, balance ledger sheets, or admit failings. I know that high school is the central American experience,
^*
but my memories of what I did in high school are drowned out by what I
missed
. And I missed it by
twenty minutes
.

Twenty minutes from Washington, DC, was twenty minutes from eternal hipster cred—“Oh, I was at that Fugazi show when I was
fif
teen . . .” “Yeah, well, I stole my parents’ credit card and caught Bad Brains at WUST Hall . . .” “The Minor Threat bassist punched me outside of Piccolo’s in Georgetown on my birthday . . .”

To give you an idea of how wide a mark I missed this explosive time by, I had to look up most of those bands on Wikipedia. I had no car. I had no money. There was one bus in and out of Sugarland Run, and it stopped running at seven p.m. All the older kids who could’ve given me a ride into DC had just discovered the Doors, whippets, and doing whippets in their garage while listening to the Doors. My throat still feels floaty and burned whenever I hear “The Crystal Ship.” “Strange Days” still tastes like cheap beer in someone’s town house when their parents were vacationing.

There was also a plague of divorces among my friends and acquaintances when I was in high school—fallout from the suburban swinging that finally reached Sterling as the seventies were flickering away. We were too young, too gobsmacked by
Star Wars
and
Saturday Night Live
and snow forts and thunderstorms to notice the dalliances that led to the rifts. But we wasted no time taking advantage of the suddenly empty houses on the weekends. And now, one floor below the heartbroken half of a shattered marriage brooding in an upstairs bedroom, we were free to bray along with Zeppelin or the Who or whatever decades-old band we believed we were discovering. I know a lot of people associate the eighties with MTV, post-punk, New Wave, and the second birth of hiphop, but not us suburban kids. We were broke-ass white boys, plundering our parents’ LPs from when they were young and horny. The bands we followed were the ones savvy enough to survive suddenly being filmed—thus, Springsteen pumped iron, Genesis got teddy-bear cute, and Aerosmith hooked up with the cool new black kids. REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Grand Funk Railroad were not so lucky. Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors, and the Who were safe in their aeries. The importance of adaptation and luck were the first things I learned about music.

But not creation. I wasn’t there for it. No one will ever spot my dopey face in a crowd shot from a coffee-table book about the DC hardcore scene. There will be no fleeting glimpses of my underage self in the inevitable documentary about Fugazi. Now that I think of it, I’m sure there
is
a documentary about Fugazi. I know I’m not in it. Maybe my initials are still in the “high score” top 5 on the Galaga machine at Dominion Skating Rink. Someone tell Ken Burns.

I did manage to see Genesis twice on their Invisible Touch tour. The second time I saw them, opening act Paul Young knocked himself unconscious twirling his mike stand around, singing “Everytime You Go Away.” No one in the stadium seemed to notice. The lines at the pretzel stands were hella long.

I was trapped, stuck in the syrup of the suburbs. And there, among houses built one year
after
I was born (I had more history than the streets I wandered), I found an underground scene.

Literally, underground.

Subterranean but unheralded. Gone forever and unmourned. Pungent and vibrant but Unchronicled. No one involved brags about it. None of us will be portrayed by Kevin Corrigan, Peter Sarsgaard, or Chloë Sevigny in a brilliant indie biopic about the movers and shakers of said scene.

The Towncenter 3 Movie Theater, in the Sterling Town-center Shopping Mall of Sterling, Virginia. Right at the intersection of Route 7 and Dranesville Road.

That was my Lapin Agile. My Factory. My Elaine’s. My CBGB. My Studio 54.

Most of those places are gone.
^*
So is the Towncenter 3. I think. Sort of. Until recently, it still existed as a movie theater, under the clubfooted name of the Sterling Cinema Drafthouse and the Hollywood Café, Cinema 3 Nite-Club. Now their website says, simply,
The Sterling Cinema Draft is closed forever!

Not to me. Never. And in my mind, it will always be, simply, the Towncenter 3.Three screens. Five employees. One manager. At least, as long as I was there.

I got a job as an usher there in the summer of 1987. You entered at street level, in between a karate studio and a pizza joint. But, due to some weird, Escher-like construction I still don’t understand, you
descended
three flights of stairs into a murky, fluorescent-lit lobby and snack area that looked like it should have been in a Nik Ker-Shaw video. Then, once you bought snacks and drinks, you descended
another
flight of stairs to an even dimmer, grimmer lobby where you’d choose one of three theaters. It was a theater designed like an artless logic problem— which door leads to freedom, which to death, and which to
Adventures in Babysitting
?

The day I was hired was the last day they were showing
RoboCop
. After that, we showed a procession of unanswerable trivia questions like
Jaws: The Revenge, Who’s That Girl?,The Living Daylights,
and
Summer School
.

I’d had some really good times in the Towncenter 3 when I went there as a teen.
Return of the Living Dead, Beverly Hills Cop,
and
Richard Pryor: Here and Now
. Now that I could watch anything I wanted, they showed nothing I wanted to see. My fellow employees felt the same way. We were rats locked in a lightless underground warren, toiling under bright, loud distractions beamed onto soda-splattered screens. Now we found ourselves facing a summer where the distractions weren’t distracting. Our fancies slowly turned to the . . . unfanciful.

This growing discontent was overseen by Dan the Manager.
^*

Dan claimed he was an ex–Texas Ranger. Do the Texas Rangers make their members drink a quart of Vladimir vodka every day? If so, Dan was keeping their frontier spirit alive. His face was scorched craggy by fermented potatoes and not the punishing Laredo sun. He had a swaggering, bowlegged walk that came from personally insulting, every waking second, gravity and inertia—not from sitting astride a noble steed on the prairie. His ten-gallon hat hid his bald, psoriasis-ravaged skull dome.

Cheap liquor is a magic potion than can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.

He insisted we called him “Dan the Manager”—not “Dan.”

“I always carry a gun, and it’s impossible to get the drop on me,” Dan the Manager would say as we’d open the snack bar for the twelve thirty matinee. Then he’d round the corner to the projection booths. Gary Jay, an usher and steroid abuser (he wasn’t ever going to grow taller than the four foot nine God gave him, so why not?), would hop out like a demented gnome, brandish a Goody comb like a pistol, and scream,
“Bang-you’re-dead-Dan!”

Dan would chuckle through clenched molars, mutter something that sounded like “Y’tried that in T’xs you’d git a winder in yer head”
^*
and then vanish into his “office”—a lawn chair behind one of the platter projectors. The he’d crack the cap on another bottle of liver eraser and we’d get to work bringing the magic of Hollywood to Northern Virginia.

The first matinee would end. The afternoon crowd, sunblind from swimming or footsore from shopping, would be gathering at the upstairs box office. Dan the Manager had long ago drifted into whatever slushy Chuck Norris dreamscape the vodka took him to. Gary Jay and I couldn’t handle the swelling masses alone. Who would rise to take the reins at the Towncenter 3? Who would push through the double glass doors of the street-level entrance and stomp his way down the stairs, like Gene Simmons and Wilt Chamberlain about to set a basement full of uppity pussy straight?