Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede Part 1

Bradley Denton.

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede.

For Barbara Jean...

...these words of love

"The Midwest has a lot to answer for."

-HOWARD WALDROP,following the August 1990 Wisconsin helicopter crash that took the life of guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan

prologue.

In life, their names were linked for only a few cold, miserable weeks.

In death, their names became a Trinity, as if carved into the same tablet of sacred stone.

Ritchie Valens. The Big Bopper.

Buddy Holly.

Years later, we would look back with longing and say that the music had died.

We should have known better.

Part 1 - the annunciation

1.

OLIVER I was conceived in cold circ.u.mstances in the front seat of a 1955 four-door Chevrolet in the early morning hours of Tuesday, February 3, 1959, near Des Moines, Iowa. I read about this in Volume I of Mother's diary when I was nine years old. I was terrified that she would catch me, but I needn't have worried. She was writing Volume IV at the time, and she never looked back at finished work.

The same pa.s.sage in Volume I notes that the song playing on the car radio during the crucial moment was Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat." Mother wrote:I know, now and forever, that it is "our" song. I am home in bed now, and had an argument with Mama because C. brought me back so late on a snowy night, "and a school night at that!" I cannot sleep because I hear that song over and over in my head, as if I had a radio behind my eyes. I hope to G.o.d I am not pregnant but I don't think I am because you cannot get pregnant the first time, at least that's what they say, and it all dripped out on the seat anyhow, and if you read this you can go to h.e.l.l, Mama, because you have no business snooping in my diary in the first place.

When I first read this pa.s.sage I was terribly confused, but one of the kids at school explained it to me the next day. That was the occasion of my first fight, and my first split lip.

Throughout our life together, up to and including the day she died, I was careful to never let Mother know that I think "Heartbeat" is a lousy song.

The next entry in Volume I told me that my father, referred to as "C.," committed suicide less than twelve hours after impregnating Mother... when he heard the news from Clear Lake. He was found in his parents' garage in the Chevrolet, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Mother was the only person in Des Moines who believed that he had intentionally killed himself. She wrote:His mama and daddy say that C. had the engine on so that he could listen to the radio without running down the battery, but he had a radio in his room, so why would he go out to the car if the radio was the reason? He must have left me a note, but they won't let me see it. I hate them and plan to poison their Chihuahua.

She probably did, too.

One other thing I should mention now: I have always felt that the moment of my conception must have coincided exactly with the moment that the V-tailed red Beechcraft Bonanza hit the frozen Iowa soil, smashing life from the mortal bodies of Ricardo Valenzuela, J. P. Richardson, and Charles Hardin Holley.

Whenever I try to imagine what my father may have looked like, the only face I can see is that of a skinny Texan wearing gla.s.ses with black plastic frames.

I have avoided discovering my father C.'s true ident.i.ty, although it would be easy to do.

That's enough to begin.

My name is Oliver Vale. I live in the one-story Kansas ranch-style house Mother willed to me. It is full of rock 'n' roll memorabilia, j.a.panese appliances, and Volumes I through VII of Mother's diary, dated from May 13, 1957 (her sixteenth birthday) to February 3, 1984 (her last day of life). I pasted the white date sticker on the spine of Volume VII myself. Then I called the ambulance to come and get her.

At 1:03 A.M. on Friday, February 3, 1989, the picture displayed by my twenty-five-inch Sony color television dissolved into bright speckles of static. I was immediately aware of the significance of the time(displayed in glowing blue numerals by the Mitsubishi VCR), and for a few moments I sat frozen in my recliner like a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Buddy Holly had died at about this moment in 1959, just as the most determined of my father C.'s umpteen zillion sperm had plunged into Mother's eagerly waiting ovum. As a multicellular process, I was exactly thirty years old, and my Sony was delivering white sparks in celebration. Mother had been dead five years.

I tried to ponder the significance of it all, and convinced myself that therewas no significance. The Sony had been presenting static of this sort with increasing frequency over the past several weeks, and it was only coincidence that it was doing so again at this particular moment. Unfortunately, this particular moment was rottenly inconvenient, because I had remote-controlled the Sony to life hoping to see John Wayne inThe Searchers, the 1956 John Ford western that gave Buddy Holly the phrase that led to his first hit single. I had seen the movie only once before, so I'd been ecstatic whenDish Digest told me that it was going to be broadcast via satellite from a co-op station in Albuquerque. I had spent a good part of the chilly evening redirecting my creaky SkyVue satellite dish to the proper point in the heavens, and had even popped a seven-dollar blank tape into the Mitsubishi. Now, though, the Sony had erupted into snow, and I was going to miss the opening credits.

Leaving the VCR running, I grabbed my ten-inch crescent wrench from its place on the coffee table, ran through the dining area, kitchen, and utility room, and slammed out through the back door.

The temperature outside had dropped about fifteen degrees since I'd finished tinkering with the SkyVue, and the shock of the cold stopped me for an instant. In that instant, I saw that the night was clear and beautiful. Except for the dull orange glow of Topeka eight miles to the north, the sky was purplish-black and full of stars. The hills of northeastern Kansas were silhouettes that hid all but a few of my various neighbors' mercury-vapor yard lights, and the black outlines of the bare trees were still. It was a different sort of night than it had been when the Winter Dance Party had played in the stupidly named Surf Ballroom at Clear Lake.

I shivered, and that broke the spell. If I didn't hurry, I'd miss the Indian attack and the slaughter of most of John Wayne's relatives, so I sprinted across the dead lawn toward the eight-and-a-half-foot aluminum dish. It glowed a dull white in the wash of the yard light, but that didn't help me see the stepladder that I'd left lying on the ground beside it. I tripped over the ladder and fell forward, banging my head on the dish's lower rim. The SkyVue rang dully, like an old church bell.

Despite the cold, or because of it, I didn't feel much pain, so I wasted no time recovering from the blow.

Instead, I set up the stepladder on the concave side of the dish, climbed in, and proceeded to use the crescent wrench to whang on the cylindrical cover of the block converter at the antenna's focus. A satellite-video specialist would cringe at this remedy, but as Mother used to say in her more lucid moments, "Whatever works." The much-cratered skin of the converter was testimony to the fact that the crescent-wrench-whanging method not only worked, but had been employed often.

The noise brought back memories. Mother had bought the dish from an obscure outfit in El Dorado in the spring of 1983, and we had developed this method of adjustment shortly thereafter (mainly because the wrench had been packed in the parts box and was handy). It had been easier when Mother had been alive, because she could yell from the house when the Sony's picture had been whanged back to normal.

Since her death, I'd had to adjust the antenna by trial and error.

Currently, about twenty-five whangs seemed to do the trick. I gave it a couple more just to be sure and then jumped down from the ladder and ran back to the house. I was wearing sweatpants and a ROCK-CHALK, CHICKEN-HAWK, F*** KU! T-shirt (my movie-watching uniform), and my arms had popped out in goose pimples from wrists to pits. I dashed into the living room and saw John Wayne on the Sony, as big as life and twice as studly. You never would have thought to look at him that he would eventually have a pig valve in his heart. I dropped the crescent wrench on the coffee table, giving the veneer another nick, and flopped into the recliner, pulling its orange afghan down to bundle myself.

It happened this quickly: A corner of the afghan, fuzzy and fluorescent, pa.s.sed before my eyes, and when it was gone, so was John Wayne. In his place, standing alone on a marbled gray plain, was Buddy Holly, wearing a powder-blue suit with a white shirt and black bow tie. A woodgrain-and-white Fender Stratocaster was slung on a strap over his left shoulder, and behind his black-framed gla.s.ses, his brown eyes looked bewildered. A pinkish proto-zit was just visible on his chin. Behind him, an enormous banded oval of red, orange, and white hung suspended in black.

I closed my eyes. This was just the sort of thing I would dream up on this night. For the forty-millionth time, I wished that I had never read any of Mother's diary, and for the forty-millionth time, I replied that it wouldn't have made any difference if I hadn't. After all, I had spent my first ten months of multicellular existence listening to "Heartbeat" over and over again (which may account for my loathing of it), and I had spent every year after that listening to the dozens of other songs that the gangly kid from Lubbock had written and/or recorded between 1955 and 1959....

I opened my eyes. Buddy was still inside the Sony, looking around as though he might have dropped his guitar pick.

"Leave me alone, Dad," I said.

He looked out of the set then, straight at me. "Oh," he said. "The red light's on. Got a little distracted, Mr. Sullivan." He spoke with a down-home, West Texas tw.a.n.g, and his smile was shy but honest. This was clearly a boy who would offer to fix your flat tire on a long, empty stretch of road. He wasn't like your Elvis Presley or your David Lee Roth, thrusting his pelvis out there and daring the girls on the front row to touch it. This was agood boy.

As Mother wrote in Volume I:Just before C. and I did you-know-what, he told me that he thought Buddy Holly, unlike all the others, spoke directly to us. Bill Haley and Chuck 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 onThe 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 theconverter 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! a.s.shole!

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, sc.r.a.ping 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 rea.s.suring 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 t.i.tle. 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. pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses 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-a.s.s 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 a.s.sistance, 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 n.o.body's listening right now." He looked up and around, as if watching an airplane cross the sky. "Seems like I'm in a big gla.s.s 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 c.r.a.p whipped up by Jupiter's hyperactive magnetic field. It was no place for a picker from Lubbock.

The cordless. .h.i.tachi 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 s.h.i.t 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 onme, 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 watchThe Searchers too?" I asked.

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

Bruce Werter was Sharon's person-of-opposite-s.e.x-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 cla.s.sic 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 s.e.x 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 matterwhere 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 G.o.d'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 ofThe Watchtower dating back to 1982. "It wasn't me on your TV, though. It was Buddy. My Stratocaster is solid black, and I can't play it for s.h.i.t. My fingers bleed. That proves I'm innocent, doesn't it?" Something else occurred to me.

"Besides, why did you a.s.sume thatI was playing a trick onyou? Couldn't somebody else be playing a trick onme?"

I felt the puff of Sharon's sigh through the cordless phone. "Oliver, no one would go to this much effort just to... I mean, no one would do this to you. You have no enemies other than yourself. Besides, whether you did it or not, whether youbelieve you did it or not, you're still in tremendous trouble. Bruce is listening to the radio-your tape is still jamming the TV stations, you know-and he says that the reports claim you've broken in on regular programmingworldwide, on every channel that's been checked so far. They're describing you as-what is it, Bruce?-'An obviously brilliant but seriously disturbedcomputer and video genius.' And I suppose you must reallybe a genius if you did what they say."

I had no problem with the "seriously disturbed" business, but I laughed at the rest. "When it comes to video, I can connect, disconnect, or adjust it before you can blink-with the exception of my stupid off-brand satellite dish. But that's because I'm a salesman at Cowboy Carl's Computer and Component Corral in the White Lakes Mall. I sell IBM and Apple clones along with the occasional minicam, CD player, food processor, VCR, and biorhythm-charter. Does that make me a genius?"

"The news media will infer that it does, and so will the FCC," Sharon replied. "At least, that's what Bruce says."

I snorted, a noise I'd practiced since childhood and had down to near-porcine perfection. "What does Bruce know? This is the guy who thinks Eddie Cochran was a World War I flying ace."

"Oliver,"Sharon said irritably, and for that one wonderful moment I imagined that we were married.

"Listen to me. You arein trouble with thelaw."

"Deep sewage," Brace's voice said in the background. He sounded pleased.

"Gobble it and choke, Bruce!" I yelled. If nothing else, I had learned some snappy phrases during my Relationship with Julie "Eat s.h.i.t and die, Oliver" Calloway.

"I want you to come over here," Sharon said.

"What?"Bruce bellowed.