Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton [libby ebook reader .txt] 📗

has been a problem for big-city Negroes for decades. Big-city anybody is my guess.

Things are only going to get worse. I keep hoping for the UFOs to come for me, but sometimes I think that they never will. 1968 will be a bad year.

I was eight, and I remember most of it: The USS Pueblo was seized by North Korea. The Tet offensive made Vietnam even bloodier. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Police in Chicago went berserk.

And then, in early September, Mother receiver a telephone call from Grandmother. It was the first time they had spoken in almost a year. Grandmother had just been told that Uncle Mike was dead.

His death was “accidental,” the result of a mistake with a Claymore. But how Uncle Mike died meant nothing. Dead is dead. Even at eight, I knew that. I had not forgotten what I had learned from the death of Sam Cooke, from the reality of a squirrel smashed in the street.

For Mother, though, it had become easier to forget what was real and to hope for what was not.

Buddy, Sam, Otis, and even Frankie are not dead at all, she wrote. They are still alive because I can still hear them sing.

But I can’t hear Mikey. Except for a few times on the phone, I haven’t heard him in nine years. Does that mean that he’s gone forever? Or can the letters he wrote serve the same purpose as 45 rpm records? If I read those letters over and over, will he still be alive? If you can think of someone, picture him as solid as flesh, can’t you say he’s really here?

Even if you can’t, what does that matter? I can’t picture the other soldiers in Mikey’s unit, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Nor can I picture the ancient Atlanteans or their machines of flying light, but others have, so I don’t have to. They exist as surely as I and Oliver do, as Buddy Holly does, as President Johnson does, as poor sweet C. does in my heart.

Say hello to C. for me, Mikey. Take a ride together in a machine of flying light and tell me what you find.

Even though I had never known Uncle Mike, I was sad that he was gone. Many times in the months after his death, I would awaken at night with the idea that there was a young man in an Army uniform sitting beside my bed, looking at me.

Things seemed better in October when the nation’s long hiatus from space ended with the successful flight of Apollo 7. Then, in December, Apollo 8 went all the way around the moon and back, and I was ecstatic. (I wished that they hadn’t done the Bible reading, though. It reminded me of Vacation Bible School.)

During the Apollo 8 launch, Mother said something like “If the government would put money into UFO research, they wouldn’t have to spend so much on those rockets.”

“You’re crazy!” I shouted, watching the Saturn booster rise on a pillar of smoke and flame.

When I finally glanced at Mother, her eyes were wet. I looked back at the TV.

1968 was a bad year.

1969 was worse.

School was dismissed early one Wednesday in April because of a sewer backup that flooded the halls, and I found myself at home alone at 2:30 in the afternoon. My after-school babysitter would not arrive until a quarter to four, and Mother would not come home until six.

I did what any nine-year-old would do. I took the opportunity to get into things I wasn’t supposed to get into.

I had long been curious about Mother’s black notebooks. She had told me that they were her diary, but she had also told me that their contents were none of my business. You don’t tell a kid that. At least, you didn’t tell me that. I knew that she kept her current volume in the top drawer of her dresser, but I was afraid she might notice if it were disturbed; so instead, I searched for the volumes already completed.

I found them in a box under her bed and began to read Volume I, stopping every few seconds to look at the alarm clock on the nightstand. I was terrified that my babysitter would catch me and report my perfidy.

Volume I began at Mother’s sixteenth birthday, and its early entries were boring: who liked whom, who was mad at whom, who was taking whom to the sock hop, etc. I began flipping pages to see whether I could find anything that other might have written about her husband, my father, about whom I knew almost nothing except that he had died before I was born. Mother always deflected my questions with answers like “No, he wasn’t a soldier.” “Yes, he was a nice man.” “No, I don’t have a picture I can show you.” “Yes, you look a little like him.”

What I found was the description of my conception. I didn’t understand all of it, especially the sentence in which Mother wrote it all dripped out on the seat. But I knew that I had discovered something that I would wish I hadn’t.

I read further, feeling sicker and sicker, all the way to my birth. Then I went back and read it all again.

It seemed to say that Mother and my father had not been married. But that wasn’t possible. People who weren’t married couldn’t have babies.

The apartment’s front door opened while I was still sitting on the floor of Mother’s bedroom. Panicking, I crammed the notebooks back into the box and shoved it under the bed, then rushed into the living room. My babysitter had just come in. I blurted that I had just been to the bathroom, and she gave me a look that said she didn’t really care about my bodily functions.

That evening, Mother felt my forehead. I was flushed, and she was worried that I might have a fever. I told her that I felt fine, honest. I was fine, school was fine, everything was fine. She said that I didn’t have to get so agitated about it. She believed me.

The next day at school, I sat atop the monkey bars with my best friend, Steve, during morning recess. Steve had other best friends besides me, but he was my only one.

Pretending that I had read it in a book I’d found on a sidewalk, I described the things from Volume I that I had not understood. Steve was smart, and I figured that if anyone could explain those things to me, he could.

He laughed. “You found a dirty book! Didn’t you know that? Was there a naked lady on the cover?”

“No.”

“Well, there should have been,” Steve said. “Did you read the whole thing?”

“Most of it,” I mumbled, climbing down to the ground. I didn’t want to talk anymore.

Steve followed me. “Did the girl in the book get pregnant? My brother says that a chick who’ll do it in a car is a slut, and that sluts always get pregnant.”

I started walking toward the building. My face burned as if it had been stung by wasps.

“Come on,” Steve said, hurrying to walk beside me. “Tell me about the book. Did the slut have a bastard baby?”

I turned and hit him in the mouth.

He stared for a few seconds, and then his face contorted and he swung a fist, hitting me in the left eye. I fell on my rump in the dirt, and Steve dropped on top of me, pounding furiously. I pounded back, and we rolled over and tore at each other’s clothes. Two teachers pulled us apart and dragged us to the principal’s office.

What happened there was the same thing that has happened in principals’ offices ever since there were such places. When it was over, Steve was no longer my friend, and my nickname at school, said in whispers when no teacher could hear, became “Ollie the Bastard Baby.”

The principal telephoned Mother that day, of course, and she had to leave the radio station early to come to the school. She didn’t seem upset, though. She simply listened to what everyone had to say, and then she said that she would punish me.

When we got home, she cleaned my scrapes and said, “No skydiving for a month.” She didn’t ask me what the fight had been about. Her mind was on other things.

A few days later, on Saturday evening, my babysitter showed up while I was watching TV, and Mother appeared from her bedroom wearing a dress and makeup. She was going on a date, and she told me nothing about it.

I glared at her as she sat on the divan to wait. She asked me to stop it, but I wouldn’t. My babysitter sat cross-legged against the wall and pretended to read a magazine.

The doorbell rang, and Mother went to answer it. The man she let into our apartment was tall and had bristly blond hair, a reddish moustache, and freckled skin.

“Oliver, this is Keith,” Mother said. “He’s the new midday on-air personality at the station.”

“I’m at school at midday,” I said, trying to make it plain that this Keith person had no place in my world and never would. I kept hearing Steve say the word slut.

Keith squatted and held out his hand. “How ya doin’, pardner?” he asked.

“Watching television,” I said, turning to face the screen. I kept my eyes fixed there until they were gone.

“He seems real nice,” my babysitter said. “He sounds different than he does on the radio, though.”

“Big deal,” I said, and didn’t speak again that evening.

Mother dated Keith from April to July, and I did my best to be a brat about it. I even turned our radio dial away from KKAP so that I wouldn’t have to hear Keith’s voice on commercials. Mother turned it back a few times, then let me have my way.

Fortunately, I didn’t see what Mother wrote in Volume IV during those months. Most of the entries are so erotic that the ink virtually smokes. Even now, I can’t read those passages without experiencing a weird nausea that I can only describe as voyeuristic-Oedipal shock:

I had forgotten what it was like to feel reality. Fingers touching, stretching the skin of his back, breasts pressed to chest, strands of my hair sticking to our faces, my calves locked over his—Those are real. UFOs, Vietnam, Atlantis, Mikey’s death, Mama’s hate, my son’s pain, Nixon’s jowls— Those are unreal. At least, they seem that way when I’m with Keith. Nothing exists at those times except the touch, the kiss.

I am never so alive as when lying with Keith. Nothing else makes the universe so sharp and clear. Nothing else makes me feel so sane.

Reading that now, I know that Mother was trying to heal herself of Buddy’s death, of my father C.‘s suicide, of Grandmother, of everything. She might have done it too, if she had been blessed with a different son. Or a different mother.

Mother’s relationship with Keith came to an end in July.

They were both scheduled to work on the Fourth, so they were given Thursday, July 3, off and had planned a long date for that afternoon and evening. My existence created a problem because my usual babysitter was out of town and there were no others to be found. I insisted that I was old enough to stay home alone, but Mother disagreed. At first, she suggested that I accompany her and Keith on their picnic, but I replied that I wouldn’t go anywhere with the two of them even if