Helium

by Tim Earnshaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Once Gary had been 'Gary Wilder and the Hi-Tones - live on stage tonight'. But that was before he let everything drift away: his folks, his wife, the band, the shower curtains... And this is now - a bizarre bad hair day made worse by the reappearance of Kent Treacy, acid casualty guitarist from the days when the old surf band mutated into The High in a chemical haze. Kent's warped perspective on the gravity of Gary's situation proves unexpectedly influential as the lightness in Gary's step becomes of great interest to NASA.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 188

Sample

—Want to see something weird?

Gary squeegeed the bathroom mirror with the ledge of his hand. His hair was floating.

—Stunt hair. Static, I guess. Real poetic. Like an underwater fern.

He looked in the cabinet for some greasy kid stuff to stick it down, found a tub of blue gel Marcie had bought him, what, five, six years back. Jesus. And his fucking disciples. He sank his fingers into the clammy goo and wiped it on his hair, lowering his gaze to the pale, hairy bulb of his belly. Monday mornings were traditionally set aside for a starkly pitiless appraisal; Gary Wilder: The Wilderness Years – Failure and Waste in Modern America.

—Forty-five years down the fucking toilet.

He cursed the government, the economy and his ex-wife.

—Even took the shower curtain. What kind of woman takes the fucking shower curtain for fuck’s sake.

He ran a comb through his hair, laying it in a shiny slick back from his forehead, thinking the whole Marcie thing over again, using the familiar litany of hindsight.

—Never told me exactly why she left, never gave me that consideration, nope, never showed me the courtesy of a discussion, just looked me up and down in that heavy-lidded way she had and said, go figure. Look at the fucking water all over the shop, I mean it’s a fucking aquarium for fuck’s sake.

He curled his lip and snarled at his hair.

—You look like a wetback pimp son of a bitch sportscaster.

He padded back to the perma-gloom of his bedroom and pulled on a stale Barry Manilow tour sweat. In the kitchen he squinted at the sunlight bouncing off the smeary worksurfaces like it was trying to give him a headache. His dad had fitted out the kitchen back in the early seventies with pale turquoise units he’d salvaged from somewhere, and they’d never fit the square plan here. Big grief from his mom day one. Okay, his dad said, very quietly, you do kitchens from now on. And the house, a white cinderblock bungalow with green Spanish tiled roof, had stayed unchanged since then. Gary didn’t do kitchens either.

—Already too hot to think about tapdancing as a career option, he said to himself. Could shut up early and mellow out at the coast before visiting the old guy, or leave Carl to mind the store all day and just head into the hills with some beers and get headachey. Maybe borrow Big Dave’s Colt and shoot some fucking trees or flowers.

He rinsed a mug in the sink and stared absently at Gretchen hanging out the wash in Vandergelder’s yard. The yards here were all the same, big squares of bleached crabgrass bordered by nameless straggling shrubbery, rubbed bare round bent basketball hoops with no nets. Cracked patios, broken barbecues. Light a barbecue now, some punk gets a bead on your ass with a crossbow. Gary guessed Gretchen was about twenty, twenty-five. Hard to say. Her brown-blond hair just touching her shoulders and her bare arms as she reached up, and green pegs in her mouth like dinosaur teeth. She saw him and waved a big pair of gray jockeys. He waved the dishcloth back.

—God knows I have done my best to entertain wild sexual fantasies about that girl. Low carnality quotient, name like Gretchen. Like Heidi, a bit Nazi. Nice kid, though. Yeah, yoo-hoo.

He felt his hair stiffening against his scalp, and slid his fingers over the flat blades, reminding him of the bones of a sea-ray he’d eaten out at the point. He heard Vandergelder’s reedy voice calling for Gretchen. She made a face and disappeared. She was the live-in help, and some kind of relation, but of course people talked. Vandergelder was soaking up a disability pension, and liked her to push him up and down the mall in his wheelchair and a plaid rug so people could see how sick he was. One night Gary had caught him creeping about setting rat-traps in the yard and looking pretty light on his feet. Gary leaned over the fence and asked if he could help. He remembered Vandergelder’s doglike yelp of surprise and pain as the trap sprung in his hand. Gary laughed without pleasure and tipped the coffee down the sink, squashed his feet into some crumbling sneakers. Out in the driveway, a couple of kids were stomping on the deck of his pickup. They gave him the finger.

—Your hair, man.

—Fucking spic.

Gary sighed and climbed into the cab. The kids jumped down, kicked the tires and lit Marlboros. Gary drove off down Aspen Boulevard. No aspens, just a few tired and dusty mimosas. Newdale Heights was a frayed fractal curve of suburban tract housing, about seventy miles from LA, that looked more half-erased than half-completed, thinly constructed identical bungalows in their own square of scrubby soil, surrounded by unmade hammerhead roads sketched in with broken curbing, littered with sacks of cement gone stiff years ago, and straggling twists of rusty cable. Gary swerved to avoid a dog sprawled in the road.

Remember being a kid here, he thought, actually sitting on the fucking porch with Mom and Dad. Like it was that old movie with that guy, Stewart Granger, Have a Wonderful Life. Unbelievable. Saying hello to folks without giving them the finger. Or raping their dog. Sitting on the porch in my short pants, forty years ago, with my hair slicked back. When there were fences.

His hand went to his hair, realizing what had triggered this bittersweet stroll down memory lane.

—Hair trigger, he said, for his own amusement. He fumbled for his aviator shades in the glovebox, and snarled at the rusty Jap cars on blocks in cracked driveways, the boarded-up windows, the sullen staring kids, the blurred knots of graffiti.

—Dick Van Dyke doesn’t live here anymore. These guys do not have a fucking idea how to make the place look nice, I mean look at that fucking refrigerator, door hanging off, bust mattress, they sit out on that, their fat asses, dogshit all over.

Newdale Heights had started falling apart after the plant closed thirty years back. Then his dad had gotten sick, and his mom took off with the insurance broker who’d sold them the policy that was paying for his dad’s care on the coast. Gary drove past the old plant, with its sagging cyclone fencing and peeling ‘under development’ sign. He’d painted a hyphen between the two words one night, secure in the knowledge that no one would understand why. Newdale was still behind the irony curtain. He made the right onto Main and stopped for the red light out front of Ed’s Bait Shoppe. He peered up at the corroded bolt stubs that used to hold the big neon sign for Klub 45 way back whenever. The Hi-Tones had played more, or possibly fewer, gigs than he could remember at Klub 45. On Stage Tonite!!! Gary Wilder and The Hi-Tones (‘Surferama’) Plus Twist Contest!!! Newdale’s Own!!! And afterward, swearing you could smell the surf a hundred miles away, with that little redhead wriggling in your lap, what was her name, Jenny something, nice tight ass …

He realized he was staring at a green light, and swung off onto Beach Street, pulling up in front of Wilder Sounds. The stores to either side were boarded up, but somehow Newdale’s only guitar store had survived, and in a good year paid the grocery bills. He’d designed the sign himself, with letters like notes on a wavy stave. Across the street was the Your Favorite bar, where he and a bunch of other terminal under-achievers spent whatever time they could spare from their busy schedules, wondering why the waitress never threw any of them a fuck. Further down the road was the big mysterious Government Building, which someone long ago said was funded by the Defense Department to produce a new type of nerve gas, inspiring the Hi-Tones to pen an instrumental called ‘Nerve Gas’, which was eventually backed with ‘Surferama’, and a hit itself in some regions, when the jocks had enough sense to flip it. Whatever, it was a big mysterious building that employed mostly out-of-towners, and was probably an IRS office or something equally boring. Some way beyond that, and a tatty row of food stores selling strange vegetables from another planet, was a burnt-out dry cleaner’s and the trailer park, where Airstreams wobbled in the heat like mercury. Beyond that was the desert, where they kept all the rocks. Gary grunted as he bent to struggle with the lock on the shutter. Sweat ran off the end of his nose and made inky dots on the sidewalk. He went crosseyed looking at them.

—Yo, Gar …

He knew the voice. It was Carl, the skinny teenager who helped at the store. Gary lifted the shutter with a head-splitting rattle. He turned and wiped the sweat off his nose with the back of his hand. Carl was wearing a teeshirt with a design of a blown-apart chest. He pulled the front out so Gary could see it better.

—Neat, huh, Carl said, looking down at it. You can see all the organs and shit.

—Real educational. And your mom ironed it nice for you.

—Sucking Chest Wound Official Merchandise. He blew a pink bubble of gum. What’s with the hair, Gar?

—Doo-wop. Big this summer, I swear truthfully.

Gary unlocked the door, cursing the worn-out key, and scooped up the mail. He waited for Carl to say something. He usually wanted something if he got in on time, Mondays most definitely so.

—Gar?

Gary raised an eyebrow, sifted through the mail, said nothing.

—Is it okay if I have the afternoon off?

—Little league commitments? Or seeing that fat old whore up at the trailer park?

—Got an audition.

—Great. Who for?

—Just these guys.

—Am I your fucking mom for chrissakes? Which these guys?

—Death Spasm.

Gary frowned. Do they play surf music?

—More thrash. Not really thrash metal. Death metal.

—Huh?

—Death thrash. Kinda. But with neat tunes.

Gary took his shades off and looked at Carl across the gulf of years.

—Whole world’s a sucker for those neat tunes. Yeah, sure, kid. Rotsa ruck. Wanna borrow the amp?

Carl got stuck into the inventory with something approaching enthusiasm, and Gary sucked on a beer he’d taken from the icebox in the office. He stared up at his memorabilia corner, not for sale so don’t ask and we mean it. A whole bunch of stuff hooked to some pegboard well out of reach. There was his first Mosrite, in cherry with a whammy bar, which he’d bought when The Wild Ones got their sponsorship deal from Hi-Tone Music Sales and had to change their name to The Hi-Tones. A faded peach satin sport coat with the name of their sponsor on the back, which he’d worn for the Battle of the Bands way out at Thousand Oaks. They’d come second to a bunch of longhairs who later mutated into Quicksilver Messenger Service and encouraged them to re-assess both their tailoring and their commitment to drug abuse.

Next to the sport coat, some old 45s, including the Wild Ones’ ‘Surferama’ and ‘Big Shot’, on the old Regality label, which Gary knew were worth a lot of bucks to vinyl nerds. They did keep asking. And the sleeve to the only album they’d been on, the soundtrack to Bikini Au-Go-Go, a grade double-z teen-sploitation movie which featured an early line-up of The High in the party scene. The movie played at a few flyblown drive-ins but nobody noticed and everyone went back to their day jobs.

Soon after that, as The High, they started doing chemically induced three-hour versions of ‘Nerve Gas’, their hair started getting good in the back, and Hi-Tone Music Sales got edgy about the whole deal and withdrew their sponsorship. Gary remembered Arnie Cobb’s concern over the name, The High. Wasn’t there a danger of a connection with, you know, getting high on drugs? Gary had said well Arnie, there is a danger there, but hey, take a toke on this. Understandably, Arnie took the line that he didn’t want the family business to be thought of as a head shop, kids wandering in off the street asking for roach clips. Gary caught himself snickering affectionately at the memory, getting all camply nostalgic. Suddenly he felt embarrassed about it. He turned to Carl and gestured up at the wall.

—What do you think about this stuff?

Carl looked up from a tray of plectrums he was counting. Huh? I lost my count.

—This old stuff. Think I should take it down?

Carl pursed his lips, thought for a moment. It’s like history. I guess.

Yeah uh huh, thought Gary. It’s like history. One day history is something only countries have and then whammo, you wake up to find you’ve got forty-six, no, forty-seven for God’s sake, years of the stuff to call your very own. Half of which could be compressed into a single boring day without losing anything. He looked at his watch.

—I’ll be in the bar if anyone needs me. Don’t sell everything at once, huh.

He stepped into the shadeless heat just as a wretched-looking tan compact scrubbed into the curb, popping a hubcap. Someone unfolded himself out onto the sidewalk and wiped his palms on his pant legs.

—Gary? he said, stretching his bony head forward on a razor-rash neck. His nylon shirt was a map of Sweatworld, showing major land masses and coastline detail. Gary felt suddenly clammy and nauseous. He hoped to hell he was wrong.

—Kent?

The man nodded, put his hand forward and snatched it back, wiping it on his thigh, put it forward again. Gary held it and shook it very carefully, in case it fell off. This was Kent Treacy, or someone doing a scarily good impression of what the guy would have looked like after being sandwashed in a Stasi basement for twenty years. A quarter of a century ago Kent Treacy had played guitar in The High, disappearing to Mexico to avoid the draft. He hadn’t been heard of since, except for a postcard with suns drawn all over it. They stood staring dumbly at each other, Kent swaying slightly. Gary put his toe on the hubcap to stop it spinning.

—Shit, Kent, you’ve changed. Jesus. I hardly recognized you. If I’d known you were coming I’d have rented some majorettes.

Kent laughed, exactly the same laugh, a bit on edge, a bit crazy. He’d always been out of it, but back then he’d looked great, and now he looked sick. He pointed up at Gary’s sign in mock surprise.

—Whoa! Hey, nice set-up you got here. Nice.

There was another silence. Gary could feel his guts tensing into a knot like a big slippery fist.

—Let me get you a beer, Kent? It’s frying out here.

They crossed the street to the Your Favorite, Kent clapping his long hands like flippers.

—You’ve changed too, Gary. The hair. I didn’t remember you at first. But me too, I guess, and it’s been a long time. We’ll do it right this time.

Do what right exactly? thought Gary, feeling like Death h. . .