Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

  The other Kool-Tones were transfixed by what was about to happen.

  “They can’t do that, man,” said Leroy.

  “They’re gonna cop out.”

  “That’s impossible. Nobody can do it.”

  But when the Bombers got to the break, this guy Fred stepped out to the mike and went: “Eee-de-ee-dee-eedle-eee-eee, eee-deee-eed le-deeee, eedle-dee-eed le-dee-dee-dee, eewheetle-eedle-dee-deedle-dee-eeeeee,” in a splitting falsetto, half mechanical, half Martian cattle call—the organ break of “Runaway,” done with the human voice.

  The crowd was on its feet screaming, and the rest of the song was lost in stamping and cheers. When the Kool-Tones jumped out for the last song of the first set, there were some boos and yells for the Bombers to come back, but then Zoot started talking about his girl putting him down because he couldn’t shake ’em down, but how now he was back, to let her know. . . . They all jumped in the air and came down on the first line of “Do You Love Me?” by the Contours, and they gained some of the crowd back. But they finished a little wimpy, and then the lights went down and an absolutely black night descended. The stars were shining over New York City for the first time since World War II, and Vinnie said, “Ten minutes, folks!” and guys went over to piss against the walls or add to the consolation-prize bottles.

  It was like halftime in the locker room with the score Green Bay 146, You 0.

  “A cheap trick,” said Zoot. “We don’t do shit like that.”

  Leroy sighed. “We’re gonna have to,” he said. He drank from a Coke bottle one of the Purple Monsters had given him. “We’re gonna have to do something.”

  “We’re gonna have to drink pee-pee, and then Vinnie’s gonna denut us, is what’s gonna happen.”

  “No, he’s not,” said Cornelius.

  “Oh, yeah?” asked Zoot. “Then what’s that in the bottle in the clubhouse?”

  “Pig’s balls,” said Cornelius. “They got ’em from a slaughterhouse.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” said Cornelius, tiredly. “Now let’s just get this over with so we can go vomit all night.”

  “I don’t want to hear any talk like that,” said Leroy. “We’re gonna go through with this and give it our best, just like we planned, and if that ain’t good enough, well, it just ain’t good enough.”

  “No matter what we do, it just ain’t good enough.”

  “Come on, Ray, man!”

  “I’ll do my best, but my heart ain’t in it.”

  They lay against the loading dock. They heard laughter from the place where Bobby and the Bombers rested.

  “Shit, it’s dark!” said Slim.

  “It ain’t just us, just the city,” said Zoot. “It’s the whole goddamn U.S.”

  “It’s just the whole East Coast,” said Ray. “I heard on the radio. Part of Canada, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Hey, Leroy,” said Cornelius. “Maybe it’s those Martians you’re always talking about.”

  Leroy felt a chill up his spine.

  “Nah,” said Slim. “It was that guy Sparks. He shorted out the whole East Coast up that pole there.”

  “Do you really believe that?” asked Zoot.

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  “I believe,” said Lucius, coming out of nowhere with an evil grin on his face, “that it’s show time.”

  They came to the stage running, and the lights came up, and Cornelius leaned on his voice and: “Rabbalabbalabba ging gong, rabbalabbalabba ging gong,” and the others went “wooooooooooo” in the Edsels’ “Rama Lama Ding Dong.” They finished and the Bombers jumped into the lights and went into: “Domm dom domm dom doobedoo dom domm dom dobedoobeedomm, wahwahwahwahhh,” of the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me.”

  The Kool-Tones came back with: “Ahhhhhhhhanhhwoooowoooo, ow-ow-ow-owhwoo,” of “Since I Don’t Have You,” by the Skyliners, with Slim singing in a clear, straight voice, better than he had ever sung that song before, and everybody else joined in, Leroy’s voice fading into Slim’s for the falsetto weeeeooooow’s so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

  Then Bobby and the Bombers were back, with Bobby telling you the first two lines and: “Detooodwop, detooodwop, detooodwop,” of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” calm, cool, collected, assured of victory, still running on the impetus of their first set’s showstopper.

  Then the Kool-Tones came back and Cornelius rared back and asked: “Ahwunno wunno hooo? Be-do-be hoooo?” Pause.

  They slammed down into “Book of Love,” by the Monotones, but even Cornelius was flagging, sweating now in the cool air, his lungs were husks. He saw one of the Bombers nod to another, smugly, and that made him mad. He came down on the last verse like there was no one else on the stage with him, and his bass roared so loud it seemed there wasn’t a single person in the dark United States who didn’t wonder who wrote that book.

  And they were off, and Bobby and the Bombers were on now, and a low hum began to fill the air. Somebody checked the amp; it was okay. So the Bombers jumped into the air, and when they came down they were into the Cleftones’ “Heart and Soul,” and they sang that song, and while they were singing, the background humming got louder and louder.

  Leroy leaned to the other Kool-Tones and whispered something. They shook their heads. He pointed to the Hellbenders and the Purple Monsters all around them. He asked a question they didn’t want to hear. They nodded grudging approval, and then they were on again, for the last time.

  “Dep dooomop dooomop doomop, doo ooo, ooowah oowah oooway ooowah,” sang Leroy, and they all asked “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Leroy sang like he was Frankie Lymon—not just some kid from the projects who wanted to be him—and the Kool-Tones were the Teenagers, and they began to pull and heave that song like it was a dead whale. And soon they had it in the water, and then it was swimming a little, then it was moving, and then the sonofabitch started spouting water, and that was the place where Leroy went into the falsetto “wyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” and instead of chopping it where it should have been, he kept on. The Kool-Tones went ooom wahooomwah softly behind him, and still he held that note, and the crowd began to applaud, and they began to yell, and Leroy held it longer, and they started stamping and screaming, and he held it until he knew he was going to cough up both his lungs, and he held it after that, and the Kool-Tones were coming up to meet him, and Leroy gave a tantrum-step, and his eyes were bugging, and he felt his lungs tear out by the roots and come unglued, and he held the last syllable, and the crowd wet itself and—

  The lights went out and the amp went dead. Part of the crowd had a subliminal glimpse of something large, blue, and cool looming over the freight yard, bathing the top of the building in a soft glow.

  In the dead air the voices of the Kool-Tones dropped in pitch as if they were pulled upward at a thousand miles an hour, and then they rose in pitch as if they had somehow come back at that same thousand miles an hour.

  The blue thing was a looming blur and then was gone.

  The lights came back on. The Kool-Tones stood there blinking: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot. The space in front of the center mike was empty.

  The crowd had an orgasm.

  The Bombers were being violently ill over next to the building.

  “God, that was great!” said Vinnie. “Just great!”

  All four of the Kool-Tones were shaking their heads.

  They should be tired, but this looked worse than that, thought Vinnie. They should be ecstatic. They looked like they didn’t know they had won.

  “Where’s Leroy?” asked Cornelius.

  “How the hell should I know?” Vinnie said, sounding annoyed.

  “I remember
him smiling, like,” said Zoot.

  “And the blue thing. What about it?”

  “What blue thing?” asked Lucius.

  “I dunno. Something was blue.”

  “All I saw was the lights go off and that kid ran away,” said Lucius.

  “Which way?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly see him, but he must have run some way. Don’t know how he got by us. Probably thought you were going to lose and took it on the lam. I don’t see how you’d worry when you can make your voices do that stuff.”

  “Up,” said Zoot, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “We went up, and we came down. Leroy didn’t come down with us.”

  “Of course not. He was still holding the same note. I thought the little twerp’s balls were gonna fly out his mouth.”

  “No. We . . .” Slim moved his hands up, around, gave up. “I don’t know what happened, do you?”

  Ray, Zoot, and Cornelius all looked like they had thirty-two-lane bowling alleys inside their heads and all the pin machines were down.

  “Aw, shit,” said Vinnie. “You won. Go get some sleep. You guys were really bitchin’.”

  The Kool-Tones stood there uncertainly for a minute.

  “He was, like, smiling, you know?” said Zoot.

  “He was always smiling,” said Vinnie. “Crazy little kid.”

  The Kool-Tones left.

  The sky overhead was black and spattered with stars. It looked to Vinnie as if it were deep and wide enough to hold anything. He shuddered.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Somebody bring me a beer!”

  He caught himself humming. One of the Hellbenders brought him a beer.

  AFTERWORD

  As I said in an interview in Postscripts, I usually give stories titles late in the process, even if I knew what the title would be before I started. I usually give them just a reference thing—“the alternate Africa story”—“the Little Moron story”—“the dodo story,” etc.

  For a year before I wrote it, this was “the piss-drinking story” or “the doowop story.”

  This came to me on a sudden, as we used to say.

  See, I remember the NY Blackout (actually 11 states and 3 Canadian provinces) of 1965, and so should you. I mean, it went totally dark, all power out, on the whole grid.

  Doing research, I read the official Commission Report (3 Volumes): they tell you everything, second by second: when what city’s power went out; when they shunted power to another grid (and those were the days when guys or girls had to actually pull a lever to do that, vacuum-tube technology days; no trusting some solid-state circuit’s word for it like today.) The report had it down second-by-second; when we lost Brooklyn, when Buffalo shut down; when the Canadians started feeling the pain.

  And on and on. The report tells you EVERYTHING. Except one thing: what caused it.

  That’s easy, I said. It was flying saucers and a doo-wop contest. My theory is as good as anybody else’s, including Consolidated Edison’s.

  What people don’t know is this was written as early as it was; thereby hangs some twisto publishing history.

  I’d thought about this one for a long time, but the actual writing took from October 2-16th, 1980, a little more than a year after “The Ugly Chickens.”

  I had to read it at Armadillocon 2. That was the Rock ’n’ Roll Arma-dillocon. Lew Shiner had just written and read “Stompin’ at the Savoy” his r’n’r story. Gardner Dozois, the Guest of Honor, had just written (with Jack Dann and Michael Swanwick) his Rock ’n’ Roll story “Touring” which starts with Buddy Holly landing at the Fargo Airport on February 3, 1959 . . . I went home Saturday night and finished “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll”, writing away, listening to doo-wop mix tapes as I wrote.

  I went back to Armadillocon and read it at 4 p.m. as the closing reading, starting a 24-year-tradition.

  A day or two later I typed it up and sent it off to New Dimensions. New Dimensions was an original anthology series edited by Robert Silverberg. Only Bob was leaving as editor: #10 was edited as by Robert Silverberg and Marta Randall, #11 as by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg (oh! see! Bob is slipping over the back of the dust jacket!) and #12 would be edited by Marta alone.

  Well of course she bought “FSRnR” as we call it. And a lot of other great stuff including Connie Willis’ “All My Darling Daughters” and Edward Bryant’s “Dancing Chickens” (and if you’ve never seen Ed Bryant put his hand up the butt of a supermarket chicken and make it dance across a kitchen countertop, you haven’t really lived.)

  Anyway, plans go on. I’m going to be in a swell anthology, along with other great stories. We get paid by Pocket Books, Pocket sends out review proofs, Nebula recommendations start coming in from writers who are also reviewers, based on the proofs.

  Then Pocket cancels the New Dimensions contract and wants its money back.

  Supposedly it’s because sales on the last one were so bad. If you’re going to do that, you do it before you send out review proofs on the next one.

  I smell tuna.

  I think they took one look at the contents: me, Connie’s great incest story, Ed’s story of aliens using us as “dancing chickens,” etc., etc. And, if YOU cancel the contract, you don’t ask for your money back; in fact it’s not your money anymore.

  All of us are in limbo for more than a year (this was only one of the many idiocies the early 1980s management of Pocket Books committed)—I think they straightened out their meds and have been lots better since then—including a plan at the time to make the Scott Meredith Literary Agency be the SF editor of Pocket Books (think about that awhile.)

  Everybody exploded about that—SFWA, the Society of Author’s Representatives—even the average NYC doofus-on-the-street heard about that. Cooler heads finally prevailed—even the late Scott Meredith himself finally realized it was a bad idea.

  On our front, after about a year, Pocket Books decided, well, yeah, uh, the series is cancelled by us and uh we guess you can keep the money. (“Oh thank you, Thank You, Kind Sirs,” I cried “and God Bless Us, Each and Every One!”)

  About 15 seconds later, I got a letter from Ellen Datlow in her new (and for the next 16 years) guise as the Fiction Editor at Omni Magazine.

  Now that it was loose, could she look at the story and maybe buy it for about ten times the money I’d gotten from Pocket?

  Well, uh, sure, Ms. Datlow (I’d already sold one story—mano a mano- “Ike at the Mike” to her as editor.)

  She took it and it finally appeared in print in 1985, and was one of two of my stories up against each other for the Nebula in 1986, and was in Bests of the Year and so forth.

  It has had a long and busy afterlife (“legs”, we call it in the pub. biz.)

  The last and most recent chapter in its history is not so nice.

  For years George and Jan O’Nale of podunk Virginia ran Cheap St. Press, a limited edition publisher of exquisite for-big-money books (they’d earlier done my Thomas Wolfe novella You Could Go Home Again, about his zeppelin trip home from the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, in an edition with a box so neat that when you let go of the boxlid, the air damped its own fall and it closed with a touch like God caressing a putti’s butt. Anyway, they did editions of like 143 or something, and had a subscription list with a two-year wait.)

  Cheap St. had gone through some convolutions since the Wolfe novella (1991) they used handmade paper and their papermaker retired; their binder died and they had to audition for a new one, and it had been a couple of years since they’d printed anything but their holiday pamphlets.

  They wanted to do the “National Treasure Edition” of “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll”. In the biggest edition they’d ever done, like maybe 250 of them . . .

  (The quick story behind that phrase; Lizzie Lynn, reviewing H
oward Who? in Locus in 1986 called me “a National Treasure”. I’d gone into the local comic book shop a couple of days later, and someone said “Oh—Look!—there goes a national treasure.” I turned to him and said “That’s Mister National Treasure to you, Bub.” The story got around.)

  Anyway, I’m in Oso, I get the beautiful copies of the book, and we’re corresponding back and forth. I know they have plans to close down the press after twenty years and I’m sad about that. George O’Nale also knows my penchant for claiming to kill editors, magazines, presses. And he writes: “Just so you can’t claim to be the last thing we published, I want everybody to know I did a small booklet of Forest Service jokes, and sent them to local people and the Forest Service.” (The O’Nales had just gone through 6 years of fights with the local power company that wanted to put some 750 kv lines through their yard, and the Forest Service had been no help at all, even though the line was to go through 7 or 8 miles of F.S. land, too. (The O’Nales are the kinds of people who win those fights, and the line was rerouted—but not the F.S. part.)

  I thought that was neat. It was such the usual letter from George O’Nale—there were cartoons, a couple of internet downloads, jokes etc.—that I answered him immediately.

  What I didn’t know was that he had written lots of letters that day to his usual correspondents, much like mine, and one to the county sheriff telling him where to find his and Jan’s bodies.

  A couple of nights after I mailed my letter, there was a phone call for me over at the Oso General Store . . .