Acres of Perhaps Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACRES OF PERHAPS | Stories and Episodes | Will Ludwigsen

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acres of Perhaps

  S1E2: "Ourselves and Immortality"

  The Zodiac Walks On The Moon

  S1E5: "Singing Each to Each"

  The Leaning Lincoln

  S1E10: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?"

  Night Fever

  S2E2: "Dark Horse Candidate"

  Poe at Gettysburg

  S2E8: "Unable Are the Loved to Die"

  Story Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ACRES OF PERHAPS

  Stories and Episodes

  Will Ludwigsen

  ACRES OF PERHAPS: Stories and Episodes

  Copyright © 2017 Will Ludwigsen. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2018 by Lethe Press, Inc. at Smashwords.com

  www.lethepressbooks.com | [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-159021-365-0

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Credits for original publication appear in the Story Notes.

  Cover design: Will Ludwigsen

  Cover image: David Lally

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Ludwigsen, Will, author.

  Title: Acres of perhaps : stories and episodes / by Will Ludwigsen.

  Description: Amherst, MA : Lethe Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical

  references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017051093 | ISBN 9781590213650 (softcover : acid-free

  paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3612.U35 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051093

  For my mother, Dianne Hall, who always told strangers three things: we’re geniuses, we’re from New York, and her son is an author. I’m not sure about the first, but she’s the reason I’m the second and third. She taught me by example how to live in the world of dreams even when terrible people keep trying to pull you out.

  ACRES OF PERHAPS

  If you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of schedule in the early 60s, you probably saw a show that some friends of mine and I worked on called Acres of Perhaps. By “certain kind of person,” I mean insomniac or alcoholic; by “certain kind of schedule,” I mean awake at 11:30 at night with only your flickering gray-eyed television for company.

  With any luck, it left you feeling that however weird your life was, it could always be weirder. Or at least more ironic. We would have settled for that in those earnest days.

  They have conventions about our show where I bloviate on stage about what the aliens represented or how hard it was to work with Claude Akins or what we used to build the Martian spaceships. Graduate students write papers with titles like “Riding the Late Night Fantastic: Acres of Perhaps and the Post-War American Para-Consciousness.” I’m now an ambassador for the show and for my friends, and I’m the worst possible choice.

  I wasn’t the one with the drive to create big things like our producer Hugh Kline, and I damned well wasn’t the one with the vision and the awe like David Findley. I was just Barry Weyrich, the guy who wrote about spacemen in glass bubble helmets, who put commas in everyone’s scripts, who never had writer’s block, who grimaced when they talked about “magic.”

  And if there’s anyone to blame for the shriveling death of that show’s magic, it’s me.

  Jesus, I don’t write anything for years and when Tony dies, bam, I’m sitting at his old computer typing about David Findley. David Fucking Findley, who wasn’t even really David Fucking Findley.

  Not that we felt magical making Acres of Perhaps. The question for every episode wasn’t whether it was good but whether it was Monday: that’s when we had to have the cans shipped off to the network for broadcast. The money men at the studio had no idea whether what we did was good or not, but they gave Hugh a lot of freedom because they sure didn’t want to run anything valuable at 11:30 at night. As long as medicated powders and furniture polish kept flying off the shelves, we could have shown a half hour of fireflies knocking around in a jar for all they cared.

  We came close.

  You might remember “Woodsy,” an episode David not only wrote but shot himself. That’s the one where the camera stays fixed on a dark patch of woods at night for the whole half hour, and after five minutes you see tiny faces watching you through the leaves grinning madly, first a couple and then many more. About ten minutes before the end, a half dozen of these little goblin people drag a man’s body across the camera’s field of vision, tugging it in bursts until the shoes disappear on the left side. Then something pushes the camera over. Roll credits.

  Hugh almost burst a blood vessel in his neck when David came back with that one, but he’d borrowed the camera all weekend and there wasn’t much else to do but send off the episode and see what happened. A whole big nothing, that’s what: people watched it, wondered what the fuck was going on, and then went to bed. We got letters about it, but no more than we did for the episode about the Hitler robot.

  David pulled shit like that all the time. He was the tortured genius, treated with delicacy, and he pissed me off. I was young and insecure with a cottage in Venice to pay for, and here was this guy living like Poe in a boardinghouse, writing unfilmable stories about finding dead satyrs in a Manhattan street. David never seemed to understand there was a time when the words had to hit the page and go out to a real world of people who just wanted to be entertained.

  Remember the one with two Jewish teenagers learning to fly as they plunged from the Stairs of Death holding hands at Mauthausen? That was David’s. There was one told from the point of view of an atomic bomb as it dropped, admiring landmarks and slowly revealing its target is Washington; that got us a visit from the FBI. We lost General Foods over the one where Abe Lincoln turns out to be the second coming of Jesus, but at least I talked them out of spreading his arms on the stage of Ford’s Theater at the end.

  Hugh was the big picture guy—the big exploding “gee-whiz” picture guy. He liked to hold up his hands, framing the world with his fingers and imagining it better. To him, the three-act structure of our stories was, “What the fuck? Holy shit! Oh, my God.” Why anyone trusted him with money, I have no idea, but he was no help with David.

  That made me the bad guy. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have an imagination, either: I’d written for the pulps since the forties and knew my way around a graveyard or a ray gun. But I sure as hell wasn’t writing scripts about two Scotsmen pulling in Nessie’s corpse with hooks so the tourists would never know she was dead. It fell to me to point out what was too expensive to film (walking skyscrapers in a city of the future) or too skull-cracked crazy (octopus women driving walking skyscrapers in a city of the future). I had to make the characters sound like real people, too, not all breathlessly eloquent.

  Hugh appreciated that, I guess, the balance between us. Maybe David did, too. Thinking back on it, I was the only one with the problem.

  David was so much younger than I was, very young, and he carried around an old-fashioned carpet bag with clothes and a portable typewriter, ready to sleep or write anywhere. I had no idea where he got the little money he had—God knows it wasn’t rolling in from Hugh—but he spent it cracking up a car at least once a year and buying girls drinks at the Br
own Derby. Hugh and I once had to bail him out of jail because he woke up inside an empty water tower.

  He was six years too early for the world, born for bell bottoms and LSD. I was six years too late with my crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses. It’s taken me a half century to admit this, but yeah, he was everything I didn’t know I wanted to be. We were friends the way television writers are, smiling like sharks at each other across a dinner table.

  I’m grateful to Hugh and David for at least one thing, sharks though they were: never seeming to care Tony and I were together. That meant a lot in the days when it was dangerous for two men to get a hotel room, when a neighbor peeved about too much noise could call the cops to report something worse.

  Yes, they sometimes cracked jokes about where one applied to be a “confirmed bachelor,” but they liked Tony. They liked the sandwiches he’d make on poker nights, not little triangles with the crusts cut off but giant heroes.

  They didn’t like that he was unbeatable at cards.

  “Please,” Hugh said once, “make an expression of any kind. Look down at your cards and then up at us.”

  Tony shook his head and then drew his hand down in front of his face like a curtain.

  “Buddy,”—that was what Tony said in public instead of ‘honey’— “With guys like us, it’s all poker face.”

  We were mid-way through filming episodes for the second season when the Mullard family came looking for David at the studio. He didn’t often show up even when the story was his, but when it wasn’t, he was usually sleeping off a drunk or reading about ancient Egyptians in the library or doing some other goddamned thing.

  We were working on the episode “The Dreams Come By Here Regular.” I’m sure you remember it; it starred that child actress, what’s-her-name, and she gets lost in the woods to be rescued by the ghosts of escaped slaves. It was all moralistic Hugh, right down to the fading strains of spirituals at the end—pretty gutsy for 1962, though, when people were getting their skulls cracked open for thinking those things in the South.

  The stage was all set up as a forest at night where the action took place, and our guys were good at building forests. The trunks were huge and roughly coated, and the branches drooped with nets of fake Spanish moss. Hugh and I were looking over the script when a beam of glaring California light crawled our way across the stage.

  “Close the goddamned door!” the cameraman shouted.

  Figure after figure stepped in through the light, and they wove their way through our trees like pygmies coming for us in the jungle. If we’d turned the cameras on, we could have gotten an eerie scene, and I’m sure Hugh regretted it later.

  A stern matron in a graying beehive came out first, clutching a patent-leather pocketbook with both hands. She examined our faces in the dim illumination behind the equipment, squinting at us each in turn.

  “What can we do for you?” Hugh asked.

  She didn’t answer, only squaring off with him as though ready for an honest-to-God fistfight. A fistfight, by the way, that you could see she had no plans to lose.

  Before it came to that, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen came out from the fake woods behind her. She was a strawberry blonde, and she had all the grace and delicacy the old lady didn’t—that most ladies didn’t. Her calm eyes and strong brows, though, gave the impression that she’d learned the lady-like art of making things happen with leverage from the sides of life.

  But that’s David talk.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” the woman said, surprisingly at us. “We’re looking for Leroy Dutton.”

  Hugh glanced around. “Any of you call yourself Leroy?”

  The grips, the cable jockeys, the flannel-shirted union men who seemed to be paid to drink our coffee all froze, perhaps contemplating if it would be worth pretending to be Leroy for that pretty girl...and that awful woman. Nobody spoke up.

  By then, the rest of the clan had come through—a father in a loose too-short tie, a couple of strapping brothers in coveralls, and a kid sister with cat-eye glasses. They could have been the cast of a variety show a few stages over, something wholesome sponsored by a bread company with square dancing. All they needed were straw hats.

  “No Leroy here, I’m afraid,” Hugh said.

  The older lady snapped open her pocketbook and handed him a photograph. “He might not be calling himself Leroy anymore.”

  I looked over Hugh’s shoulder. It was a wedding portrait, and the beauty on our stage was the bride, gazing up at her groom and holding a bouquet of wildflowers between them. The groom, of course, was David.

  “This was taken three years ago,” she said. “Before Leroy up and left our Melody. Not much before, let me tell you. Weeks. Right after he came back from the woods.”

  “He’s a writer,” Melody explained, as though we wouldn’t know.

  “He calls himself a writer,” the old lady corrected. “He’s a husband and a son-in-law and an employee of the J.W. Mullard Feed Company is what he is.”

  A husband and a son and an employee—none were things I’d ever have linked to David Findley. I mean, everyone working on that show was unemployable. We’d been too blind or flatfooted or gay to go to Korea. Some of us had dabbled in college, but those days were cut short by a few bad creative writing classes and a lack of money. We worked as clerks, as janitors, as too-old newspaper boys. And we worked on our writing, of course, holding the few checks that came in just long enough to clear before taking everyone else out for booze. We had mortgages; David had a trunk full of paperbacks. He could jump into a borrowed convertible with a cocktail waitress and go racing in the desert at three in the morning.

  Though apparently he couldn’t after all.

  Hugh was smooth. “Doesn’t look familiar to me, and I know almost every writer in this town. What about you, Barry?”

  I swallowed hard and looked at the picture. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

  The old lady wasn’t buying it, and I’m not sure Melody was either.

  “Oh,” Melody said, curling one side of her lips in thought. “Is there another show like this one? With little spacemen and ghosts and things?”

  Hugh put his hands on his hips. “Is there another show like this one? Ma’am, this is the most inventive television program in the history of the medium. Is there—”

  I cut him off before he dug any deeper. “What he means to say is that there are shows passingly similar to this one, and your husband could work for any of those. General Mills Playhouse, The Witching Hour, Dr. Hyde’s Nightly Ride...maybe they’re worth a try.”

  “They’re not as good as we are,” Hugh couldn’t resist saying.

  Melody considered this. “Well, he’d only work for the best. If he hasn’t come here yet, he will. Can you tell him I’m looking for him?”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  “And that I love him?”

  “Of course.”

  “And that I’ll always know who he really is?”

  Hugh thought a second before saying, “Okay.”

  The old lady pointed at Hugh. “You’d better be careful when you see him. He can take on any form.”

  “Believe me, lady, I know the type,” Hugh said.

  The family turned and headed back for the door one by one. The littlest Mullard sibling, the girl with the glasses, waited until last and handed us each something out of the pocket of her sweater: crosses fashioned from Popsicle sticks.

  “In case he comes at night,” she said. Then she followed her family out through our woods and into the sunshine.

  Hugh shook his head and tossed his Popsicle cross to a grip. “Can we get some footage shot today?” he barked.

  Tony, by the way, was not religious, which is one of about ten thousand things I liked about him. It would have been hard to be in those years, living like we were. The only place to feel and think differently than everyone else was on silly spaceman shows like Acres of Perhaps...shows you watched with thousands of other people alone in
the dark.

  We found David where we usually did when he wasn’t at the studio: hunched in a booth at the Derby typing away on the portable with a glass of something clear and poisonous by his side. Hugh slid onto one seat and I slid onto the other right next to David.

  “So, Leroy, tell us about Melody,” I said.

  He paused with his fingers above the keys but then plunged them down again almost in a chord to finish the sentence. He batted the carriage lever and sent it clunking to the far side.

  “Melody,” he said, “is the most beautiful and brilliant woman in the world, and I don’t want to even think about your eyes on her.”

  “Well, everybody at the studio had eyes on her today,” I said. “She came looking for you.”

  “Brought her whole clan,” Hugh added.

  “Probably spelled with a K,” I said.

  David tapped a Chesterfield from a pack and lit it. There was a shimmy in his hands. “That so?” he said.

  “That’s so,” I said. I gave him time to take a drag and let out a whisper of smoke, maybe think of something to say next. When he said nothing, I did instead.

  “So tell us how your marriage in a hick town crushed your artistic sensibilities until you had to break free, please. I’d like to hear it for the hundredth time, and I’ll bet your version is the best.”

  “I didn’t want to leave her. I had to.”

  I leaned back from the table. “You had to.”

  He waved his cigarette near his face. “Look, I didn’t want to end up here, for Christ’s sake. I’m from Jenkins Notch, North Carolina, and I spent my first twenty years thinking I’d be right happy working in a farmer’s store until I could afford a place of my own. I’m a hick, whatever you assholes think, and I’m not here because I want to be famous or rich. Shit, look at you guys.”

  The waitress was sliding a gin and tonic over to Hugh, who came here so often he didn’t have to order it.