Waiting for the Galactic Bus

Waiting for

the Galactic Bus

Parke Godwin

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

ISBN 0-385-24635-8

LCCN: 87-33069

 

Copyright © 1988 by Parke Godwin

All rights reserved

 

These 
ePub, Mobi 
and LIT 
editions v1.0 by Dead^Man November 2011

dmebooks at live dot ca

 

Jacket illustration © 1988 Chris Hopkins

Jacket design by Jamie S. Warren

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

First Edition

 

To Marvin Kaye,

for more Incredible Umbrellas

 

 

Charity, by way of prologue

 

I
 

Sort of Genesis

1
 

This was a real nice clam bake...

2
 

Killing time: genius ad lib

3
 

The serpent’s gift

4
 

Topside/Below Stairs

5
 

Management problems among the mad

6
 

Slouching toward Plattsville

7
 

A conspiracy of princes

8
 

The hero is the one who just wants to finish his drink and go home

9
 

H hour minus one

10
 

The woman taken in adultery, and other set pieces

 

II
 

The Eduction of Charity Mae Stovall

11
 

One man’s media...

12
 

Prometheus in Dolby

13
 

Yonder lies the castle of my father

14
 

Enter Nemesis, pursuing

15
 

Aryans in the fast lane

16
 

Problems of the whore/madonna syndrome (Aryans at the half-mast)

17
 

Faith, hope and Charity Stovall

18
 

This can’t be hell, the plumbing works

19
 

Money can’t buy happiness, but why not be miserable in comfort?

20
 

The late, late show

21
 

Doing the Reichstag rag

22
 

The rewards of faith and their avoidance

23
 

The clear vistas of paranoia

24
 

Romanticism as theology: Is there hope for the spiritual drunk
?

25
 

Meanwhile, back at reality...

26
 

A rescue! A rescue!

 

III
 

Banalities

27
 

Judas with strings

28
 

Everyone comes to the Banal

29
 

The treadmills of your mind

30
 

Barion explains; it doesn’t help

31
 

Roy Stride and the First Amendment

32
 

Blossoms and thorns of the media culture

33
 

All this significance – what does it mean?

34
 

The catsup factor

35
 

The higher education of Roy Stride

36
 

Perks for the upwardly mobile

37
 

Doom at the top

38
 

The new, the terrible and the maybes

39
 

Back to the drawing board...

 

About the Author

 

Charity, by way of prologue

Charity Mae Stovall spent her childhood in a county orphanage. Yearning for a mother or any kind of palpable parent, she sublimated in adolescence to a rigid Christianity. Charity was — and still is — a highly intelligent young woman, although for her first twenty years she never thought herself acute in this regard, nor was the quality noted by the school system that passed her through its portals and curricula without a second glance. Since she didn’t read much and no one ever required her to think, Charity’s potential remained a string unsounded in the decaying factory town of Plattsville.

She was very active in the house of her chosen faith, the Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior, where she accompanied congregational hymns on the hammer-worn piano, was wooed by an aggressive young man named Roy Stride and, to a more retiring extent, by Roy’s self-effacing friend, Woody Barnes. Woody furnished trumpet obbligato for these musical effusions. He played well, Charity with more precision than talent. She was a Fundamentalist and earnest about it, distributing leaflets for the removal from libraries of harmful books like
The Wizard of Oz
and
The Diary of Anne Frank
. On a personal basis, Oz didn’t do much for Charity one way or the other, though she did wonder why the Tabernacle was against
Anne Frank
. Outside of her being a Jew, the day-to-day life and thoughts of Anne were pretty much like her own at thirteen. Nevertheless, Reverend Simco thundered against it as an alien blot on a Christian land already imperiled. Dutifully, Charity demonstrated against an abortion clinic, opposed the teaching of evolution as a dastardly onslaught of secular intellect upon defenseless children and believed herself a direct descendant of Adam.

Not entirely without justification.

Barion found her earliest direct ancestor by a Pliocene water hole, a creature with no likeness to Adam other than health, appetite and uncertainty. Unlike Adam, the ape was quite savage. Anything outside its immediate family group was a dangerous enemy. The crucial difference in this primate, for Barion’s purposes, was a brain verging on but not quite ready to be called a mind. In this regard, the creature had much in common with its descendant, Charity Mae Stovall.

 

   I  

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