Matthew’s face pulled down into a dour expression, an exact duplicate of his mother, an unhappy woman who always wore green polyester pants and print shirts from the early seventies.  She gave birth to all eight of her children naturally in the back bedroom of her sister’s house.  I think the father cut the umbilical cord with his teeth.  It went a long way towards explaining her inability to smile.

“How much you think you need to make the movie?”

“Once I get the camcorder, probably about fifty bucks.”

Matthew whistled.  “What’s it about?”

I took a deep breath and got to it.  “It’s about a young man, a kid, you know, named Billy Starkiller.  He’s really good with a laser gun and light sword, but no one gave him much of a chance.  And there were these bad guys called Star Slavers who rule the universe with an iron fist.  They just treat people all around poorly.  Billy Starkiller has a really cool supercycle and he and his friends get together to overthrow the Star Slavers led by the android, Mammon Destroyer.”

I could see the synapses firing and the connections being made in that Lutheran-scrubbed piece of cheese cloth he called a brain.  It had only been a year since Return of the Jedi hit theaters.  We talked Star Wars canon incessantly.  Would he make the connection?

“There’s also an alien with eyeballs on his tentacles.  So he can look around corners,” I added.

Matthew said “can I be Billy Starkiller?”

“Hell no.  I’m Billy Starkiller.  Why you think I named him Billy?”

“But you said you were directing.”

“I am.  And producing too.  I’m what they call an author.  I do it all.”

“Then what do I get to do?”

“Every thing else.  And there’s a role for the cocky smuggler named Bocephus Rex who helps Billy Starkiller defeat the Star Slavers.”

“Neat.”

“Bocephus Rex is a laid back dude.  You might have to unbutton your top three buttons so the camera can see your chin.”

“I might can do that.”

From across the alley and the three houses down came the silly sound of a slide whistle being blown.  It was the sort of noise you’d expect a ringmaster to make when calling the clowns to order.  Matthew’s eyes popped wide and without so much as a goodbye, he sprinted for the back gate.  Somewhere down the alley I heard him holler “I’m coming, mama!”

Shit.  That slide whistle was going to pose a problem once filming began.

I knew Matthew would be unavailable for the rest of the day.  His mama liked having him inside and snuggled against her bosom at least three hours before the street lights came on.  I could scout locations.  The playground equipment at Hermit’s Park would make an excellent alien city with the right amount of aluminum foil. 

But I didn’t feel like walking the five blocks to the park and my old Huffy bicycle was all but useless.  The brakes were no longer capable of halting forward momentum which didn’t matter since the chain was rusted tight.  Mom warned me not to leave it out in the rain, but the rain always took me by surprise.  It’s not like I watched weather reports.  I did keep track of the sports.  My beloved Cubbies through some magical alignment of the stars managed to field an excellent team.  I knew they were going to break the curse and win it all this year.  Next year at the latest.

Mom was watching an old Vincent Price movie on the box.  V.P. was the last man on earth, which meant it was going to be a boring hour and a half.  I knocked together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and slipped into my room.

The Starkiller script didn’t actually exist in written form yet.  It was more of a highly detailed outline in my mind.  I sat on the bed, brought out a notebook from my ratty school bag and wrote STARKILLER in big block letters on the front page.

Plans for a beginning immediately eluded me.  I knew I wanted to utilize the starport, but how?  Rather than waste any more time agonizing over the blank page, I socked the notebook away and peeled out a few sheets of drawing paper and my colored pencils.

I understood the importance of having clearly designed characters, maybe even some story boards before tackling the written aspects of film making.  It was how I heard George Lucas went about things.

I wrote Mammon Destroyer at the top of the sheet and sketched for ten minutes.  The result looked like a capeless Darth Vader.  Even with the blue and red color scheme, there was no escaping the resemblance.  And it really needed the cape.  Nothing said EVIL quite like a totally superfluous article of clothing.  Presidents should have to wear big flowing capes.  I added the cape and a gigantic, curving proboscis to its face plate giving Mammon Destroyer the sense that Darth Vader and Gonzo from the Muppets got together and had a love child for the sake of my movie.

“Good-Looker” as I called the alien sidekick of Bocephus Rex was much easier to draw.  It was just an octopus on legs with eyeballs everywhere.  Creating the beast for film would have been a difficult endeavor for less imaginative special effects artists, but I know with enough green felt, gift wrapping paper tubes and a bunch of superballs painted with the last of my flat white Testor’s model paint, I’d have Good-Looker looking good.  On the downside, I’d have to ratchet up the all ready escalating budget another ten bucks.

I’d have to get a paper route.  There was no other way.

Dad came home in an ill mood.  Still wearing his navy blue monkeysuit with his name printed over his left shirt pocket.  He sat at the kitchen table staring at his hands.  After a mostly silent meatloaf dinner, he asked if I wanted to play catch. 

I put on my Cubbies shirt with the red 23 emblazoned on the back.  Dad bought the shirt for three bucks off a street vendor near the Hohman train tracks.  He must’ve believed the shirt imbued me with Ryne Sandberg-like baseball prowess because he acted surprised every time I booted a ground ball or threw the ball three feet over his head.

In the sliver of side yard, not thirty five feet from each other, my first throw cleared his mitt by five feet.  The ball bounded down the driveway, across the street and into Vermette’s front yard.

Dad didn’t look at me.  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.  “Go get it, Rhino.”

Jogging across the street, my thoughts turned to Billy Starkiller’s supercycle.  My Huffy wouldn’t cut it.  Even with brakes and a new chain the bike still looked like something Voltron pooped out.  Matthew had a Schwinn his Daddy use to ride when he was in short pants.  I doubted Matthew would let me ride it when he all ready had to share it begrudgingly with seven siblings.  I needed a new bike, something stellar that would do Billy Starkiller proud in his fight against the Star Slavers.  With my birthday less than a month away, I had to drop hints fast.

I took my time returning with the ball.  Handing it to Dad, I said “sorry it took so long.  If I had a new bike, I’d’ve been there and back in seconds.”

“If you’d’ve thrown the ball straight, you wouldn’t have had to go nowhere.”

The litigious world of attorneys suffered a great loss when Dad opted to become a janitor.

My next throw went wide by a couple feet.  The ball bounced around the swing set and mercifully stayed in the yard.  With some side-stepping action, Dad could’ve caught it.

“What the hell you throwing at?”

“You coulda caught that.”

“You getting smart with me?”

“No.”

“I’m not a fuckin’ goalie, got that?  Throw me the ball.  I’m too goddam old to be running all over the place.”

Now it was my fault he waited until he was almost forty to have kids.  I fetched the ball from beneath the slide which would have made an excellent spaceship escape shaft with a layer of aluminum foil.

I tossed the ball to Dad and ran back to my place.  He hurled the ball directly at my forehead with far more force than I felt the game of catch warranted.  Fortunately, I blocked it with my glove.

“That’s how you throw the ball,” Dad crowed.

Temper flaring, I wound back and threw the ball as hard as I could.  The ball sailed five feet over his head.  It bounded down the driveway, across the street and into Vermette’s front yard.

When I returned with the ball, he was all ready inside, likely lying down for a few hours before going to his second job, janitoring at the Hammond Medical Center.

I waited until I was relatively sure he’d be asleep and told Mom I thought he was back to drinking again.

She denied it.  “He wouldn’t get so mad if you’d just throw the ball to him.”

“I did!  He just let it go by!  His hand/eye coordination is affected by the booze.”

Mom gave me her shut-the-hell-up look, and that was that. An hour later, I went outside, telling Mom I had to bring my piece of crap bike in cause it looked like rain and I didn’t want the handlebars to rust off.  There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, just the usual hazy funk from the nearby refinery.  I bee-lined for my father’s rattletrap Ford station wagon and looked under the driver’s seat.  I immediately found what I was looking for.  I placed the empty pint of Smirnoff vodka on the steering wheel and ran back inside.

Dad may have had me pegged for a loser, but he wasn’t fooling me, either.  When he left for work, I watched him from the front room window.   He never checked up.  He eased himself behind the wheel, pushed the bottle away, started the ignition and drove away.  I felt sick to my stomach for a little while.  Mom asked what was wrong and I told her the meatloaf might’ve poisoned me some.

“You always gotta be a smartass.”

A few days passed before Matthew came back around.  Evidently he had some sort of Lutheran gathering to attend.  Being Catholic, I felt obliged to despise his crazy ass beliefs just as he resented me for what he saw as the satanic worship of saints and the sinful idolatry of the Pope.  But what it really came down to is that I moved through life with few restrictions whereas he wasn’t even allowed to play with any toys that hinted at witchcraft (which surprisingly turns out to be almost all of them) or watch any television programs featuring women in bikinis (which surprisingly turns out to be almost all of them).  Sentient robots straddled the line between good and evil.  Star Wars androids were tolerated while Transformer robots were deemed heretical.

“You got the camcorder yet?” He asked.

“Not yet.  I’m working on it, though.  I did thieve a whole roll of aluminum foil.  I got it stashed in the basement.”

“Oh.”  That dour expression again.

I had to repress the urge to jumpkick his face.  “We can choreograph the light sword fighting,” I said.  “That way I can visualize it better when I’m writing the scene.”

“Cool.  I get a light sword?”

“No.”

“Awwww.  Darn.”

“Bocephus Rex is more of a blaster sort of guy.  But, you know, Mammon Destroyer is a robot.  You could wear a mask and play that role, too.  There’s the climatic light sword battle at the end.”

“I don’t know what Ma and Pa would say about the whole robot thing.”

“Android.  Mammon Destroyer is like a cyborg.  But you only see the mechanical side of him.  He’s...still got his soul.”

“I guess that’s okay.”

His dour expression took another turn for the pouty when I introduced him to the light swords.

“Wiffle ball bats?”

“Yeah, wiffle ball bats.  What the hell were you expecting?”

“Don’t cuss me, please.  Mama says I don’t have to put up with that kind of language.”

I breathed out my nose long and hard, the way my dad did when he caught me out doing something stupid.

“Look,” I said.  “We got a tight budget.  The spray paint to color these is gonna set me back another five bucks.  So for the sake of the movie, just pretend these are purple and neon orange light swords, okay?”

He shrugged in a way that pissed me off.  Rather than give in to the dark side and strangle him, I waited until he brought his wiffle ball bat into a guard position and I busted his knuckles with the hard plastic at the end of the bat.

Matthew dropped his bat and raised his crooked hand in the air as if he were giving God a better look at it.  “Ow, ow, ow, ow oh ow oh.  Why?  Why?”

“You were suppose to block that,” I said.

“Oh, ow.  It hurts.”

“Quit being a baby and let me see it.”

He held his shaking hand out.  His first two knuckles were all ready purpling.

“It’s fine.  Pick up your light sword.  This time around we’ll take it slow.”

Even in super slow motion Matthew cringed every time the bat came near him.

“Quit ducking,” I hollered.  “You’re gonna mess up the movie.”

“We’re not even filming.”

“But you should always treat it like we are.  Now quit being a sissy.”

“I don’t want to be Darth Vader.”

“Mammon Destroyer!  He’s got nothing to do with Darth Vader.  Mammon

Destroyer’s got a long, curving, sharp nose that cuts off limbs that get too close to its face.  Let’s see Darth Vader do that.”

“I don’t want any part of your movie.”

“Oh yeah?”

I viciously swung the bat upward, knocking his back against his forehead.  I executed a 360 degree spin that would have made Mark Hamill proud and clocked Matthew right in the nuts.

His dumb brown eyes bulged.  He doubled over gripping his jewels.  “Ow.  Ow.  Oh.... oh.  You.... Oh... You...” Spittle shot from his mouth.

This is gonna end badly for me, I thought.

“Sorry about that, Matthew.  Total accident.”

“Oh...Ow.  You...no good... cat-licker.”

“Hey, there’s no reason for name-calling, buddy.”

Hands girding his testicles, he managed a loping run for the back gate.  It occurred to me, maybe I should chase him down and pin him to the ground until the pain subsided and he regained his senses.

Perhaps guessing the direction of my thoughts, he began calling for his mama at the gate and continued the mantra all the way home.  

“Hell with it,” I mumbled.  Let him tell his moose-faced mama.  They didn’t even have a phone to call my folks.  It was unlikely she’d leave eight mewling kids hanging off her apron strings to tell my mother how I mishandled her precious Lutheran boy.

I figured wrong.  I hid in my room while Mrs. Loxas recounted how I waylaid her punk ass kid with a baseball bat.  She made it sound as though Matthew were walking along the sidewalk, minding his own business, when I jumped out of the bushes and clobbered him for the sheer Catholic wickedness of it.

The whole time I wondered what she would do if someone blew a slide whistle.  Would she take off running home?

Once Mrs. Loxas left, Mom called me out of my room.

“Billy, did you whip the tar out of Matthew with a baseball bat?”

“No.”

“So Mrs. Loxas is lying?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It was a plastic wiffle ball bat.  We were playing a game.”

“A game where you hit him in the nuts and the head and the hand?”

“Not in that order, no.”

That was enough for Mom.  I heard her laughing after I walked back into my room.

Dad didn’t think Matthew getting racked in the balls was too funny.  After work, he came into my room, looking around as though he were entering it for the first time.  It wasn’t an impressive sight.  A room maybe seven paces wall to wall, just large enough for a cot, a pressed wood bureau and a nineteen inch television holding down a couple milk crates stuffed with Star Wars toys.  There was a Return of the Jedi poster on one wall opposite a 1983 Chicago Cubs team photo compliments of Delco cleaning supplies.

Dad sat on the cot beside me, his two hundred, fifty pounds straining the springs.  He seemed resigned to giving me an ass-beating just as I was resigned to receiving one.

“You know, hitting that goofy kid in the balls, you coulda done some serious damage to him.  You know that?”

“It was an accident.”

“If you swing a bat like you throw, I can see that.  What were you aiming at?  His head?”

“I was aiming at nothing.”

My father sighed deeply and it was a sad thing to hear.

“Son, you don’t need to be hanging out with that boy.”

“Who can I hang out with?  You won’t let me hang out with Nervous Harold.”

“I told you he’s too old and he’s screwed up in the head.  And that Lutheran boy...”

“I didn’t mean to hit him.  We were sword-fighting with bats.  He just wasn’t no good at blocking.”

“Sword-fighting, huh?  You’re almost twelve years old.”

“I know.”

We sat in silence for a little while.  All I could think about was the empty vodka pint propped on the steering wheel.

“I don’t want you to be expecting too much.  For your birthday.  Money’s tight.  We’ll get you what we can, though.”

“I need a new bike, Dad.”

“What’s wrong with the old one?  You been leaving it out in the rain?”

“It’s too small.  My knees keep thwacking the handlebars.”

He sat there staring at his hands.  Working man hands, finally, after fifty years.  The hands of a man who, for the first forty years of his life, never filed a tax return, never worked an honest day’s labor.  Now he was making up for lost time providing for a sit-at-home wife and an ungrateful kid who beat up on nancyboy Lutherans with a wiffle ball bat in the name of scifi cinema.

“We can’t afford it.”

“What about gramma and grampa?”

His eyes bored into me.  Mom’s mother lived upstairs with her second husband who owned the house and let us live in the front half of the first floor rent free.  They were pretty upset with us at the moment due to my inability to bounce a ball off the house without breaking a basement window.  There was a flaw in my pitching motion which I flatly denied until the truth was beat out of me.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said.  He pulled himself off the cot.  Two steps and he was at the door.  “Straighten your room up.”  He never said bye.  Just make yourself useful.

Several weeks passed with no sign of Matthew.  For all I knew that shot to the nuts could’ve triggered a near fatal case of testicular elephantitis.  A couple times, I tried to peak through the windows of his house, but since the last time I got caught peering in, they’d taken precautions, keeping the blinds closed tight.

Relations with my grandparents improved.  I made sure not to jeopardize the peace by throwing baseballs anywhere near the house.  I jotted a few script notes for Starkiller centering on a race of small, furry creatures called the Lowokees who assist the good guys in defeating the Star Slavers.  But mostly I sketched pictures of the supercycle which I envisioned as a heavily-armed BMX with rocket boosters and an oversized blast shield to deflect stardust and laser beams.

Several weeks passed with no sign of Matthew.  For all I knew that shot to the nuts could’ve triggered a near fatal case of testicular elephantitis.  A couple times, I tried to peak through the windows of his house, but since the last time I got caught peering in, they’d taken precautions, keeping the blinds closed tight.

Relations with my grandparents improved.  I made sure not to jeopardize the peace by throwing baseballs anywhere near the house.  I jotted a few script notes for Starkiller centering on a race of small, furry creatures called the Lowokees who assist the good guys in defeating the Star Slavers.  But mostly I sketched pictures of the supercycle which I envisioned as a heavily-armed BMX with rocket boosters and an oversized blast shield to deflect stardust and laser beams.

My birthday arrived as it always does and I celebrated it alone with my family as I always did.  Mom baked a chocolate cake and I didn’t choke on any bones eating it.  Dinner consisted of my favorite meal, chili dogs and macaroni and cheese.  Afterward I opened presents.  Corduroy pants, a maroon with white piping sweat suit, a couple old Atari 2600 games like Yars Revenge and Dodge ‘Em.  The big present, the one Dad made a big deal about, was the pitch rebound, a springy net strung over a square of pipes staked into the ground.  Ideally, if you managed to hit the strike zone, the ball would bounce right back to you (sort of like a house without the windows).  I thought with a length of PVC pipe and a little aluminum foil, the pitch rebounder would make an excellent ground mounted laser canon.

When the festivities ended, I didn’t voice my disappointment in regards to the total lack of bicycle.  After twelve years, I’d learned the value of a poker face.  Also, I’d crept into the basement earlier in the day and found nothing.

I allowed for a little hope when Grampa asked me to accompany him outside to help clear garbage from the shed.  I knew this to be bullshit.  Grampa never threw ANYTHING away.  He still kept the shards of glass from the broken basement windows boxed away somewhere.  And secondly, he disliked me.  He would sooner impact his vertebrae straining them to ask my help for anything.

My hopes were dashed upon seeing the bicycle propped on its kick stand behind the house on my imagined starport.

By definition it was a bicycle.  It had two wheels.  It was pedal and chain propelled.  Long rainbow tassels streamed off the red grips on the end of the ape-hanger handlebars.  The rainbow motif continued along the bicycle frame.  Canary yellow oranged into bloodlust red purpling into frostbite blue greening back to yellow.  A rainbow arched across the banana seat.  A lasso-twirling cowboy straddling a bucking bronco traversed the rainbow on the seat.

I can’t ride this bike in public, I thought.  Too many creative differences.

I looked to Dad but he was all ready walking away.

“You like the bike?” Grampa asked.

“I think... I’d like to take it for a ride.”

It was the only thing I could think to say to my grandparents that didn’t include accusing them of sabotaging my movie and my life.  No amount of aluminum foil or duct-taped PVC pipe could turn this rainbow massacre into a supercycle worthy of Billy Starkiller, bane of intergalactic wrongdoers.

I pedaled the bike to the end of the block as hard as I could.  It was quite a feat, considering the bike felt as though it were constructed of solid steel.  The red tassels flapped in the breeze.  Even wearing my new maroon sweat suit and almost new Pony high-tops, there was no dignity to be had for me.  I considered ghost riding the bike beneath the wheels of a truck, but there were no moving trucks to be had.

From the open window of a passing Volkswagon Bug, and old man hollered “nice bike, tootles”.

I took the alley home.  Matthew met me near his house.  By the way he kept glancing over his shoulder, I assumed his mama had yet to clear him to associate with me.

“Neat bike,” Matthew said.  “Totally great... bike.  Is this going to be the supercycle Billy Starkiller rides?”

“No.  There ain’t going to be a Starkiller movie.”

“Awwww...”

“And I’m sorry for beating your nuts.  You didn’t deserve it.”

“It’s okay.  Mama says you don’t know no better.”

“Yeah, well, I got a new movie planned.  It’s about a paleontologist named Illinois Smith.  He discovers the skeleton of the missing link in the woods behind Hermits Park that will prove the theory of Darwinism.  But he’s got to protect it from an army of jackbooted Lutherans who wish to continue the lie of Creationism.”

“Neat.  Can I be Illinois Smith.”

“No.  I think you’d be better served by the role of Illinois Smith’s nemesis, Martin Luther XXI.  You won’t even have to unbutton your top three buttons to play him.  I’ll be starting on the script real soon.”  

Bio: Karl Koweski escaped the shadow of the steel mills twelve years ago.  He's been running in place ever since.  His latest story collection, Low Life/Her Machine a collaborative chapbook with Melissa Hansen is available at www.zygoteinmycoffee.com where he also writes the monthly column Observations of a Dumb Polack.