Residuals

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On his way out, the motel guy switches on the TV and the AC without bothering to ask if I want either. The unit over the door rattles and starts to drip on the purple shag carpet. On a dusty screen, a cowboy hunkers down over the Sci-Fi Channel station ident, squinting from under a Stetson. It ought to be like looking at myself because the cowboy is supposed to be me. But it’s not.

The Omega Encounter is always playing somewhere on a rerun channel, I guess, but here and now it’s like an omen.

I’m still living off the Omega residuals because it’s my version of what went down, officially adapted from the “as told to” book Jay Anson did for me. Nyquist sold Starlight, the book Tom Fuckin’ Wolfe wrote with him, for twenty times as much to Universal.

There’s a little skip where there used to be a shot of a fly-blown, bloodied rubber cow carcass. It could be a censor cut or a snip to reduce the running time. When E.W. Swackhamer directed Omega, there were thirteen minutes of commercials in an hour of TV; now there are eighteen, so five minutes of each hour have to be lost from everything made before the nineties.

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