Once there was this kid, named Mark. He was raised by Puritans and lived in a house free of such potentially evil things as science fiction, save for one VHS copy of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (which, when he was sick, he would ask his mom to put in the VCR, imploring her to let him watch "the whale movie").
***
He and his father never did get along, and so the boy's hero growing up was his maternal grandfather, William "Bill" Moore.
Between third and fourth grade, something very special happened. He was sent to a family friend's house to be babysat during the summer, as he was devoid of older siblings, and lived so far out in the country that there were no older children to watch him. And it was there that he first saw the entirety of the Star Trek film franchise, in all of its glory.
From then on, science fiction was a haven for this overweight, asthmatic child. His friends were Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, and when the other children refused to let him play their reindeer games, he found solace in the works of Arthur C. Clarke.
Sliders became a favorite, and the young Mark spent hours upon hours throwing himself off of a hill and learning to roll without hurting himself. And while waiting for the premiere of the fifth (and as fate would have it, final) season of Sliders to air, he first saw an episode of something called Farscape.
Farscape was like something he had never seen before. The storylines were beautiful, the cinematography novel, and the story arcs epic. It was truly something original. And at the tender age of 11, he was hooked.
At the tender age of 14, he was devastated when it was cancelled. He swore that his eyes would never again fall upon the Sci-Fi Channel, that bastion of broken promises.
But then something amazing happened! The fan campaigns were successful, and a miniseries was produced to wrap up the dangling plot threads that had been left so cruelly unfinished when the program was decapitated in its prime.
But young Mark was already at boarding school when the time of its airing finally came to pass. And thus it was that his mother recorded it for him, and sent it to him via post, post haste. And it was during this miniseries that an advertisement for something even more beautiful first aired.
***
Something called "Battlestar Galactica." Of course, the boy had seen the old series, in his time. In an era before Ghost Hunters and countless hours of Stargate: SG-1 were readily available to fill out its programming block, the Sci-Fi Channel was home to various pieces of speculative fiction, of every caliber, high and low, of quality imaginable. Lost in Space, Beyond Reality, The Odyssey, Mission: Genesis, and yes, Battlestar Galactica; these were the things that had entertained him in his youth.
But this... this was something altogether different. A horse of a color unimaginable. And so, his mother managed to capture a few episodes of this new and fledgling series on a VHS tape, which was again sent by mail: "33," and "Flesh and Bone." It was dark. It stood for something, and said something; about the human condition, about life, about individuality. It dared to ask questions like, "If it walks like a man, talks like a man, philosophizes and has faith like a man, what fails to make it a man?"
His life would never be the same.
***
At age 19, Mark moved into his first apartment. It was a lovely experience, but although he managed to find a shithole amid other shithoes that housed a nakama forged in boarding school, it was still a studio apartment in which he lived alone. His mother, seeking to alleviate what she perceived as loneliness, showed up at his apartment one afternoon with a blonde guinea pig. It was a girl. And it had no name.
***
Now, while in boarding school, Mark made his first foray into something that would become as important in his life as pop culture. The local radio station, KNWD, put out a call for DJs, and out of curiosity and curiosity alone, Mark showed up. His unique ability to absorb film, television, and book information impressed the college kids who ran the place, and he was hired as an unpaid intern to read the movie news on Wednesday afternoons. By the time he graduated, he was hosting two shows a week.
After he returned to his homeland, he would sometimes sit and listen to a cassette recording of the penultimate episode of Saturday Morning is for Rocking, as his show had been called, and wistfully remember the days when his voice had been important, and his words had carried weight. Somedays he would cry.
During his first visit to the university that would be the institution of his higher learning, he found himself lost on its sprawling campus after a tour of the offices of KLSU, which he had skipped a mathematics placement test to attend. It was dark and he hesitated to ask for help, for fear of being taken for a serial killer, as the city was still reeling from the capture of Derrick Todd Lee a mere two years before.
***
Ultimately, he took the risk and asked a young woman passing by how to get to the place where he knew his car was located. She kindly offered him a ride, as it was quite distant. En route, she introduced herself as Kim Hebert, and pulled, from a large stack of CD jewel cases, a compilation of some electronica. She apologized, and explained that she was the productions director for KLSU, and had a lot of CDs to go through, and would Mark mind listening to one?
Some months later, Mark confusedly asked a waitress at Louie's if she was the same Samaritan who had assisted him that April. But this was a girl named Natalie, who encouraged him to listen to her all-girl power hour specialty show on that same radio station.
And so he did. He listened to KLSU all but daily, except for the days when remembering his own short-lived radio career weighed too heavily upon him, and his sad heart refused to let him hear the radio at all.
This Natalie began every show with the same theme tune: The Shangri-La's "Sophisticated Boom-Boom." It was a song that, albeit short, always warmed the cockles of his cold, dead heart, and quickly became his favorite.
***
Then one day, while watching Battlestar Galactica and thinking about "Sophisticated Boom-Boom," he finally named the nameless guinea pig.
Sophisticated Boom-Boom. Or "Boomer," for the sake of brevity.
***
But no happiness could truly last in Shantytown, the inexpensive but virtually unlivable housing where Mark and his unrelated family resided. The peculiar combination of Boomer's flesh (and feces) and the apartment's compromised sealing led to an infestation of insects. Whether they were fleas or fruitflies, or merely the tools of fate was never determined.
Mark fought bravely. But unfortunately, in May of 2007, when he returned from Natchitoches where he had ventured on a mission of love (that is another story, to be told another time), the apartment was a nightmare. He would describe the scene he found later to friends in four words: "Alfred. Hitchcock's. The Birds."
Boomer and the apartment were irreconcilable. And so it was that she was forced to return to the rural home from whence she came.
***
Not long after, Mark reached an impasse. He could no longer keep living without radio in his life. Years before, he had assisted his dear friend Kat Stephens in acquiring a job at KNWD, and the time had come for her to return the favor. Mark was hired at KLSU, but there was one issue that had to be dealt with: his DJ name.
During his days in Natchitoches, the airwaves had known him by the name "Red," an abbreviation of his surname. Unfortunately, when the time came for his triumphant return to them, the airwaves of Baton Rouge already had a "Red," 93.7 Red FM.
And so he had to find some other name with which to rechristen himself. After many false starts, he discovered a piece of the fencing in which Boomer, his still-living but departed pet, had frolicked. In her honor, he took the name Boomer, and paired it with the false surname Ng, to create "Boomerang with Boomer Ng," if for no other reason than because it was just the sort of pun that did not work in radio.
***
It was a success on several levels. Firstly, it paid homage to the second greatest science fiction show to ever grace a television screen (there has never been and shall never be a program as groundbreaking, necessary for its time, or enlightening as The Twilight Zone), and his roots were in Sci-Fi if nothing else. Secondly, it referenced the earliest days of his rebirth into radio, with "Sophisticated Boom-Boom." And thirdly, it served as an anagram for the name of his first and greatest hero, his grandfather, William "Bill" Moore, or "B. Moore."
Boomer, nee Mark, saw his show grow in popularity, and he became more widely known by his DJ name than his own name, and this suited his attitude well. It was not Boomer who had been friendless for the entirety of his first 16 years of existence; it was not Boomer who had been forced to endure two separate internments at Camp Exodus; it was not Boomer who sat by the radio, listening to the recording of his former glory and marinating in depression; it was not Boomer who had a lifetime of bad memories. Those were Mark's bad memories, and Boomer was Mark in a new stage of life, after the chrysalis and the confinement. Boomer gave Mark new life.
***
And now you know the rest of the story
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