SPACE NOIR BAR, Mike Marino [good e books to read .txt] 📗

Martian mescaline and Retropolin LSD. I was  a comfortably numb space mime most times according to my publisher, Arthur.

Soon I added opium, morphine and hashish to the volatile confusion of psychedelic fusion. Now in Retropolin retrospect I could make sense of it all and it was no longer a blurred and scattered jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces. It was actually beginning to take shape and form so now, overly  confident, I put the galactic pedal to the alloy metal to increase the  intake of pills and anything else I could get my hands on, uppers, downers, (Darvon a favorite) benzedrine, dexedrine, mescaline, LSD, marijuana, opium, morphine, and strangely...booze..


I was a human  yo yo on a short fuse string, ready to burst into flames any minute. To counteract the uppers, a shot of heroin, to corral the heroin, more uppers. Eventually I was back down to a reasonable level of weed and speed, and damned if alcohol didn’t enter the spotlight center stage always fueled by speed weed as I now referred to my laced reefer.

A juncture had been reached as  a new frontier began to unfold. Narco as it turns out was our new guide and his was evident as he laid out the best laid plans of mice and men on the table. I felt my jaw tighten as he began his discourse.  “We all have a vested interest in the recovery of the Strip Tease Falcon. I have my own reasons which I’m sure you suspect. Poontang, yes, I have your sister, and can assure you, for the moment she is quite safe and unharmed. Sappho, you and I will have to cooperate and perhaps cut a deal to join forces.  You and I share an addiction for power and neither of us is a child.  As for you Mr. Yucatan, you have been drawn into a dangerous situation and I am afraid there is no escaping it.”

He was right of course and all the more reason I wanted to  cold cock the sonofabitch and erase the smirk from his face.  Narco had a way of laying his cards on the table that brought out the animal killer instinct and desire in a person to leap across the room and take his fat neck in your hands and squeeze until his breathing stopped.

He also had some intell we didn’t have. “The Com-Reds have been following all of you since you left Retropolis and Toho Police know you’re here, and in fact are tossing your hotel rooms at this very moment so it behooves us all to band together and find the Falcon before they do. I am not as uh, mobile as the three of you so I will make this one time  offer...find the Falcon, bring it to me and I will not turn Mary Asteroid over to the Eroti-bot Project...I will partner with you Sappho which will also ensure your safety from being vaporized by your former Com-Red comrades and, ah yes, M. Yucatan you, Poontang and her sister, Mary Asteroid will be given safe passage back to Retropolis, accompanied by my men who are quite handy with weapons,and you Sir, will take with you a hefty sum of space bucks in your pocket to keep you supplied in your various vices until the sun explodes!” He laughed with such largess that I thought he would explode or implode before the Retropolin sun did.

Narco was good. I had to give him a silent standing ovation. I felt he had a secret dossier on me that peered into the recesses of my soul, my past and my weaknesses..in fact he knew the right buttons to push on everyone in the room. My willingness to face dangerous situations while stoned, Poontangs love for her sister and Sappho’s lust for power.

He was the maestro playing us like a finely tuned symphony orchestra, using  our individual weaknesses to set us up for the mission and quite possibly...the kill zone!

Chapter 18 - The Lesbian Revolution (The Kotex Vortex)

The first step in any journey on the path to locate stolen merchandise or scant evidence at any crime scene is the one that leads you to door Number One….the one right in front of you. What better place to begin the beguine than at the headwaters. You can paddle your way up the Forensic River from there following along the riverbank trail of clues that lie along the way. In time you’ll become as proficient a space age trailblazer as James Fennimore Cooper’s last 26th Century radioactive nuclear Mohican.


The Strip Tease Falcon was stolen from the Tohos by persons unknown, although it was a widely accepted theory that the nefarious and gregarious Narco Marx had his fat paws in the robot cookie jar in some manner. Proof? Naw. Not a clue was left behind implicating Narco in the kidnapping of an inanimate object. The real crowning achievement of the criminal process would require the skill of a Barnum and Bailey juggling mime to get it off the planet, hold it hostage, then sell it to the highest bidder.  

Most trained criminologists such as myself would agree on one prominent factor. The  Strip Tease Falcon was not just the most powerful source of power in the known universe that in the improper hands could play God. It was a Rock Star! In the realm of galactic supremacy it is to the world of conquest what Jimmy Page in the 20th and 21st Century was to the guitar. We were however, not on a musical stairway to heaven. We were instead going headfirst, headlong into the kill zone.


It was too well known to have been smuggled off the planet avoiding detection by a vigilant and well trained Intel organization. Especially one as advanced and thorough  as the Robotian Toho network. Even the slithering servile Joel Faberge couldn’t shed his skin in molting season to escape detection, and he was an expert at deception and pulling off a feminine haute couture look without batting an elongated elegant eyelash to go with his Joan Crawford eyebrows and shoulder pads.

The hiding in plain sight theory was backed by Narco  and our adventure was about to begin as Poontang, Sappho and I  were off to find the Falcon, the wonderful Falcon of  mechanical  Oz.  The weekend  began with  great buckets full of galactic anticipation found only in the adrenalin rush of a Saturday night falcon fever. If Narco didn’t have the damn falcon in his possession, who the hell did? What other players would benefit most from its capture, and more importantly  had the means and the balls to pull it off? Narco, Poontang and Sappho could only think of one local group with enough chutzpah to score the bird. The fearless all female  Labia Hill Gang.  My Com-Red fox on the run, Poontang and the exciting Miss Strangelove,   knew more about this espionage stuff than I did and both of them had quite a set of invisible balls themselves.

Labeled gangsters by the Toho reactionary Supreme Council... the Labias were not mobsters. They were more dangerous than Luca Brazzi in the “Godfather”. They were revolutionaries! The Cyborg  “underground” comprised of uncompromising deadly Cyborg Amazon women who broke free of their captors and  rose up against the Toho’s who were about to transform them into sex machines through forced  “Erotiobotization.”  The initial revolt, small as it was, was put down with massive ruthlessness by the machine machismo of the full robot mecha-army at the Tohos disposal. The half robotic cyborgs were no match and the rebellion, far from over, merely went underground to continue the fight, but not before other Cyborg females  were freed in a victorious vaginal assault by the newly formed Labian army.

Lucky me, instead of a carnal pleasure carnival cruise with two sexually exciting and talented human Retropolin Bond Babers I was instead  going on a journey to the center of Robotia’s revolution which was still smoldering  in the streets in small pockets of resistance. The resistance movement was minimal at best and the Labia’s were outgunned at every turn.

The three of us  left Narcos penthouse. Fortunately I had managed to talk Narco into returning our guns..I was not about to fight Tohos, Com-Reds and Revolutionary Labias without firepower. Poontang and Sappho Strangelove were both highly trained in the school of one-shot one -kill arts whereas I sometimes had to empty a full nine yards of Link Wray power just to wound a perverted pornographer from Pluto.


We traveled to a neighborhood that my Com-Red poster girls knew about on far east side of the city, where the Labia Hill Gang held their ground. It was dubiously referred to on Intel charts at Robotia’s Toho military headquarters as the Kotex Vortex, or among the rank and file, the G-Spot Ghetto.

Revolution! It happens in the best of families. And you say, you want a revolution...that’s all well and good, but, ask yourself, do they all work as the warranty suggests, or is the reality that they are a worse curse than what they've replaced?

Somewhere, soon after overthrow and the mask of reform is ripped from the face, the revolution and it's leaders reveal themselves for what they are and the people’s message soon gets trampled by the very same crowds who not long before, stormed the Winter Palace..the fever of revolt is usually followed by the fervor of excess and executions, retaliation replacing revolution, and the monologue of a demagogue’s diatribe turns into a comintern compost of collective constipation.

Revolution is an internal family affair...like incest its best kept hidden away in the closet of the trailer. It's a social fabric that has torn, and in time inbred, ready to come apart at the familial seams it seems. It's a case of weird Uncle Hector fucking his 13 year old first cousin dressed in a sheer see-through frock behind the barn, why? Because he can, and the resultant child is a mutant, born with three heads similar to a freak farm animal on display at some roadside rattlesnake farm.. Revolution is not like war where the factions are delineated by a "border" and participants from outside the "family."

Nope. Revolution is a good old fashioned down home brother sister fuck. Which brings me to my point about keeping a revolution hot and juicy and alive after it's initial success...it needs the social version of KY jelly to keep it aroused to achieve what it craves....a social orgasm of formidable change of epic proportions.

As we neared the 10 square blocks of the Kotex Vortex I noticed the neighborhood was contained far away from the main bordello boulevard of the Eroti-bot entertainment district. Can’t have a revolution screwing up the screwing now can we?

It was a small walled big balls city-state on it’s own, inserted as a tempestuous Tampon into the vagina of daily planet life containing the flow of revolt and absorbing the  estrous cycle of anarchy it produced.  The outer layer of the walls of the Labia enclave were completely surrounded by watchtowers (not to be confused with a wall of Jehovah Witnesses banging on doors)  armored personnel carriers and armored personnel as well. Sporadic gunfire could be hear  from inside the confines of