The Space Noir Bar, Michael Marino [people reading books txt] 📗

Space Noir - Prelude to a Prey Lewd

Calling Earth! Calling Earth! Come in Earth! Do you read me? Atomic Commando Cody lasers ready to fire and launch from the outer fringes of the outer limits of outer space. Flying silver disks composed of strange heavy metal alloys are attacking every capital on Earth from Bejing to London to Moscow to Washington. It was an age of sci fi action..giant saucers, 50 foot women, Amazons from Mars, mutants and nuclear bad asses...all on a rampage to ravage the Earth.

That was the accepted perceived imagery of beings from other worlds attacking Earth from the infinite reaches of space in the long ago forgotten 20th Century. Intergalactic tourists in search of a Disney-esque planet for a two-headed alien fun filled family vacation...and what happens? Earthlings immediately pull out their nuclear zip guns and atomic switchblades to re-enact a Day the Earth Stood Still gang fight scene from “West Side Story” complete and replete with atomic choreography designed to defeat the show tune minions of Ethel “Martian” Merman...there’s no business like space show business..cue the chorus boys in fishnets and cabaret berets so they can dance their sweet asses off.

It was the race for space copulating with the arms race to see who could bluff the best..the east or the west, that fostered this fairy-tale silver screen projection of erroneous perception.

I had spent hours watching these old films in the basement level of the Retropolis Propaganda Ministry as I scoured archived holographic discs re-mastered from archaic outdated records from something quaintly called the “television”. It was required viewing during my orientation once I had passed the exams to get my Retropolis credentials and security clearance to have access to cases as a freelance investigator for the Prometheum Division of Intelligence...the top secret investigative wing of Retropolis for the consortium of populated and colonized planets in our Solar System known collectively as Dystopia.

I made a decisive choice early in my life to earn a living as a professional gumshoe. Gumshoe! I crossed paths with that term while reading and maxi-pad absorbing one of the “outlawed” books by Raymond Chandler, an obscure noir mystery writer of the 20th Century. Black and white words and paper bought and sold to make black and white dark mood ring films.

I was not only fascinated by the stories he would deftly weave, but damn, I had a fashion hard-on for those jaunty fedora hats! Today’s space wear leaves much to be desired. There is no fashion sense whatsoever in my Century, the 30th unless you find tinfoil pants titillating and metal alloy thongs a thrill. All that is missing is beanie copter head gear to go with the oxidizer fueled jet pack back packs.

I also read the other banned books . You know, the 20th Century “Future” books... “1984” by George Orwell and “Animal Farm” laughing now at how the future was envisioned back then. Utopia gone wrong. They were wrong..it is much worse..but it’s the deck of marked cards we have to play with or pass when we sit down at the casino’s big table and then do the best we can with the hand we are dealt in a rigged game. The future was far and away not Utopian orgasm, it was a disfunctional Dystopian Dictatorship rendering the vox populi castrated of thought and emotion.

I followed in the wingtip footsteps of my fictional predecessors who set the literary precedents for back alley noir, the brotherhood of crime writers. I joined the ranks as a writer of mystery novels. My two professions, as writer and detective, have proven to be the perfect fornication partners. You can blame my addiction on Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Neither is around to be tried and convicted...case dismissed gentlemen..you are free to go.

On the other side of my two headed P.T. Barnum carnival coin I admit happily to a degree of degenerate sex addiction. One on one, two plus two equals four, pick a gender and take a gander or a goose or go for a group grope awash with blindfolds and handcuffs. Sex to me is the breakfast of champions and in the 20th Century I would have ended up on a Wheaties Box with Kaitlyn/Bruce Jenner endorsing Vaseline.

Next to fucking, I find reading sexy, in fact, almost ejaculatory as literary orgasm is reached when the last period takes a bow and places itself on the page, end of the performance, SRO, applause, applause.

So what can match your first fuck? To me it was the first books I ever read as a child. The wonder of words and stories, and admittedly I started reading 20th Century lit as that was the pivotal point in Earth’s history….(You don’t know who you truly are until you know where you came from) I would read bootlegs of encyclopedias from A - Zed and was hungry for this knowledge as each page turned and revealed Parisian poets long forgotten, Austrian composers whose concertos are no longer heard,what a great bird the phoenix must have been had it existed, what hieroglyphs were and why and what, and why was the War of 1812 called the War of 1812 and why wasn’t World War One called the War of 1914?

Tom Swift Collections of real “boy” adventures in airships and radio electronics and all manner of other Dick Tracy electro-wizardry we acknowledge today with a strained yawn. But I didn’t yawn at these yarns...I wanted more, I was an adventure junkie, addicted as I was to sex and drugs, a young wino lying face down in a gutter of literature waiting for my connection to supply me with the lit fix a word junkie requires..Twain’s Tom Sawyer and secret caves, Huck Finn and riverboat pirates meeting up on the road with Steinbeck’s wrathful Joad grapes.

I soon found myself floundering on storm tossed oceans, setting sail with Jack London books to Zanzibar or Manila with portraits and tales of sea wolves and typhoon storms riding the waves to the east with a harpoon in one hand and chopsticks in the other to feast on 14 year old whores in Bangkok bordellos and great giant bowls of William Burroughs in Chinese opium dens. Hold the egg rolls and pass the pipe and re-write the fortune cookies in Mandarin so Lao Tse could see far out to sea...far out..further...way past Kesey’s cuckoo’s nest

Herman Melville’ whaling classic “Moby Dick. (Not to be confused with the psychedelic band Moby Grape) Here’s my business card. Just call me Ismael if you will as I seek out a tattooed Queequeq searching for Moby Dick with one legged Ahabs, while enjoying the pages of Sinbad’s travels and travails, while Jules Verne launched me in a rocket to the man in the moon so I could take his place as king of the mountain crater and then round tripping back to earth with force of a zero gravity sling shot to begin my travels to fight and defeat the mighty H G Wells Morlocks in mortal time machine time travel portal combat. The books were pounding images into me with the force of the butt of a .45 knocking me out cold in an abandoned warehouse..or whorehouse..who can remember anymore...then along came Tolkien and Kerouac...hopped up hipster hobbits can be habit forming on the narco Jack K road where the Anthony Burgess sideshow with talking bears look for honey, finding it’s all gone but uncover Vonnegut’s flashback time travels...travel, adventure, freedom … books led me on my own path of travel and adventure and I can only blame the written word, or praise the written word depending on if you look at the glass half full of Jamaican rum. Matters of personal reality relevance, mental measurement and a dose of subjective optimism.

That was long ago...the 20th Century..a forgotten time lost in the fading light of a gas lamp obscured in the fog shrouds that enclose the wee small hours of the old days..no one alive today remembers those days...it’s all on vis-discs now. No one reads books anymore (it’s illegal) and illiteracy is the law of the land decimated by the cult of texting which was implemented seductively as a covert government viral additive in the 20th Century to destroy all language. Libraries no longer exist (they were shut down..overdue charges apply) ..Alexandrian repositories razed into rubble and cinders by injecting the numb fuck dumb fuck factor or game proliferation turning the mental plane from one of self to one of avatar, reality held in check and sense of self was no longer allowed entry to the big show...life was a game..a worthless commodity...the game will go on...it fears not death by a pinball machine with a five o’clock shadow..who does..who knows..the Shadow knows!

Hell this is the 30th Century, the Age of Dystopia, as we mark time, and for me the galaxy is my turf. I ‘m Doc Yucatan. I am a criminal by definition, as a writer. New books are forbidden unless approved by the Censorship Branch of the planetary council for content. My writing looks under the rocks of history and the present and it is not a pretty picture brother. So I write under a assumed name and print my own books off on an old mimeograph machine I acquired during an excavation project of Old Moscow that was used for the production of revolutionary pamphlets used to incite riots in the early part of the 20th Cent. I also was in possession of an illegally obtained item called a typewriter. Marvelous machine for producing ideas and dangerous concepts.

My real job however is pounding a beat as a detective for clients who hire me to track down a missing male or female sold into sex slavery as sex and domestic slavery was now in fashion once again as were human zoos where Subs from Retropolis were placed on display along with prisoners from alien planets for the enjoyment of the population. Toss the Christians to the lion of Judah it’s time to make human pasta for the Rajah and the Rasta.

In addition to my private practice, I freelance as a private investigator for the government’s Prometheus division of the Congress of Retropolis as Earth was now called ...space detective... planetary private eye...gumshoe...private dick….and the story I am about to tell is true...even though now in retrospect it seems like a dream…. a dream that soon turned into a nightmare that haunts me to this 18 hour Retropolis day of the search on behalf of a client for a missing sister who had been abducted by a race of eroti-bots who turn males and females into half-human/half machine sex machines...real Inna Gadda Da Vida stuff as she and i began our search for the missing sister on a plane of sex and the mystery of the Strip Tease Falcon! Let me start at the beginning…..

1947...Roswell, New Mexico, Earth Sci-fi hi-fi so high saucers from spaced out outer space, stone-henged, stoned age and crashing just outside of Roswell with a klaatu, barada, nicto thud, loaded with debris and Michael Rennie-gades who now become the alienated of the alien nation – born in lunarcy, and cloaked in secrecy with lunar cretin secretions giving birth to bugged eyed, anal probers and wild eyed UFO’ologists

This all on the helter skelter heels of Rockin’ Robert Goddards rocketry revelry and associated atomic badda - bing badda boom boom bomb tests near A-Bomb Alamogordo, Flashback Gordo!

“Waitress, could I get a big ass plateful of radiation and isotopes with a side order of mushroom clouds please?” Muchas Garcias, Martinez…Holy Hiroshima, Batman! Nagasaki nuked, Fatboy Wonder…duck and cover, duck and cover..and damn, do I miss the cold war. The bomb wasn’t all bad after all hell it gave us silver screen scream direct from the new mex white sands