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

wilderness, giving birth to Gojira and the 50 foot wo-myn, the atomic hula with large, massive coconut breasts the size of Jupitor, cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon and as delicious as Venus in a wet sweat of passion. Outer space implodes, explodes and exposes inner space with Aldous Huxley Little House on the Mental Prairie, windows wide and doors unlocked and open….

In the 20th Cent, every kid wanted to be an astronaut thanks to “television” as it was known then then. A “box” filled with Saturday morning cartoon shows with Space Commanders with decoder rings and garish clowns in bizarre regalia regaling them with a saturnalia of commercial blatherings competing headlong with puppets and cartoons for the attention and cash of the Jetson’s gen who were hopped up like junkies on smack cooked up by the corporate oy manufacturers. Something called Hula hoops as large as flying saucers making an orbit around the non-hula female waist while yo yo's ran up and down on a string like a dead body floating in the water. It was the age of mechanical toys and space age plastic dolls that did everything but fuck.

 

Before holographic toys of my century, boys in the 20th Cent were game for Robots from outerspace with armies of rock 'em sock 'em robots invading toy train earth and fighting off the legions of Amazon Barbie women with Commander Cody Decoder Rings. Led into battle by General Mattel..."they're swell!" great bastions were made from Erector sets to keep out little rubber cowboys and indians while GI Joe went into battle with a Buck Rogers battery powered ray gun from Ronald Ray-Gun to storm Fort Apache and and Rin Tin Tin. Cap pistols exploded and Lionel trains crashed into lincoln log buildings...long ago in a toy retro galaxy far, far away...a time before Atari...a time before the internet...when imaginations ran wild and Betsy was wetsy and Cathy was chatty and Barbie and Ken were an item before Ken got gay...and Barbie jumped under the covers with Skipper....action figures with rubber legs and arms that could be twisted sister by your mean little brother....train sets and turntables....mechanical robots and talking dolls...Cowboys and Indians and Good guys and Bad guys all tossed into the toybox cabaret at night to see the stripping Barbie in a Peep Show Betty Boop Booth playing with her own erector set....it was the age of nostalgia...yo yo's, Pee Wee Herman bicycles with the emphasis on bi- as it goes in cycles...flashlight tag and dodgeball...Barbie and Barbie...doll on doll action ...action figure on action figure action...Gi Joe and GI Jane....ah...Retropolis..wind me up Sparky...my batteries are full and I'm on cruise control...

 

The only other planet I had been to was Mars. The casinos and whorehouses of the moon don’t count. The moon had been colonized for centuries and although the freedom movement to have it reclassified for economic reasons as a planet has gone underground as most of it’s leaders have been arrested and asteroided to the isolated penal colony A-11 located in the Temple-Tuttle Leonid Quadrant

 

 

A messiah from Mars...code-named on the wanted Tel-Vis as Martian Luther King (named after a forgotten civil rights worker from Retroplins own past) rose from the planetary plantation pulpits to lead the masses in a series of Freedom Marches on a scale seldom seen in any of Retropolin occupied orbs. Then, as quietly as it began, the Masters would sweep Martian racial and cultural differences aside, they would fall in love and mate with a green Martian woman with three three breasts and two vaginas. Now you could actually say, and mean it..a bird in the hand is not better than two in her bush!

 

After sweating up the space blanket, they would soon produce an afterburner afterbirth of a pleasant placenta that would produce little green umbilical children and buy a little suburban green dog and tanks of multi-colored fish. Physical differences would melt away like heated cheese, with interspecies copulation and in time, light years maybe from now, the fornicated population wouldn't be white, black, yellow, red or green...but a soft, quiet, gentle faded grey.

 

My next interstellar journey would take me light years beyond Andromeda and mental stability. I would need a lot of sedation on Lobototranqs & Peyoticite on this one. A journey that had its Genesis on a cold, grey Centauri (old November) Retropolis day…..

 

 

Chapter One - Asian Seduction

 

The Centauri Equinox always brings a drop in business for those in my line of work, not that my agency was doing very well anyway. More time is spent in and out of the office drugging (it was all legal now) and drinking cheap Venusian booze. Drunk, drugged or sober, it was all the same to me. My partner, Sandoz Diego Cerveza and I were barely hanging on economically by the torn seams of a pair of fishnet stockings.

 

While most agencies got the juice freelance accounts from the governing congress we were hand the leftovers..the crap….the back alley shit cases no one else wanted. We were the alley dumpsters where junkies toss their used needles, gangs dumped their incriminating weapons and winos threw up on the Chinese restaurant scraps that no one was ever sure of their origin...an organic farm or the local dog pound or worse...body parts from the local flop. Losers that no one would miss who would disappear into a won ton soup disguised until you noticed one of the won’s or one of the ton’s, never sure which was what would end up staring straight at you from the bowl...may even wink at you when you realized it was a human eye looking for a fortune cookie.

In my line of work, sleep does not make peace with reality after defeating it. Dark shadows fall tall on the floor and the wall. The night becomes a hypodermic needle filled with sleaze, and greed. Money, sex, adultery! Choose one from column A or jump into bed with all three...what the hell a romp with a foursome for foreplay, but don't forget to take a gun and blast away at the demons The Sex is Free...the bullets cost a nickel each but well worth it for the big payoff.

 

Soon it's early morning, dark clouds rolling in..now if this were old Chicago, the dark black-thick clouds would be a deep blue, like the dark in an underground cavern, or the dank cigarette stale beer interior of some Retropolin saloon with hustlers and pimps and faded hookers and lost dreams. the jukebox stands lonely in the wee small hours of the morning corner, forgotten its promise of three plays for a quarter, a cheap street whore to say the least at that price, the kind with needle tracks up and down her arm, greenish hue with bruises and a shot of whiskey with a syphilis chaser and together, they all sit…stony silence until someone, probably from Cincinnati jams a quarter into the juke…the ancient 45 rpm takes it’s place on the spindle, while the needle takes it’s place in it’s waiting groove, moving gently c and almost lovingly, more black vinyl foreplay then anything else..the mojo goes east-west, and keeps on moving, gyrating actually, in it’s own dream, not shared, the dream is an erection, blues from the alley straight to the soul like a junkie jamming needle for a quick fix…close your eyes..enjoys the rush of making love on a dark and rainy Sunday to the stench of stale cigs in an ashtray,  ..narcolepsy, necromancy, nothing fancy..just sex with the grateful dead… smile now…it’s a dark blue black morning, with a full mind sky of blues sunshine, and what the fuck, you got your blues on and his rocks off…you promise to call again..and the line is always busy when you  dial, the line is always busy so you may as well  head on down  near the old faded opium dens in Chinatown. Charles Bukowski is waiting and Tom waits..both have a gun hidden...and damned if those pianos are drinking while the drunken barfly  sings a song off key...and then the lights go dim...and it's last call for alcohol.and the dark night...the coal jet black night light flickers...it's time to wake up from your dream and face another day in another century, another time, another place..and this day would prove to be anything but ordinary

 

I had closed the office early for the day but had made a last minute appointment with a woman with a throaty sexual power packed voice who called me earlier in the day about a missing sister she suspected was missing and feared she had had been abducted to a distant planet I had only heard of. A planet of wanton sex and eroticism and a ecstasy producing midnight blue drink called Soma. The planet Robotia the sex and Soma capital of the quadrant.

 

Good soma (drinking or smoking varieties) was hard to find, too much Soma had a kick that caused a Jekyll Hyde transformation causing a frenzy of murder and rampaging rape, no longer gender specific that could go on for hours on end until the effects had worn off. There were never any criminal charges brought against a person or perp as they used to be called in pulp novels of the 20th Cent..on Robotia...you could murder, rape and engage in extreme  BDSM legally...all you had to do was pick a gender or both and enjoy the macabre fantasy turned reality

 

To come down off a soma high you needed a huge combo amount of tranqs, cannabis and peyoticite and the planet Robotia to where I was about set a course for was the Soma and drug vortex of the universe which to me was my Cibola...I was Coronado searching for the lost city of  sex and drugs...my pot of gold...did it exist? Was the phone call a mere illusion? Was someone, perhaps one of my drunken friends having a go at me to have fun at my expense...

The fog that dusk was as thick and heavy as steel reinforced nylons on an overweight hooker from the bordellos of Venus. As the fog thickened outside my window, I could make out her shadow back lit in the hallway closing in on the door of my office in down and out downtown old beat Detroit..once proud..now a gang war zone that even the cops were part of mayhem.

 

I was behind in the rent and utilities, in dead last place on the race rack and flat on my ass cash strapped..I couldn’t afford a 500,000 spae buck back alley blow job by a Neptunian nymph dressed up as a Catholic school girl, every mans fantasy even now in the 30th Cent. Catholic  girls are now a race of vixens unto themselves and they had sex down to a science.  they were , over easy, and we were hungry, so together it was a sexual plate of eggs and sausage. You don’t have to be Fellini to figure this one out.

 

These girls dressed in plaid skirts  the catholic girls you saw in the hallway everyday who were damn near virginal but these were real ass kickers! Catholic schools still existed (The Pope was part of the Planetary Congress as church and state were now one) I went to one and