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

later, were fierce fighters and the kind of Lord of the Flies comrades you’d want watching your back at all times. Most of the kids, homeless thanks to the war on their own planet started off as gentle and socialized but soon degenerated into wild animals like denizens from the Ninth Gate of Hell. The boys factionalize and the battle is on between conformity and individualism until they unite to  fight a common enemy. One of those Red Scare things no doubt of Commies vs. Us paranoia scenarios of the early cold war 1950's of the 20th Century.  I wonder how long they can stay united and not see begin to imagine me as an imaginary beast who eventually gets kidnapped  by the gang of juvies so that tribute might be offered to an imaginary  King Kong who is fookled into thinking I was a nubile white babe with pink nipples to fondle in his fortress of solitude, turning Fay Raye into a finger puppet, yes, use your own imagination, mine is busy right now with my own visual.

 

Or worse I could end up in a  "Clockwork Orange" scenario of violence that violates all our precepts of what violence is all about. Would we all be sacrificed to the god Kubrick as we become a carnal feast for the beast f gratuitous sex and violence permeating this fest of fetish as though it were the Fulton Fish Market in NYC on a hot windless August day. The Rudy Valley,  where Peter Pan does a Vulcan Mind Meld with Charles Manson. If only I can find a pair of white pants to show off my Peter Pan in all its glory. Maybe if I start singing in the rain it will be safe. If not then I'll become a lost boy vampire and feed only during menstruation periods..a lost boys breakfast of champions!

 

As we approached the lodge of Ed Wood, I could feel the tension in the air among my comrades. “Prepare yourself Yucatan.,” Long Wang advised quietly. “You’re about to meet Col Kurtz!!!”

“The horror...the horror” I kept repeating to myself. What the hell...As long as Asrini was at my side I felt safe...besides I love the smell of feminine hygiene products in the morning!

Chapter 29 - Che Stadium and Samuel Beckett Wait for Godot

Music was assaulting and attacking from deep within the lodge hut of Kurtz. Loud and proud, louder as we closed the gap eliminating altogether the wide space across the barricaded compound as a smidgen of old White Out obliterates a writer’s spelling mistakes that arrive on a typewritten page quite by accident.I was plagued on this whole joyride with my head fronting as an antiquated pulsating neon jukebox in a dive bar. Someone invisible, tailing me in the dark perhaps followed me there and kept dropping old three plays for a quarter coin currency into a front slot to begin its journey at 45 RPM’s s the needle dropped into a groove. The music was a strange brew, a real he man brew of sound that I referred to as He Brew which was human he man music minus all the beards and dancing to Zero Mostel numbers.

 

A sensational sensual sexual saxual saxaphonic saxaphone barfly broad on her last buck for the evening filling the empty seat next to me at the Pacifico bar in Detroit at one a.m. “Excuse me. I have to make a saxaphone call. Can you tell the bartender to keep the blues away from the piano please and do something about that trumpet!”“Doc? Doc?” Asrini had penetrated my thought trance. “Yeah, yeah. Here, present and accounted for.” It was then someone pulled the plug on the jukebox and I was aware of the deafening strains of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” at surround sound pounding from the compound emanating from a point dead ahead and our destination...the elusive Col. Kurtz. He commanded loyalty, perhaps out of fear maybe shared beliefs. Either way his followers would die for him, that was plain to see. They were Mouseketeers following blindly the evil version of Mickey Mouse. Why? Because they love and worship him. Who’s the leader of band? “C-O-L-O-N-E-L K-U-R-T-Z!”

 

Our guard left us at the door and with one swift deft motion indicated we were to enter. Cautiously I pulled the bamboo door open only reveal a dark interior with wafts and whiffs of Uranian opium billowing from within and rising high in the air outside. As I peered deep into the moody blue colored smoke screen I noticed a rather large humanoid ensconced in its hallucinogenic aura. His head was as bald as a lunar landscape and he was mumbling under his breath to no one in particular, in fact to no one at all. I I could tell he was alone in his world. Those he had gathered around him were mere theatrical props and one dimensional actors on a Samuel Beckett minimalist stage reading their lines for the 350th performance on far out far off Broadway to the entranced patrons of the arts slumming for the evening in fancy dress and already drunk on F. Scott Fitzgerald booze engrossed in a nude performance of “Waiting for Godot”

 

We entered his domain, the den of the lion, not knowing what his response to our intrusion would be. To my surprise he smiled broadly, acknowledging our existence. “Long Wang, long time, no see. Wang Chung you are a sight for these old eyes. Please, you and your friends...sit and relax. I knew you were coming. I could tell by all the activity in the Vortex.”“These are friends of mine Colonel. Asrini and Maddie, formerly Comred agents, and this rumpled character is Doc Yucatan. A detective from Retropolis who came along to help find the Falcon and of course the rabbit,” Long Wang explained.“I know all that already. The Toho’s sent an emissary under a flag of truce to make a deal with me for it’s return. In fact they made me an offer they didn’t think I’d refuse. I surprised them when I turned them down. They misjudged me. My son Fredo, who now works at a carnival as a barker running a tilt-a-whirl and guessing weights on Jupiter said we should take them up on their offer. I told him to never go against his family again!”

 

Then as if reading from a copious Coppola script he added “I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”He paused for that dramatic pregnant pause so cliche in film, then continued as an old vinyl record stuck in a groove “I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Yucatan, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything – everything I did, everything you saw – because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Yucatan, you will do this for me.The horror! The horror!”

 

I felt like a grocery clerk at a checkout stand waiting for the customer to indicate paper or plastic. I sat quietly enjoying the opiated rush that soon consumed me as his monologue droned on...and on...and on. “I know you have blood on your hands Yucatan. You must, I am never wrong about these things.”Col. Kurtz, as revolutionary Ed Wood, Jr. now called himself had frayed internal wiring and his mental connections no longer were traveling the same circuits.

 

He went rogue while fomenting revolution along with his compadre Che Stadium on the planet Castroid with a band of hired juvenile mercs, escaped runaway Regulators. His focus got lost but he, Che and their army of delinquents found the rift in a strange vortex that had many escape hatches. One led to present day Robotia where he developed an army of annihilation aligned with the rebellious Rabbit.“I remember when I was on Castroid during the revolt Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile: a pile of little arms. And I remember I...I...I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot — like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius! The will to do that: perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than me, because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres — these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who have children, who are filled with love — but they had the strength — the strength! — to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. Without judgement! Because it's judgement that defeats us.”

 

I had heard this all before too. I felt I was reincarnated as Charlie Sheen sitting in an opium den waiting for a hooker, except this time I was the hooker.Long Wang noticed the look of fearful consternation on my facial facade. “He’s a genius Yucatan. I served with him in battle. He sees no grey, only black and white. His see only dialectic logic because there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them. He likes you because you're still alive.I mean, what are they gonna say about him, when he's gone, huh? What are they gonna say? Are they gonna say "he was a kind man"? "He was a wise man"? "He had plans"; "He had wisdom"? Bullshit, man! What are they gonna do when he's gone? One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions – what are you going to land on – one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.”

 

I was trapped in a room loaded on opium with a space cadet Dennis Hopper explaining physics sitting cross legged across from me