The Star-Spangled Future Page 10

  “As Chairman Mao has said,” the Heir-Apparent threatened, “I may not be the best man in town, but I’ll be the best till the best comes round.”

  Hidden behind a facade of placards, posters, pagodas, dancing paper dragons, hatchet men, schoolchildren performing calisthenics, rioting Red Guards, captured American airmen in chains, opium dens and filthy peasant huts, three hundred soldiers of the People’s Army of the People’s Republic of China girded themselves for a human wave attack.

  “We only deal with you Commie pinko Chink bastards because you’re the only mass suppliers of heroin aside from the Federal narcs that we can find.”

  “As Chairman Mao has said, tough, shit.”

  Ominously, the Meyer Davis orchestra began playing “Hawaiian War Chant.”

  Jerry Cornelius stubbed out his roach and reached for his violin case. “The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things,” he observed as, out on the raft, The Big Boy gave the finger to the Heir-Apparent.

  “Fifty million for the boxcar, take it or leave it,” the Heir-Apparent said.

  The People’s Army Brass Band broke into “Light My Fire” as seven hundred Red Guards doused themselves with gasoline and immolated themselves while singing “Chairman Mao ist unser Fuehrer” contrapuntally, but since they were all off-key, the ploy was a failure.

  “As Al Capone once observed, play ball, or we lean on you.”

  Jerry Cornelius opened his violin case and withdrew a violin. To the untrained observer, it appeared to be merely an ordinary electric violin with self-contained power supply, built-in amp and speaker rated at 100 watts. However, an Underground electronics expert on 150 mg of methedrene had made a significant modification: the high notes registered well into the ultrasonic and the lows were deep down in the subsonic, while all audible frequencies were eliminated.

  When Jerry tucked the violin under his chin and began to play “Wipeout,” the brains of everyone within a five mile radius began to vibrate to the beat of a drummer who was ultra-and-supersonic as well as different and nonexistent. To the naked human ear, Jerry appeared to be playing “The Sounds of Silence.”

  Out on the raft, The Big Boy was growing quite cross as the subliminal strains of “Wipeout” inflamed cells deep within his paretic brain. “Mao Tze Tung eats shit!” he informed the Heir-Apparent.

  “Al Capone was a faggot, according to the infallible thought of Mao Tze Tung!”

  The The Meyer Davis orchestra began to play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  The People’s Army Brass Band immolated their 5 tuba-player.

  As Jerry segued into a subliminal rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel,” fifty slot machines produced spontaneous jackpots. Cadillacs gunned their engines, whores’ poodles howled, thirteen plate glass windows shattered, and every starlet at poolside achieved climax. (Some of them had not come since their first screentests.)

  Hatchet men began chopping at papier-mâché pagodas. A paper dragon set itself on Ere. Three hundred soldiers preparing themselves for a human wave attack began to drool and got erections. Seven hundred chanting kindergarten children achieved satori and began to devour an American flag drenched with soy sauce. A giant poster of Stalin broke into a grin and thumbed its nose at a poster of Mao.

  ! “Mao Tze Tung eats the hairy canary!”

  “The Maf sucks!”

  “Faggot!”

  “Creep!”

  “Chink!”

  “Wop!”

  “ARGH!”

  Salivating, The Big Boy leapt at the Heir-Apparent, chomping his El Ropo Supremo Perfecto Grande to bits, and buried teeth and cigar in the old Chinaman’s beard, setting it aflame. The two men wrestled on the raft, biting, spitting and cursing for a few moments, then toppled each other into the pool, which proved to be filled with crocodiles.

  Pleased with, his work, Jerry Cornelius began to play “Fire.”

  A phalanx of Cadillacs screamed around the pool and barreled into the People’s Army Brass Band spewing machinegun bullets which ripped into a poster of Mao Tze Tung, enraging a rioting mob of Red Guards who set themselves on fire and threw themselves under the wheels of the cars, causing them to skid into a balsa wood pagoda which toppled into the pool in splinters which were devoured by the blood-crazed crocodiles who expired in agony from the splinters in their stomachs some time later.

  Three hundred soldiers of the People’s Army launched a human wave attack, firing their machineguns at random.

  Jerry continued to play “Fire,” seeing no particular reason to change the tune.

  Major Sung shrieked; “Capitalistic running dogs of the demographic People’s revisionist lackeys of Elvis Presley have over-run the ideological manifestations of decadent elements within the amplifier of the pagoda!” and committed harakiri.

  The Rock began smashing slot machines with a baseball bat.

  Starlets tore off their bikinis and chased terrified hatchet men around the poolside.

  The human wave reached the pool, dove in, and proceeded to beat moribund crocodiles to death with their gunbutts.

  A suicide squad hurled itself through the plate glass window of a trailer and devoured the rug.

  Cadillacs circled the boxcar of heroin like hostile Indians, filling the air with hot lead.

  The sopping remnants of the human wave reached the trailer camp and began beating thugs to death with dead crocodiles.

  Red Guards showered the C-5A with ink bottles.

  Tongues of flame were everywhere.

  Explosions, contusions, fire, gore, curses, looting, rape.

  Jerry Cornelius began playing “All You Need Is Love,” knowing that no one was listening.

  Riding eastward across the wastelands on their diseased ponies, something under two hundred decrepit remnants of what once had been the glorious Golden Horde, most of them incoherent with exhaustion, spied a great conflagration on the horizon.

  Flaccid adrenals urged near-moribund hearts to beat faster. They flayed their ponies with the shafts of their spears. Drool flecked the lips of doddards and ponies alike. Their backbrains smelled blood and fire in the air.

  The smells of gunpowder, gasoline, burning balsa wood and papier-mâché, sizzling flesh, gave Jerry Cornelius a slight buzz as he began to play “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly.” The swimming pool was colored a bright carnelian, which did little to mask the chlorine odor. Bits of anodized aluminum struggled to keep afloat amid scraps of charred balsa wood and shards of placards.

  A dented Cadillac careened through a barricade of beach chairs and into a squad of Chinese soldiers beating a starlet to death with copies of the Little Red Book before sliding over the rim of the pool to sink bubbling into the churning depths.

  The pillar of fire consuming the Chinese Disneyland reminded Jerry of the Dresden firestorm. Sentimentally, he began to play “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want To Leave The Congo.”

  In a strange display of gallantry, Red Guards, hit men, capa mafiosas and Chinese soldiers joined hands in a ring around the ruined trailer camp, screaming “Burn, baby, burn!” in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Pidgin, and Yiddish. At each “burn” a canister of napalm dropped from somewhere onto the conflagration.

  Reduced to sentimentality despite himself, Jerry played “God Save The Queen.”

  Two hundred or so pairs of rheumy eyes lit up with feral joy at the sight of a great city (by current Horde standards anyway) going up in flames, at the sight of smashed cars, broken bodies, naked starlets shrieking, and a great pool of what appeared to be blood.

  Weeping great nostalgic tears, the last generation of the Golden Horde shouldered their spears, whipped their ponies into a stumbling gallop and charged in a body into the fray, the image of the Final Massacre burning like a city in the fevered brains of the aged savages:

  Village! Burn! Pillage! Rape! Kill!

  Mongolian ponies wheezing and gasping under them, the crazed doddards reached the conflagration and found to their chagrin th
at there was precious little unburnt, unpillaged, unraped, unkilled.

  They found a boxcar guarded by machinegunners and charged it en masse, sacrificing half their number to impale the befuddled Chinese troops on their spears and set the boxcar aflame. As a strangely-intoxicating aromatic smoke billowed from the burning boxcar, the remnant of the remnant scattered, looking for more things or people to burn, rape, and kill.

  A dozen of the doddards expired attempting to rape an aged whore to death, and another dozen were compelled to shamefacedly trample her to death under the hooves of their ponies, eight of which expired from the effort.

  Fifteen of the Horde had heart attacks trying to beat Cadillacs to death.

  A half-dozen doddards died of broken hearts when the slot machines they were torturing failed to cry out in pain.

  Several of the Horde fell to devouring the corpses of crocodiles and choked to death on the splinters.

  As the last Khan of the Golden Horde watched in senile befuddlement, the great silver bird issued a terribly battlecry and began to move. The doddard’s bleary eyes bugged as the C-5A picked up speed, shot by him, and actually left the ground!

  A feeble nervous impulse traveled spastically from his optic nerve into his brain, and thence to his arm and throat.

  “Kill!” he wheezed asthmatically, and hurled his spear at the unnatural thing.

  The spear was sucked into the intake of the left inboard Jet engine, lodged in the turbine, and shattered it. The jet engine exploded, shearing off the wing. The C-5A nearly completed a loop before it crashed upside-down to the runway and exploded into flames.

  From an aerial viewpoint, the runway and the railroad spur formed a T with a finite bar and an infinite upright, but the only living being in the area did not notice the symbolism. Riding into the sunset on his pony, his back to what in the distance seemed naught but a smoldering refuse-heap, the last Khan of the Golden Horde, sole survivor of the Final Massacre, filled his dying brain with one thought, like a dwindling chord: fulfillment; Golden Horde died in glory; village; burned; pillaged; raped; killed; ancestors proud.

  This thought flared brightly in his brain like a dying ember and then he went to that Great Carnage Heap in the Sky. The wheezing pony tripped over a rock, dislodging the body, which fell to the ground in a twisted heap. A vulture descended, pecked at the body, sniffed, and departed.

  The pony staggered on for a few steps, then halted, its dim brain perhaps mesmerized by the glare of the setting sun.

  The Mongolian pony was still standing there an hour later when Jerry Cornelius, in his pin-stripe suit, porkpie hat, and Italian loafers, wandered dazedly up to it out of the wasteland.

  “Here’s a bit of luck,” Jerry muttered, perking up a bit. (The short-circuiting of his electric violin had seriously vexed him.)

  Jerry mounted the pony, kneed its flanks and shouted: “Git ’em up, Scout!”

  The pony waddled forward a few steps, puked, and died.

  Jerry extricated himself from the corpse, brushed himself off, and consulted a fortune cookie he had secreted in a pocket.

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” the fortune cookie informed him.

  Munching the soggy rice pastry, Jerry trudged off into the setting sun whistling “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, now hear de word of de Lord…”

  Introduction to

  Holy War on 34th Street

  If there is a courtyard of Mammon in New York City, it is Herald Square, a Stonehenge circle of giant department stores. A few years ago, proselytizers for any number of paths to enlightenment took to working the hordes of shoppers who poured across the intersection of Broadway and 34th Street Moonies, and Hare Krishnas, and Scientologists, and Jews for Jesus, and the Lubevitch Society, and a whole gang of others vied in their fervor to preach The Word according to whoever. On a hot summer’s day it came to resemble some Ganges flea market of gurus and movements.

  This, understand, on one of the most screwed-up intersections in Manhattan’s snarling traffic. This story could have erupted at any moment…

  Holy War on 34th Street

  There oughta be a law, or if there ain’t a law, then there oughta be a place where all the loonies can do their thing without driving a poor cop nuts. Like they have in London, where I took the wife and kids on my last vacation—Hyde Park, where all the religious kooks can stand up on their soapboxes and yell at each other without screwing up traffic. We got enough trouble on the streets of New York with stoned out hippies thinking they’re on LA freeways, buses hogging three lanes, crazy cabbies think they own the streets, winos gorking out in the middle of intersections, and trucks parking anywhere they damn please and to tell with all the citizens leaning on their horns behind them. What we sure enough don’t need is thirty-one different flavors of religious fruitcakes crapping up traffic too, let me tell you, Charlie.

  Especially not at 34th Street and Herald Square, which is a traffic cop’s nightmare to begin with. You got Sixth Avenue and Broadway crisscrossing and 34th punching right across both of them, all three being major arteries, islands, and three-way traffic lights and a pattern so confusing that some out-of-town yuk is always panicking and creating a balls-up. It ain’t bad enough, you got Macy’s and Gimbel’s and Korvette’s and a major subway station pumping mobs of pedestrians into the intersection, just to keep things interesting.

  Down on 33rd Street is the McAlpin Hotel, where the Scientology nuts have got a whole floor. A weird-looking crew—got eyes that seem too close together, if you know what I mean, and they like to stare at you with them. There are always a few of them hanging around on the corners trying to rope in the marks with some kind of free aptitude test or something, but that’s for the bunco squad to worry about, they never gave traffic any trouble. Not until, that is…

  No, I think the whole mess really started when the Hare Krishnas staked out the northeast corner of 34th and Broadway. Now even in New York, which is a twenty-four-hour freak-show, the Hare Krishnas are major league weirdos for my money. Barbled-looking kids in orange robes, the guys with their heads shaved, some kind of white gook on their noses sometimes, playing drums and bells and cymbals and dancing up and down and chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare…” Over and over again till you know the words by heart, whatever they mean. They peddle incense and magazines too, but what the heck, there didn’t seem to be any percentage in trying to move kooks like that along as long as they didn’t do it in front of Macy’s and really screw the sidewalks up. Live and let live, right? Wrong, Charlie, as I was to find out the hard way.

  Because eventually the Scientologists got to notice the crowds they were drawing. There would be maybe a dozen or so of these bozos in orange robes chanting, jumping up and down, and staring into space; naturally, they would draw a crowd of shoppers from Macy’s, tourists from Keokuk, hippies from the East Village, and grease from the Bronx and Brooklyn, “Street Theater,” what they call it, and so much of it goes on in New York that we don’t try to bust it up unless it really impedes traffic or starts turning ugly, I mean who wants to turn a little free-lance craziness into something for the riot squad.

  But the Scientologists, working the sidewalks like Orchard Street pullers, started homing in on these crowds of stationary people—easier to run their spiel on marks just standing there than trying to catch them on the fly.

  Trouble was that the Hare Krishnas had their own goods to peddle—magazines and incense and religion—and they were into hard-sell techniques too. While most of them were drawing the crowds with their dingo act, two or three of the least spaced-out types would be pushing incense and magazines and catching citizens in raps.

  Some poor schmuck from out of town comes walking down the street with the little lady, staring up at the Empire State Building or gawking at the free freak-show, and all of a sudden he’s staring into a pair of spaced-out eyes attached to a weirdo in an orange robe saying loudly: “Have you heard about our Lord Hare Krishna?”
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  “Uh…”

  “Are you a religious man?”

  “Ah…”

  “Well then wouldn’t you like to know more about our beautiful Lord?”

  “Uk…”

  “This magazine will tell you, go on, take it, it’s yours!”

  And he hands the mark the magazine, and the guy, who by now wants nothing more than to get the hell away from this nut, nods thank you, and starts to escape.

  At which point he finds the Hare Krishna freak standing in front of his face with his palm out: “That’ll be a dollar.” Maybe six times out of ten, the yuk will give him the buck just to get free.

  Well when the Scientologists started working the same crowd, the scene began to change. They started competing. The same poor schmuck wanders down the street, stops to look, and all of a sudden he is accosted by two loonies.

  “Have you heard about our Lord, Hare Krishna—”

  “Pardon me sir, I’m a student and my school is offering these free personality profile tests to—”

  “—beautiful Lord—”

  “—right around the corner at the Church of Scientology—”

  Both of them trying to stare him down with the same kind of crazy eyes, you know, too close together and too close to his face. “Huh? What? Jeez, Maude—” He starts to freak.

  “Here, take this magazine—”

  “If you’ll just come this way, sir—”

  They start shoving magazines and personality profiles in his puss and grabbing him by the sleeve. “What the—? Buncha crazy people here, come on Iris, let’s go to the top of the Empire State Building or somewheres…” And he brushes the weirdos away and pulls the old lady double-time down the street like a kid’s balloon.

  In the beginning, this was about all that happened, but once it began happening often enough, the Hare Krishnas and the Scientologists started noticing each other. You might think that this was stating the obvious, but Charlie, these were; people who had trouble noticing anything outside their own brands of craziness, let alone each other. It must have taken them at least a week or two to finally realize that the other loonies were costing them customers. And from there to realizing that there was another flavor of nut out there. In that order.