The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  He kicked irritably at a rock, then heard the phone ringing in the house. He went inside, plopped down in the black leather director’s chair by the phone stand, picked up the living room extension, and grunted, “Yeah?”

  It was Wally Bruner.

  “What’s going on, Bill? I haven’t heard from you in nearly two months, ever since you started in on that matter we discussed. I heard you’d started shooting three weeks ago, so I knew you weren’t dead, but why haven’t you gotten in touch with me? Did you get what you went there for?”

  Marvin stared out of the picture window into the garden, where the late afternoon sunlight cast shadows across scraggly patches of lawn under two big eucalyptus trees. Two dun-colored morning doves had ventured out of their wooded seclusion to nibble at seeds in the glass and gobble moodily to themselves like dowager aunts.

  “What are you talking about, Wally?” Marvin said vacantly.

  “Damn it, you know! Golden Groves. Harry Krell. Are we ready to proceed?”

  Suddenly glowing bubbles of pastel shimmer were drifting languidly up through a viscous wine-colored liquid, and Marvin smelled the sweet aroma of perfect sunset; just for the tantalizing fraction of a moment, and then it was gone.

  Marvin sighed, blinked, smiled.

  “Forget it, Wally,” he said. “I’m dropping the whole thing.”

  “What? Why on earth—”

  “Let’s just say that I went up on a mountain, came down, and want to make sure it’s still there.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Bill?”

  “What the vintners buy,” said Marvin.

  “Bill, you sound like you’ve flipped.”

  “I’m okay,” Marvin said. “Let’s just say I don’t give a damn what Karen spends her alimony on as long as I have to pay it, and leave it at that. Okay?”

  “Okay, Bill. That’s the advice I gave you in the first place.”

  After he hung up on Bruner, Marvin sat there looking out into his garden where ordinary dun-colored birds were pecking at a scruffy lawn, and the subtle gray tinge of smog was barely apparent in the waning light.

  He sighed once, shuddered, shrugged, sighed again. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of Golden Groves.

  Introduction to

  The Perils of Pauline

  Living back in the Big Apple for the first time in years. East-West culture schlock. Heavy sexual and karmic currents. Nevertheless objects of caricature jump out of the landscape. Sidewalks of New York, yellow brick road of the mind.

  Sanity seemed to call for a Busby Berkeley version…

  The Perils of Pauline

  CHAPTER ONE: NEVER TRUST A GYPSY CABBIE

  The telephone woke Pauline from tantalizing dreams of golden light pouring down over azure hills like hot butterscotch sauce over blueberry ice cream. Her head felt like a parade ground for the Wehrmacht and her mouth tasted like an old catcher’s mitt—someone had slipped ipecac into her coke—but the phone bell drew her to it like a Tibetan gong summoning monks to prayer. She staggered across the painter’s loft in cruel early morning light and found the instrument under a pile of evil-smelling paint rags. The fumes gave her a thirty second scopolomine flashback as she fished out the receiver.

  Her sixth (seventh? It was hard to keep count) sense had not betrayed her. It was Caspar Johns summoning her to a yoga lesson. She hastily abluted herself with a lukewarm shower and a bottle of sesame oil she found in the roach-infested kitchen, threw her mink (a gift from the Quicksilver Kid, her djin godfather) around her naked body, and staggered down four flights of ominous stairs into the gray streets of lower New York, empty at this obscene hour save for an occasional bum blissfully asleep in his doorway. Extending her aura into a golden beam, she caused a cab to materialize from Canal Street. A gypsy cab, of course. Driven, of course, by a gypsy: Marlene Dietrich out of Golden Earrings.

  “I see a tall lean man in your future,” the cabbie said as they tore up Sixth Avenue, “driving a Stalin tank.”

  Caspar? Pauline wondered. It hardly seemed his style. Must be the Quicksilver Kid. The Kid never appeared on the same charger twice, whereas Caspar, for all his worldly success, drove a Volkswagen camper equipped with a glycerine-filled waterbed and embellished by Hari Krishna freaks with shaky designs out of the Bhagavad Gita.

  Pauline forced her psychic attention away from the unattainable Quicksilver, and onto Caspar, whom she had met through the gift membership in the Guru of the Month Club given her last Christmas by her father, the Toilet Paper King of Sheboygan Wisconsin. December, January, February, March, and April had all been duds, but Caspar had proven to be worth the subscription. Author of How To Mold a Prehensile Penis (“Taught Nixon all he knew, child”), Caspar Johns had a softly muscular body and a thousand tasty little tricks. Satori seemed just as far away as ever, but Pauline could at least count on a blissful fifty minutes. (Caspar worked a fifty minute hour, like her shrink, Dr. Blackwish.)

  At Caspar’s West Village apartment house, she tossed Marlene a 50 zloty note and a Frank Perdue chicken, bustled past Billy Budd the beach boy doorman, and hurried up to Caspar’s apartment, where she got her card in the timeclock just on the stroke of ten.

  CHAPTER TWO: LIGHT ON THE MUSTARD

  Caspar’s living room was tastefully done up in framed Peter Max posters, Early Jack Kerouac antiques, and uptown garbage collages. The Great Man himself awaited her, his godlike body shrouded from neck to toes in a long black cloak. She had never before noticed how much his isolated head resembled that of William F. Buckley, Jr. “Welcome child,” Caspar said. “Let us hasten to the meditative chamber. I’ve an appointment with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at eleven.” Leapin’ Lizards! Pauline thought as Caspar ushered her into the bedroom. He sounds like Buckley too!

  The bedroom was all business: Madras tapestries from Azuma, a waterbed, a single glowing candle, an icon of Albert Ellis. But as she drew off her mink, Pauline could not escape the dread feeling that Gore Vidal was looking on from somewhere.

  She positioned herself on the waterbed in the lotus position, but as Caspar disrobed, she saw that something was horridly amiss. His Apollolike member was all green and warty; it looked just like a cucumber!

  Seeing her distress, Caspar flicked his tongue around a serpentine smile, and lifted the tip of the thing with thumb and forefinger, like one handling a very dead fish. Beneath the green cylinder was the genuine article, and Pauline thereby realized that it was in fact a cucumber, strapped around his shapely waist and buttocks dildo-fashion.

  “We have progressed to the stage of the vegetative yab-yum ceremony, child,” Caspar said, folding himself into lotus position before her. “Trust me. I shall prepare your yoni for the lingam.” So saying, he arched gracefully toward her, and with a few chameleonlike darts of his subtle tongue, anointed her with a secretion strangely not unlike Prof. Himmelfarb’s Wonderous Snake-Oil.

  “We begin,” he said, inserting the capacious cucumber into her yoni with the aid of an obsidian shoehorn. “You ain’t gonna believe this, kid, but if you are truely worthy, the walls of thy yoni and the pureness of thy heart will in the passage of” (he checked his Rolex) “forty-eight minutes transform this humblest of vegetables into that paragon of transcendant lingamhood, a kosher pickle. Thus will you achieve satori.”

  Caspar wiggled his buttocks once, then assumed the Buddhalike stillness of true yab-yum and stared at her with his beagle-lizard eyes. “Meditate,” he ordered. “Concentrate on the godhead. Fill your being with the essential sourness of Vishnu’s Shiva aspect. Think of Katz’ Delicatessen. Open yourself to true communion with my own ineffable being, let me be the Gulden’s mustard on your pastrami sandwich.”

  Earnest as always, Pauline did as she was bade. Or tried to. But insidious thoughts kept disturbing her meditations. Lines from Bob Dylan songs. Gypsy prophecies. Daddy’s latest creation, Duck Down Delight. Smokey Stover cartoons. Myra Breckenridge. God help her, Lobster Newburg on white toast poin
ts. How Protestant can you get? she thought mournfully. Will I never achieve satori. Will I never attain the pure golden light? Am I doomed to wander the Earth eternally like Little Orphan Annie, without even a Sandy’s arf to recenter my being? Oh Lord Jesus, where is thy Punjab, oh Daddy, where is the Asp?

  Time, as its habit, passed. Caspar’s gaze remained inscrutable; was he meditating upon Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the bitch, or was he, unlike her, actually succeeding in filling his being with the essence of Katz’ Delicatessen? Occasionally, Pauline felt a twinge within her, as of cucumber transforming itself into the holy substance, but her attention wandered, her faith failed.

  Finally, the alarm on Caspar’s watch sounded, and, with a sound like a beer-bung, he withdrew the lingam from her yoni. Unstrapping it from his body, he nibbled thoughtfully at its tip. Purple rage contorted his aristocratic features. He gobbled angrily at the green cylindroid with teeth that Pauline suddenly noticed had become razor-sharp and pointed.

  Spitting fragments of pickle, he screamed: “A sweet gherkin! After all we’ve meant to each other, you insult me with a sweet gherkin! You have failed! I thrust you into the outer darkness, Whore of Sheboygan!” The room filled with a Jovian thunderhead. Lightnings crackled. Horns sprouted on Caspar’s brow.

  “But first, I must take holy vengeance,” he hissed, snapping at her treasonous snatch.

  “Get away from me, you creep!” Pauline shouted, vaulting off the bed, grabbing up the candle, and battering at Casper as the holy man, slavering, chased her around the meditative chamber, running now on all fours.

  From somewhere, came the clattering roar of helicopter vanes, and a moment later, the Quicksilver Kid, ice-blue eyes, hair in the usual chrome-colored afro, burst through the fifth story window, wearing the natty scarlet and brown uniform of the Northwest Mounted Police and brandishing an antique Sten-gun. “I’m Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines…” he sang, firing a burst of automatic weapons fire into the waterbed, which began to bleed a clear viscous goo.

  Caspar squealed, gibbered, and avaunted into a clothes-closet, locking the door behind him.

  “Where the hell were you?” Pauline demanded.

  “My Stalin tank threw a tread on Houston Street,” the Quicksilver Kid said. “When are they going to fix those potholes?”

  “Never trust a gypsy cabbie,” Pauline sighed.

  The doorbell rang. Pauline answered it, and a bull dyke in a Western Union uniform handed her a telegram and tweaked her nipple. It was from Houlihan O’Rourke, the Poet Laureate of Canarsie:

  “I need my muse

  And don’t forget the booze.”

  “He needs me!” Pauline cried delightedly. “Give me a lift to the East Village, Quicksilver.”

  The Kid held his finely-chiseled nose. His blue eyes twinkled. His silver curls twanged like a thousand miniature sprung sofa-springs; his disdain was all too apparent. “For you, oh Princess of Sheboygan,” he said, “even that.” He threw her mink around her, grabbed her up by the waist, and leapt out the shattered bedroom window, catching the last rung of the helicopter ladder with a negligent hand. “Up, up and away!” he shouted at the pilot.

  “When do I get to ball you?” Pauline asked for the thousandth time.

  “When the swallows come back to Hoboken,” the Kid answered as they ascended skywards. At least he never gave the same answer twice.

  CHAPTER THREE: A GUINNESS GOODNIGHT IN LONDONDERRY TOWN

  Pauline arrived at O’Rourke’s lair lugging two fifths of Old Bushmill’s. O’Rourke lay on his sprung sofa in an Oscar Wilde pose swilling Romilar from the bottle and coughing consumptively. A notepad and a Bic Banana with a goosefeather taped to it accented the crotch of his threadbare dressing gown.

  “My daemon has deserted me,” he moaned as Pauline kicked her way towards him through the debris of the living room. “I’m out of booze. I’ve been smoking kitty litter.” As she knelt reverentially beside him, Pauline noted that the breath of the Poet Laureate of Canarsie did in fact smell like a catbox.

  How the poor creature did suffer for his art, how she envied the knife-sharp goad of Olympus that drove his consciousness through the nether pits, the better to hone what was left of his purified mind for the holy task of carving truth out of gladly suffered pain! Would that it had been given to her to wallow heroically through the quagmire of maya towards that bright and distant shore! As it was, what was she but heiress to a Toilet Paper empire, fairy godchild to the Quicksilver Kid, seeker after sweet nirvana that seemed forever beyond her Midwestern grasp, enemy to those who make her an enemy, friend to those who have no friend.

  Feebly, O’Rourke stroked her coal-black hair. “Ah, my flower of delight, you have come to succor me in my hour of darkest despair,” he sighed. “Oh tempura, oh mores!” He snatched a whiskey bottle out of her hand. “Gimme!” he grunted, ripping out the stopper with his powerful teeth, and gargling down a third of the contents.

  As the poet drew sustanence into his ravaged being, Pauline glanced at the lines of verse scribbled on his notepad. The deathless words had all been written atop each other, layer after layer on the same line. Pauline sighed. She had done the same thing, taking a sociology final on mescalin during her junior year at Vassar. It drew her soul towards him with dim maternal longings.

  “Let me give what it is in me to give,” she said, removing pad and pen, parting his dressing gown, and shooing a cockroach gently out of his navel. “Let me suckle in some small way the splendors of your creation.”

  “Sure kid,” the poet said, still chugalugging the bottle of Old Bushmill’s. “I can always use a good suckling. If the flesh is willing, as it were,” he added uncertainly.

  Pauline set to her noble if under the circumstances formidable task with holy dedication. She drew on her full resources, cycling her prana energy up from all chakras into the halolike interface between her lips and the quill of the Poet Laureate of Canarsie, She called upon the powers of the universe to fill her with their transcendent strength, to come to her aid in this moment of need. From somewhere, the pure golden light began to fill her, and she felt a tremulous communion with that which she had lifelong sought, the tentative tendrils of the Cosmic Connection.

  Never before had she felt this close to total union with the unattainable. “Oh children,” the voice of Mick Jagger sang in her head, “it’s just a shot away…” And while O’Rourke’s limp flesh showed no signs of joining her in that land over the rainbow, the poet did give an ecstatic moan, and take up pad and Bic Banana. “Oh yeah, I feel it!” he cried. “The muse returneth.” And he began to recite in barroom stentor:

  “Twas a Guinness goodnight in Londonderry town

  The world was opening up as the bars were shutting down…”

  All at once, the crystalline light was shattered by a commotion bursting through the door. “O’Rourke! At last I’ve found you!”

  “Daddy!” Pauline groaned, as she looked up to see her gray-haired father, clad in a black pinstripe suit, making his way towards the couch.

  “Pm the President of Feather-Bright Bathroom Tissue of Sheboygan Wisconsin,” Daddy declaimed, “and I’ve got a commission for you. We’re starting a new line called Epic Bathroom Parchment, a thousand wipes to a roll, and a heroic quatrain on each and every one of them! I’ll pay you three dollars a panel.”

  O’Rourke beamed at him, “Enlightenment for the masses as they wipe their asses,” he exclaimed, handing Daddy the severely-depleted bottle. “I’ll be the Baudelaire of the Bathroom!”

  Daddy poured himself a shot into a Dixie cup that he produced from a jacket pocket, downed it, and noticed Pauling kneeling at the foot of the erstwhile Baudelaire of the Bathroom.

  “You’ve done it again, Daddy,” Pauline sighed.

  “Oh hullo Pauline,” Daddy said mildly. “I’ve got a present for you in the car. A nice friendly doggie. His name is—”

  “Don’t tell me—Sandy.”

  “My little girl is psychic,” Daddy
said paternally, tilting his head proudly at O’Rourke.

  CHAPTER FOUR: TAKE TWO AND HIT TO RIGHT

  Out on the street again, trailed by a threadbare j orange mutt with undotted eyeballs, Pauline accepted the homage of a green pill proffered by an aging hippie, tore up a few random parking tickets, read her fortune in a puddle of spilt beer, wandering south across Houston onto pushcart-choked Orchard Street, still searching for the ineffable. Which Daddy had once more snatched from her butterfingered grasp. “Arf,” the dog commiserated, but she found that his word of wisdom moved her not a silly millimeter closer to true centeredness. One more legend down the willy-hole!

  A bearded old man in a beaver hat and black frock coat accosted her confidentially from between a fruit cart and a stand purveying slightly defective rubber underwear. “Secrets of the Torah, kiddo, and for you, dirt cheap!”

  She followed his crooked finger into a convenient alleyway. He unbuttoned his coat and flashed her a scroll sewn into the lining. “It’s all here,” he said. “Wisdom of the ages. Stock market tips. Dynamite recipe for gefilte fish. You name it, I got it, straight from heavies like Solomon and Moses, direct to you for a pittance.”

  “What do you have on nirvana?”

  “What do I have for you on nirvana?” crowed the old sage. “Listen, in here is stuff on nirvana that Gautama Whatshisface got straight from my great-great-great-great-great granduncle Schmuel, his name be blessed. Only fifty kopecks.”

  Forlornly, Pauline searched her coat pockets. “No tengo,” she shrugged.

  “Well then, how about a little sweet potato pie for a hungry old man?”

  Resignedly, Pauline opened her coat, leaned up against a brick wall, arched her pelvis towards him.

  “That’s not a sweet potato pie,” the bearded sage said. “You got maybe a charlotte russe?”

  Seeing her distress, the sage relented. “Okay, for you kiddo, a little spare change, as it were, not that you should think I’m usually a sucker for schnorrers.” He bent close to her ear.