The Star-Spangled Future Page 8

  “Take two and hit to right, you can’t go wrong,” he whispered, and disappeared up the alley as the illusive meaning of his words reverberated just beyond her grasp.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE QUAINTEST LITTLE TEA-ROOM

  “Quack,” Pauline found herself abruptly observing, The green pill was starting to hit. A creature in a pantsless blue sailor suit scuttled across the alley. Merde! She had been fed Duck Tranquilizer again. Back on Orchard Street, everyone had sprouted bills and walked with a waddle.

  “Help!” she telepathically wailed. Soundwise, it was just another “Quack.”

  Nevertheless, a moment later, the Quicksilver Kid appeared, this time in a flash of ectoplasm and dressed as Uncle Scrooge.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…” he sang in a computer voice as he proffered a handful of dry corn, which Pauline gobbled up with her long yellow lips. She quacked one more time, and then Duckville faded into the morning mist like Brigadoon.

  “When do I—”

  “When shrimps learn to whistle,” the Kid said, and vanished.

  “Arf!” observed Sandy.

  Turning, Pauline bumped behinds with a fat lady in a leopard skin coat who was scrutinizing a box of used rupture-easers through a whale-bone pince-nez.

  “Mother!”

  “Pauline, my only!” Mother exclaimed. “Still wearing that tacky old mink.”

  Actually, Pauline wasn’t her only, but her brother Ogden had been disowned when, after eschewing the family product for thirty days in order to cop out of his induction physical, he had found that he liked what he called “The Rousseauian innocence of me unwiped arse.” Poor Ogden had been banished to the nether reaches of Harvard Law School.

  “We must have lunch together my precious,” Mother declared. “I’ve discovered this quaintest little tea-room in Chinatown.” So saying, Mother summoned her peach-colored Rolls, chauffeured by a bearded Cuban in matching livery, and whisked Pauline downtown to an alleyway off a hidden muse off an unknown sidestreet in the labyrinth of mysterious Chinatown, where she rapped three times with the ivory head of her umbrella on a graffitied green door.

  A leering Chinese in a blue Mao suit admitted them to a large low-ceilinged room smogged with opium smoke. Racks of straw pallets climbed the walls, each supporting a comatose lotus-eater. A Nubian giant with a panga strapped to his waist passed the pipe around. A cockfight was being held in the far corner, and close by their table, Peter Lorre dropped a cageful of hamsters one by one into a tank of piranhas, giggling delicately. Arabs shot themselves up with syringes of black petroleum. A spirited auction of machineguns was taking place. Tarantulas scuttled across the floor, gingerly avoiding islands of broken glass, A befezzed Turk expired loudly with a scimitar in his back as they sat down.

  “Isn’t it darling?” Mother said as an Albanian dwarf brought evil-smelling cups of thick green tea. Mother sighed. “It’s only a matter of time before Cue Magazine discovers the place and utterly ruins it.”

  Pauline took a gulp of tea and retched. Peyote. “The usual,” Mother told the waiter. She slugged down half her cup of peyote tea. A peglegged pirate with a green vulture perched on his shoulder sat down at the next table, ordered grog, leered at them with his one bloodshot eye, and motioned a quartet of Arabs to him with his rusty hook.

  A dead bat fell from the ceiling onto their table; Mother daintily picked it up with her chopsticks and dropped it onto the floor. “You really must let me choose a new wardrobe for you at Lord and Taylor’s,” she said. “You’ll never make a decent match looking like that. And Antonio absolutely must redo your hair!”

  The Albanian waiter angrily slammed a huge steaming platter of gray rice and stewed fish-heads down on the table. “Death to the revisionist lap-dogs of the Wall Street blood-suckers,” he observed. “Henry Kissinger eats the hairy canary.”

  “You may go now,” Mother told him, noblesse obligewise. She popped a smiling carp-head into her mouth and swallowed it with crunches and gurgles. “Absolutely authentic,” she said, spitting a single fish-eye onto the plate. “I must get the recipe before we leave, do remind me, my precious.”

  Pauline poked nervously at her food with a single chopstick. Something about the place disquieted her—it was all so… so pseudo.

  “You’re not eating, child,” Mother said. “You must eat your food.” She picked up a fish-head with her chopsticks and shoved it in Pauline’s face, “Eat it!” she commanded, blushing scarlet.

  A vein pulsed purplely in her temple. “EAT IT!” she roared. “EAT IT, OR I’LL CRAM IT DOWN YOUR THROAT!”

  “May we join you, ladies?” the one-eyed pirate asked, catching mother under the throat with his hook. An Arab conked her over the head with a baseball bat and stuffed her into a gunny sack. “The Sultan will pay well for this one, Black Pete,” he promised. “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” shrieked the vulture.

  “Arr, what about the little girly?” Black Pete slavered, cuffing the bird with his meat hand.

  “I’ll take her on consignment,” the Arab said, and Pauline found herself held aloft by the feet and dropped into a burlap darkness smelling of moldy potatoes.

  CHAPTER SIX: MAMELUKE OF EXXON

  “Well, it’s not the Plaza, but it does have a certain raw charm,” Mother said, leaning back against a mountain of plush velvet cushions and sipping grapejuice from a silver chalice. The huge tent was hung with Persian tapestries; a whole camel was being turned on a spit; gold trays of sweetmeats were everywhere; forty-seven beautiful women in harem costumes lounged about on pillows, plucking their eyebrows, teasing their hair, popping chewing gum and reading Silver Screen. A eunuch in red-and-green pantaloons dropped myrrh and frankincense on a charcoal brazier; another stood at the tentflap stroking a Thompson submachinegun.

  “Daddy will be livid,” Mother said. “I was supposed to meet him at the Forum at six. He’ll probably get drunk and be picked up by some hooker. Just wait till I get him home, the beast!”

  Mother fingered her mauve harem flimsies distastefully. “As for this,” she said, “they must’ve picked it up at Klein’s. And it absolutely clashes with my eyeshadow!”

  There was a flourish of off-key trumpets beyond the tentflap, a roll of tin drums, and then a reedy muzzein’s voice proclaimed: “His Sultanic Majesty, Al-Arad-Al-Bul-Abdul-Ben-Dar-Kamir, Lion of the East, Sheik of the Burning Sands, Mameluke of Exxon, the Last of the Red Hot Lovers!”

  Pauline looked up expectantly as the harem pressed their collective forehead to the Bigelow on the floor, and Mother raised her pince-nez, the better to regard the countenance of the fabulous sheik. “I’ll bet he looks just like Rudolf Valentino, my precious,” she cooed.

  Through the tentflap came a stooped, emaciated little figure wearing tan Bermuda shorts and an Aloha shirt. His gray hair was greased into a pompadour-and-DA with a pound and a half of Vaseline. His pop-eyes, set a quarter of an inch apart, rolled in their sockets like spastic ball-bearings. Green drool spewed from his toothless mouth with which he furiously gummed a soggy green cigar.

  “Pussy,” slavered the Sultan. “Pussypussypussy! Me want me pussy!”

  His eyes chanced to fall on Pauline, and with a magnificent effort managed to stay there, staring at her like a frog’s. He gummed his cigar to bits, spat out the fragments, and with a long warty tongue, licked at the pimple on the tip of his nose. “Pussy!” he howled, and scuttled across the tent towards her.

  “QUICKSILVER!” Pauline screamed on all psychic wavelengths. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”

  From somewhere came the dopplering hoot of an approaching train whistle. A moment later, an eight-wheeled black iron locomotive burst through the fabric of the tent, bellowing steam, throwing red-hot cinders, and tossing Al-Arad-Al-Bul-Abdul-Ben-Dar-Kamir into a brass spittoon with its cowcatcher.

  In the driver’s cab was the Quicksilver Kid, wearing an Israeli general’s fatigues, and a black patch over one eye. As the locomotive roared through the tent, he leaned dow
n, snatched up Pauline, and bore her off into the trackless sun-seared wastes of the Arabian desert, singing “The Wabash Cannonball.”

  “When do I get to ball you, oh Djin of the Desert?” Pauline asked, as the Kid held her against the outside of the locomotive cab, steering nimbly with one hand. The encampment of the Sultan disappeared behind a horizon of endless dun sand dunes as the locomotive chugged merrily on into the horse latitudes of the desert sea.

  “Inside the gates of Eden,” the Kid said, depositing her on a sandy wavecrest. “Listen to the rumble, the lightning and the roar…” he sang in a hillbilly voice as the locomotive turned and disappeared into a convenient mirage.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM

  For what seemed like the proverbial forty days and forty nights (forty years? She was not really up on Occidental religions), Pauline wandered in the desert under a klieg-light sun that never seemed to set, sustaining herself on random patches of psychedelic manna and the warm bottles of Coke littering the pristine desert sands. Long gone was her mink, her civilized persona, and about fifteen pounds of shapely flesh.

  But as the desert sun tanned her skin, bleached her hair to starlet blond, wrung her dry like a Turkish towel, etched all surplus meat from her bones, and leeched her consciousness of all save the sparkly sand, golden sun, and baby blue sky, her spirit, her prana-energy, the essence of her Paulineishness, began to soar. Heat waves enveloped her in a perpetual silver aura. Her head seemed large enough to at last contain the cosmos. A clean sweat anointed her body with holy oil. The world was filled with light.

  Satori flirted at her fingertips. Raga-rock rang in her ears. She felt herself closer than ever before to the ineffable oneness of it all, tiny lightning flashes of energy arcing between the Universal Mind and the points of her nipples, the golden tips of each strand of hair. Sipping warm Coke and striding like a goddess from dune to dune, she felt it was only a matter of time before the Connection was finally made.

  Visitations appeared from out of the endless mirror mirage of the desert, travelled silently with her apace, then faded back into the shimmering void. An Englishman in a burnoose riding a camel. Country Joe and the Fish. The Maharishi. Mr. Natural. George Harrison. Mandrake the Magician. Yogi Berra. Winnie the Pooh.

  Finally, with the inevitability of a Henny Youngman punchline, the Garden hove into sight, floating beyond the next ridge of sand dunes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: INSIDE THE GATES OF EDEN

  Palm trees and junipers. Christmas trees dripping with sugar-plums and frosted with cocaine snow. Rivers of lemonade and pools of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Soft green grass and Beatles Muzak. Hillocks of Baskin-Robbins Jamoca Almond Fudge ice cream. And under the mother-of-pearl gateway, an honest-to-Judy-Garland yellow brick road leading into the interior.

  As Pauline followed the yellow brick road, munchkins giggled from behind banks of rosebushes, pink and white bunny rabbits gamboled beside her, patchouli incense wafted from giant lavender orchids, Bambi darted across her path, lions played jacks with lambs.

  In the center of the Garden was an azure lake. In the center of the lake was a small island, lawned like an English park. In the center of the island grew a tall tree, heavy with bright red apples and festooned with No Trespassing signs. Under the tree grew a giant mushroom embellished with bright psychedelic scrimshaw like a Fillmore poster. Atop the mushroom sat the Quicksilver Kid, naked except for a golden loincloth.

  CHAPTER NINE: WHEN THE SWALLOWS COME BACK TO HOBOKEN

  As Pauline swam through the warm water, shrimp in its limpid depths began to whistle “Bolero”. And she knew at last the swallows were returning to far-off Hoboken.

  Glistening, Pauline emerged from the lake and walked across the lawn to the kid’s mushroom. Sinuously, he debarked from it and stood before her.

  His hair was a Buddha’s silver mandala. His ice blue eyes were lidded with wisdom. His ears had grown to the Bodhisattva-like magnificence of a Lyndon Johnson’s. The transcendental hush was broken only by the OM-like chant of bright neon hummingbirds.

  “At last,” Pauline said. “At last my search is over.” For the moment of Enlightenment was surely at hand. Golden light was the world.

  “The time to hesitate is through,” the Kid sang. “Got no time to wallow in the mire…”

  With a tremulous hand, Pauline drew aside his golden loincloth, the last veil of maya, and beheld—

  A pelvis as smooth and featureless as a Barbie Doll’s.

  “You can’t always get what you want,” sang the Quicksilver Kid, ascending skywards on a royal blue cloud.

  “Arf!” said the faithful Sandy, who had appeared at her side. Poit! Satori! It was time to return to Hoboken.

  Introduction to

  The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

  This story was first conceived as a fantasy movie extravaganza with a cast of thousands and a budget the size of the national debt. “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” remained an unmakeable movie and an unwriteable story until I met Jerry Cornelius or Michael Moorcock or whoever.

  As a film spectacular, it would be a studio-breaker, and as a story it had no central character, since lack of a centrality was part of the point.

  When I arrived in London, however, I found that a literary experiment was going on aimed at playing with this very notion of lack of centrality, among other things. Michael Moorcock had written a novel called The Final Program, the first part of a tetralogy, in which he created the character of Jerry Cornelius and “stated the themes” of a kind of four part novelistic symphony. In the three succeeding novels, he would use all this material as unstated mythic substructure so that subsequent “Jerry Cornelius stories” would be structured by allusion to an “artificial myth” that was not necessarily in the readers’ repertoires. At the center might be void.

  Mike not only wrote the four novels, not only wrote many Jerry Cornelius stories in addition to the books, not only called into being a Jerry Cornelius movie and a Jerry Cornelius comic strip, but encouraged over half a dozen other writers to write “their Jerry Cornelius story.”

  How did he do this? It’s very hard to explain. Each of us had our own different reasons for participating in Mike’s weird experiment. In my case, Jerry Cornelius gave me a bankable dark star and turned “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde” into a shootable story.

  Or would you rather buy a duck?

  The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

  Eastward across the Gobi, three hundred old men ride upon three hundred shaggy, wizened Mongolian ponies. The ponies, like their riders, are the tag-end of a dying breed. The men are dressed in filthy, cracked, badly-tanned leathers. Across their backs are strapped short Mongolian bows; swords dangle from their waists and they carry lances in their horny hands as they ride toward the sunrise.

  In the dingy storefront on Sullivan Street identified as the D’Mato Social Club by the peeling green letters on the fly-specked translucent area above the black-painted area of the plate glass window that hid the cave-like interior from the view of casual assassins in the street, Jerry Cornelius, a not-so-casual (or in his own way a more casual) assassin, sat on a gray-enameled metal folding chair facing a gnarled old man with a Jimmy Durante nose across the cracked surface of a rickety card-table. Jerry wore a carefully-dated black suit, a black silk shirt, a white tie, and white boots. His black vinyl raincoat was draped across a counter which paralleled one wall of the room and which held a display of candy bars and a cardboard showcase of De Nobili cigars. Behind the counter hung a faded photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt framed in black. The man with the Jimmy Durante nose was smoking a De Nobili and the semipoisonous smoke that he blew across the table was clearly designed to blow Jerry’s cool. Jerry, however, had expected this, and as a counter-measure kept his violin case close at hand. It seemed a draw.

  “This is a big one, Cornelius,” the old man said.

  “Flesh is flesh, Mr. Siciliano,” Jerry replied. “Metal is metal.”
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br />   “Have you ever hit a Cabinet-level official before?”

  Jerry pondered. “It’s open to doubt,” he finally admitted. “I got a head of state once, but it was a benevolent despotism.”

  The old man chewed his cigar, much to Jerry’s disgust. “It’ll have to do,” he said. “You’ve got the contract. How soon can you be in Sinkiang?”

  “Three days. I’ll have to change passports again.”

  “Make it two.”

  “I’d have to pull strings. It’ll cost you.”

  The old man shrugged. “Do it,” he said.

  Jerry grinned. “My motto, Mr. Siciliano. Who’s the contract on?”

  “Mao Tze Tung’s heir-apparent.”

  “Who’s that these days?” Jerry asked. The situation in China had gotten somewhat muddled.

  “That’s your problem,” Durante-nose said.

  Jerry shrugged, “And my cover?”

  “Arrange it yourself.”

  Jerry got up clutching his violin case, ran his hand through his great bush of blonde natural, retrieved his raincoat, took a De Nobili from the counter, and said with an evil smirk: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The railroad train consisted of a locomotive, a sealed boxcar, three flatcars and a caboose. The boxcar contained one ton of (uncut?) heroin. The open flatcars held three hundred members of the People’s Army of China armed with machine-guns, protected from the elements by the thought of Chairman Mao. The caboose held the negotiating team. The locomotive was a diesel job.

  “You’ll be working with the Russians on this, Inspector Cornelius,” Q said. “Our interests happen to coincide.”

  Jerry frowned. The last time he had worked with a Russian, he had contracted the clap. “I don’t trust those buggers,” he told Q.