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BLACK
HELICOPTERS EPISODE 36 SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 10:08 PM Santo's
Lounge... Anne was pleased to discover... still had its old killer jukebox -
all shiny wood and chrome, even a holograph of spinning vinyl that cloaked
the compact disc machinery. Heavy on classic Motown... "Baby Love"
fading into "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted", then "What's
Goin' On?” accompanied by a fairly interesting
collection of 60's photos and posters on the wall - some even autographed
(all, however, replicas). But as Anne
and Andy watched not-so-young, not-so-dark professionals on the dance floor
flailing away like bit players in some blanched, geriatric Soul Train special
from their vantage point in a corner booth, self-recognition crept into and
diluted their amusement as inexorably as ice in their half-finished cocktails
melted. |
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"Never thought shit would turn out like
this," Andy reflected. "You know? Used to make fun of my parents with
their Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo... now look at us! Everything on the fuckin' jukebox
sold to sell something, the Beatles, the fuckin' Clash!... and nobody cares.
Laurie Anderson! Johnny Rotten! Bill Withers dies and WalMart
jumps in to pick the bones. Fuckin'
Saudis signed up those old New Doors for their propaganda, light my fire with
OPEC. Advertising... it killed the fuckin' Revolution! That - and the Jesus
freaks, country music, Scientology... just recycled as Q-Anon…”
"All the smart people are dead,
too," he added. "I mean... could you imagine the real John Lennon or
Hendrix in a place like this? Well,
maybe if they were very, very wasted,
tampon hat – drown in your vomit wasted.
Still don't believe they let me in after I told that doorman I wasn’t on
Lockedin, or whatever they call it. Went by three or four times back when it
opened, two years ago when the Sanctuary was paying me a salary and I was
thirsty, and it was always like, sorry man..."
"At least you're dressed for the
occasion now," Anne pointed out, fingering the Conk necklace that had
gotten them past the bouncer. "Shabby, but making an attempt to look
respectable - you're like some associate prof from the U. English, maybe, or history. Working his way
up through the University politics, writing monographs on Chaucer or Grover
Cleveland for little journals nobody reads; denouncing Confederate monuments
along with the rest of the herd, taking sides in academic arguments like for
the symbolists or deconstructionists or multiculturalists. Poor, but aspiring
to tenure. Speaking of which..." she opened her purse, "Glenn
disappeared with all my plastic and personal checks too – couldn’t tap the
bank, but I've found my Coalition expense account checkbook... how much was
that dinner? And that tip to the doorman here.
Don't object, you already told me that money wasn't yours... it was
supposed to go to people at the demo... and Glenn and I can well afford it. He
was just playing with our heads. Do you know how much the CNC pays us, not to
mention this expense account?"
"No! And I don't want to hear
about it... I've seen those vans of yours picking up kids, dropping them off in
the burbs with their coffee cans and Catfish catalogs and Rayna’s Modes propaganda,
signing up Conks, selling lipstick..."
"It works," she silenced
him, signing a hundred dollar check, "like the former President’s
overpriced hats and ninety nine dollar action figures do. The payee's blank... make it out to anybody
you owe money to, or to yourself. Keep the change. It's almost Sunday but it'll clear Monday,
promise! How do you get by, anyway?"
Some depressing mid-70's power-anthem
from an inspirational movie hit the turntable and Andy winced, took the check,
folded it, put it in his well-worn wallet and put that back in a side pocket of
his jacket, still bulging with the paper bag of what remained of Pinhead's cash
settlement. "You're asking me?
When we were getting funded by the block grants, I'd be making, like, two bills
a week… that’s hundreds. Not thousands… and I still had money saved up. Feds
cut us off, so I sold the car... that money lasted awhile, but a mistake, coulda slept in it rather than pay rent. Then Pinhead cuts us off, too. Don't have
many expenses, just my own hotelroom, ciggies, beer... figure I'll move into
the shelter for keeps after this blows over, then I don't know... ghostwrite
term papers for the jocks, plasma factory again. Those people tried to kill me two years ago,
after I complained about their giving out special debit cards only good in a
few places instead of cash… accidentally on purpose stuck their needle into an
artery instead of a vein. Or vice versa,
one of those… you know, they’ll need a lot of plasma for those new modulated high
definition TVs..."
"Not your kind, Andy. If you
believe in the Sanctuary, why haven't you been staying there all along?"
"Because I'm not a bum!" he bristled,
"not yet. I’m a failing social
justice warrior, not a failed
one. Yet. Poverty doesn't make the spirit noble, just
tired and confused. There's not one damn thing heroic about lying on a floor
with fifty other stinking derelicts, babbling and watching the insects and the
time crawl by. Only men ever went from the outhouse to the statehouse were
Nixon, Clinton and Hitler... and look how they turned out! Fact is… I'm already living like a nigger.
Word! And if nothing's going to come of it, I'm tired of living like a
nigger!"
Even though he’d lowered his voice, a
sort of electric current rippled through the minority of the minority patrons
and the politically sensitive of Santo’s, antennae quivering like bugs sensing
the opening of a can of Raid. Anne
recoiled.
"That's an awful thing to say.
You're no... well, Jack says 'nwords', and you’re no Hitler, just a hypocrite,
like all the rest of us. The next step is to step up from being a low-life
hypocrite to being a high-roller hypocrite. Look... you do more time for
sticking up a Burger-Jack than you would for floating half a billion in junk
bonds. Lay off a few mil on the politicians, open up a
bank account in the Ukraine, and you'll even get a Presidential pardon! So
finish your drink and let's get out of here. This music is starting to
suck!"
"Hey... I warned you," Andy
said as she gathered up her belongings. They pushed their way to the door,
where the bouncer was turning away some students with their mouths and IDs
hanging open.
"Yeah, I know the law says you
can drink at 21, but our insurance company says nobody under 25 gets in. Go talk
to your law professor, if you want, but beat it! Come back on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Spoiled kids’ night."
The slummers
slipped out into an urban fantasist's wonderland of cobbled streets and fake
gas lamps shining on the little shops carved into the old, rehabbed brickwork
of a long-dead mill.
"God, this Oldie City crap is
awful!" Anne admitted. "So many franchises! What happened to the Hays Room?"
"Rehabbed into a childcare
center, then went out of business during the pandemic."
"Well at least that’s
something. Used to be something, I
mean... Graceland?"
"Gay."
"Brook's?"
"Fire, eight years ago. Finally
got torn down, along with the whole block, our beer and porno strip. Now it's a
Burger-Jack parking lot."
"Sick!"
"That's just survival. Or
progress," Andy said, "take your pick. World ain't
ending with a bang, even a whimper or a cough... just fizzling out with the
sizzle of a patty of diseased rainforest cow, served up by overqualified
psychotherapy majors... piss-tested middle-aged, trainee sub-minimum waged
surplus Americans... to dolts on rent stamps..."
A voice quivered up from something
huddled in blankets in the doorway of a Shoppe featuring nothing but stone cats
smiling inscrutably behind their steel-gated, security-stickered window...
"Spare change?"
"Fuck off!" Andy slid his
arm through Anne's elbow protectively. "Most of these downtown people
won't even come to the Sanctuary for the free food, even those who can't stand
Malik's sermons. We don't have money for much more than stews with spoiled
dumpster vegetables from the bodegas – the chains have been arresting divers
for trespassing and the City whacks them for six months in lieu of the fifteen
hundred dollar fines they can’t pay - and the bread that gets tossed from the
day-old store goes straight to Malik... this University egghead testifies
against us at Pinhead's last budget hearings, says begging for change to eat at
a Whopper at McDonald's is supposed to be their way of maintaining a last link
with the American dream..."
"Well don't you believe in the
American dream?"
"If it covers up sordid
reality? These guys just want to fuck
things up for everybody, lower the whole world into reflections of themselves,
their personal disease. It's not the money, it's contamination. And
recruitment... they touch you and your
soul catches the disease, brings you closer down to their level. Spiritual Covid. Making a spectacle of yourself to disgust the
world... the last permissible form of protest.
Like Buddhists with nothing left to do but set themselves on fire. That’s why they call the social disease media
going viral. Remember George?"
"Jack Parnell's brother? Oh no...
right, George from the astronomy department... Crazy George," Anne
remembered. "Discovered that comet, but they named it after Dr.
Probst. I thought he died!"
"Yeah, finally... about two years
ago. Took long enough! At least he got his revenge on the U. for rejecting his
thesis and denying tenure fifteen years back... crawled up the ventilation
system in that shabby old Planetarium over spring break, cut his wrists and, by
the time they found him a week or so later, they had to close it down for months until the smell went away.
Wanted to be a scientist without working for Halliburton, but couldn't hack the
necessary grant money, so he found a way to use his own organic biology to get
back at the human race, make them all uncomfortable for a little while. Now
that the age of social swarming is back, everything winds down to random
retaliatory acts of meanness..."
"Washington's full of that!"
Anne agreed. "You can't even go outside for lunch in the spring without a
posse of angry white lesbians demanding you make a fist to support whatever
black person the police shot last, or else some mentally disturbed ragbag
staggering in, touching and spitting at all the plates, saying they're looking
for scraps. Guess it’s no better
here. Ratso
told me how Fanio's closed... they got tired of
throwing these people out, having them come back and the police doing nothing
because they all were black and Pinhead had cut some sort of deal with Malik.
So all the black people working at Fanio's lose their
jobs and have to go out on the streets too... which is why Jack's involuntary
commitment and microchipping laws will put a stop to all that!"
"You really believe that Catfish
shit?" Andy guided Anne around a particularly ripe aggregation of garbage
at the curb... some of the plastic bags were ripped and bleeding filth; cats or
surplus Americans having gotten to them. "All he brings is a new rug to
sweep old problems under. Remember the Half Moon? It's a Houlihan's now."
"What a great place! Those people
from the Maiter Band played there before they got
famous, a lot of people did..."
"Yeah, and by the time you and
Glenn moved on, they were playing on their way down after becoming unfamous again."
"Well it's still a bar,"
Anne squinted, looking across the street to where the green and deep purple
neon flickered among the Shoppes crowded between a BlockHouse
music and video download box on one corner, always open, a Gap on the other
end, closed and For Rent behind its fence. "Is it a chain? Houlihan's...
sounds like one."
"Probably. Upbeat though... only
one allowed per town, that sort of thing. This sleazebag Morrow bought up that
whole block across the street where the used textbook stores were, turned it
yup..."
"Watson Morrow?" Anne
stopped so quickly that Andy's arm was jerked out of hers. "He's Mayor
Potter's patron in the Coalition... they have this business together, Cato
Consulting... like the Libertarian think tank?
After some Roman, I think…"
"Morrow's a Conk?" Andy shook his head.
"You are up to the
knees in it. Let's go in... I'll show you the future after Parnell's
revolution. I thirst, Coalition pays."
They crossed the street and a spectre straggled from out of the shadows of boxes and
dumpsters in the alley next to Houlihan's. "Spare change? Spare anything,
man... a quarter, nickel, a penny..." Andy shut his ears and bidened her shoulder with a protective hand; entered,
finding the place a cheery replica of an ersatz Irish pub, ordered two pints
and two whiskies and put his finger over Anne's lips when they came.
"Now that we're in the heart of Conkland, no more politics! Talk baseball. No? How about
the two of you... ever plan on making things permanent?"
"Uh... not up to me," Anne
replied. "There's always work. Work to be done. What about you?"
"Oh... you ought to know by now.
How did that go... mutts, sluts and nuts, that's Andy?"
"Didn't I have a right to be
mad?" she retaliated. "With a chaser of cynicism..."
"Hard living makes for hard
times," he said, wiping a mustache of porter away with his wrist.
"And in case you haven't missed the fact, we're neck deep into these
just-say-no years we thought would go away decades ago when you made your
decision to go with Glenn and the respectable life. Instead, things just got
sleazy. And drugs and AIDS and plague are just the tip of the Titanic... appetizers,
if you will. No smoking under twenty-one in
"And where does that leave Andy
boy?"
"Remember how we all used to
worship crazy people... chicks who pulled their teeth out and put feathers in their
hair, silver rings through their nipples? Guys who shaved their heads and
quoted German poets?"
Anne put her glass down, leaving a
foam moustache. "God, I can't believe how stupid I used to be..."
"But it was fun, wasn't it?"
"I don't know, I guess... at the
time. I can't... won't answer! Because if it was, then my thinking it wasn't
means I've made a catastrophic mistake in life, and I can't afford mistakes. Good people don't make
mistakes."
"So if they do, they're not good
people anymore? Mark... he certainly wasn't good people, whatever we might have
thought at the time. OK... but his old lady that he chopped up did encourage
him, all the way to the bitter end ... was she good? Or what’s that word… enable him? When he chopped her up the papers... even the
Urinal! that hated everything he did... were full of how good and successful
they used to seem together. Fake
news..."
"You went to the funeral, I
remember..."
"Yeah... I knew the chick. I’d have said woman but she was eighteen,
after all, and Mark was thirty-three, back then. Like Jesus.
Must have been hundreds there, a thousand maybe. Couldn't fit in Saint
Phillip's... had to stand out in the street with loudspeakers. Closed off, no
permit problems there, you may be sure. Hundreds of people like us. Nobody else
like Cobb... except maybe hiding on the inside. So is the free spirit, one who
acts on impulse, a hero? A tragic hero? Some sort of wife-beating American
version of the Taliban? What about the
coward whose cowardice prevents him from ever becoming a monster... does that
make him a good man? Or woman? Beats me! I mean... I was as self-righteous as
anybody out in that street, but isn't someone bragging about how amoral they
are just striking another pose..."
"So if we get back to the
subject, is it safe to say you're not alone... poor, unhappy, confused, maybe,
but..."
"I guess," Andy shrugged.
"And so you're unhappy too?"
Anne rolled the proper Irish whiskey
round her tongue, then raised her pint. "I'm satisfied... not necessarily
happy, nor un-. If I were either, I wouldn't be doing the job. Got to be
doing the job. The job is what makes a container that holds the person, body
and soul, and keeps everything from spilling out, all over the sidewalk... slaintch,” she
exhaled.
And Andy lifted his glass in
agreement. "Arbeit macht frei!"
he toasted. “Slanté!”
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