The Children of Hamelin (26 page)

“And who is
that?”
said the Linda-thing.

“Some crazy hippy he dragged here,” said Ida.

“You’re avoiding the issue,” I informed them. “Don’t you notice that old Harv, the master-programmer of this cuckoo-clock, is changing your piano rolls?”

“Piano rolls?”

“He’s under the influence,” O’Brien said paternally.

“Under the influence of
what?”
said the margarine voice of Ida’s hausfrau friend.

“It is you who are under the influence,” said The Man in Black. “You are all under the influence of the Piano Roll Blues. In fact, you’ve all been incorporated into Old Uncle Harvey’s Black Forest cuckoo-clock mechanism while your backs were turned.”

The aesthetic faggot rolled his pretty blue eyes at me, sucked in a little reverse-kiss: a Brotherhood of Grass secret catacombs recognition signal.

“Cuckoo clock?” Harvey said with a vapid little smile, mistakenly shifting to a humor-the-drunk mode. General metallic laughter from all voice-box systems.

“Come on, Harvey,” I said, “stop putting us on. You’re not in your own cuckoo clock, you’re
outside the mechanism.
You’re changing the piano rolls. You’re punching in a Let’s-Go-To-San Francisco program.”

“Are you all right, Tom?” Harvey said earnestly. “You seem rather—”

“Ah, so this is the world-famous Harvey Brustein!” Robin exclaimed. “You’ve got a funny cartoon going here, man!”

“And who are you, young lady?” Harvey said coldly, appraising her financial potential with a pawnbroker’s eye and finding her wanting.

“I’m not a young lady,” Robin said. “I’m an evil chick and a dope-fiend and a perverted degenerate.”

“Crazy hippy,” said Ida.

“Not as crazy as you are, Prune-face,” Robin said. “Yeah, now I recognize the style—it’s Dick Tracy. Prune-face and B-B Eyes and Flattop and B.O. Plenty. A paranoid narc’s nightmare cartoon.” She studied Harvey. “Hey man,” she told him, “you don’t belong in this cartoon; you’re drawn in the wrong style. You belong in Terry and the Pirates or something—you’re an Oriental Menace.”

“He’s the Programmer,” I explained.

“Programmer...? Oh, I dig—he’s the cartoonist!”

“Who... who
is
this creature?” a quavering girl’s voice said from behind me. My arm brushing Robin’s waist, I turned to face Arlene. She looked silly and unreal in a white blouse and blue skirt and honey-blond hair and those intellectual bullshit glasses—the All-American Semi-Bohemian College Girl. Her jaw was hard and cold as a bear-trap and her green eyes were trying their best to be cool and not making it.

“Arlene,” I said, easing our nasty little threesome out to the periphery of the Mystic Circle, “meet Robin. Robin, meet Arlene.”

The mechanisms around Harvey looked everywhere but where they really wanted to, going into an ignore-the-bad-scene program.

“Interesting...
”
Robin said, studying Arlene like a side of beef. “Not bad.” She smiled pseudo-possessively at me. “I see your taste is totally depraved,” she said.

Arlene opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, like a beached fish. “How... how
could
you?” she finally said unimaginatively. She stared daggers at Robin, who smiled cherubically back.

“How could I
what?”
said the Innocent Man in Black.

Arlene looked around frantically: a signal pleading for Private Words.

“Go make some waves for a while,” I whispered into Robin’s ear and sent her on her merry way with a little secret touch of tongue-to-ear. I shunted Arlene off to a quiet little corner far from the maddening crowd.

“Who
is
that girl?” Arlene hissed at me as I stood with my back against the wall, screened from the party by her rigid, uptight body.

“What do you mean, who is that girl?” drawled The Man in Black. “Name is Robin. She’s an evil street-creature.”

—Over Arlene’s shoulder, I clocked Robin standing over Rich Rossi and Chester White sitting on the floor trying to make the two pimple-things. The pimples were very uptight as Rich and Chester stared up at Robin with drooling eyes—

“You know what I mean!” Arlene said.

“No, I don’t know what you mean. And I don’t think you know what you mean, either.” Was Arlene a clockwork creature wired into the mechanism? I could sense clockwork behind her eyes, but kind of blurry....

—Robin said something to Rich and he went pale. Chester laughed and said something leering to Robin. Robin said something back. Chester turned green. Both of them returned their attentions to the pimples—

“Stop gibbering at me, damn you!” Arlene said. Real unprogrammed tears rusted the mechanisms behind her eyes. Could I freak her out of it, blow the old Piano Roll Blues out of her mind? Shit, if I couldn’t freak hard enough in my present state, I’d never be able to do it straight!

“I’m not gibbering,” I said. “I’m in tune with the harmonic structure of the universe, is all, making me telepathic, homeopathic, and a little psychopathic. Like I know what you really want to ask is: namely, why am I here with Another Woman?”

—Robin talking to another faggot, Mannie Davis, a closet-queen with a wife and a son he found a wee bit too succulent. Rhoda Steiner, Hilda Charles, Claude West, and a few other would-be-hip types looking on—

“You call that creature a woman?” Arlene’s voice mechanism said—clearly a Jealous Cattiness Piano Roll in action. Ambiguity here: Arlene capable of unprogrammed emotion but expressed only through programmed responses. Environment producing spontaneous emotions which immediately get shunted into the gears of Harvey’s cuckoo clock and come out in the form of preprogrammed responses.

“You are jealous,” I said.

—Robin smiled, put her hand square on the secret faggot’s crotch. Mannie Davis smiled sadly (“If only you were a boy, my dear!”), would-be-hip types totally grossed out—

“Of course I’m jealous!” Arlene said. Ah, now
that
was a genuine protoplasmic response! No clockwork there. “Why the hell shouldn’t I be jealous? That take the key to my apartment business and then you show up at a party you know I’ll be at with... with... some crazy unwashed street-bitch!”

“But you didn’t take the key, now did you?”

Arlene hesitated as if her mechanism were trying to come up with an appropriate piano roll and coming up dry. Had The Man in Black succeeded in throwing a monkey-wrench into the clockwork?

—Robin was now talking to Ted over by the beer table. Smiling hot looks at him. Ted was making eyes back. Where was Doris?—

“I just don’t see where you can afford to put down Robin,” I said. “Where do you come off blaming me for being here with her? I asked you to more or less be my woman and you just fed it into the old Foundation clockwork soul-grinder and copped out on me according to some preprogrammed response-pattern. What the hell did you expect?”

“I... I didn’t exactly say no...” Arlene said defensively.

“You didn’t exactly say yes.”

—Robin leaned up against Ted and purred like a pussy. Ted seemed to be enjoying it, but his eyes were all over the room. Looking for Doris? Or me?—

“So because I didn’t take your damn key, you come here with some crazy hippy just to humiliate me?”

—Ted looked our way. I caught his eye. He shrugged at me as Robin fingered his neck. I shrugged him back a go-ahead sign, knowing he wouldn’t. Nasty, nasty!—

“Not
just
to humiliate you,” said The Man in Black. “She also happens to be a groovy chick who’s free as the birds and is an excellent fuck.”

“Meaning I’m a bad fuck?” Arlene nearly screamed. But there were clockwork gears grinding.

“Meaning you play unpleasant games with both of our heads and Robin is a Chile of Nature and therefore a welcome change of style,” I said.

—Said Chile of Nature was now kissing Ted. Was I uptight behind my massive cool? Well... not really... And anyway, there was Doris walking toward them—

“So you prefer her to me?”

“I didn’t say that. The invitation is still open. Any time you want the key, just holler. But in the meantime, don’t put down a chick with more guts than you’ll ever have.”

—Doris was watching the kiss with a knowing, secure smile. She let them finish, then said something non-uptight to Ted. Ted and Doris smiled fatuously at each other. Poor Ted, his last bluff called! Robin chatting with them like some genteel tea-party all smiles all around. Evil chick!
Evil
chick!—

“What do you mean, more guts?”

“Guts enough to live her own life without Big Daddy Harvey,” I said. “Guts enough to do without a piano roll.”

“Ooooh...” Arlene snarled through her bear-trap lips, her hands balled up into fists. Hit me, baby! I telepathed. Do you good.

“You two have a nice little talk?” Robin said, appearing beside me. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

Robin smiled sweetly at Arlene. “Our boy’s a nice tasty piece of dick, isn’t he?” she said woman-to-womanwise. “You can ball him tonight if you want to. Lots of other action around.” And she halfturned as if to leave like a gentlewoman.

“Oooh shit!” Arlene howled. And she stomped off into the depths of Uncle Harvey’s Bavarian Cuckoo Clock.

“Evil chick!” I hissed at Robin.

Tiger-eyes and a pussycat smile. She parted her lips and ran her dainty pink tongue around them.

The Man in Black shrugged and kissed his Chile of Nature hard on the mouth and let her fill his own with her luscious magic witch’s tongue.

“I do not
believe
this place,” Robin said as we took a breather in the dark hallway separating the monkey cage from what is sometimes laughingly referred to as the real world. “I just do
not
believe it.”

“Neither do I,” said The Man in Black. “I don’t believe it either, is how come I can hang around and not get incorporated into the cuckoo-clock mechanism.”

“Yeah man, but
why?
Do you dig what this is all about, do you really dig it? I mean, I can
play
at being an evil chick, but that Harvey cat is not playing, man.
Eeevill
All those cartoon-character people... he’s got their souls in a paper bag. Yeah, he probably goes home and sticks all those souls in a hookah and smokes ‘em.” She touched my cheek with the palm of her hand. “You’re a nice cat, I like you. I don’t want to see old Soul-Smoker roll you into a joint and suck you up, baby.”

“Harvey Brustein can’t touch The Man in Black,” I assured her. “I have the strength of ten because my heart is rotten. Besides, tonight, thanks to better living through chemistry, I have seen the mechanism. No way he can stick a piano roll in me. I can take old Harv any time I want to. Do you believe, girl,
do you believe?”

“Well yeah, I guess, I mean I can see your game and it’s not his game. You’re a heavy cat, but so is he. I suppose you can stand him off—”

“Stand him off!” The Man in Black shouted indignantly. “I can STOMP HIM INTO THE FUCKING GROUND, you better believe it!”

“Yeah man, but why bother? Who needs this bummer?”

“Nobody needs it,” I said. “That’s just the point. None of these poor fuckers need it. Harvey is scooping their souls and replacing them with clockwork.”

“Are you going to save them?”

“Fuckin’-A, baby!”

“But why do you care about these losers? They’re gray, they’re pimply, they’re cartoon-characters.”

“Yeah, but what were they before Harvey wired them into his Bavarian Cuckoo Clock? Maybe they were all groovy people once. Ted was.”

Robin made a face like biting into a lemon.
“Ted?”
she said. “Man, that is one pathetic cat! A mile of mouth and an inch of action. The cat’s a total fraud.”

“That’s the point, chile. Time was, Ted wasn’t a fraud. Time was I’d kick the shit out of you if I saw you making eyes at Ted because I’d know what would happen. Harvey’s cut my friend’s balls off. Think I let him get away with that?”

“Wouldn’t have something to do with that Arlene, would it?”

“You’re jealous!”

Robin looked me cold in the eye with pupils as hard and measured as ball-bearings. Smiled a smile a million years old. “Baby,” she said evenly, “when I find myself getting jealous of a chick like that, I take ten thousand mikes and go out in a blaze of glory. Do
you
believe that?”

“I believe,” I said.

“Groovy. Then listen man, you’re doing a Knight in Armor number. You’re not so hung up on the chick as hung up on the ego-trip of saving her from the Soul-Smoker.”

“So? Didn’t you tell me that was my game? Don’t put down ego. Where would I be without it?”

“Yeah, but that’s a Goodness Trip. It’s a drag. You’re blowing your cool.”

“Are you accusing me of not being evil?” The Man in Black asked righteously.

“You’re in danger, man. I haven’t seen you do anything really evil tonight.”

“Didn’t I give it to Harvey in there?”

“You started to, but as soon as dear sweet Arlene showed up, you blew your cool and forgot about it.”

By God, the chick was right! I
had
forgotten all about Harvey as soon as Arlene had showed up. Yeah, but....

“But I did a really evil number on Arlene,” I said.

“I didn’t see that,” Robin said primly. “Come on baby, go on in there and let’s see some evil. Kill! Kill!”

“You are an
eeevil
chick!”

“Come on tiger, go on in there and let’s see you do your thing. Give me Harvey’s head on a platter. Bet you can’t! Bet you can’t....”

“Evil chick,” I said, but this time I smiled. She was right; I was losing the razor-edge of my cool.

“What you need is a booster-shot,” Robin said, taking my hand and leading me down the hall to the coatroom. “I’ve got about four good tokes in the hash pipe in my coat. Let’s go suck up some tasty evil and then go set the cartoon on fire!”

“Lead on, Lady Macbeth,” said The Man in Black.

Just what the witchdoctor ordered. My cool honed to a switchblade edge, I was Kid Death, The Man in Black, gliding out of the shadows with his Dark Lady and onto the Main Street of Cuckoo-clock City. The Smoker of Souls, Master of the Cuckoo Clock, had gathered most of his creatures around him, or caused their piano rolls to form them up into a series of concentric semicircles centered around the foot of the dais on which he stood. Sense of the night building to a climax; all individual piano roll programs coming together at a preprogrammed harmonic point and Harvey standing above this space-time nexus ready to make his move, change the Master Piano Roll, the hand is quicker than the eye.