by Darius James
Her head, arms, hands, legs, and feet move with an independence of their own. They begin to talk, change shape, and emit sounds: Music. Radio white noise. Reptile skin. A bird’s head. A cat with a coat of flames. TV commercials. Radio white noise. The BERNHARD GOETZ confession mixed to hip-hop rap rhythms. Pentecostal tent-house shouts. Police sirens. MALCOLM X speeches. Harlem bar talk. The bark of heroin pitchmen. The assassination of JOHN F. KENNEDY cross-edited with the Amos and Andy radio show. And the recurrent image of a YOUNG BLACK BOY repeating the phrase, “Yo, man! You got five dollars? Yo, man! You got five dollars?” answered with gunfire.
The Maid’s convulsions subside. She pants with exhaustion. A RAT scurries from the shadows, sits on her heaving bosom, and cleans its whiskers. The maid’s eyelids snap open with the rat trained in the cross-hairs of her vision. She spits like a cat.
The rat leaps from her bosom and wriggles down a hole in the attic’s floor. The Maid scrambles into a four-legged position on her hands and knees. She arches her back and mewls. Lifting the attic’s door, the Maid disappears down the stairs.
Bubbles dangles alone in the darkness.
The sounds of breaking furniture, crashing glass, and a hissing cat filter through the floorboards. The rat’s terrified squeal is heard offscreen.
MAID
(o.s.)
Ahah! Gotcha!
SFX: Death squeal, ripping flesh, and crunching bone.
MAID
(o.s.)
Uuuum—mm-mmm! Lawd hab mercy! Raw rat-haid innards!
SFX: Suck! Suck! Slurp! Slurp! Smack! Smack!
MAID
(o.s.)
Nah where d’res ob dat reefas? Here it is! ’N’ its d’stick! No stems! No seeds! Not nary a leaf! Jus’ a long pretty braid o’ choice Jamaican buds! Roll dese bad boys up, turn on wif Cab ’n’ ah be ready fo’ Freddy! Hah!
A sheaf of cigarette paper crinkles. A match ignites into flame. A sharp, sibilant intake of breath. The slap of a record on a turntable. And the voice of Marlene Dietrich singing “Hot Voodoo” blares through the speakers.
MAID
(o.s.)
Dat ain’t Cab! Dis’ dat blond Venus Nazi ho bitch singin’ dat phony hoodoo song she sang in a gorilla suit ’mongst all dem big-lipped jungle Niggas! Ain’t dis ’bout o’ blip! Dat chile try’n drape me wif m’own shit! Well wait to dat bellydonna gits into her ass! Ha! Huh?
The Marlene Dietrich recording skips, repeating:
MARLENE DIETRICH
(o.s.)
Hot Voodoo . . . ! Hot Voodoo . . . !
Hot Voodoo . . . ! Hot Voodoo . . . !
MAID
(o.s.)
Wha’ da fuck?! M’hands! Deys meltin’! ’N’ m’feet! Deys meltin’, too!
There is an unearthly wail of anguish.
MAID
(o.s.)
Oh, Lawd! M’face done turned to snot ’n’ commenced t’drippin’ off d’bone! Oh, Lawd! Hep me, Jesus! Hep me! Hep me! Ah’s wastin’ away! Hep me, Jesus! Hep me! Hep me!
Tilt up Bubbles’ glistening body through mists of incense and candle flames.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
And there I dangled, in the attic, quietly hallucinating amid vile odors and strange Negro figurines. On the floor below, the maid had gone mad—her blubbersome black bulk flopping and flailing about the floor, bellowing for a pink-skinned god who would never come. In her superstitious Negro narcosis, she believed her end was near, and all that would be left of her would be a puddle of bubbling black bile with two eyeballs floating at the ends of their tendrils. If only she had taken the precaution of wearing a pair of rubber gloves. Or had simply wiped the unguent from her hands. She hadn’t. Instead, she chose to underestimate the power of the Blond Venus.
Dolly in for close shot of Bubbles’s face.
The ceiling’s termite-burrowed beams splinter and collapse under the strain of Bubbles’ chains. In a rain of rotted wood, plaster, and steel links, she falls to the floor, landing crouched on the balls of her toes. Dazed but alert, Bubbles searches through the debris.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
The belladonna bucked and kicked in like a mule. But I hadn’t been a Deadhead for nothing.
I knew those thorny, vine-entangled wilds of psychedelia as well as I knew the mystical significance of the lines on my own hand. After all, even if he was a fat, over-forty beer fart, I did suck off Jerry Garcia.
Bubbles finds the key to the handcuffs in the Maid’s pile of shredded clothing. She unlocks the cuffs and stands, shaking the circulation back into her hands. She rummages through the attic’s trunks and boxes, finding a two-piece leopardskin bikini and an old electric razor.
First stroking the bikini’s cheap fuzzy fabric, Bubbles ties herself into the bikini bottom and knots the bikini’s top. Walking to the ritual area, she takes a hand mirror scrawled with modern petrodesigns, and places it on top of a trunk. She plugs in the electric razor and shaves her scalp peach-fuzz short, leaving the shock of hair arcing over her brow.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Even with the jumble of coke smoke and other shit, the belladonna head didn’t seem much different from a jimsonweed high.
Bubbles lifts her eyes to the ceiling, as she pulls her arms through the sleeves of her black leather jacket, and stares into the light of a bright full moon, balancing her Wayfarer shades on the bridge of her nose.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
I found some jimsonweed at school once, a whole field of it, behind my dorm. And what happened next was like what happened to that village in France that flipped from ergot poisoning. Or like that scene in Wild in the Streets with Shelley Winters shaking her fat ass on a headful of acid in a concentration camp for the over thirty.
Turning over the objects in the Maid’s temple, Bubbles drags a trunk across the floor and places it under the hole in the ceiling. She mounts the trunk and pulls herself through the hole.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
What it wasn’t like was Woodstock. I’d hoped that bird on the fucking poster keeled over from strychnine poisoning.
Bubbles stands on the brownstone’s roof and scans the skyline. Bands of ALLEY CATS roam the rooftops.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Once, I threw a Jonestown Kool-Aid party, and painted a big messy mural of that stupid fucking bird, with two X’s for eyes, hanging upside down on the neck of a guitar. Then I strung black lights and spiked the punch with acid.
It’s the closest thing you can get to cyanide and still have a good time.
With the moon looming large and luminous above the skyline and Cats flocking underfoot, Bubbles leaps from roof to roof with swiftness, agility, and athletic grace.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
If you’ve ever copped in Washington Square Park, you know what I mean . . .
The Cats descend fire escapes, wind through alleys—
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Still, tripping to a cassette of the Jonestown death screams with a roomful of black-light-blind Oi Boys somersaulting overhead isn’t half as frightening as what happened to us after eating that field of jimsonweed.
—and jump, finally, through the paneless windows of an abandoned factory.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
One girl stained her entire body green by rolling around in the grass. She moved out of her dorm, and lived on the shore of a nearby stream without a stitch of clothes. She brought all of her furniture, too—including a four-poster bed and a full dining room set. Another student’s girlfriend died. He had fucked the corpse several times over the course of three days before he realized what had happened.
The skyline’s industrial configuration of stone, steel, and smoke loses its aspect of modernity in the ancientness of night. DESOLATE FIGURES are reduced to grotesque primeval forms with strange geometries of moonlight and shadow. Cruel machineries grind pinwheels of fla
me. Sludge churns in the harbor. Tugboats bleat in the fog.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Trying to navigate with belladonna in your blood is like trying to sustain a thought on really shitty smack. Forget detachment and well-being. Think nausea and stupidity. And not just your basic weed-bed, feeble-head, dunce-cap stupidity either. But monumental stupidity in all its awesome klieg-light wonder. Try and imagine the complete collapse of the higher functions—the simple failure of brain—coupled with a tightening net of pain wrapped around your bowels. Imagine a host of stillborn phantoms reeling before the mind’s eye. Imagine all this. And the long Negro night ahead.
But, like I said, I hadn’t been a Deadhead for nothing.
Bubbles, too, descends fire escapes, winds through alleys, and climbs on the window ledge of the abandoned factory.
*Voodoo terrorists take note.
INT. Paint Factory—Night.
With her figure silhouetted by the moon in the mouth of the window frame, its light casting her in a halo fringed by glass fangs, Bubbles kicks the remaining shards of glass from the window’s lower half, scattering slivers through the gloom.
Climbing over the ledge, Bubbles drops to the floor, raising a swirl of phosphorescent fairy dust around her. She coughs phlegm and grit into the cup of her fist.
Peering over the plane of her Wayfarer frames, Bubbles stares into the surrounding darkness.
The floor of the factory is heaped with radiant piles of paint pigment. Misty and eerily luminous, the piles spill in all directions, joined by a confluence of vaporous, variegated lines.
Phosphorescent paw prints track the dust over the floor. Green eyes gleam in the gloam. And multiply in kaleidoscopic unfoldment.
Glyphs shift in and out of focus, in a fuzzy, fluorescent glow, squirming with repellent underlife, as if maggots feeding in the furrows of moldering flesh.
Bubbles withdraws her straight razor from her jacket’s inside pocket, casually noting the color of her hand. Her once white flesh is now a dusky violet. Staring down at her legs, she finds the same dusky hue. Knitting her brow in curiosity, she looks up at the vaulted ceiling.
Entangled in a confusion of soot-encrusted cables, a network of black lights are strung high above the floor.
Agitated tails thrash. Bubbles pivots on the balls of her toes. Her straight razor whisks open and glimmers in the black-light glow.
HUNDREDS OF CATS—all black with gleaming green eyes—pace to and fro. PUSSIES IN HEAT point asses in the air, drag bellies across the ground, and push forepaws along the floor. TOM CATS pounce and pump.
Mysterious paw prints materialize and phosphoresce.
Under scrawled squiggles on the factory’s far wall, Bubbles deciphers the words:
BUSH MASTER PAINT FACTORY
The letters permute in shape. The scrawl slithers to the outer edges of the wall, circling in a nimbus of shimmering spermatozoa. The geometric permutations shift with mechanical precision, pinwheeling into a disk of vibrancy and color.
A square turns counterclockwise within the circumference of the disk. Inside the square, a triangle revolves on its axis.
The mandala spins faster and faster. And a whirl of demonic images are twice reflected on the surfaces of Bubbles’ shades.
The scrawl slithers down the wall and undulates across the floor, swimming up Bubbles’ thighs.
Shuddering in disgust, Bubbles flings herself to the floor and lands in a pile of effulgent dust.
Dropping her straight razor, Bubbles pinches herself in hysteria. Her Wayfarers fly from her face.
The scrawl fades under her touch. The cats yowl in chorus. Ice-blue static bristles across the floor.
Bubbles is tossed up from the ground. Spun around. Dashed down. Repeatedly. Painfully. In stroboscopic thrash-dance. A chromatic blur of blood and pigment. Flung, finally, into the pit of smoking pigment, a ghost in iridescent colors.
Bubbles spins around the pit’s rim as she’s sucked into the eye of its vortex.
One by one, the Cats leap through the air and vanish into the luminous, vapor-spewing mounds.
INT. Pit.
Down the Rabbit’s Rectum
Bubbles somersaults through the pit’s smoking underside, diving through the darkness. With outswept arms, she rides the currents of air with the buoyancy of a paper kite.
A sinuous slash of black powder cuts diagonally across her face, highlighting the gemlike luster of her eyes. The feathered puff of hair blowing over her brow is dusted a soft blue and stippled with a firefly glow of yellow and green
Bubbles talks aloud to herself, her voice tinged with an undertone of panic.
BUBBLES
This isn’t real, right? I’m having a hallucination, and this really isn’t happening. I’m actually sitting in the booth of a dingy Lower Eastside bar, nodding out on some Puerto Rican dope.
Spectral bodies tumble through the abyss. Feline sounds resound. Jagged, ice-blue webs of electricity flash in the background.
BUBBLES
I feel safe. I feel protected. My cool is beyond question. There are white people here. Flesh and blood white people. Elvis’s own white people, strengthed by the courage of booze and jukebox rock and roll.
What wool-headed hipster in his right mind wants an encounter of the drunken, Caucasoid kind?
I can keep my head together. I’m in control. It’s just a drug in my body.
Relax. Breathe deeply.
Her mouth gapes in realization.
BUBBLES
Omigod! I forgot how to breathe!
INT. Pit.
The Cave of the Flaming Tar Babies
Contorting like a drowning swimmer, Bubbles slams the pit’s clay floor with a bounce—ooff!—landing on her rump in a ring of tar-colored DWARVES with sagging toadlike skin; bulbous heads; bulging lemon-shaped eyes; and plump, red lips framing a bow of gleaming, yellow teeth. Uncircumcised penises poke out from beneath pitted potbellies. Bubbles offers a reluctant smile.
BUBBLES
Let me guess. The Antipathies, right?
Twittering their tongues against their teeth, the Dwarves stand Bubbles on her feet.
BUBBLES
Hmmmm. The short twittering types.
Bubbles’ brow furrows in sudden curiosity. She sniffs the air.
BUBBLES
What’s that smell?
She places her hands on the shoulders of the Dwarf standing below her, bends over, and licks the top of his head.
BUBBLES
Yuck! Nasty ol’ coon candy! It looks like doo-doo! It tastes like doo-doo! I hate licorice!
Wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her black leather jacket, Bubbles pulls the zipper of her breast pocket open and takes out a fistful of humanoid fudge figurines. With a grimace of disgust, she tosses the candies into her mouth like a handful of Spanish peanuts. Her teeth turn brown with saliva and chocolate.
The LICORICE MEN stare in wonder. Bubbles spits into her hand and extends her palm, offering the few half-chewed chocolates in her hand.
BUBBLES
Want some?
Sensing a distinct familial link between themselves and the cluster of mangled fudge faces in the cup of Bubbles’ palm, the Licorice Men fling their arms in the air with a squeal of revulsion and trundle away in the echoing darkness.
Bubbles is left standing alone in the stalactite-roofed cavern.
BUBBLES
I guess they weren’t ready for the fruits of the White Man’s technology. Or Muhammad’s message to the New Black Man . . . !
FADE
INT. Cave—Night.
Emerging from an opening between the cavern’s walls, her eyes seemingly suspended in darkness, sparkling with the inflamed radiance of precious stones, Bubbles’ mouth falls open in shock.
Manacled to the walls on each side of the cavern’s widening passageway, in varying states of thaw and decay, are a dozen pudgy DOUGHBOYS—the pale spherical fellows pictured on the cylindrical packages located
in the supermarket’s frozen-food department.
The Licorice Men release ONE OF THE DOUGHBOYS from his manacles. They lift him off the wall and carry him through the cavern. The Doughboy kicks and screams. He cries in a high thin voice—
DOUGHBOY
No! No! Anything but that! The briar patch!! But, please, no—NOT THE FLAMING TAR BABY!
LICORICE MEN
Chortle. Chortle. Chortle.
Bubbles panics and runs but finds no route of escape. Concealing herself in shadow, she flattens herself against the wall. Edging along its hard, uneven surface, she smears A HALF-DOZEN DOUGHBOYS in her wake—mouths groaning black ovals, eyes anguished crow’s feet, gray paste spurting from deflated bellies in conical turdlike piles—leaving a stucco surface of squashed limbs and flat, disfigured faces. She nears the ring of Licorice Men, hiding behind a large rock.
Inside the licorice ring, the Doughboy cowers. The Licorice Men punch and kick him about the cavern like a beach ball. The Doughboy snuffles back a bubble of mucus, crying boo-hoo-hoo. The Licorice Men mimic his suffering and laugh at his neutered crotch.
The Doughboy is kicked to the ground. He pleads for his life.
DOUGHBOY
There were deals made! Lies told! It was the corporation’s decision! I was just a pawn! A trademark! A mere promotional symbol! But I fell into the wrong hands! A team of unscrupulous animators! It could have been anyone! The Marshmallow Puff-Head! The Riddlin’ Rubber Man! Mr. Creme Bean! Even the Selzer Kidd! Anyone!
The Licorice Men turn to each other and snicker. The circle parts. The Doughboy screams—
DOUGHBOY
No! Please! Don’t! My wife has a bun in the oven! She’s French! A croissant! You can have her! I’ll even throw in a wheel of Brie and a bottle of Bordeaux Grand Cru!
Scrambling about the ground on hands and knees, the Doughboy runs in circles like a wounded pup. His body swells in size and ripples with a spasm of violent hiccups.