COME BACK TO THE FIVE & DIME . . . ZARATHUSTRA: Nonwhite athletically inclined punk-oriented animal lovers (handicapped okay) desired for (proto) fringe videos. Selected foreign audience. Flat fee. Working name director. No amateurs or freaks who answer ads like this—685-8299.
Does anybody out there have one of those rubber-chicken enema bags so popular in the 1950s? Hah, thought so. Dr. Sleaze.
House noise cassettes. Keep your canaries company while you’re not at home. $7.95 ea. 747-4414 Eves.
Frustrated military, used athletes and adventurous college boys call Sid. 556-4348.
Jack’s eyes skimmed past two familiar words, then backtracked to get the whole message;
The Omicron Theatre should pay us money to attend such a moth-eaten, seat-sprung, paint-peeling, roach-infested garbage dump! Flake away, hippie scum! D.W.E., South La Brea.
When he rose to pull a beer from his tiny refrigerator, he rechecked his shirt pocket, forgetting his temporarily unlovely aroma. The free pass was still there, and that decided him for the evening. His car, a 1972 Comet with the pedals displaced to the left, was still undergoing a mileage checkup in the shop, but that did not put the Omicron out of his range. He could still walk, by God.
The Omicron reminded Jack of a kid’s bedroom. To an adult, a noninitiate, it looked like a trash heap—but there was a comforting order inside for those who cared to delve past the superficial. It would never appeal to the Rolls Royce trade, yet was not quite as bad as the kung-fu sleaze pits of downtown L.A. which looked as though they had been razed by Mongols. The Omicron was, in essence, a “normal” theatre stripped down for combat, its patrons exemplars of the no frills class.
Jack assumed the seats were veterans of less fortunate film emporiums long since demolished. The heavy draperies, colorless with dust and age, had been hanging around since 1930. The concrete floor had been scoured clean of carpeting ages ago and remained unpainted; two-dollar customers spilled an awful lot of crap. During intermissions the auditorium lit up from behind; two emergency floods on battery banks comprised the sole interior illumination. They were mounted high on the corners of the projection booth like devil horns, and when they clicked on they threw long shadows from the heads of the audience all the way to the foot of the disused stage in a silhouette mimic of a churchyard’s listing headstones. When those lights clicked off, you’d better be sitting. Jack knew, because here there were no niceties like usher bulbs on every other row, or twinkling blue “landing lights” on the aisle like he’d seen at the Vogue Theatre. Even the EXIT signs on each side of the screen were long dysfunctional.
And if the snack bar had been a restaurant, Jack would have found a Grade-C certification ditched behind the clotted Coke machine. He suspected that the roaches flatbacking it, feet-up in the yellow light of the candy counter’s display pane, were victims of the popcorn.
The Omicron was practically Jack’s only acknowledged watering hole. Like him, it was tatty in patches and looked broken down, but he could pass its portals and trade nods of recognition with the dude he had met at the magic shop, and that was important. He was a regular here, an initiate, and he appreciated that the caretakers of this dump, unquote, took pains where they counted—with the programming, and the quality of the projection.
Oh, yeah—and admission was still two American bucks.
Jack’s terrific feeling of renewed well-being evacuated through his bowels and good knee when he plunked down his free pass at the booth and looked directly up into the varnished, wine-bottle-green eyes of the new Omicron employee.
From the third row he could barely see the screen. The crash-and-bash din of the gangster movies could not etch his concentration even in the darkness of the theater. The tarpaulined shapes in the orchestra pit became ominous; the auditorium, an ambush waiting to happen. He slouched in his seat. His mind chased logic chains like a lab rat on the scent of good, putrid Limburger cheese. None of the available conclusions eased his shock by a mote.
He had shuffled dumbly through the lobby, knowing that to meet the gaze of the candy-counter employee, the dude, would now be to let the fear engulf him to the upper lip. Those flat, glassy stares, unwavering, unblinking, like the appraisal of a puff adder, came out of a tray in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe.
The Cong—a supernatural hive intelligence, they could blank a grunt’s brain, make themselves invisible. Twelve-year-old commandos were kicking President Johnson’s butt by proxy. The fear. It could ambush you in the dark.
(On the screen, Bruce Dern, twelve years younger, indulges a sadistic little flash of ultraviolence. Homosexual rape.)
The Omicron staff. Not shellshocked orts from the dead age of the flower child. Just . . . dead, perhaps? Certainly they seemed to feel of death, and smell of it. Fragile, with their mushroom-pale, coolly bleached skin and their fixed, shellacked eyes. Stinking of aftershaves, colognes, patchouli, any heavy oil or preservative base of alcohol. Moving, like—
The baby palm lizard he found at the base of a tree. The roiling chaos of maggots revealed when he flipped it over. The legless grubs filling the stomach cavity; their mad dining was what made the lizard appear to be moving. Its flesh remained as an envelope, papery and stiff, a lizard-shape to hide the fact of entrails long consumed. Its eyes were gone.
Crazy.
Motive, you dumb gimp! yelled his mind. Motive! The why of a fleatrap cinema overseen by ambulatory dead people, or whatever the hell they were. Certainly not to derail the world and the American Way.
(Robert De Niro, having spent an hour of screen time evacuating his skull with airplane glue, is discovered amid the marsh reeds, his spike in the dirt, a rubber lanyard still making his dead bicep bulge.)
A snap decision in the dark. Jack knew he had to investigate, to resolve. It was what he had always done.
He found temporary satisfaction in the glow bouncing back from the movie screen. One row back and five seats over, a black guy swaddled in a stinking fatigue jacket snored gutturally and no one told him to shut up or get out. In some of the wing chairs, the ones affording an uncomfortably slanted view of the screen, more wineheads dozed unchallenged, their feet on the chairbacks. The others this far forward (guys with dates generally holed up further back in the auditorium) seemed totally narcotized by the film. The date duos, the monster-movie preppies, and the good citizens would scurry out during the end credits, while the snoozing derelicts and street dregs of Tinseltown waited to be ushered out under duress. For a couple of bucks over the flat rate for Ripple, a spongehead could blow an entire day sleeping out of the weather and sucking up racy moving pictures. Where did one find zombie fodder? Just haunting the Hollywood streets like gray wraiths, filthy blankets rolled under one arm, with hollow eyes and vacant stares, hanging out long after the sideshow freaks and hookers and male hustlers vacated Hollywood and Sunset and Santa Monica in the predawn. One more bag lady, one more shopping-cart loon or religious burnout or sooty panhandler would never be missed.
Intermission came, and with it a few more truths. He slouched down when the auditorium floods blinked on, actually recoiling from the light because he did not wish to be singled out. The decision to stay after closing had already been made. During the second feature he must have touched the pistol in the pocket of his pea coat a hundred times, to insure it still existed. He packed it around with him almost all the time now.
If trouble leapt out of the trees tonight, it was reasonable to allow that he could win a physical contest against the Omicron’s scraggly human cinders, even with a missing leg. Their bones must be like communion wafers now, he thought, his hand seeking the gun unconsciously again.
It was a luxuriously heavy .45 automatic, Marine field-issue, and his practice had been to pocket it whenever he traveled on foot. Lately it lived in the pocket of the pea coat all the time. The sucker ate an eight-round clip and an extra slug was already in the chamber. It had frequently proven a ready deterrent to muggers, at least those marginally human. Provided his th
esis was true, even artillery like the monster .45 could not kill someone already dead . . . But it sure as hell was capable of blowing off arms and legs and heads at medium range, and they couldn’t chase you if they didn’t have legs.
Provided he could retreat efficiently without one, too.
He considered his chances as the second film, Bonnie and Clyde, began to unreel.
During one of its chaotic shootouts (Gene Hackman was about to get iced by the Feds), Jack changed seats, edging closer to the wall of curtain on the left side of the auditorium. As long as he was not in the firing line between a viewer and the luminous rectangle of the screen, he would never be noticed. He knew how to walk in the dark, even theatre-dark, even leaning on the damned cane and humping his surrogate leg along. Once on the fringe of the farthest row of seats, he edged toward the nearest dead EXIT light. The suffocatingly musty curtains smelled like some abandoned library, and his nose tried to sneeze. He held.
In another minute the early leavers would be hurrying out. He avoided the stair railing leading to the push-bar exit, and angled behind the screen, and looked up to be confronted by a reversed tight close-up of a face thirty feet high. The boxy, flat-black speaker apparatus, its horizontal planes steeped in brown dust, directed its salvo away from him and out through the million tiny perforations in the screen. Out toward—
He felt a mad, directional itch skittering from his hairline, around one eye, over his nose. Stifling his cry of reaction, he slapped away the cockroach before it could hide in his mouth. Yeah, the curtains were probably alive with the goddamn things. He thought of them congregating in the trough of the filthy Coke machine after closing, leaving their egg cases in the drains, or mating in the cigarette butts and piss filling the john’s two urinals. Did roaches mate or were they, what did you call it, parthenogentic? Hermaphroditic? He hated the damn things the way he hated breaking spiderwebs with his face, the way he hated the monster leeches and vampire mosquitoes he’d met across the ocean. Or rats.
Above him, the screen lit up with an end-credit roll. Backwards. He hunkered down and thought about rats for a minute.
The grunge theater in Chicago is a sleaze-pit, cold as a corpse locker, in the bosom of the annual blizzards. Jack and two fellow renegades from Basic are celebrating their first-ever weekend passes by touring the Windy City. Their passes are thirty-five hours old; now they are in attendance at a triple-bill of skin-flicks aimed at the midnight-to-dawn beat-off crowd. The theatre is in the middle of a burned-out DMZ called Division Street. Swindler, grandly polluted on a fifth of George Dickel’s finest 80-proof paint remover, re-dubs Chicago the Shitty City, tittering at the rhyme. Ford, equally blitzed, elaborates by making Chicago the Puckered Red Asshole of the Universe. Jack’s laugh goes cheesy and sour; he pulls his boots up off the floor because he has spotted the rats quietly on the discarded candy boxes and popcorn tubs. In the middle film, a cowlike naked blonde accidentally sets fire to her bed with a smoldering reefer (the fire is a special effect that must have planed away half the film’s $1.98 budget), and she and her musclebound Latino buggerers flee the frame as a line of jet-gas fire sweeps along the bottom of the picture. Jack hears the squeals from the screen and realizes they are not part of the soundtrack. What must be dozens of rats have been surprised by the sudden flood of light back there, behind the screen. Unpleasant. The rodent army retreats into the dark, to mingle with the audience. He watches a crushed soft-drink cup manipulate itself patiently across the cold stone floor. He gets up to leave.
Could there be rats in the Omicron? In California, maybe mice. A voice in Jack’s head told him he was obfuscating. Rats did not worry him.
The house floods snapped on and the rest of the patrons herded noisily out. Jack waited, secreted behind the hanging curtains, weight at ease on his fake leg.
The EXIT door crashed shut—sheet metal hitting a wood jamb and rattling a loose push-bar—and did not open again. For sixty seconds he breathed shallowly, listening. Then he inched forward until he could see the auditorium under the glare of the floods.
There were perhaps ten derelicts out there, still snoring. Maintenance movements and sounds echoed toward Jack from the lobby area; then somebody—the new guy, the one with the bottle-green eyes—moved down the aisles, waking the bums up. Excuse me excuse me you have to leave now. Jack watched his progress; the same speech for each sleeper. They grunted. Some got the speech twice before reluctantly shuffling out. One nodded and resumed sleeping—the black guy in the fatigue coat. The Omicron employee moved to the next customer. Like shabby, ragtag Conestogas lurching west, they dragged themselves out, all except Fatigue Coat, who had been sitting behind Jack, and to whom the new employee gradually circled back.
Behind Jack, the curtains rustled, moving themselves. Drifts of thin dust sifted down. It might have been the vacuum effect of the front doors closing.
He looked, and saw the Omicron guy standing mutely over Fatigue Coat, watching him sleep, watching with those fixed eyes whose pupils never expanded or contracted. Watching with the head-cocked attitude and characterless gaze of a praying mantis surveying the struggle of a future meal.
The other made his way toward the pair, dressed exactly as Jack had seen him in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe. He had a baseball bat.
Budget security as well, Jack thought.
The curtains were still moving, wafting as if in an unfelt, warm breeze. There was a faraway, crackling-paper noise.
When the dude swung the bat against the back of Fatigue Coat’s neck, it made a sound like five pounds of raw steak smacking a linoleum floor. Jack felt a sympathetic local jab in the area where his backbone met his skull, and the black guy did a forward roll to slump out of sight between the seats. They bent to lift him, and he came up as slack and limp as an abused mattress.
Another roach dashed in a zigzag across the back of Jack’s hand. His reaction came an instant too late, and when he tried to brush it away he hit the curtain, and three of its buddies fell from the folds of cloth to the floor and scurried away. The crackling-paper sound, like hundreds of tiny, drumming fingers, was noticeably louder.
When he looked back, Fatigue Coat was being laboriously dragged toward the orchestra pit. Each Omicron dude had a leg. And a dark, wet, erratic smear was left in their wake, shining up from the concrete slope of the aisle. It was something the regular patrons would never notice anyway.
It sounded like rain, and Jack thought of the flea-pit movie house in Chicago. His vision of the movement in the orchestra pit resolved into a roiling whirlpool of scuttling brown bodies. Not rats. Roaches. Millions of roaches, swarming over each other in the dark maw of the pit. Not the killer cockroaches, the three-inch long monsters that could fly—merely the tiniest household vermin, multiplied a billionfold before his awed eyes. And around his feet. He saw them move in quietly scratching, brittle brown masses across the floor like a shoe-sole-deep tide of sentient mud. He thought of them detouring up his plastic leg, antennae probing. The hairs on his good leg prickled. He held. The leeches, the Stuka mosquitos, the goddamn kraits had been far worse, he told himself. The .45 automatic, polished to a dull sheen by the pea coat pocket, came out now, shaking in his hand. The shaking pissed him off.
He thought of them living in the seat cushions, the curtains, the cracks in the floor, the moldy planking and rafters, the termite-hollowed superstructure. More than enough breeding room, even if one did not count the snack bar . . .
The dude and the new employee heaved Fatigue Coat over the lip of the orchestra pit into the riotous, churning sea of chitinous bugs. He seemed to hinge at the waist, like one of those backward-jointed dummies used for the big jump in the cheapest films. He did not look real. Neither did the sheer mass of waiting roaches—at least three vertical feet of them, he saw now, swarming nearly to the rusted brass rail of the pit. They embraced the body hungrily. The last part of him to submerge into the attack of brown, bulletlike forms was his foot, toes protruding from a demolished sneaker wou
nd with dirty friction tape. Then he was gone, gobbled up, and quickly.
The hammer of the quivering .45 was cocked now. The display below forced Jack to grip the gun tightly in his fist and cock it with his free hand. That was when he fumbled the cane. It dropped away, missing his grab, and hit the edge of the stage, somersaulting into the open, its rubber street tip bouncing it off the orchestra pit rail. It clattered to the bare concrete floor. Loudly.
The EXIT door was still at hand, but Jack did not try to stump toward it. He had heard it being chained shut from his hiding place.
They came for him behind the Omicron screen, clumping in cadence up the exist steps like a two-man funeral procession, and found him backed against the wall, pistol rigidly thrust out before him, a scepter of power, a talisman against evil.
“No closer.” His voice did not quaver. The gun was now steady; the threat was defined. His good leg held him locked to the stone wall.
The new employee’s voice croaked in monotone: “Excuse me, but you have to leave now . . .” The bottle-green, glassy eyes stared at the dead space between Jack’s head and shoulder.
Jack could not trust the light, but he was certain that the dude, the elder employee, smiled at him when Jack uttered the single syllable: “No.” The grin was dry and lifeless, a manipulated, puppeteered thing, matching horribly with the fixed phoniness of the eyes and the memory of fragile, cured, dead flesh. He moved toward Jack purposefully, grin fixed, eyes fixed.
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