Everything was getting very hazy.
Requiem Mc2
“Two Rotten Bars, please.” Jilly looked at her own little dolls on display in the foyer. She still thought she should get the bars free, but she paid for them anyway. Alvarez began to sing at her.
“You stop that, Sarge,” Mrs Cornelius came round the corner. “Don’t let ’im bovver you, love. ’E wants ter be discovered. Will Captain M be along later?”
“Discovered?”
“Like America.” She laughed heartily so that her goods in her tray bounced beneath her bouncing breasts. “An’ all them ovver bleedin’ colonies.”
Jilly went inside. She wanted to be sure of a good seat.
They were all beginning to arrive now. Nearly everybody was in some form of fancy dress. Mickey Most, in lugubrious and inappropriate corduroy, Jake Riviera, Tony Howard, Peter Jenner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Martin Davis. A lot of denim and fur. A lot of vain leather.
Shuffling in and standing in the shadow, the half-collapsed pierrot looked at them going by. It was like a gathering of Mafia dons, old and new. Richard Branson, Michael Dempsey, Miles Copeland: some of them in modifications of demi-monde styles, some in grotesque parodies of dandyism. The Nouveaux Noires arrived, singly or in couples, with their girlfriends.
The pierrot noticed how comfortable they all were. It was probably because not a single punter had been on the invitation list. Some of them complained that they had to pay, but in the main they were not discontented.
Elton John, Rod Stewart, Olivia Newton-John, Cliff Richard and Barbra Streisand. Bishop Beesley, Miss Brunner, Anne Nightingale. Frank Cornelius didn’t notice his brother. He was walking on air. He felt euphoric in the presence of cash. The slightly self-conscious members of the musical press were trying to look like musicians, and as usual were not absolutely certain of their social status: their expressions changing constantly as they tried for an appropriate mode.
They were piling in, drawn by curiosity, greed, a wish not to be left out.
Music publishers, record company executives, the owners of studios; agents and managers.
“What a lot of controllers,” mumbled Jerry vaguely. “What a lot of mortgages.”
Elegant cowboys, smoothed-up Hell’s Angels, Beverly Hills punks. Nobody required any hope, only confirmation. They confirmed one another.
The pierrot was reminded of a bunch of burghers going into church.
Mo and Flash wandered in. Mo’s trenchcoat was covered in a variety of old food, vomit and semen. He had lost his hat. A bouncer appeared from nowhere. “Sorry, you’ve got to have invitations.”
Ronnie Biggs and Martin Bormann said in chorus: “It’s all right. They’re with us.”
“Johnny won’t come,” said Mo to no-one in particular. He hadn’t noticed the pierrot in the shadows either.
Wasting It
“I’ve seen this before,” whispered Miss Brunner to Frank as the film came on.
“We’ve all seen it before,” said someone behind her. “That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.”
Mo was crawling between the seats, still looking for Captain Maxwell.
He found a tartan knee. “Flash? Wake up.”
“Give him a break,” said Jilly. “Can’t you leave him alone for a minute?”
It was standing room only for the old pierrot. He held on tightly to the rail at the back, trying to focus fading eyes.
His mother popped in. “Jerry. Yore lookin’ terrible. There’s a chap in the foyer. Sez ’e’s Mr Bug’s bailiff. Is it ther Receivers?”
“They’re not playing tonight.”
“El tell ’im.” She disappeared.
“Mum … ” He stretched out his wounded hand. “My wiring’s gone … ” But she didn’t hear him.
He could only dimly detect the soundtrack now. There was a lot of plummy laughter coming from the seats. The film was reassuring its audience while pretending to shock them; a perfect formula for success.
“It’s sure to be a winner,” said Mitzi B, slipping out for a pee.
The pierrot gasped. Everything was going round and round.
Sometime later, as he desperately tried to revive his attention, he saw Sid at last. The operation had been a success. He wasn’t absolutely sure by now if Sid was actually on stage or on film. He was singing “My Way” with all his old style.
Mo crawled up and began to tug at the pierrot’s suit. Bits of it tore away in his hand. “This is where I came in.”
He crawled on, towards the exit.
The volume rose higher and higher. There were a few murmurs of complaint.
The pierrot felt a shade better. He managed an appreciative groan.
The song ended.
Gunfire began to sound in the auditorium.
The pierrot sank to the dirty floor with a happy grunt. “It worked, after all. We did it, Sid.”
The hall became filled with the sounds of terror. Blood and bits of flesh flew everywhere. The audience was tearing itself to pieces as it tried to escape.
Eventually there was silence. A dark screen. A vacuum. An avenged ghost.
Mrs Cornelius opened the doors. She had an expression of resigned disgust on her face. “’Oo the bloody ’ell do they expect ter clear up this fuckin’ mess, then?”
“Jimi?” said Alvarez behind her.
He began to sing again.
Ladbroke Grove, 1980
Marrakesh, 1988
Cincinnati Lou
Benjamin Whitmer
Derrick Kreiger hasn’t dreamed since his heart was rewired in Vietnam. Not once. It’s like the pacemaker’s electrical current has driven his unconscious mind from the subterranean to the surface, like a crank phone and a lead wire will do to catfish. And Derrick’s pretty sure it’s not him alone. Not when he remembers the scalpings, the overdoses, and the jungle fraggings in the war. Nor has Derrick allowed himself anything like normal sleep since he returned from the war. He settles for nothing less than the complete obliteration of his mind, conscious and unconscious. And he excludes no chemical in that pursuit.
Now he awakes with a jolt. His entire body clenching, fingers curling. He’s laid out on the back seat of his car, and outside he can hear frantic footsteps, metal on metal, glass smashing, screams. He can’t be sure it isn’t a dream, after all, and a dream of the one thing he annihilates his dreams to avoid. He puts his cheek against the back of the seat and inches his face upward until he can just peek what’s happening.
Over-The-Rhine. Cincinnati’s blackest and poorest ghetto, just up from the central business district. Rioters whirl in and out of the main body in clusters, cells, breaking through the smoke into Derrick’s vision, and then gone again, agitating against each other with a relentless ferocity that makes him wonder they don’t combust. The smoke drifts. Three junkies kicking the glass out of the front window of a drug store. The smoke drifts. A gang of teenagers turn over a Cadillac. The smoke drifts.
Breathe, Derrick thinks. Not one of ’em knows you’re here.
Then the smoke drifts again, and a little black girl, maybe twelve years old, materializes right in front of the passenger window. Her teeth slash out of her face in a wicked, firelit grin. “Over here,” she calls back into the smoke.
Derrick stumbles out onto the sidewalk on the other side of the car from her. He wobbles in his cowboy boots, his lungs clutching in the smoke. The street tilts, his vision threatens to black out.
“The peckerwood’s scared,” she cackles, and Derrick thinks about giving her the palm of his hand. But then the smoke drifts, and out of it steps the biggest and ugliest black man Derrick’s ever seen.
“Does your mama know you’re out walking your gorilla?” Derrick says.
“My mama’s doing five to ten on a trafficking charge.” She’s wearing a pretty little pink dress, the hem charred by one of the riot fires. “This is my brother. He hasn’t said it yet, but he thinks you’re a pig.”
“He ain’t as dumb as he look
s.” Derrick pulls his badge. “This is my license to shoot niggers when they riot. Even smart-mouth little bitches like you.”
“Your crackerjack badge don’t scare me, honky,” the little girl says. She chucks her baby chin at her brother. “Stomp his ass.”
“Your call,” Derrick says. He reaches back to his belt holster where his gun should be, a grin starting.
The holster’s empty.
Derrick tries to hold the grin but it’s impossible. But the man moving towards him, he starts a grin of his own.
“Well, shit,” Derrick says. Then he spins to the right and runs like hell. He runs straight into a cloud of smoke, out again. A pack of five rioters appear in the clearing. They’ve got a half-naked woman trapped between them, shoving her back and forth. She’s screamed until she has no voice left, her mouth still gaping with the effort, blood running in rivulets down her face.
Derrick flattens the first of them with a straight shoulder block he pulls from his high school football days, then catches another with an elbow to the throat. By the time they’ve figured out what’s happened, he’s gone, and the little girl and her giant brother are smashing straight into them, the whole gang collapsing in a spitting pileup of limbs and “Motherfuckers!”
You can’t run for long in cowboy boots. Derrick wears them because he doesn’t run, that’s one of the benefits of carrying a gun. He hits the steps to an abandoned brick building and smashes into the plywood nailed over the door, falling through the rotted wood, shoulder first.
A foyer. Derrick sliding into the blackness, scooting the wall, hoping the flooring’s still intact. He moves two rooms deep into the ruin, and then stops and hunkers down on his knees. Then he stays like that, quieting his breathing, until his legs prickle, hurt, burn, and go numb under him. And then he closes his eyes and lets himself sink into the dense tedium of the wait.
There’s this feeling Derrick gets in his chest since they put the pacemaker in. It feels like the current has created a hollow space where his heart should be, like the pacemaker is expanding its electromagnetic field, driving the tissue out. He pays attention to that feeling.
Sitting still is a skill that he perfected in Vietnam. But it’s not a skill he learned in Vietnam. It’s a skill he learned from his father.
It was after Derrick’s mother died, flattened by a coal truck while walking her Maltese, that Derrick’s father sold their house in the small Eastern Kentucky town where they’d lived, and the two of them moved into the cabin. Now Derrick realizes how quickly that move took place, but at the time there was only his father’s guiding hand on his shoulder as he carried his small box of personal belongings inside. His legs trembling, threatening to betray him altogether.
The walls of the cabin were lined with books frequently removed and reread, but never rotated. And guns and traps that were always oiled for a use that never came. Not that Derrick’s father was forced to keep these things in the cabin. Derrick’s mother might even have had enjoyed some hint of his father’s presence in her house. But Derrick’s father didn’t compromise with domesticity.
The books on the walls were serious books. Books that Derrick’s father first began to read during an undistinguished tour in Korea. Books about men making war, not because they believed in war, but because they believed in manhood. Books that Derrick’s father would read aloud, standing erect in one of his gray department store suits, his neatly trimmed mustache greyly immobile over his cultivated Kentucky drawl. He was a schoolteacher.
Derrick sat pinioned in the monotonous repetition of those books. Because they contained the only things worth knowing, his father said. And because, though Derrick hated his father every minute of every day, there was no time he hated him as much as when he read aloud. The stupefying boredom of the reading sent Derrick into a reverie. He imagined himself removing every single gun from the walls and shooting his father in the face with each of them, one right after the other.
Time to move. Derrick stands, feels his pockets. Wherever his gun has disappeared to, he still has his Zippo lighter. He sparks it every few feet. Drywall chunks, shattered light fixtures, dead squirrels, piles of trash. He swims through the stench of death and garbage. Finally, a back door, and he erupts into a small backyard heaped with busted furniture, gulping at the night air, and then slings himself over the backyard fence into an empty alley. He scoots with his head below the fence line until he sees a window with a low lamp burning back in the recesses. He bangs on the door. “Police.”
“I’ve got a gun,” a man’s voice calls back.
“Me too,” Derrick says, “And I’m police. You got the count of two afore I start shooting through the door.”
The door opens. He’s young and white, with a soul patch and greasy black hair, and he’s holding a huge cap and ball Colt 1851 Navy revolver. Derrick grabs it out of his hands.
“You ain’t got a gun of your own?” the kid says.
Derrick puts the revolver in half-cock and checks the cylinder. Loaded, except for the chamber under the hammer. His father had one just like it, hanging on the wall. It’d been passed down from father to son from the first Kreiger anybody bothers remembering. Who, according to family lore, rode with Forrest during the war, and after. “How old are these percussion caps?” Derrick asks.
“I don’t know what that means, percussion cap,” the kid says, and walks absentmindedly into the living room and sits down on the couch. Everything in the room is dilapidated crushed red velvet, like it was all looted from a single antique store that specialized in halftrashed Louis XV knockoffs. “I’ve had it maybe five years and I ain’t done nothing to any caps, I can tell you that. I didn’t even remember I had it until this shit started.”
Derrick slumps into one of the chairs. He rubs his eyes, sparks rioting behind his lids. “What’s your drug?” he says to the kid.
The kid gives him a bemused look. “My drug?”
Derrick looks at him.
The kid crosses one leg over the other and holds onto his knee. “Heroin,” he says.
“Heroin.”
“Not what you were looking for?”
Derrick raises the revolver.
“I might be able to help you out is all,” the kid says. “We have parties, and sometimes people leave things. That’s how I ended up with the gun.”
“Coke,” Derrick says, squinting over the front sight at the boy’s forehead.
“Okay.” The kid stands and sort of floats out of the room.
Derrick lays the revolves in his lap and closes his eyes. He listens to his heartbeat, takes stock.
Derrick had been on the Tac Squad for a year, part of a plainclothes unit working street crime. After leaving his father’s house, police work had seemed like a natural fit for him. But it was a pale imitation of what he’d done in Vietnam, and the soldier in him hated the policeman he’d become. Closing down block parties, breaking up corner streetwalkers, shutting down curbside drug dealers. He broke his head open nightly on the senselessness of it all. And he was suspended yesterday, which he knows has got to have something to do with him waking up in this fix.
It was one of Over-The-Rhine’s late-night jazz clubs, about three weeks ago. African masks on the wall, militants hammering out plans for the revolution. She was a big, rolling woman with a raucous face, and when the Tac Squad rousted the joint on a marijuana tip, she’d thrust her face right up against his, called him a pig, and spat into his mouth. It was pure reflex when Derrick headbutted her, but it was a good one, cracked two of her front teeth.
She’d gotten a lawyer, of course. They always did, but they never won. The reason Cirillo had suspended him had nothing to do with the head butt. Cirillo suspended him because he’d been ordered to take Derrick on the Tac Squad, and Cirillo didn’t have any use for Vietnam vets. He’d told Derrick the first day that if he pulled any of that cunt Vietnam shit, he’d be off the squad faster’n he could say post-traumatic stress disorder. He was a World War II veteran, the Pacific Th
eater, and he had the same opinion of Vietnam vets that he had of asylum inmates.
Derrick didn’t protest the suspension. He just sat there in his chair while Cirillo read off the paperwork, his face like an exploded ham, his eyes pink and brown and gristly. He just sat there and imagined himself removing every single gun from the walls of the precinct and shooting the motherfucker in the face with each of them, one after the other.
And, then, when Cirillo was done, Derrick dug his back-up gun out of the glove compartment, strapped it on, and drove down to the Dancin’ Bay, where he drank well bourbon until he couldn’t do anything but sit at the bar, watching the pickled eggs jiggle to tunes from the jukebox.
One of Derrick’s father’s favorite refrains was how men are changed by war. But Derrick knows that’s horseshit. A way for old men who no longer believe in the greatness of war to sell books of war, and war itself, to the young. Men are not made by war, men make war. And if there was any deeper truth in Vietnam, it was the terrific wonder of war itself. The pyrotechnics, the jet fuel fires, the fully-automatic weapons, the drugs and the jungle shadows, the camp wives. It was being entirely free of that air-conditioned hell back home. It was a carnival riot in a country you couldn’t help but love completely and hate completely from the moment you landed.
Some nights Derrick will sit and look through the few photographs he has, the boy who looks back at him already scraped as clean and raw as a pig just after slaughter. His face gaunt and hard and his eyes huge-pupiled. And that little combat grin, restrained but twitching on his face, threatening to explode free.
Derrick knows what that look means. From time to time, he catches it in the faces of other soldiers in photographs. And it’s on the face of almost every bomber pilot he ever saw, especially after they’ve just completed a run. It’s not the look of duty or sacrifice. It’s the look that comes of watching bombs detonate across hundred-yard swaths of earth, of watching an entire countryside erupt in flames, people scattering under you like cockroaches. It’s the look of free and unrestrained carnage. Of free kills.
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 23