20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  Synopsis

  The 20th Century is over and done with and nothing can be changed. Or is it? Felice Picano’s two short novels take delicious what-if peeks at outwitting Time’s (seemingly) unbending Arrow.

  In Ingoldsby, a handsome graduate student finds himself caretaking a Midwestern architectural treasure in which not everything or everyone is what they seem—or when they seem either! But a sexy newcomer challenges him to change all that, for himself, and for a gay youth way out of his own time.

  In Wonder City of the West, a man too young in spirit to be at retirement age takes a leap back to Golden Age Hollywood. He encounters youth, friendship, a movie star lover, and talents he never knew he possessed. But as he succeeds beyond his dreams, he must ask—is he merely a tool for a shadowy group with a far larger purpose?

  Provocative, mind-bending, sensual, and entertaining, 20th Century Un-limited is an unexpected addition to an established body of work by an author unafraid to confound and surpass expectations.

  20th Century Un-Limited

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  20th Century Un-Limited

  © 2013 By Felice Picano. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-936-7

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: April 2013

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri (GraphicArtist2020@hotmail.com)

  Also available from Bold Strokes

  The Lure

  Late in the Season

  Looking Glass Lives

  Contemporary Gay Romances:

  Tragic, Mystic, Comic & Horrific

  Twelve O’Clock Tales

  20th Century Un-Limited

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Steve Soucy, the earliest reader of Wonder City of The West, and to Ian Ayres, earliest reader of Ingoldsby, for their comments and help in making these fictional works become more fully alive.

  for Len Barot

  WONDER CITY OF THE WEST

  I believe the future is the past again, entered through another gate.

  —Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

  1

  “The benefits of walking, especially up a hill like that one,” Dr. Deanna Cheung had said, “are inestimable.”

  Little did she know.

  Deanna was my blood pressure specialist at a clinic for such, attached to a hospital, and she insisted that I walk as much as possible, and that walking regularly would be even better than the lisinopril and amlodipine she’d prescribed and that I was taking for my moderate blood pressure issue.

  “Our distant ancestors walked five to six hours a day,” Deanna pointed out. “And they ate predominantly fruits, nuts, and vegetables.”

  I’m pretty good with produce, eat a lot. But I forebore from mentioning that our distant ancestors were three-feet-four tall, weighed sixty pounds at most, and lived until the age of about seventeen.

  But the hill was there. I lived two-thirds of the way up a steep hill in the West Hollywood Hills, and it went all the hell the way up, a corkscrew road, with, once you got to the top, absolutely dizzying views.

  Dizzying: that was the exact and actual word used by a visiting friend from the East whom I drove up to the top to show the view. As we were circling down, he closed his eyes tightly and said, “Tell me when we’re out of the clouds.”

  I found it not so much dizzying, as expansive. Being so high above West Hollywood that I could take in all of that town, some of Beverly Hills, lots of Hollywood, all the way down across the basin to the Baldwin Hills and on clear days the airport and ocean even… It broadened my view of the world during a period when it seemed walls had begun closing in: Career walls. Financial walls. Personal walls. Stuff that happens when you reach retirement age and don’t (or can’t) retire as comfortably as you’d like to. So I walked up the hill three times a week—up to the top and back to my house: half hour or so. Great cardio exercise.

  How can I better explain this hill?

  What I told people was that it was ten minutes up the hill and three minutes down in a car.

  By now you’ve got the idea of how steeply I was walking.

  Which is how I came upon the friendly Bedlington terrier—Ralf.

  Which is how I met the Bedlington terrier’s master—I call him Mr. Morgan.

  Which is how I ended up back in—but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  Let’s start with Ralf.

  Rowf? Ralph? I never saw it spelled out.

  Ralf was your ordinary gray-haired and unattractive wire-haired Bedlington. I’ve known three people in my life who have liked this breed and constantly kept them around. Margaret Darrieluex, our “house mother” and drug dispenser during the mid to late 60s in the West Village commune I hung out with. A neighbor of Boy Ondine, star of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and costar (at least he told me it was his bobbing head) of Blow Job. And then Mr. Morgan.

  Ralf would bark in a friendly fashion and wag his tail whenever I appeared, and then jump a funny little jump five inches into the air whenever I passed along the gated narrow strip of front yard before Morgan’s house while trudging toward the top, which he was pretty close to. Then Ralf would bark and jump again and follow me again, back a few minutes later, when I went down the hill.

  Which is why I finally saw Morgan, standing there through an open door, via a closed and locked wrought-iron fence. Morgan nodded. I nodded back.

  Until after maybe the twentieth nod and half wave, when Morgan called me over to his front door gate, still all locked up, behind which he remained, and he said hello and he introduced himself and Ralf, and asked what I was doing.

  “Oh! So you want to stay young?” he asked.

  “Too late for that. I would like to stay healthy into my old age.”

  “How old are you? Maybe fifty-five?”

  “Add ten years.”

  “No! Well, you are already healthy if you can get up this hill at that age. Guess my age.”

  “About the same. A little younger?” I said, generously. He looked older; wait, that’s not right, he looked odder, not older.

  “I’m actually over a hundred. A hundred and sixteen, to be exact.”

  “What’s your secret? Armenian yogurt?” I’d heard people in some Armenian mountain town who ate a certain yogurt all lived long.

  “I have a little time machine,” he said with a straight face.

  “Yeah, and…?” I was waiting for the yogurt—or the other shoe to drop.

  “Yeah, and I’ve come back in time. I was born in 1995. In the year 2061, I used my time machine to come back a century. To 1961.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how you are a hundred and sixteen.”

  “Well, I lost some years I had aged when I came back. I was sixty-six when I left there. But when I arrived in 1961, I looked about eleven years old. I had lost a lot of my acquired age. Add up the two spa
ns I’ve lived and they total a hundred and sixteen.”

  This was the most interesting conversation I’d had in months.

  “Did you bring anything from the future?”

  To back up that statement, I meant but didn’t say.

  “I did. Want to see it?”

  Ralf was barking his welcome too, so I stepped inside the now unlocked gate and into the house.

  It was oddly furnished, although what I saw was the one floor. Very bare bones. Handsome, you could say, with maybe six pieces of furniture in each large area.

  He sat me down at a Danish modern sofa and table and went away. When he came back he was holding out something that looked like a little transparent screen, something that you would put over the front of a BlackBerry.

  He held it up to the light where it was iridescent. Then he put it on the table.

  When I touched it, it spoke, and as it spoke it sort of went away and instead I saw a two-foot-high, pale, holographic video presentation of the U.S. Mint in Denver, and then the 3-D head of a young woman appeared in one corner and she said very clearly, “Mr. Fath Paul Morganna. You have seventeen hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars on deposit at this location.” It then said, “This is an official message. May thirty-first, 2061.”

  “Terrif! And that little video is what, exactly?” I asked.

  “That’s my last financial statement,” he added calmly.

  “I see inflation continues into the future,” I said. “Or you are really well off?”

  “Inflation continues. A dollar then is equal to about a dime now,” he admitted.

  He’d brought me a glass of juice that looked like pomegranate or grape.

  “No banks in 2061?”

  “No banks. Everyone keeps their money in the U.S. Mint,” he said.

  I was looking out the window at one of those amazing—dizzying—views. He meanwhile was looking at me curiously.

  “So!” he said. “You keep walking up that hill and you’ll live to how old?”

  “Well, I’ve got longevity genes. My great-aunt is a hundred and six. Her brother died at ninety-nine and a half. My grandpa on the other side made it to a hundred and one. What do you think? Barring accident, maybe a hundred, hundred and five?”

  “You won’t like 2050,” he said.

  “I won’t?”

  “You’ll hate it. You’re too spoiled.”

  “War? Pestilence?”

  “Only the usual amount of those.”

  “Bad climate?” I tried.

  “Very bad climate. This area will be mostly unlivable.”

  “Because of jungle conditions? Wild coyotes and mountain lions and giant lizards?” I asked, thinking of global warming already evident.

  “No. Because of icy roads. Ice and snow even this low, how high is this hill? Six hundred feet above sea level? It’ll be impassable more than half the year. No one ever comes up this high anymore in 2050.”

  “Half a year of ice in the Hollywood Hills!? That’s the result of global warming?” I asked.

  “You’ve noticed our winters have gotten cooler? And our summers warmer? That trend will continue unabated. This used to be a temperate zone. A Mediterranean zone. Not anymore. And soon the cold will outdo the hot. Meanwhile, the rest of the country will heat up pretty well. Heat up. Melt down and drown lots of places. Become tropical and desert. But California gets a lot colder in the winter. The entire West Coast freezes up like Alaska is now. San Francisco becomes unlivable most of the year. Far too cold. Blizzard conditions three months of the year. Only the flatter parts of the Bay Area are at all doable. Ever been to northern Chile? That’s what it comes to resemble most closely.”

  “The Andes and the Atacama Desert?” I asked.

  “You’ve got it.”

  “And Manhattan?” I asked.

  “Ever been to Venice?”

  “Italy?”

  “Venice, Italy, is an underwater museum. Venice here—is ice skating heaven.”

  “Manhattan is underwater in 2050?” I asked.

  “Manhattan, Philly, D.C., Boston, the entire East Coast up to the foothills of the Appalachians.”

  “While Portland, Oregon, is frozen tundra?” I asked.

  “Huge packs of feral wolves up there. Caribou. Elk. Polar bear make a big comeback. Whales fill the Ess Eff Bay! My first dad used motorized sled-omnibuses to go up there with his buddies and hunt big winter game.”

  “Your ‘first dad’ because you had a second one when you came back in time to 1961?”

  “Had to. I looked ten or eleven. I was adopted. But…you catch on fast. Some people can never get their minds around it.”

  “So tell me how awful it is in sunny Southern California in 2050 again?”

  “Food supply is way down here, of course. Farms are gone. Ranches gone too. The Central Valley drowns and becomes glacial ice and taiga. The Rockies freeze over pretty well all year round. Huge glaciers the size of L.A. All those mountain cities and towns up there have to be abandoned. Boise. Salt Lake City. Even railroads can’t get through by 2061. Cargo planes come into Burbank airport with fruit and produce grown in eastern Colorado and Wyoming. LAX is drowned, of course. But food isn’t cheap. From Santa Fe over to what’s left of the state of Georgia it’s all desert. North of that, the Carolina plateau begins another green belt, mostly fed by the much-expanded Great Lakes and their inlets. Ashland is an island. Chicago, Cleveland, all drowned.”

  My cell phone rang and it was a reminder that I had to get home and shower and get ready to go out to dinner with an old pal who was in town for a few days.

  “Thanks for the juice.” I petted Ralf. “Gotta go.”

  “I hated it back then,” Morgan said. Then corrected himself, “Forward then. The population of the country was under fifty million and dropping annually. So as soon as this thing worked, I sent myself back in time.”

  “You invented it?”

  “I helped invent it. I’ve got to tell you, it was the best decision I ever made—coming here. I’ve loved living this second time, in this time. People here and now complain a lot. They’ve got nothing to complain about it. It’s the peak of Western Civilization.”

  God help us, I thought.

  “But won’t you live till 2050 and then have to see it again?” I asked.

  “Not me. I don’t have any longevity in my ancestry. I’ve got short telomeres on my genes. I’ve got maybe another five, ten years. Tops. And like I said, I’m actually a hundred and sixteen.”

  “So you did! O-kay! Nice meeting you. I’ll wave when I come by.”

  “Do more than wave. Ring my bell.”

  As I was stepping out and still petting Ralf, I figured he was a lonely old guy. So I said, “Sure. I’ll ring your bell.”

  “Do so. I’ve got a very interesting proposition for you!”

  “Bye, Ralf.”

  Refreshed, and pleased by the oddness of it all, I walked the third of the way down the hill in good spirits, enjoying the dizzying (wait! expansive!) views around houses perched on the roadside, until I was at my place again.

  2

  “I don’t get it. Why exchange houses? Yours is much better than mine,” I said. “Twice as expensive for sure, if not more.”

  We were in Morgan’s main room again, Ralf on the floor where I could pet him.

  “This house gets half knocked down and the other half gets covered in a mudslide a few years from now. While your house is on the other side of the hill and escapes the mudslide altogether,” Morgan explained.

  “Then why give me this at all?”

  “Well, if the time machine works for you, you will eventually arrive back here at 2010 and you’ll be what? About ninety years old? And you’ll find that you own a big house. You just might need a house! And if you don’t, sell it! Live on the cash!”

  “Okay, that makes sense. Tell me again how far can I go back?”

  “The fuel cell we used the first time I traveled back was more than halfway used u
p by my trip and I couldn’t fill it. So I’m figuring you have no more than eighty years. More like seventy-six or seventy-seven years.”

  “Back to the 1930s?” I asked.

  “Right. That’s why the year on the money you use will be important. There was a big new design and even a new paper-cloth mixture involved in the re-minting of U.S. money in 1935. 1935 bills were common for years, but now they’re hard to find.”

  “And then the next design was when?”

  “Not till 1960,” Morgan said. “So, it’s important. I managed to get in contact with a couple of numismatists and they’ve agreed to release some ’35 bills.”

  “Bills, because metal won’t travel back in time?” I asked.

  “Only natural materials, except some plastic types did make it back with me, as you saw. So maybe plastic will travel too.”

  “Tell me again about the money.”

  “Well, it’s a good idea to have cash in case something happens, so you’re not a bum, right? I’ve managed to gather seven hundred and ninety-eight dollars of 1935 bills for you,” Morgan said. “Mostly fives, tens, and twenties. They cost me more than double that.”

  “And that’ll last me what? A couple of months. Great!”

  “No. No, it’ll last more than half a year, even if you never supplement it. Remember, all prices are much cheaper back then. You can rent a one-bedroom flat for about nine dollars a month. You can eat out for a dollar a day. A car’ll cost you maybe five hundred dollars. A house maybe two or three thousand, even in a good neighborhood. What I’ve collected for you would be about equal to fifteen thousand dollars today. So, I’d suggest you lay low, open a bank account, be thrifty, and look for work. It was still the Depression in ’35. There was lots of unemployment, although the movie industry was thriving and using many different kinds of workers then. You should arrive there aged somewhere in your early twenties. In that time period, with all the poverty and displacement going on in this country, you’ll be able to live on your own without too many questions being asked. Unlike myself. When I got back to 1961 as a kid, I arrived into a tightly ordered society. I had to hide money, equipment, everything, for almost a decade.”