Cities of the Red Night (26 page)

“That would be Van…” I put in.

“It would. Next thing these two boy-eating sows move in their own Special Police with firearms and pressure the Council into passing an I.D.-card law so anyone who doesn't have an I.D. card stamped and updated can be arrested and hanged in the Institute. So all the boys have to apply for these cards or risk getting picked up anywhere.

“One night five SPs come in here checking I.D.s and they start to drag some kid out. They have guns of course. Doesn't do them much good. The kids is on them with broken bottles, knives, chairs, feet, knees and elbows. Four kids is killed but they take the SPs apart. You can see the bloodstains right over there. Then some little Irish kid I'd never seen before jumps up on the bar screaming:
‘What are you waiting for? Waiting to get milked by these foreign bitches like randy cows? Kill! Kill! Kill!'

“The SPs and dogcatchers are barricaded in the Garden of Delight, ready to defend the richies with their last drop of blood, and it comes to that quick enough. They open up with machine guns but the boys just spread out and keep coming, throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

“Better than a hundred are killed in the few seconds it takes for the rest to swarm over the barricades and cut the guards to hamburger. Then they charge up the mountain screaming.

“‘Death to the Foreign Sows!'

“Well, the Countesses and their sawbones got their asses out to Yass-Waddah in an autogyro. Their villas were looted and burned to the ground along with most of the other villas. The Hanging Fathers were thrown into the fires along with all the Sirens that could be found. Some of the rich kids was with the mob, so a few big villas are still left. But the richies sure got a new look since then.”

I soon see that there is more here than just a spontaneous explosion of overcrowded poverty-ridden slums. The whole scene has been staged from above to point up the need for a strong police force, and some of the mob ringleaders turn out to be agents of big money.

“A young man in dirty overalls who fought valiantly with the mob was killed by the police and was found to possess aristocratic features, well-cared-for hands and a fair white skin. Though dressed as a laborer in dirty overalls and a filthy shirt, underneath there were fine cashmere pants, a handsome rich vest and a fine linen shirt. His identity was never learned.”

—Herbert Asbury,

Gangs of New York,
p. 154

Through the havoc and wreckage of the burning and looted city, through streets littered with the dead and dying, street boys dance and caper like gay insouciant sprites, many of them wearing Halloween masks. A boy in a skeleton suit flops beside a stiff corpse in grotesque imitation.

“You're dead and you stink.” He jumps and capers away.

They prance around a dying policeman and mimic his death throes. “Whydon'tcha get up and stop the fight?” They snatch his hat and badge, chasing each other.

“Stop in the name of the law,” they mock.

A boy snatches a coat and vest from a looted store. Another boy in fake beard and skullcap pops out.

“Shoot him in the pants! Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest is mine!”

*   *   *

“They called in a new Commandante who accepted the conditions of the rioters. The Sirens who survived by concealing their assets someplace were confined to licensed cathouses or deported to Yass-Waddah. They had to walk it stark naked. Two hundred miles of desert, wild dogs, hyenas, and leopards out there waiting. The kids lined up and whipped them out the gates with hangman's nooses.”

*   *   *

The bartender goes into a song and dance as he taps glasses with a spoon, singing:

“She's too fat for me

  She's too fat for me

  I don't want her

  You can have her

  She's too fat for me.”

He wipes the bar from one end to the other. “And the sperm dealers has left too, most of them. Can't operate under the new conditions. And good riddance to the Gombeen men.”

*   *   *

Marty has a good thing going. Operating with a friend in the Records Department at City Hall he is forging quitclaim deeds to properties in the burnt-out areas. When the smoke clears away he will be owning a big chunk of lower Manhattan. “The
compensation
and
then
the
building contracts.
The whole thing drips with goodness.”

He has troops of boys in the street to keep the home fires burning. And these riot boys will later be used to harass any wise citizens who try to reclaim their property and rebuild. The boys screaming insults at visitors. “I catching one clap from fucky your asshole.” Swarming over the house like monkeys, leering in at windows, throwing stones at passersby from the roof, urinating and masturbating from balconies.

There are a number of these boys sleeping in the Turkish bath where we have billeted ourselves. They parade around naked doing imitations. Death throes they dig special, flopping around, screaming and groaning and jacking off while the others piss themselves with laughter.

Krup gets it together finally. Two kraut SPs at the door. “All leaves cancelled. Report back to ship immediately.” Next stop: the future.

TAMAGHIS REVISITED

When we were first stationed in Tamaghis, it was such a frantic and dangerous place that we never got a chance to relax and look around. At that time, Tamaghis was in the hands of the women with their dogcatchers and Sirens, supported by a weak and acquiescent City Council.

Since the I.D.-card riots, the massacre of the Sirens and dogcatchers, the flight of the Countesses and their retinue, and the appointment of the new Commandante from Waghdas, power had definitely shifted to the men. The new Commandante dissolved the City Council and ruled by decree.

The rioters are now the elite of the city, setting style and tone. The fashionable thing is to look for the answers or the questions behind sex and death. So the youth of Tamaghis look to the academies of Waghdas. I am speaking of about ten percent of the total population. As always, the permanent parties remain: the shopkeepers, restaurant and bar owners, merchants, craftsmen and farmers.

Tamaghis is a walled city, circular in shape, with gates at the four cardinal points. The population is about twenty thousand, but the area of the city would accommodate a much larger population.

Since considerations of privacy do not apply for the emancipated youth, they live by preference in dormitories and cubicle rooms, sharing bathing and sanitary facilities. This concentration of personnel leaves room for the fishponds, farms, aviaries, and orchards within the walled area, so that the city is almost self-sufficient.

And the rich, eager to disassociate themselves from the lingering taint of the dogcatchers, Sirens, predatory Countesses, and the infamous Hanging Fathers of the erstwhile City Council, have made their estates productive. Some have thrown their houses open to youth communes. Cows' milk is brought in from a farm outside the city walls, since the new Commandante banished all cows from the city.

The main square is a composite of the Djemalfnaa of Marrakesh and the Mercado Mayorista of Lima, surrounded by parks and trees. I am sitting in the Red Night Café with Dahlfar, Bluie, and Jimmy Lee drinking tea one afternoon. There is no alcohol and no tobacco in Tamaghis by order of the new Commandante.

A kid I recognize as a former outcast, barred from the Double G, is moving from table to table. Now he is a hero of the I.D. riots.

The kid has a basket full of xiucutls. This small orange-and-red speckled snake has a venom that causes erotic convulsions and acute diarrhea and is frequently used as a practical joke in commune initiations. Of course you can get the same thing in ampules or poppers but the old folkloric ways still have charms for the rich. The boy is making a sale at a table of rich kids.

Looking out across the square, I see a man pushing a cart with crates roped onto it and one of the kraut kids is walking alongside it.

“Looks like Krup is taking on some cargo.”

“He sure is,” Jimmy tells me. “Right after the riots he bought up all the nooses on the open market and all the noose material. The nooses he plans to sell to tourists in Ba'dan. He's got all the old noose merchants making rugs … and he's shipping Red Hots and White Angels and Blue Burns and Black Lights and Greenies—the lot. So he cuts them with Spanish fly and sells them in the Ba'dan cathouses.”

“He sure is an operator.”

“He's putting up the prices, the miserable bastard.”

“We'd better lay in a stock.”

We walk around through the bazaars pricing color poppers and aphros. The price has about doubled but we know it's twenty times higher in Ba'dan for cut stuff.

The Red Hots bring you out in red blotches and dots, squirming around on your red-hot ass, itching to pop, and you can top it with a Red Pop. This can be dangerous, bringing on internal hemorrhaging or in some cases spontaneous fracture of the vertebrae.

The White Angels turn your jism to light. A Snow Pop is a blaze of cold white light with hot sex sparks. The Blue Burn, which is usually mixed with Yagé, is cold and hot at the same time. You come out in a blue rash with a cold menthol burn, and a Blue Pop is like cyanide and ozone.

The Black Light turns you black as obsidian and knocks all the white words out of your brain so you are right there with whatever the sex scene is, and a Black Pop brings you off in synch. The Greenie is something between animal and vegetable. You come out in a green rash, your nuts a tight seedpod popped off by the Green Pop.

You can mix colors—say Red Hots with a Snow Pop for bells of rosy fire ringing in the sky while you squirt a choir of angels. Now, your partner may be doing the same thing or he may be squirting blue twilight in attic rooms and distant train whistles. Or you take Red Hots and smooth it with a Black Pop and spurt deep purple. An Old Glory threesome: red fucking blue, who is fucking white, and red pops blue, blue pops white, and white pops red.

Try the Rainbow Special—all colors in one—and squirt Niagara Falls, Pikes Peak, souvenir postcards, rainbows, and Northern Lights. Step right up, good for young and old. Young boys need it special. Sometimes they forget the heroes of the fever who made all this available to young boys.

Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever … Audrey thought as they made selections. But it won't get me a discount. Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever, and knowing what went into those products I don't like to see them cut and sold to drunken American Legion slobs. That's right—the City Fathers are setting up an American Legion Convention. The Ba'dan Hilton and American Express arrive in a cloud of pop stars.

The proprietor, a thin gray old man in a gray djellaba, follows us around pointing out rare items, apologizing for the higher prices.

“Oh there are some Itchy Tingles!” Audrey exclaims. “Just the thing for my high-school Christmas play. Give me a case.”

“Oh and there are some Firsties. I'll take all you've got.”

A Firsty Pop is the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons, a whiff of school toilets, locker rooms, and jockstraps, rectal mucus and summer feet, chigger lotion, and carbolic soap—whiffs you back to your first jackoff and leaves you sitting there on the toilet—if you don't keep flying speed. Never linger over a Firsty.

The proprietor has it all crated up. We pay him and tell him to send it to the mail room on
The Billy Celeste.

I stop at a bookstall by a canal to pick up some light reading for the trip to Ba'dan. From an old Frenchman smoking a Gitane I buy
An Outcast of the Islands
by Conrad,
Maiden Voyage
by Denton Welch and
Brac the Barbarian
by John Jakes.

We walk out through the flower markets, florist shops and greenhouses. Sex nettles for fraternity initiations. It's more fun than paddles. Orchids that grow into your flesh, tendrils stirring vegetable lusts. And here is a humanoid mandrake six feet in height.

“Is it a screamer?” Audrey asks.

“It sure is, son. And when he screams it will bring off every living creature for a twenty-yard radius. And the beauty of it is, he lives on your shit … saves you installing a toilet.”

“What makes him scream?”

“You fuck him, son. Or jack him off or suck him off and he screams like a major.”

“What happens if we hang its green ass, roots and all?” Jimmy asked.

“Son, you'd be doing what mankind has always trembled to do. You'd be upsetting the balance between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. He'd scream the planet apart. It would be the last scream.”

“He certainly has potential as a weapon,” Audrey mused. “That is, if he weren't so bulky.”

There are bits and pieces of many cities in Tamaghis. We are walking down a street of worn blue cobblestones rather like the outskirts of Edinburgh when a little boy falls in beside us. About four years old, I think at first. He has a rolling walk like a sailor. He is dressed in shorts with a white sailor shirt and white tennis shoes. I put my hand on his shoulder and he snaps at it with sharp little teeth.

“Keep your hands off me, you bastard.”

And I see that he is a miniature youth of eighteen. When we make it back to the ship with the kid, who has pulled a sailor cap out of his pocket, and get to our cabin there are two more krauts in it. Krup is making room for the cargo. I hope he can get it off the ground. He does. Next stop: Ba'dan.

WHERE NAKED TROUBADOURS SHOOT SNOTTY BABOONS

Boys in codpieces and leather jerkins carrying musical instruments from the Middle Ages invade American Express. The clerk glares and beckons to a security man. A boy with long blond hair steps to a window.

“Can I help you with something?”