The Wild Boys (3 page)

“GIVE ME THE SIXTEEN.”

The cameraman shoots wildly … pimps scream by teeth bare eyes rolling, Esperanza sneers down at the Mexican earth, the fat lady drops straight down her pink skirts billowing up around her, Tía Dolores sails down her eyes winking sweet and evil like a doll, dog falls across a gleaming empty sky.

The camera dips and whirls and glides tracing vultures higher and higher spiraling up.

Last take: Against the icy blackness of space ghost faces of Tío Mate and El Mono. Dim jerky faraway stars splash the cheek bones with silver ash.
Tío Mate smiles
.

Marrakech 1976 … Arab house in the Medina charming old pot-smoking Fatima drinking tea with the trade in the kitchen. Here in the middle of a film to find myself one of the actors. The Chief has asked me to his house for dinner.

“Around Eight Rogers.”

He received me in his patio mixing a green salad thick steaks laid out by the barbecue pit.

“Help yourself to a drink Rogers.” He gestures to the drink wagon.

“There’s kif of course if you want it.”

I mixed myself a short drink and declined the kif.

“It gives me a headache.”

I’d seen the Chief smoking with his Arab contacts but
that didn’t give me a license to smoke. Besides it does give me a headache.

The Chief’s cover story is an eccentric old French
comte
who is translating the Koran into Provencal and sometimes he will pull cover and bore his guests catatonic. You see, he really knows Provençal and Arabic. You have to study for years on a real undercover job like this. The Chief wasn’t pulling cover tonight. He was expansive and “watch your step, Rogers” I told myself, sipping a weak Scotch.

“‘I think you are the man for a highly important and I may add highly dangerous assignment, Rogers.’ You fell for that crap?”

“Well sir he is impressive,” I said cautiously.

“He’s a cheap old ham,” said the Chief. He sat down and filled his kif pipe with one hand. He smoked and blew the ash out absently caressing a gazelle that nuzzled his knee.

“ ‘Gotta stay ahead of the Commies or everybody’s kids will be learning Chinese.’ What a windbag.”

I endeavored to look noncommittal.

“Have you any idea what we’re doing here, Rogers?”

“Well, no sir.”

“I thought not. Never tell them what you want until you’ve got them where you want them. I’m going to show you a documentary film.”

Two Arab servants carry out a six-foot screen and set it up ten feet in front of our chairs. The Chief gets up turning switches adjusting dials.

A jungle seen through a faceted eye that looks simultaneously in any direction up or down … close-up of a green snake with golden eyes … telescopic lens picks out a monkey caught by an eagle between two vast
trees. The monkey is borne away screaming. I can feel a probing insect intelligence behind the camera, pyramids ahead fields and huts. In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate. Satisfied with the inspection the camera moves back to observe group patterns of the workers. They are moving through a three-dimensional film of the operation that covers them with a grey sheen. Occasionally the overseer adjusts a slow worker with his eyes.

Next take shows a room in the temple suffused with underwater light. An old priest naked to his pendulous dugs and atrophied testicles sits cross-legged on a toilet seat set in the floor. The seat is cushioned with human skin on which are tattooed pictures of a man turning into a giant centipede. The centipede is eating him from inside legs and claws grow through screaming flesh. Now the centipede is eating his screaming mouth.

“Criminals and captives sentenced to death in centipede are tattooed with those pictures on every inch of their bodies. They are left for three days to fester. Then they are brought out given a powerful aphrodisiac, skinned alive in orgasm and strapped into a segmented copper centipede. The centipede is placed with obscene endearments in a bed of white-hot coals. The priests gather in crab suits and eat the meat out of the shell with gold claws.”

The old priest looks like a living part in an exotic computer.
From festering sockets in his spine fine copper wires trail in a delicate fan. The camera follows the wires. Here in a little copper cage a scorpion is eating her mate. Here the head of a captive protrudes through the floor. Red ants have made a hill in his head. They crawl in and out of empty eye sockets. They have eaten his lips away from a gag. A muffled scream without a tongue torn through his perforated palate showers the floor with bloody ants. In jade aquariums human rectums and genitals grafted onto other flesh … a prostate gland quivers rainbow colors through a pink mollusk … two translucent white salamanders squirm in slow sodomy golden eyes glinting enigmatic lust … Lesbian electric eels squirm on a mud flat crackling their vaginas together … erect nipples sprout from a bulbous plant.

“They know an aphrodisiac so potent that it shatters the body to quivering pieces. The Sweet Death is reserved for comely youths and maidens. This wonderful old people had a rich folklore. Well I happened onto this good thing through a Mexican shoe-shine boy … Yoohoo Kiki … Come out and show Mr. Rogers how pretty you are …”

Kiki stands in a doorway smiling like a shy young animal.

“Now that lad … he’s a doll isn’t he? … is one of the best deep trance mediums I have ever handled. Through him I was able to teleport myself to a Mayan set and bring back the pictures. The whole thing was so frantic I cooled it all the way in my reports. All I said was it looks like a lovely WUP. That’s code for Weapon of Unlimited Potential … He’s hotting up now.”

The old priest rocks back and forth. The wires stand up on his spine and his eyes light up inside. His lips part and a dry insect music buzzes out.

“It’s known as singing the pictures. The principle is alternating current. That old fuck can alternate pain and pleasure on a subvocal perhaps even a molecular level twenty-four times a second goading the natives around on stock probes in out up down here there into the prearranged molds laid down in the sacred books. A few singers can deliver direct current and they are only called in an emergency. The control system you have just seen broke down. This happened quite suddenly a whole generation was born that felt neither pain nor pleasure. There were no soldiers to bring captives from other tribes since soldiers would have endangered the control machine. They relied entirely on local criminals for the pain and pleasure pictures. As a last resort they called in the Incomparable Yellow Serpent.”

The Serpent is carried in on his amber throne blue snake eyes skin like yellow parchment two long serpent fangs grafted into the upper jaw. As the current pulses through him he begins to rock back and forth. He shifts from A.C. to D.C. A thin siren wail breaks from his lips now open to the yellow fangs.

DEATH DEATH DEATH

The pictures crash and leap from his eyes blasting worker and priest alike to smoldering fragments.

DEATH DEATH DEATH

A thin siren wail rises and falls over empty cities.

“This secret of the ancient Mayans which few are competent to practice.

When comes such another singer as the Old Yellow Serpent?”

“Now the Technical Department think we are all as crazy as our way of life is reprehensible.

“ ‘Bring us the ones that work* they say ‘facts, figures, personnel.

‘“Put that joker DEATH on the line. Take care of Mao and his gang of cutthroats.’

“I was privileged to assist in a manner of speaking at the Yellow Serpent’s last broadcast in Washington D.C.”

Room in the Pentagon. Generals, CIA, State Department fidget about with that top secret hottest thing ever look open line to the President Strategic and NATO standing by. The Old Yellow Serpent is carried in by four marine guards. He begins to rock back and forth. He breathes in baby coos and breathes out death rattles. He sucks in wheat fields and spits out dust bowls.

“He’s just warming up,” says the CIA man to a five-star general.

The Old Serpent shifts to D.C. blazing like a comet.

DEATH DEATH DEATH

The pictures lash and crackle from his eyes.

DEATH DEATH DEATH

A wall blows out and spills screaming brass eighteen floors to the street.

DEATH DEATH DEATH

And now the Serpent swings his whip in the sky.

Here lived stupid vulgar sons of bitches who thought they could hire DEATH as a company cop … empty streets, old newspapers in the wind, a rustle of darkness and wires.

In the night sky over St Louis the Mayan Death God does a Cossack dance shooting stars from his eyes.
The Chief smiles
.

The Green Nun has stopped the unfortunate traveler in front of her red-brick priory set among oak trees, green lawns and flower beds.

“Oh do come in and see my mental ward and the wonderful things we are doing for the patients.”

She walks with him up the gravel drive to the priory door pointing to her flowers.

“Aren’t my primroses doing nicely.”

She opens the door of the priory with a heavy brass key at her belt. Down a long hall and flight of stairs she opens another door with her keys. She shows Audrey into a bare cold ward room crayon drawings on the wall. A nun walks up and down with a ruler. The patients are busy with plasticene and crayons. It looks
like a kindergarten but some of the children are middle-aged. The door clicks shut and her voice changes.

“You’ll find plasticene and crayons over there. You must have permission to leave the room for any purpose.”

“Now see here …”

A paunchy guard with a tin helmet and wide leather belt stands beside her. The guard looks at him with cold ugly hate and says:

“He wants Bob and his lawyers.”

At six o’clock there is a tasteless dinner of cold macaroni that Audrey does not touch. After dinner the night sister comes on.

Cots are set up by the patients and the ward room is converted into a dormitory.

“Anyone want potty before lights out?”

She jangles the keys. The lavatory cubicles stand at one end of the dormitory. The sister on duty unlocks the doors and stands in the open door watching coldly.

“Now don’t try and play with your dirty thing again Coldcliff or you’ll have six hours in the kitchen.”

A dim religious light burns all night in the dormitory. The patients sleep on their backs under a thin blanket. Erections are sanctioned with a sharp ruler tap from the night sister.

And so the years passed. Sometimes as a special treat there were nature walks in the garden, Bob there with three snarling Alsatians on a lead. The patients could watch a praying mantis eat her mate.

Daily confessions were heard by the Green Nun on a lie detector that could also give a very nasty shock in
the nasty places while the Green Nun intoned slowly “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

These confessions she wrote out in green ink keeping a separate ledger book for each patient. Once after a particularly degraded confession she levitated to the ceiling in the presence of an awed young nun. Every night she put on Christ drag with a shimmering halo and visited some young nun in her cell. She liked to think of herself as the nun in a poem by Sara Teasdale.

“Infinite tenderness infinite irony is hidden forever in her closed eyes.

Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness how empty wisdom is even to the wise.”

She was an inveterate hypochondriac and dosed herself liberally with laudanum. As a result she suffered from constipation which could put a comely young nun on high colonic duty. This honor was invariably followed by a nocturnal visit from Christ with a strap-on. In her youth the Green Nun had toyed with the idea of ordering Bob to raid a sperm bank. Then she could claim the Christ child. She put aside these ambitious thoughts. Her work in the kindergarten was more important than worldly glamor, her picture on the cover of
Life
.

You learn not to have a thought you will be ashamed to tell the Green Nun and never to do anything you would be ashamed to do in front of her. And sooner or later you join the Quarter G Club. Converted patients are allowed a quarter grain of morphine every night before lights out, a privilege which is withdrawn for any trespass.

“Now you know that dream about flying is WRONG don’t you? For that you go to bed without your medicine.”

Shivering with junk sickness in the icy ward room all next day he has to look bright and happy as he busies himself with crayons and plasticene. He has learned to draw pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa with an unmistakable resemblance to the Green Nun. Crosses are always safe in plasticene. Soon after his commitment he made the error of molding a naked Greek statue. That day sister’s ruler slashed down on his thin blue wrist and he was forced to write out
i am a filthy little beast
ten thousand times in many places.

Dizzy dance of rooms and faces, murmur of many voices smell of human nights … St. Louis backdrop of redbrick houses, slate roofs, back yards and ash pits … As a child he had an English governess with references so impeccable that Audrey later suspected they had been forged by a Fleet Street hack in a shabby pub near Earl’s Court.

“You can’t put in too many Lords and Lydies I always sy.”

Listening back with a writer’s crystal set he picked up mutters of the servant underworld … the pimping blackmailing chauffeur … “You don’t get rid of me that easy Lord Brambletie.”

Overdose of morphine in a Kensington nursing home … “She said that Mrs. Charrington was sleeping and could not be disturbed.”

The governess left quite suddenly after receiving a letter from England.

Then there was an old Irish crone who taught him to call the toads. She could go out into the back yard and croon a toad out from under a stone and Audrey learned
to do it too. He had his familiar toad that lived under a rock by the goldfish pool and came when he called it. And she taught him a curse to bring “the blinding worm” from rotten bread.