Untitled (6 page)

    All of these are wired together in a fne twiney matrix of gibberdeen vines, assorted charms and fetishes (including a plastic Elvis nightlite), and… "Are those language bush branches?" I ask, fnally getting the picture.

    "Exactly," chirps in the gillikin girl, who has picked up on my boner for Mikio. Clearly, she has one, too; competition now, rearing its adorable head.

    "That's why I think it will work," Mikio sez, completely oblivious to gurl-politics (yay!). "It's so simple, it has to. That's just how Oz is."

    He certainly has a point; and I fnd myself thinking, why didn't
I
think of that?; and that's when he says, "Why don't you get your C
D player and, you know, pick out something perfect?"

    It's in that moment that the panic begins to claim me. My pulse soars. My breastbones squeeze. Little blobules of sweat start to knock at my pores. I realize how much I've already emotionally invested in this experience, even though it's patently absurd. A stereo made of nuts and kindling? Am I fucking joking? Is he putting me on?

    "You're not putting me on, right?" I ask him sincerely. "Because if you are, I will just cry…"

    "…no…"

    "…cuz this would mean so much to me…"

"…um, Aurora…?"

"…I'm sorry, I'm freaking out. I'm just so excited…"

    "Aurora," says Mikio, taking me gently by the shoulders. "Just pick a song you want to hear."

    At which point the door fies open, and in struts Señor Poogli, the six-armed chef. He is swarthy and squat and hyperbolic, brandishing his new faux-Mexican mustache with Pancho Villa swagger. When he gestures, he gestures large.

    Behind him, Pim and Bom and little Cheeba sneak in.

    "AND WHAT," Señor Poogli demands, "IS THIS?"

    "It's music," says the gillikin girl. "And I would like some wavos rancheros."

    "Hmph!" Poogli says, with a gesture that suggests that it doesn't look like music to him. All the same, the frst order of the morning is in, and he is nothing if not duty-bound. With a last caustic glance at the lot of us, he goes tromping off into the kitchen. The g-girl smiles, then looks at me. We size each other up.

    Her face is cute and round. Her hair is bobbed and purple-brown. They don't need dyes to get those shades. It just happens. But it's great. Her eyes are purple-violet too, intense and determined. She would make an excellent terrorist. Four foot two, intensely buxom, with just enough waist between bosom and hips to imply an hourglass exploding.

    I wonder if Mikio's fucked her yet, can only imagine he will. I see her thinking the exact same thing, and we catch each other there.

    "Pinky? Pim?" Breaking the spell, returning to the power-spot that is my job. "I think we've got some hungry people here. Bom? Get these tables set up? Little Cheeba? Go help Senor Poogli, okay? We're about to open for business."

    Already, outside the door, the frst morning diners are amassing. I can see Ambassador Spang and Enchantra; the twelve blond winkie children and their mannequin nanny; Squinko the boot-salesman; Bing the extra-smart hamster; and some other characters I don't know. I gesture through the window to them, uno momento, por fa
vor; they nod and go back to curiously watching, or talking amongs
t themselves.

    And so, at last, the moment has come. Despite the pulse-pounding pressure, I make my way to my bag. The CD player is there, along with a folio containing ffty CDs that for some reason were on my mind. I take out the player, set the folio down beside it. "Where should I set up?" I call across the room to Mikio.

    "How should I know?" he says. He's right.

    "So it doesn't matter where I put it?"

    "Only to you. It's your CDs. I'll tell you when I'm all set up."

    There's a counter just inside the kitchen door, to the right of the service bay. It's a place where we mostly keep cook books and stuff. I move through the swinging doors and set up there.

    And as I peruse, Mikio comes to me, ready. He's got one end of his miracle cable in hand, with a language bush tip carved like an audio jack. "Plug it in," he says, and I do.

    At that moment, the only possible selection leaps into my head.

    Grinning, I say to Mikio, "Tell Pinky to open the doors."

    He leaves the room. I open the player, take out The Plimsouls and slip it back in the folio. The song that I want is the very frst track on the gleaming gold CD I then take in my hand.

    The name of the song is "Never Been To Spain."

    The artist is the immortal El Vez.

    I put the disc in the machine. I close the little lid. I crank the volume to eight and pray. Then I quick kiss the sky and press Play.

    I leave the kitchen, just as the frst customers enter, and the frst susseration of sonic wave whispers out from those beautiful speakers. It's the sound of the ocean, and it is loud, but not as loud as it's going to get. I think about pinning it back just a little, but then I see the mounting confusion on all those magick faces.

    
Why cheat them on their frst time?, I fgure.

     Then I just stand back and enjoy.

    Out from the sound of crashing waves comes a single distorted guitar. It's buzzing around one note, like a wiggly bee, and then it starts a steep slow crazy tension-building climb.

    When the frst clipped power chord in the history of Oz rings out, loud and clear, I watch the crowd lift off the foor.

    And by the time they land, one split-second later, the greatest Mexican Elvis of them all is crooning his way into their sweet virgin hearts.

"Well, I've never been to Spain
But I've heard about Columbus.
Well, they say the man's insane

Cuz he thinks he discovered us.
In fourteen-nine-two,
Who discovered who?
Here's how it happened:"

    Words struggle to fail me, but I can't allow it. All I can say is:
you shoulda seen their eyes. You shoulda seen their eyes: all thos
e munchkins and gillikins, tourists and traders and bigshots and locals, suddenly lost in astounding sonic places they'd never known before.

    You should have seen the way they moved, so totally instinctively. Freezing up. Or letting go. Intensely moved.

    Or scared to death.

"Well, I've never been to Tikal
But I've been to Chichen-Itza.
The Mayan culture: man, it thrived, boy
Before Columbus had a teacher…"

    Remember: these are people who never heard rock 'n' roll. Who had no nostalgia. No connection to its history. Not a trace of the stuff in their genes. They weren't responding ironically, from some post-modern dreary ground zero of contempt or knowing mockembrace.

    They were responding to the music, purely on its own terms. And it was fascinating to witness the actual nature of their response. Like watching the frst Norwegians to stumble across the bossa nova.

    By the time El Vez & Co. cranked the song into high gear, a good chunk of the crowd was really truly gettin' down. They didn't know what to call it, but they knew what it did; like magick, that was good enough for them. Mikio and I were busy struttin' our stuff, from our respective corners of the room, so those near us could pick up on a couple of shoulder-snappin', head-cockin', hip-grindin' moves. I liked—no surprise there—the way he moved.

    But the room was full of surprises.

    First off was the wily Enchantra: offcial mistress to the Winkie Ambassador. While the obsequious, every-quivering Spang seemed startled and skittish in his Ambassadorial togs—eyes as wide as his built-in squint allowed, triple chins a-jitter in the river of sound— Enchantra appeared to be channeling the spirit of Uhura from the old Star Trek. Her golden feline eyes, black mane, and slinky chocolate physique made the overblown serpentine slinkster moves alluring, despite my post-modern inclination to giggle. I realized that some seduction ploys are not learned at all, but unspeakably natural. (I don't know if this is reassuring or not.)

    The fact that she was aiming the ploy at me was not in the least surprising. She's been trying to get me into bed since we met last year, when I frst started hanging out with Scarecrow. But beyond that, the music really seemed to be getting her off; and creepy as she often strikes me, I still thought it was kinda cool.

    The manniquin nanny seemed unmoved by the groove, but the little Winkie children were going wild. Several of them had found their way to Mikio's speaker cabinets, where they held their hands up to the sound and laughed as the bass waves whuffed them. And Mikio's friends belonged at the ENIT Festival, all over it like ravesters at some three-in-the-morning peak.

    There was more. There was more. More people, fooding through the door. Pinky wasn't sure what the protocol was, but neither could she stop her butt from swaying. I kinda lost sight of Bing, but later on I found the tabletop skritches from where he'd been kicking up his heels.

    And onward it went, through the chick singers wailing "agua…," mimicking George Harrison and his "Wah Wah" refrain. Onward it went, until the song faded out. And the wild applause erupted.

    I will never be the same.

    And I don't want to blow this thing out of proportion, but I suspect that Oz, too, will never hear itself in quite the same way again. Before the day was done, I played
Swordfshtrombone.
I played "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast." I played luscious Jeff Buckley and righteous Rev. Horton Heat. I played psychotic Thrill Kill Kult, spritely Cindi Lee Berryhill, and the red-hot sounds of Dizzy Gillespie, plus a little Latin Playboys and Debussy on the side.

    While half the Emerald City tried to pack its way inside our doors.

    I'll tell you this much; the Fonz is defnitely going to shit. He wanted the most exciting restaurant in Oz, and it looks like he's fnally nailed it for sure. Mikio's looking into the logistics of extension speakers, and the possibility of wiring the city for sound. There've already been over a thousand requests. Business is going through the roof, walls, and foorboards; we've never really taken reservations, but it's starting to sound like an awfully good idea.

    And, at last count, it seems that three count-em' three brand new local bands are forming, as the young-at-heart of Oz claim Earthly music as their own.

    Sound like a ripple in the normosphere to you?

    It's the dead of night in the Emerald City, as I write down these fnal words. The place has been closed for about three hours; I've been alone with the room and the succulent sounds.

    Now the last CD has gone to sleep, and I'm listening to the silence of the Emerald urban night. No squad car ululations. No drunken roars. No shots. No screams.

    It's funny how the music takes me back, gives me tacit sensememories of the days before I left. How unhappy I was. How hemmed-in by the blindness. How starving for action, in whatever form it took (or, more often, didn't).

    How glad I am to be gone.

    But there's something about sitting here, with the songs and the memories, that makes me weirdly proud of the place from whence I come.

    And much as I love this endless smorgasboard of strangeness, I have never been so grateful that there is such a place as Earth.

Dear me,

    Something deeply weird just happened. Lemme get it down quick.

    About an hour before dinnertime rush, and I'm back in the kitchen with Señor Poogli. We are discussing tonight's specials: a nice Rump O' Goomer with mole sauce, and Poogli's new innovation: the Mexican Goomer Weave. It's this elaborate process, which he's trying to explain—something about making threads of shredded goomer meat, then weaving them into sculptures—and it's really fascinating, but then the kitchen door blows open.

    And in walks this character I've never seen before. A kind of icky man-weasel, slightly taller than me. He's got slicked-down salt and pepper fur with a musky, slightly-oily sheen. Up on his hind legs, slinking into the room, there's something oddly prim about him. Maybe it's his pantaloons. But the vibe gets unnerving, the second he enters. And I don't like his eyes.

    In the background, Dead Can Dance are playing, and I can tell that he doesn't much care for it.

    "Hello," he says, with his long skinny snout, and I notice he loves to show his teeth. They are many and pointed; and without hesitation, I imagine them taking a chunk out of me.

    He enjoys my reaction. It's the one he had in mind. That pisses me off, and I summon up steel. To my right, Señor Poogli looks equally tense. He's got one hand on a cleaver, and the other fve are fsts.

    "Excuse me. Miss Aurora Jones?" the weasel continues.

    "That's me."

"I am here to discuss the…dinner reservations."

"Okay. And just who might you be?"

    He pulls himself up to his full height, draws his thin black lips into a condescending sneer. "Perhaps you've heard of me," he says, still showing teeth. "My name is…Rokoko."

    I laugh. "As in Rocky Rokoko?"

    "Er, no." Displeased. I'm guessing he's heard the joke before.

    "Ah, well. So how can I help you, Mr. Rokoko?"

    He takes a couple steps closer, and now I can see Pim and Pinky in the doorway, with their big worried eyes. It's so clear that they're already blaming themselves for this little confrontation. I fash them reassurance, and hold my ground.

    Rokoko is confdent, self-absorbed, but his danger radar isn't bad. Or maybe he knows a little something about me. Either way, he stops. Flashes ugly teeth. And makes a quite bogus conciliatory gesture.