The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  We took a left from Broadway onto Bleecker. By then we’d started gathering satellites — a minor crowd of young girls trying to touch Mick — and my orchestra was playing something that sounded suspiciously like “Hard Day’s Night,” with more false notes than usual from the unrelated bassoon. A six-foot-tall blue lobster — another little something of Mike’s, I gathered slightingly — watched us make the turn.

  That reminded me. “Shouldn’t we be taking notes?”

  “Do you think we can forget?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  The Village proper, if there is such a thing, was still some four blocks ahead, a sudden bright island in Manhattan’s after-midnight dimness. Already we could see that even though the entertainment houses were closed, Bleecker Street was as crowded as usual, hopefully with nobody we knew. Michael, therefore, stepped up the tempo of introductions, calling the rest of his pantheon front and center double time and dismissing them before they had a chance even to say hello, which was all to the good. They were:

  * Fellatia, the goddess of something she and Mike coyly refused to name. She was a bulbous chick of moderate ugliness, aged anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and dressed all in pretty-colored Kleenex. Despite Mike’s brusque dismissal, she tried to assault me for nameless reasons of her own, but we beat her off. I began to think MacDougal Street might not survive the evening.

  * Phlipout and Phlippina, twin deities of disorder, were muscular male and female teenyboppers — very healthy and confused — in whose presence, Mike claimed, all things tended to dissolve into the most spectacular chaos imaginable. The blithe madness lurking in their eyes made this seem all too likely, and I noticed that their place in the marching order was right beside my friend the out-of-tune bassoonist.

  * Moe, the god of tourists, was forty-five, fat, crew-cut, drunk, bellicose, and gifted, so Mike said, with superhuman powers of abuse.

  * Buldge, the goddess of minor disasters, was a kind of accidental fertility figure, very pregnant, incredibly naked, alarmingly busty and genital, with unkempt brownish hair hanging down to where her waist used to be, whose merest glance could delay a chick’s period two weeks.

  * Chuck, the god of miscellany, was a super-Mike of sorts, taller and leaner but with the same look of bland malevolence and random fanaticism that so endeared Mike to everyone who could put up with him. I suspected Chuck was basically road manager for the rest of Mike’s crew.

  “And this,” Mike boasted less than half a block from West Broadway and the frontier of the Village, “is Zap, titular deity of changes, in whose presence nothing is ever the same.” Zap was pretty formless and it hurt my eyes to look at him.

  “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” I worried. Michael only smiled.

  Then we entered the Village. Suddenly Mike blew three loud blasts on a police whistle. The orchestra — my orchestra, mind you! — struck up a march:

  heavy on the piccolos and very loud. Michael’s gods and goddesses scattered to the five winds, and the action instantly became too confused to follow.

  Mick ran up Bleecker Street, and every teen-aged girl he passed screamed and followed him. He zigzagged back and forth across the street, ignoring traffic, and the girls, screaming, followed him, making traffic impossible. Weeping girls performed incomplete flying tackles at his legs as he passed. Overwrought female tides brutally washed over anything, especially people, that stood between themselves and Mick. The clamor of auto horns, shrill screams, and breaking glass threatened to drown out my orchestra, and I rather wished it would.

  Mick was built for running and stayed easily ahead of his following. Every now and then he paused to kiss some unsuspecting chick, who promptly fainted. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were littered with broken glass, abandoned escorts, and the limp bodies of kiss victims.

  Close behind Mike came Fellatia, vigorously propositioning the abandoned escorts, who fled in yelping droves before her.

  Phlipout, Phlippina, and Toke ambled into every coffeehouse, restaurant, street food dive and bar on the street, all the patrons of which instantly ran outside in noisy panic, there to encounter Moe, who yelled, “All you people’sh jush a bunch a’ flippin’ faggots! C’mon, lesh fight!” and struck out indiscriminately at everyone in reach.

  Meanwhile Buldge, smiling vacantly, strolled up to every female, conscious or not, who remained after Mick’s army had passed, saying, “Oooo, are you gonna have a little baby, too? I bet you are,” causing every girl who hadn’t fainted yet to faint.

  Behind Buldge came Zap, now nine feet tall and formless, shooting purple rays from his (perhaps) fingertips at every overt hippy in sight. “Oh WoW!” or the equivalent the smitten hippies yelled. “Oh WoW!” and took off like stampeding hippies, running in tight circles and pleading, “Get out of my head! Oh WoW!”

  Through this confusion, Chuck, the super-Mike, strode calmly, giving orders (“Come back, Buldgie love, you missed this one!”) and tending to such minor details as cops, mounted cops, and cops in prowl cars. Cops he passed developed uncontrollable urges to disrobe, horses tried to climb light poles, and prowl cars suddenly issued vast clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke.

  The carnage swept forward faster than we could walk, and soon turned north at MacDougal Street and passed out of sight, though not out of earshot (whatever that might be). Bleecker Street looked like something out of World War II: broken windows, overturned cars, and fallen bodies as far as we could see. Only Mike, the orchestra, and I were still erect and functioning. The orchestra played the dead march from Saul and we picked our way delicately through the rubble.

  Despite the devastation all around me — my own, my native land, in ruins — I still felt great. The Reality Pill, I thought, had much to recommend it, if you didn’t mind a little chaos on the side. But, “Is this what you really wanted?” I asked Mike.

  “Well,” he said, looking slowly around him, “I am a little disappointed.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was expecting something a little more colorful,” he sighed.

  “Oh.”

  The sound of screams et cetera grew faint as Mick and Company tore up MacDougal toward West Eighth, where they were sure to do such things as I shuddered to imagine. In the distance an approaching chorus of sirens could be heard. A few photographers had already appeared — that was a big summer for photographers — and flashbulbs popped around us like exclamation points.

  MacDougal Street, when we reached it, proved to be utterly impassable. Cars and trucks, not all overturned, sprawled every which way like mechanized spaghetti, blocking street and sidewalks equally. Dazed survivors of all types and genders wandered aimlessly through the ruins, mouthing strange, poetic expressions of dismay. Every window above street level was crowded with frightened people gibbering in nameless tongues. An acrid blue haze hung over everything, pierced by sporadic flashbulbs. A very blonde girl, naked except for an arcane blue and red tattoo above her navel, sat cross-legged atop an overturned chrome trailer truck playing aimless squiggles on what seemed to be a soprano recorder.

  “Busy,” I observed.

  “Indeed,” said Mike.

  “Detour?”

  “Detour.”

  So Mike and orchestra and I went on to Sixth Avenue, which was still untouched by the gods.

  Rescue vehicles started arriving as we walked up the avenue — dozens of police cars, lots of ambulances, three or four full fire companies, and some odd National Guard equipment left over from Saturday.

  “That’s what I call prompt action,” I said.

  “Right. Sort of gives you confidence, doesn’t it?” Mike answered.

  Despite the orchestra — which I, for one, would’ve noticed right away — we attracted no attention as we made our melodious way toward Third Street. This was mainly because the rescue vehicles, arriving from every possible direction, created an instant chaos of their own, a modern consort o
f horns, sirens, screeching brakes, tearing metal, and obscure, thickly accented obscenities.

  “I don’t know,” I worried. “It doesn’t give me all that much confidence, really. I mean,” waving expansively, “look. I’ve seen better organized games of pick-up-sticks.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Mike forgave them.

  The orchestra played Telemann. That bassoonist played Vivaldi.

  The Garden of Eden was packed with jabbering refugees, but its windows were intact.

  “Jesus Christ!” Joe yelled from behind the cash register as we entered. “Wha’s happenin’!?”

  We shrugged eloquently and groped our way to the table. Only strangers were there, none of our people. We unseated two of them, ordered coffee, and relaxed.

  “Are you satisfied?” I asked.

  Mike looked doubtful. “I’m not sure,” he said. “There’s got to be more to it than this.”

  “Excuse me,” said another tall blue lobster, making its way to the John.

  “One of yours?” I wondered.

  “I thought it was one of yours.”

  “I don’t like blue lobsters.”

  “Oh. I guess the party’s broken up.”

  That gave us something to think about, so we did. We weren’t the only people roaming through the city high on Laszlo Scott’s famous Reality Pills in liquid form. Not a bit of it. And what were those other few hundred maniacs doing? Our minds mutually boggled.

  There was a disturbance at the door, but we carefully ignored it. We’d had enough disturbance for a while. The disturbance got louder, harder to ignore, but still we managed. Then a new note was added to the disturbance, a flat note, obviously uttered by a skitterish bassoon. “Uh-oh,” I commented.

  “Hey, Andy!” Joe barged through the crowd toward us. “There’s these People outside that they say they’re like friends of yours, and…”

  Something tripped him and he fell. The orchestra marched sedately over him, playing somebody’s Trumpet Tune full blast. The Garden of Eden became unwholesomely crowded.

  The orchestra grouped itself in a cramped semicircle around my chair and finished the trumpet tune with flourishes. “We missed you,” the leader said. Then the orchestra plunged into Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto.

  Joe, disheveled and flamboyantly annoyed, shoved past the trumpets, yelling, “Get these people outta here!”

  “Something wrong?” in Michael’s blandest tones.

  “I ain’t got no license for no band,” Joe yelled. He was verging on hysteria. “An’ I can’t have all them people in here. It’s illegal.” His swarthy face was turning an unappealing purple. “An’ they all gotta order. Jesus Christ!” He turned and drove back through the orchestra, rending his garments melodramatically as he drove.

  “Excitable type, that Joseph,” I murmured.

  “Lousy insurance risk,” said Mike. Then Joe screamed magnificently treble in the near distance.

  “Yoo-hoo!” somebody yelled. “Michael!”

  “Oh?” we said.

  “Michael!” someone yelled again. We could feel lines of panic form in the mob like lines of force around a magnet, and when Michael’s gods tore through my orchestra (putting that bassoonist out of business for a while), we weren’t at all surprised.

  “Hey, boss,” Chuck said, “we finished Eighth Street.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Eek,” said a number of people tritely as Mick deftly dealt with them.

  “What next?” asked Chuck.

  “Hey! Help!” from Joe, who was completely surrounded by Fellatia.

  “Zap!” from Zap.

  “WoW,” from everybody else. All males present clutched their groins convulsively. Mike and I seemed to be immune.

  “Yoo-hoo!” That was Phlipout and his sister. Behind them untold crockery broke noisily.

  “Have you tried Washington Square?” Mike was being businesslike.

  “Got it on the way back.”

  The confusion was spreading to the orchestra. This dragged me. I like the first Brandenburg.

  “Yow Yow Yow Yow YOW!” Joe yelped all the way back to the cash register.

  Mick was surrounded by a squirming pile of shameless female teenyboppers, plus a few shameless males I’d never suspected before. There seemed to be enough of Mick to go around.

  “What about Sheridan Square?” Mike asked.

  “Where’s that?”

  “West of here.”

  The noise was impressive and growing. It was almost too loud to hear, and the walls were shaking like drumheads. All the gods were working overtime, the orchestra was doing its high baroque best, and Mike and Chuck were planning strategy. No good, I decided, could possibly come of this.

  I was right.

  “All right, all right,” said a bullish voice. “Move along.” The law had arrived, lots of it. At least a dozen irate fuzz in riot helmets beat a path through the melee, past our table, to the rear of the room. Hippies and other innocents, forgetting gods and chaos, ran shrieking to the front and out, overpanicked by the presence of police. I was getting sick of all that noise.

  “Shall I?” Chuck suggested.

  “Forget it,” Mike explained.

  “This is all your fault,” I told Mike.

  “Eh.” He shrugged.

  “All right, all right,” said the cops. They had portable loudspeakers. “Everybody out. Come on, now. Move.”

  Everybody turned out by then to be the gods, the orchestra, Mike and, irritated, I; not quite seventy-five people, so to speak. We moved.

  Outside we were herded into green buses with barred windows.

  “Are we under arrest?” Mike blandly asked a cop.

  “Move on there,” he explained. We moved.

  Thanks to the pill, I was simultaneously euphoric and enraged. Arrested, by God! And it was all Michael’s fault.

  Despite Mike’s efforts to engage me in light banter, I preserved a fairly stony silence all the way to the Charles Street precinct house. There we were herded out of the buses and into the station like so many oddly dressed cattle, the orchestra going fairly quietly, the gods giving everyone their usual hard time, Mike and I pretending to be meek and somewhat invisible. Inside, the orchestra began the Bach again, the gods flew madly about spreading disorder, and we took up inconspicuous positions at the rear of it all.

  We were in a large, high-ceilinged, dingy room, poorly lighted, with fly-and spit-specked dirty marble floor and grimy plaster walls, drab green, that echoed without mercy. At the far end of the room, at the foot of a rusty flight of wrought-iron stairs, half a dozen plainclothesmen tried to look unalarmed, with indifferent success.

  A uniformed elderly cop with lots of gold braid, sitting at a brightly lighted, battered oak desk at the east side of the room, looked threatened. Fellatia was crawling gracelessly over the desk toward him, despite the efforts of two burly patrolmen to restrain her.

  “What’s goin’ on here?” the man at the desk wanted to know.

  “It’s like this, Sarge,” said a cop, launching into a highly colored report of the events at The Garden of Eden. Words like riot, indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, resisting arrest, attempted bribery, felonious assault, and disturbing the peace ran through his monologue like a wearisome refrain.

  Michael looked elaborately unconcerned. I worried.

  “Oh yeah?” the sergeant said when the cop had finished his gory report.

  “Yeah,” the cop insisted.

  “Lemme go, you great big handsome brutes,” Fellatia told the two cops who were holding her.

  “I better call Centre Street,” the sergeant said. He did so. Meanwhile, Mick, Toke, Chuck, and the twins were sneaking up the stairs, apparently unnoticed by the huddled plainclothesmen.

  “Chuck’s clever,” Mike said admiringly.

  “Hmph,” I said.

  The sergeant hung up. “They’re sending over a Special Investigator,” he said, visibly impressed. “Now,”
collecting himself, “who’s in charge here?”

  “I am,” said the leader of my orchestra. I softly groaned.

  “Oh, you are, eh?” the sergeant sneered. He opened a large notebook and uncapped a fountain pen. “An’ what’s your name, buddy?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” the leader said in calm, reasonable tones, “but, a name being clearly unessential to my function, I wasn’t given one.”

  “No name?” The sergeant was upset. “What’re you tryin’ ta pull?”

  “Pull? Nothing, sir. I don’t pull anything at all. I merely play the violin. “The sackbutt players, now…”

  “Ahr, a wise guy, huh?”

  Just then there was a loud disturbance upstairs. Mike chuckled. We heard loud, metallic hangings, drunken yowls, and the sound of many heavy feet. Then an extra motley crowd poured, shuffled, stumbled, and staggered down the wrought-iron stairs, ridden herd upon by Mick, Chuck, Toke, and the twins, who were followed in turn by a brace of cops yelling, “Come back here,” and, “You can’t get away with this.”

  The gods had been freeing prisoners.

  “What the hell is all this!” The sergeant was becoming hoarse.

  Half the prisoners were women of one sort or another. As soon as they reached the main floor, they forgot about escape and started reacting to Mick. Mick encouraged them. While the sergeant stared in speechless horror, a medium-sized orgy took shape in front of his desk.

  “Whoopee!” yelped Fellatia. She broke free of her guards and started toward the sergeant, clearly bent on some unwholesome and unnatural variety of rape.

  The sergeant yelled and stumbled backward. Fellatia charged. He picked up a chair and held her at bay, almost, but she had longer arms than he’d counted on.

  Several cops tried to rescue the sergeant, only to be trapped in the growing orgy around Mick.