by Steve Aylett
‘Unless I am sadly mistaken we are experiencing a minor technical difficulty,’ he hollered above the roar. ‘But if you denizens stay serene, I feel it in my black heart that we can re-balance the wheel and get back to our innocent recreational pursuits with a vengeance.’
But nobody could re-balance the wheel because it was moving too fast to get ahold of. Jammy Le Mot the head technician put a stick in the spokes and was showered in wood-shavings. Ever the opportunist, Jerry Earl pretended to help and all the while he was using the spin-handle to carve a delicate wooden swan from an old log. A rumour began to spread, that the wind funnel created by the wheel would cause freak weather conditions in the Beerlight area. A five-year-old came to Kicker’s and flew a kite. People who had just washed their hair came to the casino to dry it. Toward the end of the evening Brute Parker dropped in and used the edge of the wheel to sharpen his knife. Kicker Charlie’s had lost all credibility as a gambling establishment. Early in the morning the decision was made to axe the machinery.
Kicker was later arrested for grasping the sleeve of a streetcop and sobbing openly. Ben Rictus left the power plant and went in search of a literary enigma - but that’s a story. Garris never played paynose again. He’d made a bet with Lou Shallow that he could break the wheel at Kicker’s, blow everyone else off the table and close the casino through loss of repute. Garris used the money to buy a luxury apartment and he only returned to the casino once, to stroll in rueful, Armani-clad reverie around the now-gutted premises. Nobody had ever found the paynose ball - that is until Garris’s visit, when he slipped on it and broke his neck.
MOTORCRASH
Sally the Gat was called Sally till she bought an Armalite semiauto assault rifle at Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop and started shooting at Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire. The first person to call her Sally the Gat was shot at such close range the cops drew a chalk body-outline on the ceiling. Everyone was surprised because Sally had always been such a sweet girl. Some thought Billy had led her astray.
In the old days Sally had been the simplest of car thieves. She’d go into a showroom and ask to take one of the items for a test spin, then drive it down the block to a second-hand place and sell or exchange at a pancake profit. People admired her easy style and she and Billy Panacea were separately regarded as kids of enterprise and initiative. They’d headline in the same issue of Parole Violators Bugle. Finally they met in the Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine Street, where they had both ordered meals which were of frail health. Billy’s burger was bleeding like a miracle. Sally’s chicken sandwich had been inflated manually. Billy and Sally independently approached the owner Don Toto from opposite sides of the establishment and proceeded to throttle him. Their hands met around his neck - there was a spark of electricity. When Toto subsided to the floor the two saw eachother for the first time.
Sally’s beauty existed on the edge of sanctioned reality. Her body was a three-dimensional relief map of the beaches of Southern California. Her legs were a grounding cord extending from her base chakra to the centre of the earth. Her wraparound shades seemed to be an organic part of her head. Billy was pinned to the wall.
Billy was wearing white dungarees and a bruise-blue jacket over a black T-shirt which said in bold white lettering THE CONNOISSEUR OF SLEEP. He looked like a million Mexican dollars. Sally was overcome with a protective desire to buy him a new wardrobe.
Over the next few months the two fit together like a brain in a kettle. Billy had never been so happy, and knifed anyone who said he had. Sally made him a jump-and-stick, velcro-covered outfit for scaling pebble-dashed walls. Billy bought Sally a double-capacity roll-on roll-off haul truck which allowed her to steal a dozen vehicles at a time. Sally would hold street-mimes while Billy punched them. They seemed the perfect underworld couple in all but their neglect to get shot repeatedly in slow motion.
Of course Billy Panacea and Sally were openly ambitious in the bettering of themselves in all things non-legislative, and this created conflict in the relationship. There grew up a competitiveness as to who made the most money, who could run the fastest at night and which profession required the most skill. Pretty soon they were taking stupid risks, bringing home more items than they could ever sell and putting their asses in jeopardy.
Neither Sally nor Billy possessed morals which were nosebleed high. The Mayor had recently made a speech stating that all crime was equally repugnant, and this led Sally and Billy to consider that their professions should be interchangeable. They decided to swap jobs for a day, as a test to see who was more resourceful. Billy was a modern guy, so he was happy to get into this variety of deal. But despite herself Sally was full of trepidation. The great thing about car theft is that transport is provided. Burgling a house is like walking into the lion’s den.
Billy intended to acquire a car by Sally’s tried-and-tested showroom exchange method, so he suggested to Sally that she burgle the showroom-salesman’s home premises shortly after Billy made off with a vehicle. Billy promised to create so much havoc at the showroom that the cops would keep the staff busy for hours. Sally would have a clear run during the early evening - time for decaf and a donut. This seemed like a fierce idea.
Night fell like an unbreakable plate. Sally climbed in the window of the relevant premises only to be confronted by the car salesman frying an omelette at the stove. Right away she knew Billy had set her up - he’d led her through the steps of the burglary so that the modus operandi would match that of his own illegal entries. When Sally was caught she’d get the rap for Billy’s recent achievements as well as this one. As Sally beat the salesman into unconsciousness and tied him to the radiator she wondered how she could have fallen for it. Everything felt unreal, like a modern novel. Time flies when you’re having trouble staying out of the penitentiary.
Sally’s next stop was Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop where she picked up a firearm powerful enough to send a man into space. There was a sneering new Ferrari 348 parked out front of Billy’s place. Sally blew her gourd. Billy was watching the Hair Bear Bunch when his apartment was shaken with gunfire - windows exploded and walls crumbled - the place was being reduced to a hotel. Billy was embarrassed to find himself calling the cops almost immediately - partly to confirm whether it was the cops who were shooting at him. He’d never given Sally a key because he himself never used one. Sally blew the lock with the semiauto as the cops pulled up - she entered the living room and fired at Billy, who dived like a pike - Sally filled the davenport with beans. Making her escape, Sally aired two cops and ran over a third in Billy’s Ferrari, leaving a mark in the drive like a fumbled pizza.
She was across the border before Chief of the Cops Henry Blince could count to ten, and during this three-day interval Billy Panacea thought up a cover story, all the while shaking like a leaf in a shredder. He said he’d damn well asked to be shot at by Sally, as he’d tried to remove her shades against her will. Billy was put away for assault and Sally began a spree of armed robberies which stretched decorously from coast to coast. The thing is that Billy hadn’t set her up at all and had in no way stolen the Ferrari - within seconds of Billy’s arrival at the showroom the salesman had intimidated him into buying the vehicle for a hundred and fifty thousand smackers.
BLOCK WAR
It was a joke downtown that Eddie Slam’s desire to kill everyone was buried so deep in his subconscious as to be hardly relevant. The apartment building where Eddie lived was like something out of Metropolis - the walls glistened and the tenants were pale. It had a communal rat and a clientele of crazed barbers who hadn’t worked in years. Merit stars were awarded for the fastest and scariest whole-body convulsion. Eddie had to wade through uneaten seaweed to reach his door, behind which there was barely enough room to change his religion. He was going stir-crazy and he knew it. It was like being awake during an operation.
Eddie’s only friend was the unrecognisable, Jurassic janitor Ivo Beak. When Eddie first met him Ivo was spending all his time c
arving miniature figurines out of frozen snot. His face could only be done justice by the glare of a hurricane lamp and his DNA probably resembled popcorn. He was so amorphous Eddie could never determine what he was wearing. When Eddie asked him to define a snail he described it as a ‘small, hard, electric child’. Eddie had been strenuously teaching him to read and now Ivo had written a haiku of Woyzeck to save people sitting through the whole thing:
♦ ♦ ♦
Flying cat - catch!
Mad bugger -
stab girl!
♦ ♦ ♦
Ivo left this with Eddie and went to stoke the coal-gas furnace in the basement. As Eddie read and re-read the poem he felt a strange loss of gravity. The sky outside the window flickered like a dodgy computer screen. When god wants to reward a man, she first deprives him of all his reason. Eddie started lighting his cigarettes in the middle. He created a device which ate bagels, and trained his dog to shout accusations at passersby. He wrote a letter to the New York Times about his eyelids, and claimed in addition that his earlobes belonged to some other guy. Eddie was barking mad as a hare and thus almost indistinguishable from those around him.
Eddie perceived the galloping drabness of his undead domicile with a new clarity. The furniture had obviously been grown in the darkness of a mushroom cellar. The blackleather desk in the foyer had, it seemed, been surgically removed from a bison. And the guy down the hall once addressed him as ‘Sunbeam’. Where was the life in this slobbery? The existence of a brain in the entire building was a matter for savage speculation. Eddie plotted action in his barnacle-encrusted room - something had to change.
But it wasn’t so easy. Eddie tried to provoke mass arrests by anonymously calling Chief of the Cops Henry Blince about the dozens of insane barbers in the building but Blince came round to have a shave and left stroking his face. Eddie tried to evacuate the building by yelling fire but at this everyone burst into the corridors with cameras and peels of celebratory laughter. He bought a bomb from Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop but the blast only succeeded in straightening out the north wall. He released a sackful of energetic adders but later discovered that they were being snared and roasted by the penniless residents. One guy gave Eddie the recipe for a sauce. Eddie saw another tenant stroll through the lobby gnawing at a toffee-covered snake-head on a stick.
For all the respect Eddie was given in this place, he may as well have been wearing antlers.
It was a habit among the inhabitants of Eddie’s building to shoot at the communal rat for therapy and sport, but Eddie just pleaded with it to breed like a rabbit and drive the other tenants away - the rodent would stop and look at him with a mixture of profoundest pity and lofty disdain. One dismal night Eddie taped a pack of plastic explosive to the back of the glossy vermin and sent it out - he figured someone would strike the expanded target and blow themselves to hell. The rat shuffled off the plastic, swallowed it and skittered right back for more - Eddie was frantically aware that he couldn’t have an unstable rat in his pad and chased it all the way out to the Loop Expressway, shooting the bastard with a Norinco AK-47 submachine gun. The rodent crouched on the road and exploded like a gas truck. People ten miles away saw the flare.
After that, things got worse. Eddie was a gaunt, Perkinsesque obsessive. He swore he heard rats in the walls. Maybe the communal had taken his advice and bred - maybe the whole family was ballistic. And every week Ivo came snaffling up and waved a bit of phlegm-soaked paper at him, covered in scrawl. Didn’t Ivo understand this was the tenement where god had died? That its destruction was a service to life-loving men and women everywhere? And if the occupants got a little cod-eyed in the crossfire, Eddie could take the heat.
Saturday night, Eddie told Ivo to piston over to the Muse Street movie house and pantomime someone with a life. Then he went down to Ivo’s basement and chuckled as he stooped to adjust the coal-gas furnace. Like the rest of the building the furnace had been constructed when people were thirty percent smaller. Eddie easily bust the main feed and jammed it into a hole high up in the hollow wall. The rats would be the first to go. He’d sit tight an hour and a half for the gas to rise as far as the middle floor, then pick up Ivo’s phone and call the rooms up there until somebody switched on a light, igniting the gas and blowing the roof off the building. But the sap had miscalculated - coal gas doesn’t rise, it falls. Within an hour, Eddie Slam was dead.
Several froth-lipped residents of the apartment building attended the funeral and Ivo Beak read Woyzeck over the grave, into which two of the frenetically convulsing mourners fell. Ivo’s first novel was published a year later and he was hailed as a brave postmodernist voice. He dedicated the book to Eddie Slam, ‘patron and benefactor’. Five years later he bought the apartment building, evicted everyone, and bombed it to a shadow. ‘Ask not what your country can do to you,’ he whispered, ‘ask what you can do to your country.’
INTERLUDE
The Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine Street was a popular den with the moody and furious. Don Toto the owner and barman specialised in inscrutable, undead snacks, and shakes which were so narcotically corrosive that spillage resulted in convictions for arson. This intense fare left its customers conversing in the crash position. Grandiose lethargy and insane belligerence were the order of the day, and woe betide the silver-haired gran who dared boast of her grief and frailty.
Yet Toto had not always been such a bacchanalian figure. He had been energetic and unsuccessful for years before coming to Beerlight, but after an arrest in Seattle for drive-by chuckling he had set upon a fresh life. The family fortune derived from his father’s design patent on Mr Potato Head - this Toto used to acquire the Delayed Reaction on Valentine, though amid the froth-lipped delirium and blistering invective of the bar, he at first displayed a pious and subversive calm. Unlike the denizens of Beerlight, some of whom slashed car tyres with their teeth, Toto was a mild-mannered gentleman possessed of a belief in the common good and a normal hatred of the cops.
The change occurred when Toto read a newspaper article which estimated that crime was taking place at a rate of one crime every four seconds. Toto had always assumed that crime was constant - like ten or twenty per second - and the revelation of these four-second pauses fired his curiosity. Why four seconds? Why intervals of no crime? Like a scientist who agitates atomic particles to observe their behaviour, Toto decided to study crime on a quantum level by creating wild fluctuations in its frequency.
He was in the perfect position to do so. The Reaction was slambang on a line between Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop and the Deal Street banks, which were regularly robbed at the point of guns acquired at Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop. The line transected a mile known as the Beretta Triangle and Toto was up to his ears in thugs who exhibited a pop-eyed and bellowing menace. Without provocation the Reaction regulars would batter him with tales of bloody rage and stabbing daggers, and at the drop of a hat would yell in finely-crafted detail what they’d like to do next. A typical exchange would go something like this:
BILLY PANACEA, BURGLAR EXTRAORDINAIRE: I would like to steal everything, Toto. Leave every home on god’s green earth as bare as the truth, for I’ll have you know as well as I do, property is not theft - we are required to pay and pay, and that is sad in the short term and fruitless in the long. Why can we not exist like the startled rabbits of nature?
DON TOTO: Well now Billy, have a care. Go around with that finely-crafted attitude and before you know it you’ll be button-eyed and deceased.
PANACEA: You do not understand, Toto. I would like to steal and steal. Until the world is purified and clean, Toto, picked clean and white like the glossy bones of a buffalo. And there will be no hiding-place for these ultra-monkeys who are not even worthy to clutch the hem of my garment.
TOTO: Simmer down Billy, I have a suggestion.
PANACEA: I tell you I will leap off a rumbling bridge if I do not steal something big within the hour.
TOTO: Well perhaps. And a
s for bigness my lightweight stick-on friend, I am not unaware of a two-fisted shitpile of a tank just waiting and oh-so-ready for acquisition.
PANACEA: What are the premises?
TOTO: The Magnuson-Kramer Military LaughIn off the Loop Expressway, and in regard to firepower I believe we are discussing a 12.7mm turret gun for the purposes of anti-aircraft mania and two 7.72mm bolt-on items which will cause the ultra-monkeys you mentioned not a little distress.
PANACEA: I’ll be there before you understand it. And as for the getaway it cuts out the middleman, like putting a cigarette directly into a brainfold.
♦ ♦ ♦
Billy burst onto the street drooling like a Hadrosaur, and so did every other crook who exchanged views with Toto. Anyone who entered the bar with even the dimmest notion to misbehave would re-emerge with an ear-shattering scheme to fire indiscriminately among praying nuns or set light to all that is good and free in America. There was a gridlock of hoods and bastards heading out for a kick at the legislation. The crimewave rushed up and down the northeast corridor, taking its boisterous toll on Washington, Philly and the Chog. Amid the uproar Billy Panacea was arrested for trundling a tank over a mime.
