This eurasian-looking guy was high-jumping, something out of a Jackie Chan movie, and kicking the bejesus out of old Jules, who crawled off with a wounded and suprised look on his face, then painfully got onto his feet again and ran like hell.
The eurasian guy was still jumping around doing that animal imitation karate shit—what is it—a crane or something? Whatever it was.
"I know who you are, dickhead!" he screamed out to Jules, "You better sleep with one eye open, fool!"
I'm starting to get a complex. I mean, jeez, what is it, three people have saved my ass in as many days? And some of them more than once.
"You're Gene?" Then he did a little bow. "Mikio Furi. Allallo down at Topeka said you would need help at the park. He didn't elaborate."
"Charmed," I said, and bowed back a little. So this was Mikio. Tall, skinny, long stringy black, black hair, and half-Japanese looking, and smart, smart that you can smell a mile away.
"Wait," I said, catching my breath, "Allallo? Is that the Indian guy? The bartender? What's his trip, anyway?"
"Not an Indian. Native American kind, anyway. His people are Ozite all the way. Best indications are they're of the Mississipian Culture, came through the Salina gate about a thousand years ago." He grinned at me with big white, even teeth. "And he's not exactly a bartender like we think of them. More like a shaman—medicine man."
"Any idea why somebody would want to steal my laptop?" I asked him, as I checked to make sure it was still functioning, remembering what Aurora had said about her heart and brain.
He chuckled over that one. "Any idea why somebody wouldn't want to? This place is crawling with C.I.A., ex-K.G.B., probably Israeli, French operatives, not to mention the nasty guys who already live here. You've got a living artificial intelligence in your hands, buddy. Wanna sell it?"
I noticed that the little guy in question had written something while the scuffling occurred, probably the cyber-equivalent of pissing its pants. It looked like gibberish to me: unnumber cloud, unnumber man, an admonishment to look at the sky...
I let Mikio see it. "This mean anything to you?"
He read it, got a puzzled look on his face, then without a word, motioned for me to follow him. I powered down the laptop and stuffed it in my pack.
Mikio walked over to one of the taller trees in the park, had a few words with it. Some branches came down and boosted him into the lower reaches of the tree. In a few moments he was so high up that I could barely see him.
"Come on," he called down to me, "It's cool—you won't fall."
I shrugged, and got the same treatment from the tree. Soon I was, with little effort on my part, being pushed high into the tree. The floutist-birds shuttled and flapped out of my way, and I found myself situated, finally, at the top of the tree with Mikio, perched on a wide bough, staring out over the tops of the towers of Emerald.
I was digging the view; Mikio, however was not so excited.
"This is bad," he moaned, "Damn. This is not good." He pointed over towards the northeast, not one of my favorite places, and I could see a blackness covering a third of the horizon over there, reaching up to what looked like the top of the atmosphere. It might have been my imagination at the time, but it looked like it was moving.
Our way.
"Why do I think this doesn't mean it's going to rain?" I asked.
We got down out of the tree and hiked over to his place, which was not more than a few blocks from the park and the Burrito. It was across the street, kitty-corner, from Ozma's Gate, a giant gingerbread house of a place (green of course), the place you went to when you got to feeling like there's no place like home, or lemme the fuck out of here, whichever came first. There were purportedly other ways out of Oz, but this seemed to be the safest way out. Of course, like the Salina Gate, there were no guarantees. That was rather a chilling thought to me, as I was quickly approaching the "lemme the fuck out of here" stage.
As we crossed the street, I could see that there was a line around the block, consisting of mostly Ozite traffic, psychedelic Oakies lugging children and personal belongings. It still suprised me that so many of them wanted to go to Earth, but the more I hung out here, the less surprised I was.
"Ozma's gonna close that up any minute now," Mikio said as we climbed the stairs to his place. "She's gotta know all about that cloud. Probably most of those people across the street know about it, too—hence the line."
"Isn't she gonna do anything about it? I mean, shouldn't we do something?"
He looked away for a second, choosing his words. "Nothing we can really do yet. We'll know when the time comes. You have to understand these people. They don't do anything the way you'd expect. Especially Glinda and Ozma. Inscrutible, inscrutible, inscrutible. In-scrutible is the key word here."
I could hear music coming from behind the door as he opened it onto a big loft space, filled with all manner of crap, chochkies, knicknacks, toys, electronic devices, and people. Half a dozen people were kicking back, one of them playing a guitar—a Fender Mustang—and the rest were either clapping in time or dancing in a rather curious manner.
"Roommates?"
"Naww," he said, "I just have a lot of friends."
The guitarist was playing some really out stuff, like a bi-tonal, nine-and-a-half-bar blues. The guitar sound was stunning, transparent. I could hear the deep time-worn curly-cues and inflections of whatever native melodies he'd practiced in order to learn how to play. You could tell that Hendrix was an afterthought, an addition to already proficient chops, and the thought intrigued me.
One of the dancers caught my eye almost immediately. I wanted to consult, "So You're Going to Oz" to see what nationality she was, but would have felt really uncool. So I guessed, from her naturally violet hair, that she was a Gillikin. Not that it really mattered so much—she was a really cute girl, which was her significant attribute, and since I hadn't so much as touched my weiner in an impure manner for over a week, she was a really, really cute girl.
"You want a beer?" Mikio inquired.
"Beer?" I replied, "They have beer?"
"I guess that means 'yes'," he said, and went off to fetch me one.
As I wandered over toward the group, glancing at this or that little tiki or altar, past a pumpkin-like gourd resting in a pail of viscous pink stuff and trailing wires attached to a Rube Golberg assemblage of meters and dials, the really cute girl danced over in my direction and, with outstretched arms and a lascivious smile, coaxed me to dance with her.
"No, thanks," I said, waving her off, "I'm really not much of a dancer."
But she insisted, taking both my hands, and I ended up trying to copy her modified bunny hop. It probably looked really silly, but I have to admit it was fun once I got going.
The guitarist whipped out a few more chords and ended with a flourish, followed by applause, and introductions all around.
I have to confess, I don't remember any of their names but hers.
"Lidelei," she said, in a voice like orange blossom, or some such sweet or perfumey item. I was quite taken. Lust at first sight.
"I'm—"
"Gene of Los Angeles," they said in chorus.
"Your reputation proceeds you," Mikio said, handing me a bottle of beer. It was big, not quite a forty ouncer, and covered with a label and writing—"Green City Brew"—not unlike the Weird Aspirin.
"Reputation for what?"
"Well," he said, taking a swig off of his own beer, "for being Aurora's friend, first off—for meeting and fighting alongside Nick Chopper within the first day of arriving, for getting away from the Hollow Man's army at all... Oh, yeah, and you're from L.A. I can't see it, personally, but these people are nuts for all that—" He waved his hand around dismissively.
I looked at the other people in the room, all in what looked like their twenties or thirties, wearing a mishmosh of Earth fashion from the last fifty years—one Winkie guy had a pompadour, the top half of a Zoot Suit, complete with gold watch and chain, black Speedo bik
er shorts and a pair of platform shoes. A Munchkin lady wore a Gault-ier/Madonna metal poker brassiere, a big blue Afro, a bobby-soxer skirt, white socks and saddle shoes. Evidently they liked American Pop Culture alot, but didn't quite get it. I stifled my urge to laugh, realizing I knew next to nothing about their cultures, and in that, they had me at a disadvantage.
The Winkie guy, obviously quite proud of the look, fixed me with a smirk and announced, "We have a band. ARock Band. We play tonight at Topeka. You can be on the—" He looked really thoughtful for a second, then looked over to Mikio to help him out.
"Guest list," Mikio offered.
"Guess list," the guy repeated.
Then Mikio said to me, "Of course, it doesn't cost anything to get in, but they want it to be official. Gene, meet "Liquid Secretary." They're the first live rock band in Oz. They've been learning things in dribs and drabs from Aurora's CD player, playing it acoustically, but when they heard the loud stuff in the restaurant, they begged me to try to make it work for them. Turned out to not be so difficult.
Same principle, really. Check it out."
I really wanted to go over and drink my beer in the wooly blue claw chair over next to Lidelei, but was also sort of interested about how that exquisite sound was produced, so I followed Mikio and the vine he was tracing, for my benefit, from the guitar to a assemblage of giant shells—King-Kong-size coconuts, that were tied together with some sort of twine. They had leaves and feathers, little bells, wrappings of brightly colored string, and twisty fetishes all over them. In the back there were little open boxes looking like avant-art constructions, parodies of circuit boards, but with crazy things in there—wires with transistors hanging off them soldered to a fork stuck into a dinner roll, etc.
I looked at it, up at Mikio. I would have thought him a complete lunatic if I hadn't heard the results, here and at the Emerald Burrito, with my own ears.
"How does it work?" I asked.
"Fuck if I know. How does electricity work? What is electricity? Everybody knows what it does, but what is it?
Sorry, I don't mean to be cryptic.
"I'm working backwards here. I just see something work, and try to reproduce it. Trial and error. Sometimes I get lucky."
I got the feeling that he was just being modest. According to Aurora, this guy was doing things after living here for a year that no research team or think tank had been able to do for fifty years.
"Everything here operates according to rules," he continued, "they're just different rules."
He'd built a couple of these Gilligan's Island amplifiers for guitars, and even a small P.A. system.
"I tested the P.A. over at Topeka today, and it worked okay. We'll check it again later, to make sure. I found this little ear-horn in an antique shop; I got it to work as a microphone. Sounds better than a Neumann. Go figure. Next problem is how to record. But one thing at a time."
Having examined this stuff, I picked up my beer (which was suprisingly good) and made my way back over towards the beautiful Gillikin girl.
She was obviously miffed by my choice of audio gear over her, however, and was now flirting with the guitarist.
I sat down on the claw-chair anyway, and every once in a while
she would glance over at me and look me up and down.
I sat there for awhile, listening to the funhouse-mirror guitar and watching the dances, until the sun ducked under the towers and the greens began to ease down, mixing into the furious orange and red of the sunset. You would almost have thought that nothing was wrong anywhere, it was all the sunsets of the world, all sunsets, and these were like children, so trusting of their sovereign queen that they chose to drink beer, dance and play music all afternoon rather than worrying about impending doom. They, and Mikio, and I think even Aurora to a certain extent, believe that Ozma's got it covered. I got the somewhat creepy feeling also, that if Ozma told them all to run into a burning building and shut the door, they would do that, too.
From time to time I attempted a conversation with Lidelei, with limited success. I had snubbed her, in her view, and it was gonna take a little work before she was going to be as friendly as when I walked in the door. That was alright with me, I thought, I had all night.
Mikio finished his last of several beers, lit a small gas lamp that somehow managed to brightly illumine the entire room, and informed everyone that the party was over—it was time to hump all the musical gear over to Topeka and do a sound check.
I got up and quickly offered to be a roadie: I had done my share of helping friends' bands hump gear all over Hollywood and Silver-lake, and even had a band myself for about a week until I realized it was actually work.
My offer was gratefully accepted, and I soon found myself walking down the street in the company of Mikio and the band, carrying an assortment of vines, boxes and shells.
Three blocks later, I happily dumped the load of gear in front of Topeka, huffed and puffed a little bit. It hadn't been completely exhausting, though, which suprised me. I guess that three days of marching around and killing guys with Tinman and the gang had toughened me up.
Allallo appeared at the door, looking skeptically at the equipment, and at the motley crew that was going to use it. "If you play it too loud," he said, "you have to stop." I guess some things are constants anywhere. Then he spotted me with them. "Gene!" he shouted, smiling, like we were old buddies, "Glad to see you're okay! Come on in and have that drink now" And slapped me on the back, kind of hard, and led me inside.
After being checked off the guess list, I sidled up to the bar, counter, or whatever you want to call it, at Allallo's insistance, looking around a little guiltily at the rest of the crew loading in and setting up, but nobody seemed to mind. I turned around to see the big guy blowing the dust off of an old bottle made up of stacked rings of fused glass. The contents were ruddy, rusty, and lethal-looking.
"This is special," Allallo whispered. "Good stuff" He pulled out two little pale green cups shaped like just-opened flower buds. "I think I'm gonna join you."
Mikio walked by with a box of stuff, and got a concerned look on his face. "Gee, Lallo, go easy on the guy. You're gonna make him puke."
The bartender waved him off. "Aw, one little one won't hurt him. I wasn't gonna let him drink more than two or three anyhow."
"What is this, anyway?" I asked Allallo.
He put a finger to his lips. "Holy stuff. Big offense to utter its name—bad medicine. Just drink it."
The two old guys, who looked like the same ones that had been sitting there when I stumbled in earlier in the day, looked on with what seemed like looks of astonishment on their faces. Reflecting on it now, I think they were just incredibly fucked up.
He held the two cups up between his palms, closed his eyes and uttered a silent prayer to somebody or something, then took one, and handed me one.
"Well, skoal," I said, and downed it.
And it was incredible. It was nectar. It was the finest single malt scotch. It was a Stag's Leap Cabernet. Refreshing as diving into an alpine lake on a sweltering summer day. And none of those things. The remnant of it danced on my tongue, producing subtle harmonics of the big note.
As soon as it hit my stomach, the buzz ran warm through my body, a tricky buzz, a subtle buzz. There was more than alcohol in that brew, and I liked it, whatever it was.
"You're supposed to sip that," Allallo said.
"Well, Lallo," I said, "may I call you Lallo?" He nodded his approval. "Pour me another one, and I'll sip it."
He did so, repeating the little prayer procedure, but only pouring the one for me. "Enjoy," he said, with a satisfied look on his face, and went back to work.
I sipped that one, savouring each taste, then regretfully set the empty cup on the bar, and wandered over to where Mikio was unrolling vines and tying lots of little things onto other little things.
"Take this," he said, proffering the ear trumpet and some string, without looking up, "and tie it to the pole up over there o
n the stage. Then say something into it, okay?"
I did as I was asked, going over to the "stage," which was really just a cleared out corner of the room. I moved carefully, as there was a heavy vine precariously attached to the thing. I somehow managed to secure the ear trumpet to the pole using some knots I learned in Boy Scouts.
"Heeeyyyy!!!" I started yelling into it. "Test, one, two! Test." What came out was strange: my voice followed by some tight, dop-plered echo remnant, trailing off. Normally, I would have said it was being run through some effects, but there were no effects. Hell, there wasn't even any electricity.
When I started singing "Blue Moon of Kentucky" Mikio told me to shut up, that was enough, thank you. I guess I was starting to feel the effects of The Drink That Shall Not Be Named.
I noticed the place starting to fill up with people. There were all kinds, not just more "rockers" like the band. Farmers, merchants— people were genuinely curious.
A couple of waitresses, quasi-young women who looked like hardened veterans of earth-bars, came in to help Allallo. It seemed strange not to see somebody taking money at the door, but then I remembered how things worked here. The band would actually be compensated somehow by the people watching. Everybody got whatever they wanted here, they just had to provide some kind of valuable, free service for other people.
I know, it shouldn't work. I guess this is the only place it could.
Thinking about this reminded me to ask someone just when exactly when I was expected to start earning my keep—but it could wait. I was having too much fun right then to worry about reality.
I got off the stage and went back over to the bar, watching as the band got up to play their sound check.
It was no surprise that the band itself consisted of everybody that had been at Mikio's place. There was the guitar player, and the pompadour guy, who was obviously the singer: he got up and grabbed the ear horn/mic and started making wailing noises into it. Lidelei was the totally Archies tambourine player, and the munchkin girl was playing on another Mustang with heavy bass strings wound on it. Another guy was setting up some ancient-looking drums that looked like they'd been swiped from some marching band: an oversized bass drum, a little snare, some cymbals and some long skinny drums of a type I'd never seen before. Another guy was playing something like a cross between an accordian and a bagpipe.
The Emerald Burrito of Oz Page 11
