“Donel, you guys will meet me at the EleRail station in Le Grande Park at eight o’clock,” Xavier said. “In the Cellar, we’ll catch a cab. Don’t tell me you can’t remember the way.”
*
That evening, Donel and Bryan—lovers who had only recently abandoned their public impersonations of straights—met him at the EleRail in Le Grande Park and rode with him across the river to a nightclub in Satan’s Cellar, a bistro called P. S. Annie’s. It was on a street in an area so bombed-out-looking that some of its denizens called it Pearl Harbor. P. S. Annie’s had a small cover and no minimum—but if you stayed too long without buying into some of the action, either at the card tables or in poke dens off the main cabaret, a bouncer would ask you to leave.
Donel and Bryan stayed in the front room. Xavier made his way into a side room redolent of the characteristic reek of salad gas. He’d read about poke for months, but this was the first time he’d come face to face with any of the pathetic human specimens addicted to it. Although the authorities had tried to confine the epidemic to the Southeast, habitual substance abusers in New York, Chicago, and California had fallen prey to the “redneck allure” of salad gas—partly in response to the high costs of better-known drugs after the bombing of Central and South America’s coca fields, and partly in reaction to the heightened visibility, and coolth, of all things Salonikan.
The Instigator called getting poked the “white-trash high.” It hinted that celebrities like Emmalyn Pugh, R. X. Haliburton, and Graig Goudray were growing pokeweed in windowboxes or on secluded areas of their estates. To proffer your guests the white-trash high was chic, even if an instant’s rational thought told you that doing so was like substituting crawdad for lobster at a formal dinner. But no spoiled celebrity had ever schlepped into a pokehouse in Salonika or beheld in person the degradation and hopelessness of habitual users who scarfed the stuff not because it was trendy but because it was dead-dirt cheap.
Xavier found the stench in the poke den nauseating. The addicts hunched over warm bowls or Sterno-heated chafing pots were as frail as ghosts. The steam coiling about them gave them an aura of insubstantiality, of eerie semiexistence. If he could keep down the contents of his stomach, it wouldn’t be hard to drag one of these haints outside. A pokeweed junkie would have neither the strength nor the moxy to resist. Xavier moved from table to table, looking at the specters bent over their habits. The faces that pivoted toward him were those of human gargoyles: greenish-grey Halloween masks, haggard mugs from lamely colorized film noirs. Shuddering, Xavier squinted into the choking fog, asked if anybody’d seen a kid nicknamed The Mick, and, getting no reply, stumbled deeper into the poke den’s maw.
“You’re that Xavier Thoxton,” a slurred Good Old Boy voice, mostly baritone, accused. “Thot snooty Fine Orts fellaw on th’ Urbonite.”
“No,” Xavier said, his wrist encircled by a fat red hand.
“Yaah, you are. Don’ give me no false-modesty crop. Yore pitcher’s in th’ popper ever’ week.”
Xavier found himself sitting next to this poked-up character, a crewcut, ruddy-faced boar of a man who introduced himself as Wilbon T. Stickney. Stickney informed him—over Xavier’s protests of no time, no time, he was looking for a lost child—that, once upon a time, he, Stickney, had been a “true cunnersewer of th’ fine orts: old Brother Dave Gordner comedy records, all thirteen Nightmore on Elm Street flicks, them crofty sparts paintings by Leroy Whatz-his-face, and orticles on censarship in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler.”
“Mr. Stickney, I’ve got to—”
“Shut up, Thoxtan. I’m trying to tell you somepin. A few manths bock, it turned where I couldn’t listen to Brother Dave, or Jerry Clower, or Minnie Pearl, or any of them comedy people ’thout coming down with a bellyache, a case of dizzies, or a pesky little sore on my tongue. Same ’ith my fovrit slasher vids and trucker paintings on noppy block velvet. Same ’ith my reruns of Petticoat Junction and th’ orticles in my cutie books. Somepin’d hoppen ever’ time I tried to eddicate myse’f—a upset stamoch, a eyebrow tic, a wort sprouting orta my thumb. You know.”
“You’re kidding,” Xavier said.
“Naw. Why would I? I mean, it was sarta like I wuddun meant to enjoy th’ fine orts anymare. Like my bady was telling me to give ’em up. ’At ever hoppen to you, Mr. Thoxtan, wi’ yore big-head snooty-hooty jab?”
“No,” Xavier said.
“ ’At’s why I’m a pokeweed junkie—not ’cause I like th’ high ever’bady brogs on. Hell, no. It’s only ’cause it gives me relief from my aches, pains, and whotnats after I’ve jes’ done somepin quasi-clossy.” Stickney put the squeeze on Xavier’s wrist. “You get me, don’ jur, Mr. Thoxtan?”
“I don’t know.”
“It ain’t camplicotted. Before I gat so law as to toot poke, I found other things that’d help—for a while. I just wish they still did me some good.”
Xavier’s wrist hurt. “What kinds of things?”
“It’s emborrossing. I had to gat real law to do myse’f any good. When Brother Dave recards made me sick, I storted calling Dial-a-Breather ever’ urther night or so. When Nightmore on Elm Street brake me out in hives, well, I storted renting videos of old forts jocking arf to ’cardian music. They ’uz lousy—really lousy—but my hives’d go away. And when my fovrit warks of ort made my hair fawl, or my knees smell like ronk cheese, or my elbaws blister, I’d head dawntawn, straight for th’ men’s room in a bus stotion, and spend a little time looking at th’ ort wark in th’ restroom stawls. Binger! Cured again.”
“Let go of me,” Xavier said.
Stickney obliged. “Today, none of that lawdawn stuff works for me anymare. For reliable relief, I’m dawn to two things. One of ’em’s this putrid pokeweed.” Stickney nodded at his chafing pot. “Domn it awl to hell.”
“What’s the other?” said Xavier, massaging his wrist. Stickney had mesmerized him. He would have heard him out even if unforced. “Tell me the other.”
“Baxing,” Stickney said. “ ’Fie can wortch a fight on TV—you know, even two old forts clutching and rubbing their laces in each uther’s eyes—uh, I’m fine for a day or two. Thonk Awlmighty God for baxing. It jes’ ain’ on orfun enough.”
Stickney, Xavier realized, had what he had, a peculiar variety of the Philistine Syndrome. A lower-order variety of the syndrome, maybe. Radioactivity of some kind—from Plant VanMeter?—had affected Stickney’s metabolism just as it had affected his. The only difference was that Stickney’s concept of the fine orts had been several rungs down from Xavier’s. Thus the discrepancy in degree between the higher arts triggering Stickney’s ailments and those triggering his. Thus the discrepancy in degree between the debased arts affording each of them temporary relief.
*
P. S. Annie’s was noisy. Bottles clinked, little tins of Sterno whooshed and puttered, people sang, snuffling noises punctuated any ebbing of the general hullabaloo, and, from a side room to Xavier’s left, hand-clapping, cries, and foot-stomping bounced off the walls and ceiling. A minor riot, thirty or forty feet away.
Stickney’s red nostrils spasmed. He was still trying to talk to Xavier when Donel materialized behind him out of the salad-gas fumes. “We think we just saw him, sir. But when he saw us, he skedaddled.”
Xavier stood, upsetting his chair. “The Mick? For God’s sake, let’s go after him!”
“Bryan’s already chasing him, sir.”
“Call me Xavier, not sir. We’re not in the office, this is Satan’s Cellar.” He made as if to go through P. S. Annie’s main room to the street—but two young men in powder-blue jumpsuits emerged from the fog aiming at them a pair of snaky-looking automatic rifles: Uzis, if he knew anything at all about assault weapons. Amateur white yakuza in their late twenties or early thirties. One was sandy-haired and hollow-eyed, the other well muscled and blue-jowled with stubble. Their jumpsuits—leisure garb, not work clothes—bore big ameoboid stains slightly darker than the surrounding fabric.
&nb
sp; “Hands up,” the blue-jowled gunman said, raising the drawbridge of one eyebrow. “Both of you.”
“Shee-it,” Stickney said, inhaling a puff of poke gas. “C’mon, Trey. C’mon, Lamar. Leave theze fellaws be.”
“Keep a-whoofing, Pops,” the stubbly man, said. “But stay outta our bidnuz.”
“Up!” the sandy-haired gunman said, illustrating up with his Uzi barrel.
“All I’ve got is credit cards.” Xavier reached for his wallet. “But take them.”
“No,” the stubbly man said. “We don’t give a hobbled he-goat for credit cards.”
“Shee-it,” said Stickney, thrusting his face into his poke-weed steam and withdrawing from the matter.
The gunmen paraded Xavier and Donel at Uzi-point through the poke den’s smothering fog. Their destination was a side room—a bar, as it happened, with a runway upon which two young women in high heels and G-strings were cocking their hips and showing their headlamps on high beam, the same bar room from which all the shouting, hand-clapping, and foot-stomping had issued as Xavier talked with Stickney. The noise from this room hadn’t subsided at all. Men continued to howl, clap, wolf-whistle, gibe, tramp in place. The exposed B-girls, a discolored mirror on the wall behind them, looked bedraggled, defeated, violated. They weren’t cocking their hips or showing their headlamps on high beam, Xavier saw. No, not really. They were enduring what P.S. Annie’s patrons were paying them to endure, taking what had to be taken—not with high spirits and good grace, but with repressed anger and true bemusement.
The women’s bodies glistened under the colored spots. Their hair clung to their skulls in sticky strands. They were soaked, their near-nude bodies streaming with . . . beer. That was it, that was the smell. The women here had been drenched in warm lager, and the drenching hadn’t stopped, it was continuing. The target-shooters’ Uzis and AK-47s were plastic water rifles. My God, Xavier thought.
The Good Old Boys in Annie’s were drilling streams of beer from authentic-looking weapons at the women struggling to stay upright on the catwalk. They were shooting each woman in the face, in the stomach, and to the huzzas of those urging them to “nail the bitches!” in the sequin-shielded V of her pubic zone. One gunman took his Uzi off Xavier and pointed it at the bent woman on the right. Over and over, he squeezed its trigger, sending rays of beer ricocheting in splashes off her thighs, belly, chest, and spangled crotch. A bearded yahoo at the bar’s other end caught this woman in an amber crossfire. She turned from side to side in her heels, seeking safety where there was none, increasing the likelihood that she’d slip and crack her head.
“Stop!” Xavier shouted. “You damned animals!”
The gunmen laughed. They grabbed Xavier and Donel, pushed them through the cheering crowd to the catwalk, shoved their fake Uzis into Xavier’s and Donel’s hands, and commanded them to “take you some target practice”—a boon not granted to many who weren’t P.S. Annie’s regulars, they pointed out. After all, they’d rented the guns, bought the beer serving for ammunition, and picked out Xavier and Donel because they looked “in outright need of a happy little cunt hunt,” being newspaper dudes with deadlines, late hours, and plenty of other stressful shee-it, right?
“Shoot!” the stubbly-faced man commanded. “It’ll melt the poker you got running up your back from your ass!”
Xavier and Donel each held a loaned-out Uzi. Too many blotchy-faced men hemmed them in to be able to swing about and drench their antagonists—but the idea crossed Xavier’s mind and, he believed, maybe even Donel’s. No way was he going to abase himself or these young women by obeying the beetle-browed louts encouraging them to do just that.
“Shoot!” one former gunman shouted again.
“No,” Xavier said.
“ ’N’ why not?” the man asked. “You’re the hotshot who’s always quoting Nee-chee, aren’t you?” He sounded almost literate.
“What’s Nietzsche got to do with it?” Xavier shouted into the roar ballooning up from the men as the girl on the left—a heart-faced kid hardly out of her teens, with half-moons under her eyes and a cranberry birthmark on one haunch—slipped and put both hands on the bar to prevent a worse fall.
“Jes’ this! I read in a old column of yours, ‘Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.’ I guess old Nee-chee said a mouthful there. So go on, Thaxton—pot ’er in th’ mouse!”
“No.”
Someone got behind him, applied a half-nelson with his forearm, dug his radius into Xavier’s Adam’s apple. “Shoot, Thaxton! Shoot her, you highbrow wuss!”
Hating himself, Xavier took off-balance aim at the woman on his right, the elder of the two dancers. She saw him. Her eyes were brown, the glazed brown of a roast turkey. With his own eyes, he tried to tell her he couldn’t help doing this, that another stream of stale beer couldn’t hurt her much more than the previous barrages. She got his message, but she no longer gave a damn, the game was too far gone, and when the stream from his fake Uzi hit her thigh, splattering like urine and dripping down her legs, she sucked in her cheeks, a signal of either acquiescence or contempt.
Laughter—appreciative laughter—from the Good Old Boys in camouflage fatigues, grease-stained khakis, bib overalls and string ties, white shirts and Levi’s. Yucks from the jumpsuited bullies cheerleading Donel and him. In fact, so happy with his reluctant marksmanship was this crew that once Donel squeezed off a token stream at the kneeling dancer, they reclaimed their water Uzis, flung Xavier and Donel aside, and even more fiercely renewed their own B-girl shoot.
Xavier and Donel, trading looks of wary disbelief, cut through P.S. Annie’s labyrinth of dens to the street.
*
Outside, Bryan was waiting for them. He gestured breathlessly down the bricked defile into the recesses of Satan’s Cellar.
“I lost him. . . . A guy could get killed in there.”
“Mikhail too,” Xavier reminded Bryan.
They stood at P. S. Annie’s weather-stained brick facade, near a pawnshop and a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant, waiting for a cabby with spunk to drive up.
Donel had his arms crossed. “Why would you quote Nietzsche to the effect that men are warriors and women their toys?”
“I didn’t do it approvingly,” Xavier said. “I was reviewing an exhibit of martial art at the Upshaw.”
“Whatever you meant, you gave those rednecks intellectual justification for their vulgar game.”
“I can’t believe that idiot read my piece,” Xavier said. “It’s even harder to believe he remembered it well enough to toss a ‘Nee-chee’ quote back at me.”
“A redneck philosopher,” Donel said disgustedly.
“On some level, I’m being read,” Xavier noted. “On some weird level, I’m having an impact.”
“Right,” Donel said. “To justify the public humiliation of women dependent on bar work to earn a living. How does that feel?”
“Terrible,” Xavier said. “But I’m . . . being read.”
“People still read the Bible,” Bryan said. “Some of them wear sheets. Some of them bomb abortion clinics.”
“That’s a misapplication of what they’ve read,” Xavier said. “My work’s being misapplied, too, but at least it’s getting through to some of the yahoos.”
“In a twisted way,” Bryan said.
Donel said, “Somebody quoted you to those guys. Quoted you quoting Nietzsche, I mean. There’s no way they read your column. No way.”
A cab finally came. They rode it, minus Mikhail, back over the cobblestone bridge into Salonika proper.
23
Mikhail, Come Home
“Sorry, Lee. Sorry, Xave. But I don’t want you to switch back to your old beats yet.”
“Walt,” Lee Stamz implored.
“Walt,” Xavier wheedled, echoing Stamz.
“I’m doing you a favor, Xave,” Walt Grantham said. “I’m going to help you get Mikhail home before your sis flies in from Pe
shawar or your lovely Ms. Carlisle from the Continent.”
“Yeah? How?” Xavier was thinking how lousily their jaunt into Satan’s Cellar had gone. Donel had emerged blaming him for the recreational perversities of lower-middle-class Suthren males. Bryan, traumatized by unrealized dangers, hadn’t showed up for work this morning. And Mikhail . . . Mikhail had fled.
“Actually, I’ve already done it,” Grantham said. “For the past two days, I’ve run an item for you in the Urbanite’s want ads.” He picked up a newspaper, shook it open, and pointed out to Xavier his miniature masterpiece:
Mick, chill out and phone home. I have 2
tckts for Frdy’s STH&T gig at Grotto. If
back by Thrsdy, we go f’ sure. Trooce, X.
“Ess, Tee, Aitch, and Tee?” Xavier said. “What’s that?”
“An acronym for Smite Them Hip & Thigh, whom The Mick, I hear tell, nigh-on to wets his pants over.”
Lee Stamz leaned into Grantham. “You’re sending Xave, the acme of unhipness, to a Smite ’Em gig? Meanwhile, Mister Walt, what ’m I s’posed to do?”
“The Turandot preview at the opera house. You see, the pop stuff Xave’s banging on, well, that’s selling papers.” Grantham thought better of this all-out stroking. “I mean, along with our sex-lives-of-school-superintendents series and Louis Duplantier’s daily ‘Computer Cannibals’ strip.”
“Turandot! Jesus, Walt.”
“I’d never write something like ‘we go f’ sure,’ ” Xavier said, eyeballing the ad copy. “Never.”
Stamz said, “It’s amazing that a dude who’s gotta sign his name with an ‘X’ can write anything at all.”
“And he won’t phone me, either.” Xavier pursed his lips.
Grantham handed him two tickets. “These’ll bring him—bet you money. Who cares if he phones, s’long’s you get him home again?”
“Giving Thaxton those tickets is like giving a blind guy a paint-by-numbers kit. A man with no feet, shoes. A snake, a catcher’s mitt. Jesus, Walt.”
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