The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “You been in there a long time, man,” said Tex California. “You wouldn’t have gotten a piece?”

  “You wouldn’t be asking me if I had a piece unless you were prepared to find out in some unpleasant manner,” said The Man in Black.

  The very air seemed to cringe. Robin looked at me wide-eyed, thinking maybe she had never seen me before; T. Blackstone looked as relaxed as a junkie in withdrawal; even Tex California looked a bit like he had run up against an unexpected wall.

  “No need to get uptight,” he said. “I’ll remember that’s a bad question to ask. To show you how honest I am, I’ll even tell you up front that I do have a piece. There, now doesn’t that make you feel all warm and secure?”

  The fucking Man in Black had done it again. Now I had convinced an armed berserker that I had a gun! Yet somehow, the trip hadn’t yet turned into a total bummer—with destiny in control, I found a new faith in the blind forces behind it all. I had to believe that Acid, if not God, was on my side.

  Because if It wasn’t on my side...

  Outside, double-parked and blocking the narrow street, Tex California had the car I knew he would have: an old red Cadillac convertible in mint condition. At least the top wasn’t down!

  Robin and I in the back seat, Tex behind the wheel, and Terry Blackstone up front beside him in what is sometimes unfortunately referred to as the Death-Seat by statistically-minded safety-freaks.

  “Let’s go cross-town to Fred’s,” Robin said. “Him and all his head-professor friends are having a party. It’s a fancy crowd; those cats have bread.”

  She gave Tex Byzantine instructions on how to get to Fred’s loft in the lower West Village and after a kamikaze tour through traffic during which I couldn’t have had more than a couple dozen heart attacks, we were parked outside an old loft building on Greene Street. Of course Fred’s loft was on the sixth floor. It always is. Grunting and cursing in our private freak-outs, we chain-ganged up the stairs. Robin pounded her fist against the metal-plated door one flight down from the roof. Again.

  The door opened to the sound of voices over acid-rock music, and Fred’s face above a tie-and-collar peered out.

  “Robin?” he said nervously. “Ah... er... ah... who are your friends?”

  He had been referring to the California Lizard and his tame Terry Blackstone who definitely was suffering from lack of something—tossup between smack or speed. I had been lurking behind them, and when I stepped out, trying my best to look like a literary agent, Fred seemed mightily relieved. “Oh, it’s you, man. The two guys with you—they’re... all right?”

  I calculated the chances of grabbing Robin, shoving us inside Fred’s pad and slamming the door behind us before Tex California could draw and run amok. They weren’t bad. But then what? We’d be trapped inside a pot party with a crazed monster with a gun shooting his way inside. What could we do about that? Call the cops and all get busted?

  “Salt of the Earth,” I lied. Then, with a surge of conscience-driven honesty: “Don’t worry, they’re not narcs.”

  Inside was a big dim loftful of toney West Village hip college prof small-time serious actor lower-echelon publishing crowd in uncasual casuals and a captive cloud of pot-smoke. The Doors were freaking out unnoticed on a stereo set a low volume and it looked insanely like a low-budget Hollywood cocktail party except half the extras were smoking joints.

  Fred stood by the door with us not quite knowing what to do next. It was like we cartoon-characters had suddenly invaded a French intellectual feature-film of New York Bohemia. The genteely-stoned gapers didn’t know whether to laugh or sneer or get uptight at the appearance of these quaint characters out of their own heroic mythology. I felt incredibly weird—I remembered what Dirk and Dickie were trying to shove on me and what it was was a trip out of the cartoon and into the feature film. But digging the people in the feature film not having any more idea than I did of who was real and who was not, I wondered if anyone knew.

  But Tex California had no trouble deciding whose reality we were in. “Look,” he said loudly, still standing by the door, “I got no time for bullshit, so I’ll come right to the point.” Every eye in the room zoomed in on him, fascinated by the gross-out.

  He reached inside his coat and pulled out a medicine bottle of acid. “This is pure acid,” he said, “and I’ve gotta sell it all tonight.” He appraised the crowd with pawnbroker’s eyes. “I’ve gotta let this stuff go for almost nothing. So for fifty bucks, you get to dip a one-inch square of paper into the bottle. It’s pure acid. You’ll get enough for dozens of trips. I’m taking a beating, but I gotta do it!”

  Faces flapped open like dying fish. Ah, we wowed ‘em in Peoria! They were all smashed on grass for openers and suddenly you had a whole roomful of stoned intellectual potheads who didn’t know what the fuck was coming off. Reactions ranged from slavering greed to gibbering paranoia.

  Fred seemed to see fuzz under every speck of dust. “Robin,” he hissed, “get this guy the fuck out of here!”

  Fred turned to me in pure panic, begging with his eyes for me to do something. Standing to one side of Tex California with Robin, I had an overwhelming urge to melt into the woodwork. Behind Tex, Terry Blackstone was bobbing and weaving like a punchy pug. Yeah, I could see how a thing like us could look like the end of the world to the feature-film players.

  “Look man,” Fred finally said to Tex California in the lamest phony-brotherly voice the world has ever seen, “I don’t want to come on antsy, but this is a private party and dealing acid in someone’s pad in pretty uncool. You can stay if you cool it man, but—”

  “Screw your party,” Tex California said coldly. “I just want to sell some acid. Don’t give me a hard time.”

  A plastically-pretty chick in a mini-skirted black dress shrilled: “Who does that creep think he is?”

  Fire behind Tex California’s ice. “Shut up, cunt,” he advised sagely.

  Terry Blackstone was already inching towards the door. Robin leaned closer to me. Fred folded his tents, having just realized that he wasn’t talking to one of his pot-smoking students and finally waking up enough to be scared.

  But of course, some big dumb dick with a bald head, and black beard and a fancy shirt full of muscles elbowed his way through the lowing cattle and, like a member of Hip Rotary, stuck his stupid puss in Tex’s face and snarled: “Watch how you talk to my chick, motherfucker!”

  Tex California gave off fumes like a volcano about to go nova. “Get this shit-eating prick out of here,” he said to Fred. “If you don’t, I’ll kill him.”

  Beard-and-muscles lifted his arm and formed a fist. Tex’s hand went into his right outside coat pocket and came out with a large caliber revolver, the point of which he proceeded to place against the Defender of Feminine Honor’s nose.

  I—

  —Flashed: a gun he’s really got a gun gonna use it used it before a gun a gun jesus oh jesus oh god brains and guts and blood all over everything kill him murder him death cops murder electric chair fry you till you die forever and ever—

  —Snapped away from the unfaceable, saw the scene stopped in freeze-frame: the Bearded Jerk turned to stone by the pistol, crowd in the room frozen to immobile monuments to horror, Terry Blackstone caught in a crouch, Robin plastered to my side in terror, Fred’s mouth wide open and Tex California’s eyes drooling insanely behind his statue of cool sucking up the surge of a death to come.

  “Whimper, you mother!” Tex cobra-hissed. “Ask me to let you suck my prick.” Nobody dared move.

  “I’m not kidding, you cocksucker! Ask to suck my prick or I’ll blow your brains against the wall.”

  Dead silence and crystal stillness. Then a tiny whimper escaped the lips of the cat with the gun pressed against his nose. His eyes started to roll—he was going to freak! And Tex would go apeshit! The creep was totally psycho—one loud scream and he’ll start to shoot!

  “Cool it, you fucking psycho!” The Man in Black suddenly said, cold and clea
r.

  Tex and his gun whirled around and I found myself staring straight into a bottomless hole into final darkness. Up that cold metal hole spurted wave after wave of electric blackness—and something inside me inverted and I found myself riding the bird of death. Death looked up at me with his single steel-stalked eye and I sucked it up and threw it back into the neon-blue eyes of the California Lizard.

  “I’m stoned, not you, fuck-up,” I said with cosmic coolness. “Look what the fuck you’ve gone and done, pulling a gun in a place like this! There’ll be cops all over us if you shoot this jerk.”

  Tex’s white porcelain cool suddenly shattered. “Cops? Whatdaya mean, cops? They don’t have any idea of where I—”

  Oh shit, the fuzz were after him too! “They fucking-A will know where you are an hour from now, asshole,” said The Man in Black. “One of these squares’ll be sure to call ‘em after this!”

  Tex spun on the room, waving his gun. “If anybody talks�”

  “Nobody’ll talk,” Fred whined. “Far as we’re concerned, you’ve never been here, right everybody?”

  “Right!” “Right!” “Right!”

  “Okay, now all of you want to buy some acid—”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I screamed at him. “We’ve got to get out of here! Now!”

  “What the hell for?”

  Goddamn, he was stupid! “How do you know there aren’t any narcs in the house? How do you know someone hasn’t already called the cops? There’s a couple of other rooms back there.”

  “But I gotta deal this acid—”

  “You dumb jive motherfucker!” The Man in Black howled at Tex, reaching significantly into his coat pocket. “You’re not gonna deal your fucking acid if we’re in the fucking joint! You don’t get your ass out of here, I’ll blow your brains out.”

  It sure wasn’t fear that iced over the fire in Tex California’s mad blue eyes—but suddenly he must’ve realized what he had been doing. He smiled a broken smile at me. “Yeah, well maybe I got carried away,” he said. “No need to get excited. Your chick’s got some other places to go, let’s split.”

  And my moment of control went as quickly as it came as Tex California led us out of the loft and on a crazy race down the endless dark flights of stairs to the street.

  “You better come up with something better than that,” Tex California told Robin as we got into the car. Terry Blackstone curled up in the front seat beside him like an aging fetus. Beside me, Robin was like a plastic doll with things wrong inside: smiling and shivering and looking at me with now-vacant, now-uptight, now-greedy eyes.

  “Stop freaking my chick out,” I told Tex California.

  “You know,” he said ominously, “you got a big mouth, friend.”

  “Not half as big as yours, friend,” said The Man in Black. I had already gone over the Big Edge with the California Space Monster, backed his piece down in front of the marks. No turning back now, it was his cool against mine, mano a mano—could I con myself into believing it was an even fight with Acid on my side?

  “All right, all right, so I flipped a little in there. So what? So worst thing that could’ve happened, I kill that square. Could happen to anyone, man. He was coming on real rank...”

  “Maybe you like the fuzz looking for you...”

  “Look man,” said the California Lizard, “I got Feds after me already, why do you think I’ve gotta get out of the country? All the same trip, baby: when you’ve killed one man, you’ve killed ‘em all.”

  I started to shiver. The cat’s for real, I tried to convince myself, but I couldn’t believe it; the acid told me with mathematical logic it was all one big comic book trip. There was no real Tex California; he was just some character out of some other reality’s trip.

  “Yeah, well you blew selling maybe a thousand bucks worth of acid,” I told him, “and don’t blame that on my chick.”

  “Yeah, yourself, well your chick better come up with something or I got no reason to keep you creeps alive.”

  Terry Blackstone whimpered. Robin seemed to snap back to fear-driven reality. “The Meat Factory,” she said.

  “The what?”

  “The Meat Factory. It’s a group. But they all deal a lot on the side. They got a big pad over on Avenue C.”

  “That sounds more like it,” said Tex California.

  “Hey man hey man hey man...” Terry Blackstone started gibbering. “Anybody got any speed... need some speed weed reed need some speed...”

  “Shut up, you shitty speed-freak!” Tex said, slamming the back of his hand into Terry Blackstone’s mouth as he pulled the Cad away from the curb.

  The Meat Factory’s pad was an incredible combination of electronic opulence and oriental squalor. All rooms of the apartment had been collectivized into one giant opium-den by the simple process of knocking down the interior walls with a sledge-hammer (jagged plaster scars on floor and ceiling). Against the far wall were three or four monster amplifiers and about ten thousand dollars worth of more esoteric and amorphous electronic bric-a-brac. Angled off this East Village IBM complex was the complete Shooting Gallery: a musty blue couch and a table in front of it holding spikes and pieces of rubber tubing and various other junkie and/or crystal-freak works.

  As a matter of fact, a cat with long straight black hair dressed all in blue denim was knotting a length of rubber tubing around the arm of a fat girl with pimples as an emaciated bearded, bald freak of maybe twenty-five opened the door with a joint in his hand. Looking inside past him, I saw, in addition to the needle-freaks fixing, a couple balling with their clothes on on one of the mattresses that carpeted the floor. A charming establishment Robin had dragged us to.

  Terry Blackstone, however, thought it was just fine. Almost before the cat in the doorway could wheeze “Robin?” he pushed in front of all of us, stuck his head inside the doorway, and shouted: “Hey man, you guys got any speed in there?” The fuckers kept fucking; didn’t miss a beat. The cat fixing up the chick grunted “Yeah” and like something on drippy tentacles, Terry Blackstone slithered inside.

  Even Tex California wasn’t quick enough to stop him, though he grabbed a good fistful of air trying.

  “Hey Robin, what the fuck’s going on here?” said the cat holding the joint, as if about to say, hey, we run a respectable establishment.

  “You guys want to buy a lot of acid cheap?” Robin said, coming right to the point. “Real cheap?”

  “Well come right in,” said the bearded cat with a y’all come flourish. We came in.

  Terry Blackstone was already pleading with the cat in the Shooting Gallery. The girl had already taken her shot and was nodding on the couch dreaming sweaty fat-girl dreams. The couple was in the process of coming, and off in a dim corner of the room (which was lit by a single bright blue light) another cat with long stringy blond hair was diddling a disconnected electric guitar.

  As the couple came and groaned, Terry Blackstone whined in inverted vibrational harmony: “Sheee... just gotta have some speed...”

  “Why should I give you a taste, man?” Blue Denim said. “You got any bread?”

  “Got something better than bread,” Terry Blackstone cackled shrilly.

  “How much acid you say you guys have for sale?” the bald doorkeeper said loudly. The guitarist’s head swiveled our way in a sweep of blond hair. The needle-freak toying with Terry Blackstone pricked up his ears at the word.

  “One ounce,” said Tex California.

  “AN OUNCE OF ACID?” shrieked the guitarist. Blue Denim gaped. Baldy took a long drag on his joint. The guy balling the chick on the floor rolled off her and stared up at us through steel-rimmed glasses. The skinny chick on the floor with him zipped up her Levis and sat up. Even the nodding fat girl opened her eyes.

  “Ah bullshit!” Baldy said. “Nobody ever had an ounce of acid around here...”

  Tex California brought out the bottle. “Jesus Christ,” the just-fucked chick said.

  “Is that really a
cid?” Blue Denim said, getting up and joining Baldy who was peering dimly at the bottle. The guitarist joined the mystic circle, then Steel-Rims, finally his chick. The fat girl was too far gone to move and Terry was using the opening to grab for the works on the table.

  “It’s acid,” said Tex California.

  “How do we know it’s acid?” asked the guitarist.

  “Are you called me a liar?” Tex California inquired.

  “I just don’t believe in Santa Claus,” the guitarist said. “That’d be an awfully expensive bottle of water to buy. Unless you want to wait around till we take it and see if we get high.”

  “You’d need a chem lab to cut it into doses,” Tex said.

  Steel-Rims giggled. “We got it,” he said.

  “I don’t have the time to wait around here while you try it,” the California Lizard said.

  “That doesn’t exactly give me a trusting feeling,” said Baldy.

  Tex started to flare, caught a glimpse of me, cooled it. “Tell you what,” he said. “Terry here is our partner, right Terry?”

  “Right man,” Terry said, pulling the needle out of the pit of his elbow and unwrapping the tubing from his arm.

  “You guys know Terry?” Tex asked. Somewhat unenthusiastic nods. “Then you know what a paranoid freak he is. Terry, you know that’s real acid, don’t you?”

  “Sure man,” Terry said.

  “Okay,” said Tex California, “so our partner stays here till you’re satisfied. If you get burned, you can always kill him. Got that Terry? Are you scared?”

  Seemed to me Tex had laid an awful lot on a very weak commodity. But Terry was paranoid enough to know not to act scared even though he must’ve been scared shitless despite having no reason: “No man, I’m not scared.”

  “You got a deal,” Blue Denim said. “But we can’t buy all that. What are your prices?”

  “How much money you got.”

  “First tell me your prices,” Blue Denim insisted.

  “Tell you what,” said Tex. “You tell me how much bread you got and I’ll tell you how much acid it’ll buy and I guarantee it’ll blow your minds.”