"...got a nice apartment in the city", Joe Christ had sung, "not too much crime in the streets / Teenage girls to do my laundry / I always have enuff to eat...."
Flashbacks of His adenoidal recitativo stamped disquieting imprints onto
what was otherwise a perfectly normal scene of smut-stoked, videopathic
squalor for Screw columnist Mark Kramer -- who owed his presence at
the heart of 42nd Street's glandular polyphony this afternoon to a
long-festering controversy amongst connoisseurs of desperate living, i.e.,
Kramer's readers, regarding which peep-show token bought the most viewing
time for 25 cents.
Suddenly the screen went empty of all sexual content and a ceiling fixture switched on to illuminate one of the planet's very few salaried reviewers of human sexual commerce -- with the occasional dog, pony, eel or Joe Christ thrown in -- freezing the moment on his cheap plastic stopwatch and filling in the appropriate blanks his clipboarded "Naked City" Field Report.
There and then, the tokenage matter was decided in PeepLand's favor, with Kramer's in situ audit proving conclusively that the PeepLand token outperformed the currencies of other leading Times Square masturbatoria -- including the redoubtable Show World Center -- by nearly twenty-five percent.
This bluntly quantitative element, considered along with PeepLand's pedigree as the former site of Hubert's Museum -- the sideshow and flea circus that spawned Larry "The Singing Canary" Love, who soared to planetary fame as tragic warbler Tiny Tim< -- and, fast-forwarding somewhat, as birthplace of the Windowless Fondling Booth -- nearly guaranteed that this neon-and-semen-drenched carnival of sleaze would continue to receive Screw's highest rating: four tiny, illustrated penises on the "PeterMeter".
Kramer -- the only Screw staffer to actually view the unsolicited VHS copy of Communion in Room 410 which had arrived in the tabloid's offices that week -- stewed reflectively in the cublicle's stale incandescence, in the kind of low wattage that only a token drop can dispell. His mind churned mnenomically with more selections from the Joe Christ libretto:
"I got a lot of party-hip friends / And I can do what I like/In counterpoint, the following scene unfolded at this very moment in an East Dallas efficiency apartment rancid with evaporating human excrudescences: Joe Christ, attired in jackboots, prune-colored briefs and a clerical collar, prepared to attend tonight's premiere of Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ -- which Fundamentalist Christians had already vowed to picket -- at a nearby shopping mall.
Don't have to work to make a living / It's a wonderful life"
As neurologically depleted Mary Loehr slumbered noisily on a blood-and-vomit-streaked sofa bed, her soon-to-be penectomized Svengali applied the finishing touches to a placard reading "This Film Doesn't Insult Jesus Enough".
Something molecular stirred -- causing the 400-pound, hillock-shaped co-star of Joe Christ's own controversial filmic debut, Communion in Room 410, to gain consciousness, or a very pale facsimile thereof, in her foul nest.
"Where's my crank?", croaked Mary, referring to her wake-up ration of amphetamine -- which, she would soon learn, had already been nasally relished by Joe Christ, who ignored her as He fished Mary's car keys and last three cigarettes from her bag, and -- with only six hours to spare -- went forth in a publicidal frenzy.
Also feeling particularly immortal this summer's afternoon was finely muscled, tightly wound Swiss danseuce Monika Beerle, awakening in a tenement apartment at 93 Orchard St. after a particularly lucrative night of manipulating and contorting her anatomy for the beerhounds, smedleys and disgustos at Billy's Topless on Sixth Avenue. The sputtering remains of a votive candle that bled wax onto a cinderblock and plywood bookshelf flickered upon a watercolor Moni had painted -- a self-portrait rendered like a Middle Eastern tomb painting, the subject's head detached from her body. Next to it was an eight-by-ten photograph of Moni with blood trickling from her flushed and painted lips.
A rail each of dope and coke, purchased at Hector's East 7th St. "laundrymat", beckoned from a mirror on the milk crate that did service as a nightstand. Heeding the call, the painstakingly structured blonde ecdysiast -- still a full-time, or almost fulltime, student at the prestigious Martha Graham School of Dance -- freshened her limbic system with two reedy inhalations, one nostril for each. On a hormonal tide, Moni drifted back into the pillowy shores of her futon, cooled with the shadows engulfing the Lower East Side and its denizens at this moment as it did each day as the sun moved on to the more vital business of lighting Manhattan's West Side and then the American mainland beyond.
Nearby, in a darkening tidepool of East Ninth Street, Daniel Rakowitz puffed magisterially on a Tiperillo-sized joint as he waited for the Temple of The True Inner Light to throw wide the doors of its tabernacle following Afternoon Eucharist. Next to Daniel on the stoop was the robustly aromatic shoulderbag containing his pet rooster, somnambulized by the sock which Daniel had slipped over its head.
The rooster's gentle dream-clucks could be heard as Daniel basked in the most recent evidence of the supernatural to reveal itself to him.
It was a discovery Daniel had made only that morning during a random perusal of the first edition Mein Kampf that had belonged to his deceased mother. Daniel, who did not permit his monolinguality to come between him and the German-language edition's deeper, if incomprehensible, essence -- had opened the much-thumbed leather-bound volume to page 696, which was marked with a Rohrschasch-blot-shaped inkspot revealing a rising cow's head with two horns. Extrapolating the numerological significance of his birthday -- which occurred in the 21st hour, at 9:02 P.M -- Daniel rotated the diagram 90 degrees (left for the '9', right for the '6'), and through the pigment he saw his own entire image...reconfigured into the form of a dog!
Off to one side of Daniel's interspecies vision, a witchy blond-haired female -- someone he had glimpsed not only in Tompkins Square Park but around the Chelsea Hotel as well -- looked at the him with pity, revulsion and fear as Daniel moved towards her on furry paws.
In the hyperactive reaches of his ambition, this data conclusively proved that he was the Second Coming of Christ -- something Daniel had already long suspected.
Four ZIP codes to the northwest, Kramer had his own Second Coming to deal with as a molecule of freebased cocaine detached itself from PeepLand's olefactory bouillabase of chlorine, nicotine, mutant pherenomes, tetrohydrocannibinal, butyl nitrate, cherry-citrus-scented Zep All-Purpose Odor Counteractant and other recreational essences -- and drifting into Kramer's cubicle and thence into the reviewer's sinuses, docked on a receptor already drenched with Communion in Room 410's byproducts:
"....I had religion when I went crazySpurting brain fluids floated these materials before his memory's eye as Kramer eidetically relived the feculent trio of Joe Christ, microcephaloid smut-crumpet Dana Wisdom and dangerously obese -- despite multiple chemical dependancies -- Mary Loehr.
when I went crazy..."
As the ritual razoring of Mary's dermis recurred in Kramer's wetware, Joe Christ's triffid-like spectre was accompanied by the possibly self-referential voice-over narration:
"...I had religion. when I went crazyThe post-literate, pre-frontal mixage of cut-up sound labored in peristaltic backbeat to a scene best described in the deathless prose of a Dallas newspaper reviewer: "A chunk of bleached hair sprouts from one side of his [sic] head and drops over his [sic] face like a bougainvillea" -- -as Joe Christ and speed-wizened, squirrel-faced Dana slurped blood from Mary arms as as though the latter were an oozing tower of baked brie:
"....went crazy
when I went crazy
crazy ...."
"....restoring/in the name/in the name....Onward and inward convulsed the slime-slathered spectacle of pain-proof plumper Mary Loehr wringing blood from her scorned and mangled bosoms, whilst the soundtrack raged as italically as ever:
...I'm so high my eyes are bleeding....
...... I got a needle in my arm/
It won't come out but it gives me charm
I got a bottle in my hand/
and now I'm singing for a fucking band....
...Hear the ball go down the tube/
I think she's gonna be coming soon...."
"....Getting down...getting down...down...Joe Christ and Dana, dwarfish in her leopard coat, were poised in Kramer's remembrance, eating bits of Wonderbread soaked in Mary's blood, when the velvety garage-sale Jesus portrait in Communion's background -- the film's only non-human, non-edible prop -- slumped visibly on its thumbtacks in a moment that fairly dripped with deus ex machina...
My girlfriend is only thirteen
she really screams....
Biggest brown eyes/
darkest wild hair/
damn she don't care....
The lies...."
Just then there came the rapping on the cubicle door and a PeepLand floorman's harangue, "Token, tokens, you gotta drop more tokens!"
Kramer stepped smartly from the booth and moved aisle towards 42nd Street. Squinting into the waning sunlight that percolated through the establishment's plate-glass exterior, he scribbled these words in the margin of his "Field Report": "[Joe Christ]...recreates a dunning, obsessional quality not unlike that with which peep-show loops have devitalized and degraded spectators since the very dawn of coin-operated entertainment."
Kramer stepped out onto The Deuce, inhaled its flatulence, gazed upon its neon-limned facades, felt its pain. Just across the street, The Lyric Theatre, acts like Fred Astaire and The Marx Brothers had once played; today, The Lyric was a a gilded palace of slime featuring "Two Horrifying Hits". Adjacent, The Harem, a bargain-debasement showcase for ninth- and tenth-run fuckfilms, catered to skells and sundry psychosexual retardates festering 24-hours-a-day in each other's filth. Next door, Show Center -- where the sixty-second token drop made a coffin-sized cubicle costlier per minute to occupy than a Plaza Hotel suite -- -.offered one-on-one PeepAlive encounters with the pre-op transsexuals known locally as Chicks With Dicks!
With a chuckle, Kramer hypothesized that Communion in Room 410 -- with exactly none of porn's payload and twice its wishful thinking -- would score a half-penis at best if put to the rigors of Screw's "PeterMeter" test.
This analysis, of course, would prove especially apt in the turbulent cultural wake of Joe Christ's penectomy later that year.
More endangered relics of several vanishing eras convened, meanwhile, in a green-and-gold painted single-occupancy unit at the Chelsea Hotel. The gathering was centered on a card table, which, as usual, hosted a dysfunctional game of medium-stakes poker from which swank blond Linda Twigg -- whose party this was -- took a twenty-percent cut. Mounted on the wall were photo portraits of William Burroughs, Candy Darling, Allen Ginsberg and other doomed souls who'd visited this room down through the years. Strewn haphazardly about were ziplock bags of marijuana and envelopes stuffed with cash. Lurking just beyond Linda's preternatural perkiness and the fragrant oils that signified her presence, there was an aura of undifferentiated menace that kept Room 215's delicate behavioral homeopathy intact.
Linda, a Dirty Dancing fan, had been walking along Eighth Avenue when she espied fellow neighborhood resident Max Cantor eating alone at the Riss Restaurant countertop. The perky blond moll introduced herself, and left Max with one of the gold poker chips -- embossed with a marijuana leaf -- that was simultaneously Linda Twigg's calling card and an invitation to her salon at the Chelsea. Thus Room 215 was the site of Max Cantor's induction into the metrophobic narrative that would also include both Joe Christ's genital nullification and the nullification of Monika Beerle's life and anatomical integrity.
Among the other features of the estimable Ms. Twigg's Chelsea Hotel salon was that it was perhaps the last remaining leisure environment on the continent where convicted subway vigilante Bernie Goetz could play cards and smoke a joint in peace anymore. Another fixture was septagenuarian Herbert Huncke, "Huncke The Junkie", whose early acquaintanceship with William S. Burroughs was and is inseparable from the vision in which this and every other transgressively true-life tale of today is steeped.
"It's just like a Paris in the '20s -- ", Max wrote in the never-finished article on marijuana messengers with which he justified the long hours he spent at Linda's. " -- that is, if Paris were populated with alien abductees...."
In pursuit of the story Max thought he was pursuing but which in fact was pursuing him, he permitted Mickey Cezar, the Pope of Dope -- who boasted of fellating one tenth of the U.S.S. Intrepid's crew while on a Navy tour of duty in the 1959 -- to pass him the sacrament-filled bong as many times as it would take to produce the desired effect, regarding which the two were not in complete agreement...
Max's dark, smoldering Ashkenazic elan induced in Mickey an instinctuality as predictable as the response of Daniel's rooster to a sock slipped over its head.
Unfortunately for The Pope of Dope, Max had been fending off blowjobs from overripe beatniks since puberty. And Max, like everyone else presently in the room--except for Bernie Goetz, who would go into seclusion with his chinchilla--was destined for imminent or untimely death.
Back on Ninth Street, as the afternoon converged upon what the dailies would call "A Night Of Rage!" in Tompkins Square Park, Daniel Rakowitz had just finished carving the word "Pray" into the doorframe opposite The Temple of The True Inner Light.
Mark Kramer, meanwhile, standing in front of PeepLand, detected little outward sign of the ineluctable forces closing in on this shimmering street of shame, forces that would squelch 42nd Streets commercial carnality as surely and as radically as the iatrogenic act that was about to nullify Joe Christ's virilia.
Ninth Street came alive with the whoops and yodels that that meant Afternoon Eucharist was about to let out. Upon hearing the high-pitched cluck that meant his rooster had slept sufficiently, Daniel slipped the sock from the animal's head. Then he stood back to admire his "Pray" graffito.
As he had a thousand times before with doorframes and sundry surfaces throughout Manhattan, dyslexic Daniel had again failed to catch his recurrent typographical error: Once more, what he had meant to write was, "Prey."
TO BE CONTINUED
This episode of Dickless In Babylon is dedicated to Kathy Acker, 1944-1997.