There is almost no petroleum left and gasoline engines are a rarity. Steam cars and electrics are coming back. The silent electric dirigibles of the rich sail majestically across the evening sky the cabin an open-air restaurant wafting a scent of wet lawns and golf courses calm happy voices 1920 music. Le gran luxe flourishes as never before in history on the vast estates of the rich. The foremost advocate and practitioner of luxury is A.J. who owns a private steam railroad which he stocks with 1890 drummers and bankers, 1920 prep school boys on vacation, 1918 card sharps and con men according to his whim, anyone wishing to travel A.J. is required to report to casting.
“I maintain my railroads for the train whistles at lonely sidings, the smell of worn leather, steam, soot, hot iron and good cigar smoke, for the glass-covered stations and the red-brick station hotels.”
He contributes lavishly to the guerrilla units, maintains a vast training center and hires fugitive scientists to develop new weapons in his laboratories and factories. He thinks nothing of spending millions of dollars to put a single dish on his table. His annual party collapses currencies and bankrupts nations.
“I want a dinner of fresh hog’s liver, fried squirrel, wild asparagrass, turnip greens, hominy grits, corn on the cob and blackberries. The hog must be an Ozark razor-back fed on acorns, peanuts, mulberries and Missouri apples. My hog must be kept under discreet observation round the clock to insure that it does not eat anything unclean like bullshit, baby rabbits or dead frogs the surveillance being unobtrusive so as not to render the animal self-conscious.”
“When you want this by, boss? A year from now?”
“Next Sunday at the latest.”
“But boss how in the hell…?”
“Go to Hell if need be but find me such a hog.”
“Yes boss.”
“Once found he must be brought here. As you know hog’s liver that has been on ice for even a few hours is quite unfit to eat. The hog must be butchered in my kitchens and the twitching liver conveyed immediately to the skillet to be cooked in the bacon grease of another such hog.”
“Well sure boss … We could crate the hog up and jet it out here.”
“Are you mad? My hog would be terrorized and this would surely have an adverse effect on its liver.”
“Well boss we could take over an ocean liner fix it up like an Ozark range and …”
“Are you trying to poison me? The hog would become seasick and I would lose my dinner. Obviously the hog must be gently wafted here on a raft slung between two giant zeppelins, a raft lifted bodily from the Ozark Mountains. My squirrels, blackberries and wild asparagrass will of course accompany the hog and send a farm boy with it a thin boy with freckles. He will tend my hog during the trip. He will shoot and dress my squirrels. Then he will make himself useful in other ways.” “Boss the hog is here.”
A.J. steps onto his balcony and there in the sky suspended between two vast blue zeppelins is a piece of Missouri trailing the smoke of hardwood forests …
“I want a dinner of walleyed pike, yellow perch and channel catfish from clear cold spring-fed rivers.”
“Right boss I’ll have a jet plane lined with aluminum and filled with water.”
“Did you say a jet plane?”
“Sure boss.”
“Mindless idiot the pike would eat the perch and the catfish would eat everything. When the plane landed there would be nothing but one gorged sluggish catfish quite unfit for my inhuman consumption. Three planes must be outfitted.”
“Sorry boss but the catfish crashed. All that water slopping around and the boulders come loose.”
“Praise be to Allah it was not the pike that crashed.”
As a piquant offset to all this luxury there is hunger and fear and danger in the street. A man’s best friends are his Colt and his Nubs experts with their staves jabbing with both ends blocking out teeth with a straight-thrust stave held level.
It is a day like any other. Breakfast in the patio served by my Malay boy. The patio is a miniature oasis with a pool, palms, a cobra, a sand fox, and some big orange lizards mean and snappy which eat melon rinds. So after breakfast I set out for the Djemalfna to meet Reggie. We are going to plan our route to A.J.’s annual party which is tomorrow it will be the do of the season. We call ourselves the “Invited” and we all have punch card invitations around our necks like dog tags that will punch us through A.J.’s electric gates. So I am cutting through the noon market sun helmet Colt cartridge belt the lot flanked by my magnificant Nubs when we run into a pack of twenty wild boys. At sight of us their eyes light up inside like a cat’s will and the hair stands up straight on their heads spitting snarling they are all around us slashing at my Nubs. The leader has a patch over one eye and a hog castrator screwed into a wood and leather stump where his right hand used to be. Quick as a weasel he darts under the Nub’s staff his hand flashes in and up you can feel cold steel cut intestines like spaghetti. Now it is very unchic to lose your head and use the gun for trouble the Nubs should handle like say a pack of diseased beggars. You have to decide and decide quick is this or isn’t it a Colt case. I decide it is definitely a Colt case get my eyes converged on the leader’s skinny stomach and fire. The heavy forty-four slug knocks him ten feet. I shift and fire shift and fire gun empty reach for my snub-nosed thirty-eight in a special leather-lined inside breast pocket when they scatter and fade out like ghosts. Taking inventory I count seven wild boys dead or dying. The priest darts out of a potato bin and starts giving unction. I saw two wild boys spit at him with their last spark of life. The Nub’s eyes are glazing over, intestines steam in the noon sun drawing flies. A policeman approaches reluctantly and I give him some orders in crisp Arabic. I find Reggie on the square sipping a pink gin shaded by a screen of beggars. An old spastic woman twitches and spatters Reggie’s delicate skin with sunlight. “Uncontrolled slut!” he screams. He turns to his henchman. “Give this worthless hag a crust of stale bread and find me a sturdy shade beggar.”
I sit down and order a Stinger. “Rumble in a square. I lost a Nub.”
“Saw it all from here. I think Donald knows about a good Nub.”
“I am burying my Nub in the American cemetery. We can meet there and plan our route to the party. Might have a spot of bother on the way you know.”
“More than likely. A.J. has been criticized for his lavishness by a few ridiculous malcontents the eternal bane of the very rich.”
Next day after the Nub is laid away with taps and all the trimmings thirty of us join forces and set off for A.J.’s compound which is outside the walls. Rather conspicuous we are too with our Nubs clad in aluminum jockstraps and sandals carrying wire shields to screen us from stones and at their belts for emergency use the razor-sharp machetes. So we walk along between our Nubs very dégagé as if we aren’t actually there.
“The old man will break a stack of bricks with his karate of course it’s a bore but there’s no stopping him. Any case it’s free meals and drinks for a month. I will say for him when he does a do it’s a do.”
The streets are worse than I ever see them the walking dead catatonic from hunger jammed in like so many sacks of concrete the Nubs shove with the stave the bodies bend and come right back up again they are all shuffling slowly forward and all headed for A.J.’s. From between the legs of this river of flesh the wild boys dart like vicious little cats slashing with razor blades and pieces of glass, slash and then dart back into their burrows of walking flesh. A young agent just down from West Point where they call him the Ferret he can snake through a football line like a ferret down a rat hole follows a wild boy in there and what we found after some fast machete work you don’t tell the next of kin.
There it is just ahead now the electric gates thirty feet high set in a wall of black granite. Stumbling over legs we make the gate and click in while the crowd sticks its hands through the bars and shoves fingers in their mouths drooling like cows with the aftosa.
A.J. resplendent in white robes greets us fr
om a dais over the outer courtyard. He smiles and waves to the slobbering crowd.
“They know the score right enough. The better I eat the better they eat. Le gran luxe makes tasty leavings.” The outer courtyard is a small arena with balconies around the sides. We get up in the balconies and A.J. walks down into the middle of the arena.
“Release the bull.”
There is a blast of music and the bull rushes out a chute sees the old man and heads straight for him. He stands there fist drawn back and there is a light seismic tremor as he plants himself for the kill. Then his fist flashes forward and I see the brains go. The bull stumbles by him and falls on its side one leg in the air kicking spasmodically. Within seconds the carcass is butchered and the raw bleeding meat heaved to the crowd.
We go through the inner gates into the compound. There are open air restaurants serving smórgåsbord, beer, chilled aquavit and the hot fish soups of Peru, quiet riverside restaurants in blue evening shadow, redbrick houses with slate roofs whole blocks serving home-cooked American food the way they used to serve it turkey, fried chicken, iced tea, hot biscuits and corn bread, steak, roast beef, homemade strawberry ice cream, duck, wild rice, hominy grits, creamed chestnuts. There are pools and canals, floating restaurants covered with flowers, old riverboats with a menu of passenger pigeon, lark, woodcocks, wild turkey and venison, zeppelins and dining cars, chateaus of haute cuisine ruled by eccentric tyrants, Russian country sideboards with sturgeon, caviar, smoked eel, vodka, champagne and hock, farm restaurants and all varieties of plain peasant cooking, inaccessible cliff restaurants famous for a pigeon with white meat. And every famous restaurant in the world has been duplicated to the last detail, the 1001 from Tangier, the old Lucullus restaurant from Marseilles, Maxim’s, the Tour D’argent, Tony Faustus from St Louis.
I notice that if anything is left on a plate or in a glass it is scraped or poured by the waiters into hampers one for liquids the other for solids. After we have circulated and put away what we could we are summoned to a balcony overlooking the main gate where the poor of Marrakech mill around waiting. A.J. harangues us briefly on the importance of maintaining a strong benevolent image in the native mind and at this point a panel slides back in the wall on one side of the gate and a huge phallus slides out pissing Martinis, soup, wine, Coca-Cola, grenadine, vodka, bourbon, beer, hot buttered rum, pink gin, Alexanders, glog, corn whisky into a trough forty feet long labeled DRINKS. From a panel on the other side of the gate a rubber asshole protrudes spurting out Baked Alaska, salted herring, duck gravy, chili con came, peach melba, syrups, sauces, jam, fat bone and gristle into another trough labeled EATS. Screaming clawing drooling the crowd throws itself at the troughs scooping up food and drinks with both hands. The odor of vomit rises in clouds. A.J. presses a button that seals the balcony over. Ventilators whir and a smell of cool summer pools and mossy stones envelops the guests. We all stay a month which isn’t hard to do considering what is inside and what is outside.
In addition to the restaurants of the compound culinary expeditions on location to all parts of the globe are organized for the more vigorous guests. The guests are up at six for a breakfast of fruit juice, fried eggs perfectly cooked so that the yolk runs slowly when you cut it, bacon that bends slightly over the fork neither too crisp nor too limp, homemade bread, tea and coffee a cigarette and a rest and they start out through the flaming autumn hills. It is a bright blue October day. They walk ten miles to a river where the flatboats are waiting. The river is cold and clear and deep. They float downstream fishing along the way in pools and bays and inlets. Tying up the boats for lunch the guests arm themselves with springy clubs and walk along the bank killing frogs and skinning the legs which they fry in bacon grease and eat crisp with cold beer. By late afternoon when they arrive at the farm ferry they have an ample string of jack salmon (also known as walleyed pike), black bass, perch and channel cat. Red-brick house on the hill bourbon and marijuana grown in Missouri summer heat on poor hill soil has a special tang, purple weed they call it. A twilight like blue dust sifting into the river valley as they sit down to a meal of jack salmon steaks, fried perch and bass cooked in bacon grease with a faint smoky tang cider and apples from the farm orchard. They hunt through the autumn woods and return to a dinner of quail, wild turkey and squirrel with chestnuts, spring onions and sweet potatoes. Other locations feature skiing in preparation for smórgåsbord with chilled aquavit, hot chili dishes after a ride through the mountains of northern Mexico, lobsters and clams on the beach, iced tea and fried chicken at The Green Inn.
Food is only one attraction. Every pleasure, sport, diversion, interest, hobby, pursuit or instruction is provided for. To list some of the facilities: computerized libraries with complete references on any subject, expert instructors on any subject, sport or skill. There are gliders, balloons, parachutes, aqualungs and deep-sea diving from the coastal estates. There are sense-withdrawal chambers, immersion tanks, no-gravity capsules simulating space conditions. There are ranges where you can practice with every weapon from a laser gun to a boomerang. There are blue movies of incomparable artistry. Every period of history and every place or country is represented in A.J.’s International Pavilion. You can enjoy a trip to the 1920’s, Renaissance Italy, Mandarin China, ancient Greece or Rome. Every sexual taste is provided for in any setting you want. Jack off in the 1920’s? Fuck temple virgin? You make Gemini with nice astronaut? Greek youths clad only in beauty and sunlight? Forecastle on whaling ship? Afternoon in the Roman baths? See me fuck Cleopatra? Kinky Chimu kicks? Sex in a 1910 outhouse? Rumble seat? Bomb shelter in the blitz? Bedroll for two in the Yukon? The old swimming hole? Viking ship? Bedouin tent? Public school toilet? Anything that you like.
This morning after a breakfast of fruit, yogurt and pheasant eggs I walk over to the glider hangar. A.J. has several hundred gliders derived from the early models you launch by running and land on your feet sometimes. There are gliders that can be launched from skis, roller skates and bicycles. In all cases the gliders have been designed to most closely approximate the dream of wings and flight. If you have your own ideas for a new model the designers will make it up for you in a few days. The gliders are of many materials and colors to match different landscapes and sky conditions and many of them are painted with landscapes. There are red models for sunset gliding, transparent plastic for ski gliding, blue wings for the mountains. I select a mountain model that shades from lightest egg blue to blue black. The wings are of ramie fabric. A small electric dirigible takes us to the launching station up in the Atlas mountains. From the station a steep concrete runway slopes down. I put on roller skates and pick up the glider, the wings on each side my hands braced on two struts. The ship is piloted by shifting weight with the hands the pilot being suspended between two struts at the center. When your arms get tired there is a sling seat. I start down the launching run faster faster knees bent I zoom right off across the valley legs dangling over two thousand feet of space. This is really flying like you do in a dream, piloting the glider with both hands feeling it vibrate through me I am out there now in the wings, my wings sailing across the valley. I sit down on the sling seat and see the city spread out between my legs. I bring it down on a cracked weed-grown subdivision street and skate back to the compound for an afternoon in the blue movies.
Some years ago the actors went on strike protesting conditions prejudicial to their dignity.
“Your flesh diseased dirty pictures how long you want us to fuck very nice Meester Slastobitch? We is fucking tired of fuck very nice.” Accordingly the great Slastobitch introduced a series of reforms. Considering the demands of the workers he decided that the blue movies must have story, character development and background in which sex scenes are incidental. For example a story of a whaling voyage 1859 two hours in length contains only eighteen minutes of sex scenes scattered through the film.
“The blue movies as a separate genre have ceased to exist. We show sex as it occurs in the story as a part of life not
a mutilated fragment.”
I go to the old Palace Theatre on Market Street. The first number is an educational short showing how le gran luxe can be achieved on a modest income.
“Now here is my immersion trough in the blue room just a trough full of glycerine sheet aluminum I got it all through the PX for almost nothing my dear now if you’ll just slip into this plastic cover Yage and Majoun for this trip Majoun is good on a bluie your first solo my dear and you are well prepared you see it’s all so simple home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else’s ass. I remember a science-fiction thing about an institute called Fishook given over to paranormal psychic things they have a box they get in and their minds travel to other planets. Well one of these planets is so ‘evil’ it drives an astronaut back to the Bible Belt where he preaches up a holy war against the ‘Parries’ they are called and by now everyone outside Fishook hates the ‘Parries’ and there are signs up ‘Parry, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You Here.’ And Fishook has closed the doors whole villages of nice old ‘Parries’ and the teenage ‘Parries’ all bucking for Fishook will be slaughtered.”
But there is another astronaut on the lam from Fishook security who knows about a nice quiet planet and he wants to rescue all good “Parries” everywhere but how to transport the paranormal assholes? In a flash the know-how comes to him from that “evil” planet and when he tells the villagers what to do they say
“But that’s dirty.”
“Not dirty just alien” he says. “Besides you don’t have much choice.” He points to a long row of headlights approaching the paranormal village. “The vigilantes are on the way. So you see it’s time to move on. And what you find outside is only what you put there in the first place. Time to move into first place.”
He was lying on a bed in his shorts split bamboo walls top floor of the hotel. A knock at the door. The Indian boy stood there a quart beer bottle in one hand.