submachinegun conciousness Chap 2:

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     Across the nine square feet of big screen opened a cable tv rerun of Secret Agent. To the theme music Art Rambo played air guitar, seated in an orange plastic chair that had been 1965’s idea of comfort in outer space.
     To his right Greg hunched uncomfortably in a beige metal folding chair that looked stolen from a high school gymnasium. Under a stem-in-the-center black beret loomed his ruined pumpkin of a face. As a final chord echoed electrically, he raised the remote like a Raid can; killed the volume; leaving the visuals to plead their snazzy, slightly sleazy cause to a deaf audience of two – forty years in the future.
     “I send you downstairs,” Greg frowned, returning the remote to the bare floor beside his chair, “to spy on my delinquent tenant, and all the info you come back with is now the goof thinks he’s some kinda artist?”
     “Photographer. He blew the money on a camera. Computerized polaroid. Maybe two K new.”
     “He’s taking pictures of his…,” Greg winced, “anus?”
     “Yeh, man. It’s kinda cool. I think he markets the pix to medical book publishers and such. He’s got some kinda funky disease. I never saw a butt so overgrown with weird sores.”
     “Could we change the topic?” Greg creaked in the chair. “Feces ain’t my favorite discussion material.”
     “You were accusing me of falling down on the job,” Art shrugged. “I never miss a trick, man. I am totally attentive to detail. Besides, no feces were invloved. Hey – you wanna know what else I glimpsed in that mirror before he jumped up? I’m talking colors: bile yellow, pus green, bloodblister purple…”
     “I can’t listen to this disgusting shit! Look, lemme recite this work in progress I got about Mona. I’m gonna get her to set it to music. I think you’ll like it. Get your mind off that nut down there anyway.”
     “I think you already repeated this one for me.”
     “Impossible,” Greg hoisted his plastic of geyser water from the floor beside the remote. “I just composed it last night. I ain’t seen you since lunch yesterday. God, wasn’t that salami wretched!”
     “Don’t get me started,” Art said to the tv, as men in suits stabbed one another in the vest. Then a double-agent in a Fedora began gunning down everyone in sight. They were out in a dark alley. Ricochets holed garbage cans. A helicopter rotored overhead, blasted down a search. The gunman fled across the border. The electric guitar crazed the Secret Agent Man theme (only this part Greg and Art don’t hear, just me creating it down here). “Next time you wanna hire me for a job, we meet in a place where I can digest the food, OK, Pops?”
     “OK – this is it!” Greg leaped to his feet, knocked over the folding chair in the process. “I call
it Song In Progress.”
     He took two steps left. Brought himself up between Art and the tv. Gazed into Rambo’s eyes, which fought for peeks at the screen. Raised his arms palm up:
          “So cool is the dude,
          His house got mildewed.
          He aimed for the lewd,
          But only got rude.”
     Greg regained his chair, first picking it up and clanking it out of its collapse. “Ya like? It’s hot off the press. Song about a black guy wants to imitate Elvis. The old triple-reverse-o-roony. I mean, it’s just a start. But once I show it to Mona and we sit down and work out some bugs together…”
     “I tell you Mona and me are partners?” Art frowned at muzzle flashes star the night of a parkinglot behind a Monte Carlo casino.
     Greg’s head snapped around. His thick, half-gone-to-flab neck muscles rippled, squinched. The apartment manager knifed eyes at the dope dealer. “What you talking about?”
     Rambo slipped out of his shirt pocket and plopped over his vicious little pig eyes the sunglasses. He snickered, head kept pointed at the tube.
     The manager stood up carefully. “Is there something I don’t know?” Faced the profile of the television viewer. “Or haven’t been told?”
     “Relax, man. It’s a joke. Just stringing you along. I’m not porking your babe.”
     “Well, I… I mean she’s not,” Greg slumped back on the chair, forced himself to become engrossed in the tapestry of black-and-white violence six feet from his nose. “I don’t care what she does. What you and Mona got goin ain’t none of this old drunk’s business.”
     “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s the movies, Pops. I’m her agent.” He flashed Greg a smile; revolved his gaze back on the screen. “I’m in contact with a producer down in West Seattle.”
     “Is it…?”
     “Sure,” Art nodded at the Secret Agent Man using a chrome Zippo to light a cigarette, then firing a bullet from the derringer in disguise. “It’s porn. Only kinda opening in town at the moment. It’s a start.”
     “Ain’t she too, uh… too…?”
      “At forty-three she’s perfect. This is mature amateur. A new niche in the industry got created less than a year ago. Dude out in West Seattle invented the concept. Cutting edge, my man.”
     Cut to the conning tower of a surfaced sub. Two officers in smart Soviet uniforms scan through binoculars the horizon; on which finally – about two seconds television time – appears the fattening dot of an approaching chopper.
     Greg squinted at the action as though himself staring through binoculars, “Why you telling me this?”
     “She’s your girlfriend – you got a right to know.”
     “I wish,” the Secret Agent descends like a tuxedo spider on a rope from the chopper belly, “wish she was my girlfriend.”
     “OK – she’s your fantasy. All the more romantic. Love, similar to art, is founded on irreality.”
     “So…,” the famous actor sprints in Florsheims across the deck of the sub. “This a lesbian film?”
     “Nah. This is her first appearance. Straightforward boy-meets-girl. Not even any anal.”
     “Who’s the, uh…”
     “Lucky guy? Well…,” Art turned his mirror-blotted eyes on the hepatic ex-lush, “no reason I can’t be also your agent.”
     “I meant no such thing.” Dodging bullets from above, the suave spy hustles up a dozen steel rungs to the top of the tower. “I’m in love with Mona. And I happen to think porn degrading. I don’t begrudge people making a living. Don’t get me wrong. Folks gotta pay the rent. I’m in favor of porn above starvation. But on a personal level…”
     “You could probably recite a poem in the film,” Art said to the tv. “I already told the producer I know this wellhung mature poet.”
     “It ain’t but eight inches,” Greg chuckled, pleasantly losing all consciousness of what transpired on – even though he persisted staring at –the screen. “Say, you serious about me reciting a poem in this movie?”
     “What?” Patrick McGoohan pitched a Russian officer into the Mediterranean; returned to karate chop ballet with the remaining Red.
     “Listen, Art – this could mean a lot. I mean, if enough people could see me recite… I’ll cut you in handsomely on any of the take directly resulting from this cinematic production, rest assured.”
     “Oh, that’s it…” McGoohan removed something from a hip pocket of the corpse he had just created by appropriating the officer’s luger, then shooting the officer pointblank in the stomach. “That’s just the point – there is no take. Male actors in the industry don’t get payed. I mean, they do – they get free sex; ain’t no free lunch. Totally. You’re old enough to know that by now.”
     “Wait a minute here: two items: 1) I gotta get payed, because I don’t give away my poetry free in no goddamn movie; 2) I need a disguise – I can’t have Mona know who it is. At least, not till I recite.”
     “Script calls for male lead to wear an executioner’s hood. Film’s a Black Mass girl-has-sex-with-sacrificer kinda genre. You’ll fit right in. She’ll never know who owns the eight-inch joystick looping her loop through multiple fake orgasms.”
     “Fake?”
     “Remember what I just said about irreality the lynchpin of art? Well, the irreality of this flick will intensify the love totally. I’m speaking of your thing for Mona as an art form. I mean the irreality of the celluloid coupled with the staged love act.”
     “Love act?”
     “Yeh – the love act. And in this movie the whole setup will be sterilized – all love depicted totally sterile. Intellectually, I mean. Although a work of art in its own right, this film is protection-free. Excuse me while I step into your bathroom.”
     “This is your apartment, you hophead. Christ, some day one of you addicts is gonna burn this building down.”
     “So it is,” Art mused, clomping in snakeskin boots to the bathroom set to the right of the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Pops. Stuff keeps me alert. Hey, at least I was being polite. I’ll be out in a sec.”
     Inside the small, bright-lit, white-tiled bathroom Rambo closed and locked the door. An old habit.
     He reached out of his candystriped polyester slacks a tiny ziplock of off-white powder. Examined it carefully. Saw the indelible H scrawled on the plastic.
     Yes, heroin after the sun goes down. Thank God for the sun. A wonderful invention, sinking below the ocean out there, to let us know it’s time to lay aside the coke and snort smack.
     After breathing up the contents of the bag, he stares into the mirror above the sink, watching himself on the sunglasses, thinking, “Through a glass darkly I threw myself into myself darkly.”
     Art emerges from the john. Lopes across the floor of the two-window, one-bedroom, groundlevel apartment. Eases himself back down into the orange plastic contoured theoretically to the pelvis. 77 Sunset Strip is coming on. He demands volume, needs to hear the theme.
     Greg grunts. Lifts the remote. Holds a thumb down on the button, till 1958 fingerpops into the room.
     While across the screen flashes Kookie – the carhop-cum-undercover-detective – Art aircombs his own hair, chanting softly, “Kookie, Kookie – lend me your comb!”