Index

 

 

Chapter One - Page 4

Chapter Two - Page 9

Chapter Three - Page 14

Chapter Four - Page 19

Chapter Five - Page 24

Chapter Six- Page 29

Chapter Seven - Page 35

Chapter Eight - Page 40

Chapter Nine - Page 46

Chapter Ten - Page 50

Chapter Eleven - 57

Chapter Twelve - Page 61

Chapter Thirteen - Page 65

Chapter Fourteen - Page 71

Chapter Fifteen - Page 78

Chapter One

 

As I entered my  second floor apartment, my  arms loaded with what could be best described as hungover marionettes who had seen better Boston days, I was met with a barrage of recently beheaded ventriloguist dummy heads hurtling at me with the atmospheric re-entry fury of Charlie McCarthy meteors heading on a collision course with dinosaurs and a manifest destiny that manifested itself and festered unfettered in its quest to quash end extinguish life as I know it.

 

She was PISSED! She being the head hurler aforementioned  who was responsible for the dummy decimation and decapitation. God damn it..she must have run out of painkillers again. Lovely little Darvons, or perhaps she took too little belladonna and her menstrual cramps were now in charge of her control tower.

 

“Whoa, what the hell are you doing! Stop it!” was all I could muster up in the way of offering a truce for something I didn’t even know we were arguing about.

 

She, again the head hurler whose name is Louis Comfort Tiffany, responded not too kindly I might add, “You...you asshole,  we’re out of money. The rent is due in a week and all you do is to avoid a real job. You know WORK! PAYCHECK! FOOD! I earn a paycheck, but it’s not enough for the two of us and these...these creepy dummies you keep around here. IT looks like a flop house for puppet junkies!!!”

 

To set the record straight for you the reading public, I do have a job..two in fact two count them, TWO! I bust my ass as a writer and stage theatricals for a living. I felt smug as  I reminded her of those facts.

 

She came close, you now that red face rage in your face close and slowly said deliberately emphasizing each word for me to absorb and comprehend as though I were a three legged dog named Tripod who laid about all day on some southern   front porch dreaming of banjo music until a car went by that I could chase (hence how any dog named Tripod probably got its name in the first place on a summer day in pursuit of a Gremlin thereby losing a leg...paw and all of course, its front leg having gotten stuck in the rear hubcap and spun around at 50 MPH as though it were on G Force spin dry in a Maytag!)

 

“Job? You are kidding me, yes?” Oh shit. Here it comes, duck and cover. I better head her off at the pass.

 

“I know it’s not much, but I need time to write the next great American novel. For Whom The Bells Toll, that kind of thing. I also want to write plays. Make a huge Andrew Lloyd Webber splash on Broadway...the great white way where I can give the middle finger salute and my fucking regards to patrons of the arts.”

 

There that should do it. I told her off but good. Damn, I was proud of myself for that vendetta of an explanation.

 

“Write the next great American novel Mr. F Scott Hemingway Steinbeck Twain? You haven’t written one word,” she pointed out.

 

I countered her thrust and parry with “I have over 100 pages already written!” Proudly spoken!

 

“Yes, yes and all 100 are here, crumpled up in the wastebasket!”

 

“It takes time, you know for it to come together, but I do have that freelance writing job that pays a little, so yes I am a writer!”

 

Then she clobbered me with the ax of reality.

 

“You write shithole fortunes  for the Shanghai Fortune Cookie Company for god sakes. I found this months list you did, what a joke…’Good fortune will smile on you as  does Buddha’ or how about these, ‘Excitement and intrigue follow you closely wherever you go!’ ‘A pleasant surprise is in store for you.’ ‘May life throw you a pleasant curve.’ You call this a career? Miss Buddha here ain’t smiling!”

 

“But...but…” stammer…

 

She continued “Write plays? You do puppet shows on the Boston Commons on the weekends. Fucking puppets!”

 

“Now hold on,” my ire now erect, “they aren’t just puppets, there are some marionettes and hand puppets too!”

 

“Good, I’m leaving you so the next time you need sex let Senor Wences give you one hell of a hand held blow job, and if you’re really hurting go fuck a mime!”

 

With that she walked out the door, suitcase in hand, leaving me with an apartment that had been through a blitzkrieg of super bitch proportions. Head everywhere, headless dummy bodies strewn about mixing with marionettes tangled in twine. Hand puppets were headless as well. It was a crime scene...a real Charles Manson Marionette Murder spree…

 

I sat down on the floor to regroup with a warm bottle of Night Train wine, the toast of the town at the Jesus Saves Mission. I also broke open another box of free fortune cookies they always sent me along with my meager check.

 

If Buddha were going to smile on me...now was the time….

Chapter Two

 

Kathleen Morphine was frustrated by her early morning foray to find the key to the magic fountain of artistic expression of American Gothic Grant Wood, famed Iowa painter of corfields, farms, agrarian landscapes and a closet homosexual. She now returned to her third floor  apartment in one the old factories in Boston’s renovated red brick gentrified 19th Century Industrial Revolution . She and other artists of varied disciplines were living out their Bohemian dream of an artful lowbrow starving artist hipster chic utopia in buildings that at one time made shoes, plows, light bulbs and  firearms.

 

Through research she discovered her floor was a long forgotten button manufacturer in the 1800’s. At one point they made all the buttons for General U S Grant’s Army. The confederacy had developed a plantation mentality that produced cotton and slaves...alas..but...no buttons for the CSA.  It was illegal for Northern companies to do business with the south of any goods….thus began the great button famine of 1861!

 

The button company, eager to profit off the war struck a deal with a British company in London to purchase the new CSA buttons and in turn would sell them to the Confederacy. Ah gotta love American ingenuity! No laws were broken. The button manufacturer made a fortune throughout the uncivil war as now both Blue and Grey could button up their pants and in effect not let their guard down exposing their pride and joy flapping in the breeze.     

 

She entered her hybrid loft apartment/studio  empty handed of any inspiration. Every Boston morning she went search of a patch greenery of one single Thomas Hart Benton muse inspiring farmland with red barn and silos and a sad eyed cow standing alone in a patchwork field of soybeans and tall corn with perhaps a far off in the distance one dimensional man of Amish persuasion, stoic and religious.

 

Hold the Amish, hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, religious sects don’t upset us!  Hold on the lonely sentinel of a grain silo. This was Boston afterall, a modern Boston I might add where the Standells sang proudly in complete mono….”I love that dirty water..Boston you’re my home!” (Cue the familiar guitar riff here)

 

It was a landscape of steel and glass, a subway system (first in the US) and of most importance, it was one of the first ballparks, to offer hot dogs for sale during the games! “Fenway Franks, get yer red hots.”

 

In place of a serene pastoral portrait of the land...Boston could only offer up old hubcaps that ended up in a vacant city lot overgrown with weeds hiding rats . Beer cans and bottles, broken pieces of lumber, a dead possum every now and then, old used condoms, hypodermic needles. A monstrous monument to refuse with a regional flavor. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse!” I love one word that can switch meaning faster than Charlie Sheen can remove a bra from a virgin.

 

As she sat down in the chair by the window, an epiphany of extraordinary illumination came as a bolt of lightning. Rain silos and red barns, was the landscape Grant Wood and others lived. However,  trash and Salvation Army stores defined her neo-American Gothic landscape.

 

No lonely cow in a field..but there is probably a stray dog  rooting around in an alley garbage can for scraps of food amidst the broken glass bottles and junkie needles  you had to deftly dodge. The inspiration was intoxicating. She would cast aside her midwest search for the heart,of  Americana art replacing paint and brush with rusted cans and hubcaps and anything else that defined HER world.

 

Her quest for artistic recognition was insatiable, you know gallery galas with enough wine, cheese, fondue and kiss kiss greetings to fill Boston Harbor. At this point all she could garner and gather were a few commissions for the Sleep Inn Motel chain to recreate paintings of various breeds of dogs playing poker and the paint by numbers look of an old man and the sea with a rickety boat. She was very good at reproducing kitsch, but she craved more.

 

Andy Warhol painted soup cans and bananas as canvas subject matter.  Kathleen Morphine would use soup cans, junkie needles and beer cans as well s a myriad of other good old fashioned trash  found on a scrounge or two as the message of her medium….

 

The paintings would be composed of objects that define society’s castaway toss away disposable attitude to life and the planet itself all in a three dimensional  projection from the canvas which would have various ecology posters pasted in place. Of course she would have steal a Do Not Litter sign from the Department of Public Works to highlight a video screen   in the middle of the canvas with Iron Eyes Cody tears streaming down his cheek as he gazed at a trash filled stream.

 

She had her direction now. Don’t try to power your environment...let nature empower you!

 

She sat back and smiled and lit up a joint..content now..while across the street on ground level, right below the puppeteers second floor apartment, a young student of ballet was practicing her best dance movements to Swan Lake on the hi fi. If not ballet then she would aspire to be the next Isadora Duncan combining modern dance with ballet.

 

Unfortunately she had to break off her practice as outside of her window on the street, the street musicians had already gathered as they did every weekend, homeless looking beat hipsters with guitars and saxophones and steel drums to entertain the stroller and passerby with improv jazz and blues, hoping to catch some cash for their efforts for a party of wine later in the evening when the Standells lover, muggers and thieves take over the not so Grant Wood landscape of Bean Town...the city of dreams...

Chapter Three

 

The sun was blasting through the late morning clouds as Alexia Dyslexia placed the 33 ⅓ record of “Swan Lake” onto the spindle of the old portable Viva Zapata hi fi system that she found while rummaging around at the Salvation Army Store down the street from her apartment next door to the bodega owned by the Gallegos family, recent immigrants from the drug wars of El Salvador. Roberto Gallegos, family patriarch always had a pleasant smile when he saw Alexia and was praying to St. Pancho Villa that her dreams of ballet success would be met.

 

When Alexia purchased the relic record machine she took it home and wanted to buy it a steak dinner as its reward for surviving the years of someone’s rock and roll bedroom. A rescue animal from the nearby shelter waiting to be euthanized (isn’t a group of teenagers in China referred to as ‘Youth In Asia’?) yet saved in the nick of time just as the heroes in those white knuckle Perils of Pauline movie serials. It was however, NOT a stray collie miniature poodle mix used in dog fights for bait. It was merely a hi fi,  so from now on Chuck Berry was to be replaced by the Nutcracker and other ballets of note and distinction.

 

She was mindful of the volume even though she wanted to immerse herself in a sea of sound, but did not want to disturb her neighbor up on the second floor directly over her apartment. A writer, T. Rex Fitzgerald, who wrote fortunes for fortune cookies until he could complete what he called ‘the great American novel’ even though others had done this already ranging in subject matter from Okies on the move to California to Civil War in Spain.   

 

Her neighbor across the street, Kathleen Morphine,  was an artist, a painter who has dreams of having given birth from the artistic  placenta to euvre at the Louvre. She was even so kind as to have done some portrait work, sketches really,  of Alexia dancing. The fluidity of the human body is at its peak when doing a perfect pirouette.

 

She remembered well one evening discussing ballet over a couple of bottles of Burgundy with Kathleen Morphine and T. Rex Fitzgerald as they assumed a lotus position sitting around Alexia’s apartment

According to T. Rex, “Ballet is and always will be to me Nureyev trying to land his swan into  Lake Margot Fonteyn. I hear they also wear a dance belt which is nothing more than a thong supposedly to act as a first defense against any visible signs of an erection and to retard in the leotard by supporting a dancer’s “manhood” to avoid any hint of male “ballet bulge”.

 

It was the wine talking. As much as T. Rex   enjoyed cheerleaders in short skirts showing off ample amounts of thigh, Alexia was sure in his mind he wished  ballerina’s would do handstands or form a pyramid!

 

He continued in a wine soaked observation, “ I suppose we have the great Balanchine to thank for removing the restrictive overly dressed dance wear of earlier eras. The dance wear was god awful, as bulky as John Candy in a gorilla costume. But thanks to his carnal senses the audience can  now drool and actually see the leg movements of the dancers. Supple female legs performing an adagio with grace and style can move a male to warp speed libidinous pole dance mode fluidity in under 60 seconds..faster than Pee Herman at the Club Pussy Cat in a stained raincoat over his lap!” He triumphantly deduced.

 

He did have a point of sorts. Many patrons of the arts favorite movements is the female “Arabesque” which is where the dancer stands on one leg with the other leg extended behind her posing ever more as a flamingo lawn ornament in a trailer park. Done properly she will bring out the Bedouin in you as you race in your mind to her tent for a private Arabian Night of debauchery and tutu madness!

 

Of course there are many leaps and jumps, upwards, spinning like deranged Frisbees making you dizzy with awe and wonder...if you like mental roller coaster rides. Many cities in America have ballet companies and usually in conjunction with that they also have a symphony orchestra to show they have class..unless of course you live in the deep south where the annual festival is to honor Barney Fife or Billy the Exterminator. Hell, even Akron, Ohio of no places has a ballet company or two to compete for the tourist dollar, unless of course that family tour of the Goodyear Tire Factory makes you horny.

 

As he rose from the chair he went to get more wine for Alexia and Kathleen, mumbling his way into the kitchen  “Look If you want to witness the Battle of the Ballet Bulge and watch a swan dive into a ballerina’s lake then by all means have at it as tutu’s go flying high with sky high thigh...as for me I’ll be at the Club Demento drinking and cheering and screaming at the top of my voice..”Give me pole dancing and mud wrestling or give me death”

Chapter Four

 

 

As the writer dashed madly up the one flight of stairs to his own apartment and reaching the landing, he was confronted by the flamboyant neighbor, Dennison Monet, the buildings resident homosexual and bon vivant who preferred to wear Oriental print kaftans and way too much Moulin rouge that clashed with his Goth eyeliner and black lipstick. He was Wynona Ryder and Beetlejuice all rolled into one rather large, imposing life form.

 

In fact it was he who proposed an idea that would ultimately fuel inject T. Rex Fitzgerald’s career!

“May I speak with you for a moment? Please? It’s important.”

 

T Rex was all ears, and always had time for Mr. Monet as he was great copy for a character he could use in his future Pulitzer novel. “Fire away, Dennison.”

 

“I saw your march of the marionettes Sunday down by the park at the harbor. I was thinking a show of that sort, would go over big at the Pink Leather Cabaret bar I frequent, kind of a queers and beer kind of joint. A modified performance of course. Have you ever thought of having gay puppets or those things on strings? They would be a rush at the club! They’d pay you to perform and could open a whole new avenue of art for you.”

 

T Rex thought for a nano second. “You know I can see it now a bisexual marionette who can go either way...hardwood or softwood. Ha...sounds like a challenge. Let me work on a few ideas and get back to you.”

 

Mincing drag queen puppets, gay hand puppets giving gay hand jobs and lesbian leather characters going one one for the straight crowd. The more he thought about itl the more he liked it. It was perverse enough to work! There would have to be some sort of scripted scenarios, costumes and mini sets and damned if he didn’t know who to enlist.

 

Kathleen Morphine the artist would be perfect. He met with her the next night and laid out the plan for her. She hungrily accepted. She would design small scale sets and costumes for the players. They would have scenes, puppetized of course from “The Boys in the Band” and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” My favorite line from ‘Band” was Cliff Gorman entering a party scene and asking aloud, “Who the hell do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

 

T Rex worked with the fervor of a madman on a set of Broadway show tunes to incorporate into act….imagine a ventriloquist dummy in full drag singing “Why Can’t a Woman Be Like A Man” from ‘My Fair Lady’ along with a modified Jet song from ‘West Side Story’...”When you’re a fag, you’re a fag all the way from your first undercover arrest to you’re last dying day…”

 

As a side note, Kathleen realized quaint slow pace of agrarian America’s pastoral settings lent themselves to canvas and paint, but for the faster pace of today’s urban environment she needed something faster to capture the societal landscape, so she scraped up the cash and bought a Nikon camera with motor drive. No street junkie, wino or hooker could now elude her photographic death rays in black and white which eventually led to a gallery showing of her urban landscapes and street people. She had found the key to acceptance as a true artist. She was now one existential one with her environment and the media was now silver oxide in black and white noirish photographs of Boston’s underbelly.

 

If this LGBT Puppet Cabaret works out they could work together on more projects and do modified puppetry in the park to gain even more notoriety. Social issues tackled by an enlightened Punch and Judy sure to appeal to the college liberals and intellectuals. He began working on scripts for the gay crowd at the Pink Leather Cabaret Bar as well as developing new characters and scripts for the park performances. He wasn’t kidding himself, this would not be Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park or his father’s Oldsmobile.

 

By Monday he had three outlines for the first three performances One would be a set of Three Stooges marionettes doing their most outrageous nyuk, nyuk, eye poke, belly punch, soitenly routines as well as a second group featuring Marx Brothers Jewish schtick and wise cracks! As the grand finally T Rex wrote a discussion piece between two puppets called Lenin and Marx, where Karl Marx and Nikolai Lenin whose body and souls are taken over by John Lennon and Groucho Marx. The Russian Revolution gets hot to Trotsky and goes all out showbiz!!!

 

The troupes fame would spread and hopefully would increase T. Rex’s wordsmithing output. Of course he’d still have to rely on the fortune cookie gig until the literary fountain came gushing forth in the form of royalties for that great American novel in the sky. HE even had a plan to propel himself with fortune cookie power by taking it into a whole new direction.

The first nights gig at the Pink Leather was arranged, costumes and sets being worked on at a fever pitch. He and Kathleen with help from Alexia Dyslexia were exhausted and thirsty as hell.

 

T. Rex spoke first the immortal words…”Who the hell do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

 

Chapter Five

 The ground floor apartment of Alexia was alive with abundant Tomaso Albinoni adagios. Some of the finest classical baroque compositions for ballet ever written used mainly as the background for “Dancing With The Medieval Stars” (Remember, if it ain’t baroque ...don’t fix it!) Along with compositions for live theater, he also did baroque stand-up and was the Lenny Bruce of the late 1600’s. His most famous piece was and is “The Adagio in G Minor” which is cut three on the White Album! (Alexia actually one night drunk with T Rex Fitzgerald played it backwards and swore to this day they heard a secret message … “Voltaire is dead….Voltaire is dead….Bach is the eggman….and Vivaldi is the walrus!”

 

While her apartment turntable z(locked and loaded) dispensed a full automatic 33 and a third full metal jacket of fluidity and grace as befits a ballerina with enough balls and chutzpah to make it to the top of the pirouette pyramid with slow movements performed with fluidity and grace. Fluidity is important in the ballet racket...grace itself can be purchased at the local corner gas station along with a breakfast burrito and a lottery ticket.

 

As Alexia became absorbed by the music she noticed the street musicians outside were blasting away and the infused blues began to permeate her apartment drowning out the adagio by layers. The old Martin guitar of One Legged Slim was in perfect alignment with the electronic keyboard of Loose Shoes McGovern and the homemade ba boom ba boom drums of the old blind Chinaman who no one it turns out knew his name.

 

Alexia, this time rather than get angry at the musical intrusion noticed that her whole body began to move to the street music. Not Bobbysox, boogie woogie crap, hip hop shit ..note even rockabilly psycho movements for Hot Rod in C Major...it was something different carrying her away on the wings of a musical cattle drive...ballet movements fornicating with modern dance she was inventing as she went along. Her ballet movements were now being pollinated by the fast moving blues numbers you can only hear and savor properly at downtown Chicago bars.

 

She found out later they also shared addictions to pills, needles and booze. They would fly high at night with a jet stream fix in their arms...scored on the beat streets of Boston with more than its share of Chinese restaurants, and one room bars with one broken stool,

They were artists, as a whole as they painted with music, self-portraits of blues on the surface of rough textured bags of burlap which can be found in dumpsters on the westends of eastside alleys... old burlap bags that held the fresh marijuana from old Burma herself.

 

They lived on and off the streets with its grotesque neon bus depot signs and pawn shops as the junkie juice flowed hot and steamy, and the musical notes played out like so many bottles of illegal pills at a pharmaceutical convention with doctors in attendance, wearing togas stolen from New York City bath house locker rooms with fat sweaty Greeks and those from the Baltics with secret rings eating lunch naked.

They played for change, spare, copper, nickel or silver, with buffalos on one side, and Indian heads on the other, very old, old change, yes..and sometimes someone would toss a grenade of crumpled bills into the collection cups set about.

 

.The currency itself was as wrinkled as an old suit of cheap material, the money tossed by cavalier passerby, you know the type. They would all fold up their three piece suit-tent cubicles with battleflag neckties flapping in the wind, to go see the blues guys, and then move on to Starbucks to read some Steinbeck not knowing who he is or why his grapes are wrathful.

 

Just who the hell were these cats? “Probably they came from the bootheel in Missouri, kick ass cotton country, with rockabilly mules hitched to plows with eight track tapes of Narvel Felts blasting from the front seats of pick-up trucks with rifle racks and crushed beer cans on the floor near the gas pedal.”

 

Yes, they were junkies, but aren’t we all to some drug or emotion?

 

Most of their veins were darkened now, to a bruised swampy green and black-blue bruised too, weaker and harder to raise, a limp pulp, even with a gentle spank, Nodding and smiling, the junk microwaved in the bloodstream, so warm it's global warming swarming over you in layers melting your personal ice caps, arctic and antarctic. The homemade syringe is emptied, a sigh and smile cross the junkies face as the junk drag races further and further along the two lanes of veins right along the quarter mile finish line of the brain.

 

Alexia had no discovered her own path...fusion of modern dance and ballet with a street beat to junkie concertos! She had to meet this musicians, but first she called T. Rex Fitzgerald for his advice. A whole new world of artistic achievement was about to kick the doors wide open to a Wonderland of dance, art and literature as Alexia Dyslexia, T. Rex and Kathleen Morphine were now on a delightful collision course that would change their world.

 

 

Chapter Six

 

T Rex Fitzgerald was getting the puppets (Thank gawd they weren’t Muppets, but this was a gay bar after all and we’ve all heard about Bert and Ernie!)  and props ready for the gay club opening of the Marionette Boys in Fishnets Follies. Kathleen Morphine was on her way over to his apartment which was just across the boulevard where vehicles played dodge ‘em cars with hapless pedestrian targets..some of them worth 20 points on a good day of hit and run fun in the sun.

 

Dennison, the nellie queen neighbor, as large around as the planet Neptune  who resembled a cross between an aged obese Marlon “Wild One” Brando and Orson “Citizen Kane”  Welles and Hermann “cyanide” Goering , had made all the arrangements for the trial performance at the Pink Leather Club, home of Liberace piano playing impersonators and Judy Garland’s galore and where dueling banjos would be welcomed at all hours.  

 

When  Kathleen showed up with the last minute wardrobe changes for the puppets, dummies and marionettes they loaded them into the van as neatly as Ted Bundy would stash  his treasure trove of victims.

 

It was showtime!

 

When they arrived at the nightclub they  parked in the alley and unloaded the gang of weird assed puppets in drag behind the stage curtain, then met the owner, an Asian drag queen who went by the name of Long Wang who booked them and was to pay them. The night could be a rousing success or a complete bomb. They were nervous,

 

What the hell..go with the flow. This would be one hell of a ‘Give my regards to Broadway, there's no business like show business’ kind of night.  Puppets in drag singing, well, lip synching to Broadway show tunes!

 

Adrenalin began to take over as they arranged the stage and props for a smooth performance.  It was time to man up with a fishnet chorus line of marionettes on strings, hand puppets and a ventriloquist dummy that would belt out tunes with the power and force of a damned Ethel Merman torpedo.

 

They peered through the stage curtains and the place was packed to the rafters with the gay crowd. It's showtime at the cabaret boys and girls, and those of you in between! The sexual cabaret culture was flourishing at the Pink Leather Club like a $500 a night hooker at a convention of Republicans from Iowa.

 

The room looked like  nothing more than one large breathless bordello laden with lacy boys in fag drag with tight waists, while macho manly women donned fedora's looking for some same gender vaginal gratification and satisfaction. Someone had opened Pandora's box of jazz and jive, and T Rex and Kathleen were in the middle of the vortex of ready to spin dry! What would the Colonel in Apocalypse Now say...oh yes...I love the smell of Vaseline in the morning!

 

Yes, boys will be girls and girls will be boys according to the song "Lola" by the Kinks, and the tonight this club  scene was locked and loaded on kink from transvestites in tights to Marlene Dietrich’s in top hat and tails.

 

Everything in the  audience was ripe with sex so you could now rub elbows and perhaps other body parts with patrons which included not only the straight community, but also Gay men, Lesbians and Transvestites...Strange bedfellows indeed, but interesting wouldn't you say?

 

Tonight, T. Rex thought aloud, “We’re going full Sondheim steam ahead”! Don't worry about masculinity atrophied or your wrist gone limp...it's showbiz after all not brain surgery. They would have scenes, puppetized of course from “The Boys in the Band” and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” My favorite line from ‘Band” was Cliff Gorman entering a party scene and asking aloud, “Who the hell do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

T Rex had worked with the fervor of a madman on a set of Broadway show tunes to incorporate into act…. a ventriloquist dummy in full drag singing  “Why Can’t a Woman Be Like A Man” from ‘My Fair Lady’ along with a modified Jet song from ‘West Side Story’...”When you’re a fag, you’re a fag all the way from your first undercover arrest to you’re last dying day…”

Afraid you won't be a man anymore because you have an urge to hum or sing a gay white way tune...don't worry..and don't ask/don't tell William. It's overture time This is it, the night of nights...It's time for Henry Higgins to come out of your closet to liberate the Liberace that lurks by candelabra light in all of us..yes, you too!

A real man can crush a beer a can with one hand and make Busby Berkeley have an orgasm with a display of flawless manly choreography ...one, two, three kick...all backed by a legendary backline of high kicking long legs with thunder packed thighs.

 

As 8 P.M. rolled around, the lights dimmed to a level that would mask a groin grope under the table except T Rex and Kathleen could imagine this crowd masturbating to a couple of hand puppets or a marionette dressed up as Marlene Dietrich with top hat and tails..

All Hail Ethel Merman, and when Warner Bros. cartoon characters break out into song singing.."this is it, the night of nights..." grab your best pair of fishnet tights...and let loose a vocal volley...remember...don't ask..don't tell...but above all never mind what others may think of you and your manhood...just smile and keep a stiff upper lip...and be tall and proud as you show off your truly limp wrist!!! It's Showtime Gang...one..two..three...kick...one...two...three...kick!

Chapter Seven

 

The drag queen puppet show was more boffo than T Rex Fitzgerald could have hope for. In fact, it was a turning point in his career as well as for Kathleen Morphine. Neither one of them were aware of the fact that Harry S. Truman Capote, local art critic for the Bostonian Arts Magazine was invited, and was in attendance that evening thoroughly enjoying the comic opera of hand puppet parody, marionette merriment  and dummy debauchery. He was also aware of a young woman with a Nikon camera shooting frame after frame of the production as well as candids of the undercurrent of the gay bar scene. Dancing, kissing, and fondling. Romance in the form of sheer lust was rampant in the club that evening...It was a two for one sale!

 

After the performance, to huge applause, whistles and blown kisses Mr. Capote invited Kathleen and T Rex to his front row table.

 

“Bravo, Bravo!. Marvy performance and I would like to do two articles. One on the puppet politics of assailing the vanilla fortress of Parochial prudishness and one on you, Ms. Morphine. I’m sure your photos have captured the very essence of the performance and the performance of the patrons in an environment of, shall we say, dangerous sexual liaisons, even in this day and age?”

 

Both Kathleen and T. Rex were surprised and excited of the prospect of magazine coverage. This could launch both of their careers into orbit in the right artistic circles...meaning galleries, playwriting, and of course access to the patrons of the arts with and eye for talent and large checkbooks.

 

“I, we are flattered Mr. Capote, an yes, will cooperate in way we can. Thank you!” T Rex effused.

 

Mr. Capote sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette at the end of long holder that gave a feminine air to this ego driven enigma. Hopefully he won’t ask for a hand puppet hand job to seal the deal! Senor Wences would be the logical choice in such matters and that prospect  was not an option.

 

The next few minutes were filled with Capotisms and observations of the art world and how the  two of them were changing that.

 

“Most art and art shows are as a flat as a  two day old beer in a mug sitting next to a jumble of wet cigarettes  fermenting in an ashtray in some dingy dive. Most of your mental dictionaries  spell art "prissy" and "sissy"? Now you gave it balls. Man-up! You know damn well the heavy-metal mucho machismo macho-machino Diego Rivera could kick whitebread milktoast Monet’s lite-rock soft-pastel ass in a fair fight!’

T Rex had an instant vision as he was being transported on a magic carpet ride of Mr. Capote and his -isms of an evening with imposters and impossible poseurs at the galleria; joining hands with the incurable curators who act as secretive as ever; stealing and smuggling art and antiquities from the back alleys of Tangier and Cairo while the writer smoked from a long stemmed hash pipe  dreaming of lit-fame and big chunky bricks of "dumb blonde" hashish, getting more and more stoned while the art critics search for a Mary Martin lostboy or sweet Sal Mineo lost girl in all of Neverland behind it’s massive great walls of art everywhere, along with painters and pirates inhaling pixie dust, and there's a full jammin' needle loaded with kreative karma to ease the pain of the summertime art-fix cold turkey blues.

 

Kathleen Morphine was also on a magic carpet ride of visions of the future, her future and he place in the vain avant garde vanguard  of the art community. She would soon be camping it up with Warhol himself no doubt. She could be a Chelsea girl….or even Nico!!

Andy the Hipster painted icons, pop cans and soup cans, all the while camping it up with Campbells and mincing gaily daily while working on marvelous Marilyn enjoying more than the allotted 15 minutes of fame he proclaimed as 8 Elvises escaped from the velvet painting and blazed a trail to the Velvet Underground leaving in its wake a pile of Joe Delassandro's trash to be devoured by hungry Chelsea girls taking their own Warholic walk on the wild side...do do do do do do do...Surrounded by Sugar Punk Fairies and Little Joes from Miami, F.L.A. who never once gave it away to Lou hiding in the reeds, while Narcotic Nico sang like a muse  while J.J Cale regrouped while Lou laid his head on Andy's Chest and dreamed of Valerie Solanas with a loaded sex pistol in hand firing wildly in the Factory at anything that moved. Annie Oakley on meth looking to blast a hole in the canvas of pop culture.

Now it was Kathleen’s turn. She could feel it. The creative juices of dykes who arrived by
bike, intellectual drag queens, street people, the wealthy from the world of art and Hollywood, writers, drunks, junkies, who wandered in and out of lucidity among the collective mass of societies sub strata of masturbation and creativity, and creative masturbation. You need to have your card punched to gain entree to this wonderland world of art and Alice. It was Schindlers A-List without the Nazi's!

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

The street blues coming from outside her minimalist St. Antoine Street apartment were addicting amd intoxicating. The whole apartment had been converted to a loft dance studio graced only by a small couch and table, a mattress, a few chairs hauled from the Salvation army while the walls were a gallery of famous ballerinas and Nureyev. Modern dance icons Isadora Duncan and Twyla Tharp also found pictorial sanctuary on the lofts wall of fame.

 

Alexia Dyslexia was fast becoming more than curious about the street music, the musicians who were creating it and why did her whole body want to flow with it as opposed to classic ballet movements that all of a sudden seemed rigid and regimented.

 

The old Martin guitar in the hands of One Legged Slim performed flawless musical mojo mirroring what a glissandro might emit as it danced and caressed the gentle strings of a harp. Loose Shoes McGovern, more than a mere keyboardist had complete mastery of the keys, a captain of his ship, a true Ahab in search of the Great White Whale. The homemade steel drums under the spell of the old nameless blind Chinaman kept the beat and cadence and drove the other instruments along a coordinated cattle drive of instrumentation longhorns destined for the meat packing plants of Chicago.

 

Today, Alexia noticed the addition of a plaintiff saxophone wailing it’s lonesome let’s get mugged in a back alley sexual saxy voice added to the mixture by a new cat in town….Gator James.

 

It was time to meet the band.

 

She watched and listened intently. They were as absorbed in the musical moment as she was when dancing. Kind of a zen in the moment kind of spirituality only true artists can feel. Enraptured? Yeah, I guess that would be the word to best describe that form of artistic incarceration of the moment.

 

When they took a break she introduced herself and why she wanted to met them. Simple enough..to blend ballet with street blues. Can it be done? Was it possible? Was it improbable? Would the ballet gods and goddesses destroy the earth if it was attempted.

 

Loose Shoes McGovern spoke first after all had nodded in the affirmative that it might indeed be possible. “We can always give it a try,” he spoke calmly with a gentle hard to place southern accent, probably from Georgia.

 

The band packed up and pickled up their instruments and followed Alexia into the apartment building to her apartment. The loft was bright and large, plenty large to spread out the instruments as Alexia put Swan Lake on the turntable so the band such as it was could get the “feel” of ballet.

 

Before long One Legged Slim was laying down a common blues chord but also added a ninth and thirteenth chord to give that extra flavor and to add a little bit of jazz flavor.

Loose Shoes began banging the ivories with the simple twelve-bar blues used in blues and rock and roll. Gator James inserted a dose of C Minor sax appeal while the unnamed blind Chinaman layered it all with a semi reggae beat.

 

Tchaikovsky had been transformed and now Swan Lake was ready to shake it’s money maker. It was uncanny. It was Swan Lake yet it wasn’t Swan Lake it was Swan Lake on cocaine!

 

Alexia began to dance to a new beat, ballet had met the blues head on. Her movements were even more fluid now. Freedom had been reached through this hybrid bastard child of dance and theater.

 

She could see performance now not as something imprisoned in form over substance.

She would mark her territory of style and freedom of expression that would be as flamboyant and even risque as a frisky drag queen in a dazzling feather boa.

Her penchant for the elegant beauty of the ballet now ran at a full gallup as a revolutionary gamut of free expression.

 

She might afterall realize her ultimate dream to be an A List, a rock star in sheer tunic who could tease her audience with her grace and style and captivated the male species with her beauty, as well as attracting a side order of faithful lesbian groupies who would wanted to camp it up in her camp. Perks!

 

In the local art circles of Boston it was no secret. On the sexual frontier She could not only turn a man into a quivering mass of jello with her beauty, but in bed could contort into a sexual pretzel.

 

One evening while appearing in Boston when she came out on stage in see through flowing gown which she lowered to her waist and bared her ample breasts for all to feast on or gasp in horror, whichever they preferred. Bang! Banned in Boston! Once you get banned in Boston the box office in other cities would overflow to the tune of sold out crowds!

 

She began to change in her public persona as well, dressing in definitely male pants, pants, pointed mens boots, huge hats and a cape. She was the goddess of Goth before Goth caught on keeping her face as white as a ghost with pancake, her lips flaming red as the fires of hell and jet black sexy hair greased up and slicked back prompting one critic in Chicago to refer to her as that "furious lesbian" to which she replied in a letter to the newspaper’s editor, "I can get any woman from any man I want"

 

The future was now set on a course of success. She and her new band and new dance aberration would be the toast of the performance art world. Her technique and music the band developed was out of the box, away from the rigidity of post-modern ballet and more in tune with natural movements and natural environments. The body movements were the expression of the human spirit and dancing in bare feet, sometimes bare breasted were more in keeping with classic dance of forgotten civilizations that were more "earthy" in philosophy. The ocean and it's movements also exemplified the free form of her dance technique, the ebb and flow of the body and tide as one movement, not separate.

 

It was pure zen ballet blues! The Nutcracker and Swan Lake would, never be the same again!

 

Chapter Nine

 

T. Rex Fitzgerald, thanks to all the recent media publicity he had been gathering, was negotiating the literary labyrinth and flexing his writing muscle. He began writing sarcastic pieces of work for magazines that were intended to be tongue in cheek, or in this case tongue in chic. He had found his own perverse voice in the void and wilderness of words by not following the path blazed by others. Fuck the great american novel...he was now on his own turf.

 

The biggest thrill he was getting were the irate irrational Letters to the editors that praised his work, but an even bigger rush were the ones from readers who just didn’t get it. Why wouldn’t you understand, “How To Hunt Endangered Species with a Slingshot” or “The Art of Suicide: Hanging or Gunshot” or his infamous, “Why We Should and How Best to Kill a Poet!”

 

He began writing a series of interviews where he interviewed himself, via one of his many alter egos admitting that the neighbors dogs were speaking to him and that he was the Son of Sam and Rosemary’s Baby all in one and the demon voices wanted him to use weed whackers on the grass skirts of hula dancers at the mall to expose the gentle genitalia that drove missionaries to sin.

 

Who wouldn’t want to know “How To Tell if a Nun is a Virgin” and “Why Did the Blind Man Cross the Street?” (He didn’t, he was the victim of a hit and run by a Good Humor Truck driven by a dope dealing senior citizen!) Not to be forgotten was his fake factual expose on “Why You Should Join the Ku Klux Klan” (Clean sheets everyday) and of course, “How To Be an Army of One at the Next Mass School Shooting...Be All You Can Be!”

 

How about the piece he did on a visit to the Ted Kennedy Underwater Driving School, isn’t that newsworthy enough? The mystery of Natalie Wood’s death solved due to poor hygiene habits..why didn’t Natalie Wood take showers? Because she liked to wash up on shore! The mysterious death of Helen Keller who bled to death trying to read a cheese grater thinking it was one of the juicy chapters of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”.

 

He also had helpful hints directed towards readers of the deep south...Watch “Gone with the Wind” backwards and it has a happy ending or Why Truck Tires are More Important Than Medicine for Your Dying Child”

 

Discover the fact that JFK and Elvis are still alive living in a double wide trailer in a community of lesbians disguised as Wal-Mart greeters in wheelcharirs.

 

T. Rex also began writing ludicrous fortunes for the Shanghai Fortune Cookie Company. He only got away with it as the Chinese workers who actually locked and loaded the cookies could not speak nor read English. Imagine the customer after a wonderful won ton egg roll fried rice feast opens a cookie and it tells him or her to “Fuck Off and Die!” or “The Test Results are back, you have full blown AIDS!” or “Your Spouse is Giving Blow Jobs Tonight at the Mcdonalds Drive Through Window...that will be 5 dollars please..go the next window so she can get a free refill!”

 

Rather than upsetting the apple cart of good taste (“What’s the difference between a piece of spaghetti and an Amish woman?” The spaghetti moves when you eat it!) he was also working on a myriad of photo and word essays for art magazines with Kathleen Morphine, including a photo shoot interview with their friend Alexia Dyslexia on her new modern dance street band wino ballet school of movement. All three had found their compass direction in their own environment and enjoying the good life of newly found fame that was driving them to artistic nirvana….

 

T Rex and Kathleen were gaining notorious attention and kudos in their combined Puppets in the Park and Art performances. Life was a rocket ride….and the puppets were horny for a good marionette hooker...or an Amish blow job!

Chapter Ten

Rex Fitzgerald and Kathleen Morphine would put on collaborative art and puppet production in the park on weekends. Many of the artisans from around Boston would mark their territory, dogs in heat that would rather hump your leg than miss an accolade or sale of artwork that ran the gamut from pretentious to parochial. Kathleen’s art was neither,  it was in a class by itself.

 

The puppets now had a crew of four T. Rex had hired to man the marionettes and handle the hand puppets. At first the productions were yawn, generic, predictable...Pinocchio and Gepetto couldn’t have done any worse, so T. Rex popped the clutch and revved it up with the first offbeat offering...Howdy Doody Exposed!!!!!!! The bizarre story of the Doodyville Horror! … or Amityville meets the Peanut Gallery!

The plot centered on Boy Howdy, a marionette  who hung out with degenerate clown named Clarabelle who never spoke, but loved playing with his bicycle horn, or anyone’s horn for that matter. T Rex designed the him as a yin yang  cross between Harpo Marx and John Wayne Gacy.

 

(Now this where most of the little kids in the audience began crying and throwing up)  Doody went missing one day...and soon went on a bizarre mass killing spree that eliminated his competition! He led a cult called the Doody Family who viciously carried out a carnival of carnage at the home of ventriloquist puppeteer Edgar Bergen.

 

Howdy was living in Haight Ashbury at the time and started using acid and speed and hanging out with a perverse gang, we know today as the Doody-Manson Marionettes. Howdy was involved in the brutal slaying of famed dummy Charley McCarthy and others who were at the Bergen mansion one night.

 

Edgar was out of town in Europe staying in Roman Polanski’s villa at the time fighting extradition on charges of unlawful sex acts with an underage hand puppet, Lambchop, When they arrived at the mansion the Doody Family was unaware that a party was going on and also in the house were hand puppets Kukla and Ollie ….all found beaten and stabbed and the few marionettes present had their strings cut, thereby rendering them helpless to defend themselves. Many speculated the whole,attack was set up by Kermit the Frog as he was jealous of the fact that Jerry Mahoney was getting more “hand puppet” from Miss Piggy than he was...

Later during the Summer of Puppet Love in San Francisco...Doody was also involved in the rape of Doodyville prom queen marionette Princess Summer Spring Winter Fall. Howdy had a real hardwood woody for her but she refused Howdy’s doody so he decided to wax his woody in her pinewood forest. At one point she did have a restraining order taken out on him but as you can see when a puppet has rape on it's little wooden head, his woody will win every time.

Sexually, Howdy was a bi-doody and had raped anything in his path...Clarabelle the Clown who had also moved with him to the Haight  huanging out with the notorious Pennywise. In a relentless search for clues to Doody’s whereabouts, US Marshall, Buffalo Bob and his Peanut Gallery Posse closed in on Doody along with his new gang which included three circus performers and a mime who were engaged in a crime wave in clown costumes based on tip from a midget detective posing as a talking dummy to solve the murders at the Bergen Mansion.

The grand finale regarded the released government documents that  revealed a plot formulated by the CIA proving that Doody also assassinated JFK with an Italian rifle he had purchased from notorious Italian international arms dealers Topo Gigio and Pinocchio. The buy was made in Hoboken, New Jersey and arranged by a mysterious figure in the underworld known only as Senor Wences.

 

Doody escaped capture and was last seen in Detroit...around the same time Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. Many theories are floating around like a Pennywise balloon but most believe Hoffa’s body was disposed of at a construction site in the Sesame Street Industrial Park being developed by real estate tycoon Mr. Rogers on a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

I kid you not! Even I can't make up this stuff! Corn on Macabre stuff to be sure. So Hey kids...what time is it? It’s Howdy Doody time you little bastards!

 

Needless to say, many parents filed complaints with the city and T. Rex had to go to court to defend the production. The judge, a former dwarf used as a bowling ball at a cowboy bar agreed.

 

But..before long, T Rex found himself back in court as a result of his newest pushing of the envelope when he and his troupe performed “Polio Boy: The Iron Butterfly Meets the Iron Lung”

 

Polio Boy has cracked the Nancy Drew Columbian crack cocaine cartel. Polio Boy has a new weapon in his asshole arsenal boys and girls. Tom Swift, his Special Ed friend from down the street has designed a special wheelchair outfitted with NRA approved fully automatic machine guns and tear gas rockets. Now Polio Boy is locked and loaded and ready to bust the Party Hearty Hardy Boys and their sex crazed gun moll, Nancy “Scarface” Drew.

In this exciting libido laden children’s story Nancy “Scarface” Drew runs a white slave dope and prostitution ring where she kidnaps Little Orphan Annie and has her working the streets pulling tricks for every Big Daddy Warbucks that can hum “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” while being driven in a Heidi Fleiss  Limited Edition Lincoln with fold out bed.

The story takes a sinister turn when Polio Boy stumbles on a lead about an upcoming drug and sex orgy at the home of Blondie and Dagwood, notorious wife swappers who were caught red handed with their hand deep into Brenda Starr’s cookie jar while Lil’ Abner (nicknamed Lil’ because of an erectile dysfunction problem discovered while in the boys shower after gym class one day after a dodgeball tournament).

Present upstairs at orgy central, the bi-sexual Jughead was getting it on with Archie while Betty and Veronica were doing a double dildo dance with Maryann and Ginger for a three hour orgasm tour while the Skipper was playing with his Little Buddy (that’s what he called it anyway!) Meanwhile Dobie Gillis was in the basement snorting coke helping Maynard G. Krebs OD on a heroin hot shot..while hot, hot, hot Thalia Meningitis pole danced with Jack’s Beanstalk.

The Orgy was officially called the Annual Orgy and Bess Saturday Funnies Frolic. Believe me, why do you think they called them “comic strips”? The Jetsons were regular robot swappers and Judy and Elroy may have been brother and sister but insisted on incest, Southern Style. George and Rosie the Robot had the bot hots for each other while while Jane Jetson got her booster rocket goosed getting Flintstoned with Wilma and Betty.

One of the more famous puppet lines happened when Wilma Flintstoned smiled and admitted….”that Jetson woman has one hell of a lift off! I always thought Betty was an up and comer, so to speak, but when you countdown with Jetson you can really get your moon rocks off.

During the grand boffo SRO finish, The Dragon Lady Transvestite Midnight Show with the virginal Snow White takes on the Seven Dwarfs in a Sexual Endurance Bondage Tag Team Grudge Match...the doors burst open and Polio Boy let loose a barrage of lead from his wheelchair! The Hardy Boys flee the scene and later found hiding out at the D Bar Eh Canadian Ranch run by Spin and Marty,

The Drug and Sex Ring is destroyed. Polio Boy is hailed as a hero in a wheelchair...just like his grandpa, FDR Boy! A chip off the old block.

 

This time a different judge found the production “not in keeping with the norms of the community” and T Rex was fined $1,500 dollars and the puppets were placed in solitary confinement with no chance for puppet parole!

Chapter 11

 

The local art world was kicked in the balls and knocked on its collective fat pompous ass with the opening of Kathleen Morphine’s latest gallery showing of “Obsolete” that was designed as an artful foray of social commentary of those and that which  has passed it’s useful life from the public pay phone, shoe repair shop, newspaper to sex. Not that sex was passe’ but how it was being performed today with the aid of mechanical devices, masturbation and props.

 

In one of the displays designed to comment on  gender gentrification and change, she had a collection of naked Barbie dolls with the Barbie heads removed and replaced with naked Ken heads, while the headless Ken dolls were now sporting very feminine Barbie heads. Neither Barbie nor Ken had glorious genitals to write home about...in fact they were non existent altogether.  A condition Ms. Morphine referred to as the Vaginal Void and the Phantom Penis syndrome.

 

Mannequins also played a part in the performance as a group of them, throw aways from a local Lord and Taylor store at the mall were grouped together as a gang of groping gangsters utilizing all manner, shape and size of battery operated devices spelunking sexual caves in search of a journey to the center of the earth.

 

Yet another display was a rather large globe of the planet such as the kind you’d find in a classroom with various toy robots, toy military tanks, bombs, soldiers, spaceships and few M-80 and Cherry Bomb fireworks glued to North America and Europe demonstrating that the planet itself, therefore humanity was becoming obsolete through self destruction.  On the last day of the showing the crowd gathered around as the M-80’s and Cherry Bombs were lit and exploded utterly destroying the globe, planet , Earth as it blew apart in pieces.

 

The true gauge of society’s view of sex was the inclusion of live nude models engaged in “regular sex” … Sado Masochism sex… sex with an inflatable doll….and same sex sex. The patrons got to voice their opinion and the results were inconclusive although at the time of the voting there happened to be a group of mental patients (sexual deviates from Upstate  New York...where else?) who wanted to know where all the farmers daughters in pigtails having her first period were hiding.

 

To emphasize the self destructive nature of pollution on the planet there was large canvas that covered one wall and attached to it were various items of trash found along the roadside and elsewhere surrounding a large portrait of Iron Eyes Cody crying as he stares out over a landfill of old cars, hubcaps, used condoms, beer cans and syringes left behind by junkies, as a forest fire burns out of control and one of its victims is the charred body of Smokey The Bear, who we are told was a pyromaniac at heart and started all the fires in the first place. Don’t forget….”Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!” spoken by a crazed owl who was shot by mistake by a group out hunting for Big Foot.

 

Ms Morphine also had an electronic performance of tv’s stacked on top of the other, sort of an electronic totem pole minus Eskimos. Each screen had a continuous looped video of Max Headroom, assorted Star Trek holograms, anime characters and the UFO festival in Roswell, New Mexico. Not a live human in the whole damned Brady Bunch of computer generated clones of clones of substitute human drones.

 

At the end of the gallery showing, as the last ounce of wine and last morsel of cheese was about to be consumed, a projector placed a massive video of an atomic explosion obliterating everything and everyone in its nuclear path..as the mushroom cloud rose higher into the atmosphere the words “Duck and cover, have a nice day!” filled the screen.

 

Yep, life itself would soon be obsolete on our present course making  the entire gallery exhibit just experienced itself obsolete...therefore you were never here at all….You have now been rendered….OBSOLETE!

Chapter Twelve

 The ballet recital was ready to rock, roll complete and replete with a back up band, or what Alexia was billing it as, “a symphony of ballet, booze and blues” was causing nerves to be as frayed as old wiring in a crumbling ancient ghetto tenement. T. Rex Fitzgerald and Kathleen Morphine would be on hand to not only lend moral support to their ballerina comrade in arts arms, but cover the event with written word and a stunning array of black and white photography capturing every eruption of this debut form of graceful movement that had never been attempted or on display before. Again...a zen moment of time of one hand clapping.

The band, had taken the name Narco Marx and the Night Train Hipsters after their favorite cheap brand of wine best served from a bottle stashed in and plain brown paper bag, the way the sterno sommelier of some dark alley dumpster would recommend.

The recital was booked in an old Boston pub that the vice squad had to close down last year but was now open for business under new ownership for recital rentals (it had a great stage) Jewish weddings and Catholic funerals and bingo along with Amish pole dancing and mud wrestling competitions with free valet buggy parking.

The band had miraculously mastered every nuance of ballet music and rock and blues. A musical mixture not unlike combining heroin and cocaine...a real speed ball of Swan Lake meets Smoke on the Water where a death defying arabesque blends with a Latin “West side Story” Puerto Rican salsa as it begins to melt and morph into an artistic adagio before your very eyes. A movement of fluidity and grace to a sound that goes from classic guitarist riffs by Carlos Montoya to Carlos Santana on uppers at Woodstock.

Showtime was still three hours away as the Narco Marx Band set up to go through a sound check and to make sure they had the playlist in everyone’s hands so there wouldn’t be any screw ups. Anyone who had a habit and needed a fix had to go out back and shoot up no later than 6 P.M. As for the drunks, usually to be found among the family of drummers and tambourine players were to have their last drop well before curtain time at 7 P.M.

The media and it’s Boston art cadre had all been invited to cover the event, as well as patrons of arts and member of various groups who funded the arts. Nothing like a few arts grants to help open a permanent home studio, recital facility and school for budding ballerina blossoms in the garden of grande jete and ballerinos, those daring young men with ballet bulge that separates the men from the boys.

The Narco Marx Band now included a trumpet player, a cat who would sniff glue from a bag when no one was looking but what the hell...if it made him play as well as it did...he should get a years free supply of Elmers Glue! The band also added a harmonica, key of C and G player. A down and outer they discovered passed out on a Boston subway car claiming he was a dead spirit come back to life as Paul Butterfield. Even though he wasn’t he sure sounded as if he could have been...his money maker hd his mojo working overtime on that blues harp….

It was no 6 P.M. and the recital doors were open to let in the invite crowd to enjoy some wine and cheese and finger foods before the “event” got underway. T. Rex and K. Morphine were on pins and needles...they had hitched their pony to this experimental wagon...if it was a success...all three of them, T. Rex, K. Morphine Alexia Dyslexia would ride the art rocket to the moon.

If it was a disaster...think Titanic where they would all end up not in the glamorous world of the arts, dance and theater...but rather wearing a paper hat at a fast food drive through where instead of offering culture on the halfshell...you could only offer a free refill and a bag of fries. It would be Lobster versus Cheetohs….Prime Rib versus a TV dinner of frozen meat loaf. Sex with Raquel Welch or Ruth Buzzy!

Time now to work the room...prime the pump...run the flag up the old pole...It was almost showtime!!

Chapter Thirteen

 

T Rex was surprised to see a pro model 16mm Bolex movie camera in place by the stage on a supportive tripod with  Kathleen Morphine peering through the viewfinder intently it reminded him of all those WWII propaganda films of Nazi U Boat commanders ...up periscope looking for allied shipping to send to a watery grave. She was flitting about the stage area  using a hand held light meter to gauge her aperture settings. This was no home movie camera… this was a serious documentary industrial grade tool that she had been working with for months now under very clandestined hush hush conditions! I’m ready for my close up Mr. Demille. All that was missing was an old golden age of Hollyweird mansion on Sunset Boulevard, a dead monkey on a slab and William Holden shot dead floating  face down in the pool.

 

Kathleen Morphine had obviously been holding out on us.

 

“Don’t look too surprised Fitz. (She always called him that to yank his chain and break his balls.)  “I’ve been experimenting with motion pictures and surprise...ta da...this will be my first exploratory dip in the documentary oceans. Sorry I’ve been keeping it a state secret, but I wanted to make sure I had the hang of the damned thing first. Tonight’s performance will be captured in striking film noirish black and white motion.. I’ll get still shots too for the mag piece we’re working on.. “

 

I was now working with a very clever  female Fritz Lang and could see it now…”Metropolis: The Musical!”

 

We were both taken by surprise earlier as Alexia in addition to the Booze and Blues Street Band had also hired other musicians of the classical kind you would find in a fine orchestra doing Mozart or Beethoven which included a  female Asian violinist (if you look carefully all violinists in symphonies today are Asian females), a french horn player (You don’t have to be French to play with your horn!) a flutist , an oboe and a cello

 

Secretly, they all had been practicing together with the street band on the ballets playlist and if ever there was a more diverse diorama  of organic symphonic talent gathered under one roof….this was it.

 

The musicians were in place tuning up, the lights dimmed slowly enveloping the sold out crowd in darkness.  The two young university students manning the spotlights and gels for various effects to match the music and the movements were set to go. It had all the potential to be the  Liebeslieder Walzer with lava lamps.

 

“Me thinks our little ballerina will be moving to the top of the modern dance foodchain before you know it! Impressive!” Kathleen could only agree with a nod as she too was as surprised as a turtle in the middle of the road facing it’s demise at the hands of a  Firestone tire at 70 MPH.

 

Alexia also had been working and grooming  young ballet students.

 

Conducting the arrangements that blended blues, jazz and classical musicians was a young baton as lightsaber maestro Marcello Pesto Al Dente who was formerly a tuba player for the Salvation Army Band in Gary, Indiana.

 

The lights dimmed, the stage left alone  bathed in a narcotic darkness portending something momentous was about to emerge and immerse the audience in its wake. Maestro Marcello tapped his baton gently on the music stand as the spotlights highlighted Alexia Dyslexia as the lithe and lovely alabaster white  swan soon to be magically transformed into Odette who falls in love with the virgin Prince Siegfried the hunter.

 

Odette was obviously the victim of an evil spell hit and run which was common in those days. Sleeping Beauty bobbing for apples is but one example of mayhem and black magic that befell heroine after heroine not to be confused with heroin or cocaine...both of which were mainstay drugs of  Munchkins and Seven Dwarfs. High Ho, High Ho, off to the dealer we go!

 

The swans began swimming as the opening oboe blended with first the flute before being overcome completely by a frenzy of violins. The classical mixture of music carried  cast and audience alike aboard a gentle magic carpet ride into the symphonic stratosphere where they met a high altitude crescendo that was soon met by perfectly synchronized   blues guitars, jazzed up keyboards and the lonely wail of a saxophone. Strangely enough the concoction was flawless in its performance of the lilting waltz in the opening  and especially in “The Dance in the Cygnets”

 

The choreography was a masterful blend of motion  complimenting the scenery of the romantic lake where the two meet, a fancy ballroom at the castle and the lake once again on a dark, tragic night. (Cue the saxophone whenever things are dark and tragic!)

 

The movements were graceful, awe inspiring and rebellious as the dancers improvised here and there mating classic ballet movements with more modern slightly jazzed up  dancing steps combining with some jive jitterbugging with a feel of bobby soxers at the high school prom, than back to ballet again. The symphonic sound swallowed the ballet sequences while the blues-rock riffs would replace it seamlessly for the more frenzied American Swans Got Talent segments.  Woodstock had now met the Bolshoi..and the result was remarkable.

 

All the while Kathleen Morphines 16MM was whirring away, eating frame after frame, collecting the beauty and grace of the leg movements as difficult as any athletic endeavor. The black and white film capturing the shadows and lights and music perfectly. You couldn’t have asked for more if you were filming porn. Alexia Dyslexia and her handsome Prince Siegfried, which by the way was a young dancer and noted Catholic bi-sexual bingo player, Dimitri Alexander von Douche, were a perfect match.

 

The ballet planets were in harmonious synch, and it was all captured on film, both motion and still shots that alone were works of art...I was writing the review as the performance progressed. One..Two...Three...Kick Ass!

Chapter Fourteen

 

The past had passed...10 years in fact having  receded in the rearview mirror, where nostalgia and other objects may appear closer than they are.

 

Alexia Dyslexia had bloomed in the rose garden of modern and ballet dance where her sheer determination and innovation elevated her to the pinnacle of performance art in New York, Paris, Berlin and London. London! Home of Big Ben, the Tower of London,  The River Thames, Monty Python, Jack the Ripper and fish and chips.

 

She lives in London where she maintains her modern dance studio where young people who want to break into ballet, choreography  and strip club pole dancing flock as lemmings ready to leap off the novice cliffs in hopes of landing a professional position with The American Ballet Company or perhaps as a dancing Puerto Rican  in yet another incarnation of “West Side Story”.

 

In fact, she had successfully choreographed and directed a modern dance topless version of “My Fair Lady” that opened recently at the Top Hat Mens Theatre complete with Eliza Doolittle performing a lap dance for Professor Higgins. Higgins, played by the Rex Harrison’s grandson, belts out a version of “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like A Man” with a bevy of bisexual and in some cases trisexual transvestite dancers.

 

As for Kathleen Morphine, she now resides in Key West as a world class documentary filmmaker and  photographer. In addition to producing diverse documentaries that range from the educational “Why Pelicans Date Rape  Flamingos” to “The Life Cycle of Land Crabs” to her Academy Award Winning Docu-short “Is That a Conch Shell in Your Pants, or Are You Happy to See Me?” the definitive exploration of the wild thing swinging singles scene in Miami  Retirement Communities where geriatric wheelchairs and walkers become the Centrum Silver version of “The Fast and the Furious!”

 

National Geographic had just given a freelance assignment to go Africa to expose the horrific ritual where live Pygmies are used as human bowling balls, basketballs, and hood ornaments on luxury automobiles in Cape Town.

 

T Rex Fitzgerald no longer had to make a living writing fortunes to be implanted into fortune cookies for the Shanghai Fortune Cookie Company. Confucius was confusing enough. A Western writer posing as a Tibetan monk expounding one sentence one hand clapping Oriental “predictions” was ludicrous.

 

He had finally written his great American novel “The Not So Great Gatsby” that sold millions. He travels frequently now from New York to San Francisco performing to sell out crowds his one man stage play portrayal depicting through spoken word the life and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as the split personalities who inhabit the psyche of Doc Yucatan, a noted gynecologist to the stars. He plays all three parts.

 

T Rex had never left Boston. It was home...it was comfortable and he now lived high aloft in a Penthouse overlooking the city giving him a birds eye few of night time muggings including the murder of Louie the Gimp, small time hood, hustler  and carnival worker in charge of the Tilt-a-Whirl. Seems Louie had crossed the wrong wise guys getting caught trying to pick the pocket of John Gotti who was in the crowd in the park during a Monkees Reunion Tour.

 

Every now and then, T. Rex would wander to the old industrial neighborhood where he, Kathleen morphine and Alexia Dyslexia  were all neighbors in apartments in buildings that were once factories that made everything from buttons to genuine voodoo dolls. The neighborhood had undergone gentrification and where once on the corner was a noted Boston mob bar, there was now an Amish Party Supply Company selling balloons and buggies and bonnets.

 

The old liquor store midway down the block where no bottle of wine sold for over $1.98 had been transformed into a drive through Catholic confessional. You had to be 21 to confess any mortal sins.

 

The old neighborhood had changed except for two things. Long Wangs Chinese Restaurant where the three of them would go for chicken fried rice, egg rolls and fortune cookies, and The Vinyl Jungle that had always and still does carry vinyl records. The good stuff.

 

He decided to go in one afternoon and while browsing the Oldies Section he came across a classic Standells album that included the song, “Dirty Water” He, Alexia and Kathleen used to sing along to it and were proud as hell Bostonians. He bought the album nd that evening he put on “Dirty Water” and epiphany time….IT IS OUR HOME. Screw London...Screw Key West!

 

He made up his mind then and there...call Alexia and Kathleen for a Boston hometown reunion to catch up on each others lives. It had been 10 years since they were all last together, and although they kept in touch by Skype and Email there ain’t nuthin’ like face to face with a bottle of wine and some egg rolls at Long Wangs.

 

He made the first call to Alexia in London and turned the volume up on the hi fi so it would be playing the background. Music as bait!

 

Dirty Water lyrics, copyright by Ed Cobb

I'm wanna tell you a story

I'm wanna tell you about my town

I'm gonna tell you a big fat story, baby

Aww, it's all about my town

 

Yeah, down by the river

Down by the banks of the river Charles

Aw, that's what's happenin' baby

That's where you'll find me

Along with lovers, buggers and thieves

Aw, but they're cool people

 

Well I love that dirty water

Oh, Boston you're my home

Oh, you're the number one place

 

Frustrated women (I mean they're frustrated)

Have to be in by twelve o'clock (oh, that's a shame)

But I'm wishin' and a hopin', oh

That just once those doors weren't locked

I like to save time for my baby to walk around

 

Well I love that dirty water

Oh, Boston you're my home (oh yeah)

 

'Cause I love that dirty water

Oh, Boston you're my home (oh, yeah)

 

Well I love that dirty water (I love it, baby)

I love that dirty water (I love Boston)

I love that dirty water

(Have you heard about the Strangler)

I love that dirty water (I'm the man, I'm the man)

I love that dirty water (Owww!)

I love that dirty water (a come on, a come on)

I love that dirty water (come on)

I love that dirty water (I'm in love with Boston)

I love that dirty water (Aww yeah)

I love that dirty water

I love that dirty water

I love that dirty water

Chapter Fifteen

 

It was late summer before T. Rex Fitzgerald, Alexia Dyslexia and Kathleen Morphine convened their unconventional convention of creative creations in Boston  to discuss which way the artistic waters would flow both as individuals and as a collective.

 

Kathleen was the first to probe the waters. “So, F. Scott T. Rex Fitzgerald…I bought your book “The Not So Great Gatsby” and have to say it kept me laughing all the way through. I love how you you took alcoholism and parlayed it into pure farce. Magnifico! Any chance you’d take it on the road with your puppets, dummies and marionettes?”

 

1. Rex took a sip of wine before he answered.

 

“Not a chance in Punch and Judy hell. Sold the whole lot of them to Jim Henson and his Muppet Mafia. He saw how the performances were boffo and SRO and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse like breaking my legs. I held out for as long as I could but woke up one morning and felt something strange under the covers..turns out it was the severed head of Edgar Bergen...not the dummy Charlie  McCarthys head, but Edgar himself. I made a deal the next day!”

 

Alexia, who loved the puppets looked sad, pouty actually. “So what are they doing now?”

 

“The puppets? Oh hell.” He began explaining. “They have their own goddamned show talking about the alphabet, learning to count and sexual hygiene. How to change a Tampon while singing songs from ‘Sound of Music’ to How Much Should A Doctor in an Alley Charge for an Abortion? Elementary math is another area they get into as well. You know “If Billy enters a school cafeteria with an Ar-15 that has a high capacity magazine that holds 100 rounds of ammunition, fires off 35 rounds wounding 15 of the students out of 60 students eating lunch….how many rounds does he have left and how many students are still targets? Will he have to reload?”

 

They all nodded their heads in affirmation that it was sad that T. Rex was no longer a puppeteer. He loved that work. The creativity, the story telling, the performance, the sheer joy of the art. “Hell I don’t even write weird fortunes anymore...damn those sarcastic ones were fun until my book started to sell , then it was book signings, radio and TV interviews and all the schmoozing that goes with it..but I got to realize my dream at last!”

 

Alexia had somewhat the same story. Her dance career was in orbit, her dance schools were world class and she no longer had to struggle.

 

“I miss the old days with the Booze and Blues Band when we were forging a new kind of dance and music. What a rush in those days. Now I tech young swans to be young swans in the classical sense but toss in a few improvisations on the side and let it filter into the mainstream of ballet. Ha, my little rebellion to storm the ballet bastille!”

 

They found out that the Booze and Band was signed by a major German label and the first album, “Goosestepping to Woodstock” soared like a bullet and they were in high demand world wide.  ABBA was their warm up act and Willie Nelson drove the tour bus from gig to gig.

 

Things were going well for Kathleen too.

 

“Assignment after assignment. Great money, but miss picking my own subject matter. After awhile you get numb and bored with filming “Can a Shrunken Head Give a Decent Blow Job” or “The Mating Rituals of the Vatican” but I can’t complain.

 

After a few moment of silence for the three of them to absorb the conversations that just transpired, T. Rex made a suggestion. “Look, let’s all go to Long Wangs restaurant. He’d love to see you guys and we can enjoy some sake, won ton, chop suey, chicken fried rice...the works...well?

 

There was no argument and with mucho gusto they headed down to Long Wangs. It was better than a high school reunion. The old gang back together..temporarily..but together once again even for a small fraction of time they had managed to carve out for themselves.

 

As soon as the entered, Long Wang ran up to them with the biggest smile you could imagine and ushered them to a comfortable booth by the front window they always preferred.

 

Sake was plentiful and they were served enough food to feed a Chinese army battalion  about to invade Taiwan!

“Man, this is the life,” T. Rex remarked. “‘We’re all successful and have what we want. Except for another egg roll!”

 

The group became quiet as if in contemplation as the table was cleared of dishes and the waitress brought out three fortune cookies which is a must at any Chinese restaurant to end the meal on a happy and high note.

 

“You didn’t write these I hope,” Alexia said with a sly wink in her voice.

 

“Ha, no, I assure you...after all the ones that insulted people they fired me! Sure was fun while it lasted. I tell ya….we’ve all been on a long road but finally we have reached our destiny, our goals, our vision, OUR DESTINATION!”

 

They all three cracked open the cookie, extracted the thin slip of paper holding there fortune, their fate such as it will be or not to be…

 

There was dead silence all around the table. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that all three fortunes were the same. The exact same! Although they had all three attained the pinnacle of success in their field where do they go from here. Where is the spark that creativity and discovery controls. They had reached to top of their respective mountains...but it was a hollow victory...near boredom at times they had never felt before...then it hit them all at once...the success they sought and attained  was not what kept them happy, full of life, creative juice...all three fortune cookies held the answer…OK, so a little zen answer but an answer nonetheless….

“The journey itself  IS the destination…”

 

They walked out into the dusk of Boston and  while thinking of the Standells song...T Rex Fitzgerald said it aloud…”If the Journey is the destination..then we overshot the runway!”

Impressum

Texte: Mike Marino
Bildmaterialien: Mike Marino
Cover: Mike Marino
Lektorat: Mike Marino
Übersetzung: Mike Marino
Satz: Mike Marino
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.08.2018

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Widmung:
Puppets go berserk on journey through the world of ballet, puppetry and photography and modern dance Shanghai Fortune Cookies and the Puppeteer Trilogy