DRAFT RIOTS
And here I was with a pop-happy skipper in an old leaky jinxed gallows-propelled space tramp with all the heaviest guns of the planet trained on us: the Countess de Gulpa (not nearly so unimportant as Pierson would have liked me to believe), the CIA and the Board, Blum and the Movie Studio. I figured we’d be lucky to reach Hoboken. As a matter of fact, we got a few miles farther to what is now lower Manhattan.
Four kids insisted on guiding us to the Double G in New York and when we walked in, I saw that the whole place had changed. The gallows were gone but there were two nooses on the wall above the bar with brass plaques: “Rope used to hang Baboon O’Toole—June 3, 1852.” “Rope used to hang Lousy Louie—June 3, 1852.” And a photo of Baboon and Lousy standing side by side on a double gallows.
The decor is now the New York of 1860: vintage crystal chandeliers and a huge female nude in a gilded frame over the bar. I spot Marty sitting with four thuggish-looking wooden-faced characters drinking champagne, and he waves to me.
“You boys join us and have some bubbly.”
We sit down and the thugs give us a cold fishy who-are-these-nances look. The fever does convey certain advantages. We all have a virus feel for weak points in any opponent and Krup has given us some basic courses in unarmed psychic combat. The techniques mostly run on a signal switch—I love you/I hate you—at rapid intervals, but this is only effective once a weak spot has been found.
We soon have these four hoods in line with just the right shade of show-you. Hoodlums are ducky soup. Anyone who has to be tough on the surface is riddled with weak spots. But don’t try the switcheroo on the wrong people. Try it on a tiddleywink and it can bounce back with a meat cleaver. And don’t tangle with some Mafia don sitting in front of his grocery store.
* * *
When we walk into the Double G in Tamaghis, we see a heavy padlock on the gallows mechanism with a lead seal and a notice on a brass plaque: “All public hangings forbidden by order of the DNA Police.”
“Yep,” the bartender tells us. “That’s right. No more publics. It’s the law.”
Death requires a random witness to be real and a public hanging is real because of random witnesses. In the Garden of Eden, God left Adam and Eve alone to eat the fruit of the Hanging Tree and then popped back in like a random house dick who just happened to be passing in the hall when he heard amorous noises.
“What’s going on here?”
“See any dogcatchers or Sirens in the street?”
“Well no, come to think of it.”
“You won’t.”
The bartender is a little, thin, middle-aged Irishman with glowing gray eyes. He is dressed in a tight-fitting green suit. He picks up ten glasses in each hand, spreads them out on the bar, and starts polishing. “We had a riot here. The boyos killed every dogcatcher in Tamaghis and most of the Sirens.…” He holds up a glass to the light. “The kids all want to get out to Waghdas now and find the answers. I tell them every time you find an answer you find six questions under it, like leprechauns under a toadstool.”
* * *
New York—the Double G—1860 …
A little, skinny, middle-aged Irishman dressed in a filthy green suit bangs on the bar with his beer mug and a respectful silence falls. He jumps up onto the bar, his face contorted like an evil leprechaun as he spits the words out: “The bankers on Wall Street and the sheenies is buying their sons out for three hundred dollars.” His eyes glow and the hair stands up on his head. “And what about you and me who don’t see three hundred dollars a year in one piece? We get drafted into the frigging army to fight for the frigging niggers.”
A bestial roar goes up. The patrons are four-deep around the bar, brandishing clubs and crowbars. The little green man leaps down from the bar.
“What are we waiting for? An invite from City Hall? Let’s go!”
About fifty blood-mad men and boys and a few screaming harpies troop out after him screaming: “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
* * *
“How did the riot start?”
“Well, you know how it is with riots. Things build up and up—then something sets it off.” He tosses a chipped glass twenty feet into a trash can. “The dogcatchers start raiding out of fair-game areas and there is a move by the Hanging Fathers in the City Council to extend fair-game areas. Then two foreign Countesses they call themselves—yeah, Countesses de Slutville—buy villas on the mountain and set up something they call the Genetic Institute and there are rumors about transplant operations carried out by this sawbones they have brought in from Yass-Waddah.”
“That would be Van…” I put in.
“It would. Next thing these two boy-eating sows move in their own Special Police with firearms and pressure the Council into passing an I.D.-card law so anyone who doesn’t have an I.D. card stamped and updated can be arrested and hanged in the Institute. So all the boys have to apply for these cards or risk getting picked up anywhere.
“One night five SPs come in here checking I.D.s and they start to drag some kid out. They have guns of course. Doesn’t do them much good. The kids is on them with broken bottles, knives, chairs, feet, knees and elbows. Four kids is killed but they take the SPs apart. You can see the bloodstains right over there. Then some little Irish kid I’d never seen before jumps up on the bar screaming: ‘What are you waiting for? Waiting to get milked by these foreign bitches like randy cows? Kill! Kill! Kill!’
“The SPs and dogcatchers are barricaded in the Garden of Delight, ready to defend the richies with their last drop of blood, and it comes to that quick enough. They open up with machine guns but the boys just spread out and keep coming, throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.
“Better than a hundred are killed in the few seconds it takes for the rest to swarm over the barricades and cut the guards to hamburger. Then they charge up the mountain screaming.
“‘Death to the Foreign Sows!’
“Well, the Countesses and their sawbones got their asses out to Yass-Waddah in an autogyro. Their villas were looted and burned to the ground along with most of the other villas. The Hanging Fathers were thrown into the fires along with all the Sirens that could be found. Some of the rich kids was with the mob, so a few big villas are still left. But the richies sure got a new look since then.”
I soon see that there is more here than just a spontaneous explosion of overcrowded poverty-ridden slums. The whole scene has been staged from above to point up the need for a strong police force, and some of the mob ringleaders turn out to be agents of big money.
“A young man in dirty overalls who fought valiantly with the mob was killed by the police and was found to possess aristocratic features, well-cared-for hands and a fair white skin. Though dressed as a laborer in dirty overalls and a filthy shirt, underneath there were fine cashmere pants, a handsome rich vest and a fine linen shirt. His identity was never learned.”
—Herbert Asbury,
Gangs of New York, p. 154
Through the havoc and wreckage of the burning and looted city, through streets littered with the dead and dying, street boys dance and caper like gay insouciant sprites, many of them wearing Halloween masks. A boy in a skeleton suit flops beside a stiff corpse in grotesque imitation.
“You’re dead and you stink.” He jumps and capers away.
They prance around a dying policeman and mimic his death throes. “Whydon’tcha get up and stop the fight?” They snatch his hat and badge, chasing each other.
“Stop in the name of the law,” they mock.
A boy snatches a coat and vest from a looted store. Another boy in fake beard and skullcap pops out.
“Shoot him in the pants! Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest is mine!”
* * *
“They called in a new Commandante who accepted the conditions of the rioters. The Sirens who survived by concealing their assets someplace were confined to licensed cathouses or deported to Yass-Waddah. They had to walk it stark naked. Two hundred miles of desert, wild dogs, hyenas, and leopards out there waiting. The kids lined up and whipped them out the gates with hangman’s nooses.”
* * *
The bartender goes into a song and dance as he taps glasses with a spoon, singing:
“She’s too fat for me
She’s too fat for me
I don’t want her
You can have her
She’s too fat for me.”
He wipes the bar from one end to the other. “And the sperm dealers has left too, most of them. Can’t operate under the new conditions. And good riddance to the Gombeen men.”
* * *
Marty has a good thing going. Operating with a friend in the Records Department at City Hall he is forging quitclaim deeds to properties in the burnt-out areas. When the smoke clears away he will be owning a big chunk of lower Manhattan. “The compensation and then the building contracts. The whole thing drips with goodness.”
He has troops of boys in the street to keep the home fires burning. And these riot boys will later be used to harass any wise citizens who try to reclaim their property and rebuild. The boys screaming insults at visitors. “I catching one clap from fucky your asshole.” Swarming over the house like monkeys, leering in at windows, throwing stones at passersby from the roof, urinating and masturbating from balconies.
There are a number of these boys sleeping in the Turkish bath where we have billeted ourselves. They parade around naked doing imitations. Death throes they dig special, flopping around, screaming and groaning and jacking off while the others piss themselves with laughter.
Krup gets it together finally. Two kraut SPs at the door. “All leaves cancelled. Report back to ship immediately.” Next stop: the future.