WILL HOLLYWOOD NEVER LEARN

In Ba’dan both sides are looking for a showdown. Darg, because he knows that he cannot conceal the actual state of affairs much longer. Dimitri, because he feels that a state of siege is not to his advantage owing to the numerical superiority of the enemy and their readier access to supplies and weapons. So both generals evoke every aid they can summon through magic rituals.

As the sun climbs higher, the square looks like Hollywood gone berserk. Roman legionnaires under Quintus Curtius are fighting French riot police. Vikings and pirates battle crusaders and Texas Rangers. Old western gunfighters shoot it out with the Black and Tans and Kenya Special Police. Hannibal’s elephants charge a train of 1920s Marines on their way to protect the assets of the United Fruit Co. Battle cries and songs ring out. Peons with machetes decapitate lynch mobs … mucho bouncing heads, meester. Battle cries and songs ring out with grunts and bellows, war whoops, bagpipes, the reek of horses, chili and garlic.…

“La cucaracha la cucaracha

  Ya no quiere caminar

  Porque no tiene porque le falta

  Marijuana por fumar.”

Pancho Villa’s men shoot down a helicopter from Operation Intercept. An army of Chinese waiters charge out of a false-front chop-suey joint with meat cleavers, screaming: “Fluck you! Fluck you! Fluck you!” They reduce narcs and Mafiosi to hamburger. Poison darts from Indian blowguns wipe out a Klan rally. Nigger-killing southern lawmen are hacked to pieces by naked Scythians on horseback.

Audrey is in the very thick of it, changing costumes every few minutes. Now he leads a detachment of amok Malay youths with krisses against the Shah’s Savak. Next Audrey, on a great black horse in medieval armor, charges down the streets of Middletown skewering religious women and lawmen on his lance. Then he is a shootist with his custom-made 44 double-action revolver leading the Wild Bunch to break up an auto-da-fé in Lima. Now he boards a Spanish man-of-war with cutlass and laser gun. Machine-gun bullets, poison darts, arrows, spears, boomerangs, bolos, throwing knives, cobblestones. Rockets whistle through the air, sharp smell of weeds and dry heat from old westerns, snow and ice with Viking ships, amok Malays trail muggy heat and jungle smells, pirates blow in with a sea wind and a whiff of rum and spices, pitchmen and camp followers spread out their wares, false-front saloons, whorehouses, taco stands, carny booths with root beer and spun sugar, sod-roofed huts serving chicha, chick-peas and roast guinea pig, street performers passing around the hat and picking pockets—pea under the shell, now you see it now you don’t … shift partners round and round—Malay youths with krisses skewering religious women, shootist with custom-made Kenya Special Police in his nostrils, southern lawmen are hacked to Hollywood and gone, and a grinning boy passes around a bloody Stetson.

“Nominate your poison, gents.”

Klansmen clutch their throats and turn black.

“We don’t serve niggers in here!” thunders the bartender. “Take them outside because they stink. Take them to the Nigger Morgue.”

Boys in medieval codpieces have set up a catapult. Roman soldiers break down doors with battering rams, impervious to the bullets, which break against clear classic light with a whiff of ozone.

Raids and prisoners … Rape of the Sabine … Romans sweep in on a women’s rally and carry the bitches away, screaming and kicking, an old western posse is lynching a Neanderthal man, KGB and CIA agents bustle scientists and enemy agents into cars or sweep down and hook them into a silent chopper like actors pulled offstage, Inquisition Police drag jet-setters out of cocktail lounges, and the Green Guards are busy with their nets.

“Oh I want that one…” coos a courtier.

Audrey leads an army of twelve-year-old boys carrying banners of colored silk … POLTERGEISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

They stand now, still as stone, in a sickening uneasy calm. As the barometer drops and drops, slowly a black cloud gathers over their heads. A little wind stirs brown hair across the mouth, blown lilacs and brown hair, ruffling through hair yellow as corn silk, through auburn, orange, russet and flame-red hair and black Pan curls.…

WIND      WIND      WIND

A sighing sound, a whistle, a shriek, hair standing straight up now as a black funnel whirls around their slender bodies tearing cobblestones up from the street, screaming hurricanes of broken glass as the boys ride this bucking whistling wind—it’s known as a “space horse.” You let it carry you all the way out, glass blizzards stripping flesh from the bones, tossing bloody bones through the air with street signs and branches, masonry, stones, and timbers—the whole city is flapping and shredding.

Thousand-mile-an-hour winds—the fences, barbed wire, and massive iron gates hemming in the Casbah are tearing loose … flying wire decapitates screaming crowds. Pan, God of Panic, rides the wings of Death as the torn sky bends with the wind, prop sky tearing, shredding—incandescent force—the pure young purpose blazes like a comet.…

WIND!      WIND!      WIND!

Audrey is in the eye of the hurricane, a point of lucid calm. In front of him is a dusty tube of Colgate toothpaste in the window of a Tangier shop.

Far away he sees Middletown: red brick houses, a deep clear stream, stone bridges, naked boys, high-pitched distant voices. A boy who looks familiar … he knows the boy’s name but can’t remember from where exactly … it’s Dink … Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown.

Now Dink waves and beckons: “It’s me, Audrey! I’m back!”

Audrey tries to reach him but the wind tosses Audrey about like a cork. He is fighting his way upriver through breaking ice floes … years tearing loose.

The distant voice of the pitchman: “The age-old story of Adam and Eve…”

Audrey finds himself in the Fun City of his dream … can’t remember exactly … pinwheels … shooting galleries a rural slum … rundown houses … rubbish … little fields of corn and cabbage … blotched diseased faces … silent and intent … all moving down a steep road of red clay … no one seems to see him.

The road leads to a rubbly square. In the middle of the square is a platform built around a tree.