 |
|
|
|
|
Move This
Woman With Your Cursor And Left Click
Music -
Spring
Johnny In Action Against The Tonton Macoutes - Columbus Circle
GMT - Time Check
Slave - Waffen-SS
Bird Trap - Pieter Bruegel
Wedding Dance - Pieter Bruegel
Hunters in the Snow - Pieter Bruegel
Isabelle Huppert (Ooo-Pear)
Chilam Balam - Jaguar Priest
Jaguar - Reflection
Children's Games - Pieter Bruegel
Land of Cockaigne - Pieter Bruegel
Der Nachtportier - Charlotte Rampling
The Girlfriend Who Claimed She Had No Memory
Johnny Truffles speaking. Giovanni Garibaldi Tartufo.
THREE YEARS LATER - 52ND ST. BIRDLAND STREET.
When somebody asks me to give them the story on something, I ask how much detail they want. "Do you want the short version or do you want the one with the details?" Most people say give me the short one and then ask for selected details as they listen. That's what I do.
Some people don't listen to anybody's stories, but I listen, at least for a while.
I'm back home now, looking exceptionally good after three years of hard labor on the Carolina chain gang. "Baby It's You" by the Shirelles fills the place from my new Euro-HQ speakers, in this lounge I've seen only in my dreams for three years. The women are burning up my new cell phone and wearing out this new number.
Some wait in chairs or on stools until I appear. Some cross and recross their legs as if this friction of thighs and calves will hasten my arrival. Some beckon with their asses from porticos. When I wake up at noon and go to the kitchen for coffee, I find them in there testing pasta for the al dente. I slip into the sunroom during the afternoon and there's a lanky movie star on one of my moderno folding chairs, ready to fight.
One sleeps in as long as I do, anticipating her wake-up kisses.
One calls daily to ask if I'll meet her at the Horse Latitudes Motel in Jersey City. They're swarming me. They're shameless. The ones I enjoy the most are allowed into my Turk-style steam room where they stretch out for hours and hours and luxuriate with the thick Turkish towels. And Jaslene.
When I personally flag a taxi for them, they turn in their seats and look back at me until they're out of sight. I give them what they want and stay on the curb. I never step back inside until they've disappeared. Sometimes they're unhappy when they have to leave.
During my three years on the Carolina chain gang I got to know a convict named Buster Natchez. He's a direct descendent of Aaron Burr, who had it all over Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Burr was irreverent and had a greater spirit of adventure than either one. They were both jealous of him, even though Burr was only about 20% politic and didn't even write his own version of those now-mythic American events -- including his killing of Hamilton during the most famous duel in American history, across the river in Weehawken.
Jefferson became obsessed with him, especially after Burr left the East in 1805 and headed down the Ohio and into the frontier of the Southwest. Jefferson had him arrested and tried for treason three times, but all juries found him not guilty.
In the 1800 Presidential election Burr had tied Jefferson in electoral votes, and he missed being elected President of the United States by one vote in the House of Representatives. He'd been Jefferson's Vice-President.
Pause now to watch this woman in rag-doll free fall or move her with your cursor and left click.
Some think Burr became a traitor during his explorations, but the authorities had altered his first life more than he could tolerate, so he was putting the next one together. Who could have a problem with this?
Maybe Burr wanted to set up in the Spanish Floridas or in the Spanish Southwest or both. None of the regions he was probing were part of the United States. It was frontier life out there, and everything was up for grabs. Maybe the Spanish wouldn't be able to mark and control these regions, and maybe Aaron Burr would prove to be a force they couldn't stop.
Buster Natchez traces his immediate family origins to the Louisiana-Mexico frontier along the Ouachita River in the early 1800's. Way down there, along the shady-grove tributaries of the Mississippi, Indian women, sandy quadroons, and African slave women were doing it with the Spanish and with white men like Aaron Burr.
Long before the Spanish and Aaron Burr, the ancestors of Buster Natchez were building mounds, worshiping the gods of natural forces, and developing their sacred symbols -- near the banks of all the rivers flowing into the Nile of the New World, which they called "Mississippi," the Sha-tom-tom of Waters.
Down in Dixie on the chain gang, I also got to know the ex-Steeler, #31 himself, Donnie Shell, who had been a headhunting, hall-of-fame safety during the era of Steeler dominance in pro football. He was the oldest prisoner, but he could outwork anybody if he wanted to perform for the bosses, which wasn't often. Hall of Fame.
Donnie Shell and Buster Natchez were on the chain gang when I arrived, but soon they will be sprung, because I'm making some payoffs to the right cops, the right prosecutor, the right judge, and to the right pretty boys and fat functionaries at the statehouse. I know how to fight for justice.
They're both coming to Birdland Street. I have some rebuilding to do, and it'll take a year or two. I've got full-time work for both of these duttos since much has changed in the three years I've been gone. I can't find Rousseau, Jefferson's gone, Wanda's gone. I had a chance encounter with my favorite girlfriend of all time, but she's married now and still being faithful to her husband, so it was only a few soulful stolen kisses, nothing else. She hasn't called. Frankie Panorama and Bobby are still around, but some of these jobs will need Buster Natchez and Donnie Shell.
Now, I'm off to spend some time as a Tango Man and as a Joy Man.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER
I'm up here on the roof in the garden, and the smell of fall is in the air. Crisp, clear, sunny, blue, and almost cool. The only things in bloom are the sweet alyssum and some ragged phlox, but last night some blooming was going on -- a woman I'd met at Expeditions Afrique was up here dancing and telling me she felt like she was on top of the world.
I'm listening to crackling reports coming in from the Sudan on Greta's short-wave radio. She left a letter on my bed telling me she took Aero-Caribe back to the islands, but maybe she's in the Sudan now. She could be anywhere. I'm thinking about how she always asked for the long version, the one with the details.
After I'd been on the chain gang for maybe two weeks, somebody slipped an assassin named Joey Zazza into the barracks. He was supposedly in for bank robbery, but he didn't seem to know much about banks.
Joey Zazza came after me one July evening when I was in the tool shed pretending to stack tools but really looking through my high-powered binoculars at Daphne. She and I met at an abandoned barn once a week, at 10:30 PM every Tuesday, after lights out. I'd dog under the fence, run through the long tobacco field, and she'd be waiting in her Jaguar Sedan, parked in the red dirt in front of the barn's wide doors, the engine idling at a different rpm each time. I'd slide quickly into the back seat, staying low. She'd pull into the barn and then we'd close its big doors, slip into the blue back seat, and begin kissing and pressing and squeezing each other. That's the way it was.
There was a women's prison four miles away, and if one of us could have gotten there from the highway or through the woods, sneaked in, and taken a room with access for the prisoners, it would have been a form of paradise for this convict. But the place was heavily guarded day and night by an army of big dykes and dogs. No man from a chain gang had ever been able to perform this feat of stealth, and the word was that over the years nine convicts had died during various attempts to break in.
Even though I had the binoculars going on, I saw Joey Zazza and his shank in my peripheral vision -- so he got a spring-loaded, straight-ahead right to the temple before he could strike. This punch knocked him silly, and, six seconds later, as he was staggering around in the cloud of his fresh concussion, I sent him to the family plot in Zazzaville via the flying neck-drop.
The Fat Man down on South Street forsook me in my absence, and it looks like he's assumed way too much of my work. He took my work upon himself, and this has earned him a visit from me, tonight. We're gonna talk about him having too much ambition. And after I see him, I'm gonna steal a few hours with the Puerto Rican woman who likes to get high, dress up, and dance. She's attractive to me in several ways and as gravy has a supreme deluxe feature.
Sometimes when you're on the chain gang you think about women, and while confined I decided to alter the way I handle them. There are only two good ways to do it -- either line up three or four and slip from one to the other, or boss a harem, where the women are sometimes restless, sometimes bad, and where each summons initiates an inner throbbing. I'm spending time these days deciding which of the two is better, and there's no easy answer.
THE NEXT MORNING
Last night I found the Fat Man with a group of thin people, at a show in Chelsea where there was some posturing, some mummery, some display, a tall mystery man in a black hat, some posing, and some dancing around while looking at the art. I followed him into a darkened back room but lost him among the curtains. Beyond these curtains was a maze of rooms and staircases, and like everywhere else, things were going on behind the scenes, in secret.
I heard drums and pursued what I thought was the Fat Man's shadow into a pulsing room, but it was like midnight in there and there was voodoo dancing going on. Then I ran after the shadow into a well-lit hospital room, but the patient was being treated and there was no Fat Man. So I dodged into the dark adjoining room but I was interrupting something.
After that, I slipped back out into the dimly lit corridor and encountered a fearful girl being followed up a staircase; then I turned left, opened a door, and found myself in a floral-style day room where two women were relaxing after finishing their coffee. From the corner of my eye I noticed two other women in the shadows across the room, and to my right a girl looking up a number in the phone book was being eyed by her friend.
I left quickly and eased into a restroom, hoping to find the Fat Man, but a girl was in there writhing against the tiles, so I danced slowly backwards and got out of there. On the way down the back stairwell I saw the shadow again, so I raced after it one more time, down a second-floor hallway and into another brightly lit room.
THREE MONTHS LATER -- LITTLE ODESSA, BRIGHTON BEACH
I'm here at Svetlana's Bystro where at 8:30 AM they drink vodka from a gallon-sized milk jug along with their coffee. I'm having coffee only, robust Russian coffee with cream.
I'll tell you the story of the Fat Man Down on South Street later. The short version is, he's back in line and happy to be there.
This morning in the shower I came to my conclusion -- it's best to have three or four women and slip back and forth between them. The harem idea would be too much like what happens to male lions, alpha monkeys, and antlered males, who have to stop all the time to look around; they're stuck in one territory and they exhaust themselves guarding the harem and fighting off the sniffing challengers. You need freedom to roam, untroubled.
I'm poised to take revenge on the Russians, out here in the remote reaches of Brooklyn at Brighton Beach, on their own turf. They gunned me down four years ago, and they're gonna get the big payback. Most observors of world crime call them the most vicious and brutal of all gangsters anywhere on the globe.
The Russian Mob is run by Vyacheslav Ivankov, and last week I learned that he's the one who fired the shots that hit me. So this is personal and he made it that way. This job would have been done long ago if I hadn't spent three years sojourning on the Carolina chain gang.
Buster Natchez, Donnie Shell and I have been coming over here early, every day, to do surveillance and put the strike-plan together. Two weeks ago I bought a Super Hoverhawk for fast access to Little Odessa from my place in Manhattan. I keep the craft docked over on the Hudson, beside the USS Intrepid, the aircraft carrier you see off W. 46th at Pier 88, the one with the SR-71 Blackbird on the flight deck. I want this Hoverhawk nearby for quick water takeoffs.
Once I fire the engine, warm it up, and get it cranked for action, I roar down the center of the Hudson and it's seven seconds until I'm in the air. Liftoff in seven seconds. Then a quick flight across the East River into Long Island Sound. After that it's a straight shot to my sandy spot on the low side of Brighton Beach. Six minutes from Pier 88 -- less, with the right tailwind.
What are Russians doing here anyway? All the signs over here are in Russian, all you hear is Russian, and it smells like Russia. Brighton Beach is Little Odessa. The boardwalk, which once led to the most legendary of all American amusement parks, is beaten up, delapidated, and dangerous for all but cheetah-walkers.
We just stepped out for a reefer in the alley and things have taken on a different look.
If things don't go right on the first strike, this revenge I take will spark a war, with large forces marshalled on each side. V. Ivankov moves among his veteran thug army all day long and into the night. It's disciplined and prepared for battle at any time. He could bring war with a snap of his thick fingers.
So I don't want a war. I want a precision strike, then slip away fast and disappear. Stealth going in, no casualties, stealth going out.
I'm learning much about the Russian Mob over here in Little Odessa, and I'm refining the number of fighters I'll need to take them out. I've been here daily for almost a month, and right now the number is 9, hand-picked by me for their distinctive abilities.
I'll bring in The Last Neanderthal for this one, and Donnie Shell, Buster Natchez, Pink Ibo, Bobby Three-Heads. And Frankie Panorama as Wise Man. Jefferson if I can find him. Maybe Rousseau would take an interest in this effort, as part of an American force driving the Russians out of Brighton Beach.
We'll arrive all at once, in the tugboat, at low speed, just before dawn. Then we fan out in three teams of three for the three locations to be hit, and my personal crew will head for Victor Ivankov himself at the nerve center. We'll be outnumbered about three to one, but that ratio is about right to insure victory when you consider the quality of each dutto with me.
Over here in Little Odessa I've confirmed what I always knew about the Russians -- they're coarse, brutish, their skin is pasty, they got no sense of humor, no style, and what these Volgas and Kalashnikovs care about is the dollar. They live for the dollar.
There's a married woman over here named Tatyana, who lives with her connected Ukranian husband and his sister. I've been slipping over there sometimes when the husband is gone. You never know what you'll walk into when the husband's gone.
When this one is over, Brighton Beach will be American again. Maybe I'll run for Mayor of NYC as a champion of the people and as a liberator. And after that the U.S. Senate. I've decided to go legit, after three years on the chain gang. When this Little Odessa job is finished, I'll be prepared to go fully legit. It's going to be public service for me.
Frankie Panorama tells me I'm vainglorious and says I went crazy down there in Carolina on the chain gang. But look, V. Ivankov tried to kill me and it took months for me to recover fully. He asked for it and he's gonna get it. He's gonna get the big payback. V. Ivankov is unfinished business.
If I don't stop the Russians now, in a year or less they'll be in Manhattan and I can't allow them to set up. They'd be like the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals whose real ambitions were revealed after they sacked Rome -- they wanted to ape the Romans. They took off their animal skins and stretched out in togas to drink wine from golden goblets and wait for the entertainment.
No Russian is gonna ape me in Manhattan. Anyone else does it and I'm flattered, but no Russians. If you have a problem with this idea, then you can take your problem to the United Nations. You can Russian down on this.
Cat-eyed Slavic women with full lips, high cheekbones, and long legs are exceptions. I'm talking about Russian men here, not women.
DECEMBER 23
"I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm (1936)" -- Billie Holiday with Buck Clayton on trumpet, Teddy Wilson on piano, Benny Goodman on clarinet, Lester Young on saxophone, and Cozy Cole on drums. Coffee and a cordial glass of glowing Chartreuse Green. Chartreuse. Followed by Barbara Lynn, "If you should lose me, you'll lose a good thing . . . and if you don't believe me, just try it Daddy and you'll lose a good thing. Just try it, Daddy . . ."
JANUARY 3
I'm dealing with a complication caused by the two German women on the park bench, especially the thinner one, partially obscured. As I was walking past them in The Park one afternoon last summer, on impulse I sat down between them and we began talking. The three of us had a wonderful time for the rest of that afternoon and for a week afterward. They were staying at The Gansevoort, and when it was over we parted ways.
Then, two days after Christmas, one of their friends with a retro look arrives from Berlin. She calls me from JFK as if she knows me and asks if I'll come pick her up and then drive her to The Gansevoort. She'll wait for me instead of take a taxi.
Since then we've met a few times. Two different people have told me she's a spy for Ivankov, but she's hard for me to resist. She has neuroses and she's obsessive about her hair, her exercises, her diet, her marijuana, her many therapies, her supplements of vitamins and minerals, and her waistline.
And now the attack on the Russians is scheduled for August. Russians have the advantage in the dead of winter.
FEBRUARY 12
Last night I put on the cashmere topcoat and the long white silk scarf and slipped down the street to the parking garage, where I picked up my new enthusiasm, the 1963 Sting Ray.
I drove around town for a while, for sport, flying up and down the avenues, flashing through the cross streets, crossing and recrossing the Brooklyn Bridge, bouncing around the asphalt and rails of the West Side, and shooting down wide Park Avenue with the keen eye, staying on the edge and considering the odds of catching the eye of a cop in a cruiser, or alarming a cop on a corner.
New York.
Bobby Three Heads says I should have gotten a black Magnum wagon with a hemi, similar to the one Daphne had down in Carolina.
Finally I pulled over in front of Blue Billiards, just off Columbus Circle on 72nd, which is eight-ball central in Manhattan. I wanted to shoot against the greatest sharks of this town.
"You have the hot-dog style," Roxanne said to me one afternoon when we were down on Cornelia St. having some drinks and I was shooting. There was one table and it was stack your four quarters, winner stays up.
She's right of course: I have the hot-dog style. Mainly, as the winner, I stay up. I demonstrated long ago that my game is non pariel and that my backspin shots are wonders to behold in their magical precision.
My only real competition last night was the current house champion of Blue Billiards, a skinny, acne-scarred guy with a big adam's apple they call Cecil the Stork. Ugly Cecil and I warmed up by exchanging victories as I watched every nuance of his game with the wolf eye. I learned what to fear, and that he had only three exploitable flaws: on the break he couldn't make the cue hit the triangle of balls, back up, and then fly forward; his position was usually off when he used low left; and he had a temper.
As we were chalking up, after maybe twenty minutes, he said "How about $100.00?" I said "How about $200.00?" and we were off.
I showed The Stork no mercy. My hot-dog style got to him and made him mad. He blew crucial shots and I was locked in and on a roll.
My hot-dog style also irritated and angered his backers, and it caused them to keep raising the stakes. I had the rhythm; and my stick, a perfectly balanced 19, was lining up and firing with a life of its own. I was aflame and left there with $110,000, a giant wad of cash bulging from every pocket.
The game that finished him off was over in less than a minute. He was dogged and careful but he only got one turn, and after he sat down I sank a string of kick shots, three-ball combinations, full-length bank shots performed with one hand -- calling one carom and one kiss, and I ran the table with energies perfectly focused to blow him away with a sprezzatura never before witnessed under the lights of Blue Billiards.
FEBRUARY 28, ON THE NIGHT TRAIN
I'm riding through the Clyde Valley of Scotland on the night train, heading south toward Troon, Ayrshire. Outside, it's dark and wet. The windows are blurry with sleet, hail, and snow and you can hear it hitting the roof and the sides of the car.
In the club car a Germanic woman follows me with her eyes, but I pretend not to notice her.
Once every twenty minutes or so we stop at a little station and two or three shivering new passengers climb on. From my compartment I watch them step up and in. Their heavy tweed overcoats and hats begin to steam in the warmth of the club car.
These people wear the thickest scarves I've ever seen, and I've been adjusting to their practical style, first by getting one of those ribbed, oiled-wool sweaters designed for fishermen and sailors on the North Atlantic. It has weight, and the heavy lanolin makes it naturally water-repellant.
I'm in the club car eating toasted oatcakes and lamb sandwiches with a fierce and wiry old man about 80 who claims to be 100% Pict. He says that within him survive the genes of those who once claimed and defended all of Scotland, which he calls Alba. But the trouble with his story is that the Picts had all disappeared mysteriously by the end of the 10th Century. He looks more like a Celt to me, with some Pict.
Now he's reciting the famous speech of the great Pict, Calgacus, before the battle of Mons Graupius.
I've come to Scotland to do a favor for the three Legionnaires who've agreed to join us against the Russians in August. By Labor Day it's all over for V. Ivankov. We're putting him on the Express to his Big Odessa grave.
The Legion is traditionally found in North Africa, and today they also go southeast into Sudan, further east to the Horn, and south through Uganda into Rwanda and Burundi. But these Legionnaires are here in Scotland, incognito, doing dark work. They asked me if I'd perform one job for them, a task requiring smoothness of gesture under stress, and I said yes.
I met these Legionnaires four years ago in one of the tarpaper juke-joints of Djibouti, during a midnight sandstorm. We were slow dancing with local women, all of whom had long, slender, graceful necks like Iman. A gang of outraged men from their village, dozens of them, attacked us so it was a real battle for more than 15 minutes. Only one Legionnaire, whose name was David Noble, outperformed me in the bloody, up-close, life and death brawl with those wild-eyed men, all of them crazed from chewing kaat.
One week from today, I'm going to drive this Kubelwagen through a British checkpoint in Northern Ireland. Anything could happen. Tomorrow we take the NL 1500 tugboat out into the North Atlantic and down to Galway.
APRIL IN THE ROOF GARDEN
A mug of Medaglia d'Oro espresso roast, which Frankie Panorama says should be a controlled substance. Heavy cream, light sugar. Viburnum in bloom and filling the garden with its heavy fragrance, and the lilacs about to pop. Crabapple blossoms. It's spring now and much has happened.
MORNING IN MAY
Lilacs still in bloom, two of the crabapples still in bloom, and now the clematis, the Sweet Woodruff, the periwinkle, and the wisteria.
I just awoke from a strange and troubling dream. As spring brings the greens of summer here to the East, I'm here to report that the strike against the Russians was a feat of stealth and precision. Rousseau appeared out of the blue and delivered the performance of his life.
Right now I'm looking over the threat posed by Ti'jean Hautefort, who just arrived from Paris and has been proclaiming around town that he will soon be the Ti'jean of Manhattan. Translated into English, his slogan is "My fort is high; Johnny's fort is low." That's how he's been phrasing it around town.
I've been checking the angles, listening to reports from my ears and eyes on the street, and I'm proclaiming that he's small potatoes.
He says his imminent rocket-rise to power is common knowledge among the lowdown cognoscenti. Well, Ti'jean from Paris is welcome to take a chance, since I must keep my moves quick and agile for real threats.
MORNING IN MAY - UPDATE FROM JOHNNY'S TECHNICIAN
Johnny's Citroen with the New Hampshire plate was found in one of the parking lots at LaGuardia. There was a half-finished bottle of Chartreuse in the passenger seat, but no sign of Johnny. He's incommunicado. He's an official missing
person. Authorities speculate that he's taken a new identity and is trying to disappear. The detectives are focusing their searches in the Caribbean, most intensely in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but I don't think Johnny would go on the lam down there. I think he'd go somewhere with a higher percentage of white people to blend in with, but when they interrogated me I assured them he'd definitely be in Haiti, nowhere else. "He always said he'd go to Haiti," I told them. "He once had a fling down there with a woman named Giselle." The detectives wrote the name "Giselle" on their tablets.
