table. Now he is a hero of the I.D. riots.
The kids have a basket full of xiucutls. This small orange-and-red speckled snake has a venom that causes erotic convulsions and acute diarrhea and is frequently used as a practical joke in commune initiations. Of course you can get the same thing in ampules or poppers but the old folkloric ways still have charms for the rich. The boy is making a sale at a table of rich kids.
Looking out across the square, I see a man pushing a cart with crates roped onto it and one of the kraut kids is walking alongside it.
'Looks like Krup is taking on some cargo.'
'He sure is,' Jimmy tells me. 'Right after the riots he bought up all the nooses on the open market and all the noose material. The nooses he plans to sell to tourists in Ba'dan. He's got all the old noose merchants making rugs ... and he's shipping Red Hots and White Angels and Blue Burns and Black Lights and Greenies—the lot. So he cuts them with Spanish fly and sells them in the Ba'dan cathouses.'
'He sure is an operator.'
'He's putting up the prices, the miserable bastard.'
'We'd better lay in stock.'
We walk around through the bazaars pricing color poppers and aphros. The price has about doubled but we know it's twenty times higher in Ba'dan for cut stuff.
The Red Hots bring you out in red blotches and dots, squirming around on your red-hot ass, itching to pop, and you can top it with a Red Pop. This can be dangerous, bringing on internal hemorrhaging or in some cases spontaneous fracture of the vertebrae.
The White Angels turn your jism to light. A Snow Pop is a blaze of cold white light with hot sex sparks. The Blue Burn, which is usually mixed with Yage, is cold and hot at the same time. You come out in a blue rash with a cold menthol burn, and a Blue Pop is like cyanide and ozone.
The Black Light turns you black as obsidian and knocks all the white words out of your brain so you are right there with whatever the sex scene is, and a Black Pop brings you off in synch. The Greenie is something between animal and vegetable. You come out in a green rash, your nuts a tight seedpod popped off by the Green Pop.
You can mix colors—say Red Hots with a Snow Pop for bells of rosy fire ringing in the sky while you squirt a choir of angels. Now, your partner may be doing the same thing or he may be squirting blue twilight in attic rooms and distant train whistles. Or you take Red Hots and smooth it with a Black Pop and spurt deep purple. An Old Glory threesome: red fucking blue, who is fucking white, and red pops blue, blue pops white, and white pops red.
Try the Rainbow Special—all colors in one—and squirt Niagara Falls, Pikes Peak, souvenir postcards, rainbows, and Northern Lights. Step right up, good for young and old. Young boys need it special. Sometimes they forget the heroes of the fever who made all this available to young boys.
Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever ... Audrey thought as they made selections. But it won't get me a discount. Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever, and knowing what went into those products I don't like to see them cut and sold to drunken American legion slobs. That's right—the City Fathers are setting up an American Legion Convention. The Ba'dan Hilton and American Express arrive in a cloud of pop stars.
The proprietor, a thin gray old man in a gray djellaba, follows us around pointing out rare items, apologizing for the higher prices.
'Oh there are some Itchy Tingles!' Audrey explains. 'Just the thing for my high-school Christmas play. Give me a case.'
'Oh and there are some Firsties. I'll take all you've got.'
A Firsty Pop is the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons, a whiff of school toilets, locker rooms, and jockstraps, rectal mucus and summer feet, chigger lotion, and carbolic soap—whiffs you back to your first jackoff and leaves you sitting there on the toilet—if you don't keep flying speed. Never linger over a Firsty.
