'And remember, boys, that's where champagne comes from.' 77
MANAGER: '
A.J.: 'It's an Illyrian poodle. Choicest beast a man can latch onto. It'll raise the tone of your trap.'
MANAGER: 'I suspect it to be a purple-assed baboon and it stands outside.' STOOGE: 'Don't you know who this is? It's A. J., last of the big time spenders.' MANAGER: 'Leave him take his purple-assed bastard and big time spend some place else.' A. J. stops in front of another club and looks in. 'Elegant fags and old cunts, God damn it! We come to the right place. Avanti, ragazzi !'
He drives a gold stake into the floor and pickets the baboon. He begins talking in elegant tones, his stooges filling in.
'Fantastic!'
'Monstrous!'
'Utter heaven!'
A. J. puts a long cigarette holder in his mouth. The holder is made of some obscenely flexible material. It swings and undulates as if endowed with loathsome reptilian life. A. J.: 'So there I was flat on my stomach at thirty thousand feet.' Several nearby fags raise their heads like animals scenting danger. A. J. leaps to his feet with an inarticulate snarl.
'You purple-assed cocksucker!' he screams. 'I'll teach you to shit on the floor!' He pulls a whip from his umbrella and cuts the baboon across the ass. The baboon screams and tears loose the stake. He leaps on the next table and climbs up an old woman who dies of heart failure on the spot. A. J.: 'Sorry, lady. Discipline you know.'
In a frenzy he whips the baboon from one end of the bar to the other. The baboon, screaming and snarling and shitting with terror, climbs over the clients, runs up and down on top of the bar, swings from drapes and chandeliers....
A. J.: 'You'll straighten up and shit right or you won't be inna condition to shit one way or the other.'
STOOGE: 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself upsettin' A. J. after all he's done for you.' A. J.: 'Ingrates! Every one of them ingrates! Take it from an old queen.' Of course no one believes this cover story. A. J. claims to be an 'independent,' which is to say:
'Mind your own business.' There are no independents any more. ... The Zone swarms with every variety of dupe but there are no neutrals there. A neutral at A. J.'s level is of course unthinkable.... Hassan is a notorious Liquefactionist and suspect to be a secret Sender --'Shucks, boys,' he says with a disarming grin, 'I'm just a blooming old cancer and I gotta proliferate.' He picks up a Texas accent associating with Dry Hole Dutton, the Dallas wildcatter, and he wears cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat at all times indoors and out.... His eyes are invisible behind black glasses, his face smooth and blank as wax above a well-cut suit made entirely from immature high denomination bank notes. (Bank notes are in fact currency, but they must mature before they can be negotiated.... Bank notes run as high as one million clams a note.)
'They keep hatching out all over me,' he says shyly. ...'It's like, gee, I don't know how to say it. It's like I was a Mummy scorpion carrying those little baby notes around on my warm body and feeling them grow.... Gosh I hope I don't bore you with all this.' 78
Salvador, known as Sally to his friends --he always keeps a few 'friends' around and pays them by the hour --got cured in the slunk business in World War II. (To get cured means to get rich. Expression used by Texas oil men.) The Pure Food and Drug Department have his picture in their files, a heavy faced man with an embalmed look as if paraffin had been injected under the skin which is smooth, shiny and poreless. One eye is dead grey color, round as a marble, with flaws and opaque spots. The other is black and shiny, an old undreaming insect eye. His eyes are normally invisible behind black glasses. He looks sinister and enigmatic --his gestures and mannerisms are not yet comprehensible --like the secret police of a larval state. In moments of excitement Salvador is apt to lapse into broken English. His accent at such moments suggests an Italian origin. He reads and speaks Etruscan, A squad of accountant investigators have made a life work of Sal's international dossier.... His operations extend through the world in an inextricable, shifting web of subsidiaries, front companies, and aliases. He has held 23 passports and been deported 49 times --deportation proceedings pending in Cuba, Pakistan, Hong-Kong and Yokohama.
Salvador Hassan O'Leary, alias The Shoe Store Kid, alias Wrong Way Marv, alias After Birth Leary, alias Slunky Pete, alias Placenta Juan, alias K. Y. Ahmed, alias El Chinche, alias El Culito, etc., etc. for fifteen solid pages of dossier, first tangled with the law in NYC where he was traveling with a character known to the Brooklyn police as Blubber Wilson, who hustled his goof ball money shaking down fetishists in shoe stores. Hassan was charged some third degree extortion and conspiracy to impersonate a police officer. He had learnt the shakeman's Number One rule: D.T.-Ditch Tin --which corresponds to the pilot's KFS --Keep Flying Speed.... As The Vigilante puts it:
'If you get a rumble, kid, ditch your piece of tin if you have to swallow it.' So they didn't bust him with a queer badge. Hassan testified against Wilson, who drew Pen Indef. (longest term possible under New York law for a misdemeanor conviction. Nominally an indefinite sentence, it means three years in Riker's Island). Hassan's case was nolle prossed. 'I'd have drawn a nickel,' Hassan said, 'if I hadn't met a decent cop.' Hassan met a decent cop every time he took a fall. His dossier contains three pages of monikers indicating his proclivity for cooperating with
