Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

smoke.

“What?” asked Bud and, “What’s that, didn’t hear!” the waiter shouted.

“Ginger ale.”

“What?”

“Ginger ale!”

“GINGER ALE!” Len screamed it out and the drummer, behind the raging curtain of noise that was the band’s music, almost heard it. Len banged down his fist. One-Two-Three!

CHORUS: Ginger Ale was only twelve years old! Went to church and was as good as gold. Till that day when—

“Come on,come on!” the waiter squalled. “Let’s have that order, kids! I’m busy!”

“Two whisky-waters and two Green Swamps!” Len sang out and the waiter was gone into the swirling maniac mist.

Peggy felt her young heart flutter helplessly. Above all, don’t drink when you’re out on a date. Promise us that, darling, you must promise us that. She tried to push away instructions etched in brain.

“How you like this place, honey? Loopy, ain’t it?” Bud fired the question at her; a red-faced, happy-faced Bud.

Loopy (loo pi)

Common alter. of L.U.P. (Lifeless Undeath Phenomenon).

She smiled at Bud, a smile of nervous politeness. Her eyes moved around, her face inclined and she was looking up at the stage. Loopy. The word scalpeled at her mind. Loopy, loopy.

The stage was five yards deep at the radius of its wooden semicircle. A waist-high rail girdled the circumference, two pale purple spotlights, unlit, hung at each rail end. Purple on white-the thought came. Darling, isn’t Sykesville Business College good enough? No! I don’t want to take a business course, I want to major in art at the University!

The drinks were brought and Peggy watched the disembodied waiter’s arm thud down a high, green-looking glass before her. Presto!-the arm was gone. She looked into the murky Green Swamp depths and saw chipped ice bobbing.

“A toast! Pick up your glass, Peg!” Bud clarioned.

They all clinked glasses:

“To lust primordial!” Bud toasted.

“To beds inviolate!” Len added.

“To flesh insensate!” Barbara added a third link.

Their eyes zeroed in on Peggy’s face, demanding. She didn’t understand.

“Finish it!” Bud told her, plagued by freshman sluggishness.

“To… u-us,” she faltered.

“How o-rig-inal,” stabbed Barbara and Peggy felt heat licking up her smooth cheeks. It passed unnoticed as three Youths of America with Whom the Future Rested gurgled down their liquor thirstily. Peggy fingered at her glass, a smile printed to lips that would not smile unaided.

“Come on, drink, girl!” Bud shouted to her across the vast distance of one foot. “Chuggalug!”

“Live it, girl,” Len suggested abstractedly, fingers searching once more for soft leg. And finding, under table, soft leg waiting.

Peggy didn’t want to drink, she was afraid to drink. Mother words kept pounding-never on a date, honey, never. She raised the glass a little.

“Uncle Buddy will help, will help!”

Uncle Buddy leaning close, vapor of whisky haloing his head. Uncle Buddy pushing cold glass to shaking young lips. “Come on, Olive Oyl, old goil! Down the hatch!”

Choking sprayed the bosom of her dress with Green Swamp droplets. Flaming liquid trickled into her stomach, sending offshoots of fire into her veins.

Bangity boom crash smash POW!! The drummer applied the coup de grace to what had been, in ancient times, a lover’s waltz. Lights dropped and Peggy sat coughing and tear-eyed in the smoky cellar club.

She felt Bud’s hand clamp strongly on her shoulder and, in the murk, she felt herself pulled off balance and felt Bud’s hot wet mouth pressing at her lips. She jerked away and then the purple spots went on and a mottle- faced Bud drew back, gurgling, “I fights to the finish,” and reaching for his drink.

“Hey, the loopy now, the loopy!” Len said eagerly, releasing exploratory hands.

Peggy’s heart jolted and she thought she was going to cry out and run thrashing through the dark, smoke- filled room. But a sophomore hand anchored her to the chair and she looked up in white-faced dread at the man who came out on the stage and faced the microphone which, like a metal spider, had swung down to meet him.

“May I have your attention, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, a grim-faced, sepulchral-voiced man whose eyes moved out over them like flicks of doom. Peggy’s breath was labored, she felt thin lines of Green Swamp water filtering hotly through her chest and stomach. It made her blink dizzily. Mother. The word escaped cells of the mind and trembled into conscious freedom. Mother, take me home.

“As you know, the act you are about to see is not for the faint of heart, the weak of will.” The man plodded through the words like a cow enmired. “Let me caution those of you whose nerves are not what they ought to be- leave now. We make no guarantees of responsibility. We can’t even afford to maintain a house doctor.”

No laughter appreciative. “Cut the crap and get off stage,” Len grumbled to himself. Peggy felt her fingers twitching.

“As you know,” the man went on, his voice gilded with learned sonority, “this is not an offering of mere sensation but an honest scientific demonstration.”

“Loophole for Loopy’s!” Bud and Len heaved up the words with the thoughtless reaction of hungry dogs salivating at a bell.

It was, in 1987, a comeback so rigidly standard it had assumed the status of a catechism answer. A crenel in the postwar law allowed the L.U.P. performance if it was orally prefaced as an exposition of science. Through this legal chink had poured so much abusing of the law that few cared any longer. A feeble government was grateful to contain infractions of the law at all.

When hoots and shoutings had evaporated in the smoke-clogged air, the man, his arms upraised in patient benediction, spoke again.

Peggy watched the studied movement of his lips, her heart swelling, then contracting in slow, spasmodic beats. An iciness was creeping up her legs. She felt it rising toward the threadlike fires in her body and her fingers twitched around the chilly moisture of the glass. I want to go, please take me home- Will-spent words were in her mind again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man concluded, “brace yourselves.”

A gong sounded its hollow, shivering resonance, the man’s voice thickened and slowed.

“The L.U. Phenomenon!”

The man was gone; the microphone had risen and was gone. Music began; a moaning brassiness, all muted. A jazzman’s conception of the palpable obscure mounted on a pulse of thumping drum. A