And as to Papa Crossbar! Well! So he was the super-villain. A black-magic voodoo evildoer. And it was he, Papa Crossbar, whose intention it was to destroy every vestige of life on this planet and reduce the Earth to a Necrosphere.
Scary stuff indeed it all was and I knew it all to be true.
And Papa Crossbar knew that I knew and so it was odds-on favourite that he would be sending some of his awful minions to butcher me horribly before I passed my information on.
I did nervous lookings around to the right and the left of me. Were any of his awful minions already here? He could read my mind, which was probably why he had let me run – for a bit of sport, because he knew where I was staying. The clientele looked normal enough. But, as I have already mentioned, I have never been able to define exactly what normal might be. And so the apparent normality of these folk, these chaps in their business suits and ladies in sweatsuits and pearls, might well belie the awfulness of what they really were.
I became now not only sick to my soul but frightened.
I would have to tell someone. Mr Ishmael, that was who I must tell. And he must help me. It was his duty to help me. After all, it was he who had got me into this mess in the first place. In fact, it was all his fault that I was involved in it. And so it followed that it was really his fault that Lazlo Woodbine had come to such a terrible end. But this was really absolutely no consolation whatsoever, so I sat and sulked and fretted and feared and gulped away at my bourbon.
And then the barman sauntered along to me and pushed the bar bill that I had signed for my double Kentucky bourbon on ice (although the ice was complimentary) under my drooping nose. ‘This is no good,’ he told me. ‘You’ll have to pay with cash.’
‘Of course it’s good,’ I told him in reply. ‘That’s my room number. Stick it on my bill.’
‘Sir does not have a bill to stick it on, sir. Because sir is not a resident at this hotel.’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ I said. ‘I’m booked in with the rest of The Sumerian Kynges. We’re a really famous rock ’n’ roll band. You must have heard of us.’
‘Indeed I have, sir,’ said the barman, adopting that obsequious tone that oh-so-easily becomes sarcasm. ‘In fact, I have two of The Sumerian Kynges’ albums, one of them signed by Andy, the lead singer.’
‘You what?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I am talking about The Sumerian Kynges, sir. I am a big fan. But they are not staying at this hotel and neither it seems are you. Now, do you wish to pay for your drink, or should I call for the services of the doorman? He is a master of Dimac, I understand, and although he only uses his vicious martial skills in self-defence, it is remarkable how much damage he does to folk whom he clearly believes, although perhaps misguidedly, are trying to attack him.’
‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any trouble. I am booked into this hotel. And I am one of The Sumerian Kynges. And all of us are booked in here. But we haven’t any albums out yet.’
‘Sir would appear to be wrong on all counts there,’ said the barman. And he reached down beneath the counter top.
Fearing the arrival of a knobkerrie, I took a cautionary step back. But no such cudgel was brought to light, rather a long-playing record in a glossy twelve-inch sleeve. ‘Wallah,’ went the barman. ‘Doubt this if you will.’ He held out this album to me and I stepped up and took it from his hands.
The Sumerian Kynges ~ CHEESEMANIA ~
That’s what it said on the album cover, all in psychedelic writing in the style of Rick Griffin. And there was a picture of The Sumerian Kynges, wearing kaftans and looking suitably trippy. There was Andy and there was Rob and there was Neil and there was Toby.
I flipped the album over. It was a Greatest Hits album.
‘The Smell in the Gents’. ‘The Land of the Western God’. ‘The ‘Two By One Song’, not to mention ‘Your Soul Will Burn’.
Which I did not.
But I gawped at that album cover. Gawped at it and felt a tad more sick. Well, more than a tad, an avalanche of pukiness. It had to be a hoax of some kind, surely. We hadn’t even had a single single out. How could there be Greatest Hits album? It was a trick, wasn’t it?
I pulled out the vinyl record inside. It certainly looked real enough, though.
‘Careful with your fingers on that,’ said the barman. ‘I know there’s millions of them about, but that one is mine.’
‘Millions?’ I said, in a breathless, whispery voice. And I peered closely at that record. And I read the date upon it: 1973.
‘It’s a fake,’ I cried. ‘Nineteen seventy-three! It’s a fake.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said the barman. ‘It came out in nineteen seventy-three. I know it’s four years old, but it’s mine and it’s signed, so hand it back here.’
‘Four years old?’ I said. ‘Nineteen seventy-seven?’ I said.
‘Do you know what?’ said the barman. ‘The Sumerian Kynges did stay in this hotel. Way back in nineteen sixty-nine, it was, before my time. That must have been about the time New York was going for the Jewish look and folk were dressing the way you’re dressed now.’
I sank down onto my bar stool. But missed my bar stool and fell down onto the floor.
‘You’re drunk,’ cried the barman. ‘I’m calling the doorman. He’ll make it look like self-defence.’
‘No,’ I blubbered and I got to my knees. ‘Something is very wrong. It can’t be nineteen seventy-seven. It was only nineteen sixty-nine this very morning. The Sumerian Kynges were leaving tomorrow to play Woodstock.’
‘I understand they were brilliant at Woodstock,’ said the barman, leaning over the bar counter to further enjoy, it appeared, the spectacle of me on my knees on the floor. ‘I wasn’t there myself. Too young. And The Kynges don’t appear in the movie of the festival. Contractual differences, apparently. Which is why The Beatles and Bob Dylan, who also played there, aren’t in the movie.’
‘What?’ I went. ‘What? What? What?’ It couldn’t be true, could it? Nearly nine years had passed. The Sumerian Kynges had become world famous without me and had a Greatest Hits album out. Was I dreaming this? And if not, how could it have happened?
I climbed giddily to my feet. ‘I need another drink,’ I told the barman. ‘And I will pay in cash.’
‘Happy to serve you, sir.’
I paid in cash and happily I had enough. I quite expected the barman to tell me that my money was out of date and thus no good, but he didn’t. Apparently American dollars have remained the same for the last one hundred years. Apparently so that if you do commit a bank robbery and get caught and sent to jail, but manage to avoid giving back any of the money, it will be waiting for you wherever you buried it, ready for use when you get out of prison. And not be out of date. It is something to do with the American Dream, Democracy and Freemasons running the world. Or something.
So the barman accepted my money.
And I tucked into my bourbon.
‘Has the mobile phone been invented yet?’ I asked the barman. ‘Or the jet-pack?’
The barman shook his head sadly. ‘Shall I call for the doorman?’ he asked.
And I shook my head. Sadly. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I will be all right. I won’t cause any trouble. Something very weird has happened to me. I must have lost my memory or something. Perhaps I had an accident.’
The barman eyed me, queerly. ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked, ‘that the last memory you have is of nineteen sixty-nine?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It seems so. One minute it’s nineteen sixty-nine and I am over on Twenty-Seventh Street. Then I run back here and it’s nineteen seventy-seven. How weird is that?’
‘Most weird,’ and the barman nodded. ‘Twenty-Seventh Street. That used to be the Detective Quarter, didn’t it?’
‘Used to be?’ I shrugged.
‘Nice shrugging,’ the barman observed. ‘Did you know that the Shrugger once got drunk in this bar?’
‘I just bet he did,’ I said. ‘I was with The Sumerian Kynges, you know, really I was. And we were in New York with The Flange Collective.’
‘I’ve read about that – a sort of freak show, wasn’t it?’
