THE ROARING TWENTIES

Heroin train to Endsville clicks along merry track under the balmy night. Passengers with exploding suitcases push rusty shot needles in their arms. It is night and ghost porters move silent through the cars with soiled hand towels across trays on which they offer drugs.

"Pantopan, heroin, methadone! Get 'em from me, Rastus, the head motherfucker on this here flight!"

A big politician jabs horse needle in his arm and floats off in a tract of nasty legislation.

These are the twenties....

The lights of Endsville Amusement Park are lit bright. Green-winged moths with red bodies fly around the lights. They chomp cigars and think about boot-legged whiskey. There are thousands of people walking around Endsville Park and music and barkers' voices and the smell of scandal and drugs. Up in the top most car of the ferris wheel a flapper is giving head to a science teacher named John Scopes. Scopes is flying on formaldehyde and trying to shake the car off its hinges. He succeeds and they fall in perverted crash back to Darwinism.

"Here Here Here!" screams barker near sideshow tent. "Come on in! Sacco and Vanzetti! On trial for a crime they never committed! Here Here Here! Come on in and see them executed!"

People in clothes from the twenties walk around amusements with brisk flair to their step. All have money in pockets. These are prosperous times. In The Food From All Parts of the World Plaza families sit under umbrellas smoking hashish from Indian water pipes & gorge themselves on Chinese egg rolls, roast pigs, Smorgasbord, tacos and enchiladas and Southern fried chicken. Their lips are greasy and make smacking noises and the air is rent with their eating and the smell of hashish.

Here Here Here!

In the Old Opera House people wait before twenty aluminum doors. They are warned not to move until doors open, and then the doors open and everyone files in and sits in the theater. Blue curtain rises and there's spotlights and on stage there is a rubber life-size model of Harding! He stands up in funny Walt Disney animation and speaks.

"We are on the threshold of great decisions! Return to normalcy I say! Return to the tradition made this country-bleep-great...."

In the large Yes We Have No Bananas dance hall 800 naked pearly bodies glisten under silver lights to Glenn Miller and group play China Boy.

In Drug Stations men and women shoot-up mincing horrible after fix and on to Standard of Living Parlor where on huge stage people watch a man buy a second car & mink coat and watch Shirley Temple do her nails. Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Red Grange up there killing each other with Mexican clubs and everyone cheers insane reckless voices like tired broken staircases on Zero Street.

Mr. Eskimopie watches this with jaundiced eye. He spits and it lands on dirt ground and Mr. Eskimopie goes back inside tent. He sits on his trunk & picks up newspaper mumbling to himself, "People!"

He shoots a little Green. He turns on the radio and it explodes like left-over sandwiches from Burbank, Alaska and he gets up and pulled up his pants and lit his cigar and took in his belt a notch and went to the icebox for a bottle of beer.

Outside the tent two men from the Government had their eye on Mr. Eskimopie. They thought they might have a red on their hands. They thought there was a chance Mr. Eskimopie had Communistic sympathies and they were out there in raincoats with hats down low and pistols in their pockets feeling important and sly.

Mr. Eskimopie was outside now. The night was sticky like cotton candy. Mr. Eskimopie walked passed the Mah Jong and Crossword Puzzle Parlor. He passed college students on their way to shore up falling dominoes. He stopped to smoke a little marijuana and felt a tap on his shoulder.

"I just bought five hundred shares of RCA," said the excited man. "Larry Burns made a cleanup on his American Telephone. He's living in the nice part of Endsville now."

The stranger starts to beat his arms against his sides and is soon above the starry night forever.

"People!"

The tent of Hashish Horrors is closed for the season, he notices, probably because of H. Ford getting too stoned and sponsoring the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. He sits under a tree that is plastic and smokes some Vermont green and looks over his shoulder at the train station platform. A train has just stopped and under the pale light of the platform he can see the suitcases exploding. His radio exploded tonight and last week it had been the fender on his car. One man he knew had a sport coat explode off his shoulders.

People

And Mr. Eskimopie watched poor people limp home weeping under no stars. They walk crooked and zigzagged stepping over huge tin cans and pieces of rock; going home for a string of beef jerky and no milk. He watches and gets up and walks back to the tent. He undresses and climbs into bed. He turns away toward the wall the way characters in novels do when they've tasted defeat. He falls asleep.

It's a moonlit night. I get on the Dippyroo and slide along to nowhere. I meet a girl in a cream coat and we dance under silver stars and then I take her off to the meadow where I fuck her in the ass. There is nothing beautiful about it. We are in the grass and can see Endsville in the distance. We watch as it goes up in a giant breathtaking heroin flash and then she turns to me.

"What do we do now," she says, "the place has just blown up and you've fucked me in the ass and I'll probably have some sorta awful shit baby. I mean just what do we do now?"

I watched the fire. It burned and burned and burned and people were in there dying like scarecrows. She tugged at my arm for an answer. I don't know. I left her and went looking for something groovy to do.