Cities of the Red Night (24 page)

CHEERS HERE ARE THE NONDEAD

A tenor voice was singing in my head:

“A touch of sun, a touch of sun

  The color sergeant said…”

I woke up with something cold on my chest. A doctor was sitting by my bed with a stethoscope.

“Hello there, young guy,” he said when I opened my eyes.

A naval officer stood beside the doctor, looking down at me. I could feel a cast around my neck. The doctor turned to the other officer:

“Heart's sound as a gold dollar. Should be out of the cast in a week.”

The officer looked down at me from some stinker of a battleship film: “If you feel like that again, son, go see the shrink or the chaplain.”

“Would someone show me my face in a mirror?”

The doctor held a hand mirror in front of me. A shock of recognition. Familiar young face. Red hair.

“Just wanted to be sure I was still there.”

The doctor and the officer laughed, and I heard the door close. The face looked at me from the foot of the bed.

“Hello. I'm Jimmy Lee. You're Jerry. We're identical twins. I'm in the medics, you're in communications. U.S. Navy, six years' service. Depressed over the death of your pet monkey, you tried to hang yourself. I cut you down in time. That's our story. You want to remember.…”

*   *   *

They had to be careful about sex in the navy, so Jimmy and Jerry got a book on astral projection and decided to learn to do it in the “second state,” as the book called it, and they finally succeeded though they never knew exactly when it would happen or who was going to visit whom until it happened and this was sometimes under embarrassing circumstances, like in the shower room or during a physical examination. One twin lets out an eerie high-pitched wolf howl and turns bright red all over as the hairs on his head and body stand up and crackle. Then, as if struck by lightning, he falls to the floor in an erotic seizure ejaculating repeatedly in front of the appalled and salacious tars. A slack-jawed pimply boy from east Texas watches with a bestial leer.

“Look at his
peter
!”

“Medics!”

Jimmy describes a typical attack to a flustered navy psychiatrist:

“First there's this
smell,
Doctor. Like skunks in heat, if you'll pardon the expression, sir. It chokes you and gets you hot. Like a
popper,
sir.” He makes a motion of breaking a popper under his nose, moans and shows his teeth. The doctor coughs, opens a window and pulls up a venetian blind. Sunlight streams into the room.

“And then Jerry's face comes into focus like. He he he,” he titters. “That reminds me of a joke, sir. This old Jew, sir, got his wife and Mrs. Lieberman from next door in his car, he is driving out into the country to focus his headlights, sir, and he's got a sheet to do it with and Mrs. Lieberman sees him getting the sheet out, sir, and she says:

“‘Vot's he gonna do?'

“‘He's going to focus.'

“‘Vot? Both of us?'

“Rather good, don't you think, sir? Looking at me with this
smile,
sir.” He leers at the doctor and squirms in his chair. “And his body, sir, is a
translucent
red haze. I got that word out of a navy bulletin on poison fish. Some of them is
translucents.
You can see all their
guts,
sir.” He looks pointedly at the doctor's stomach. “It's like Jerry
vaporize
hisself. He just
steams
right into me feeling and wriggling down into each glittering leg hair, sir.” Jimmy hitches up his pants to show white ankles with red hairs that stir and glitter in the sunlight.

“With little electric
prickles,
sir, into my you know and you know and you knows. Then I am going down very fast in an elevator, you know the feeling, sir, right here.” He cups his crotch. “And Jerry is floating down with me. Then silver light
pops
in my eyes, sir.” He makes a loud popping sound with his mouth. The doctor starts. “And I shoot off and everything turns red. We call it a
red-out,
sir.”

The doctor made a personal diagnosis of acute homosexual panic. A colleague said it was psychomotor epilepsy. The Old Man said he didn't care what it was, he didn't want it in the navy. So the Juicy-Fruit Twins, as he called them, were up for discharge. Since they had no medical record of epileptic seizures or psychosis prior to enlisting in the navy there was the question of a complete disability pension, and this slowed things down. Then project Simulated Space Conditions got under way and the discharge was shelved.

*   *   *

“What's going on here?” I asked Jimmy Lee.

“Well, we're on Krup's spaceship or so he claims. Anyhoo, he's up there with charts and maps and the crew seems to obey him, most of them at least.”

“What do they look like?”

“Germans mostly. Young punks.”

“Who else is here?”

“All the boys from your scripts: Audrey, Jerry, all the Jims and Johns and Alis and Kikis and Strobe, Kelley, and Dahlfar. One foot in a navy mess and the other on some kooky spaceship. You see, there is a pretense this is just a naval station and you never know which is the pretense: spaceship or navy. One minute you are getting popped in Tamaghis, the next you're on KP or swabbing the deck. They got shore patrols out in Tamaghis. Whole area is off limits. And pro stations. And I've got a rundown on Krup. He's an intergalactically known spaceship swindler. You set out for the Big Dipper and wind up stranded in Vladivostok. And he's a heavy metal junk runner, known as Opium Jones in the trade.”

I'd seen metal junk addicts. Withdrawal is like acute radiation sickness. We sure are in good hands.

“Who's that joker with the doctor?”

“Oh he's one of the old navy set.… The doctor will be back any minute. I have to take a sperm specimen. They run tests on it.…”

I start to get a hard-on at the prospect of coming in another body. The doctor is looking down at me.

“How do you feel, young guy?”

“Horny, Doc.”

“That always happens with a vertebral fracture like yours.”

He folds the sheet down to my knees. I can feel it float up and throb. A throbbing in my neck sends electric tingles down to my crotch. Jimmy sits down with a beaker and runs his fingers lightly up and down my new cock and I go off in a blaze of silver light. Jimmy's face gets black around the edges and I go out for a few seconds. When I come around, the doctor is gone.

“He's a creep and I hate him,” Jimmy says. “He used to be the doctor in a Siren cathouse.”

I know what that means. Money from the Madam to pass her girls, in advanced stages of one of the fifty-seven venereal diseases endemic in the Cities of the Red Night.

“Sometimes I wish it was one thing or the other. Tamaghis or the navy,” I complain. “Six years in the navy and what did it get us? Give me Tamaghis. It beats swabbing decks and fucking clappy dry-cunt whores.”

“It does at that,” agrees Jimmy.

“What about Blum?”

“It's open war now between Krup and Hollywood.”

“Sounds like a scriptwriter's paradise.”

“It is and that's why they drafted you into the navy where they don't have to pay you anything but navy pay. Got you for a pop. Same way they got all of us.”

“So this ship is manned by the hanged.”

“Sure. That's how we all got shanghaied.”

“The Germans too?”

“Second generation. They are all artificial-insemination kids from one hanged father.”

I closed my eyes, feeling very relaxed and comfortable in Jimmy's body, and I could remember the little Michigan lake town. Fishing was the big thing then, carp and lake trout. At fourteen I ran away to join the navy with a forged birth certificate. Two years later they found it out and the President himself pardoned me—it was in all the papers. And I could remember this dream I kept having about a strange city with red light in the streets and then I was in a room naked and could see other people there naked too and suddenly they are all looking at me, I get a hard-on and go off and sometimes one of the faces lights up just as I start to shoot. And that was the first time I saw Jimmy Lee, long before I met him in the navy after my pardon. I was learning to be a radio operator and I'd gone to the radio room when this new kid with tech stripes looks up and smiles at me just like he did in the dream.

“We met—in a way, that is … weren't you in the Double G the other night?”

I remembered a place I'd wandered into where everybody was looking at something I couldn't see. The way they were looking and a smell in the place got me hot and Jimmy looking at me like that, I was getting a hard-on now so I sat down to hide it and lit a cigarette.

Jimmy starts filling me in on the officers. He always knew who was what aboard ship. “The Old Man's a real asshole and you can't smear it on too thick—tell him you want to be buried right in the same coffin with him when you die. Anyhoo, I think we're getting a new C.O. You see, this is a kook project with simulated space conditions and the old C.O. can't adjust. So they have called in someone called Krup von Nordenholz, a Nazi war criminal, I hear, but a space expert. So forget about the old C.O. Never butter a man on the way out or you can slip right out with him. Like to bunk with me? Just one other kid in the room, Jim Lewis. You'll like him and he'll like you, too.…”

*   *   *

The investiture of the new C.O. was not unopposed and a period of chaos followed.

Stepping into the hall, I saw three naked boys swabbing the corridor, wriggling their asses and goosing each other. The old C.O., with the master-at-arms, bustles round a corner.

“This is disgraceful! Arrest these men!”

“Are we going to be popped, Commander?”

“Bare-ass in front of all our mates?”

“These men are obviously deranged. Call the medics. Reefer madness most likely. If it's dope they are to be transferred to the prison ward.”

The doctor minces in. “Hello there, young guys. Come along for an examination.”

“Who's
that
?”

“That's the new doctor.”

“Well, I don't like the look of him.”

“He's supposed to be an expert on space medicine.”

“So what?”

“So long as I'm C.O. this is Naval Station 123 Communications.”

Back in his cabin, the C.O. found a full-length naked effigy of himself dangling with a hard-on from a lantern hook in the ceiling. Then a powder charge went off in its nuts and a roll of paper popped out the cock in a puff of smoke. The paper landed on his desk and unrolled: his resignation just waiting for his signature.

The resignation of the old C.O. after a nervous breakdown did not end the conflict. The old navy was still in occupation. But Krup was winning. Smoothly Krup moved in his Hitler
Jungen
boys, one looking just like another, all with rosy cheeks and yellow hair. These boys were clean, efficient, exemplary sailors and the old navy could find no fault with them. And Krup removed the off limits on Tamaghis. This made him popular with the men. All the swishes in camouflage openly wore Krup buttons: Billy Budd with a rope around his neck saying, “God Bless Captain Krup.”

And the croaker was a Krup man. He served on a Krup metal junk runner when the crew broke into the cargo and got hooked on M.J. Krup found it out and cut them off cold. “This is not a charitable institution,” he told the ward full of M.J. addicts shitting, screaming, puking, ejaculating phosphorescent sperm. “I leave you in good hands.”

Anyone reporting sick to that croaker walked out a Krup man or he went out feet-first. And the fence sitters, seeing the way the navies were crumbling, began coming over to Krup, and since many of these were the technical sergeants, that just about sewed it up as a Krup shop.

Then one night, the Krup men in every dorm got up before dawn and took down all the pinup girls. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light forty-eight naked boys fucking, sucking, rimming on a red, white, and blue gallows and some awful Nordic shit Krup laps up like a cat, the boy singing his swan song in a mountain lake full of swans who convoy him reverently to the gallows. You don't have to be a space expert, just a tech sergeant, to see the old navy game in operation—how one faction gets another out to slide in their own boys.

Morning sun on morning hard-ons as the tars climb out of their bunks and stare at the walls.

“Where's my sexpot?” a boy moans stolidly.

“I can't stand these kids on my walls.”

“They're not your walls any longer.”

“Hans, Rudi, Heinrich, Willi—
herein!
”

Come in with Krup or else. A Krup takeover of the crew and the ship, or so it seemed. He changed the name of the ship from
The Enterprise
to
The Billy Celeste,
after a nineteenth-century English man-of-war. Now all Krup had to worry about were his own men, who had used him to get rid of the old C.O., and the old navy with its loathsome pinups and pro stations.

But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We'd seen this character operate, how smoothly he'd hoaxed us into his hanging universe … Tamaghis … the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have these deactivated Sirens just give you the sex trill.

The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-knot ties.

“Might pop myself a month's pay tonight.”

“More likely you'll swing the other way.”

The heavy-handed kidding—it's all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise—he's from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror.…