I lit my pipe and watched the suck of the yellow flame into the dark whiskey and pine smelling leaves, and I felt the rainwater soak into the hole in my left Oxford, the black one. The brown one was waterproof. I stepped into the booth for the phone to ring, waiting for the smoke to cover up the smell of the apparantly incontinent alcoholic Turkish fishermonger who last used the place, to, it seemed clear, complain to a herring merchant in the Dardenelles about the bad batch he just received.
The phone appropriate tinkled.
"Brain? Mack Brain? Dr. Mack Max Marion Brain?"
"Spit it out, Chief."
"Aaacchchhcchchchch....."
"Did you just spit something out or are you being strangled?"
Fourteen quick burps from what sounded like a BAR rifle that woke up on the wrong side of the bed popped on the other line.
"You're being strangled AND shot?"
"Garreshshhghhgaaahchh/"
Then there was the distinctive rumble of a 1928 DeGrise Steam Shovel warming up, and the menacing clank of its chain linkage and bucket assembly betoke no beneficent intent.
"Just my &%$#ing luck. Okay. Do you want me to call the cops or just come right over?"
"Hoarachscchchaaaachchhh...Aieee!..Gaccchhhshshshhcchchchch!"
"Alright, just hang on. What? Operator? Collect?"
I dropped in a Buffalo nickel and considered taking my own sweeet time for that cheap bastard. But Hedy Lamarr needed him alive.
---
Unfortunately, the line went dead before I had an address. The guy had money, so it was probably in the toney part of town. That narrowed it down: a rich neighborhood with an operating steam shovel. I hailed a cab, calling it a monument to modern transportation, then I got one to stop and handed the driver a $5 and popped one of those special go pills the Fly-Boys used. I topped off with some more cough syrup, took a drag on the special Jamaican pipe tobacco, tossed the bottle out the window and off we went. If only I had been sober to begin with.
It was not so much that the cab was fast, as that the curvature of space-time began to warp inward somewhere on the up side of Pacific Heights. Yet, I'm a grown man. I'm the first to admit that the driver might have motivated to speed by a fare as high as the moon screaming to shut up so I could listen for a steam engine because Roosevelt needed the Finnish robot scientist to tell Hedy Lamarr about the electro-atomic relay coupling before he was strangled by Nazi spies disguised as an Esther Williams' swim dance troupe. In frustration I may have fired a couple of .45 rounds through the roof. But it was hot. I needed the air, and the air was also were the chartreuse were-elephants and Errol Flynn dressed as Marie Antoinette were dancing their mysterious dance of the all-knowing nothingness. This was also the moment I was the catalyst but not legally responsible for accidently shooting some bum poet named Kerouac in the elbow.
Finally, above a sandstone Edwardian Mansion rose a cloud of yellow dust from the suspicious collapse of the sitting room. The interior lights exposed the steam shovel's remorseless steely bucket whose jaws opened and clanked shut and opened again. Menacing!
I left the cab, or rather the driver poked me out of the door into a street puddle with a broom handle. My legs were wobblier than an overweight belly dancer, and after a brief ecstatic vision of the loving reunion of Krisha and Mary Magdelene in a Helsinki sauna bath, I collapsed like a bag of mechanics' laundry on the ornate red door.
The door opened. It was Herb Caen. That guy really did know everybody.
Suspecting he was a collaborator, I screamed "You'll never last in this town!" before passing out to a another vision: it was the city in the future. Guys had long scruffy hair and were beating drums. Girls were running around nearly naked, dancing in the street. "F" on 1, "A+" on 2, I thought. But then a giant blimp flew over, with gondolas brimming with weapons, machine gunning everything in sight. The enormous tail had a giant smiling Hitler wearing a dashiki and blue sunglasses and straw hat and making an "OK" sign, as drums exploded, houses burned and the girls ran away, breasts jiggling in terror.
I was unconscious. One thought: "I can't...let....all...of. ..this...happen!"
I awoke to green velvet room with an enormous Turner painting of an avalanche wiping out a aristocratic picnic. "Scotch and Soda," said Herb, handing me a glass sardonically. No one could hand over a glass sardonically like Herb. He was so casually debonaire I once watched him take out a squad of fascist infantry in Spain with a cocked eyebrow. So what was he doing running around with the secret Esther Williams death squad?
My head felt like it had two old people whose property taxes had just been raised living in it. My religious ephinanies took a back seat to an overwhelming desire for a can of Clammato. But I reached for my .45 and discreetly pulled it on him when his back was turned to reach for the spare soda dispenser.
"Brain. Relax. I was the one who called you. We were lucky they left the keys in the steam shovel after they locked us in here. We have work to do."
That's when I noticed that my gun had been replaced with a bottle of hair tonic. No sense pulling the trigger unless I wanted to improve his appearance. A door opened and Dardenella suddenly slinked in, wearing a tight silk bathrobe with giant shoulder pads which I knew from previous experience could be used to store ammunition, lunch or penicillin, depending on the circumstances. She looked gorgeous, good like a cool summer lake in hot August weather full of women who looked just like her.
"Brain. Darling! You're here, you're alive!" She rushed over and squeezed me. "Closer, Closer!" She cried.
"If I was any closer, you'd need a obstetrician. Now what's going on, Schnookum-lips?"
"That nazi-cootch Coulter escaped with the help of the fake Esther Williams, her transvestite swim team and the atomic robots and kidnapped Hedy Lamarr, the X-47 electro-relay design and also Eleanor Roosevelt and are fleeing as we speak across to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland in a new german submarine-dirigible."
"Hmm. That's exactly what I thought you'd say."
Caen wrly pointed to a spindly blue gyrocopter, armed with flares and depth charges.
"Time's a wastin'. Here's a manual and a thermos of Manhattans."
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