mangozeen

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Last Night At The Flamingo (1978) John Ioza

There were two thousand queens last night at the Flamingo Before the sun came up they dropped a thousand dollars in drugs on the dance floor.

Eighteen superb mixes got sixty thousand oohs and Forty thousand aahs last night at the Flamingo.

Two queens got six replays on a pinball machine As I stared at the Rockola jukebox next to them Last night at the Flamingo.

Two hundred and twenty-eight egos were destroyed Last night at the Flamingo

Forty thousand cigarettes were smoked Last night at the Flamingo. Thirty five thousand of them were Menthol. The rest were Mafia.

Seven queens forgot where they were At least half the evening Last night at the Flamingo.

Ten thousand plastic cups Were flung to the floor

As six thousand cups of coffee disappeared Last night at the Flamingo.

Four thousand sleeping pills were swallowed In a masturbatory rush of self-administration Last night at the Flamingo.

Seventeen hysterectomies were performed Last night at the Flamingo.

I saw one queen checking hemlines Behind a banquet Last night at the Flamingo.

Twenty people fell out of the booth Last night at the Flamingo.

Eighty thousand questions were asked And nine thousand answered Last night at the Flamingo.

A thousand conversations Drowned in music Last night at the Flamingo.

Thirty-seven queens changed their clothes At least twice last night at the Flamingo.

Five hundred phone numbers And seven hundred promises Changed partners Last night at the Flamingo.

Eight hot records, so new They're not even on the radio yet Produced a thousand yawns Last night at the Flamingo.

Two people fell in love with each other Last night at the Flamingo.

The seeds of eight thousand orgasms In three downtown bath houses Were planted last night at the Flamingo.

Three hundred-fifty bottles of Ethyl Chloride Were consumed by six hundred white goddesses On a honky-tonk safari Last night at the Flamingo.

At least one person passed out Last night at the Flamingo. Unfortunately, I was dancing with him And didn't get to see who it was.

Fluctuations in the price of life Caught my eye last night at the Flamingo And several birds couldn't survive introductions.

On my way home I spotted two queens Licking the pavement outside the door Last night at the Flamingo.

When I brought my white pants to the cleaner today, He asked me if I'd been rolling around with the pigs.

"No," I said, "Last night I was at the Flamingo."

End The Endless War

United States troops have fought in Afghanistan since 2002.

The Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11.

Neither did Osama Bin Laden

In 2003 the USA invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

The Baathist leader might have been a piece of shit, but he almost had nothing to do with 9/11.

How many Iraqis and Afghanis were on the planes of 9/11?

None.

And the Endless War has spread across the globe to Syria, Yemen, Tanzania, Libya, Somalia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Cameroon, and Central African Republic as well as Black Ops in many other countries. Drones strike popilated areas with a kill radius on 150 meters, assassins hit the unknowing, and attack planes strike villages in the middle of nowhere. We have slaughtered women and children. Each death recruit troops to the other side, who are always portrayed as terrorists by Hollywood and the Pentagon.

The Israeli Occupation Army killed these four young boys on a Gaza Beach with American technology.

The Endless War stretched out even before 9/11.

The USS Vincennes knocked Iran Air Flight 655 out of the air in 1988. 290 civilians died and the sailors of the missile cruiser were awarded medals for shooting down a passenger plane.

No one has ever said sorry.

Biden never mentioned the War during his campaign. Trump said it had to end. No one has called for a truce.

They are hand in fist with the military-industrial complex who care nothing about soldiers or their victims.

End the Endless War and now Biden has declared that all American troops will be out of Afghanistan by August 31.

The war ends for us. but not them, because some wars last forever.

A Last Night At the Royal Lieu

Paris was a beautiful city in 1985.

I worked the door at several nightclubs around the city.

My bosses were Albert and Serge.

We also had a club in London, the Cafe de Paris, and another in Nice, Le Nautique.

Jacques was my partner at the door.

The ex-con was a soothing balm to my constant rage.

"Pete Johnson, calmez toi."

I tried my best.

Paris was a City of Light.

Famous people came to the clubs.

We treated graciously as if they were the hoi polloi.

They liked being normal, even if they looked special.

Not everyone was that famous.

Willie de Ville showed up with a playboy friend from Hamburg.

I had worked for Jurgen at Bsirs in that old Hanseatic city. No one knew what he did for a living. He always said it had something to do with telexes.

The club was owned by the city's # 1 pimp. They had been best friends from youth.

Kalle was more than dangerous, but never gave me any trouble unlike some of his underlings.

I left right before Christmas 1982.

I never went back.

Jurgen had a drug problem. So did a lot of us, but we thought we were destined to live forever.

Heroin can make you feel immortal until it kills you.

Jurgen and Willie arrived to the club high.

Their eyes pinned by Iranian Brown.

They asked if I wanted some.

"No thanks, I'm more into white."

"Me too," answered Willie. We knew each other from the punk scene in New York. He had a big following in Europe. Everyone was surprised both of us were still alive.

None of us died easy.

The previous evening I had run into Johnny Thunders at Gibus in Republique.

His manager said I owed him money for a bad deal in New York.

"This is Paris, man. He don't owe you nothing."

Johnny was great that night.

In more ways than one.

After hearing that story everyone wanted to see the legendary Johnny Thunders.

"You never know when it will be his last show."

Willie was running the same odds, but said, "Persian brown won't get me."

They packed Albert's Cadillac and headed east to Republique.

I went home with Karine.

She and I had been a thing once.

Heroin had killed that love.

Now we only had sex and drugs.

She left my hotel room in La Marais at noon.

Karim, her dealer was waiting at the Pere Tranquille Cafe in Les Halles.

She needed it more than me and I slept late.

The room telephone rang. I picked it up. It was Pauline.

"Jurgen is dead." The thin Parisian stylist loved the German.

"How?"

"OD. He is at the morgue. Can you go identify him?"

"I'm not family, but I'll try."

The back entrance of the Quai de la Rapee morgue was quiet.

The interior was deserted, but the sound of electrical saws buzzed in the back rooms.

A clerk allowed me to view Jurgen's body for a 200 franc 'pour-boire'.

Jurgen and I had been to Switzerland.

We had sailed on the Alstersee.

I asked the examiner the cause of death.

"Heart attack and drug overdose."

Jurgen looked like he was sleeping and I thanked the ME for his information with 200 francs.

I called Pauline from outside.

She cried when I said it was him.

Years later I ran into Willie.

I mentioned Jurgen's death.

"He was in good shape when I left, but he wasn't ready to stop."

"I guess not."

Paris was a City of Light, but the light doesn't shine everywhere.

Not when death comes knocking on the door.

Better to be alive.

Forever.

Immortal.

THE ROAD TO KABUL by Peter Nolan Smith

Afghanistan was a two-day drive from Italy in the summer of 1972. At the end of the school year my future friend Gianni bought a school bus in Milano and told his parents that he was going on vacation.

Kabul was his destination.

His parents offered to pay the gas, viewing the venture as a mind-expanding experience after which Gianni would enter medical school. His companion for this voyage was his future wife, Julie, who knew the real purpose behind the trip, since she was holding over $20K in a money belt around her waist.

Hashish cost $5 a gram in the cafes around the Duomo cathedral. Gianni was planning on quadrupling his money by a smuggling venture to Kabul, which was the first step of the hippie route through Asia.

"Kabul, Kathmandu, Kuta Beach."

On the journey through Turkey and Persia, he didn't let Julie touch the steering wheel. Italian men are like that with cars and Muslim men are that way with their women.

In Kabul he packed the school bus with several hundred kilos of hash bricks and headed back to Italy, where he sold the shipment for millions of lira.

Gianni made three more of those trips during his years in medical school. Julie and he had a good life. No one asked the source of his good fortune. In Italy questions about income were considered impolite.

In 1979 I met Gianni at Hurrahs. The club booked punk bands. I worked the door. He was an intern at a big NY hospital. He loved the Damned, Buzzcocks, and B-52s. We became friends. He thought my girlfriend was beautiful.

Lisa was a model from Buffalo. She dated a ranked tennis player. I was never jealous. She came home to me every night. I never questioned the smell of another man's cologne on her skin. Accusations wouldn't have changed the model's moral code, when it came to getting ahead and I had little to offer her other than love.

One evening we ate over Gianni apartment on the East Side, which was near his hospital. His wife cooked northern Italian dishes.

Lisa played with their young daughter. Alice had blonde hair. She could have been Lisa's baby. Her unspoken dream was sacrifice for her career. Lisa wanted to be a top model. She was only 5-7. I didn't have the heart to tell her that she was short.

One night Gianni and I sat on his balcony, smoking reefer. He critiqued the weed like a connoisseur of fine wine and Gianni explained the source of his expertise.

Hash runs to Afghanistan enhanced my appreciation for the doctor.

"Now you’re a good citizen." Afghanistan was an exotic destination on the other side of the world. I had read THE HORSEMAN about the traditional horse game of Buzkashi, which was as violent as a Mongol charge. It had been made into a movie with Omar Sharif and Jack Palance.

"Maybe." He leaned forward so his next words were for my ears alone. "I would have kept doing it. The money was too good. Better than anything a doctor can earn in Italy or here, but once the communists overthrew the monarchy, I could tell something bad was going to happen and all things bad have long legs."

“Like what?"

"Chaos.” It was a feeling. "Afghanistan is on the map of the Great Game. You know what that is?"

"England and Russian trying to control the high plains of Asia for control of India's riches." I had read Rudyard Kipling's KIM. English pundits had traveled the high plains to upset the schemes of the Tsar. The 1975 movie THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING had portrayed two British deserters attempting to set up a kingdom based on destiny and Enfield rifles in the arid valleys beyond the Himalayan rainshadow.

"In 1842 3600 British soldiers retreated from Kabul. The only one to survive the rout, was a doctor, William Brydon." Gianni knew his history. "They tried to put a king on the throne."

The prize had been India and it still is for the Russians."

"The Russians."

"Yes, the Russians." The Commies were on the march throughout the 3rd World.

We returned to the dinner table. Our conversation focused on Lisa’s upcoming trip to the UK. David Bailey wanted to shot her for British Vogue. I planned on meeting Lisa in London a month later.

In November the two of us lived in a studio behind the Chelsea football pitch. Saturday afternoons Fulham Road was a war zone between the visiting fans and the Old Stafford firm of hooligans. Lisa and I lazed in bed until the only sign of the post-game riots was wind-blown trash. Vogue went with another model for the cover and I hung out at punk clubs, while she socialized with high society at Annabelles. She came home with her disheveled hair. It wasn't from the wind.

I was a third wheel on the bicycle of her ambition and returned to New York. The US Embassy was overwhelmed in Tehran. The Pentagon was powerless to rescue the hostages.

America had lost its taste for empire in Vietnam and the road to world domination was open for the Reds. The magnet pointed south through Kabul. Their army invaded in 1979. President Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics. Ronald Reagan beat him in the 1980 election. He had bribed the ayatollahs to delay their release.

Lisa went missing in Europe with a Russian gangster from Odessa. I spotted her in a lingerie ad for Perla. Her smile invited men to bed. I hoped that she was lucky. I never saw her in Vogue and I looked every month from cover to cover.

The 80s were a new day for America. We financed the insurgency in Afghanistan. The Kremlin fought the mujaheddin ten years.

Millions dead.

Millions more in exile.

A nation in ruins.

The last Russian soldier to cross the Amu Darya was Lieut. Gen. Boris V. Gromov.

"There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me."

Only the dead.

The USA walked away from the war.

I read more books about the region. Peter Hopkirk's THE GREAT GAME, Peter Levi's THE LIGHT GARDEN OF THE ANGEL KING, André Deutsch's A HISTORY OF CONFLICT and anything else venturing onto the subject of Afghanistan. I planned a trip across the region, although peace evaded the landlocked country until the Taliban seized power with the backing of the Pakistan secret service.

Gianni's prediction about something bad had legs.

Civil War, the Taliban, Al- Quada, 9/11.

GW Bush authorized a low-level invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The Northern Alliance rolled over the Taliban troops and their Arab comrades with the help of US air power. The ease of the conquest emboldened the president to open a second front on the War of Terror.

Iraq.

Afghanistan was an after-thought, but the Taliban were not accepting defeat. They had retreated to prevent the mass starvation that winter. The war has lasted nineteen years and two presidents with an end finally in sight.

This afternoon I recalled the words of William Gladstone, the 19th Century English politician.

"Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own."

Bombs in the compound.

Machine-gunned civilians.

Death from above and below.

Only bribes to warlords will prevent a repeat of the 44th regiment's disastrous retreat from Kabul.

Bribes to grow drugs.

In 2021 it's not about hashish now.

It's heroin.

A busload of smack could finance my retirement in Thailand for several hundred years.

Sadly Gianni passed from Co-Vid and I'm too old for that segment of the Great Game.

I have a wife and kids and grandchildren.

They want me alive for another thirty years and Kabul doesn't fit into that equation.

Then again being dead never had.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

The Great Invisible Wall Of China

Over my years of traveling back and forth to Asia I've flown into Peking on more than one occasion. Teachers around the world had taught that man-made barrier against the barbarian horde was visible from low orbit. This claim was based on the English antiquary William Stukeley writing in 1754 about Hadrian's Roman wall, "This mighty wall of four score miles in length is only exceeded by the Chinese Wall, which makes a considerable figure upon the terrestrial globe, and may be discerned at the Moon."

No astronauts in low orbit have seen the Great Wall and I never spotted the Badaling Great Wall near Zhangjiakou snaking across the mountains either upon landing or take-off at Peking.

Now coal-burning power plants and factories churn out a toxic miasma to blanket China's greatest city throughout the year, so that I doubt Peking is visible from a plane let alone the Great Wall.

I've never stopped in Peking long enough to savor those fumes, but I once deboarded on the tarmac.

The sky was clear and the Western Hills shone in the dusk just as they had for Marco Polo, but there was no way he could have seen the Great Wall from Space.

All in the price of progress.

Starry Nights for UFOs

As a child of the 1960s I lived in the suburbs south of Boston. Summer nights were filled with silence; no cars, no voices, no music. Every house was a tomb and I would steal from the house to our back yard. The grass was shorn short by constant mowing. The stubs were painful to my feet, but I would spread a blanket on the ground, strip off my pajamas and lie on the lawn, looking to the sky.

My soul sought not the mystery of God in the celestial night, but an aberration in the galactic traffic.

"Oh, Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me away."

Alien abduction was a better fate than suffering pubescence in the suburbs, yet no flying saucers snatched my body. I was stranded on Earth along with billions of other humans. None of us were going to the stars, for our solar system is located on the most remote edge of the Milky Way.

Think as distant from New York as Great Slave Lake.

Spaceships warp past Earth without deccelerting. Our planet isn't on the Inter-Galactic Guide. A cosmic billboard on the Moon WINE AND DINE AT EARTH might help trade with the passing aliens, however Earthlings are stuck on the planet, especially after President Nixon had NASA abandon a Mars landing, colonization of the Moon, or a permanent orbital station in favor of Space Shuttles.

From that moment on I felt we were alone, despite claims to the contrary by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell that UFOs regularly visit this blue planet and not only the cow-mutilators of Wyoming.

His conversations with old-timers from Roswell strengthened his own experiences in Space and Edgar Mitchell was convinced that NASA and the Pentagon have been vigorously prevented the truth from reaching a public more interested in potato chips than UFOs.

"Is there life outside of Earth?"

The Colonel thought so, although my late father considered billions spent on NASA a waste. He was an electrical engineer. He loved my mother. She only wanted to go to Cape Cod in the summer and that desitnation was good enough for him as well.

"There's nothing out there?"

No go-go bars for sure or romantic lakes or no marching bands.

Tubas take up too much room in a spaceship, although I once saw a tuba on a Star Trek episode.

The former astronaut also says that the three crafts once hovering over Phoenix were not ours. They were from another planet and not Mars either. Someplace much farther away and we can't even estimate that distance with our pea brains, but I no longer want to go to the stars.

I have four kids.

A three loving daughters and two busy boys.

Plus two grandchildren.

Those are my aliens, for ET are us.

Children from future.

The Touch Of The Stars

As a child of the 1960s I lived in the suburbs south of Boston. Summer nights were filled with silence; no cars, no voices, no music. Every house was a tomb and the deep darkness often found a pre-teen boy stealing out the back door to spread a blanket on the ground, strip off his pajamas and lie on the lawn, looking to the sky.

My ritual was always the same.

I was not seeking the mystery of God in the celestial night, but an aberration in the galactic traffic.

"Oh, UFO come take me away."