John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“To phrase it in the classic manner,” Yukio said abruptly, “is there another way out of here?”

Rickenharp nodded. “Yeah… Uh—somewhere.”

Willow was staring at a teaser blurb under a still-image of two men, a woman and a goat. He took a step closer, squinting at the goat.

“You looking for a family resemblance, Willow?” Rickenharp said.

“Shut your ’ole, ya retro greaser.”

The booth sensed his nearness: the images on the sample placard began to move, bending, licking, penetrating, reshaping themselves with a weirdly formalized awkwardness; the booth’s light increased its red glow, puffed out a tease of pheromone and amyl nitrite, trying to seduce him.

“Well, where is the other door?” Carmen hissed.

“Huh?” Rickenharp looked at her. “Oh! I’m sorry, I’m so—uh I’m not sure.” He glanced over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “The bird didn’t follow us in.”

Yukio murmured, “The electric fields on the tinglers confuse the bird’s guidance system. But we must keep a step ahead.”

Rickenharp looked around—but he was still stoned: the maze of black booths and fleshtones seemed to twist back on itself, to turn ponderously, as if going down some cubistic drain…

“I will find the other door,” Yukio said. Rickenharp followed him gratefully. He wanted out.

They hurried through the narrow hall between tingler booths. The customers moved pensively—or strolled with excessive nonchalance—from one booth to another, reading the blurbs, scanning the imagery, sorting through fetishistic indexings for their personal libido codes, not looking at one another except peripherally, carefully avoiding the margins of personal-space.

Chuffing, sighing music played from somewhere; the red lights were like the glow of blood in a hand held over a bright light. But the place was rigorously Calvinistic in its obstacle course of tacit regulations. And here and there, at the turns in the hot, narrow passageways between rows of booths, bored security guards rocked on their heels and told the browsers, No loitering please, you can purchase more time at the front desk.

Rickenharp flashed that the place wanted to drain his sexuality, as if the vacuum-cleaner hoses in the booths were going to vacuum his orgone energy, leave him chilled as a gelding.

Get the fuck out of here.

Then he saw EXIT, and they rushed for it, through it.

They were in an alley. They looked up, around, half expecting to see the metal bird. No bird. Only the gray intersection of styroconcrete planes, stunningly monochrome after the hungry chromatics of the tingler gallery.

They walked out to the end of the alley, stood for a moment watching the crowd. It was like standing on the bank of a torrent. Then they stepped into it, Rickenharp, blue mesc’d, fantasizing that he was getting wet with the liquefied flesh of the rush of humanity as he steered by sheer instinct to his original objective: the OmeGaity.

They pushed through the peeling black chessboard doors into the dark mustiness of the OmeGaity’s entrance hall, and Rickenharp gave Carmen his coat to hide her bare breasts. “Men only, in here,” he said, “but if you don’t shove your femaleness into their line of sight, they might let us slide.”

Carmen pulled the jacket on, zipped it up—very carefully—and Rickenharp gave her his dark glasses.

Rickenharp banged on the window of the screening kiosk beside the locked door that led into the cruising rooms. Beyond the glass, someone looked up from a fat-screen TV. “Hey, Carter,” Rickenharp said.

“Hey.” Carter grinned at him. Carter was, by his own admission, “a trendy faggot.” He was flexicoated battleship gray with white trim, a minimono style. But the real M’n’Ms would have spurned him for wearing a luminous earring—it blinked through a series of words in tiny green letters— Fuck… you… if… you… don’t… like… it… Fuck… you… if —and they’d have considered that unforgivably “Griddy.” And anyway Carter’s wide, froggish face didn’t fit the svelte minimono look. He looked at Carmen. “No girls, Harpie.”

“Drag queen,” Rickenharp said. He slipped a folded twenty newbux note through the slot in the window. “Okay?”

“Okay, but she takes her chances in there,” Carter said, shrugging. He tucked the twenty in his charcoal bikini briefs.

“Sure.”

“You hear about Geary?”

“Nope.”

“Snuffed hisself with China White ’cause he got green pissed.”

“Oh, shit.” Rickenharp’s skin crawled. His paranoia flared up again, and to soothe it he said, “Well, I’m not gonna be licking anybody’s anything. I’m looking for Frankie.”

“That asshole. He’s there, holding court or something. But you still got to pay admission, honey.”

“Sure,” Rickenharp said.

He took another twenty newbux out of his pocket, but Carmen put a hand on his arm and said, “We’ll cover this one.” She slapped a twenty down.

Carter took it, chuckling. “Man, that queen got some real nice larynx work.” Knowing damn well she was a girl. “Hey, Rick, you still playing at the—”

“I blew the gig off,” Rickenharp cut in, trying to head off the pain. The boss blue had peaked and left him feeling like he was made out of cardboard inside, like any pressure might make him buckle. His muscles twitched now and then, fretful as restive children scuffing feet. He was crashing. He needed another hit. When you were up, he thought, things showed you their frontsides, their upsides; when you peaked, things showed you their hideous insides. When you were down, things showed you their backsides, their downsides. File it away for lyrics.

Carter pressed the buzzer that unlocked the door. It razzed them as they walked through.

Inside it was dim, hot, humid.

“I think your blue was cut with coke or meth or something,” Rickenharp told Carmen as they walked past the dented lockers. “Cause I’m crashing harder than I should be.”

“Yeah, probably… What’d he mean ‘he got green pissed’?”

“Positive test for AIDS-three. The HIV that kills you in three weeks. You drop this testing pill in your urine and if the urine turns green you got AIDS. There’s no cure for the new HIV yet, won’t be in three weeks, so the guy…” He shrugged.

“What the ’ell is this place?” Willow asked.

In a low voice Rickenharp told him, “It’s a kind of bathless gay baths, man. Cruising places for ’mos. But about a lotta the people are straights who ran out of bux at the casinos, use it for a cheap place to sleep, you know?”

“Yeah? And ’ow come you know all about it, ’ey?”

Rickenharp smirked. “You saying I’m gay? The horror, the horror.”

Someone in a darkened alcove to one side laughed at that.

Willow was arguing with Yukio in an undertone. “Oi don’t like it, that’s all, fucking faggots got a million fucking diseases. Some side o’ beef with a tan going to wank on me leg.”

“We just walk through, we don’t touch,” Yukio said. “Rickenharp knows what to do.”

Rickenharp thought, Hope so.

Maybe Frankie could get them safely off Freezone, maybe not.

The walls were black pressboard. It was a maze like a tingler gallery but in the negative. There was a more ordinary red light; there was the peculiar scent that lots of skin on skin generates and the accretion of various smokes, aftershaves, cheap soap, and an ingrained stink of sweat and semen gone rancid. The walls stopped at ten feet up and the shadows gathered the ceiling into themselves, far overhead. It was a converted warehouse space, with a strange vibe of stratification: claustrophobia layered under agoraphobia. They passed mossy dark cruising warrens. Faces blurred by anonymity turned to monitor them as they passed, expressions cool as video cameras.