The Butterfly Kid

9

FROM THE very beginning, the party was as horrid as I knew beforehand it would have to be. The guests, more than a hundred, were just about evenly divided between people I didn’t want to see and people I didn’t want to see me. The loft was too hot, too narrow, too crowded, too dark, too smoky, and stank to high someplace of elderly cat box… There were, furthermore, two low-fi sets, one at each end of the loft, each blasting a different record I’d never have listened to otherwise, plus an atrocious and overstuffed rock-n-roll gang abusing megawatt amplifiers at about midway through the loft, plus everybody shouting to be heard above it all. Untold numbers of guests were extravagantly overdue for baths. Other hordes of guests were shakily holding foul-colored drinks ready to spill on the nearest available me. A few guests, most definitely the wrong ones, had already reached the disrobing stage, and some weren’t limiting their efforts to themselves.

And just in case we were somehow able to withstand all this, the creature that opened the door and let us in was Laszlo Scott.

“Well, well, well,” he ad-libbed, “Chester the Great and Michael the Cross-Eyed Bear. You might as well come in; it can’t make any difference now.”

We wedged our way in, escaping Laszlo in the crowd, and moved by a process much like osmosis through the steamy loft, hunting for Harriet so we could pay our counterfeit respects and split. Perfect and preferably strangers, most likely female, shrieked, “Darling!” brutally through my tender ears. Anybody stepped on my feet all the time. Something tried to remove my clothes, I hope. My well-known joi de vivre signaled TILT.

(Sativa — that unprintable lady Machiavelli — wasn’t with us, nor was Sean. They stayed home to take advantage of our absence, and I still don’t know how she engineered it. Under my breath, and sometimes above it, I invented gorgeous ancient curses for her head.)

We reached the back of the loft without encountering Harriet, which was odd, she being a lot too large to miss. We’d not found Gary either, but in that environment this single lonely blessing went unnoticed. We had, however, mysteriously acquired tall glasses full of a swampy bluish liquid that, remarkably, didn’t taste at all bad, considering. We emptied our glasses, tossed them out the nearest window, and started back toward the front of the loft.

Just as we were sneaking past that felonious rock pile again, it blew an untuned fanfare that plastered us against the wall. When this was over, silence or studio deafness fell upon the gladly smitten horde.

“Cats and chicks,” a regrettable voice boomed from the rock group’s biggest amplifier. That explained where Gary the Frog was lurking. “Cats,” it regibbered, “and chicks: welcome to our little party.”

“Yes,” came Harriet’s equally amplified baritone, “we’re so glad you could make it tonight,” which might mean a number of things but probably didn’t.

We were trapped, Mike and I, trapped and doomed. Even when no one was talking, the air pressure from that six-foot amplifier’s humming kept us pinned against the wall. We couldn’t get away, and the wall had splinters.

“Farewell, Michael,” I sighed at the top of my lungs. “I will sleep now.”

“Courage, mon brave,” he bellowed nobly. “We are not yet dead.”

“That’s half the problem,” I explained.

Then, “Cats and chicks,” the talking frog attacked again, “on account of this is our anniversity, me and Harriet’ve fixed up something superspecial for all our buddies here tonight. Right, Harry?”

“Right, Gary!”

“You bet. An’ here to tell you all about it is a local Village celebrity who needs no introduction, a cat who we all know an’ dig the most, a great artiste that his accomplishments are all the talk of MacDougal Street and environs, none other than your old buddy, Mis-ter Lasz-lo Scott!”

“Michael,” I said in what currently passed for a whisper.

“Yes?”

“I think I’ll start worrying now.”

“I’ll help you.”

Amid sporadic cheers and weak applause, Laszlo climbed over the bass drum and grabbed the microphone.

“Friends!” he lied. “Nah, let me call you colleagues.”

I was too weak to resist.

“Doubtless you have all heard about my Reality Pills, no doubt. Some of you have dropped ’em for yourself already, and even if you haven’t, you seen what they can do, right?”

Once more, “Michael,” I whispered, so to speak.

“Speak.”

“I think it’s too late to worry now.”

“Check.”

The only bright spot of the evening so far was that Laszlo kept making full stops for applause, but no one was applauding. Guessing this might be the only bright spot, I treasured it carefully.

“Now, everybody knows,” Laszlo hinted, “that I’m the only connection for my famous Reality Pills. Nobody can’t score ’em offa nobody else, you dig: just me, Laszlo Scott. An’ everybody knows how I been a Good Guy an’ just give ’em all away, mostly: just layin’ my famous Reality Pills on everyone I see, right? ’Cause that’s the kind of cat I am. I just can’t help it. If ol’ Laszlo’s got it, baby, it’s yours. Just ask me.”

I was growing ill, for any one or more of a number of reasons, take your pick. Two from Column A and one from Column B, but no one was applauding. Pass the mop.

Laszlo fumbled on. “An’ that’s just what I’m gonna do for each and every one of you people here tonight. In fact, dig it, I already done it. There’s been a great big dose of Laszlo Scott’s famous Reality Pill in Liquid Form in everything you people drank tonight. So all you people just go have yourselves a ball, an’ remember good ol’ Laszlo Scott’s the cat who turned you on.

“An’ now I want to close up with a brand-new poem I have wrote for this occasion.”

“Michael!” I was fighting like a netted panther, but Laszlo, the bastard, the inhuman friend et cetera, turned the volume up for his epic and I couldn’t even move my arms.

Laszlo made a great show of searching his pockets for the manuscript (though a rumor, made up by myself, that he could neither read nor write was generally accepted). Finally he gave up.

“Shucks,” he promised. “I must’ve left it home.” Tantalizing pause. “But I think I can remember how it goes.”

I doubted I’d be lucky enough to die.

Laszlo threw his cape back in a silent movie gesture that knocked Gary the Frog and the bass drum to the floor, struck a plaster of Paris pose, and began: “Love Song in a Summer Loft, by Laszlo Allen Scott the Fourth.

All the lights went out. The amplifiers quit. Mike and I fell to the floor in bruised and splinter-ridden heaps. Laszlo became blessedly inaudible.

“There is a God!” I yelled.

“Where are the fuses?” some idiot asked.

“Don’t tell him,” ordered Mike.

Lots of people screamed, but after what we’d just been through, the peace, though merely relative, was wonderful.

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.

“Great. How?”

“Crawl.”

“Which direction, pray?”

“Any direction. If we can’t find the door, I’m willing to make do with the windows by now.”

“Seven stories?”

“You’d rather stay here?”

“Lead on.”

I did, keeping my right shoulder against the wall for a guide and crawling staunchly toward what I was almost certain was the door.

“Keep in touch,” I whispered back to Mike.

“Roger.”

“That word again.”

“Right.” He grabbed my left heel and held on.

“Toot! Toot!” I stated in my best steam locomotive accent. This was fun! In fact, the whole party had been fun, come to think of it, but this was clearly the best part. I felt great.

Part of me worried about that. Why should I feel so good? After (“Pardon me, ma’am”) what I’d just been through, at the very least I ought to ache all over. (“Excuse me, sir or madam.”) Instead I was feeling downright euphoric, which wasn’t natural. Something (“Toot-toot, toot-too… Oops! Sorry ’bout that.”) was wrong. (“Toot-toot.”)

Then my prancing fingers found the doorjamb. Aha. Anderson was right again, as usual. When would these fools ever learn not to doubt me?

“This way,” to Mike as I pulled myself erect. He joined me and we slipped quietly out of the loft and into the hall. It was much darker there, but the air was clearer and there was no crowd, so I could find my way around by ear nearly as well as I could’ve with my eyes if the lights had been on, but I stuck close to the wall to keep from worrying Michael.

We found the stairs with no trouble at all and started carefully down. I was feeling better by the second. To think, a few moments earlier I’d been worrying because I felt good. How absurd! Why should anyone worry about feeling good? What sort of old-maid-Protestant thinking was that? Probably thought didn’t deserve feel good, right? Bull. Felt great. Greater. Greatest. Yeah!

In fact, I felt so unprecedentedly good I could almost hear Handel’s Water Music playing behind me, my favorite happy music.

Halfway down I said, “Are you okay, Mike?”

“Of course.” Hmm. He sounded lots more vibrant and virile than usual. Echoes from the stairwell, doubtless. “Why shouldn’t we be okay?”

“Groovy.” We? Really? Poor old Michael. All that noise upstairs must’ve finally unhinged him. I’d seen it coming years ago, but what can you do?

I could still hear the Water Music. It was an amazingly lifelike illusion: the sound seemed to reverberate through the all but deserted old building, and the interpretation, which was brilliant, was completely unknown to me. I realized I’d have to have something done about that tomorrow, but for now it was a gas.

“Chester?” My God! Michael sounded ten feet tall.

“Yeah?”

“Must they play so loudly? We can hardly hear ourself think.”

“They?”

“That orchestra.”

I stopped. Mike bumped into me. He wasn’t ten feet tall.

“You,” I said, “you can hear them, too?”

“I could hardly fail to. They’re probably audible in Brooklyn. Do they have to play so loudly?”

“Hmm. I refuse to believe any of this.”

“Believe what you like, but please ask them to cool it. They’re hurting our head.”

And then the lights came on.

Mike says it was five minutes before I could move again, but he’s probably tinting the facts a bit. I distinctly remember that the gaudily liveried baroque orchestra that filled the stairs behind us played a little less than half a minuet before I screamed.

The music stopped. “Your pleasure, sire?” said the fiddler in the fore, bowing deeply, fiddle straight out at a 45-degree angle behind him and bow held horizontally across his chest in what was clearly a salute, though I’d never seen it done before.

“What,” maintaining my cool, “is all of this in aid of?”

“Doctor Handel’s Water Music, sire. I was given to understand that you were fond…”

“No. I mean you. The orchestra.”

“Ah. Your privy band, sire. Did you not, upon many a time yet fresh in memory, express a fond desire that such as we might…”

“Cancel.”

“Sire?”

“Tilt.”

“Your pardon, sire.”

“Forget it. Please play on, maestro, ma un poco mezzo forte, if you please.”

“Your most humble servant, sire.” He bowed again, then nodded his white-wigged head, and the minuet I’d screamed to pieces began anew, but softer now. We all continued down the stairs.

I was quiet for another flight — not thinking, just reacting — and then said, “Yes. It’s obvious enough, once the shock wears off, and even rather flattering, in a mildly introspective way. But, Michael, why have you taken to calling yourself we?”

“No room,” Michael gestured crossly. “None at all. Your walking jukebox takes up more room than a teenyboppers’ fan club on parade. Hmph. Inconsiderate, we calls it, but we’ll wait.”

“Oh. You’ve become a convention?”

“No, more like an invocation.”

“Invocation?”

“Possibly.”

We walked the final flight in silence, not counting my personal band. That, by the way, seemed to leave a little something to be desired. Every now and then a false note rang out through the otherwise exceptional ensemble. Not a wrong note, mind you, just a slightly out of tune one. Bassoon, from the sound of it. This bugged me mainly because, the orchestra being merely an external figment of my own imagination, the false notes were my fault. The implication was humiliating.

Meanwhile I took time out to admire how well I was taking it all. Very calm. Very cool. Very natural.

“Wow!” Mike said as we approached the door. “That’s a relief.”

“Oh? Are you alone now?”

“More or less. Wow. Now I know how a tenement building feels.”

A crowd of not-much-stranger-looking-than-usual people across the street beckoned, whistled, and waved to Mike. A rowdy bunch, not really our kind of people, but he sauntered over to see what they wanted.

I was more interested in the orchestra. Oh, it was a doozy! Authentic livery of purple watered silk and plum plush with lots of lace; authentic instruments like serpents, recorders, krumhorns, sackbutts, oboi d’amore, cornets, brasses without valves and woodwinds without keys, two almost Turkish kettledrums carried by two husky ’prentices each, all absolutely authentic and brand-new and being played by virtuosi — with the exception of that bassoon; authentic interpretations such as no man had heard since the early eighteenth century; authentic musicians, running roughly six inches shorter than modern average and ruddier complexioned than we’re used to: it was perfect — except for that bassoon.

While the leader arranged the orchestra in street formation — four abreast and God help anyone else using the same sidewalk — I searched for that bassoon. There were fourteen bassoons, but I found the culprit at first glance by instinct. Except for being shorter, he was Andrew Blake’s double, stiff red beard and all. My imagination has a better sense of humor than I do and I’m jealous.

“My good man,” I addressed him, falling into character, “you seem to be a little out of tune.”

“Aye, sire,” tugging his rusty forelock, “so I seem,” and he sounded exactly like Andy’s famous Irish impersonation, the one he uses to con free drinks on St. Patrick’s Day.

“I trust you will correct the defect.”

“An it please you, sire,” the forelock bit again, “I’m not allowed.”

“No?”

“ ‘Throw ’im a clinker now and again for authenticity,’ they tells me, beggin’ your pardon, sire.”

“Oh.” How was I supposed to handle this? I decided to try ignoring it. But, “Pardon me, do you have any relatives named Blake?”

“Relatives?” He laughed. “God love ye, sire, you know the likes o’ me ain’t got no relatives. We’re all too poor, beggin’ your pardon. You want relatives, sire, you go talk to the leader there. ’E’s got himself a Nephew, he does, playin’ second fiddle. Or them four drum boys, now. They’re all each other’s Brothers, so they say. But I ain’t got no relatives, sire. Not me.”

“This is turning into one hell of a night.” Michael was back, with company: those oddly-dressed rowdies from across the street. I wasn’t at all sure about those people. They looked like the kind of Saturday types I generally avoid, but Mike was my best friend so I held my peace.

“What are we going to do with all this?” I wondered, waving florid circles in the air.

“Who am I to question the dictates of the gods? Onward to The Garden of Eden. Why not?”

Why indeed. “That’s boss.”

It took awhile to start moving. The orchestra was already in order, but Mike’s associates couldn’t agree on who ought to walk where. They exhausted the possibilities of discussion and negotiation in less than five minutes and asked Mike’s permission to retire to the nearest alley for a conference. I found myself wondering about Mike.

The rowdies’ conference took some fifteen minutes. Then they returned, none the visible worse for wear, and took up stations flanking the orchestra, four on each side. They stood there glowering and making highly improper and hostile gestures at each other while Mike and I, both a bit puzzled, walked to the head of the column.

“At your pleasure, sire,” the leader bowed.

“You may begin,” I nodded.

And we did.

There are problems associated with marching an orchestra in full throat through lower Manhattan after midnight that the average man can’t possibly imagine, and I envy him. The police were no problem — not after the leader produced, on irate demand, an appallingly official city permit to hold a parade through those streets at that hour playing music — but the people who lived in the buildings we passed were difficult to cope with. They threw some of the strangest things, and I couldn’t see just how they were being coped with. I was starting to develop some faith in the Reality Pill, though. It seemed to give good service.

Mike’s acquaintances continued to worry me. “Michael,” I inquired as we columned right onto Broadway, “your — friends — look very interesting.”

“Yes.” he beamed. “Aren’t they great? I’m really very proud of them.”

“I can see where you might be. Ah, what are they?”

“Gods, of course. A whole pantheon. It’s a little pantheon, I’ll grant you, but it has a certain fey charm of its own”

“Gods, eh?” They were still tossing graphic threats at each other and their fey charm was moderately difficult to see. Acquired taste, perhaps. “Gods of what?”

“Oh, this and that. You know. I’ll introduce you.” He turned and yelled, “Hey, Mick, front and center!” then turned back and said, “You’ll like Mick. He’s quite well done.”

Mick, it seemed, was the god of teenyboppers, and quite well done. A little under seven feet tall and glowing, with shoulder-length gold hair, deep blue vacant eyes, and a pretty face that managed to look healthy, sensitive, pouting, and cheerful all at once, he was slimly dressed in white-net T-shirt and tights over gold and brown paisley briefs, and shod in supple fawn suede boots that tapered three inches higher aft than fore. He exuded, furthermore, an almost irresistible electric adolescent sexuality. Once more I wondered about Michael.

In the prettiest boy-man voice I’d ever heard, Mick spoke a few choice words so flawlessly fatuous I forgot them before he’d finished speaking, then returned to his place beside the orchestra and set to snarling at his colleagues once again.

“That’s unfair criticism, Mike,” I pointed out. “Most rock and roll musicians are…”

“Cool it. I’m not criticizing them.”

He wasn’t, I realized, not at all, and God help MacDougal Street.

Then we had the incident of the parade permit, after which I met Toke, the god of pot, just as tall as everyone but skinnier than most, no particular age, quaintly dressed in nickel bags and cigarette papers, with a hempen wreath in his shaggy hair (the very same color as yours) and reeking of patchouli so strong I could almost walk on it: another threat to MacDougal Street’s stability.

We took a left from Broadway onto Bleecker. By then we’d started gathering satellites — a minor crowd of young girls trying to touch Mick — and my orchestra was playing something that sounded suspiciously like “Hard Day’s Night,” with more false notes than usual from the unrelated bassoon. A six-foot-tall blue lobster — another little something of Mike’s, I gathered slightingly — watched us make the turn.

That reminded me. “Shouldn’t we be taking notes?”

“Do you think we can forget?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

The Village proper, if there is such a thing, was still some four blocks ahead, a sudden bright island in Manhattan’s after-midnight dimness. Already we could see that even though the entertainment houses were closed, Bleecker Street was as crowded as usual, hopefully with nobody we knew. Michael, therefore, stepped up the tempo of introductions, calling the rest of his pantheon front and center double time and dismissing them before they had a chance even to say hello, which was all to the good. They were:

* Fellatia, the goddess of something she and Mike coyly refused to name. She was a bulbous chick of moderate ugliness, aged anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and dressed all in pretty-colored Kleenex. Despite Mike’s brusque dismissal, she tried to assault me for nameless reasons of her own, but we beat her off. I began to think MacDougal Street might not survive the evening.

* Phlipout and Phlippina, twin deities of disorder, were muscular male and female teenyboppers — very healthy and confused — in whose presence, Mike claimed, all things tended to dissolve into the most spectacular chaos imaginable. The blithe madness lurking in their eyes made this seem all too likely, and I noticed that their place in the marching order was right beside my friend the out-of-tune bassoonist.

* Moe, the god of tourists, was forty-five, fat, crew-cut, drunk, bellicose, and gifted, so Mike said, with superhuman powers of abuse.

* Buldge, the goddess of minor disasters, was a kind of accidental fertility figure, very pregnant, incredibly naked, alarmingly busty and genital, with unkempt brownish hair hanging down to where her waist used to be, whose merest glance could delay a chick’s period two weeks.

* Chuck, the god of miscellany, was a super-Mike of sorts, taller and leaner but with the same look of bland malevolence and random fanaticism that so endeared Mike to everyone who could put up with him. I suspected Chuck was basically road manager for the rest of Mike’s crew.

“And this,” Mike boasted less than half a block from West Broadway and the frontier of the Village, “is Zap, titular deity of changes, in whose presence nothing is ever the same.” Zap was pretty formless and it hurt my eyes to look at him.

“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” I worried. Michael only smiled.

Then we entered the Village. Suddenly Mike blew three loud blasts on a police whistle. The orchestra — my orchestra, mind you! — struck up a march:

heavy on the piccolos and very loud. Michael’s gods and goddesses scattered to the five winds, and the action instantly became too confused to follow.

Mick ran up Bleecker Street, and every teen-aged girl he passed screamed and followed him. He zigzagged back and forth across the street, ignoring traffic, and the girls, screaming, followed him, making traffic impossible. Weeping girls performed incomplete flying tackles at his legs as he passed. Overwrought female tides brutally washed over anything, especially people, that stood between themselves and Mick. The clamor of auto horns, shrill screams, and breaking glass threatened to drown out my orchestra, and I rather wished it would.

Mick was built for running and stayed easily ahead of his following. Every now and then he paused to kiss some unsuspecting chick, who promptly fainted. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were littered with broken glass, abandoned escorts, and the limp bodies of kiss victims.

Close behind Mike came Fellatia, vigorously propositioning the abandoned escorts, who fled in yelping droves before her.

Phlipout, Phlippina, and Toke ambled into every coffeehouse, restaurant, street food dive and bar on the street, all the patrons of which instantly ran outside in noisy panic, there to encounter Moe, who yelled, “All you people’sh jush a bunch a’ flippin’ faggots! C’mon, lesh fight!” and struck out indiscriminately at everyone in reach.

Meanwhile Buldge, smiling vacantly, strolled up to every female, conscious or not, who remained after Mick’s army had passed, saying, “Oooo, are you gonna have a little baby, too? I bet you are,” causing every girl who hadn’t fainted yet to faint.

Behind Buldge came Zap, now nine feet tall and formless, shooting purple rays from his (perhaps) fingertips at every overt hippy in sight. “Oh WoW!” or the equivalent the smitten hippies yelled. “Oh WoW!” and took off like stampeding hippies, running in tight circles and pleading, “Get out of my head! Oh WoW!”

Through this confusion, Chuck, the super-Mike, strode calmly, giving orders (“Come back, Buldgie love, you missed this one!”) and tending to such minor details as cops, mounted cops, and cops in prowl cars. Cops he passed developed uncontrollable urges to disrobe, horses tried to climb light poles, and prowl cars suddenly issued vast clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke.

The carnage swept forward faster than we could walk, and soon turned north at MacDougal Street and passed out of sight, though not out of earshot (whatever that might be). Bleecker Street looked like something out of World War II: broken windows, overturned cars, and fallen bodies as far as we could see. Only Mike, the orchestra, and I were still erect and functioning. The orchestra played the dead march from Saul and we picked our way delicately through the rubble.

Despite the devastation all around me — my own, my native land, in ruins — I still felt great. The Reality Pill, I thought, had much to recommend it, if you didn’t mind a little chaos on the side. But, “Is this what you really wanted?” I asked Mike.

“Well,” he said, looking slowly around him, “I am a little disappointed.”

“Oh?”

“I was expecting something a little more colorful,” he sighed.

“Oh.”

The sound of screams et cetera grew faint as Mick and Company tore up MacDougal toward West Eighth, where they were sure to do such things as I shuddered to imagine. In the distance an approaching chorus of sirens could be heard. A few photographers had already appeared — that was a big summer for photographers — and flashbulbs popped around us like exclamation points.

MacDougal Street, when we reached it, proved to be utterly impassable. Cars and trucks, not all overturned, sprawled every which way like mechanized spaghetti, blocking street and sidewalks equally. Dazed survivors of all types and genders wandered aimlessly through the ruins, mouthing strange, poetic expressions of dismay. Every window above street level was crowded with frightened people gibbering in nameless tongues. An acrid blue haze hung over everything, pierced by sporadic flashbulbs. A very blonde girl, naked except for an arcane blue and red tattoo above her navel, sat cross-legged atop an overturned chrome trailer truck playing aimless squiggles on what seemed to be a soprano recorder.

“Busy,” I observed.

“Indeed,” said Mike.

“Detour?”

“Detour.”

So Mike and orchestra and I went on to Sixth Avenue, which was still untouched by the gods.

Rescue vehicles started arriving as we walked up the avenue — dozens of police cars, lots of ambulances, three or four full fire companies, and some odd National Guard equipment left over from Saturday.

“That’s what I call prompt action,” I said.

“Right. Sort of gives you confidence, doesn’t it?” Mike answered.

Despite the orchestra — which I, for one, would’ve noticed right away — we attracted no attention as we made our melodious way toward Third Street. This was mainly because the rescue vehicles, arriving from every possible direction, created an instant chaos of their own, a modern consort of horns, sirens, screeching brakes, tearing metal, and obscure, thickly accented obscenities.

“I don’t know,” I worried. “It doesn’t give me all that much confidence, really. I mean,” waving expansively, “look. I’ve seen better organized games of pick-up-sticks.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Mike forgave them.

The orchestra played Telemann. That bassoonist played Vivaldi.

The Garden of Eden was packed with jabbering refugees, but its windows were intact.

“Jesus Christ!” Joe yelled from behind the cash register as we entered. “Wha’s happenin’!?”

We shrugged eloquently and groped our way to the table. Only strangers were there, none of our people. We unseated two of them, ordered coffee, and relaxed.

“Are you satisfied?” I asked.

Mike looked doubtful. “I’m not sure,” he said. “There’s got to be more to it than this.”

“Excuse me,” said another tall blue lobster, making its way to the John.

“One of yours?” I wondered.

“I thought it was one of yours.”

“I don’t like blue lobsters.”

“Oh. I guess the party’s broken up.”

That gave us something to think about, so we did. We weren’t the only people roaming through the city high on Laszlo Scott’s famous Reality Pills in liquid form. Not a bit of it. And what were those other few hundred maniacs doing? Our minds mutually boggled.

There was a disturbance at the door, but we carefully ignored it. We’d had enough disturbance for a while. The disturbance got louder, harder to ignore, but still we managed. Then a new note was added to the disturbance, a flat note, obviously uttered by a skitterish bassoon. “Uh-oh,” I commented.

“Hey, Andy!” Joe barged through the crowd toward us. “There’s these People outside that they say they’re like friends of yours, and…”

Something tripped him and he fell. The orchestra marched sedately over him, playing somebody’s Trumpet Tune full blast. The Garden of Eden became unwholesomely crowded.

The orchestra grouped itself in a cramped semicircle around my chair and finished the trumpet tune with flourishes. “We missed you,” the leader said. Then the orchestra plunged into Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto.

Joe, disheveled and flamboyantly annoyed, shoved past the trumpets, yelling, “Get these people outta here!”

“Something wrong?” in Michael’s blandest tones.

“I ain’t got no license for no band,” Joe yelled. He was verging on hysteria. “An’ I can’t have all them people in here. It’s illegal.” His swarthy face was turning an unappealing purple. “An’ they all gotta order. Jesus Christ!” He turned and drove back through the orchestra, rending his garments melodramatically as he drove.

“Excitable type, that Joseph,” I murmured.

“Lousy insurance risk,” said Mike. Then Joe screamed magnificently treble in the near distance.

“Yoo-hoo!” somebody yelled. “Michael!”

“Oh?” we said.

“Michael!” someone yelled again. We could feel lines of panic form in the mob like lines of force around a magnet, and when Michael’s gods tore through my orchestra (putting that bassoonist out of business for a while), we weren’t at all surprised.

“Hey, boss,” Chuck said, “we finished Eighth Street.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Eek,” said a number of people tritely as Mick deftly dealt with them.

“What next?” asked Chuck.

“Hey! Help!” from Joe, who was completely surrounded by Fellatia.

“Zap!” from Zap.

“WoW,” from everybody else. All males present clutched their groins convulsively. Mike and I seemed to be immune.

“Yoo-hoo!” That was Phlipout and his sister. Behind them untold crockery broke noisily.

“Have you tried Washington Square?” Mike was being businesslike.

“Got it on the way back.”

The confusion was spreading to the orchestra. This dragged me. I like the first Brandenburg.

“Yow Yow Yow Yow YOW!” Joe yelped all the way back to the cash register.

Mick was surrounded by a squirming pile of shameless female teenyboppers, plus a few shameless males I’d never suspected before. There seemed to be enough of Mick to go around.

“What about Sheridan Square?” Mike asked.

“Where’s that?”

“West of here.”

The noise was impressive and growing. It was almost too loud to hear, and the walls were shaking like drumheads. All the gods were working overtime, the orchestra was doing its high baroque best, and Mike and Chuck were planning strategy. No good, I decided, could possibly come of this.

I was right.

“All right, all right,” said a bullish voice. “Move along.” The law had arrived, lots of it. At least a dozen irate fuzz in riot helmets beat a path through the melee, past our table, to the rear of the room. Hippies and other innocents, forgetting gods and chaos, ran shrieking to the front and out, overpanicked by the presence of police. I was getting sick of all that noise.

“Shall I?” Chuck suggested.

“Forget it,” Mike explained.

“This is all your fault,” I told Mike.

“Eh.” He shrugged.

“All right, all right,” said the cops. They had portable loudspeakers. “Everybody out. Come on, now. Move.”

Everybody turned out by then to be the gods, the orchestra, Mike and, irritated, I; not quite seventy-five people, so to speak. We moved.

Outside we were herded into green buses with barred windows.

“Are we under arrest?” Mike blandly asked a cop.

“Move on there,” he explained. We moved.

Thanks to the pill, I was simultaneously euphoric and enraged. Arrested, by God! And it was all Michael’s fault.

Despite Mike’s efforts to engage me in light banter, I preserved a fairly stony silence all the way to the Charles Street precinct house. There we were herded out of the buses and into the station like so many oddly dressed cattle, the orchestra going fairly quietly, the gods giving everyone their usual hard time, Mike and I pretending to be meek and somewhat invisible. Inside, the orchestra began the Bach again, the gods flew madly about spreading disorder, and we took up inconspicuous positions at the rear of it all.

We were in a large, high-ceilinged, dingy room, poorly lighted, with fly-and spit-specked dirty marble floor and grimy plaster walls, drab green, that echoed without mercy. At the far end of the room, at the foot of a rusty flight of wrought-iron stairs, half a dozen plainclothesmen tried to look unalarmed, with indifferent success.

A uniformed elderly cop with lots of gold braid, sitting at a brightly lighted, battered oak desk at the east side of the room, looked threatened. Fellatia was crawling gracelessly over the desk toward him, despite the efforts of two burly patrolmen to restrain her.

“What’s goin’ on here?” the man at the desk wanted to know.

“It’s like this, Sarge,” said a cop, launching into a highly colored report of the events at The Garden of Eden. Words like riot, indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, resisting arrest, attempted bribery, felonious assault, and disturbing the peace ran through his monologue like a wearisome refrain.

Michael looked elaborately unconcerned. I worried.

“Oh yeah?” the sergeant said when the cop had finished his gory report.

“Yeah,” the cop insisted.

“Lemme go, you great big handsome brutes,” Fellatia told the two cops who were holding her.

“I better call Centre Street,” the sergeant said. He did so. Meanwhile, Mick, Toke, Chuck, and the twins were sneaking up the stairs, apparently unnoticed by the huddled plainclothesmen.

“Chuck’s clever,” Mike said admiringly.

“Hmph,” I said.

The sergeant hung up. “They’re sending over a Special Investigator,” he said, visibly impressed. “Now,” collecting himself, “who’s in charge here?”

“I am,” said the leader of my orchestra. I softly groaned.

“Oh, you are, eh?” the sergeant sneered. He opened a large notebook and uncapped a fountain pen. “An’ what’s your name, buddy?”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the leader said in calm, reasonable tones, “but, a name being clearly unessential to my function, I wasn’t given one.”

“No name?” The sergeant was upset. “What’re you tryin’ ta pull?”

“Pull? Nothing, sir. I don’t pull anything at all. I merely play the violin. “The sackbutt players, now…”

“Ahr, a wise guy, huh?”

Just then there was a loud disturbance upstairs. Mike chuckled. We heard loud, metallic hangings, drunken yowls, and the sound of many heavy feet. Then an extra motley crowd poured, shuffled, stumbled, and staggered down the wrought-iron stairs, ridden herd upon by Mick, Chuck, Toke, and the twins, who were followed in turn by a brace of cops yelling, “Come back here,” and, “You can’t get away with this.”

The gods had been freeing prisoners.

“What the hell is all this!” The sergeant was becoming hoarse.

Half the prisoners were women of one sort or another. As soon as they reached the main floor, they forgot about escape and started reacting to Mick. Mick encouraged them. While the sergeant stared in speechless horror, a medium-sized orgy took shape in front of his desk.

“Whoopee!” yelped Fellatia. She broke free of her guards and started toward the sergeant, clearly bent on some unwholesome and unnatural variety of rape.

The sergeant yelled and stumbled backward. Fellatia charged. He picked up a chair and held her at bay, almost, but she had longer arms than he’d counted on.

Several cops tried to rescue the sergeant, only to be trapped in the growing orgy around Mick.

Mike fell laughing to the floor. I tried to kick him and missed. Somebody started shooting in the air, and chips of plaster from the ceiling floated down like pregnant snowflakes.

Every alarm in the building went off at once. A cop, minus trousers, ran screaming up the stairs, pursued by several naked lady drunks.

The uproar was decidedly oppressive.

“If there’s anything I dislike,” I yelled at Michael, “it’s…” I couldn’t think of a word for it, so I made a wide gesture intended to take in the whole scene. Unfortunately, the gesture caught an approaching plainclothesman right in the Adam’s apple, and he fell to the floor, not quite saying anything.

Mike got to his feet, saying, “Bad company down there,” and giggling disgracefully.

“Hurrah!” Fellatia bellowed in a window-breaking tone. Several windows promptly broke.

“Our Father,” the sergeant yelled, “who art in Halp!”

Then, “What’s going on here?” said a voice so deep and authoritative that everyone stopped whatever he or she or it was doing and fell silent for a minute.

A tall, grizzled man in conservative red business clothes, full of dignity and power and the majesty of the law, strode through the middle of Mick’s temporarily frozen orgy. He stopped in front of the desk and looked around disgustedly.

“You,” he told the sergeant firmly. “Get dressed.”

“I can’t!” the sergeant wailed. “This broad, she…”

“Quiet. I’m Special Investigator Blake.” I wondered about that.

Fellatia subtly advanced on him.

“Back,” he ordered. She moved back. I was impressed.

Then, “You,” clearly meaning us. “I want to talk to you.” He looked around at the still frozen orgy with incredible disdain. “Come with me.” He started toward the door, and we followed. “No use trying to talk in this madhouse.”

We reached the door together and passed out into the cool, still darkness. “Come with me,” he said again, heading toward Sheridan Square. We went.

We hadn’t gone half a block when the noise broke out anew in the precinct house behind us. The special investigator sniffed disapprovingly. We said nothing. The noise was louder than before.

We turned a corner and passed out of sight of the station, but the noise remained impressive.

“Where are you taking us, sir?” asked Michael with unusual respect.

The special investigator stopped, regarding us both with grim intensity. Then he grinned, tipped his hat, and vanished.

“Wow,” I said after a while. “How did you do that?”

“Me? I thought you did it.”

The noise followed us halfway home.