Wildcards

C.C."

"No! You must not. It's cursed." Don Carlo tried to move farther and realized his leg was trapped. He thrust both hands into the chilly water in an effort to free it and grasped scaly skin. He looked down and saw rows of ivory teeth. Implacable reptilian eyes looked back at his.

Rosemary had gotten everyone on board, even the black cat. The car began to move back up the west tunnel. "Wait. Jack's back there. Don't leave him." Bagabond tried to open the doors. Rosemary grabbed her shoulders. "Who's Jack?"

"My friend."

"We can't go back," said Rosemary. "I'm sorry." Bagabond sat in the rear seat, once more flanked by her two cats, and stared back at the water rushing into the tunnel behind them as they moved toward higher ground.

As the subway car climbed the 86th Street incline, the skirt of dark water followed, lapping at C.C.'s flanged wheels. She eventually reached a rise in the tunnel where the tide behind ceased to follow. C.C. stopped, started to roll back, locked her brakes.

Her passengers crowded against the rear connecting door, straining to see anything of what they had left in the darkness. "Let us out, C.C.," said Rosemary. "Please."

The subway car obligingly opened her side doors with a hiss. The four of them, two human and two feline, clambered down to the roadbed and stood at this new beach. The calico sniffed at the water's edge and turned away. She whined and looked up at Bagabond.

"Wait," said the bag lady. An unaccustomed smile played for just a moment.

Rosemary strained, concentrating, attempting to peer through the darkness. The last thing she remembered seeing was her father trying to reach her, then just his face, his eyes. Finally nothing.

"There," said Bagabond flatly.

They all tried to make something out. "I don't see anything," said Rosemary.

"There. "

Now they all saw something: a vee of ripples trailing from a wide, shovel-blade of a snout. They saw the pair of armorprotected eyes protruding from the water, inspecting the group on shore.

The cats began to yowl with excitement, the calico leaping back and forth, the black switching his tail like a blacksnake whip.

"That's Jack," said Bagabond.

After a time, the dust literally settled, the water receded, wounds were bandaged, bodies buried, and the long-suffering city crews did their best to clean up the mess at union scale. Manhattan returned to normal.

The bottom of Central Park Lake was resealed and the basin refilled. Reports of sea monsters (more properly, lake monsters) were persistent but unverified.

Sixty-eight-year-old Sarah Jarvis finally realized what hidden identity surely must lurk beneath the surface of the President. In November 1972, she voted for George McGovern.

The fortunes of Joey Manzone rose -or at least they changed. He moved to Connecticut and wrote a novel about Vietnam that didn't sell, and a book about organized crime that did.

Rosa-Maria Gambione legally changed her name to Rosemary Muldoon. She completed her Columbia degree in social work and aids Dr. Tachyon with C.C. Ryder's therapy. She has entered law school and is contemplating a takeover of the family business.

C. C. Ryder is still one of the doctor's toughest cases, but there is apparently some progress in bringing both her mind and body back to human form. C.C. continues to create fine, sharp-edged lyrics. Her songs have been recorded by Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and others.

From time to time-especially during bad weatherBagabond and the black and calico cats move into the Alfred Beach pneumatic subway tube with Sewer Jack Robicheaux. It is a comfortable arrangement, but has necessitated a few changes. Jack no longer hunts rats. A common lament around the Victorian dining room is, "Wha' dis now, chicken again?"

Interlude Four

From "Fear and Loathing in Jokertown," by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, August 23, 1974.

Dawn is coming up in Jokertown now. I can hear the rumble of the garbage trucks under my window at the South Street Inn, out here by the docks. This is the end of the line, for garbage and everything else, the asshole of America, and I'm feeling close to the end of my line too, after a week of cruising the most vile and poisonous streets in New York… when I look up, a clawed hand heaves itself over the sill, and a minute later it's followed by a face. I'm six stories above the street and this speedcrazed shithead comes climbing in the window like it's nothing. Maybe he's right; this is Jokertown, and life runs fast amp; mean here. It's like wandering through a Nazi death camp during a bad trip; you don't understand half of what you see, but it scares the piss out of you just the same.

The thing coming in my window is seven fucking feet tall, with triple jointed daddy-long-legs arms that dangle so low his claws cut gouges in the hardwood floor, a complexion like Count Dracula, and a snout on him like the Big Bad Wolf. When he grins, the whole damn thing opens on a foot of pointed green teeth. The fucker even spits venom, which is a good talent to have if you're going to wander around Jokertown at night. "Got any speed?" he asks as he climbs down from the window. He spies the bottle of tequila on the nightstand, snares it with one of those ridiculous arms of his, and helps himself to a big swallow.

"Do I look like the kind of man who'd do crank?" I say.

"Guess we'll have to do mine then," Croyd says, and pulls a fistful of blacks from his pocket. He takes four of them and washes them down with more of my Cuervo Gold…

… imagine if Hubert Humphrey had drawn a joker, picture the Hube with a trunk stuck in the middle of his face, like a flaccid pink worm where his nose ought to be, and you've got a good fix on Xavier Desmond. His hair is thin or gone, and his eyes are gray and baggy as his suit. He's been at it for ten years now, and you can tell it's wearing him out. The local columnists call him the mayor of Jokertown and the voice of the jokers; that's about as much as he's accomplished in ten years, him and his sorry hack Dockers' Anti-Defamation League-a couple of bogus titles, a certain status as Tammanys best-loved joker pet, invitations to a few nice Village parties when the hostess can't get an ace on such short notice.

He stands on the platform in his three-piece suit, holding his fucking hat in his trunk for Christ's sake, talking about joker solidarity, and voting drives, and joker cops for Jokertown, doing the old soft-shoe like it really meant something. Behind him, under a sagging JADL banner, is the sorriest lineup of pathetic losers you'd ever want to see. If they were blacks they'd be Uncle Toms, but the jokers haven't come up with a name for them yet… but they will, you can bet your mask on that. The JADL faithful are heavy into masks, like good jokers everywhere. Not just ski masks and dominoes either. Walk down the Bowery or Chrystie Street, or linger for a while in front of Tachyon's clinic, and you see facial wear out of some acidhead's nightmare: feathered birdmasks amp; deathsheads amp; leather ratfaces amp; monks cowls amp; shiny sequined individualized "fashion masks" that go for a hundred bucks a throw. The masks are part of the color of Jokertown, and the tourists from Boise and Duluth and Muskogee all make sure and buy a plastic mask or two to take home as souvenirs, and every half-blind-drunk hack reporter who decides to do another brainless write-up on the poor fucked-up jokers notices the masks right off. They stare so hard at the masks that they don't notice the shiny-thin Salvation Army suits and faded-print house dresses the masked jokers are wearing, they don't notice how old some of those masks are getting, and they sure as shit don't pick up on the younger jokers, the ones in leather amp; Levi's, who aren't wearing any masks at all. "This is what I look like," a girl with a face like a jar of smashed assholes told me that afternoon outside a rancid Jokertown porn house. "I could give a shit if the nats like it or not. I'm supposed to wear a mask so some nat bitch from Queens won't get sick to her stomach when she looks at me? Fuck that."

Maybe a third of the crowd listening to Xavier Desmond are wearing masks. Maybe less. Whenever he stops for applause, the people in the masks slap their hands together, but you can tell it's an effort, even for them. The rest of them are just listening, waiting, and they've got eyes as ugly as their deformities. It's a mean young bunch out there, and a lot of them are wearing gang colors, with names like DEMON PRINCES amp; KILLER GEEKS amp; WEREWOLVES. I'm standing off to the side, wondering if the Tack is going to show up as advertised, and I don't see who starts it, but suddenly Desmond just shuts up, right in the middle of a boring declaration about how aces amp; jokers amp; nats is all god's chillums under the skin, and when I look back over they're booing him and throwing peanuts, they're pelting him with salted peanuts still in the shell, bouncing them right off his head and his chest and his fucking trunk, tossing them into his hat, and Desmond is just standing there gaping. He's supposed to be the voice of these people, he read it in the Daily News and the Jokertown Cry, and the sorry old fucker doesn't have the least little turd of an idea of what's going down…

… just past midnight when I walk outside of Freakers to piss casually into the gutter, figuring it's a safer bet than the men's room, and the odds against a cop cruising through Jokertown at this time of night are so remote that they're laughable. The streetlight is busted, and for a moment I think it's Wilt Chamberlain standing there, but then he comes closer and I notice the arms amp; claws amp; snout. Skin like old ivory. I ask him what the fuck his problem is, and he asks me if I'm not the guy wrote the book about the Angels, and a half-hour later we're sitting in a booth in the back of an all-night place on Broome Street, while the waitress pours gallons of black coffee for him. She has long blond hair and nice legs, and on the breast of her pink uniform it says Sally, and she's good to look at until you notice her face. I discover that I'm looking down at my plate whenever she comes near, which makes me sick amp; sad amp; pissed off. The Snout is saying something about how he never learned algebra, and there's nothing wrong with me that about four fingers of king-hell crank wouldn't cure, and after I mention that the Snout shows me his teeth and mentions that while there's a definite scarcity of real high-voltage crank around these days, it just so happens that he knows where he can put his hands on some…

…"We're talking wounds here, we're talking real deep-bleeding poisonous wounds, the kind that can't be treated with a fucking Band-Aid, and that's all Desmond's got up his trunk, just a fucking lot of Band-Aids," the dwarf told me, after he gave me his Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake, or whatever the fuck the goddamned thing is supposed to be. As jokers go, he got a pretty decent draw-there were dwarfs long before the wild card-but he's still damned pissed-off about it.

"He's been holding that hat in his trunk for ten years now, and all that ever happens is the nats shit in it. Well, that's over. We're not asking anymore, we're telling them, the JJS is telling them, and we'll stick it right in their pretty pearllike ears if we have to." The JJS is the jokers for a just Society, and it's got about as much in common with the JADL as a piranha has with one of those giant pop-eyed white goldfish you see waddling around in decorative pools outside of dentists' offices. The JJS doesn't have Captain Tacky or Jimmy Roosevelt or Rev. Ralph Abernathy helping out on its board of directors-in fact it doesn't have a board of directors, and it doesn't sell memberships to concerned citizens and sympathetic aces either. The Hube would feel damned uncomfortable at a JJS meeting, whether he had a trunk on his face or not…

… even at four in the morning, the Village isn't Jokertown, and that's part of the problem, but mostly it's just that Croyd is hotwired and crazy on meanass crank, and as far as I can tell he hasn't slept for a week.

Somewhere in the Village is the guy we set out to find, a half-black all-ace pimp who's supposed to have the sweetest girls in the city, but we can't find him, and Croyd keeps insisting that the streets are all changing around, like they're alive and treacherous and out to get him. Cars slow down when they see Croyd swinging down the pavement with those long triple-jointed daddy-long-legs strides of his, and speed up fast again when he looks over at them and snarls. We're in front of a deli when he forgets all about the pimp we're supposed to find and decides he's thirsty instead. He wraps his claws around the steel shutters, gives a little grunt, and just yanks the whole thing out of the brick storefront and uses it to smash in the window glass halfway through the case of Mexican beer we hear the sirens. Croyd opens his snout and spits at the door, and the poison shit hits the glass and starts burning right through it: "They're after me again," he says in a voice full of doom amp; hate amp; speedfreak rage amp; paranoia. "They're all after me." And then he looks at me and that's all it takes, I know I'm in deep shit. "You led them here," he says, and I tell him no, I like him, some of my best fucking friends are jokers, and the red amp; blue flashers are out front as he jumps to his feet, grabs me, and screams, "I'm not a joker, you fuck, I'm a goddamned ace," and throws me right through the window, the other window, the one where the plate glass was still intact. But not for long… while I'm lying in the gutter, bleeding, he makes his own exit, right out the front door with a sixpack of Dos Equis under his arm, and the cops pump a couple rounds into him, but he just laughs at them, and starts to climb… His claws leave deep holes in the brick. When he reaches the roof, he howls at the moon, unzips his pants, and pisses down on all of us before he vanishes…