SPACE NOIR BAR by Mike Marino (top books to read txt) 📖

clear,  but when I was fully aware of where we were a thin man with a thin tie holding a thin cigarette began speaking in  a voice with an razors edge and staccato delivery of words that have been carefully crafted and formulated into sentences as powerful as a literary Gatling machine gun. 

“Welcome.  You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.” What the hell was he talking about? He was obviously high on something. He never cracked a smile. “Che, who is this guy? Is he crazy?” I whispered in case he was a mental patient with a penchant whose radio frequency wasn’t quite tuned to the right space station. 

 "Look Yucatan, there is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Rabbit Hole Twilight Zone,” Che explained just as Long Wang cried out, “Look! That's the signpost up ahead ...our next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

The thin man with the thin tie led us along a thin patch through a small village worthy of P.T. Barnum.  We met a plethora of amazing and bizarre characters. Mock Turtles, flamingos doubling  as croquet mallets, a dope smoking caterpillar and everywhere signs...Eat Me! Drink Me! but none that said Bite Me or Fuck You. 

I only hoped I had time to get loaded on some of their hallucinatory inventory. I could only imagine   growing in size and shrinking  in size in under 60 seconds flat. (how cool is that?).At the edge of the village there was a caterpillar smoking a multi-stemmed pipe, the kind Turks use (it must have been the hookah that hooked me) and a Cheshire cat sporting a Lenny Bruce shit eating grin as if he just got back from Disneyland and had a corn dog and ate Mickey on a stick  in one giant gulp.
We walked not too far and soon, according to Che, we came up on the hidden entrance to the Rabbits encampment. I couldn’t see it, but Che knew what he was doing, We moved at parade pace and as carefully as possible so as not to alarm anyone and have a phalanx of phallic removing lasers shot at our midsection. 

Then, in the distance, sitting on a riverbank was one of the Rabbits captains passing a hash pipe back and forth as she spoke with a fully clothed talking rabbit with a pocket watch. I know a few of us out there have experienced the same thing or something similar while in a drug induced altered state ourselves, but in this rift it was a reality...and common.

She noticed us and gets up  to leave with the rabbit down a  hole. “Follow her,” Che said and we did,  free falling all the way. When we landed we ended up in a hallway with more doors to open then Monty Hall has. Or even the Halls of Montezuma.

When we finally crash landed we found keys,  lots of keys. I  found one that unlocked a door with a pathway to a garden of marijuana, but we were too big, in fact we were  giants by comparison and can't reach the ganja so we have  to go gonzo to get the goods. Long Wang sees a bottle that says “Drink Me”.... probably a bottle of skid row booze from a Bukowsk bums wine stash. We  empty the bottle with the style and grace of Tom Waits on downers, and damned if we don’t begin to shrink, our qualms calmed as only a handful of Quaaludes can do to a dude. Now a new  problem presented itself...we are too small to reach the key to the garden on the table high above now that we were the size of Thumbelina. Thankfully there is a piece of cake that says "Eat Me" on it...I've said that myself a time or two, both in anger on the street as well as displaying passion in bed. Yes, I do prefer the bedtime version.

We eventually gain entry to the garden and now it got real Cheech and Chongy as we ran into a blue caterpillar  with a purple hookah. The damn thing also talked and like any good pusher in a school yard offers us free samples of a mushroom guaranteed to return us to normal size. All this growing and shrinking has played havoc with us….imagine how a female  feels when  her tampon won’t  shrink but her body does.....she probably looks and feels like a bomb pop popsicle on a stick or a wet dream lollipop.

 I've taken mucho Soma and Anterian acid in my time and saw the Space Needle in Seattle melt before my very blood shot eyes...I saw Haight Street lift up off the ground and fly into the air...and I even floated encased in a soap bubble over Golden Gate Park, but ,damned if I ever smoked a bowl with a blue caterpillar or did cocaine with a talking cat. 

We emerged finally in the rebel encampment as Long Wang did a little victory dance while Poontang smiled as if she were Yoda hiding a secret and Strangelove  was breathing heavily in anticipation of something. Wang and Long hugged each other and Che Stadium looked about warily…. ever vigilant for anything wrong. I on the other hand kept thinking about a mysterious bundle delivered to my office and a dead man in the alley that I was sure Inspector Burroughs felt I had something to do with. I don’t vape delivery boys. In fact, I tip them with petty cash in my desk  just as I do a waitress or a hooker. 

Now that we were within arms reach of the Falcon we were approached by one hell of a good looking female revolutionary ...the Rabbit herself. I wanted to be in her hutch from my first look. Damn she looked familiar. She noticed my salivating  look and disguised heavy breathing. She walked up to me smelling of gunpowder and marijuana and wonderland sweat then I recognized her..Windsora! ”So Doc, how are you?” she said with broad smile of sunshine that melted my heart and fired up my libido. Damn it was her, Windsora! I couldn’t speak.

 

She put her arms around me and led us all to her headquarters. Halfway there she whispered in my  ear…”Hey Doc,  "Is that a mad hatter in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?" 

Chapter 31 - "What's Up, Doc?"

 

 

I was beyond disbelief! I felt I was thrown bound in duct tape and gagged with a pair of strippers panties off a Detroit riverfront dock and had washed up ashore battered, bruised and bloody somewhere downriver in my  past amid a pile of nostalgic debris and dead Luca Brazzi “Godfather” fishes. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked Windsora in a voice as bewildered  as a finger painting mental patient attempting to comprehend the theory of relativity. She put her hands on her hips striking a pose reminiscent of the  sleek, insatiable sexual panther she actually is with those enticing, delicious Asian hips (Remember I am a leg and Thai man!)  that made me delirious in the past embarking on a libido laden Lewis and Clark exploration, which I might add,  I had held, kissed and savored in her private pubic galaxy, long, long ago. It was her! Windsora Canada, a real ray gun blast from a sultry sex soaked monsoon past.

“I’m  the Rabbit, Doc,” she smiled with a hint and a glint in her eye that once again made my knees weaken. “ What did you expect when you left me without even a fuck you goodbye wham bam thank you ma’am Hallmark greeting card in New York. Think I’d wait for you forever? Life goes on, and indeed it went on asshole... even without the arrogance of the high and mighty Doc Yucatan.” 
Poontang looked at both us with an incredulous expression  from one to the other,  with a fierce rapidity I thought would make her  head start spinning and spewing in homage to the possessed Linda Blair. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you two actually know each other?” Poontang  practically screamed. I noticed out of the corner of my eye  Strangelove  had her head down and was facing away from us, but could see the edge of her lip had morphed into a knowing smile. I always hated those “knowing smiles.” They stink worse than a garbage barge of psychological refuse that’s been at anchor in New York harbor in the heat of August for days left to rot until wharf rats with trenchcoats run rampant devouring the putrid remains of a few missing persons left amid the acrid floating trash of dead bodies of New York’s homeless, unwanted and not missed.

I had met Windsora (now the “Rabbit”) over 2O years ago. She was a newly arrived Asian  woman who was recently divorced from a Canadian Inuit husband who had a propensity for violence. When that violence eventually left it’s mark on her face it also produced a lasting wound on her soul. Most Eskimos rub noses...this one broke hers a few times. 

She finally left him,  fled the border, and crossed the river to Detroit. She was a beauty. Skin of pure alabaster and eyes as big and dark as the old Brown Derby in Hollywood. She walked into my office one day looking for work  and as she could type faster than Pee Wee Herman could cum in a darkened adult theater she immediately gave my imagination a sexual working over with a rubber hose of sensuality. Naturally I hired her on the spot as my first secretary. I had just opened my own private practice along with my partner Sandoz who was nothing  more than a disbarred attorney, but a real artist at doctored bookkeeping...for tax purposes you understand. 

Soon Windsora and I were lovers and did everything together. We were inseparable. That is until it came to talk of marriage. I was pretty strung out on Soma and booze, barely keeping the agency alive and afloat and I was certainly not sober, nor ready for a commitment, and I told her as much. 
In an attempt to rekindle the fire of passion I had just pissed on when I told her that,  we took a red-eye to New York from Detroit one night. I, for an East Coast romp no strings attached under the covers carpet bombing of her libidinous rice paddy...she with an emotional rodeo rope ready to ride me into marriage. Saddled, bridled and broken into a corral of domesticity. 

We made love over and over ending up as sweat drenched as only a hot, humid  August high noon in Hanoi can make you.

The next morning I walked out on her...no, out of OUR life and into the New York streets forever as she slept peacefully  from the afterglow of sex and the head numbing effects