The Space Noir Bar by Michael Marino (readict books .TXT) 📖

The  morning after the dark night that preceded it, is always a day of psychological snakes while  shaking off the effects of too much Soma and Arcturian Ale. It hits me with the force of a nuclear reaction splitting my mental atom, leaving me dazed and confused (I heard that line somewhere before) I feared my own reflection in a mirror on those mornings for all I ever saw staring back at me was a cheap human hotel room mattress with too many stains on it. I was the mattress and I could only guess at what the stains were and who left them there as a marker to celebrate  their various and varied sexual victories.

Asrini on the other hand always, the sober one who took the high road as I wallowed in the late night gutter woke up refreshed and alive with happiness...I could only guess this time it had something to do with last night and our close encounter on the path with her mysterious past that almost took her under the casa blankets with an old flame fanning her passions. 

We were given clearance to leave Toho 4, make the two minute jaunt and dock on Robotia.  As we were checking out of the hostelry I was handed a strange message by the hotel clerk dressed in black. “I can’t read it Asrini. Appears to be some sort of coded message in a language I’m not familiar with.’ Asrini could read and speak 5 planetary languages and 4 Retropolin languages and dialects. When she was spying for the Comreds of the Red East she was a trained linguist and code breaker. as well as a sharpshooter with her vagina.

She took the piece of paper from my hands and as she read it I could see her eyes, beautiful as they were normally, now enlarged and I swear I could see the entire Milky Way in them sparkling and bright as the rapid fire bursts of a galactic Gatling gun tearing into the flesh of a Regulus Regulator.

“Oh no!” she cried out. “It’s from Maddie Harry. I used to work with her during the war with the Antarians. She was good, almost too good and the Bureau doubted her loyalties to the party. After the wars she disappeared and  never left word with me so I was never sure if she left or was killed by our own agents. She is alive!” she said excitedly as a bum who found a good sized cigarette butt on the ground at a space bus terminal.

 “She wants us to meet her at the Old Chum Cabaret. We must be careful though, it’s owned by Narco Marx and wants the Strip Tease Falcon and will kill anyone who stand in his way. I’ve dealt with him before!”

I took it all in as she spoke. Her words and warnings were sharp as a machete decapitating my already shrunken head ready to be hung on a warriors beaded belt in some forgotten lost world. I had heard of Maddie as well and was looking forward to meeting her. Asrini Pemalang and Maddie Harry, the doublemint twins of espionage who used sex as a weapon of subtle interrogation where their willing subjects gave valued information as easy as a school boy jacking off to a International Galactic Geographic Magazine with a hologram essay on the tits and arse of a lost tribe of Penumbrian pygmies.

Fat ass Narco Marx who would kill his own child to get his fat hands on the Falcon … Comred agents who had been clumsily tailing us all the way from Saturn and the enforcers of Toho itself who would vaporize me in a speed of light minute if they knew my true mission to Robotia. As for Asrini? She would be Cyborg’d and transformed into a Transsexual Transformer Tyrannasaurus Sex Robotic Sex Worker if we were discovered and captured. The key to our quest to find the Falcon and Asrini’s sister Mary Asteroid was now in the hands of Maddie Harry . Something told me..it was all one big ball and I was next up at the plate to bat. 

Robotian night life was a dream sequence of unreality, at least as I knew it, so I wanted to experience as much of it as possible without blowing my internal circuitry. We were to meet Maddie Harry at 10 pm at the Old Chum Cabaret but talked Asrini into arriving early to have a few Soma’s and Robotian beer, not the best beer for a buzz in Dystopia but would do the job.

When  she arrived a 8 pm it was already in full swing! It was showtime at the cabaret boys and girls, and those of you in between! "Life is a cabaret old chum." I just had to say it, and now that it's broken free of my cranial orbit we can take a delicious look up under the Catholic schoolgirl skirt of delightful debauchery found in the night time twilight zone of the dark side of the cabaret moon. 

The Old Chum Cabaret was nothing more than one large breathless bordello laden with lacy robot boys in fag drag with tight mechanical waists, while macho manly female eroti-bots donned fedora's looking for some same gender vaginal gratification and satisfaction. Someone had opened Pandora's box of jazz and jive, and Robotia was hell bent for leather and in leather to get it on with a mechanical dose of topless and bottomless displays of wet and wild faux genitalia with a delightful dash of BDSM found usually in the flesh at a Fomulhaut fetish ball.

Yes, boys will be girls and girls will be boys and the Robotia cabaret scene was locked and loaded on kink. Tin allow transvestites in tights, Mecha-Marlene Dietrich Dream Machines in top hat and tails, while the topless black machine chorus girls were ramping up the libido factor with bare breasts bouncing and flouncing like two bronze baby moons with nipples extended like 50,000 watt Newtonian reflector telescopic arrays  emitting a radio signal of pure sexuality. The whole scene was in full swing with unrepressed sexual freedom and expression. Female Cyborgs frolicked playfully baring all while mecha-boys in full drag regalia were traversing the transvestite trail to the land of libidinous Oz, following the Yellow Brick Road of good old fashioned degeneracy where midgets camped it up with the best of them, and Dorothy was making it on stage with Glinda the good witch in a lesbian frenzy free for all! Cue the Flying Monkeys!

The neon stage was exploding with exotic dancers who danced, singers who sang and exotics who exotic’d. There was plenty of Soma and cannibis and clientele to add to the highly charged adult sexual nature of the show. From it’s flood lit stage it has spawned the famous and the infamous including Maddie Harry who we were to meet in two hours. She performed on the cabaret circuit during the last Antarian war, managing to extract classified information from seduced military officers who fell under her cabaret spell of flesh and promiscuity. She was not a machine, but a highly charged Retropolin vixen on a mission.

The Old Chum was owned by the notorious Narco Marx  and gained an unholy rep as a drinking hole for artists, poets, writers, and other drunks to visit, sit and try to outwit each other in verbal fencing matches with as much caustic wit as a flock of bitchy self absorbed drag queens. Soon, the cabaret experienced urban renewal as the old ghetto mentality of sit and drink was replaced by flamboyance and panache of a red light district. It came complete with a bright whore red windmill on the roof that would keep Don Quixote busy for hours dreaming his impossible dream. 
While most cabarets had “rules and regs” for the regulars, the “irregulars” followed no rules. They were non-existent while flesh, machine  and fantasy merged into a Picasso dreamscape.

Everything on the stage was ripe with sexual innuendo and it moved to a new neighborhood. One removed far away from modesty, as topless dancers and transvestites could now rub elbows and perhaps other body parts with patrons which included not only the straight community, but also Gay men, Lesbians and Transvestites...Strange bedfellows indeed, but interesting wouldn't you say?

Porcelain boys with too much moulin rouge and highlighting eye-popping eyeliner were parading around the tables. Women in mens clothing were becoming the norm and Lesbianism was now flaunting itself openly and deliciously. Fuck the Age of Aquarius...this was the dawn of an era some historians have referred to as that of the Pink Millenium, while on the streets the pink punks strolled along mincing to the symphony of sexual abandon.

Alien and machine cabaret girls and cabaret boys pranced and danced in a sequin dream sequence, wearing enough sparkles and spangles that would give Liberace's candelabra a hard-on! Weird?  Sing along everybody...grab your fishnets and tank tops and let loose boys..girls...boy girls, girl boys.

It was the age of the new Lost Generation of old Paris, the Left Banke lefties of literature and artists that included the man's man, Ernest Hemingway, tolling Spanish bells in the thick of the battle, while Pablo Picasso misplaced breasts on canvas, a cubist butcher of body parts that somehow made sense in a mad way as they hung framed in the salons and galleries. Diego Rivera's industrial murals mouthing socialist messages to the working class, while Frida Kahlo self-portraited herself as though committing portraiture masturbation. Gertrude Stein enjoying the lesbian fruits of her lover, Alice B. Toklas who could whip up a batch of brownies to die for, and to fuck for.
It was now the Age of the Machine and Sex and the Great Gonzo Gatsby was gasping for more...and so was I! More Soma barkeep..and keep it coming. 

I kept looking at my watch and watching the seconds morph into minutes, minutes into hours when a little after ten pm Maddie  Harry entered. She was stunningly beautiful.  it was the second coming and I was ready to get my Retroplin asteroid rocks off! 

Mata Hari! The name alone evokes images of an erotic and exotic temptress awash in a raging sea of spies, sex and foreign intrigue. Secret meetings in dark clandestine alley’s against a film noir backdrop of double-crossing double agents who pass along mysterious coded messages in invisible ink. Betrayal is around every corner.... This is the fully loaded conspiracy laden and emotion packed canvas that is the background for a portrait of the life and times of Maddie Harry. Now this legendary sex spy had me turned on and my booster rocket was ready for lift off...