Joe dressed in gold from head to toe, had to sling up his fingers because they’d gone limp from all the rings … tied his ponytail back with a golden band, instead of bookshelves, cupboards, and a fireplace at home he had showcases full of gold … and most of the gold in the little shops that spread like mold after the explosion of time belonged to him as well.
Goldie was American, a Hungarian with an excellent passport, each month he flew to Bangkok to expand his hunting ground of connections in the Hungarian colony that had sprung up there in the wake of that bloody year when the Hungarians attempted to set off the time bomb … the Monster sent in the tanks, which, as everyone knows, don’t bother persuading, they just roll on through … the Hungarian colonists in golden Thailand, where the oldest whores’re thirteen forever and some of them never die, worked for Golden Joe … some, I soon realized, out of sheer joie de vivre and love of motion, and others because Goldie’s men persuaded them it was better to cough up a few gold chips than to risk tangling with their countrymen, especially when the nearest dark and silent jungle lay right at the end of the local bus line.
Joe’d been drawn to Prague right from year 1, having sensed the motion, and as one word led to another suddenly there were whole sentences of Inglish with the unfamiliar accent of the Sewer of Buda and Pest, I listened with great interest, leaving the content to Micka and David … and in came the Firewater, and since Goldie was interested in our gadgets, we agreed to make a deal … it got a little hairy when David had to advise him of our little entente … Goldie didn’t live by the contract and didn’t know about the Secret, he had intercourse with those thirteen-year-olds whenever he went to Bangkok, but seeing as he could tell that our interest in metal was real, he tossed out an idea he said he’d been toying with for some time now in the hope of giving gold a rest and enjoying life a little in his golden years, of which so far there were nearly thirty … maybe get a few massage parlors goin, staff em with sweet young things, I’m talkin real young, an white! Praga could be a minor branch of Bangkok, no problem, fly in a few tea roses to brighten things up a little, but mainly to give some classes, cause your girls here … well … they’re a little on the comfy side … maybe I’ll fly Amber an Coral over … but we’ll recruit the rest from the finest old Prague Katholik families … inasmuch as possible … an bam, we’re swimmin in metal, with the legislation the way it is here we’ll be pullin in the sickest pigs from every desirable state, suckin the metal outta their pockets before they can get a grunt in, an afterwards too … but first David had to advise him of our little entente, which we had mutually bound ourselves to so as not to please the Devil too much … porno okay, but never with fleas … an fleas means kids … said David … that’s cool, said Golden Boy, but when he made his next proposition David had to raise his voice again … we don’t transport, distribute, or offer drugs to anyone that isn’t already hooked … that we don’t think is already hooked … then Goldie, by now openly amused at what odd tradesters we were, whipped out another proposition, this one slightly soggy with Water and wheelies of truth, which I’d slipped into his Jack Daniels with my usual agility … I’d used them in negotiations with guys like him before, whenever Micka screwed up his nose in that special way and said the password: Aunt Madia may be dumb as a pumpkin, chief, but your proposition is quite attractive … I’d insidiously trot out the wheelies of truth … got em from a KGB major I knew … usually the chiefs would get tangled up in their words, and now and then they’d own up to their innermost, generally dark intentions, which was important, since maybe we wanted to be their contacts and maybe we didn’t, but we definitely didn’t intend to wind up as somebody’s sacrifice, like the son of humble Abraham that almost got his throat slit up there on the mountain … that’s what I call a close shave, and back in the days of today’s fast times that I’m talking about here, the eardrums we’d gotten from Starry Bog were pretty ground down to start with, so there was no guarantee we’d hear the command from the heavens that stopped old Abraham’s blade … and this time Goldie started off with a detour through liberated Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy, before coming back to Thailand and then up to the border … with Burma, and then he crossed over and stopped his speech there, casually tossing in a word or two about this tribe called the Karens, a pretty powerful nation, and a minor conflict with the Burmese government, inserting a mention or two about a few tens of thousands dead … and slightly and heavily wounded … villages burned, men executed, women raped, children kidnapped … in other words, the usual … adding how fascinating it was to track the constant improvement in armaments and accoutrements on both sides of the conflict … see, the Karen rebels began to suffer heavy losses when the government boosted its arsenal with wicked old lethal long-range AK-3s, which as every little kid knows come from Czech factories … now that was a racket, boys … Goldie smacked his lips … and that wasn’t all, because the clever Karen chiefs took all the gold they had stashed away in those bamboo stems of theirs and bought the very same perverted Czech weapons, and they had so much gold saved up in those thieving households of theirs that the Bohos also outfitted their rifles with infrared telescopic sights, and at night the government ranks wore seriously thin in spots … so the government had no choice but to pick up the phone and call the death factories about installing chemical warheads, and when the orders were filled … Goldie smacked his lips and took a slug of Firewater spiked with wheelies … the Karen shamans, in those old caves full of moonlight and eerie drawings in human blood, opted for the final solution and telepathically roused the death factory managers, and each invoice for special rocket hookups to fit the AK-3s … meant a huge profit for the intelligent byznysman … said Goldie … an it’s still goin on … just a stone’s throw from Bangkok … Igen! said Goldie, reverting to his native tongue just before he fainted, which tended to happened to other crews’ chiefs after sampling my cocktails … allowing us to confer in peace … without any foreign hick’s bat ears around … and David didn’t have to cite him any more clauses from our little entente, which was a good thing, since he probably wouldn’t’ve been able to take knowing what a pack of angels we really were … the main point of our contract was the Secret, because the one thing we prayed for more than anything else back in those days of today, after the explosion of time, was for the Messiach … to come … even though we enjoyed ourselves most of the dwindling time, death lurked around every corner, as always … and sometimes life was so insane … as always … and a knight isn’t allowed to do himself in … not even if he’s taken hostage … not even if they torture him … he’s gotta suffer through it all … every one of Starry Bog’s traps … and we all contained so much cancer and human misery and fear and hunger that sometimes it leaked out our eye sockets and Bohler had to step in with his cross.
To be brief … sometimes we were like spiders in cloisters, and the feeling of eternity and frustration, the fear of life and the fear of death, of cold and heat, were unbearable … sometimes you could drop acid and glimpse life pulsing in everything around you, and the trees were friendly creatures, just like you, and then it snapped and the trees were just another scary life form trying to take you out so they could suck the sun’s warmth without interference … and both were real, and you have to know and cope with both, and you have to know when not to fear and when to be full of dread … only he who doesn’t dread his fear can cope with both in the now and here … and live in time on the move … so we crossed paths in the perpetual war of the creatures to get a spot at the watering hole … and every battle was so tough that sometimes even when we switched off, hopped into Micka’s mobile, and drove out to the Rock in the countryside, it didn’t help.