said. “A person must have some occupation. How do you while away sad afternoons? Just a few days of this boredom and already I want to espouse anarchy and bring down the state in a crashing fiery cataclysm.”
He decreed a private clown’s decree that we were no longer allowed to do nothing. Each day we had to do at least one activity. And that was how we came to make our first exploratory nighttime venture into the city. I wasn’t supposed to leave our compound because there was a danger of catching dog malaria or being murdered, and previously I had only seen the poor sections of St. Louis from the window of a horse-drawnautomobile, but Edward Halloween was right. Sometimes you have to throw caution to the hounds.
First we disguised ourselves. I removed my silver armlets, put on a pink cotton dress, and circled my eyes with greasepaint. He wore rough cloth pants and no shirt, like a river boy. Then we crept away through the contingency escape tunnel and walked all the way across the city to a place called Fat Tuesday’s, which was next to the national lottery shack in the Tokyo neighborhood. For several hours we drank banana beer with the hookers and rat catchers and denture servants. It was an outstanding location. They served banana beer in earthenware cups, and you could pulverize the cups afterward because they were disposable. The ground was carpeted in red dust and pieces of cups. There was also a charcoal pit where they char-roasted barbeque shamo and goat, and all the tables were assembled from palm trunks split down the middle and fastened together with the flat side up. This was said to be the fad in the Mississippi jungle, for people in St. Louis had an enduring fascination with the Mississippi jungle. This is why they drank banana beer, for example, which was expensive and didn’t have the smoothest finish.
Edward Halloween was mostly incognito, but my accent betrayed me and several people tried to speak to me in Modern English. They knew I was a rich person. One man grinned and said, “If you would try to have perfect shoes, okay! Good on you!” But later an angry woman shouted, “Explain it please, why are they genius scientists, but it still have no cure from a zombie bite?”
These nighttime ventures became regular with us, at least for a few weeks, and I learned more of St. Louis on those nights than in twenty-six years of high privilege. I liked to keep silent and fantasize that this was my real life. It was only noise and torchlight and wheeling stars and nothing more, no state dinners, no engagements, no stuffed-pepper atmosphere of a president’s house and a president’s aspirations. It was the air and savor of liberty. It was men playing dice, and they kept score by clipping clothespins to their beards, and it was a woman with arbitrary letters shaved into her hair, and it was an embalmed decorative rat stuffed witharoma berries. Sometimes there were even MDC men from across the river, where I had never been. You could identify them by the perfumed wax that they employed to shape their hair into high crests and ridges. They came to visit the brothels. There were no brothels in the MDC because, if you believed my father, their president was an enemy of private enterprise.
Edward Halloween was addicted to banana beer in addition to sweet potato wine and palm wine and date wine, and he was also addicted to millet beer. Millet beer was only for very poor people, but he relished it best of all because it smacked of his childhood, before his uncle made him a eunuch and sent him into service as a clown. Usually he was so fuckered up by the end of the night that I had to stuff his cheeks with cocaine leaves so that he would have the energy to walk home, and this was the precipitating factor in our discovery. One night he was so badly poisoned with cocaine and beer that he could not cease himself from belting out poor person songs as we returned home through the contingency tunnel. The
He decreed a private clown’s decree that we were no longer allowed to do nothing. Each day we had to do at least one activity. And that was how we came to make our first exploratory nighttime venture into the city. I wasn’t supposed to leave our compound because there was a danger of catching dog malaria or being murdered, and previously I had only seen the poor sections of St. Louis from the window of a horse-drawnautomobile, but Edward Halloween was right. Sometimes you have to throw caution to the hounds.
First we disguised ourselves. I removed my silver armlets, put on a pink cotton dress, and circled my eyes with greasepaint. He wore rough cloth pants and no shirt, like a river boy. Then we crept away through the contingency escape tunnel and walked all the way across the city to a place called Fat Tuesday’s, which was next to the national lottery shack in the Tokyo neighborhood. For several hours we drank banana beer with the hookers and rat catchers and denture servants. It was an outstanding location. They served banana beer in earthenware cups, and you could pulverize the cups afterward because they were disposable. The ground was carpeted in red dust and pieces of cups. There was also a charcoal pit where they char-roasted barbeque shamo and goat, and all the tables were assembled from palm trunks split down the middle and fastened together with the flat side up. This was said to be the fad in the Mississippi jungle, for people in St. Louis had an enduring fascination with the Mississippi jungle. This is why they drank banana beer, for example, which was expensive and didn’t have the smoothest finish.
Edward Halloween was mostly incognito, but my accent betrayed me and several people tried to speak to me in Modern English. They knew I was a rich person. One man grinned and said, “If you would try to have perfect shoes, okay! Good on you!” But later an angry woman shouted, “Explain it please, why are they genius scientists, but it still have no cure from a zombie bite?”
These nighttime ventures became regular with us, at least for a few weeks, and I learned more of St. Louis on those nights than in twenty-six years of high privilege. I liked to keep silent and fantasize that this was my real life. It was only noise and torchlight and wheeling stars and nothing more, no state dinners, no engagements, no stuffed-pepper atmosphere of a president’s house and a president’s aspirations. It was the air and savor of liberty. It was men playing dice, and they kept score by clipping clothespins to their beards, and it was a woman with arbitrary letters shaved into her hair, and it was an embalmed decorative rat stuffed witharoma berries. Sometimes there were even MDC men from across the river, where I had never been. You could identify them by the perfumed wax that they employed to shape their hair into high crests and ridges. They came to visit the brothels. There were no brothels in the MDC because, if you believed my father, their president was an enemy of private enterprise.
Edward Halloween was addicted to banana beer in addition to sweet potato wine and palm wine and date wine, and he was also addicted to millet beer. Millet beer was only for very poor people, but he relished it best of all because it smacked of his childhood, before his uncle made him a eunuch and sent him into service as a clown. Usually he was so fuckered up by the end of the night that I had to stuff his cheeks with cocaine leaves so that he would have the energy to walk home, and this was the precipitating factor in our discovery. One night he was so badly poisoned with cocaine and beer that he could not cease himself from belting out poor person songs as we returned home through the contingency tunnel. The
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