The Atomic Hula
1959
Chapter Four
Mickey's eyes were solar system wide, big-round, dialated black holes, like orbiting hula-hoops around the gyrating girth of Saturnalia's rings. He rocketed through the hallowed hallways, space and time, shattered to shards of smithereen minuteness, to homeroom. Keeping low, to avoid detection, way and well below the radar of the rectory...fast...past the garbed gullwing habits of the floating DeLorean nuns.
Now, listen here, these weren't just any old nun's either, fercrissakes, not off the shelf, assembly lines, lines of assemblage, and certainly not off the rack.These were the custom creations of the Maker, made to order. The Elite. God's Goosestepping Gestapo Angel Girls of Gesthemane. The tom-tom beating, baton twirling drum majorette cheerleaders for Christ-a-mighty himself, who dared lead the big parade. Salivation with salvation, these were the Lord's Latex and Leather Ladies. The Spanking Order of the Dominatrix, a division of the Dominican Order!
Apples to apples, forbidden fruit to forbidden fruit, by comparison, the priests were quiet, pious, and well, perverted, who would deal with issues of purity and puberty. The frontline of the first jackoff, but nuns! Nuns! That was one gang that didn't fuck around. They were the ecclesiastical enforcement division. The Murder, Inc. of Holy Rome. Das Nuns could deal out punishment with the atmosphere sucking force and wrath of a stained glass death ray from space. A Herculean heroine armed with the righteous vengeance of a vigilante on methamphetamine, and could deal out punishment faster than Charles Bronson could say "death wish"!
The rosary was stretched taut, to it's sweating limits. A blood letting, flesh slicing barbed wire strand of beads, made up of big blocks, ten beads long of Hail Mary's, punctuated by a strategic line of defense known as Our Fathers. The atomic bomb in the arsenal was the Act of Contrition, which was thrown in contritely across the prarie of a flat, mind numbing and endless ranchland of religion. Put in place by the cowpokes and cowboys of the church, in order, to give order, and to direct the cattle drive of Catholicism into the waiting pens and corrals of the Kingdom of Heaven, come hell or high water!
High noon, time to get the hell out of Dodge. When a nun whipped out her rosary, fast draw style, from the hidden holster of her garments, she transformed herself into the absolute embodiment of a flowing haired, cascading, gold maned Wild Bill Hickok, grafted into the rougher body bark of Calamity Jane, creating a hybrid creature of fiction, half-man, half-woman, all demon, designed to bring order and purpose, to the innocent chaos of children. It was those very visions of religious retributions that projected themselves on Mickey's internal silver screen, as he dove for his seat in Mrs. Mallow's class safe from the demons..for now at least.
He was also very fortunate in his classroom seating assignment, as a matter of fact, you migh say he was blessed by the Gods. It put him right behind the Viking pigtails of Lindy Nordstrum and her sweet Nordic smell of salt-air and sea. Healthy skin the color or rich butter. A tomboy who was a cross between Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn, and a year older, wise in her nature and could raise a boys curiosity and pique his interest and destroy his innocence with her own innocent sensuality.
Within a year, they would be "going together" and she would be his Sacajawea. Leading him by his buckskin fringe, clutching his hand tightly, protectively with her own, and leading him into a realm of an unexplored land of exotica, emotion, love, puppy love, and of course, Viking sex. At night, they stared at the stars, listening to the campfire sing sweetly to them under God's canopy, and enjoyed the rush of river as it swept them way in each others arms.
Across from him sat Peter, a quiet type with intelligence, who also helped Mickey with his math. In those years Peter was considered an Einstein, quite brilliant actually and factually. In his own pre-ordained mascara future he would develope and transform into a stunningly beautiful transsexual diva, a glitzy superstar nova and absolute Tsarina of LA nightlife. Cabarets and cabernets.
Glam and glitz without the guilt. Peter, or Pamela, as he preferred, and as he became known, would eventually get shots, get tits, and get married, to a Canadian real estate agent from Vancouver in Thailand, followed up by a cannibus carnival of carnal group bachannalia in Amsterdam. She was happy with life after the honeymoon, however, later in life he/she would begin to take on water in the bilge, and begin a slow descent, and start to sink below the surface of an rolling, boiling hurricane ocean of sea monsters and sex, slowly dying of aids in the '80s, and full blown dead by the '90s.
Most of the other kids found Peter, strange, effeminate, with alabaster hands and a soft and non-abrasive nature, so of course picked on him unmercifully, crows cackling on roadkill. Mickey declined to jump into the dung pile with the others, and in fact swapped books back and forth with him and talked about tales of adventure. Herman Melville, Jack London, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper. Adventure and boys, snakes, snails and puppydog tails. Thats what little boys are made of, and Peter/Pamela proved that sometimes thats what big girls start out as!
Sitting behind him, boring holes through his head, looking for gold or silver or something of value to mine from the cranial cavity, was Maureen. She had three massive rogue brothers who never let her out of their sight. Drunken pitbulls in the bar looking for cats to eat as they entered the dark. She was as Irish as they get, and to the enjoyment of Mickeys rampant hormonal charge of the delight brigade, nature jump-started her physical upper chest formations early on during her own celestial creation.
A Vesuvian eruption of hot lava pushed upward to the surface of flesh, forming heaving Funicellian peaks and deep, grand canyons of pleasant cleavage. In the geography composed of the bodies of women, she alone was the embodiment of the speechless beauty of the Emerald Isle.
On the dark side of the moon, there was Jimmy, and there was Joey. The Basamante brothers, who took great pleasure in holding spitting contests, gnerally on other people, and other competitions that usually involved bodily noises and functions. The future held no hope of a Nobel Prize for either one, let alone a highschool diploma.
Instead, they were destined for long prison sentences later in life in a Michigan prison for trying to extort money from a downriver Hungarian bar owner, part gypsy, named Ziggy. When he refused to pay up, and started to reach under the bar for his bat, they beat him near to death with it, leaving him crippled and partially paralyzed for life. Ziggy recovered somewhat and testified against them, happy with their incarceration, although his own world would now be a prison of ongoing 30 days in the hole, heart attacks and strokes inside the solitary confinement of a cellblock of paralysis.
Mrs. Mallow, the object of his first schoolboy crush, was a teacher, but in parochial parlance, a civilian teacher, and not a nun. Some nuns dressed from head to foot in black and white, that made them look more like Jersey cows in a Wisconsin field, ready to be milked, while others wore brown colored garb that resembled an old wino's fingers with layers of nicotine stains like too many coats of paint on a weathered barn. Priests, like Batman, or a protesting Johnny Cash, wore black. Period. A strange interspersal of noxious weeds, predatory insects and poisonous plants all vying for nutrients in the composted garden soil of education.
Every day was the same daily diet of diety, and heaping portions of piety filling the academic plates to a gluttonous, seven course meal of seven deadly sins. Relief from the droning mantra of classroom monotony came when the lunch bell would sound the all clear. They would emerge from the fallout shelters in a nuclear daze of study, study, study, and thats when Mickey would unpack his alter-ego, kick his stutter in the ass and entertain the parking lot flock with his jokes, one liners and unlimited imitations of the popular TV titans of the day.
He was a miniaturized, short circuit, batteries included, high energy electronic version of Baggypants, all rapid fire Borscht belt blintz and schtick. A budding Hackett in the making. Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman, intellectualism rolled in the dough with a dash of madcap yeast and slapstick, Pinky Lee style, as he took on the persona of a porkpie punster, the sleazy warm-up act taking command of the comic battlefield with an arsenal of stolen jokes as old as vaudeville itself. A yukster yukking it up with the yokels just before the parade of granny strippers did the bump and grind on invisible phallics. It was comic badda-bing at the Badda-boom-boom Room, Ladies and Gentlemen! It's Show Time!
Another escape from academic Alcatraz occured on certain Friday's after school. If you weren't kept after class to clean the erasers because of some mortal infraction of Canon Law or the commmitment of venial sin parmagiana, then the boys in Mickeys class, along with some of the older kids would hurry down the concrete steps, below, into the very bowels of the school into the basement.
Fridays were best for these sojourns. Busy end of week days. Still lots of loitering and lingering after the school day ended. and who would notice a bunch of kids sneaking down into the belching boiler room, to take there place in the bleachers, under the dim glare of the cement bigtop tent of Armando's Ole Cockroach Circus!
Armando, the parishoner of the pinata, was a south of the border (sob!) immigrant from way down dusty Mexico way. He settled into the tiny downtown Bagley Street section of the Motor City in 1954. Originally from the hard scrabble streets of Ahumada, in some unpronouncable Mexican state, he decided early on to escape the dry skeletal desert heat, hot baking sun that turned facial skin into shoe leather tougher than buffalo tongue.
A fiesta-siesta land of burro's and burrito's, taco's and tequila. A place teeming with sexual intrigue and leetle seester could be screwed by a greenback gringo for a fistful of American dollars! In Mexico, everything was for sale. The restaurant he opened failed miserably, and he was broke by 1957, so he did what all good peasant stock had done for centuries, and headed for the sanctuary and protection of the padres of the Catholic church.
He made the 45 minute crosstown busride everyday to the Eastside to his job, clutching his black metal lunchbox tightly, reading his books on art and deathmasks. If nothing else it gave him ample time to reflect on his loneliness, and to nurse an open sore, bleeding wound of homesickness that could be classified as gangrene of the psyche. The American wetdream of the wetback wasn't panning out as he had expected, so perhaps that dream was only for Americans afterall, he thought.
As the school janitor, he was the equivalent of H. G. Wells' Invisible Man to everyone. Everyone except the kids that is, at least the ones who liked him. They greeted him warmly, sometimes in his native language and that made him smile. He enoyed being "visible" but, at times he wished he was even more invisible to the ones who made fun of him behind his back, sometimes in his face thinking he couldn't or wouldn't understand their vicious attacks.
He lived for the study of art, and also for those secretive Fridays, in the basement, after school, by the boilers, in the semi-darkened arena. Here, he was a Master of Ceremonies, the Ringmaster of the greatest vermin show on earth, the Ed Sullivan of the dark, dank basement of the home of the Holy Saints. A freakin' empressario. You see, Armando had this strange yet, fascinating hobby. He collected cockroaches, kept them in a box, and trained them at home to perform, as though they were the Bolshoi Ballet of Bugdom.
Ed Sullivan made a whole career out of introducing trained Bolshevik bears, balancing beach balls and pedaling bicycles. He was best friends with an Italian puppet mouse, mouse puppet, and a guy named Senor Wences kept his talking hand in a box until he was ready to have a conversation...with his own five fingered appendage!
The Wallenda's flew high on the stage amidst the flames of the fire eaters and ballet men and ballet women would prance and preen to the Broadway belting showtunes of Sophie Tucker. "There's no business like show business", but when it came to the show biz of bugs, no one could even come close to the highwired act of Armando's trained legion of circus cockroaches.
Incredible sideshow feats of nature. The carnival barker leered that carnie smile, that slightly "lets get the rubes, boys" sneer that is a prerequisite of that kind of job. The boys would sit, excited in their seats as Armando put his charges through thier little bug paces. Some hitched to tiny, minute hand made wagons of balsa wood, racing along to the finish line. Others rolling big steely marbles like trained seals and other, smaller bugs, riding on the backs of bigger bugs and resembling bareback riders circling the ring. There was even a death defying high wire act with out a net.
The show would last about a half hour and then Armando would take his bow, gather up his performers and close down the bigtop to huge applause. Amazingly these extravaganza's remained a secret for years and no one ever got in trouble. Eventually Armando packed up his own bags and moved back to Mexico, Mexico City this time to spend his waning days walking the hallways of the cities many museums, not ever realizing for one second, that he didn't have to study art, he was art in it's purest form.
The last show of the year had been a huge success, and now, it was time to leave for home, the school year had ended until September. Mickey rushed out of the schools double doors under the watchful eye of the statues of the saints and of the Virgin Mary, and wondered if her kid would have enjoyed the basement circus as much as he did.
