Judy stopped it, looked at the pulsing monolith in her hand, shrieked, and then crawled on top of him. His bumper slid into her greasy cunny as easily as a money-bag into a politician’s pocket. She clamped her bunny muscle around his flailer, and they were off on the roller coaster, boxing the long compass, Eve riding Adam’s tail. They came together, yelling as if the room was on fire.
After breakfast, Judy said, “The demonstration is this afternoon. This morning I’ll start proceedings to get you on welfare.”
She had to explain this. He was amazed. “You mean I get paid for not working?”
Judy, hearing this, laughed and said. “Rip, you’re a natural-born hippie.”
But his visions of paradise vanished when Judy found that he had no social security card, no ID of any kind.
“I don’t know,” Judy said. “Those clothes, the 1772 coins, your ignorance…you couldn’t really be Rip van Winkle, could you?”
“Would you believe me if I said I was?”
“Not unless I was on something. Never mind. I’ll get you a card, and you can apply.
Meanwhile, how about taking a shower with me? I sold your halfpence this morning and bought some pot with part of the bread, but I used to rest of it to pay a plumber to fix up the toilet and shower.”
Rip was agreeable since it seemed to him that there was more involved than just washing dirt off. He was right. This age was heaven, even if it was flawed. But then he was no perfectionist.
That afternoon he boarded a rusty old bus with about fifty others, it broke down a mile from where the parade started, and they walked the rest of the way. Rip carried a placard: DICK US NO DICKS. Judy carried: NO MORE BLOODSHED IN VIETNAM. He didn’t know what the signs meant and didn’t want to be ridiculed if he showed his ignorance. But it was all exciting. More had happened to him in one day than in all his life in his sleepy little village.
While he was marching along, the band playing, and he was shouting the slogans he heard the others cry out and giving the V sign, which he supposed meant, “Up yours.” a beautiful redhead with huge conical tits grabbed his crotch.
“How’re they, Pops? They say you’re tops. You got a dong like King Kong; more jism than bishops have chrism.”
Rip grinned. He felt as happy as a favorite nephew whose rich uncle has just died, as ecstatic as a stutterer who’s just had a good vowel movement. So he usually didn’t know what people were talking about or what was going on most of the time? Most of the people he’d met didn’t know either, since they were stoned most of the time. And so the food and liquor tasted like someone had farted in them? He could acquire a taste for them.
Suddenly, there was a lot of yelling and screaming, whistles blowing, and he was running for no reason except that everybody else was, and he was laughing like a woodpecker that’d hammered its brains out drilling for bugs in a streetlamp post. Maybe he might get his head busted or get thrown into gaol, but it was worth it. Such fun!
He threw his placard down just before summer fell away like a politician’s virtue at the first bribe offered. The light purple haze swirled. Snow he couldn’t feel sifted through him. Nights and days blinked like a whore batting her eyes at him. The seasons whirled around like a brindled dog chasing its tail.
“Oh, no! Not again!”
As suddenly as it had started, the gallop of time ceased. He was on the same spot and in the blaze of summer. People elbowed and jostled and groped him, but they were not those he’d left in the 70’s. However, something unusual was going on. A parade of some sort. Here came a band, followed by a float bearing a huge animal figure, a funny-looking elephant, and then a group of fat elderly men dressed like Algerian pirates. Fezes, baggy pants, fake scimitars. Their leader carried a sign:
SHRINERS FOR LEX N. ORDO
AGAINST ANTI-LIFE MURDERERS
At the rear was a man dressed like the Sultan of Turkey. His sign said:
ONE FAMILY, ONE HEAD, ONE VOTE
Behind him came marching women in white semi-military uniforms and veils. Many carried infants in their arms or jerked along toddlers. Their leader’s sign said:
CHURCH, CHOW, CHILDREN
A very pregnant young woman, wearing gloves despite the heat, bumped against Rip. She snarled at him; he backed away. He glimpsed the butt of a handgun in her open handbag.
Aimlessly, he made his way through the spectators thronged along the street. It seemed to him that he’d never seen so many knocked-up women in one place. All were gloved. Was there a new custom that pregnant females had to cover their hands when in public?
He approached a very young woman, big like so many nowadays, a head taller than he. Her size wasn’t her only elephantine feature.
Her belly looked like she’d been carrying the baby for eighteen months.
He mumbled, “I been kind of out of things for some time. What year is this?”
She stared at him, then laughed.
“You a wino? Or you been in the slammer? It’s 1987, shithead. It’s also the year of the greatest infamy in history! The blackest, the lowest, the most degrading, the Naziest! That self-righteous puritanical motherfucking male-pig-chauvinist tight-assed fascist Ordo!”
“What? Who?” Rip said, trying to back away but stopped by the crowd.
“You must of been in solitary confinement! Or are you an acidhead? The President, you twit-brained prickface! That’s who! He finally got the anti-abortion amendment passed! So…look at me! You can’t even find a backroom butcher nowadays! They’re scared they’ll be sent up for life, and…”
“Here he comes!” someone shouted, and the cheering and clapping drowned out whatever else she was saying. The people were jumping up and down like barefooted sinners in hell and weeping tears bigger than horse apples. Nearby, a man, mouth frothing, eyes rolling, was down on the pavement trying to bite chunks out of the curbing. If no one else loved him, his dentist did.
First came six cars crowded with grim-faced men carrying rifles. Then a bunch of motorcycle cops. Then some armed toughs running ahead of a topless car. In its front seat were a driver and two men with set faces but nervous eyes and, in the back, a good-looking but aged woman and a man standing up and waving and grinning like an opium-smoker who’d just had a successful session in a comfort station.
The roar of the crowd pressed in on Rip like a bill-collector who’s finally cornered his victim. It wasn’t so loud, though, that it covered the almost simultaneous explosions of fifty—a hundred?—handguns. The big woman’s pistol went off an inch from Rip’s ear, causing him to crap in his pants. A second later, the gun flew high over him and landed in the street.
Rip whirled. Though deafened, he could read the woman’s lips.
“There! Let the shitheads try to figure out who shot the asshole!”
Was it a conspiracy? Could a hundred women, or men, for that matter, keep a plot like that to themselves? Hell, no. A hundred pregnant women had just happened to come here with the same idea. Who knew how many more were further down the street, waiting for the chance they’d never get?
Now the guns were flying everywhere, like steel semen from a jacked-off robot. Their owners were getting rid of them and shucking their gloves, too. Their target was lying in the street, pumping blood from at least fifty holes. If he’d been an oil field, America could have told OPEC to fuck off.
Once more, Rip was running. The dead man’s guards were firing everywhere, and innocent bystanders, some not so innocent, were dropping like fleas from a poisoned dog. Rip finally got clear of the massacre, though he was twice trampled, kicked in the balls once, and clawed so many times he lost most of his clothes and much of his skin. He was reminded of the one time he’d tallywhacked Brom Dutcher’s wife. But now he wasn’t getting any pleasure whatsoever.
He ran into a tavern. Panting, he stood by the window and watched the noisy turmoil outside. Then, hearing a small thunderous noise, he turned. Cold ran over him. The noise had been too much like that of the game of ninepins the
little old men had played while he drank their Hollands gin, so excellent in taste but so surprising in its effects. He saw some bowling alleys, something new to him. But he paid them no attention. Facing him were two of the little old men. One was the commander, the stout old gentleman in the laced doublet, high-crowned hat, red stockings, and high-heeled shoes.
He spoke in a foreign accent. “It took us some time to track you through time, Rip. Too much of the elixir does more than put you into suspended animation. Anyway, let’s go.”
“No, no!” Rip said loudly, hoping the patrons would come to his rescue. “Please! This age isn’t paradise, but…”
This wasn’t old New York where everybody’s business was yours. No one wanted to get involved now. While the patrons turned away or just watched, the other little man jabbed something into Rip’s arm. Unconsciousness fell on him like a mugger.
Just as in the book he’d read, he awoke in A.D. 1792, in the same place where he’d fallen asleep. He had a backache ten times worse than all his hangovers put together. It wasn’t from all the fucking he’d done. You couldn’t lie on your back without moving for twenty years and not get a backache. Fortunately, the elixir had somehow kept him from freezing to death and had prevented bedsores.
Trudging down to the village, weeping for his lost if half-assed Eden, he thought about the little men. Unlike Washington Irving, Rip didn’t think they were the spirits of Henry Hudson and his crew. They were men from outer space, maybe from one of those UFOs that couple had talked about. Or time travelers from the far future.
When Rip got to the village, he knew how to act. Hadn’t the scenario been written for him, wouldn’t it be, rather, by that hack Irving forty-seven years from now? But life wasn’t too bad, as it turned out. He was an old man now, fifty-five, and nobody expected him to work for a living. Come to think of it, none but his now departed wife had ever expected it of him. His daughter’s husband, a genial fellow, didn’t mind supporting him, especially since Rip was now a living legend.
Rip sat often in front of Doolittle’s Union Hotel, which had once been van Vedder’s Tavern, and he told the story as Irving had, and he got so many free drinks he almost couldn’t handle them.
Sometimes, late in the afternoon, loaded with more booze than a rumrunner’s ship, he’d close his eyes and doze or seem to doze. The loafers and the tourists around him would see his face clench in fright. They figured he was having a nightmare, and they were right. He was thinking about the bad things in the 20th century, and those would give even the natives of that time nightmares.
Other times, he’d smile, his hips would rotate, and his beard would rise where it covered his fly. Chuckling, snorting, nudging each other’s ribs with their elbows, they’d figure that old horny Rip was having a wet dream. They were right, but they didn’t know how purple it was.
Philip José Farmer, The Purple Book
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