A neat trick, this fooling yourself, even if I do say so myself. Who's better qualified to say so?
There was a writer character in Venus on the Half-Shell, a Jonathan Swift Somers III. So I wrote a story by him and then another and hope to write more. These were done for fun; no writer's block existed then. But I'd like to point out that Somers III is the son of another Jonathan Swift Somers, the very bad and oft-frustrated poet whose epitaph appears in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. It's a case of wheels within wheels within wheels.
There are three fictional-author stories in this collection. The one you are about to read is one of them. Originally, this appeared in a magazine as 'It's the Queen of Darkness, Pal' by 'Rod Keen.' Rod Keen was the creation of Richard Brautigan, and he appeared very briefly in Brautigan's The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. Keen was a sewer worker who handed in a manuscript to the curator of a very peculiar library on a hill in San Francisco. His sole comment was that it was a science-fiction tale.
I recommend this wild book to all; it's one of my favourites.
I think that Brautigan, in giving this sewer worker the name of Rod Keen, was obliquely presenting his opinion of the works of a very well known and rich writer of San Francisco who has the brass-bound audacity to call his stuff 'poetry.' I share this opinion, and so I've given the antihero in this tale a somewhat similar name. And made him a very bad poet.
The ending lines of 'The Phantom of the Sewer' are not quite what they were in the original version.
Also, just as I wrote Venus with a slight Vonnegutian flavour, so I wrote this story with a slight Brautiganian flavor.
It's been fun being Trout, Keen, John H, Watson, M.D., Bunny Manders, Paul Chapin, Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor, and Somers III. Not to mention Lord Greystoke, otherwise known as Tarzan, and Maxwell Grant, the author of The Shadow stories. I hope to have more fun in the future.
1
* * *
All day long, Red McCune worked the city like a galley slave. Ben Hur had toiled to pull his beautiful many-decked ship across the waters. Red worked to hose and push ugly single-decked pieces of crap down the stream. They were his burden, and Red, always the poet, had once called the burdens fardels. His partner, 'Ringo' Ringgold, had said, 'What?'
'...who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life...'
'Okay, what's a fardel?'
Ringo's expression showed he thought it was something related to passing gas. That was what working in the sewers did to a man.
'It's a word used by a colleague of mine,' Red had said. 'A fellow poet. Bill, the Bard of Avon.'
'Oh, God, not another one?' Ringo had said. 'What's he doing down here?'
'Keeping me company.'
Ringo grunted. If the subject had been World War Two Japanese, Ringo wouldn't have stopped talking. He'd been one of the first of the black Marines to be shipped off to the South Pacific to kill or be killed or maybe both. Ringo opted for survival and came back with a potful of mementoes and a lot of stories.
'I admired them little yellow bastards,' he'd once told Red. 'Only they wasn't yellow. They stood up to us whites like real men.'
Red had rolled his eyes then, and Ringo had said quickly, 'You know what I mean. All us Americans was white as far as the Nips was concerned.'
Ringo was a little peculiar. That could have been blamed on the Marines, but Red thought that it was the sewer that had done it to Ringo. It did it to all the workers, including himself. The darkness, the garbage and trash on the dark waters, the gases, the heat, these made a pressure cooker that a salesman couldn't have given away.
Red raked in a high-button shoe and looked at it before throwing it back in. Some happy young 1909 beauty had worn that. She never would have believed that she'd be wrinkled and bent and open at the seams, her breath and soul sour, and living of welfare. Out of style, out of time, just like her shoe.
Gas is the pessimism of the belly, and pessimism is the gas of the soul. Red suffered a lot from both. But he considered himself to be both a poet and the archaeologist of the living. One way to pass the time, and the gas, was to imagine he was an archaeologist. Forget what he knew about the actualities. Imagine he was reconstructing the civilisation above only on the basis of what floated by and what he hosed down.
It was a strange world up there. Once there were many condoms floating by, but now there were few. This meant that they'd had overpopulation up there, and the rubber factories had been working overtime. One day, the rubbers became fewer, and in a few months where they had once been schools of little white fish, bobbing and turning and nosing each other affectionately, they were loners. No one to nuzzle or play tag with.
From this Red deduced that something terrible had happened up there. It was the Red Masque all over again, though this time it wasn't red spots on the skin but impotency. The thing in the masque walked through the streets of Golden GateCity, touching this one and that one with his wand. It made no difference who the men were: bankers, gangsters, fuzz, pushers, all-Americans, beatniks, carry-out boys, wardheelers, astrologers, talk-show hosts. They went limp as cigarettes dropped into the toilet.
Red got a lot of satisfaction from this image. He was so ugly that very few women would have anything to do with him, and those that would he wanted nothing to do with. It was a case of like repulsing like.
Red thought of himself as another Quasimodo. Where the hunchback hung around the steeple, way up there, Red chose to get down under. Heights made him dizzy, anyway.
Sometimes, he got too involved in his picture of a dwindling population. When he crawled out of the manhole at quitting time, he was surprised that the streets weren't empty after all.
'Dead and don't know it,' he'd mutter.
Today Red was working out his archaeology on the basis of the quality of the excrement going by in convoys. When he'd started working, twelve years ago, the brown gondolas that steamed on by, pushing toward their ports, the sausage-shaped gondolas floating through their dark Venice, had been of superior quality. Nothing to compare with the stuff in his grandfather's outhouse, of course, not Grade AA, but still Grade A. The stuff he encountered now, these were World War I U-boats compared to the magnificent Queen Elizabeths, the Titanics and Lusitanias that had, relatively speaking, graced the beer-brown seas. In those days even the bumboats, the stuff from the poor, were superior to the best from the rich of 1966. And if today's droppings were so bad, think of what he'd have to put up with in 1976.
Red didn't know what was causing the degeneracy. Was it DDT and artificial fertilisers and too much sugar? We are what we eat, and what we are includes thoughts. The stomach is the shadow of the mind, and where the mind goes, the stomach follows.
You wouldn't have got stuff like that from Socrates or Kant. They were thinkers; modern philosophers were stinkers.
'Hey, Red, what you dreaming about?' Ringo said.
'Socrates,' Red said.
'Oh, you mean that Greek cook at Captain Nemo's Submarine Sandwiches? Yeah, his food ain't what it used to be. But where the hell is it?'
'That's what I was thinking.'
'Better stop thinking and get your ass in gear,' Ringo said. 'The inspector's coming through today. Say, what's Ernie doing, anyway? He must be goofing off too. There ain't no hose going up there.'
Red looked up the tunnel. For a hundred yards it went straight as an ex-con claimed to be and then curved out of sight. The corner gave off a dim light like a glowworm in heat. It came from the lamp in Ernie Mazzeo's helmet. This helmet was like a miner's, though Ernie wasn't digging coal. Ernie dug hardly anything, which was why he would just as soon be down here as up there.
'Maybe I ought to wake him up,' Red said. 'The inspector'll fire him if he catches him sleeping.'
Red's lamp was shining down on the waters, which was why he was the first to notice the almost black stuff in the dark-brown liquid. It looked like an octopus that had been caught under a steamroller.
'What's that?'
he said.
'If I didn't know better,' Ringo said, 'I'd say it was blood.'
Ernie's head floated by. His mouth was open, and his teeth shone in the beam. There was enough gold in them to make it worthwhile to mine Ernie.
2
* * *
The police came first, then the ambulance, then Inspector Bleek. The detectives questioned McCune and Ringgold, took pictures, made measurements, and put Ernie's parts in a pile. These included the head, the severed arms and legs, and the heart. The genitals were missing. They might have been thrown into the sewage and had floated by unnoticed by the two workers. Nobody thought so. Richie Washington and Abdul Y had been cut apart and their heads and limbs recovered. But their genitals were still missing. The theory was that the killer had taken them with him. No one knew why he had done this, but the sale of mountain oysters at the restaurants had dropped to almost nothing.
'You two'll have to come down to headquarters,' Lieutenant Hallot said.
'Don't you worry, boys,' Bleek said, his voice thick as dipped honey. 'I'll see that you get a lawyer and bail. I take care of my men.'
He put his arm around Red and then around Ringo to show that he played no favourites.
'They're not under arrest,' Hallot said. 'I just want them to make complete statements.'
'Take the rest of the day off when they're through with you,' Bleek said. 'God! What kind of a monster is loose down here? Why's he picking on sewer workers? Richie last month and Abdul the month before. What's he got against you guys? Us, I mean. Or is it a conspiracy by some underground outfit? Are they trying to foul up the sewer system so the city'll get sick?'
Bleek looked as upset as Red felt. He was a big man, about a head taller than Red and a head wider and almost as ugly. His mirror took a beating every morning, but that didn't seem to bother him as it did Red. He had a wife, a Chinese immigrant from Taiwan who wasn't disturbed by his lack of beauty. All Caucasian males looked the same to her.
Bleek squeezed Red's shoulders and said, 'Hang in there, pal!'
'Stiff upper lip, old chap!' Ringo jeered as he and Red walked away. 'That honey-voiced son of a bitch likes you so much because compared to him you're a wart hog's hind end and he's the peacock's.'
Red didn't say anything. They had to stand to one side then while the attendants carried Ernie by under a sheet and on a stretcher. Blood was spreading out through it like it was looking for a new home.
'I think I'll quit,' Ringo said. 'Hell, we ain't even getting combat pay!'
Red didn't say much the next two hours except to answer questions from a squad of detectives. It was evident they thought he and Ringo were guilty, but that didn't bother him. In their books, everybody was guilty, and that included the judges. By the time they'd finished the session, they were even looking suspiciously at each other. The session didn't last very long, though. The cops' red faces quickly got green, and they staggered out one by one. Red finally figured that it was because he and Ringo had brought up a lot of the sewer with them.
That's strange, he thought. They don't mind the moral atmosphere in here. In fact, most of them seem to get fat on it. Then he remembered the sewer rats and how fat they were.
3
* * *
It was still afternoon when they got out. The light was the same as everyday in Golden GateCity on a cloudless day. The brightness had the harshness of reality but made the buildings and the people look unreal. It was as if the emerald city of Oz had been whitewashed. By an apprentice painter. Or maybe by Tom Sawyer's friends.
Ringo lit a cigarette. Ringo was short and very round in head and body and legs. This, with his shiny black skin, made him look like an anarchist's bomb that was ready to go off. The cigarette was the fuse.
'Let's get something to eat,' Ringo said.
'My God, after seeing Ernie!' Red said. He wanted only to go to his room, which really wasn't anything to go to. But it was better than going any place else. He'd get into the shower with his overalls and boots still on, and wash off his clothes. Then he'd wash himself. Then he'd open a cold can of beer – the beer would be cold, too – and he'd turn the heat on very low in his oven and put the wet clothes in the oven but leave its door open. The smell of cleanliness would spread through his one room and bath. It would be like forgiveness from a priest after a long, hard confession. Repentance played no part in it, though. He knew all along that he meant to sin again, to go down into the sewers the next day. The slough of despond, he thought. Despondency was a sin, but in the tunnels its peculiar odour was overridden by all the others. Moreover, up here he got even more despondent because he had to take so much crap from everybody. He took it down there, too, but down there it was impersonal.
Then, he'd be padding around naked, passing the mirror a dozen times and avoiding looking in it. When he forgot and did look into it, he'd give it the finger. It gave him the finger back, but it never did it first. It tried, but Red was the fastest finger in the West.
By the time he'd turned the old TV set on, he'd hear a banging at the door. That'd be old Mrs Nilssen, his widowed landlady. Mrs Nilssen would cry out in her seventy-year voice that she wanted to talk to him. Actually, she was a drunk who wanted a drink. After a few, she'd want to lay him. Mrs Nilssen, poor old soul, was desperate, and she figured that as ugly as he was he'd be grateful to have even her. A couple of times she'd been almost right. But he didn't want any of her desperation. He could just barely handle his own.
After he'd yelled at her to go away enough times, she'd go. Then he'd sit down at the desk he'd bought at the Goodwill and with another beer by his elbow compose his poetry. He'd look out the window from five stories up on the hill and see other windows looking up or down at him. Somewhere beyond them was the bay and the great bridge over which Jack London and Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain and George Sterling had once ridden in carriages. He knew that the bridge hadn't been built in their day, but it was nice to think of them rolling across it. And if the bridge had been built then, they would have crossed on it.
He had his own bridge to cross. This was finishing the poem which he had titled The Queen of Darkness. He'd written it on yellow second sheets and envelopes and grocery sacks and once, out of paper and funds, on the dust on his desk. The dust had inspired him; it'd kindled the greatest lines he'd ever written. He got so excited he went out and got drunk, and when he got back from work the next day, he'd rushed to the desk to read them because he couldn't remember them. They weren't there. Wouldn't you know it, old Mrs Nilssen had cleaned his room. This was the first and last time; the cleaning was only an excuse to look for the bottle that she was sure he'd hidden. She thought everybody had a hidden bottle.
He'd never been able to reconstruct the lines, and so he'd lost his chance to get his start as a major poet. Those lines would've launched him; it wouldn't be anything but Excelsior from then on. At least, it was nice to believe so.
Now, after a couple of millions of lines, Red had to admit that he couldn't even play in the minor leagues of poetry. His stuff stank, just as the sewers stank. Actually, it was the sewers that had ruined his poetry, though in the beginning they were his inspiration. He was going to write something as good as, maybe better than, Thompson's 'City of Dreadful Night.' Maybe as good as Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' Then, ugly or not, he'd be invited to the colleges and the salons to read his poems, and the women would fall all over him. But, no, his candle had gone out in the darkness and the damp and the stink. That white wavering beauty, the muse that he had imagined moving toward him, then away, beckoning him on into distant tunnels, there to show him love and death, had died. Like a minstrel show at a Black Muslim meeting.
Still, there were times when he thought he saw her dimly, a flicker, at the far corner of the dark canal.
4
* * *
'What the hell you thinking, man?' Red said. 'I can't eat now. Let's have a few drinks first.'
This was fine with Ringo. They walked through the crowd, which gav
e them plenty of room, to The Tanglefoot Tango Tavern. This was half-full of winos and pushers, and the other half was narks and a drunken preacher from the Neo-SufiChurch down the street. The Reverend Hadji Fawkes saluted them as they came in. 'Is there a God in the sewers? Does he walk in the coolth of the smell?'
'Not since last Tuesday, Rev.,' Ringo said and pushed Red on ahead. Red wanted to talk; a religion that promoted intoxication as The Way was interesting. So did the other customers, as long as Fawkes bought drinks for them. But Ringo wasn't having any of a white man's faith, free booze or not.
They sat down near the jukebox, which was playing 'Show Me the Way to Go Home,' one of the church's official hymns. They ordered a pitcher of beer apiece and a couple of hamburgers for Ringo. Seeing Red's expression, Ringo told the waitress, 'Take it easy on the catsup.'
'How's the poetry going?' Ringo said, though he could care less.
'I'm about to give up and write a book. One on the myths and legends of the sewer system of Golden GateCity.'
'Man, that's spooky,' Ringo said. 'You don't believe any of that shit, do you?'
'The Phantom of the Sewers? Why not? He could be just some wino that went ape and decided to imitate Lon Chaney. There are lots of places he could hole up, and anyway he doesn't have to spend all his time haunting the tunnels. He could live part of the time upstairs, maybe he's right here now, standing at the bar, drinking, laughing at us.'
Ringo looked quickly at the customers at the bar and said, 'Naw. Not them.'
'Has the Phantom ever done anything to hurt anybody, besides scare them half to death? And with what? A Halloween skull mask and a black robe? I don't think someone threw acid in his face and it ate his face off so the skull shows. That's right out of the old movie, Ringo.'