The Atomic Hula by Mike Marino (novels in english txt) 📕

little bit. I just don't know for sure." Somehow, Raymond wasn't totally reassured. "Maybe someday we'll find out. If it hurts and all, I mean. I hope it doesn't hurt too bad, though. That would kill me."
Mickey thought about that last comment his close friend, perennial pessimist and die hard necrophobe had uttered. An only child with divorced parents in the '50's, yeah, he got lonely at times. He hadn't seen his real dad in quite awhile, while his friends went home each night to a semi-fabulous fifties nuclear family. Mom, Dad and all the appropriate siblings.
Mickey's house had the love, the emotion, but not the "dad" to take him by the hand to "father-son this and that’s. Ballgames with giant sodas and too many hotdogs. It was as though his dad were dead, the invisible man, and that left a huge hole and a gut hurt in the living Mickey. He looked once again at his friend Raymond and said, "You know, dyin' does hurt a little, m'be a lot I guess, for the dead guy. Hurts the living even more." Raymond was puzzled, shrugged and started to finish his drink and looked at Mickey. "Dead is dead," is all he said.
Nighttime brought out the flashlights for flashlight tag on warm summer nights as only the Midwest can offer. Fireflies and frogs in the bushes. The humid aroma of bushes and plants. The gnats and mosquitoes and the sounds of boys yelling, "Bang, you're dead!" followed by an age-old one act play where a trusted amigo would feign death and drop to the ground, only to rise again later and be your best friend once more, until another time, when once again, one of you would fall in imaginary battle killed by imaginary bullets from an imaginary gun.
The hot dust sweat drops of play and the illusionary acrid, wincing, battlefield, gray haze gun barrel-blue smoke would clear. Peace treaties signed, sighed and sealed as the sun sank vertically beneath the plumb line of horizon. Fade sky blue to sky black. The impressions, imprints and footprints of the daily play-dramas would be left behind in the alleys to be covered over, obfuscated by layers of fading memory, to live out their lives as archeologically archived fossils embedded in a womb of hardened mud-rock.
Former generals, four stars and all, and western heroes, good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, answering to a higher authority, parental, and again, like magic, they were transformed into "just kids" again, stripped of whatever rank of glory they held in the false reality of the realm of play. Voices in a fierce vocal volley resonated like a thudding cannonade from the front porches.
Every kid heard his name called out, the names live ordinance fired in a barrage of artillery fire in a clomp, clomp, clomping marching band Marine-like roll call with a double time cadence. Mickey would hustle along, quickly, his brisk pace carrying him the half block or so along the elegant regal rows of the stately, royal canopy/crown of elms that flanked both sides of the street, up and down Three Mile Drive.
Tall, magnificent gladiators, woody sentinels of obvious Roman birth, silent stewards guarding Mickey's kingdom against invasion . . . Goths, Huns, Normans, Saxons, Cossacks, Redcoats and worse, the kids (Polacks mainly) from Bedford Avenue.
Crowns of leaves and nests, bird dung jewels, summer green, fall brilliant, winter naked, branches extending outward in respectful salute. Hail, Caesar! Hail, yeah! It was a good day on the battlefield of play today, lots of dead to count, but tomorrow would be even better. It was the last day of school until summer: the nuns, married to the Lord and priests, secretive in gowns, dreaming of their favorite choir boy, would go into hibernation until September.
The battle had been won, but now summer was here and it was time to win the whole fucking war
Chapter Two
The Detroit of the Nighttime Gods. The god's masturbated and the sky obliged their self gratification by ejaculating and filling the heavens with the sperm-mess of many millions, billions, trillions of tiny stars. Some seen, some hidden, hiding other solar systems in their cloak. They never tired of their game of solar hide and seek, hidden from view in plain light, not so plain sight. They whispered, conspired like pulp fiction double agents in gum shoe trench coat Prague, sending coded secret messages, streaking across the sky-universe to be deciphered by the deranged, for it was only they, the mentals, rocking back and forth, who could hear the psychotic voices from the other side.
Some voices, real and sweet, and by reason of sanity only, spoke volumes, in wet tongues of reality to the coming end of the school year that lay just over the horizon, tomorrow, at Gary Cooper High Noon. The bad guys who dished out homework by the bucket load, would crumple in a bloody heap, broken and dusty, brought down by a fictional Colt cartridge, while the school bell would ring out its ding-dong, bing-bong Halleluiah song. From then on, it would be an endless summer of Tom Sawyer days and Huck Finn nights.
Mickey, sometimes his friends called him Mikey just to irritate him, lay quietly in is room, his protective womb, as he had every night since moving into his grandparents house in 1949. Mother and child, victims of a devastating divorce. Only one year old at the time, it had been the only home he ever really knew, loved, and wanted to return to time and time again. The march of time, the biological reality of random deaths, and his own wanderings in the psychotic deserts for 40 days and 40 nights would eventually end this false mirage of comfort.
Emotional duct tape was useless in mending the fractured fences and the mirror shattering senses of loss he would feel in the future. An unwilling pilot without navigational equipment, he would watch, hermetically sealed in a psychedelic vacuum-capsule, as he spun around at ever increasing gravity defying speed and G-force, and then catapulted into space into an erratic orbit of his own calculations and design.
There were two rooms across the hall, bedrooms, secret chambers, were the two brothers, to each other, and the two uncles to Mikey listened to music every night. Tom the Older and Bill the Younger. Tom, soon to be married and out of the house, had survived WWII riding in a big bleeding bucket of Patton's metal all the way across Germany and on to, and beyond victory. Bill, would soon, in the early 1960's, trade in his Impala convertible and join the JFK's green machine, the new Elvis Army with "yes sirs" and "no sirs" but, within a year would shed his GI skin to emerge as a civilian and schizophrenic, deadly and deranged as a Davy Crockett with rifle in hand.
Soon he would be sedated on the very worst Fed-meds that the gummint's money could buy and then closeted away, forgotten, hopped up at half-way houses in Detroit's inner city where they hide the crushed, crippled dark angels of society.
Mickey’s eyes began to close, watching the movies that appear on eyelids. His mind danced and laughed at the instant re-plays of the Three Stooges that filled the small TV screen that night, a special treat of boinks, doinks and "soitenly's". Mayhem by madmen as only Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard could produce.
He began to drift off to sleep, like a wet, slippery, quiet and dark Mississippi river log cutting a path in the silent waters, guided in its quest by the moonlight. Tom and Bill, the Older and the Younger, remember the uncles? They were from two different ages, locked in a difference of generational opinion of melody and lyrics. Chuck Berry was beating off to a savage rock n' roll, sweat drenched backbeat from Bills room. Ol' Chuck was frothing, looking for Maybelline at every juke joint in East St. Louis, and trying to get seatbelts and bra straps loose. St. Louie, St. Louie, while from Tom's room, some primo Prima, Louie, Louie, growled for mercy like an animal groveling at Keely Smiths feet...spiked heels jammed firmly into his back. Dat ol' black magic, it got me unner it's spell.
The nuns and the priests were already busying themselves tonight for the last day of school until summer ended... and the cataclysm of catechism would begin afresh. Mikey smiled, and then winced. Tonight, may have been the property of Larry, Moe and Curly, but tomorrow belonged to Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
1959.
The end of the school year. The end of the decade. Eight years of Dwight, days and nights, would now make way for Camelot and the arrival of JFK, the political Lancelot. Korea, attached to the Chinese mainland shaped like a peninsular penis, or Florida, would step aside to allow another world stage to play host to American defeat.
This time deep in the steamy, mosquito repellant, boot and flesh rotting jungles of Vietnam. Korea was at a standstill at the no-mans kill zone. Up North it was Pyongyang Poon-tang while down south the Broadway boys were belting out their rendition of "I'm a Seoul Man". Soon the strange sounding towns would shift from Korea to Vietnam...Hanoi...Da Nang...Saigon...Long Wang...Suc Muc Dik.
1959.
The year that Vietnam had pulled a rabbit from its hat and had produced the first unofficial American casualties. Two dead, one wounded, officially. Officially, these were unofficial deaths, of course, off the record, but, real blood nonetheless, and real silence, and of course, real dead, officially unofficial...of course.
On television, the drag queen of the small screen, Uncle Miltie would do a Berle-esque striptease to shed his black and white frockery and defer to a fabulously accessorized colored peacock and a cast of technicolor thousands. 1959. The end of a decade's Haiku.
Mickey dressed in a hurry and grabbed that lunch bag that no matter how well food is wrapped inside, it still leaves a stain on it the size and shape of Albania. White dress shirt, black pants, black, shined to ridiculous military specifications and that damned clip-on tie. Catholic boys and clip-on ties, Catholic girls and green plaid skirts. The uniform of the day, but not yet complete, unless you had your Hail Mary, Our Father vampire slaying exorcise the demons rosary stashed deep inside your lint lined pockets as an afterthought.
Jesus hanging on the cross for dear afterlife, and dangling precariously from your pocket, swinging back and forth, ready to fall off the cross and tumble down the slapstick mountainside as you race down the stairs. Forgive him Father, he's an idiot!
Quick bowl of oatmush meal, mustache Pete milk and a piece of Jewish rye toast and you're charged for the day. Give granny a kiss, an "I love you", and a "Yes, I have my rosary Granma" as you dash out the door her voice trailing in the distance..."You mind the nuns now, hear me, you mind those nuns."
The times they were a changin'....
Chapter Three
The Atomic Age of the 1950's left the war whore scarred, scared and completely unrecognizable. Bloodied and beaten, humiliated and mutilated. The Pimp of Victory had made sure that her swastika was popped like a virgin’s cherry and left her alone, lost, to bleed and drown in a river of misery and pain. Justifiable homicide in the end, where the ends, justified the means.
Hiroshima and Berlin, the Axis spinning out of control, an evil ant colony asphyxiated with insecticides to correct the chemically imbalanced. Choking to death, before being crushed by a shoe.,,just to make sure. Just to be certain. The Werners of the Reich, von Braun'd, jumped the fence