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

of Facism and defected to the just cause of the Allies, just 'cuz, and the age of the rocket scientist was on. It was the atom splitting, fission/fusion plutonium nuke-freak/geek age of Godzilla and Goddard. The checkered flag had signaled the race for space and the need for speed.
It was an era of space-age eroticism and serialization as Commando Cody and his Rocketeers, became strange lost planet airmen in a stranger's even stranger land. Planets ruled by art deco drag queens doing battle with the milky thighed Empress from the planet Lesbos. Orbiting empires steeped in the subtle other worldly underworld of a transgendered lipstick culture and copious mountains of heaving cleavage.
Planetary life on a daily basis with a swing low sweet chariot chord of cotton field blues that foretold of an imminent collision of moons that would wipe out the advanced civilization of a people with a decided Liberacian flare for all things solar. Chuck Yeager, the first man/child to slice through the skies breaking the barrier of sound and traveling faster than an assassins bullet ripping through the bone and flesh of Kennedy's head. JFK? RFK? DOA! Yeager split it in half with a G-force kick to the groin in the Bell X-1 in 1947. Nix the -nik!
It was those rocket ready Russki's that had launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957-nik...and in 1958 "Big Daddy" Don Garlits put the proverbial pedal to the metal to break the ass of the land speed record and garnering the distinction of being the first man/machine, machine/man combo to go faster than 180 mph in one of Henry Ford's infernal internal combustion contraptions. But nothing...nothing on earth or the in the sky could match the speed, power and "right stuff" that rocketed Mickey out the door that morning, down the steps and into the school...leaving behind a vapor trail of excitement!
The last day. The last day.
The Last Scholastic Supper of the Dominus Vobiscum Academy. Waiting outside, was Tommy, the lone Polish kid on the block, who was also Mickey’s best friend. Along side him was the neighborhoods wild child, a strange but likable kid, Joey, nicknamed Joey the Torch. Joey earned his nickname because of his unrepentant and morbid fascination for packs of matches, the flames they produced and the acrid smell of sulphur.
One day in '57, in a state of moral implosion and a Freudian frenzy set his mothers cat on fire in the dirt alley behind the garage near the patch of pie baking rhubarb everybody in the neighborhood seemed to have in those days. The incendiary incident produced a howling-meowing felonious feline agony that was piercing enough to make the soul bleed, deafening and frightening. The damn thing was in pain.
Real pain. The kids watched wide eyed, tongue bit off silent, as he took careful aim and shot it point blank with a BB gun five times to silence it, and maybe even to end it's misery, and ours. Never was sure if that was the real reason or not.
Newspaper accounts finished the final chapter of Joey's story later in 1970. Shot a cop cold blooded bang, dead, drop in Akron, Ohio. No reason nor rhyme ever given. Joey wounded by another officer, was rushed waa-waa sirens to the hospital, got patched up, glucose life support, pain pills, lot's of 'em, Darvons and morphine, then stood stoic, as a remorseless hospital junkie at trial. He exited life and was executed in 1975. Neither the cat, the cop, not even Joey the Torch could brang that they had nine lives.
There were also the two "older" kids, Davey and Milt, who walked the younger ones to school. Pervert patrol. Patrones. Papal Paratroopers. Guardian angels with human form, invisible wings of godlike flight, unshined and unseen halos. The Wise Old Ones who lived deep in secret swamps, or in caves at the top of mountains, hidden in mist shrouds, yet not much older than their younger earthbound charges, mortals all.
They were not the children of Zeus wearing little Zeus-suits, and who ruled with benevolence over a mythological heaven and earth. Heaven and Earth? Hell, they were bigger than that. They were the flesh and blood of no less a god than Baggypants
Baggypants, was interesting enough, alright, but was truly unique to the Dago heavy eastside of the city. He was blintz Jewish. Holocaust Jewish. He was also a local television personality and funnyman who took centuries of angst, anguish, guilt and persecution, blended them together with the fervor of madness known only to Bavarian alchemists and autistic genius dwarves with science degrees, into a Zyclon-B strength formula of comedy, that when drunk, was intoxicating to both adult and child, and would asphyxiate them with laughter.
He infused the Gentiles small blue collar black and white tv screen with humour as the Emperor of Entertainment with a 13 inch cathode window into his world with a kids TV show at four o'clock every afternoon right after school let out. The kids loved him as they would lavish love on a crazy favorite uncle that they only see at holiday get togethers, and the parents saw him as a patron saint of parody and good clean family fun.
Most important, he was a shiny, if not slightly tarnished mirror to the past.
A Catskills throwback, a vaudevillian Napoleon from a different age, the Golden gilded era of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, proving that even in 1959, taking a direct hit with a pie in the face is still what makes the slapstick world of entertainment go around and around, Goyim acceptable gravity at work...and pie's did fly on that makeshift studio set in numbers, countless on fingers, to rival the numbers of UFO sightings born of paranoid parentage in the late night "ok, what the hell, let's have another beer" skies over New Mex.
At night, when all the kids were tucked in bed, safe from monsters, Baggypants would rip the rubber mask from his face. Under the cover of darkness and nightclub neon, he would unleash a double entendre Pandora's Box of an older, wiser, caustic "don't get me started" adult oriented lounge act at the local low lit smokey old cigarette supperclubs in both Detroit and over, across the river in the dense Maple Leaf wilderness of Windsor, Ontario. The pie in the face routine was folded neatly and put away in a battered old steamer trunk until morning, and replaced, under the cover of darkness, by the T&A humor that defined and glorified fine American tits and even finer Canadian ass!
Davey and Milt, whose mother was Catholic, attended parochial school as a late 1950's social expediency. It was easy for them. You could always hide your religion under one rock, and build a whole new church on top of another. They were proud of their pie tossing poppa, and rightly so. Mickey was proud too, because not only was he their neighbor, but would get spend hours under the slapstick bigtop at the House of Baggypants where he would practice new routines on the kids before they were aired on televsion.
Mickey, the mimic in training, was short for his age, stuttered, with words jamming up in the breach of a verbal machine gun and refused to fire off whole sentences. He was also cursed with a notable lack of athletic prowess that kept him confined to the sidelines, and had a father he hadn't seen since birth. The stigma of being from a broken home never washed off in those days and parent-teacher nights had little meaning, or joy of anticipation for him. He did learn however, under the careful comic tutelage of Baggypants, that laughter, more exact, the ability to induce laughter, was power...and it made you visible and invincible simultaneously, one in the same, sharing the same plane and all three dimensions.
He relished those times with Baggypants, and would dutifully memorize every word, every movement, every element of schtick and timing, and then reproduce all he had learned at lunchtime in the parking lot much to the delight of his pre-pubescent audience. He lit up when he saw their broad smiles, and heard them laugh with the force of a Key West hurricane. Best of all, his stutter, now you see it, now you don't, disappeared when he was "performing". He could feel the approving eye of Baggypants watching, hidden and proud, applauding his pint sized protege. Viva Las Vegas!
As they walked to school in a state of blind animated kid chatter, the sounds of gas chain saws pierced their conversation. Ripping and cutting chewing metal noise. One of the too numerous to count elms that dotted the eastside landscape had to be taken down by city crews. It, as so many others, eastside, westside, and elsewher on the compass, had succumbed to a marching invasion of Dutch Elm disease that was spreading like a malignant cancer racing through a blackened smokers lung throughout the city.
Elm limb after limb was being amputated, leaving the plant patient armless, legless, limbless, and would eventually be reduced to a comatose stump left to lie and die a helpless torso. It would lie on the ground, pleading and begging for painkillers to no avail for days until the chainsaw carnage would end and the trees could be completely cleared, and hauled away.
It was sad to see them fall and die alone. The deaf nurses heard nothing, and would not answer their screams or address thier terminal agony. The stark end of the life cycle and beginning of the death cycle of all woody plants were the same as the cyclical life and death drama of all living things. Flesh and wood. If trees were sybolic of the life symbiosis, as his grandfather had always told him, then their removal represented a lobotomy of the urban landscape.
The chainsaws sawed as they crossed the busy street, dodging traffic to reach the sanctuary of St. Clare de Montefalco school. It stood looming, a baroque Roman basilica, tragically out of place, out of time, and out of tune with it's envriron of urbanity. A large and imposing structure, a Catholic casino, where parishoners parachuted from Sistine skies to the rows of pews below. The poker-priests dealing piety and parochial dogma with the aplomb of a black jack dealer in Reno with a marked deck of cards. "Hit me, hit me" cried the players to smiling, knowing faces. The dealers knew better than anyone, that the decks were stacked and the house always won.
They entered the building, mindless little lemmings heading for the cliffs, high and perilous rocks that shielded from view the crashing beach below. Little plaid people with uniforms and an overdose of Catholic conformity and uniformity. God's assemblyline of good little boys and good little girls. Corked and ready to explode and detonate at a moments notice. Humanities scholarly pipebombs ready to be ignited by priestly admonitions for sins real and imagined. Mortal and Venial. Take your pick.
Bless me Father, I have sinned!
The last bell rang for the first class of the day as they ran inside, little punchdrunk prize fighters ready for one last day of school until summer, and one more round with the champ.
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