The Puppeteer Trilogy by Mike Marino (ebook reader that looks like a book .txt) 📕

The troupes fame would spread and hopefully would increase T. Rex’s wordsmithing output. Of course he’d still have to rely on the fortune cookie gig until the literary fountain came gushing forth in the form of royalties for that great American novel in the sky. HE even had a plan to propel himself with fortune cookie power by taking it into a whole new direction.

The first nights gig at the Pink Leather was arranged, costumes and sets being worked on at a fever pitch. He and Kathleen with help from Alexia Dyslexia were exhausted and thirsty as hell.

T. Rex spoke first the immortal words…”Who the hell do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

 The ground floor apartment of Alexia was alive with abundant Tomaso Albinoni adagios. Some of the finest classical baroque compositions for ballet ever written used mainly as the background for “Dancing With The Medieval Stars” (Remember, if it ain’t baroque ...don’t fix it!) Along with compositions for live theater, he also did baroque stand-up and was the Lenny Bruce of the late 1600’s. His most famous piece was and is “The Adagio in G Minor” which is cut three on the White Album! (Alexia actually one night drunk with T Rex Fitzgerald played it backwards and swore to this day they heard a secret message … “Voltaire is dead….Voltaire is dead….Bach is the eggman….and Vivaldi is the walrus!”

While her apartment turntable z(locked and loaded) dispensed a full automatic 33 and a third full metal jacket of fluidity and grace as befits a ballerina with enough balls and chutzpah to make it to the top of the pirouette pyramid with slow movements performed with fluidity and grace. Fluidity is important in the ballet racket...grace itself can be purchased at the local corner gas station along with a breakfast burrito and a lottery ticket.

As Alexia became absorbed by the music she noticed the street musicians outside were blasting away and the infused blues began to permeate her apartment drowning out the adagio by layers. The old Martin guitar of One Legged Slim was in perfect alignment with the electronic keyboard of Loose Shoes McGovern and the homemade ba boom ba boom drums of the old blind Chinaman who no one it turns out knew his name.

Alexia, this time rather than get angry at the musical intrusion noticed that her whole body began to move to the street music. Not Bobbysox, boogie woogie crap, hip hop shit ..note even rockabilly psycho movements for Hot Rod in C Major...it was something different carrying her away on the wings of a musical cattle drive...ballet movements fornicating with modern dance she was inventing as she went along. Her ballet movements were now being pollinated by the fast moving blues numbers you can only hear and savor properly at downtown Chicago bars.

She found out later they also shared addictions to pills, needles and booze. They would fly high at night with a jet stream fix in their arms...scored on the beat streets of Boston with more than its share of Chinese restaurants, and one room bars with one broken stool,

They were artists, as a whole as they painted with music, self-portraits of blues on the surface of rough textured bags of burlap which can be found in dumpsters on the westends of eastside alleys... old burlap bags that held the fresh marijuana from old Burma herself.

They lived on and off the streets with its grotesque neon bus depot signs and pawn shops as the junkie juice flowed hot and steamy, and the musical notes played out like so many bottles of illegal pills at a pharmaceutical convention with doctors in attendance, wearing togas stolen from New York City bath house locker rooms with fat sweaty Greeks and those from the Baltics with secret rings eating lunch naked.

They played for change, spare, copper, nickel or silver, with buffalos on one side, and Indian heads on the other, very old, old change, yes..and sometimes someone would toss a grenade of crumpled bills into the collection cups set about.

.The currency itself was as wrinkled as an old suit of cheap material, the money tossed by cavalier passerby, you know the type. They would all fold up their three piece suit-tent cubicles with battleflag neckties flapping in the wind, to go see the blues guys, and then move on to Starbucks to read some Steinbeck not knowing who he is or why his grapes are wrathful.

Just who the hell were these cats? “Probably they came from the bootheel in Missouri, kick ass cotton country, with rockabilly mules hitched to plows with eight track tapes of Narvel Felts blasting from the front seats of pick-up trucks with rifle racks and crushed beer cans on the floor near the gas pedal.”

Yes, they were junkies, but aren’t we all to some drug or emotion?

Most of their veins were darkened now, to a bruised swampy green and black-blue bruised too, weaker and harder to raise, a limp pulp, even with a gentle spank, Nodding and smiling, the junk microwaved in the bloodstream, so warm it's global warming swarming over you in layers melting your personal ice caps, arctic and antarctic. The homemade syringe is emptied, a sigh and smile cross the junkies face as the junk drag races further and further along the two lanes of veins right along the quarter mile finish line of the brain.

Alexia had no discovered her own path...fusion of modern dance and ballet with a street beat to junkie concertos! She had to meet this musicians, but first she called T. Rex Fitzgerald for his advice. A whole new world of artistic achievement was about to kick the doors wide open to a Wonderland of dance, art and literature as Alexia Dyslexia, T. Rex and Kathleen Morphine were now on a delightful collision course that would change their world.

T Rex Fitzgerald was getting the puppets (Thank gawd they weren’t Muppets, but this was a gay bar after all and we’ve all heard about Bert and Ernie!)  and props ready for the gay club opening of the Marionette Boys in Fishnets Follies. Kathleen Morphine was on her way over to his apartment which was just across the boulevard where vehicles played dodge ‘em cars with hapless pedestrian targets..some of them worth 20 points on a good day of hit and run fun in the sun.

Dennison, the nellie queen neighbor, as large around as the planet Neptune  who resembled a cross between an aged obese Marlon “Wild One” Brando and Orson “Citizen Kane”  Welles and Hermann “cyanide” Goering , had made all the arrangements for the trial performance at the Pink Leather Club, home of Liberace piano playing impersonators and Judy Garland’s galore and where dueling banjos would be welcomed at all hours.  

When  Kathleen showed up with the last minute wardrobe changes for the puppets, dummies and marionettes they loaded them into the van as neatly as Ted Bundy would stash  his treasure trove of victims.

It was showtime!

When they arrived at the nightclub they  parked in the alley and unloaded the gang of weird assed puppets in drag behind the stage curtain, then met the owner, an Asian drag queen who went by the name of Long Wang who booked them and was to pay them. The night could be a rousing success or a complete bomb. They were nervous,

What the hell..go with the flow. This would be one hell of a ‘Give my regards to Broadway, there's no business like show business’ kind of night.  Puppets in drag singing, well, lip synching to Broadway show tunes!

Adrenalin began to take over as they arranged the stage and props for a smooth performance.  It was time to man up with a fishnet chorus line of marionettes on strings, hand puppets and a ventriloquist dummy that would belt out tunes with the power and force of a damned Ethel Merman torpedo.

They peered through the stage curtains and the place was packed to the rafters with the gay crowd. It's showtime at the cabaret boys and girls, and those of you in between! The sexual cabaret culture was flourishing at the Pink Leather Club like a $500 a night hooker at a convention of Republicans from Iowa.

The room looked like  nothing more than one large breathless bordello laden with lacy boys in fag drag with tight waists, while macho manly women donned fedora's looking for some same gender vaginal gratification and satisfaction. Someone had opened Pandora's box of jazz and jive, and T Rex and Kathleen were in the middle of the vortex of ready to spin dry! What would the Colonel in Apocalypse Now say...oh yes...I love the smell of Vaseline in the morning!

Yes, boys will be girls and girls will be boys according to the song "Lola" by the Kinks, and the tonight this club  scene was locked and loaded on kink from transvestites in tights to Marlene Dietrich’s in top hat and tails.

Everything in the  audience was ripe with sex so you could now rub elbows and perhaps other body parts with patrons which included not only the straight community, but also Gay men, Lesbians and Transvestites...Strange bedfellows indeed, but interesting wouldn't you say?

Tonight, T. Rex thought aloud, “We’re going full Sondheim steam ahead”! Don't worry about masculinity atrophied or your wrist gone limp...it's showbiz after all not brain surgery. They would have scenes, puppetized of course from “The Boys in the Band” and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” My favorite line from ‘Band” was Cliff Gorman entering a party scene and asking aloud, “Who the hell do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”

T Rex had worked with the fervor of a madman on a set of Broadway show tunes to incorporate into act…. a ventriloquist dummy in full drag singing  “Why Can’t a Woman Be Like A Man” from ‘My Fair Lady’ along with a modified Jet song from ‘West Side Story’...”When you’re a fag, you’re a fag all the way from your first undercover arrest to you’re last dying day…”

Afraid you won't be a man anymore because you have an urge to hum or sing a gay white way tune...don't worry..and don't ask/don't tell William. It's overture time This is it, the night of nights...It's time for Henry Higgins to come out of your closet to liberate the Liberace that lurks by candelabra light in all of us..yes, you too!

A real man can crush a beer a can