Speak and Spell - 'The Con'

'THE CON' - Originally performed at Morrisoncon, the Hard Rock Hotel, Las Vegas on September 28th 2012

Transcribed by Deep Space Transmissions from Tamas Jakab's YouTube video, August 2013

"Here's hoping, now that someone's died

You'll drown in grief, a proper tide.

Ignoring what you feel inside:

That mum and dad and Jesus lied."

Walter Lee has wasted an entire morning composing bleak and enigmatic blank verse for sympathy greetings cards and failed to score an award winner. Rakish Walter Lee who, opiated to the tits in a three-piece suit and tie like a dime store De Quincey, taps out day-glo gobbledygrams on his Hermes Rocket portable typewriter at a truck-stop diner on yellow brick Route 66, partway to the black pyramid and...

DESTINY!

For Walter Lee, defrocked G-Man and full-time gentleman junkie, luck has finally run out. But a writer has to make a living somehow. So he only hopes the detour via Hopeless City 1959 is worth the gas...

"Slow news day Mr. Lee," the Agency contact observes. The headline on his flat-folded Desert Dispatch reads, "THOUSANDS DEAD - APOCALYPSE CONFIRMED"

"Slow news beats bad news any day." Walter Lee peers down his WASPy nose, tips his glass and salutes with the dregs of a vodka and Coke. His contact, sat opposite for fifteen minutes now; patient, forgettable, half-man half-mantis - a smile, a song and a taste for eroto-cannabalistic predation.

Walter Lee tears the sheet from the roller, peels back the carbon layer and crowns a stack of glossy paper. Surprised by this prompt execution of the deadline, the contact confirms his own appearance on page 1, paragraph 4 with a wry grin.

"You forgot to mention my gills," he says, sniffing at the concluding words, before locking the manuscript in a faux white tiger skin valise. In payment, from behind his thumb like a card trick, he produces a liquid paper dropper that glows through his bones.

"Just in case something needs rubbed out," he says, "I use Eaton's Bond. Contemplates the call and response. Corrects right on to the paper." The stranger bends low across the table to conclude the business, eyeballs shifting like pendulums. He hisses.

"It only works once I hear. Beware the side-effects of ultimate correcting fluid Mister Lee. And may God have mercy on your soul..."

"God wouldn't touch my soul with rubber gloves." says Walter Lee. When writing can't pay the bills, a boy has to go where the work is. Contract killings in the after-life, Bardo wet jobs, aetheric assassinations done dirt cheap. It's only words after all.

In the parking lot behind the diner, Walter Lee accepts his mission, loads the spike from the liquid paper dropper and thumbs the plunger to the root. Intravenous organic super-solvent sure can teach a man a thing or two about story-telling his ass into and out of trouble.

Big smile. The fear recedes like the hat off Beaver's head. Walter Lee snug as a Ken doll behind the wheel of the salmon pink and black trimmed 1959 Chrysler Imperial hardtop. The passenger seat is reserved for his faithful typewriter; his familiar, snug in it's case like a friendly Modernist snail in a shell. The mission is deceptively simple: Walter Lee has exactly twenty minutes to kill the winner of the battle between good and evil.

*****

Welcome to fabulous Las fucking Vegas...

The very last place a man with no luck at all would want to wind up. And there, ahead, at the end of the highway into town is the stop sign for human consciousness, evolution's terminus, sulking in the afternoon's oily light, a jet-black pyramid seems to float, as if in a trough of shallow piss, spilled across the horizon.

Make some space in your heads for a four hundred foot tall space jellyfish!

An incontinent Elder God, wandering in his pyjamas half a mile from the trauma ward. His name is 5-Cell, 4-Simplex. In the eternal morning before the Fall it was Pentachoron, Hyper-Pyramid, one of eleven rebel Platonic super solids who got just a little bit too big for their vertices.

The Cyclops stare, the Sauron eye of fire, extinguished at the Fall. Shell-shocked, hallucinating polyhedral casualty of some old War in Heaven or other. Crashed to Earth through the rotten math that holds up the sky. Through the worm-eaten joists and mouldy rafters of cosmology. All the way from the icy mesopods of higher mathematical topography to Nevada, desert dirt and scorpion shit.

It's golden sections chained, it's occult ratios enslaved to the Black Magician's will. Mind-controlled by Muzak, neon flesh and burnt swaddling light. The blow-hole in the pyramid emits a waste beam of 42.3 billion raw candle power. A lux-ejector brighter than a supernova of sunflowers. It's threads have extended - wire and cable, 10 miles underground in every direction - to sense it's prey.

If it had lips it would lick them.

Nothing's ever easy. A Cadillac Eldorado races by. An ink splatter of exhaust fumes, a Steadman scribble of bug-eyed, bubble-bad craziness. An exhaust of ether and adrenochrome. Concentric circles, batmen over Barstow. Time like the highway runs one way - into the pyramid's impacted Tauri vortex. A Jules Verne maelstrom, grinding centuries not water in its restless mouths.

Walter Lee lifts his hands from the wheel of the car, He ? like a bomb, on an incline that just gets steeper by the minute. He's sweating cold liquid smack, and he hopes the junkies can't smell him from here. Losing his nerve like corn plasters draining through the soles of his feet, Walter Lee turns to flee but the wide world stretches to resist escape. The distant blue horizon is 3 feet from his nose now. The city warps into wide angle on the inner skin of a soap bubble.

The trap is tripped.

The pyramid opens, four miles of white hot delirious triplet God. All it's sides are closing into place around him, all at the same time. It's Jonah and the Whale and his only hope now is to become a poison, to kill this thing by osmosis. Crawl lithe and naked from it's ass if need be. Triumphant, waving the flag, dancing the fucking can-can. Job done. Until then, bravado counts for fuck all.

First blood goes to the Black Magician.

*****

Vladziu, the Black Magician of Vegas, keeps an inside-out room at the apex of the pyramid, in the neutron dense brain of the Pentachoron. The tides and currents of it's indoor lagoons are simulated by vampiric plumbing. The clouds are dry ice, the moon an arc-light, the sky a counterfeit Sistine firmament where screaming Archangels are, and jolly old God himself is blinded, castrated, wiped across the event-horizon of a hungry black hole like a bug splatter swiped across a windscreen. Everything is kitsch baroque, nothing is real and it's too late now to change your minds. He's in there already, sprouting roots across the blood-brain barrier, rocking himself awake in our cradle of bone.

Behold the FUCK out of Vladziu, glowering from a white hot chandelier, upside down like a vampire in furs, a jewelled spider rotating anti-clockwise on his crackling, sticky threads. A rainbow tear of purest poison. Rotating anti-clockwise, he descends upon a wire of toxic gold to join us. Rouged, embalmed, undead; the funeral mask brought to life by Max Factor and formaldehyde.

Vladziu, master of the vamamarg, the Widdershins Way, the sinister style, the st-st-st-stuttering path. Vladziu puts on his peacock coat of creepy-crawling head lines, newsreel negatives and The March of Time, trailing a kaleidoscopic fur-trimmed train spangled with assassinations, armistices, weddings, moon landings and state funerals. He glides to the instrument of his will, his death engine. Lord of 88 keys, proud, mummified, hatched from a cocoon of rhinestone and peacock feathers, the pianomancer trails a personal cloud of radar-baffling tinsel chaff.

In his garden of upright phantom showgirls and trapezing boys, everywhere he looks he sees himself in a gleaming, forgiving mirror. In every sound he hears spectacular applause. In the weird quarter light, the grand piano is a paraplegic crab, encrusted with a scabby psoriasis of diamonds. Things that are part machine, part animal, attach the ever-?? magician to his instrument in a way that's ??. Half sex-act, half invasive surgery, involving cables, catheters, intravenous tubes, ??, steaming tanks of liquid nitrogen and KY jelly - until man and piano are fused as one.

The still beating organs are removed in expensive reproduction canopic jars and sealed in a replica of King Tut's tomb.

There in the boudoir, eager knives and flails get busy in the flesh of his apprentice, carving a gaudy likeness of Vladziu in the young man's face. Diamond fingertips tip up the lid to reveal the weapon's bloodstained gnashing teeth, all black, even the white ones. And with showbiz in his blood like a predatory germ, Vladziu begins to play. Accelerating to a mantric intricate embroidery on Tiger Rag, whereupon his ten fingers branch like a dozen candelabra to become ten thousand tendrils elaborating the melody beyond all human tolerance. Chain-smoking violet and yellow cigarettes, he summons a flashy trash Apocalypse.

****

"Let's take it from the top," the entertainer says and tips his ?? back, “Lets hear it one more time.”

“Vodka and Coke,” says Walter Lee, swilling the aftermath of a drink in his glass. No-one knows how long he's been jailed in the guts of the pyramid – it could be three days, three nights, or their equivalent in millennia. It's casino time. It's now o'clock. The slots clatter and chime, sounding a permanent fanfare of imaginary dollars. The metallic splash of King Midas pissing through his fingers. As he tugs again on the silver arm, as the cog-wheels of fortune bite and trigger a triple avalanche of fruit gum flavours and Bars and blazing bells, Walter Lee is forced to concede that something, somehow, has gone seriously wrong with his big, fat so-called mission.

If the ultimate correcting fluid can't do it's work, he's here for life. At least.

The stench of Noah's Ark and Pharaoh's tomb. It's hard to breath in this old starry barnyard. Half circus tent, half celestial pavilion, where Vladziu's occult fuckery has imprisoned a pantheon of animal-headed Egyptian emanations, each divine hybrid shackled to it's personal one-armed bandit. Hawk-King Horus, Thoth, Ammon the Ram, Sekhmet the lion, maned with solar flares, Bast, Khef-Re the scarab. The Gods bet with white-hot currency brighter than stars. Cosmic gambles pay off in Big Bang jackpots. Coinage fills the hopper as a runaway stellar Genesis. And it all starts over again, and the slots stretch off in rows in all directions, an Op-Art moiré like military headstones flashing on and off and on and off.

“You figured out the game yet?” The speaker is eight feet tall with an ibis head and the voice of Big Bird, “You figured out The Con?”

“I think I know why you call these fuckers bandits.” says Walter Lee.

“The odds of a jackpot are one in three and a half billion” Thoth says. The wheels of this machine show spinning tarot cards. The Crowleyian deck with Frieda Harris watercolours. Accelerating into a thrilling relay race between Gods and major arcana, the Hanged Man takes the lead.

“Sounds good to me,” says Walter Lee.

“The simpler the game, the better the odds.” Thoth says, “But remember, over time, the house always wins.”

“Any more good advice?” says Walter Lee.

“Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwqyz. If I can find out just what this word means, I'd be the smartest bird this world has ever seen.”

Thoth departs. “Vodka and Coke,” says Walter Lee. "Let's take it from the top."

Out in the distance the sky flashes stomach acid green. The entertainers toast the test from the Atom Lounge, barely suspecting the ever-present possibility of mutation in the melodic line, irreparable damage to the root harmonics. Even tone-deaf Walter Lee can recognize something sick coiled in the DNA of the song.

“Lets... hear it... one... more... time...”

*****

“I want to clean up this town and make it the home of sophisticated entertainment,” Howard Hughes explains, waving aside a fog of blue cigarette smoke and reefer smoke that rolls itself into a wave of tiny galloping stallions.

“I've come to enlist your help against the Black Magician who created this semi-imaginary spawn of Sodom and Gomorrah called Vegas.” Dean “The Dago” Martin sniggers and winks at Sammy “Smoky” Davis Jr. (who can only wink). They're too busy betting on fragile, bird-skeleton nags spun from monoxide, methane and nicotine to care what Howard has to say. Sammy improvises like an angel and, gently, with a “Ska-Di-Do-Di-Doo”, he whispers a disintegrating smoke horse into the final furlong. It doesn't matter whose money it is. These guys are swingers.

What goes around comes around on the Wheel of Fortune. They share the tab, they share the girls, they share the bill. They don't use money; it's all for free. It's a kind of American Communism. It's how the world would be if a bunch of singing astronauts from the future went back in time to terraform the 1950's.

“I mean, you boys, singing and joshing together like you do, breaking down barriers of race and colour. I see no reason why we can't combine our strength, wealth and charisma as a team of fantastic adventurers. I mean like the Gods of Olympus or the Knights of the Round Table, but happening now, in today's go-getting America. I suggest we expose ourselves to the bomb test radiation, as a prelude to gaining incredible powers...”

And so on. And so forth. But nobody's listening. Howard Hughes is on his own against the powers of evil and the Lord of Illusion. The bomb tests show no signs of stopping. Frank 'The Pope' Sinatra convenes between Mia Farrow's legs with Anton Lavey, heralding the prophesised birth of the anti-Elvis and the assassination of John Lennon; revenge for all of those Beatles records that Frank hated. What goes around comes around...

"Let's take it from the top,"

“Vodka and Coke” says Walter Lee, and tries again for the jackpot. The pyramid belches toxic waste light. “Lets hear it... one... more... time...”

*****

Howard Hughes signs the register with 'John T. Conover” - his favourite alias – buys the hotel and puts his affairs in the hands of rubber-spined, sky-high descendants of Mormon militia men. What did the Book of Moses say about the Old Dragon after all? “By the power of mine Only Begotten, I cause that he should be cast down.”.

Victory is a done deal, a scriptural guarantee. The bout's been fixed for evil to take a dive in the second round of Revelations. All he has to do is bring the house down.

'John T. Conover'. Con-over. The syllables divide and split his tongue.

Howard Hughes once had a dream of a perfected Vegas, it's trashy brothel mules and scanty negligees put away in boxes. It's wild gangster habitats bulldozed and developed. The crime, clubs, and skin erased, scoured and scrubbed from history's often corrected and revised manuscript.

"I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jewelled and furred female getting out of an expensive car." His words.

But it's hard to overlook 'The Crew That Never Rests', even here in Arcadia. A sweated film of micro-ecologies slipped on the handle of a Lincoln Aero-Mobile by a well dressed naked palm. In the undergrowth of the starlet's eyelashes, hunting packs of wild pseudomonas feast on black-matter mascara clumps, spurred on by microscopic demon riders.

Howard Hughes is sealed inside. Inside the room. The waiting room at the Desert Inn. The Overlook. The Bates Motel. The House at The Border Lands. The Room With a View of the Ozone.

The eighth floor looks onto a silver of every window. Now Howard Hughes turns corkscrew fingers in the keyhole and locks the door by means of an elaborately nested configuration of convoluted 11-dimensional manifolds which require him to painstakingly grow his own specialist tools using natural keratin and sheer savage willpower. Howard Hughes showers in gallons of cleaning fluid, immersed in holy Angelic detergent, then puts on his armour – the wrinkled fever and vaccinator rays. The visor of rotten teeth. Rubber glove gauntlets. The breastplate of ??, malnutrition and kidney failure. His shield of codeine and diazepam. He is Don Quixote, naked and deranged, 6' 4”, ninety three pounds. He who had all to give has given all in selfless service. He has forfeited his youth, sacrificed his sanity, surrendered the sky, his wealth, all human contact. Now he surrenders his ability to move in three dimensions by clambering awkwardly into an open drawer and securing his head between a box of Kleenex Man-Size and a copy of the Las Vegas Yellow Pages. There are five broken needles in his arms, rusting, infected, leaking prophecy into his bloodstream. The universe has flattened to a cardboard box in his hand. From the box he selects a tissue, and fifty years later it rains in Venezuela. He adjusts his bony knees and a volcano erupts in Iceland disrupting global air traffic. He contracts a fist and a black man is elected President.

Howard Hughes is pressed flat, like a flower in a book. Thought becomes outline. But inside... inside he is three hundred feet tall, bathes in Boulder Dam. The Ace of Cups, The Holy Grail. Where construction workers and hookers ejaculate moon beams into the Colorado. Laughing like American thunder, Howard Hughes skims a hand bigger than Staten Island Ferry across the chronic surface of Lake Mead, and 300 tons of water slop over the lip of the world's Eighth Wonder.

Armoured in chromed, stained glass, a high-Gothic cyborg knight, he draws his sword of living light and turns to face Vladziu, riding the black pyramid side-saddle to war, against a sky sick with tempest and runaway tornadoes. A John Martin apocalyptic skyline where mock flames consume the streets of a back-lot Manhattan. An Eiffel Tower falls in a scale model recreation of Doomsday. The Bridge of Sighs crumbles, made of concrete and spit. Roman Temples, mock Roman-esque revivals held together with dust and debris. The music is an overwhelming squall of decibels; martial, sentimental, a Blitzkrieg of candles and funeral lilies. And all the ghosts of Vegas cower. Sticky plastic Playboy bunnies and scarred peyote shamans. Mobsters in blood-stained spats and white fedoras. Jimmy Hoffa, searching for himself. Elvis, replicating his meme through ten thousand willing hosts. Raphael Rivera, dehydrated, sinking to his knees in 1829 in an oasis he gratefully names 'The Meadows'. And us...

Avert your eyes as the perfect knight, the last hope, Howard Hughes, is ground to string and pulp and mangled metal between the Black Magician's 88 piano keys. Carbon tetrachloride sprays from the cyborg warrior's glass tubes and ceramic veins. The pilot light goes out on his buckled visor. His breastplate read-out flashes ...ERROR...ERROR...ERROR...

Vladziu spits out the Grail Knight's sizzling chewed up carcass, but it breaks in pieces across the mosaic tiles of Fremont Street. A giant cowgirl, drawn in lines of searing yellow, red and blue, kicks one leg , ?? boot of glass and light and winks: Extinction.

Because the fake will always outlast the real. Because sleaze is more sexy than sophistication when you're drunk. In the war between authenticity and artifice, the gilded lie will always...

Howard Hughes was fucked from the start.

“Who's next?” says Vladziu, entering the chiming, clattering bowel of his poor segmented ??. The pyramid cramps, expels sour frequencies exhaled as Sphinx breath of riddles and riches.

“I guess that would be me,” says Walter Lee. He watches Valdziu in the polished chrome trim, he takes his time. He feels the refrigerator breath of galloping death upon his neck. Something like a carnivorous piano attaches itself to his spine...

He takes a chance and yanks the crank for one last go round before oblivion bites. The symbols on the reel link together, faster, correcting fluid runs from eyes and ears and nose and mouth. The world is a word bombed flat.

A magician's cabinet with nothing inside...

*****

There was never anything inside.

There is no pyramid. It's a con. It's just a con. There's only us talking. Only us making noise.

But there's a grain of this epic conflict that's real somewhere. It's only words. It's only

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. Each letter of the alphabet a bullet... in Walter Lee's gun.

*****

But Walter Lee's never been lucky. And the house always wins. And the odds are one in three and a half billion, but tonight, in the death-grip of this grand deception, this replica ??, this city of destruction, he feels... lucky!

The spinning reels ratchet to a stand still. Bells ring. Three burning tiger eyes settle in a row... Walter Lee has hit the jackpot.

*****

Back at the agency, Walter Lee's contact delivers the manuscript. It's the last page he's most interested in. Walter Lee's mission – to devise an inescapable trap for the Black Magician, an ending that would demonstrate uprightness as the undoing of artifice, suggest the sorcerer's inevitable fall to forces beyond his reach, and most importantly, somehow involve correcting fluid.

Vladziu shivers on an Antarctic page, every deception has failed. Weakened in battle, his piano broken-backed, crawling like a severed hand to die, he stands alone. Words fixate on a white expanse, bunching together like muscles, like the stink from a cat., until...there's an animal in the room.

Invisible, untamed, off the leash. Montecore!! The spirit animal, his nemesis that hunts with bromopropane on it's breath. Vladziu has nothing left but his nimble fingers, his devious charm, his devastating glamour...

Let them send armies! Let them send soldiers! Nothing exists that he cannot flatter, and deceive, and ultimately destroy .

The white tiger separates from the background. Montecore grins. A gape of sabres.

Vladziu... stands corrected.