Pipsqueak (9 page)

Chapter 13

H
i!”Angie chirped.

“We were just—” I chortled.

“Password?”

“Nobody told us about any password,” Angie snitted.

“Nobody
who
?” Silhouette leaned defiantly on the door frame, the shadow of a toothpick waggling in his lips.

“You mean who told us to come? Garth, who’s that friend of yours? The one that told us . . .”

“Friend of a friend, really.” I shrugged. “Jeez, Angie, whatsisname . . .” I snapped my fingers.

“Hardy har-har,” Silhouette boomed, standing aside. “Get on in.”

Before I could grasp what he meant, Angie glided into the speakeasy. “Thanks!” Angie nodded to the silhouette.

I followed, tipping my hat and bestowing a nervous smile up at the doorman. Out of silhouette, he was still looming large in what must have been a size-58 jacket. His neck and head were shaved close over cauliflower ears, a nasty-looking scar on his forehead arcing up into a streak of white hair on his scalp. A shoo-in nominee for the Heavy of the Year Award. He didn’t give us a second look.

Directly inside was a dusty, vacant shop, walls lined with empty spool pegs. A cracked glass counter on our right was piled high with hats. Attending was ennui personified as a bobby-soxer. She said nothing as she took my hat and held out a ticket.

Angie and I bounced eyebrows at each other and continued toward the only obvious route at the back of the room, where we went through a set of curtains. I heard Mr. Heavy open the front door and growl, “Password?” Snapping fingers followed, and the next group entered. So that was the password. And to think but for dumb luck we’d have been safely on our way home to call Dudley and explain our disappearance.

Skirting a room of aging crates and scattered excelsior, Angie and I descended a narrow stairway to the left, a rush of cigarette smoke and convivial murmuring rolling up at us.

I put a hand on Angie’s shoulder. “Take it easy with the small talk down here, okay? Don’t say anything if you don’t have to, not our names . . .” And I reflected that Angie had said my name in front of Mr. Heavy. Angie patted my hand as if to calm my nerves. As if.

We emerged into a large industrial basement, complete with cast-iron pillars. Nobody had gone to too much trouble to doll the place up. Stray crates, pallets, and dangling bare-bulb lighting constituted the decor, along with about twenty rows of folding chairs in a variety of different materials and vintages. At the head of the rows was a podium, and behind that a makeshift bandstand with musicians. We were about the last to arrive; only standing room was left available. Much of the congregation was smoking. We were too, of course, by default.

A dude in an extralong pencil-thin mustache handed us each a program as we entered, and we drifted to the far back corner of the room. Busy scanning the room for Bing and Marti, I didn’t look closely at the program but saw that the cover had a cartoon of a wolf in a zoot suit twirling a chain.

“It’s like church,” Angie said under her breath.

“Not like the churches Mom and Dad took me to, I’ll tell you that. Check that out.” I pointed with my chin at the far side of the room, where Bing, standing, gestured in earnest to a fellow with white hair, white dinner jacket, and a white Panama hat in his hands. I didn’t see Marti.

“He’s just a kid,” Angie whispered. “Kind of a silly boy smoking that pipe, wearing a straw boater. Who’s he trying to look like? Bing Crosby?”

“That’s my guess. You’re right, he is young, too young to be hanging around with Marti. She’s fifty plus if she’s a day.”

“You’re sure it was her?”

“Positive. The hooked nose and voice are a giveaway. Hey, that’s Vito. In the band!”

“Oh, my gosh! You’re right.”

A fat, older man in a loud checked suit, goatee, and a classic example of male-pattern baldness stepped up to the podium and tapped the mic. The musicians stubbed out their fags and gathered their instruments. The lights dimmed and a smoky spotlight beam snapped onto the podium. All eyes turned forward and the crowd lowered the volume to a murmur.

“Gang,” Checkers began, “Scuppy is running a little late. I—oh, here he is!”

Scuppy made his entrance from somewhere at the back of the room, and I wondered where the other entrance to the building was. In an alley? A freight elevator? The audience jumped to their feet, applauding.

Scuppy swaggered up to the podium, waving apologetically, and Checkers retreated. “Sorry I’m late, but my taxi was cut off by a pedicab rushing to the hospital with a pregnant lady.” The crowd laughed. “No, really!” Scuppy laughed. “Anyway, listen up, people. Maestro?”

The audience sat, and the band laid down a sleazy, urban Peter Gunn rhythm, the drummer working a cymbal with a steel brush.

“I want to welcome you all back to the Church of Jive and to welcome any newcomers who’ve come to get the skinny, to open their eyes, to awake to the syncopation lost years ago but regained by you, me, and a growing number of others. How many people here remember black-and-white televisions?”

Some hands went up.

Scuppy nodded thoughtfully. “Well, you at least saw the last era of freedom. I never did. We had a Magnavox console TV, and I was placed in front of that thing as a baby. And I remember . . .” Scuppy picked up the microphone and stepped in front of the podium, the spotlight following him. “. . . I remember, one of my very first memories, I was very small and used to crawl up to the screen and put my eye right up to the screen.” Pantomime began to accompany the narrative.

“I liked the little colored dots, the waves of red, blue, and green that undulated across the phosphorous inner coating, and wondered who was inside the TV. But it didn’t take long before I stopped noticing all the little dots, and I stopped wondering who was inside the TV. I just sat there.” He made a goofy face of someone stultified, and the congregation laughed.

“In the back of your eye, in a part of the retina called the macula, there’s a tiny spot containing the receptors that give you color vision. There are as many as six million cones. Did you know that the signal induced from these sensors travels along the optic nerve—a bundle of one million nerve fibers—into the vision center of your brain’s cerebral cortex? This is the same place where your ability to hear and understand and sleep are located.” Scuppy whipped the mic cord authoritatively. “Now, do you think that way back in the 1960s—in the middle of the Cold War—it was a coincidence—”

“No way!” someone testified from the audience.

“I don’t think so,” someone else added.

“—that the scientists at the Broadcast Standards Institute—an organization, mind you, rife with German, ex-Nazi scientists, and funded at least in part by the CIA—decided to have the red, blue, and green electron guns fire sixty scans a second in a frequency that sent waves along the optic nerve to the cerebrum and induced a kind of seizure? Now, I’m not talking about spazzing out.” Scuppy acted like a spaz to get a chuckle, and got it.

“You know how flashing red lights can cause epileptics to have a seizure?” Folks in the first row were nodding. “They know what I’m talking about. And how about this?” Scuppy pulled out a news clipping and held it up. “There’s a copy of this in your program. In Japan, a cartoon show caused children all over that country to go into seizures, to vomit. From flashing colored lights. And what happened? Did they pull the show? Did anybody even try to find out what that cartoon did to their brains? Or did our government look into the possibility that terrorists might be able to use this on Americans?”

Scuppy froze, a look of wonder on his face. The congregation hushed. Slowly, Scuppy pulled from his jacket a handful of clippings, holding them out for everyone to see. “Well, gee. Guess what, people?”

“What!”

“Speak!”

“Give us the word!”

“It has happened in America. It happens all the time in America, in fact.” He plucked an article from his hand like the petal from a daisy. “May 1994 issue of
The Medical Journal of Sciences
. Says here that kids all over the United States of America have been experiencing seizures from video games. Repetitive, high-intensity, multicolored flashes caused what they call complex partial and absence seizures. No spazzing, just”—he squinted at the article, as if reading—“impaired consciousness, intense memory recall, déjà vu, confusional episodes, and audible and visual hallucinations. Well . . .” Scuppy let that article fall to the floor, and pulled another. “July eleventh, 1995,
Mid-Atlantic Bulletin of Medicine
. A woman has blackouts and acts strangely when she sees a certain talk-show host.” He let that one drop. “September 1996, a study by the Hecklen Neurology Institute reports someone who smelled bacon every time she saw a local TV sign-off video of the Stars and Stripes waving in the wind.” That one dropped. “
River City Times
, 1999, residents black out after a local TV broadcast of
Oklahoma!
” He let the rest of the clippings fall to the stage. “And these are just the cases we know about. The government is all jazzed up over terrorism, over the prospect that someone is going to get us with poison gas or a thermonuclear weapon. Tell me: Why, then, haven’t they gotten to this? Could be some foreign government, some towelheads, perpetrating this, practicing on small segments of the population before they go for New York. Tell, me: Why?”

He paused, letting the question hang long enough that the audience began to squirm. Then he put a finger to his enormous forehead. “But you see, our government already knows what it is. After all, they invented it. It’s called color television, and they made it to insinuate itself into your brain and create a kind of conscious sleep. Who here has spent a whole day on the couch watching TV? How many kids spend the whole day, the whole night, playing video games? How many neighbors got their eyeballs riveted to that there PC monitor? Who here’s been a potato? C’mon!”

Hands came up all around, and Scuppy nodded. “You just lay there, you just sit there, and the longer you lay there, the harder it is to get up. If that isn’t a trance, gang, I don’t know what is.

“Now, you ask me, ‘Why are they doing this, Scuppy? Why do they want us in front of the TV? What is the purpose of putting an entire planet under a spell?’ Gee, do you think it has anything to do with
power
, anything to do with
money,
anything to do with the so-called
gross national product
? Do you think it has
anything
to do with increased work hours, less leisure time, stymied labor organization, and an economic boom?” Scuppy’s volume rose, working up to a crescendo, as did the riff from the band. “Do you think that just maybe it has
anything
to do with commercialism, with everybody wearing
ads
on their clothing, with
hyperconsumerism
, with a stock market twice the size it was ten years ago? Do you think it has to do with Internet providers cramming their screens with flickering icons and ads? Do you think it has to do with the
shopping mall
being the alternate center of everyday life when you
leave
the TV?! DO YOU THINK . . . it has
anything
to do with the fact that we are increasingly asked to stare at
color monitors
all day at work, only to spend our lunch hours on the same monitor
playing solitaire
, only to come home and tune in our
twenty-five-inch Sony Trinitrons
or
surf the Web?
!”

Scuppy’s shout echoed into silence as he scanned the congregation with his pointed finger. No music. The audience was rapt.

“DO YOU THINK?” he shouted, spittle flying from his accusing lips.

The spotlight went out, and the band blared in the darkness for a few moments before the hanging bulbs slowly lit up and the congregation broke into applause. A chant started: “THINK! THINK! THINK!” Scuppy was gone, and ushers started to pass Folgers cans for a collection.

Angie was standing right up against me at this point and squeezed my hand. “That was almost like you when you get going on your Madison Avenue diatribe. Scary, huh?”

I nodded. “Can we go now?”

“Show’s not over, gang,” Checkers reassured us from the podium. “We’re just getting warmed up. I think many of you know who I am. But for those of you who don’t, my name is Doctor Henry Fulham.” A projector screen was set up behind him, and one of the techies who’d been working the spotlight at the back of the room near Angie and me fired up a slide projector. “I am a neurosurgeon, and I was with the United States Army at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. It’s been my privilege, my duty, to serve the Church, to validate the dogma, to testify to what I know to be true about the single greatest conspiracy mankind has ever known. First slide.”

The gang proceeded to be treated to a slide show documenting the history of the pursuit of world domination and the importance of en masse brainwashing techniques to that end. There were slides of Hitler, of Nazi anti-Semitic slogans and pamphlets, of Stalin. The Soviet Union, according to Checkers, was the last big push to try to manually subjugate a population through topical means. That proceeded into a lecture on what little is known about brainwashing, about how the Moonies, Scientologists, and scores of other cults can so easily manipulate people. “Stable, well-adjusted agnostic individuals,” as Checkers said more than once, can in twenty minutes be convinced to abandon their entire life’s possessions and “supplicate their lives before the Bible” simply through a twenty-minute discussion with a recruiter. Repetition, protein deprivation, excessive memorization, were the tools that could reduce the mind to a nonthinking organ. Slides included pictures of mass Moonie weddings, Tom Cruise, John Travolta before a Senate committee, recruiters working campuses, etc. He gave a few anecdotal case histories (with slides of the victims), then hit us with some of his work for the government on epilepsy and mind stimulation through the optic nerve and how 3-D movies were actually the brainchild of the Army. The 3-D glasses have one red lens, one blue, and the Army first devised them in an attempt to study the effects of flashing blue and red on the optic nerve while introducing flash frames of popcorn. We were, of course, treated to some eerie shots of movie-house audiences during the fifties in 3-D shades.