The Street &; Babe Shadow

Baby Strange was a dead cert grade-A medicine head who looked a lot
like Charles Bukowski's ugly kid brother, threaded himself out like a
late '60's Neil Young on a bad acid comedown and listened almost
non-stop to a shoddy bootleg of Lord Buckley's 'Blowing His Mind (And
Yours Too)' through a home made headset connected, like some anorexic
umbelical cord, to a battered old third-world beatbox. And all this
while clutching a heavily thumbed and decidedly yellowing copy of
Richard Farina's tuned-in turned-on hung-up strung-out Beat bible 'Been
Down So Long Looks Like Up To Me' and gazing earnestly at the sky
through a greasy pair of cracked Tijuana shades in a manner not too
dissimilar to a fully loaded Oscar Wilde, wired for sound and open for
business on a heavy duty PCP nod-out.

Now I can lay this on ya without fear of contradiction as at that
particular moment I was to be found putting down a hype on a spade dick
name of Velvet Lips, who had sussed that I had a bad case of copper
jitters after being busted making cars down in the Tenderloin in an
effort to get some smash together in order to purchase a pick-up from a
crooked croaker by the name of Remus who was partial to penning scripts
for laboratory fresh M.S.and, seeing as how Velvet had me marked down
as a three-time loser, it was a case of turn fink or take a fall. As
you've no doubt gathered by now, my options were, to put it mildly,
severely limited.

Anyways, I digress. I'm standing outside Gravity's Rainbow, a vinyl
junkies wet dream located on the corner of Twist &; Shout, fighting
back the tears after finally discovering that 'Snow Flakes Falling On
The International Dateline' was nothing more than a figment of Lester
Bangs's coke-frazzled brain and that The Count Five had never amounted
to much more than the frenzied two and a half minutes that is the
irresistibly imbecilic 'Psychotic Reaction'.Still, I managed to cop and
blow seven inches of Fred Blassics totally arced out 'Pencil Necked
Geek' - you know,the one where Fred,the guy who wrote the rule book on
dirty wrestling, climbed out of the ring just long enough to wax this
totally cheesed cult classic tirade against, and I quote, the
"scum-sucking peaheads with lousy physique" before stamping the
recording engineer to death.Take it from me, that platter swings like
sixty.

So,as I say, I've got one ear tuned to the Velvet's underground jive
and both peepers zoom lensed in on the Strange one, who by now is well
into his patented pickpocket routine.Downtown the boys on Vice
nicknamed him Strange on account of his predilection for three-way sex
with criminally underaged Puerto Rican vipers who would cover his hype
riddled carcas ( I swear to God his elegantly wasted torso had more
tracks than Grand Central) with liberal spoonfuls of Mr.Peanuts Premium
On Parade while shoving party-sized portions of chocolate Hostess
Cupcakes into every available oriface before tongueing him off like a
couple of alleycats overdosing on Carnation. But around these parts we
hung the handle Shadow on his shoulders on account of how he could walk
in a stooges footsteps, dip his wallet, and then dissapear into the
Midtown minefield before it even dawned on the unfortunate popcorn that
he'd been taken. The Babe would lift a poke, liquidate the lean green
and, within the hour, could be found residing somewhere in wig city
with a couple of G's and a front row seat in Hustler Heaven, a low rent
AC / DC dive populated by lush working circle jerks and late afternoon
midnight cowboys desperately trying to hype down any sucker crazy
enough to even consider giving them the time of day.

So it's like this,see. A bird on the wire had whispered that The Baby
had put in a little rooster time down at the City Hall and had got real
lucky with that morning's marks. It seems he had made a couple of heavy
duty lifts and had then blown the whole bundle on a pick-up of nembies
from one Suzi Snakehips, a white trash junkyard lolita who dealt
part-time outside The Psychedelic Jungle, a deadhead alternative
bookstore on Smack Alley patronised by crypto-fascist motorbike boys
and left-wing lesbian social workers, although it is reckoned that her
true forte was on the stage of The Angels Asshole, a bottom of the
barrel t &; a sex bazaar where she trod the boards three times a
night under the monicer 'The Kitten With The Whip'. So yours truly,
painted into a corner by the people, tips a nod to their rep on the
street and,within the wink of a joy bangers eye, Velvet has The Babe
assuming the pose in the lobby of the arcade with, I might add at this
late juncture, depressingly predictable results. So now I'm off the
hook, for the meantime at least, and the Babe Shadow is in the man's
pocket owing to the fact that he has a rap sheet longer than the
Lincoln Tunnel, plus a little time served out west in '85.It's a no-win
situation. In order to stay on the street The Shadow has no option but
to turn Mister Ed, although it's a weight off my shoulders, I can tell
you.See, down here the streets have eyes and the walls have ears.Think
about it a while. Sometime, somewhere, somehow you're gonna pull the
strings on the wrong puppethead, and then it's either the five
twenty-nine burndown or else some freelance gun from out of town
finally gets to douse your edisons. Whatever you do it's Catch
22.

You go figure it out.