VULGAR SONG

Last night I poked the Queen of Transylvan-ia,

Tonight I’ll poke the Queen of Burgundee—

I’m bordering on the State of Schizophren-ia,

But Queenie is so very nice to me… .

It’s pink champagne and caviar for break-fast,

A spot of Chateaubriand wiv me tea—

Ten-shilling panatelas now are all that I can smoke,

I laugh so much you’d think the world was just a silly joke,

So call me what you will, m’ lads, but make way for the bloke

That’s poked the love-ly lit-tle Queen of Transyl-vaayn-yaa!

Slothrop’s head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizontally, constantly across the room, whilst staying in one place. Each brain cell has become a bubble: he’s been transmuted to black Épernay grapes, cool shadows, noble cuvées. He looks across at Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is still miraculously upright though with a glaze about the eyes. Aha, right, s’posed to be counter-conspiring here, yes yes uh, now… he gets involved watching another pyramidal fountain, this time of sweet Taittinger with no date on the label. Waiters and off-duty dealers sit like birds along the bar, staring. Noise in the place is incredible. A Welshman with an accordion stands on a table playing “Lady of Spain,” in C, just zooming up and down that wheezebox like a maniac. Smoke hangs thick and swirling. Pipes glow in the murk. At least three fist-fights are in progress. The Prince game is difficult to locate any more. Girls crowd at the door, giggling and pointing. The light in the room has gone bear-brown with swarming uniforms. Slothrop, clutching his tankard, struggles to his feet, spins around once, falls with a crash into a floating crown-and-anchor game. Grace, he warns himself: grace… . Roisterers pick him up by the armpits and back pockets, and fling him in the direction of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. He makes his way on under a table, a lieutenant or two falling over him on route, through the odd pond of spilled bubbly, the odd slough of vomit, till he finds what he imagines to be Dodson-Truck’s sand-filled cuffs.

“Hey,” getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his head up to locate Dodson-Truck’s face, haloed by a hanging fringe-shaded lamp. “Can you walk?”

Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, “Not sure, actually, that I can stand… .” They spend some time at the business of untangling Slothrop from the chair, then standing up, which is not without its complications—locating the door, aiming for it… . Staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for the outside.

“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted… of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?