Interesting weapon, the Hotchkiss. Comes in many nationalities, and manages to fit in ethnically wherever it goes. American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee. On the lighter side, the racy 8 mm French Hotchkiss when fired goes haw-haw-haw-haw, just as nasal and debonair as a movie star. As for our cousin John Bull, a lot of British Hotchkiss heavies were either resold privately after World War I, or blow-torched. These melted machine guns will show up now and then in the strangest places. Pirate Prentice saw one in 1936, during his excursion with Scorpia Mossmoon, at the Chelsea home of James Jello, that year’s king of Bohemian clowns—but a minor king, from a branch prone to those loathsome inbred diseases, idiocy in the family, sexual peculiarities surfacing into public view at most inappropriate times (a bare penis dangling out of a dumpster one razor-clear and rainwashed morning, in an industrial back-street about to be swarmed up by a crowd of angry workers in buttontop baggy caps carrying spanners three feet long, Kelly crowbars, lengths of chain, here’s bareass Crown Prince Porfirio with a giant halo of aluminum-shaving curls on his head, his mouth made up with black grease, his soft buttocks squirming against the cold refuse picking up steel splinters that sting deliciously, his eyes sultry and black as his lips, but oh dear what’s this, oh how embarrassing here they come around the corner he can smell the rabble from here, though they are not too sure about Porfirio—the march pauses in some confusion as these most inept revolutionaries fall to arguing whether the apparition is a diversionary nuisance planted here by the Management, or whether he’s real Decadent Aristocracy to be held for real ransom and if so how much… while up on the rooftops, out from the brick and corrugated doorways begin to appear brown Government troops manning British Hotchkisses which were not melted down, but bought up by machinegun jobbers and sold to a number of minor governments around the world). It may have been in memory of Crown Prince Porfirio that day of massacre that James Jello kept a melted Hotchkiss in his rooms—or it may’ve been only another flight of grotesquerie on dear James’s part you know, he’s so unaware….

HEART-TO-HEART, MAN-TO-MAN

—Son, been wondering about this, ah, “screwing in” you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha?

—Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That’s fer drips!

—Yes, ah, waves. “Keying waves,” right? ha-hah. Uh, tell me, son, what’s it like? You know I’ve been something of a doper all m’life, a-and—

—Oh Pop. Cripes. It isn’t like dope at all!

—Well we got off on some pretty good “vacations” we called them then, some pretty “weird” areas they got us into ’s a matter of fact—

—But you always came back, didn’t you.

—What?