Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

by Miracle Jones

It was that time of year again. The trucks and buses had pulled in, dropping whole philosophy departments from all across the country off on Austin’s doorstep. They were here to participate in the world’s biggest outdoor philosophical convention – The Deep, Important ‘Nawledge Gathering on Sixth Street. The DING on Sixth.

It was great fun to watch these clueless hordes of bespectacled head-scratchers descend with reckless abandon on our hot-ass mystical town. A Mack truck with the decal of some stodgy Northeastern university painted on the side –Bainbridgehamforth-- would roll into a parking lot, the back would open up, and a stream of beret-wearing baldies would pile out. Sometimes you’d see an existentialist screaming about free will being persuaded to leave at pitchfork-point by a provost or grad student.

“I won’t go! You can’t make me! I’ve got tenure!”

“Get out of the van, or we put a smoke alarm in your office, Frenchy!”

Every year it got bigger and bigger. Like all of Austin’s ballyhoo-garnering self-conscious street festivals, DING was a tremendous boost to the local economy. I called Veronica down at the Sexarium to see if she wanted to meet up with me and Jack and go watch Zeke give the annual lecture on fire and its philosophical magic.

“Are you kidding?” said Veronica. “This is easily one of our busiest weekends.” In the background I could hear somebody getting whacked with a paddle and screaming “More rigour!” in a British accent after every stroke.

“Oh yeah?”

“Some of these guys literally only get laid once every year,” said Veronica. “And you wouldn’t believe the sorts of contortions we make to get them off. I had to send a girl down to the University library to get a whole hand-cart full of Bibles and math books.”

“What for?”

“Inspiration! I’m at my wit’s end, Jones! I’ve got dicks here like starving baby birds. We’ve got to seize each little twitch. You’ve never seen such twisted kinks!”

“You know the story of the Gordian knot, don’t you?”

“Ha ha. Don’t think I haven’t fantasized.”

“Well, best of luck. I hope you make some good money,” I said.

“What? I can’t talk now,” said Veronica. “Kathy, more stones! And you HAVE to wear the mustache! It’s simply not optional!”

I hung up the phone. Veronica wasn’t any fun when she was all stressed out.

“Looks like it’s just me and you,” I said to Jack. He was sitting in his chair smoking bubbles out of an opium pipe, just to be contrary. “We’d better get going.”

“Philosophers frighten me,” said Jack. “I have a real fear.”

“It’s all good fun,” I said. “Just try not to look any of them directly in the eye. And don’t interrupt them unless you want to get berated for being provincial.”

“Which I am, no question.”

“Which you are,” I said. “With your crazy philosophy of invisible, impossible, contrary connections and the music of sweet dancing crappy Krishna.”

“I prefer physics. Dig: physicists have tougher minds,” said Jack.

“They just humor you more,” I said.

“I DID punch God that one time,” said Jack.

“Debateable,” I replied, putting on a jacket.

“I DO know all the secrets of the manifest universe,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said with a sigh. “So are we going, or not?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just let me finish my thought. It could be important later.”

He took a steady pull of bubble opium and then blew a long, floating bubble-weenie. He emptied the pipe into a plant and shut his eyes. He massaged the bulge of his eyeballs through his lids. His hair stood on end, and it was possible that he slightly left his chair and hovered inches above it. I wouldn’t swear before a court of law. Maybe a court of chaos. Yowser.

Just Jack, doing his thing.

We shut down the trailer, waved bye-bye to Salamander, removed an empty bottle of whiskey and a plate of mashed potatoes from Beer O’Leary’s sleeping paws, loosened his shoes, and made sure he was on his side in the back of his security car. I didn’t know it at the time, but were headed right for his green, palooka dreams. Maybe Jack had an inkling.

Either way, duties done, we were on our way down to the freak show. Tonight was the opening night of the weekend-long philosophy extravaganza, and I (for one), didn’t want to miss the inevitable opening night war and fireworks.

Sometimes it got brutal.

Last year, a group of positivists went totally feral and started kidnapping locals and using water-torture to extract confessions of metaphysical ignorance. Their University handlers had to entice them back into their respective trucks with whole fleets of dewy-eyed grad students paid to listen to their ranting. The tribal terror was a strong object lesson in why it was important for a University to intellectually diversify and to keep its mental stew from congealing into anything solid. Once these gals and guys had enough validation, they were capable of anything.

We took the bus, but we’d still have to walk a ways to get to the performance. It was always a good show, although I personally wished Zeke would throw some new material in there, now that he had the opportunity. But the Fire Philosophy rant was a “DING on Sixth” tradition by this point, and giving it was a local intellectual honor. The crowd would grow restless if their expectations weren’t met and they were left without an anchor in the popping, philosophic mess.

“It’s an institution, Jones,” Zeke would say, drawing up to his full height and punching me in the shoulder. It was something, all right.

Anybody picking up a piece of porno knew there was going to be sex. Somebody was going to get fucked. But it was the NOVELTY that made it fun. I guess not everybody shared my finely-honed aesthetic assumptions. Deluded sons of bitches, the lot of ‘em. Anything less than novelty was religion in my book. To be fair, everybody that did the fire speech got to put their own little spin on it. Maybe that was enough. Maybe I was just cranky.

Anyway, we got off the crowded bus and headed downtown to “The Think Tank,” the traditional fire bar.

Normally, Sixth Street in Austin was filled with only one sort of clientele: kids from school cutting loose in shiny shirts and short skirts, losing their minds in a cloud of cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and tedious sexual anxiety. Later came clumsy propositions and half-remembered rape. Just like how mommy met daddy. There were a few locals on hand to exploit them, a random sprinkling of homeless inebriates, and your usual crowd of diligent office-types on hand to soak up some of the yearning of their youth like tired, noose-weaving spider sponges. These particular folks were usually better dressed and meaner. They had to be, or the calf-eyed eggs of the Texas liberal elite would see through their disguises.

Tonight, however, the streets belonged to a different blend. While normally all you could hear on Sixth were girls shrieking and guys hooting to each other as they recognized packs of their friends, tonight there was only one noise bubbling up from the street’s slanted muck. Argument. Balls to the wall, vicious, raucous, pointless, fine-tuned argument.

Evidently, EVERYBODY in a ten block radius was wrong.

I was glad to be there. It was the best mental group-grope you’d ever find. Jack, however, looked like he wished he had some sort of long, forked stick for keeping the shouting at a safe distance. Every ten feet or so, he would shut his eyes and bend over at the waist and shake his head. Like he just couldn’t sort it all.

There was a lot to sort. Schools of thought swam through the street like squinty, grumbling barracuda. There were clans, and scenes, and displays of a billion different didactic varieties. Dunking booths, life-size chess games, and Scrabble contests where the participants could only use “meaningful” words.

There were a few normies, too. I guess they were either brave or lost. With a big goofy grin on my face, I walked over to one tent that featured a pumpkin carving contest. A banner flapping above the booth boasted that the most important “sign” would win.

A guy with frosted blonde hair who had just walked out of one of the bars was swaying on his feet and watching groups of lanky gents and lasses get to carving. He did not belong. I guess he had gotten separated from his “brothers.”

“What the hell is this for?” he asked, blinking.

“We are carving signs into pumpkins. The winner gets a gold-inlaid edition of Either / Or,” said one woman with a clipped, Northern accent.

“Why don’t you carve faces?”

“Faces are poor substitutes for linguistic purity in a world of insubstantial metaphor,” she said, not looking up. She was carving a spiral into the pumpkin with a nail file. I wasn’t precisely sure what it represented, but I know a spiral when I see one.

The drunk guy’s t-shirt said “Drizzunk.” I guess this meant what it (sort of) said. Signs were tricky things.

“But pumpkins are for Halloween!” said the guy.

“Halloween is the only truly transgressive holiday,” said a stern looking dude with horn rims. “And we are the only truly transgressive thinkers,” he finished with a sneer.

“I hope you aren’t speaking for yourself, Michaelson,” said the woman, brandishing the nail file. Evidently there was friction here.

“I used to be a woman!” said Michaelson suddenly. “That’s transgressive, baby! That’s T-Capital Transgressive! What’ve you got? Huh? Anybody can, what, slut around at movie theatres? Isn’t that what you are writing papers about nowadays? You are practically thirteen!”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” said the woman.

“You hook up with random dudes at the movies?” said the wobbling fraternity brother. “That’s right on, dude.”

“I’m not a dude,” said the woman, stabbing the pumpkin with particular force. “That’s HIS obsession. I’m a warrior for a fading, anarchic value system. Huh. The new anarchy. What a load. Get a good look at it.” She hooked a thumb at Michaelson, who was evidently transsexual. I wouldn’t have guessed.

Michaelson stuck his tongue out at her. The frat guy fell over on his back with a loud crash. No one stood up from their pumpkins to help him.

I walked back over to Jack, chuckling to myself.

A wild-eyed street vendor was trying to get him buy futures in “time,” which evidently was going to make a comeback. Jack was politely trying to explain to the man that he was crazy.

“What’s his DEAL?” screamed the vendor at me, sensing a kindred spirit.

“He’s just a guy,” I said.

“He’s VERY AGGRAVATING! He doesn’t UNDERSTAND me!”

“He’s got a lot of unique qualities,” I said. “You just have to know him.”

“Like what?” said the man, sidling up to me conspiratorially. Now Jack was involved in fighting off a pair of twin Platonists who were berating him for not wearing velvet blinders that they were offering free of charge.

“I don’t know,” I said to the man. “He sees things differently. Shit happens to him. He knows lots of angles. I think he’s got the sort of broken mind that uniquely matches the way the world is broken.”

“Not like mine?” asked the man.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. Observing the creek of drool pouring down one jowl line of his mouth. Noting the curry stains on his blazer. “Not at all.”

The man walked away muttering, tossing sheets of “time” futures into the air.

“I love philosophy,” I said, rejoining Jack.

“All of these people smell wrong,” said Jack, giving the evil eye to a group of Epicures who were bathing in a wooden tub full of wine and sloshing it all over the street.

“Come drink with us, brother!” said one fat tub-goblin, seizing the opportunity provided by Jack’s furtive glance. “This wine has been purified by the juices of true libertine agitation!”

Jack and I looked at each other. Hmmmmm.

“You mean you peed in it?” asked Jack. The men all laughed heartily.

“What is wine but the urine of the gods?” said a short one with a squeaky voice. He was raised up out of the tub by his peers and then allowed to drop back into it with a squelching splash.

Peers. The word never fit so well.

Jack and I stepped back from the splashing wine-wall before it hit the ground. All of the Epicurean tub brothers winked in unison and held their fists high while giving us a Roman salute. They all wore mauve caps like synchronized swimmers.

By this point, we were just part of the herd. The crowd was already forming and we let ourselves be sucked forward. It was about time for the fire speech to begin, thank god.

The Think Tank was pretty much a perfect bar. It had a military theme, and all of the wait staff wore uniforms. There was a decommissioned helicopter on the roof, and behind the long, spare wooden plank was a blinking map of the world with shifting pictographs representing nuclear submarines, threatening storms, and jet traffic. It was like drinking inside Mission Control.

Like many Austin restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, the Think Tank doubled as an art gallery, and its walls were filled with brightly colored posters of skeletons and corpses in traditional religious poses. A wall-size, maggoty “Last Supper” was particular effective, and the take on the “Pieta” reminded me of pictures you sometimes saw of the holocaust, except with more sunfire and magenta. The juxtaposition between military-industrial complex and baroque Mexican chic was great, if you were into that sort of thing.

Zeke was preparing for his fire speech out front, and so he didn’t say hello. Two trashcans were on fire by the hatch that functioned as the Tank’s door, and he was meditating between them. Beads of sweat had formed on his massive forehead, and he was sweating clean through the tailored three piece suit he was wearing. Jack’s mirror tie reflected the flames like custom hubcaps in front of a liquor store fire.

Unofficially, the fire speech kicked the whole DING off, and so the whole street was paying attention. It was something everybody could agree on -- except for the cynics, of course. But they were probably all down at the Sexarium, anyway. That’s where I’d be if I were a low down dirty dog. If. Heh.

“What’s he going to do?” asked Jack.

“Just watch,” I said.

There were some professors mingling in the crowd that seemed to be new editions to the throng. I didn’t remember seeing them last year, or the year before. The men all had beards and ascots, and the women wore their hair back in buns and carried leather satchels. There must have been ten of them; all dressed alike, each well under four feet tall.

Jack grabbed one of the ladies as she pushed past.

“Say,” he asked. “Where are you guys from?”

She stared at him, frowning.

“We are from Europe,” she said. “A very little country. You wouldn’t know it.”

“I know lots of things,” he said.

“We are here to sport and make merry,” she said. “We get very few vacations. Our employers are quite strict about educational policy.”

“Which employers would that be?” he asked.

She stared at him, narrowing her eyes.

“I am completely human,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Jack, leaning closer.

“In every way,” she said, moving backward.

“What an odd thing to say to a stranger,” said Jack, sniffing the top of her bunned head as he bent toward her.

She flared her own nostrils and scampered away, pushing out of sight between the legs of a stoned-looking hippie. It was all quite peculiar, really. But Jack seemed to forget instantly.

“He’s standing up!” said Jack, bumping me in the shoulder and pointing to Zeke. “Does that mean something is going to happen?”

“Just watch,” I said again.

Zeke held the palms of his outstretched arms flat as if consecrating an invisible wall in front of him. He brought his hands together slowly, and then – when they were less than a foot from each other – he started speaking.

“Sisters! Brothers! Knowledge has always been here for the taking, since the very day our eyes became two-way. But what do we do with it? Where do we put it, and how do we let it manifest in the world to serve human ends? How much snake do we eat, and how much crow?

“In the end, the choice is simple. It all depends on a lovely trajectory, which you can check any time you like. Here’s the test. Ask yourself: are you searching for power?”

One of the trash cans flared up with a localized fireball that raised a gasp from the audience. Thanks to oodles of pyrotechnic dollars, the fireball formed a green, smoke-hollow face – an incendiary incubus with a long chin and narrow eyes -- before dissipating. There were some random cheers. Some boos. An air-horn. A “go fuck your mother.”

“Or are you searching for freedom?” said Zeke.

He clapped his hands. The other trashcan exploded, firing a largish lump of sparkling black confetti over the heads of the cheering crowd that turned white on its way down like chemical snow. I decided that the trashcans must have pipes that led underground, and somebody was pneumatically shooting this crap out from underneath. Of course, I cheered like a jackass, just like everybody else. Freedom! Woo! Yeah! Let me out of this hell-hole!

“There are as many different kinds of knowledge as there are different kinds of fire,” Zeke continued. “Fire can be slow burning, like coals around a potato, cooking without scorching, warming without destroying. Fire can be an instantaneous flash – an explosion of gunpowder – mimicking the sudden lightning strike of inspiration. Or, fire can rage like a blaze in a forest, its crackle stirring the hearts of the sternest among us, and turning the meek wild with panic, causing them to leave runny trails of excrement behind them as the heat of death and flight penetrates their timid sphincters.

“Fire changes solid to liquid, liquid to gas. Fire in the heart, smoke in the head, say the Italian sages who chuckle at bus stops and clean deli counters. Fire is the thinker’s courtesan, and the charlatan’s nemesis. Nobody wants to end up burned at the stake for their crimes against propriety and logic. But then again, everybody secretly does.”

He strolled over to an open grate near the sidewalk. People moved out of his way, knowing what was coming. Those that didn’t move back were physically pushed aside by three or four self-appointed Samaritans.

“So we join together now to praise flame. To live as flames. To think as flames! And to one day perish as flames, with ash for hearts and steam for heads. We shall fizzle with a hiss of satisfaction as the death rattle sounds in our philosophic throats. We are thinkers. Not magicians. But we do what we can.”

The grate in front of him started to shoot flames up in his face, clouding him in a wreath of orange destruction. His chemically treated suit burned away, sparking and whistling as the zinc buttons and epaulets peeled off in spinning, jerking strips. He raised his hands to the air and threw his head back, laughing like old grim death.

He was left wearing a bright red neoprene jumpsuit that said DING on it in yellow letters. Quite a codpiece, too, I might add.

I clapped and whistled as he took a bow. Jack even raised an eyebrow, although he simply stood there with his arms folded, his eyes flicking back and forth to the sharpish shorties, those peculiar Europeans here on vacation to “sport and make merry.”

Personally, after Zeke’s speech, I was ready to head home. Even I had limits to how much philosophy I could take without getting in a fist fight.

But then the naked magician showed up. That’s when things got really interesting.

The futures salesman had sidled up along next to me while I was listening to Zeke’s rant. There was a lot of smoke still from Zeke’s big pyrotechnic display, and I was shielding my eyes from the stinging fog by keeping my head down. That was when I noticed something very pale striding up the sidewalk toward the Think Tank out of the corner of my eye. I raised my head. Was that guy? Was that guy NAKED? Was that guy? Couldn’t be. Just another strange sexual phantom for a strange sexual cat. A phantom in the mist, surely.

But evidently I wasn’t the only one hallucinating.

“What the HELL is THAT GUY doing?” asked the time privateer. “THAT is no way to express one’s IDEAS. There are laws. LAWS.”

The pale man-shaped entity parted the drifting smoke and stood facing the crowd with austere upside-down imperiousness. Zeke was officially topped, and the guy hadn’t even started speaking yet.

This was no ordinary naked man. It wasn’t that he was particularly well-endowed or anything conventional like that. There were about thirty things that made him a spectacular piece of shockingly inhuman temerity. I wondered how far he had walked with such austere imperiousness. It was the kind of austere imperiousness that would get a guy like me arrested while wearing clothes. The sort of austere imperiousness that could make a whole crowd of imperial Austrians stop and stare:

1) He was about seven feet tall
2) His bright red beard must have been three feet long.
3) Nearly every square inch of him was tattooed
4) We’re not talking lame tats – very detailed sigilistic crap, here
5) The two tats down his arms were pictures of him. One right-side up, one upside down - like playing cards.
6) He was walking on his hands. Did I mention that?
7) His toes appeared to be fully opposable; splayed like a chimp’s toes
8) He was wearing a Prince Albert
9) A Prince Albert is a chain that attaches to the penis so you can attach it to your trousers
10) The chain was not attached to his trousers
11) The chain was attached to a stud sticking out of his solar plexus
12) His eyes were way too big
13) Way too big
14) The size of small dinner plates
15) They were golden, and they seemed to spin, like the eyes of master hypnotists in cartoons
16) He had a fairly distended pot belly
17) There was a tea cup and saucer resting on it, from which he was taking small sips, using one foot
18) Upside down. Did I mention that?
19) His beard trailed along behind like the tail of some sort of pseudopod
20) Yes, yes. He was particularly well-endowed. But so what?
21) He had an outie
22) His underarm hair was also bright red and hung like double billy-goat beards
23) His pubes were braided quite charmingly. Serious care and attention had gone into this
24) In one foot he held a crystal ball
25) I could see my own reflection in the crystal ball. I was pretty sure this was in violation of some of Newton’s laws
26) He had no teeth
27) Instead: nails
28) It appeared that his knees were double-jointed
29) It appeared that his knuckles were triple-jointed
30) He was wearing a nametag clipped into his scraggly chest hair: “Hello, my name is: FORGOTTEN”

The man was an absolute crisis of misdirection.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Jack, cutting the shocked gasp of silence that had built up like pressure in a urethra. “He’s not even real.”

“SILENCE!” said Forgotten. I didn’t see him move his mouth, but I heard the voice echo like it was my own. “I HAVE COME TO TEACH YOU ALL.”

“Teach us all about very silly parlor tricks,” said Jack, turning around in a circle. “Hey! Where’d you all run off to? Why don’t you make my ace disappear and pull some flowers out of my fly?”

The man flipped up to standing on his feet. His hair stayed in the same place, but his body turned like a wheel. His cup tossed over in the air and he caught the tea as it righted, the tea slopping perfectly into his ceramic mug like a lump of mercury. The crystal ball dropped from his foot and he caught it at the last second, curling it on the inside of his wrist. And his pecker…well, his pecker was attached to his chest by a chain. It didn’t go anywhere.

Jack leaned over and whispered into my ear.

“Hang on to your wallet, Jones,” he said. “They are around here somewhere.”

“Who is?” I asked, perplexed, withdrawing my wallet just the same.

“Them! The…things. Just trust me, here. I’m gonna go fill a bucket with whiskey.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

But he had already pushed through the crowd and was gone.

“I AM THE FORGOTTEN MAGICIAN OF ALL UNRECORDED PAST! I HAVE COME TO TAKE VENGEANCE ON ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE FORGOTTEN MY WAYS, AND THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO IGNORE MY TEACHINGS! YOU PHILOSOPHERS. YOU CAN THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND THINK, AND GET NOWHERE. NOT WITHOUT ME! I HAUNT YOUR DREAMS, I FUEL YOUR FEAR, I AM UNLIMITED IN MY POWER AND UNDERSTANDING! I OUGHT TO TEAR THIS WHOLE PLACE TO PIECES!”

“You can’t derive an ought from an is!” shouted somebody distractedly, as if by reflex.

What a ball of gas this guy was! And yet, where was that voice coming from? He put his hands on his hips and leaned forward surveying the crowd, peering seemingly at each and every one of us.

“Just who the hell are YOU, buddy?” asked Zeke, casually keeping his distance.

“I AM THE FACE OF YOUR ETERNAL OPPOSITION! ETERNALLY BANISHED, I HAVE ETERNALLY RETURNED!”

“A modernist,” whispered an albino man with sunken eyes, turning around and giving me a wink.

Forgotten made a fist and the teacup disappeared inside it. Magic! The crowd oooed. He tossed the crystal ball into the air and it became a top hat which landed square on his shaggy head. With creeping drama, his hands drifted behind his back. A square patch the size of a bed sheet began to darken behind him, as if the pure force of his will was swelling a vertical king-size into night. Somehow, he stayed illuminated in this gathering darkness, as if he were glowing from inside.

“What’s going ON?” squealed the time futures salesman, grabbing his head.

“I think you’d better leave, sir,” said Zeke, courageously attempting to put his hand on the magician’s shoulder. The man whirled on him and held up one shivering palm. Zeke fell on his ass and scrambled away.

“YOU DARE GIVE COMMANDS TO ME?”

The magician started making strange glottal noises from his throat. There was a flash, and then suddenly his hands were filled with shining balls. He began tossing them into the black square behind him. They hung, luminous, like stars in a hypnotic pocket cosmos.

“YOU WILL ALL LEARN A THING OR TWO ABOUT RESPECT FOR MYSTERY!”

I smiled. Whatever this was, it was pretty great.

The magician closed his glowing dinner-plate eyes and snaked one gyrating hand between his legs. There was a squelching noise and then suddenly the magician was holding a small stool. The kind with three legs. Which he promptly sat down upon.

“Did he just pull that out of his ass?” asked a young woman.

The darkness curled around him like a Chinese screen, and his hand disappeared again behind him.

“THERE IS NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE,” he said with a horrible, mirthless laugh. With another squelch, his eyes flew open and he was holding a lit stick of dynamite.
The crowd gasped. Cops pulled guns. I wondered why they hadn’t jumped in yet. I guess maybe they were just as fascinated as the rest of us.

He set the dynamite down on the ground carefully. His hand went back into his bottom. This time, he gingerly pulled out a nude female mannequin, which he set up next to him. She wore a cockaded silver cap. Pretty neat trick. He didn’t even need flash paper.

“MY LOVELY ASSISTANT TINA,” he said. “TINA OF DOOM.”

The shit just kept coming. At first, the cops yelled at him to stop, but this quickly devolved into looking nervously at each other, and barking into walkie-talkies. The crowd was too dazed to panic, but they were still teeming with energy like the rowdiest section of a rock concert. Our eyes moved back and forth from the sparkling dynamite fuse to his effortless prestidigitation. What would he pull out next? Were we all about to go boom?

Out came a wheelbarrow full of live chickens, and then a small table with a pair of candelabras. Knife, fork, and plate came next. The teacup returned. Finally, he pulled out an entire roast turkey, which glistened seductively with the juices of its own basting. There was scattered applause.

“TURKEY,” said the magician. “IT’S WHAT YOU ALL ARE. STUPID TURKEYS.”

As he took a giant, squirting bite out of the turkey, the chickens all exploded one by one like popcorn.

“You should really stop insulting us,” said Zeke. “We do the best we can.” The magician ignored him.

A toy helicopter flew out from under the stool, circling the Forgotten Magician’s head and trailing a red banner behind it emblazoned with the swirls and loops of incomprehensible cabbalistic letters. There was a whistling noise and a length of rope shot out of the man’s ass, arcing and then pooling into a lasso on the ground. The helicopter flew over and picked up the end of the rope with a hook from inside. It started winding the rope around its tines, turning in circles, forming a wench. The magician stood on top of his stool and waited patiently as an electric guitar was yanked from somewhere inside his bowels by the little whirlybird.

The helicopter lifted the guitar up so that everyone could get a good look, and then set it back inside the magician’s arms.

“THEY SAY THIS IS THE LIVE MUSIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. BAH. I’LL GIVE YOU SOME LIVE MUSIC.”

He squirted out a tambourine which he caught and gave to Tina of Doom. He turned a key in her back, and she started to tap it, grinning dizzily. He began to strum chords, screaming in some incomprehensible language. With every high expostulation, something different shot out of his ass. A go-cart. A parrot in a cage. A foot tall snow globe. A five-iron. A smoke machine. A giant, inflatable fetus. The bones of a pterodactyl. An apple pie. Fourteen different sized mason jars filled with liquid, each one a different color. Each jar played a different note as he smashed them with a golf club. All together, it was the chorus for “Video Killed the Radio Star.” He played a wicked old-time face-melter solo and gave the audience a death stare.

“NOW WHO’S IMPORTANT? YOU LIKE MY SONG?” said the Forgotten Magician. He bashed his stool into pieces with his guitar. A cop fired a shot at him, but missed.

The magician sat on the concrete ground and put his hands together, as if meditating. He started to shake. With a sudden expulsion, he was lifted off the ground by a full-size iron maiden that squeezed out from between his bony cheeks. It was heavy dark metal, except where lichens had turned it a marbleized green. He un-sprung a latch, and the iron maiden opened invitingly. He climbed back down to the ground, using the stars in his sky backdrop as handholds.

“FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I WILL NEED A VOLUNTEER FROM THE AUDIENCE,” said the Magician, gesturing to the maiden.

“These metaphysics are questionable!” shouted somebody from the audience.

It was good thing I was still gripping my wallet tightly. I felt something move in my pocket, like the snout of a puppy. I was so wrapped up in the performance that, at first, I just brushed it aside without looking. On the second pass, I snapped back and grabbed a tiny wrist.

“Hey!” I said. It was one of the little European people. One of the men. I hoisted him high off of his feet and dangled him, an expression of utter contempt smeared across his bearded slab. I set him down and then grabbed him by his ascot. He was fiercely gripping a plastic trash sack.

“Were you trying to take my wallet?” I asked.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Look at the Forgotten! What will the crazy naked man do next? Yes? Yes?”

I didn’t have time to argue. The doors of the Think Tank burst open, and there was Jack pulling a radio flyer with a giant barrel in the back. A barrel that barely fit through the doors.

One of the bartenders was following him, and she was not happy. She was a four star general, no less -- her hair pulled back tightly into a sexy brown ponytail. She was literally leaping into the air she was screaming so loud, and her face was as red as the medals on her chest.

“HOW are you going to pay for that?” she yelled, grabbing Jack’s shoulder and trying to stop him. “You keep saying. But tell me HOW?”

“Gold, most likely,” he said with rare composition.

The General changed tactics and hit up the closest police officer.

“That man is stealing all of our whiskey! He just came inside and started pouring barrels into that novelty Vietnam-era rain barrel!”

The cop didn’t even look at her.

“Please, ma’m,” he said. “We have a dynamite situation here. Although, to tell you the truth, that fuse doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere, does it? I think this might just be an act.”

“What are you talking about?” screamed the General. The cop pointed, and then suddenly the General wasn’t so interested in Jack anymore.

Jack rolled the wagon to the middle of the crowd and whistled through his teeth.

“Anybody here want any whiskey?” he shouted. I think I might have been the only one watching him at this point, thanks to the little thief I was holding. The little thief was sniffing the air with an aura of sudden distraction. He started twisting under my grip.

“Whiskey!” he shouted. “I smell the brown!”

I couldn’t hold on to him. He wrenched out of my hands like a fox tearing out of a steel trap, leaving his cravat behind him.

In fact, all of the little intellectuals bubbled up from inside the crowd, like scum in a greasy pan. Each of them was carrying a plastic trash sack, and each of them swarmed on Jack and his barrel of whiskey like insects. Pick your simile. Moths. Ants. Beetles. Roaches. They were small, and they were all over him, scratching and muling. Forming human pyramids that Jack casually dismantled like the defender of a French castle.

“One at a time, one at a time,” said Jack, picking them up each in turn and tossing them inside the barrel with a splash. Even the magician seemed fascinated. He had stopped his performance completely and was watching with an utterly catatonic, dazed expression. As if somebody had stopped his reel. In fact, there was something strange about the way the Magician was bending light altogether. Something familiar. As if…

“Hey, that guy’s a fake,” I said, squinting closer at the Magician. “An honest to god fake.”

“Of course he is,” said Jack with exasperation.

“Yeah,” agreed the future’s salesman. “All magicians are fakes. That dynamite looks pretty real though.”

Another cop fired a shot and missed. A group of them were conferring quietly while loading shotguns.

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. I walked over to the magic man, pushing testily through the crowd. Zeke gave me a cock-eyed questioning look and I returned it with a confident grin.

Jack had tossed the last little person inside the rain barrel, and they were splashing around merrily. Jack was now collecting the plastic bags and shaking his head at the contents he found inside.

“Look,” I said, passing my hand in front of the Magician’s eyes, who didn’t respond. “Fake.”

I reared back and punched him. My hand went right through his pixilated face and rested in the sky behind him.

“He’s just a projection,” I said. The crowd gasped. I reached down and tried to pick up the dynamite. I couldn’t, of course. It was all smoke and mirrors. The best damned smoke and mirrors I’d ever seen, to be fair.

“Where the projection coming from?” asked Zeke, joining me in examining the scene.

“Pull the chain,” said Jack.

Zeke and I both looked at him dubiously.

“Go on,” he said. “Trust me.”

I shrugged, reached out, and gave the Prince Albert a yank. There was substance, but it wasn’t a chain I felt under my hand. It was the fibrous force of an extension cord. The crowd gasped again as the whole ball of wax went out like a dangling bulb in a gas station bathroom. The magician, his assistant, the table, the iron maiden, the stars…all the other crap. It was all just an illusion. Standing there instead was another little European person. He was holding a cube with a big lens attached to it and a car battery from which I had just cut the power. He held a microphone in his hand, and had wild, barely-restrained eyes. Flecks of foam had soaked his beard.

The crowd stared at him. He stared at Jack.

“Whiskey!” he screamed, ripping off the electronics and making a break for Jack’s barrel.

Jack caught him on the fly and held him up like a struggling baby kangaroo.

“You people,” he said. “Shame on you. Philosophers are so gullible. These little bastards were stealing all of your valuables while you were busy being bamboozled by that magic idiot.”

He dumped out one of the trash bags. It was filled with wallets, jewelry, and watches. As if waking from a dream, the entire crowd that had gathered on Sixth started checking their bags and pockets, stunned to find things missing and empty.

“Settle down now, people…settle down,” said one of the more bristly police officers. “We’ll get everything back where it belongs.”

“Who the hell are those people?” I asked, examining their projection set-up with not un-considerable admiration. “And what’s the deal with the whiskey?”

“They are quite obviously leprechauns,” said Jack, turning the struggling imp in his hands upside down. “Anybody can see that.”

“There’s no such thing as leprechauns,” said Zeke.

“Don’t be dense,” said Jack. “Leprechaun just means ‘half-bodied.’”

“Where’s the tam’ o shanter? Where’s the brogue? Where’s the stovepipe? Where’s the gold?” I asked in quick succession.

“These aren’t real leprechauns,” said Jack. “Obviously, that would be insane. These are obviously robots. God knows where they came from or what they think they are doing.”

“Obviously robots?” asked the General. “What do you mean OBVIOUSLY robots?”

“Note the single-mindedness,” said Jack. “Note the proficiency with technical apparatus. Note the lightweight, aluminum design. Note the lack of distinct human smell and ease of control. Note the switch panel on the backs of their necks.”

He turned the creature around, showing everyone. He pressed a button and the creature went dead. He pressed another button and he sprang back to life. He did this several more times until everyone was completely baffled.

“So they are robots,” said Zeke. “Why are they stealing wallets?”

“Beats me,” said Jack. “My guess would be that they have a hard time finding gainful employment otherwise. Thanks to discrimination and their distracting diminution.”

“Why would leprechaun robots need jobs?” I asked.

“To pay for things,” said Jack. “Whiskey, for instance.”

“Well, who made them, then?” asked the futures salesman.

“Who made any of us?” replied Jack with pure poise. He turned the leprechaun robot off once more and disrobed him. Underneath his professional attire was an aluminum exoskeleton, just as Jack had predicted. Jack grabbed the robot by both heels and started shaking. Little globs of gold started to fall from pockets in the robot’s frame, where they had evidently just been rattling around like you or I would carry lint in our clothing crevices.

“Just as I suspected. A brazen little cutpurse,” said Jack, tossing the robot aside and collecting the gold. He gave a handful to the General.

“This ought to pay for the whiskey,” he said.

“Yeah, what ABOUT the whiskey?” asked Zeke, scratching his chin.

“Authenticity,” said Jack, shrugging. “If that didn’t work, I was going to start asking riddles. That would have set them off just as easy.”

Another cop fired a shot. He blew up the projector in my hand and was roundly berated by his fellow bluebottles.

(“There’s no dynamite, Jimmy!”

“Oh yeah,” he said sheepishly. “It was all just tricks. Sorry. Forgot.”)

“It seems like there is much more to this,” said Zeke. “I still don’t know what the hell is going on here.”

Nearly all of his colleagues agreed, shouting at Jack to explain himself.

“I don’t know what’s going on either,” said Jack. “But I’m tired and ready for bed. It seems to me that creating an army of self-sufficient robot leprechauns is something anybody would enjoy. I’m surprised there aren’t more roving bands of them in the world. You might check their serial numbers or dust for fingerprints or something. I don’t know. That’s not my game. Try Germany. I’m going home.”

“But…” said the future’s salesman.

“Enough!” said Jack. “Leprechaun robots made a giant angry magician pull things out of his ass in order to distract you and steal your wallets. Let it go!”

“There are a lot of questions here!” shouted somebody in the back.

“Fine! Ask them! Just give me time to get away!” shouted Jack, grabbing me by the arm.

“This whole thing requires some serious debating!” shouted another voice.

I was being hauled away. I made my move.

“I say it’s a case of a priori discrimination!” shouted one woman with a Scandinavian accent.

“Those robots were doomed to be free!” shouted somebody else.

“Come on, Jones,” said Jack through his teeth. “Run!”

We did. The argument swept down the street like a nuclear blast. You could feel it at your back, pushing you forward. You could tell it was going to go on forever, and there wasn’t going to be any resolution. None at all. Maybe there would be an article in the paper, but this was going to be just one of those things better forgotten.

Personally, I was just happy I had snagged one of those trash bags on my way out. After all, they went to so much trouble. Could I really let it go to waste?