The man had a brown double-breasted suit and a large brim hat, equally brown, matching wingtip shoes and a white handkerchief he kept pulling out of his vest pocket to wipe his tears. He was walking very fast to a brownish region of the forties. The Andrew Sisters were singing a sweet song from a shack by the tracks. The sun was cooking the oats in a field nearby and the man appproached a brown railroad car lettered in red with “The Fabulous Forties”. A German envoy walked out and went to a small building nearby where a telegraph operator was clicking away, blending with the sound of a thousand crickets from the field across the tracks. The man with the brown suit hesitated as he heard distant jazz remixed into the aforementioned crickets in the aforementioned oat field. He saw the German boots shining darkly in the dark rectangle described by the open door of the station. When he turned towards the car door the train had started to move with angry hisses. He was then reading on the side of the next car “Welcome to the fifties”. As soon as that door materialized he eagerly jumped in. To a brunette with a brown hat and skirt powdering herself by the front exit of the "Fabulous Forties":
“Thank God the war is over!”.
She answered without missing a beat, all the while tapping on her compact:
“Go tell that to the folks in Korea!”
The man was already moving to the front of the car where through the door he could see the end of another car wiggling noisily.
“I’m going forward in that train. Fuck the Fifties”
He jerked open the stainless steel door, letting in the track noises, some smoke and a good whiff of English countryside. Before he grabbed the next car's door, he heard “And they called the wind Ma-ra-ia”, a distant song that was the saddest thing he had ever heard. At that point the man was ready to jump off the train but his pain had grown larger than the door. That’s actually what saved his life. So he just sat on the top step, sobbing and getting softly powdered with soot, his feet dangling by the side of the fast moving train. His pain was caught in the doorway, jammed tight between two moving cars. It was unbearable to watch, yet a strange light was radiating from the brim of his hat, perched farther and farther to the back of his head until it properly rode on the hump of his back. The locomotive became visible slowing down in a long curve to the east, a plaintive low whistle heard. Out of “The Sixties” burst a young clean-cut Vietnamese girl, naked from the waist up and bearing a shoulder tattoo that said “Make war, not love”. His pain instantly shrank, freeing him to move around. The man grabbed a small pistol from his vest pocket, one shaped like cigarette lighter made to look like a pistol.
“Got any free love for me baby”
The now excited man had pushed the short barrel of the gun into the girl’s navel, a feature of hers that was highly visible above the giant towel silk-screened with a $100 bill that she was wearing in lieu of a skirt. Almost instantly she pushed him off the train with a swift kick to his groin, picking up the smallish gun that had just dropped to the floor. The man described an arc as he fell off the bridge, hitting the Thames seconds before his hat that was describing a similar arc, the wing tip shoes flying escort like a pair of Sabre Jets. No one saw the man disappear under water, hunched over and holding his balls, a fact that renders this entire descriptive unverifiable.
Meanwhile back on the train the girl had unfolded the towel and reattached it upside down, showing a bill that said 001$. The reversal was hard to conceal to the other passenger of the smoking car where she was heading to. With a Miss Clairol #13 kit, she had taken the time to die her hair Strawberry Blond and learn a few key English words by swallowing a miniature book suitably called “English for Blonds” She had walked there so very slowly, her head down in pain, one she caught between the railroad cars where she had performed her ciminal deed, like a large tick moving from one host to the next. In the smoking car British sixties music was blaring as people lit their Gaylords, Pall Malls and Players cigarettes. The girl had mouthed a Matinée from a pack stolen at a Montreal Expo concession stand. That made them better tasting, she thought as she flicked the gun at her own face. “Click”.
“The thing is out of fluid. I should have thrown it after him, the macho bastard!” she thought to herself in now perfect English.
Someone came to her from behind and flicked a Zippo with the typical mesmerizing hollow sound, prompting her to suck in a long slow draft to her first Matinée of the day. “Thank you”, she purred “You light my fire!”
The man was positioned behind her in such a way as she could not see him no matter on which side she glanced. But she had noticed earlier the brown sleeve on a very wet brown suit. Not able to identify the style, single or double-breasted, she calmly said to herself “When in doubt, abstain” . Then she delicately positioned her round little derrière dead center on the stainless steel bar stool, giving her bare torso a quick twist to view the stranger face to face.
To her horror it was indeed the “free love” guy she had earlier kicked off the train, his soaking wet hat pushed back to offer a large wet forehead , a drying algae crossing it diagonally.
“How could you make it back here so fast, she said incredulously!”
The man had a curious smile as he pushed his hat back some more:
“I have connections at the railroad company. Railroad connections”
Lowering her head and noticing his soggy shoes, the girl said softly:
“Sorry about what happened. I was raped in the Fifties and twice more in the Sixties. You can’t talk to me like you’re the next moron to try that one me. I don’t want to enter the Seventies with a large lump in my belly”
“I have protection with me” said the man as he put away the Zippo, pulling out two Trojans from a very wet brown wallet.
“God, you never quit, do you!”
Then nonchalantly, trying to conceal a pain that was now larger than the sum of her two large breasts:
“Before I forget, here’s your other funny little lighter. Fill it up and its ready to go”
They both excused themselves to the other passengers visible through the cloud of smoke as they walked to the early Seventies. The bathroom door said “vacant”. Upon entering, the man immediately slapped the light switch off and pushed the girl to sit on the toilet seat, her knees tightly clamped to his own and her hands fumbling for the fly on his brown pants. It was a buttoned fly and her fingers poked through effortlessly.
“I’ll give him a good blow job and get to the Eighties smoothly. If you can’t fight them, join them”. These two thoughts were colliding in her head, making a distinct wooden sound. Her pain had left in the sixties along with a vintage bottle of Valium.
In the total darkness she looked up and saw nothing…nothing but the rim of that brown hat glowing mysteriously with a greenish tint.
“What a freak!”, she thought as she was about to mouth the man’s brown organ. This is when she heard the song that was to change her life, a soft gurgle from the transistor radio that always hung around her neck.
“Ooh my Lord…My Sweet Lord”
What a sweet song, she mused as she was about to suck the man’s dick in the dark. To her surprise he tasted so sweet that she needed no further prompting to give it her best shot, moving her head back and forth on him until he came with a soft rumble in his breath, his hat falling quietly to the floor. Anointed on her chest and breasts, she had an epiphany, connected the dots like had done Saint Paul on the road to Ephesus, stuttering out with tremors in her voice .
“Are you the second coming of Jesus-Christ?”
There was a large noise like cars uncoupling, a silence and then…blitzkrieg!
The lights came on and all that blinding stainless steel was not enough to prevent the girl from seeing that the man with a brown suit was now wearing a purple pajama, a terrible goatee and eyes that were like glowing coals. His laughter crackled as the red arcs of miniature fireworks shot from his shaved skull. He was holding a surgical saw with his mouth while his hands went to her throat, enunciating through clenched teeth:
“Try the FIRST coming of the Antichrist?”
The blond Vietnamese girl never made it to the eighties. After a short fantasy of being the second coming of Mary Magdalena, looking forward to Sweet Lord’s second coming, she was processed into 8-inch segments that were fed to the tracks through the stainless steel water closet. There was no pain to clog the sanitary. The head was stuffed into the sanitary napkin disposal bin where they found it along with a blood-soaked pajama bottom. The top of that garment was found three cars down towards the back of the train. The man had to have walked past the eighties and nineties half naked but no one saw him as they were all gazing at their respective newspapers. They were an odd lot, creepy Croatians and sultry Serbs, drunken Russians and loud Americans, all busy masturbating while holding their own version of the daily news over their respective work site. Once he got into the “New Millennium” he tried to quickly go past that car too but something had grown inside him, a pain darker, harder and larger than any of his past pains. The door would not let him through. A devout young Muslim volunteered to help by flashing open his Aquascutum. The man barely glanced at the dynamite belt, choosing instead to remove his goatee that by that time had grown to a full size beard. Then the blood-soaked pajama top was dropped to the floor as he knelt as if about to pray Allah. As his forehead touched the floor glowing orange arcs acted like powerful acetylene cutting torches cutting a hole in the metal floor, a hole large enough to easily let him and his pain through. The circle of steel fell out as a lot of air and track noises came in. The man rolled into the hole and seventeen devout Muslims jumped after him, seeding the tracks with their prayer beads. The Iraqis left in the car sighed with relief as they clutched the adorned frames they were holding, some bearing the photograph of an attractive bearded man, others with a cheap replica of Santa Claus. One could decipher the track noise as either singing “I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back…” or instead, depending on where you were sitting in the car, “Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back…”
“Same meaning, really”, thought an oriental girl with large breasts sitting near the hole, a large folded towel on her lap.
The train slowed down as it entered a small community. It was coming to a full stop at a station whose black and white sign said: “Late-Thirties-on-the-Thames”. A German Envoy with shiny booths climbed aboard carrying a fat portfolio. In it was a fake goatee and a folded purple pajama. Steam billowed as the brakes screeched for a long minute. The telegraph operator had finished his shift, stood up and put on a brown suit jacket, a brown hat and left towards the next town in a brown Bentley. The car radio played “Little Brown Jug” , a song quickly interrupted by the news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by German brown shirts. The man appeared to smile as his hat brim started to glow. He knew he could beat that locomotive to the next town. “Life is good”, he said as a million stars were alit high in the sky above.
