Glue

GLUE

BENJAMIN BENEDICT

FOR THE JETS

There can be no freedom, without a little bondage.

B.B. Hollywood, October 1978

Copyright 1979, 2006 by Benjamin Benedict

Cover illustration by Marijke

Thanks to Shirley Kennedy for typing out this manuscript more times than humanly tolerable and to Simon Hayes for placing it in cyberspace where it belongs.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information retrieval system, without permission, in writing, from the author or publisher.

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Glue 1.

Glue 2.

Glue 3.

Glue 4.

Glue 5.

Glue 6.

Glue 7.

Glue 8.

Glue 9.

Glue 10.

Glue 11.

Glue 1.

The desert air hung like a veil over the old runway, and the cement was too hot, even for the lizards. A broken down mansion sat overlooking the plateau on which the runway had been built, the rocky scrub stretching unbroken to the east for another twenty miles. Behind the house, to the north, was a small ridge of hills, and a trail snaked its way from the old mansion's driveway to wind up into them. There were about twenty cars and trucks littered around the driveway, but no one to be seen. Then, an organ began to play.

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,

He causeth me to lie down in green fields . . . . "

The choir sounded old and ragged, but there was something in their voices. A sureness, a conviction.

In a few moments the singing was over, and the organ droned gently to a close.

Brothers and Sisters, a man's voice rasped from inside the building. "You are the Lord's Chosen Few, and you are here to learn a secret known only by the deepest initiates of our order.

"It's in the wine, brethren, the Universal Consciousness has seen fit to breathe over the Church's consecrated wine.

"Our spiritual discoveries have not all been easy to bear, but they have united us, soldered us together into the loving band gathered here today. Remember, as you go on your chosen missions, it is thru this wine that we have been made aware of our true spiritual dimensions. Now, each one of you go out and found a church, as I have done, and in five more years, you will be saying to them, what I say here to you.

My brethren, you are beginning a vacation of enrichment, the first real vacation you have ever had.

The organ broke into a Bach fugue, and small bunches of people soon began appearing in the sunlight. They were all wearing hooded cloaks of a light sandy color that had zip fronts with armholes to elbow length. Those that could be seen under their hoods were mostly old people, interspersed with a few middle-aged couples. A tall figure moved amongst them as they filtered out towards the cars. His hood was pulled back, revealing long, unkempt black hair, streaked with gray. His moustache and beard were luxuriantly untrimmed and black lensed glasses covered his eyes.

Bye, Father Leonid! an old black lady called out as she took off, the first to make it out onto the trail. The man in the dark glasses turned and waved after her.

Goodbye, Father, another one shouted at him. The drive- way dusted up as more and more of the ancient vehicles choked to life, and the Father pulled his cassock's hood back up while he made his last farewells.

After the last car had gone, the Father began brushing the dust from his robe. Father Leonid, founder and temporal head of the Church of the Sacred Moment, had been living in this old gray mansion for a little less than five years. When he had moved there, Leonid had no idea that his life's work was to be crowned by this moment; there had been other things on his mind. The amazing fact was that, at that time, it hadn't occurred to him that he would ever convert anybody, let alone an entire community, because Father Leonid, alias Rubin Koslovitch had been and undoubtedly still was, wanted by the Feds.

Rubin's claim to fame was that he had been the last chemist to manufacture large quantities of high grade psychedelics. In the late sixties, the flow of good quality hallucinogens had gradually been stamped out by the authorities and only Rubin had kept the faith; only Rubin had been able to. From nineteen fifty-nine, until nineteen sixty-three, he had grabbed up a couple of kilos of ergot crystals, sold by the Sandoz Company to a bogus American medical institute that Rubin had formed. Those crystals had been the foundation of Rubin's notoriety; his claim to the purest and strongest product available any- where.

Rubin had been good for a twenty thousand dollar advance from any one of countless front men. His product was A plus, and he always performed. By the mid-seventies, everything else available was either imitation or very limited in quantity and Rubin was the only psychedelic supplier left, worthy of the name. Worthy also, of ever increasing Federal attention.

With Rubin, it wasn't the money. He had seen himself as a new age prophet, a herald of the way as preached by Huxley and the other pioneers of psychedelia. It was this faith and various pseudonym bank accounts that had kept him going, until finally, near the end of '78, still a jump ahead of the authorities, he realized that lately, they had been getting too close. His crazy luck was running thin, and soon he would be caught if he didn't change his pattern. It was time for Rubin to make a strategic withdrawal, take stock of his supplies and re- consider tactics, so he had determined to find himself a hideout in the wilderness.

One afternoon, about fifteen miles outside 29 Palms, after a week of searching, he had come upon The Manor as it was known locally, and fell in love. It wasn't exactly a hideout, but Rubin nevertheless found himself constructing an identity to justify such palatial obscurity, and had soon hit upon the solution of becoming a man of the cloth.

Originally built by a mining baron in the 1880's, The Manor had also served as control tower and living quarters for

U.S.A.F. flight training staff during the 30's and 40's. They had built the runway, along with flight hangars, and some barracks for the trainees, which the locals had quickly dismantled for their own purposes, after the Air Force's departure in the fifties. But for some reason the old 'Manor' had been left more or less intact, a deserted monument to two bye-gone generations, suffering only the occasional damages inflicted by weekenders. In the late sixties, the old house became ill famed when a series of singles clubs began using it. This was soon stopped and the rambling edifice was left empty once more, until Rubin's advent on the scene.

Rubin had quietly installed himself and was soon confirmed by mail to be Father Leonid, the Reverend Father of the Church of the Sacred Moment. Only a few days later, while walking around outside, he had discovered the huge caverns under the building, lying beneath seven feet of solid rock.

These long forgotten wine cellars had been converted into an air-raid shelter by the Air Force, designed for around forty people. The entrance was behind some disused stables, about twenty yards from the house. There were three large empty rooms and two johns. Rubin didn't have too much difficulty in pulling open the metal door at the other end of the shelter. He then climbed a steep row of steps to a trap door, and forcing the locks, he had pushed the door open above his head, to emerge in the Manor's kitchen closet.

Father Leonid's faithful flock lay in scattered pockets, amongst the desert hills. They had got wind of a priest or some such living in The Manor, and Dan Fredericks had been the one to stroll in one Sunday afternoon, to demand a service. The good Father had toasted Dan to about 200 mics of enlightenment, and the next weekend was the beginning of Father Leonid's regular Sunday meetings. They would drink some wine, eat water biscuit, and after that anything could and did happen. Hours later, Father Leonid would regroup them to the tune of The Lord Is My Shepherd, played on his cassette recorder, and after nearly five years, by the fall of nineteen eighty-three, his congregation had grown to almost fifty souls.

Rubin watched the dust settle on the trail for a few moments, then walked back inside, shutting the front door behind him. He strode thru the kitchen and went down into the cellar, coming back out only a few moments later, a bottle of wine clutched to his chest.

This was no ordinary bottle of wine. It was a bottle of 'freshly consecrated' Chambertin, 1981. Rubin had added the L.S.D. to the wine with a hypo thru the cork. But this even was no ordinary bottle of 'consecrated' wine.

Over the years, in the cavernous cellars below, Rubin had been experimenting with the moulds that can be produced from rye. In the Middle Ages, sometimes whole townships went crazy when a certain type of mould occurred in their rye bread. Properly distilled and synthesized, this same mould became the ergot crystals that Rubin had so cleverly procured in the sixties. There would come a day when even Rubin's supply of crystals would run out and so he had spent much of his time in his underground lab, trying to duplicate and then distill the identical mould type.

Finally, he had obtained his own synthesis. The bottle of Chambertin contained one thousand mics of Rubin's first product. He already knew it was potent, but how would it com- pare to the Sandoz. Would it be as smooth, as elevating, as revealing, as clear, as free of all side effects? Would it bring on a headache or physical stiffness maybe? Would it make you see spots? Or would it possibly be even more visionary than the Sandoz itself? Rubin trembled at the thought. This was his moment of truth.

He went over to the kitchen sink for a corkscrew and turned on the greasy plastic radio that stood between the salt and the flour.

"On this side of the law,

On that side of the law.

Who is right,

And who is wrong,

Who is for,

And who's against the law?" Johnny Cash sang.

Rubin knew what Johnny was on about. He pulled the cork and strolled out onto the porch overlooking the deserted air strip, a glass in one hand and the bottle of Chambertin in the other. The sun was now sinking and an expectant buzz of insects pulsed across the scrub.

Rubin poured himself a glass and downed it quickly. Another. Then another. This was no way to drink good wine, but then, he reflected, draining his fourth and final glass, science had no soul. Four glasses were equal to about 400 mics of his home cultured psychedelic; the precise dosage he had prescribed for its debut performance.

He put the bottle and glass down on the table and picked up a copy of the L.A. Times that his congregation had left him. On the front of the fashion section, his eye caught a picture of five pretty teenage girls in bras, panties and high heels. Those were the kind of converts the faith could use. He had been studying the tender beauties for quite a while before he realized he knew the man in the center spot, the man who the story was about; Herbert (Herbie) Xavier, President, L.G.P. Inc., 933 N. Fairfax Avenue, L.A..

Herbie it seemed, had never left Hollywood. His life-long dedication to servicing females in their early puberty was now threatening to turn his inconspicuous boutique, L.G.P. - Little Girls Panties; undergarments for the undergrad, into the battleground for teen rights and Herbie into a culture hero.

They'll do anything for me, Herbie was quoted as saying about his lovely young admirers. 'Cause I'll do anything for them. Anything they want.

It was at this moment that the desert insects stopped buzzing and Rubin dropped the paper onto the table beside him, to watch spellbound as a flying saucer fast approached from the far end of the deserted