In the Court of the Yellow King Read Online Free PDF Page A

after we are all gone. So! Let’s rock and roll! All ready to rock? Atta boy. We’re gonna have a ball.
    This is Alan Freed with you tonight, the Moondog, the King of the Rock & Rollers, with a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends in northern Ohio, Ontario, Canada, western New York, western Pennsylvania, aaaand West Virgin-eye-ay. Along about eleven-thirty, we’ll be joining the Moondog Network.
    Enjoy Erin brew, ten-oh-two, and the Moondog Show. And don’t sneer at crazy people. Their madness lasts longer than ours. That’s the only difference. There is only Christ to cry to now, and none to repair my reputation. Please arrange your dials of Judgment in a fulminating order to receive the Yellow Sign....
    (I couldn’t be dreaming. I’ve never slept this deeply be hind these damn drug s. Sometimes, I do sle ep, though. Just not n ow....)
    Tonight we are actually broadcasting live on whatever decimal fraction of the FM dial. I just learned yesterday that this control booth was here. That there was a baby transmitter. Here. That there was even a Here here, back back back in the back of the first floor of the hospital where they sent me to dry out from that yellow river where I almost drowned.
    I don’t know if I’m drying out. I sleep all the time, and no matter how much they dope me I can’t relax. There are dreams. Dreams. And sleepwalks. Like the one where I woke up here. Playing with switches and trying to get a level.
    I don’t know why this transmitter is in this room of this hospital, or what the breakers in this section were doing all the way on . Some of the desks and keyplates and such are stamped Civil Defense, with one puzzling lead plate on the panel hiding this very microphone, Imperial Dynasty of America.
    It’s quiet here. They don’t know I jimmied the other entrance, the one through the broom-closet in the hall. This room is soundproof, and the Moondog can yell as loud as he wants. When I can get out of bed. Sometimes, I just scream.
    Ah, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you all about this place. About what a beast that big nurse, the redhead with the bullet-bras, can be to the long-timers. She’s not on my floor, but she kind of thinks she’s security chief for the whole building. No matter how long it’s been since I even thought about a woman, I’d hate for her to catch me in a half-nelson during this broadcast. All you cats and kittens can understand, that is just too much dead air for the Moondog. Too much.
    They’re not all like her. Most of the nurses on my floor are good people who know how to pity a man who can bear no more. Cathy, the RN who works the graveyard shift up on my floor most nights, she always tells me that the human soul never really has anything to fear. That I always exist and nothing can harm me and anything else is just driving myself nuts. When she’s there, I listen. Graveyard gets long.
    So do the days. What gets me through my days, or most of them... Well, it’s the fans who kept me rockin’ and boppin’ and not stoppin’, back then, for them, until the gods all went home and the clocks melted down. The memories of playing myself in three movies about what all we were doing. The crowds in New York, and everywhere. The roaring seas of people I conducted like an orchestra, the conductor himself turning back and forth between performer and audience and down left right up and a one and a two and a....
    In Johnstown, I learned elocution on the street corner trying to talk faster than any girl in my class I could chat up. At WJAC-Johnstown-Altoona, then on my Ohio Tour ending in Cleveland, I raised the pennon of my own gold star under the goldhorn shadow of Jazz, until to the streets of Manhattan I wandered away, to my tattered cloak and beer-can crown as the King of the Rock & Rollers. Thousands of my subjects conscripted new listeners to WJW and then WINS-New York, and taped the shows themselves. At home. Nobody ever taped my shows but the occasional