Track 1 - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
And the lamb lies down on Broadway.
Early morning Manhattan,
Ocean winds blow on the land.
Movie-Palaces now undone,
The all-night watchmen have had their fun.
Sleeping cheaply on a midnight show,
It's the same old ending - time to go.
Get out!
It seems they cannot leave their dream.
There's something moving in the sidewalk steam,
And the lamb lies down on Broadway.
Night-time's flyers feel their pains.
Drugstore take down the chains.
Metal motion comes in bursts,
But the gas station can quench that thirst.
Suspension cracked on an unmade road
The trucker's eyes read "Overload"
And out of the subway,
Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid
Exits into daylight, spraygun hid,
And the lamb lies down on Broadway.
The lamb seems right out of place,
Yet the Broadway street scene finds a focus in its face.
Somehow it's lying there,
Brings a stillness to the air.
Though man-made light, at night is very bright,
There's no whitewash victim,
As the neons dim to the coat of white.
Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid
Wipes his gun - he's forgotten what he did,
And the lamb lies down on Broadway
Suzanne tired, her work all done,
Thinks money - honey - be on - neon.
Cabman's velvet glove sounds the horn
And the sawdust king spits out his scorn.
Wonder women you can draw your blind!
Don't look at me! I'm not your kind.
I'm Rael!
Something inside me has just begun,
Lord knows what I have done,
And the lamb lies down on Broadway.
On Broadway-
They say the lights are always bright on Broadway.
They say there's always magic in the air.
They say the lights are always bright on Broadway...
It begins. In the quiet of early morning Manhattan, through the steam rising from the pavement and the light filtering down between the buildings and dappling the street, the behemoth city holds no evidence of the great, busy monstrosity it is to become in the daylight hours. No, now it sleeps as slow and lumbering parasites, their yellow and black tattooed carapaces glinting and their guts purring, creep along, oblivious to the cold ocean breeze that dissipates the acrid smoke they spew. They breeze itself is dissipated in kind by the labrynthine passageways it struggles through, gaps between the skyscrapers that jut to the sky like great crooked concrete teeth. Weary men and women are dispelled from the warmth of the theatre in which they'd caught tonight's brief sleep as the war between worlds raged on around them. Now they're expelled into the cold-wet of a Broadway morning, sleep still gumming their eyes. They clutch their rags tighter about them and shiver, only believing that it's the cold that brings to them these expressive convulsions. Their muddled minds have yet to recognize the abstract stillness that hangs in the air, and even if they did, the impoverished of Broadway might not have cared. They don't see themselves as being entities with the ability to alter the way things are. And yet among them is our hero, who has a chance to bring about great change, though we don't yet recognise his face. We've yet to know him.
Meanwhile, a trucker, his hulking machine familiar parked nearby, stands forlorn. The truck was dealt some damage on a country road badly in need of resurfacing, and the master fears his paycheck at stake. The metal creature grumbles its pains. It needs help, and help it will recieve in the form of a nearby mechanic's shop, where it can sip a gasoline beverage while a metalworking surgeon performs his miracle craft. Until then the trucker will stand by, sipping at his own caustic drink and staring, glazed, at the light that is beginning to reflect off of the skyscrapers. He thinks it beautiful, but only because the alcohol has blurred his vision so that he cannot see the sharp modern coldness that reflects with the sunlight. It is a mixture of the unimaginable ancient and the next greatest new, that which will be replaced in its own time. Our trucker need not comprehend these depths, and that makes him a happier person, but not a more complete one. And so he will stand, happy and ignorant, and thinks that someday he might get away from all this and do something BIG, something worth doing. He doubts that he will get that chance, and is suddenly not quite so happy and ignorant as before. What he does not understand, however, is that everything has a place, and the fluidity of things allows for great change, if we let go our hold and let the current take us where we need to go.
Now we must leave our trucker, fondly, lovingly, and move along. There is much ado here in New York, much ado about nothing, so to speak, and we must try to be a part of it all while we have this chance. We needn't stray far. Suzanne, a working girl, sits in a grubby motel across the street, glad for once of the sounds from the auto shop across the street that keep her awake. She wants to sleep, but instead she counts her money, thinking, "money, honey, be on, neon..." and listening very hard for the creaky wooden footstep that signals something, a change, a shift. A shift that lets her drift off deeper into her hazy reverie. Until then she counts and counts, a switchblade resting near her right hand, which tingles to hold it. She is afraid, and Fear is the mother of Violence. Suzanne knows that her night isn't over until the man next door, wiry and muscular and strong, has left for the night. He is her bogeyman, her deathwatch beetle that snores gently instead of taps. Though she cannot sleep, cannot... cannot... she slips away anyway and falls for a few moments into sleep. A cabman's velvet clothed hand sounds the bleating call that wakes the prostitute from what she fears might've become her death-sleep...
and out there, somewhere in the rising steam, something moves. A lamb. Its fleece miraculously clean of the rich sludge that cakes the streets, the lamb blinks its dark, sleepy eyes, and lies down on Broadway. This scene of quiet serenity brings a tear to the eye of a young man who happens past, and he will hide this from the boys he's going to meet, unable to admit to such a childish display of emotion. But standing there and staring at the lamb feels like ending.
This beast Manhattan is full of dark places, where men dig into the Earth like ants and make their nests in the stygian gloom of Underneath. The light of day never penetrates these places, and in the virgin darkness of one of these places that our story truly begins. An acrid smell drifts through the empty subway station, thick and cloying. A sharp rattle sounds, and then the contrastingly gentle hiss of a nearly empty spraycan being used. Our eyes are not accustomed to the darkness, so all we see is a dark figure making the final white stroke, then standing back to admire his masterpiece. In large and angled lettering, "R-A-E-L" drips down the wall, next to aerosol sentiments such as, "The Lamb Lives!" (which has meaning to us, now, but not to Rael, who thinks it a silly sort of thing to write on a wall) or "The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!" next to a somewhat skilled depiction of a child fighting a make-believe dragon in the subway station dark. In some ways, Rael feels he is that child, fighting the great dragon of life with nothing more than a rusty and bent coathanger, shaped to look like a great sword but containing no more magic than a child's mind can put into it. This may mean nothing to you, it may mean everything; that is unimportant, because it means something to Rael. He's marked this place for his name, because he identifies with the picture and because this is all a part of making a name for himself. He's learned that when you're only a half-bred Puerto-Rican, the world spares you no love, and you've got to fight back to get back.
We move on. Patrolman Frank Leonowich (48, married, two kids) stands silent in the entryway to the wig store, pale eyes narrowing slightly as he surveys our Puerto-Rican kid, who has just emerged from the dark of the subway station. Rael misinterprets this look as one of veiled distaste and walks past, sparing the patrolman no smile as he might some of the kinder ones he normally meets on his forays. He can feel the officer's eyes burning into his back, but does not hurry his step, which would have been a sure sign of guilt. The officer himself senses only sparingly the odd feeling of wrong that hovers about our Rael, and thinks that perhaps it was the startling grey eyes that stared at him from the dark face, or something in the skinny boy's stride that is off. It makes the hairs on Leonowich's neck stand up. Rael might not agree, but Patrolman Leonowich is not such a bad man, really. He just believes in ghosts.
Rael sighs with relief as he rounds the corner and feels the policeman's gaze removed from his back. His deep, unusual, grey eyes shine with a cold-sweat nervous sort of triumph. The spraycan digs into his side, out of sight underneath his worn leather jacket, even as the frayed cuffs of his jeans scrape away at the rapidly drying muck on the street, the same muck that shied away from the lamb's wool. Three whores down the street give Rael the eye, and he gives them the cold shoulder. He's places to go and things to be, or, at least, he feels he does. Today is an important day for an unimportant reason. So unimportant that he doesn't know what it is, but whatever the case, he feels as though he's done all this before, or something very close to it. Today he carries something new, though: thoughts of his brother John, and perhaps that will make all the difference in the world.