the Witch and the Bounty Hunter and the Black Lieutenant and the Salem Mistress, the King of Stars and the Knight of Bridges and the Queen of Rifles and the Princess of Coins. The tattoo artist started drawing them as fast as I could come up with them, until the counter was papered with them; and we hatched our plot then, that she would tattoo the whole tarot on the women of Los Angeles, until the entire deck was dealt and wandering the city. Every once in a while I drop by the shop on Ivar to see how it’s going. And when I’m driving the streets and I see the young hookers and runaways and waifs who are all fleeing their names, I name them: I imagine that this one is the Blind Hitchhiker and that one the Ripped-Dress Debutante, their secret personae etched on them in secret places. The last time I went by the tattoo joint I had a revelation. It was filled with that peculiar odor I had been smelling in the streets of Los Angeles for some time, without being able to identify it; and I realized it was the smell of color soldered to flesh. …
America recedes into the past. History recedes into the future. From my rooftop at dusk in ravaged L.A. I see America and history in the distance, a horizon of dust pulling farther away. On the monitor every once in a while I pick up a broadcast from back east where, among the rest of the nations populace, L.A. has become just a dim recollection. Out blips the image of some politician, making the usual stern proclamations the dead make to the living.
They kept telling you it was a war for the soul of America, but you didn’t believe them. They kept saying you were the Enemy, but you wouldn’t accept that, because you just didn’t feel like an enemy. Now you know they meant every word, and more. Now, as the Twentieth Century slips America’s hold on it, you have become the Enemy they always said you were; and in the receding history that you see from your rooftop, you can’t help being impressed. No one with a highly developed sense of his own hypocrisy can help being impressed how the amoral have become the New Moralists, how the spiritually malevolent have become the New Righteous. You can’t help being impressed how the New Patriots have consolidated their power and profit in the name of an idea someone had for a country a couple of hundred years ago, or the name of a cracked visionary who died for love a couple of thousand years ago. Of course it might prove embarrassing if he were to actually return as they claim to believe he will, living among the very trash these paragons hate and despise: the hookers and junkies and abandoned teenage mothers and muttering crazies who have nowhere to live but the street, the once-beautiful young men emaciated by plague, the suffering and forsaken souls he would cradle and comfort as they die the agonizing deaths in which the “moral” and the “righteous” and the “patriotic” revel. But the New Paragons have probably concluded that there really isn’t all that much danger of him showing up any time soon; and so every one of them can come beaming in on the airwaves these days with a little more confidence, sounding a little tougher and sitting a little more ram-rod straight, like he has a ruler up his ass to measure to the last millimeter not only the distance from his rectum to his heart but which of the two is smaller and tighter and more constricted. And then after a while you have to admit maybe you’re not so impressed by them anymore. After a while you have to admit maybe you’re beginning to get your fill of these gibbering corpses, and you just wish there was another thousand miles of Mojave between them and you. You have to admit you would just as soon set the desert on fire and rip up all the highways leading into town and lay a black smoke screen across the eastern sky, so there was no possibility whatsoever any of them could ever get in.
In other words, I couldn’t help saying yes when Viv asked me to write her
America recedes into the past. History recedes into the future. From my rooftop at dusk in ravaged L.A. I see America and history in the distance, a horizon of dust pulling farther away. On the monitor every once in a while I pick up a broadcast from back east where, among the rest of the nations populace, L.A. has become just a dim recollection. Out blips the image of some politician, making the usual stern proclamations the dead make to the living.
They kept telling you it was a war for the soul of America, but you didn’t believe them. They kept saying you were the Enemy, but you wouldn’t accept that, because you just didn’t feel like an enemy. Now you know they meant every word, and more. Now, as the Twentieth Century slips America’s hold on it, you have become the Enemy they always said you were; and in the receding history that you see from your rooftop, you can’t help being impressed. No one with a highly developed sense of his own hypocrisy can help being impressed how the amoral have become the New Moralists, how the spiritually malevolent have become the New Righteous. You can’t help being impressed how the New Patriots have consolidated their power and profit in the name of an idea someone had for a country a couple of hundred years ago, or the name of a cracked visionary who died for love a couple of thousand years ago. Of course it might prove embarrassing if he were to actually return as they claim to believe he will, living among the very trash these paragons hate and despise: the hookers and junkies and abandoned teenage mothers and muttering crazies who have nowhere to live but the street, the once-beautiful young men emaciated by plague, the suffering and forsaken souls he would cradle and comfort as they die the agonizing deaths in which the “moral” and the “righteous” and the “patriotic” revel. But the New Paragons have probably concluded that there really isn’t all that much danger of him showing up any time soon; and so every one of them can come beaming in on the airwaves these days with a little more confidence, sounding a little tougher and sitting a little more ram-rod straight, like he has a ruler up his ass to measure to the last millimeter not only the distance from his rectum to his heart but which of the two is smaller and tighter and more constricted. And then after a while you have to admit maybe you’re not so impressed by them anymore. After a while you have to admit maybe you’re beginning to get your fill of these gibbering corpses, and you just wish there was another thousand miles of Mojave between them and you. You have to admit you would just as soon set the desert on fire and rip up all the highways leading into town and lay a black smoke screen across the eastern sky, so there was no possibility whatsoever any of them could ever get in.
In other words, I couldn’t help saying yes when Viv asked me to write her
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