The next morning I awoke when I normally did, just so Heather wouldn’t be suspicious. But instead of going to the bookstore, I hopped on a bus and visited one of my old stomping grounds: Prospero’s in West Hollywood. I always remembered liking Prospero’s better than any other club. Why?
C’mon, think, I told myself, just think about it … because … because?
You could do what you wanted there. You just didn’t have to tell the same jokes about … about … ?
Airplane food? Parking meters? The weather? Traffic school?
Yes … I remembered always hating material like that. I was into something else … something more … but what? I couldn’t remember exactly. Just … something more. Whatever that was, Prospero’s would let me and Heather do it.
What was it?
I was afraid to enter the club. I just stood in the alley staring at the back entrance where me and the other performers used to enter. I remembered talking about my only suicide attempt on stage. I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to resurrect the feeling of standing there on the stage with a crowd of people listening intently to my every word, trying to recall what the hell it was I found so amusing about a failed suicide attempt.
Like most things in my life, it didn’t work. I resurrected nothing. I felt such an overwhelming sensation of loss and yet … and yet I didn’t know why. Do you ever feel as if something has been stolen from you, something unquantifiable, something you never even knew you had in the first place?
God, I felt so dejected, so lost.
I was just about to leave when the back door opened and a familiar figure came walking out with a Hefty trash bag in his hand. It was Ivan. He looked the same: long gray hair pulled back into a pony tail, bushy moustache, beard, unkempt sideburns, paisley shirt … as if he’d stepped out of a PBS documentary about that place in San Francisco … what’s it called?
He just stopped and stared at me for a second. “Elliot?” he said. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I guess that ghost was called Elliot Greeley.
I stared down at the concrete like a guilty man. I felt embarrassed for even being there.
Ivan dropped the trash bag on the ground and said, “God damn, it’s been such a long time!” He placed his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the back door. “C’mon in! I hope you’re lookin’ for a job. I could put you on stage tonight if you’d like—you and Heather. The people I’ve got working for me these days are all second-raters. The last time they had a dangerous thought was the first time. It’ll be nice to have someone who actually has some fresh ideas—”
I pulled away from him. I wanted to remain in the alley. “No,” I said. “I’m not looking for a job.”
“Oh?” Ivan slipped his hands into his pockets, shrugged his thick shoulders. “That’s too bad. We really need you, particularly right now. Your political routines were always your best.”
I nodded. “So I’ve heard.” There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. “So … what did you think of the debates last night?” I said, just to be saying something.
Ivan laughed. “The asshole’s got my vote.” He pulled his hand out of his pocket and showed me a small pinback button that read: “Are You Tired Of Voting For The Lesser Of Two Evils?” “Can you believe it? This was made by some anti-ass-hole group. Makes me want to vote for the asshole even more— not because I agree with everything he says. Sometimes I don’t know what he’s talking about. Nah, I’m gonna vote for him just because it would be pretty god damn fucked-up if he won. How about you? Who’re you voting for?”
“Heather and I aren’t very interested in politics,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“Hell, that’s all you used to talk about. Remember the ’96 campaign? That’s when you first started out. You were just some prepubescent kid. Remember? You said that Bob Dole and Jack Kemp should change their names to Bob Dope and Jack Hemp if they wanted to win votes in California.” Ivan chuckled. “That’s the first joke I ever heard you tell.”
“Then it must’ve been funny, I guess.”
“Is everything okay with you?”
“I don’t know. I feel as if I’m coming down with a cold. Have you ever had memories of the future?” “Uh … no, can’t say that I have. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 43
Vipers
(October 10, 2016)
Someone snuck into the Viper Room on Sunset Blvd. on a busy Saturday night and dumped vipers onto the dance floor.
Real ones.
Live ones.
CHAPTER 44
The Society of the Spectacle
(October 18, 2016)
One afternoon I looked up the name Guy Debord in the central library downtown. I found a book by him, or at least by someone with that same name. It was called The Society of the Spectacle. I opened the book randomly and found this passage staring up at me:
In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has built its world.
I felt another migraine coming on. I put the book back on the shelf and returned to the apartment to watch television with Heather.
The new Hoarders was on tonight.
CHAPTER 45
Xenu
(October 26, 2016)
Someone broke into the Scientology Celebrity Center in Los Feliz and spray painted the words XENU WAS A GAY PSYCHOLOGIST on the twenty-foot-high bronze bust of L. Ron Hubbard. The letters were so large they covered Hubbard’s entire forehead.
CHAPTER 46
Ghosting
(October 30, 2016)
On the way home from work, while waiting for the train, I heard two men talking to each other. One man was white and dressed in an expensive black business suit. The other man was Japanese and dressed in an equally respectable manner. Both had briefcases sitting by their polished leather shoes like motionless, trained pets.
“But you’re throwing your vote away,” the Japanese man said. “If you want to make a difference you’ve got to vote for someone who can win.”
“I’m tired of that excuse,” the white man said. “Is that the big difference between us and … and … and Stalinist Russia? In a dictatorship you get one choice. In a democracy you get two choices. C’mon, man. Wake up. Sometimes I think the terrorists are right. I mean, sometimes I feel like picking up a bomb and—”
The Japanese man sniffed the liquid inside his flask. I could hear it sloshing around inside. “Careful now. I’m just saying, voting for that nutcase—”
The white man cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I’ve made up my mind. I’d rather throw my vote away than give it to the lesser of two evils.”
“Whatever. People like you are going to push some right-wing crackpot into the White House.”
The white man shrugged. “Might be nice for a change. Been years since we had someone in The White House we could really hate.”
The Japanese man laughed. “I’ll drink to that,” he said.
And did.
I didn’t go straight home that night. I wandered around the neighborhood again until I found myself standing outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
Miss Malone’s Uncle Sam mural was now a massive block of anonymous white paint surrounded by gray ghosting around the edges—a fruitless effort to make the image blend in with its surroundings. Whoever they’d hired to eradicate the image had failed. Though you couldn’t see the cockroach anymore, you could see where it had once been pinned, its insect spore staining the otherwise perfect wall.
I glanced from left to right and behind me. I was alone.
I don’t know what made me do it.
I walked across the empty street and bought a can of spray paint from Rite Aid. It was on sale for $2.99. The generic Rite Aid brand was much cheaper than the name brand. I remember feeling proud that I had saved eighty-nine cents. My initial urge wa
s to tell Heather about it, but of course I could never do that.
I wasn’t sure I was going to do it, not even as I stood there staring at those vague, gray edges.
I lifted my arm and pressed my index finger on the button, sending the black paint shooting out onto the wall.
I didn’t even bother to glance from side to side anymore. I kept going, all my attention focused on trying to create the clearest image possible.
I wanted to make a man, a stick figure chopping off the top of his own one-dimensional skull with a pitifully crude representation of a pair of immense scissors.
It took all my strength to do what a five-year-old could accomplish in less than three minutes. Sweat poured down my forehead and pooled into the crook of my neck and shoulder.
I once saw an interview on TV with Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown, right before he died of a heart attack. A few years before the interview he had suffered a stroke that left his drawing hand a twitching, spastic mess of flesh that could barely pick up a pen much less draw. But Charlie didn’t retire. No … instead he would thrust a pen into his fist every morning and use his other hand to guide the fist as steadily as possible, resulting in a Charlie Brown with an imperfect circle for a head, wavy and out of focus … and yet still recognizably Charlie Brown. The amount of concentration it took to do this appeared to be enormous.
It took far more concentration for me to draw that one stick figure.
My fist shook, ached, as if it were clawing its way up a jagged, rocky slope instead of just defacing a stranger’s private property.
Once the stick figure was done I added six jittery words arcing above his head like a substandard proscenium arch.
YOU BROKE THE RULES AND DIED, read the message.
I wasn’t even sure why I wrote the words, or what they meant.
I was an amanuensis (a word I had learned from Ivan on the first night I met him). I was just taking dictation. From whom, I didn’t know.
Maybe a ghost.
Maybe my ghost.
CHAPTER 47
All Hallow’s Eve
(October 31, 2016)
Someone broke into a mosque and left behind a herd of cows wearing pink yarmulkes.
Someone broke into a Catholic church and replaced the bell in the generations-old tower with a giant squid. When the priests found it, the poor thing was gasping its last.
Someone broke into a Jewish temple and spray painted a crude, black and white drawing on the ceiling. According to all reports the drawing was composed of six square panels, almost like a comic book. In the first panel an angry group of cats were spray painting swastikas on the outside of little houses populated by frightened mice wearing yarmulkes; over the course of these six panels both the cats and mice morphed gradually until by the sixth panel an angry group of mice were spray painting Stars of David on the outside of little houses populated by frightened cats wearing turbans.
Someone replaced the fifteen-foot-high stone owl in Bohemian Grove, a private getaway for elite politicians located just outside San Francisco, with a 22-foot-high ceramic statue of a frog dressed in a skintight camouflage suit, like something a deep sea diver would wear.
Someone mailed the sixty-ninth page of several hundred different novels to Joshua Sutler at the Twonky Literary Agency in New York and asked him to rearrange the words into “a transcendent message of spiritual liberation.”
Someone mailed a book of dirty jokes to Elliot Greeley’s apartment on the 31st of October. Elliot Greeley threw it in the trash without reading it.
CHAPTER 48
Who Cares Who’s President?
(November 8, 2016)
By the time the night of Nov. 8th rolled around everyone knew who was going to win. Heather and I began watching the coverage at around six. I couldn’t concentrate on it, though. My savings had dwindled to a couple of dollars and I still hadn’t found a job. I hadn’t yet told Heather. Every morning I left the apartment for some imaginary purpose. I felt like a phantom as I wandered the streets looking for nothing. For memories of the future.
I knew I would have to tell Heather the truth the next morning, and I wasn’t looking forward to it at all.
At around 7:30, as we lay in bed staring at the TV, I grabbed the remote and said, “Who cares who’s President?” I pressed the OFF button. Heather and I buried ourselves beneath the covers, lost ourselves within each other’s bodies.
We didn’t hear the news until the next morning.
CHAPTER 49
Acceptance Speech
(November 8, 2016)
On the night of Nov. 8th, just before Miss Malone pushed her way through the cheering crowd during a crucial moment of the President-elect’s acceptance speech and ripped open her trench coat revealing a belt filled with six-inch-long gray metal canisters, at the exact second that the bullets from the standard military issue revolvers of the Secret Service shattered the girl’s skull into a thousand jagged bloody fragments, I ejaculated inside Heather. It wasn’t often that we came simultaneously, but this time we did. She idly slid her hands down my back, from my shoulder blades to my tailbone. Then her eyelids fluttered open. She looked up at me and grinned, that old puckish twinkle in her eyes.
Something I hadn’t seen in years.
CHAPTER 50
To Get to the Other Side
(November 9, 2016)
After examining Miss Malone’s corpse, the authorities discovered that the suspicious looking metal canisters strapped to her waist did not appear to be plastique or any other form of explosives. X-rays of the canisters revealed a dozen or more coiled plastic snakes, ready to strike. Talk was the Secret Service agents would receive a reward. Maybe several of them.
The next morning, after seeing the gory image played and replayed endlessly on the news, Heather sank into a depression over the girl’s needless murder. When I saw her tears—I hadn’t seen such a reaction from her in over two years, not even when Marsha called us with the bad news the day after Christmas—I made my decision.
I removed the scrapbook from its hiding place.
I told her everything I could remember about the girl. I told her, all over again, about how I met her, this time in exacting detail. And for the first time I told her about the conversation we had outside her mother’s home. Heather listened intently while studying each page of the book. After I was done she said, “It’s good you didn’t report her.”
“But … why?” I said. “I mean, if I’d turned her in that night she might still be alive. There’s so much more she could’ve accomplished. I mean, fuck, to end up like this? It’s just stupid. What a god damn waste.” Heather didn’t respond. She just kept flipping through the scrapbook and staring—particularly at the photographs I’d taken of all those murals.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t really know if she was responsible for every news story in there. I mean, how is that even possible?”
Heather nodded solemnly while pointing her index finger at me (a gesture she knew I hated): “How deep is Miss Malone’s Axis of Evil buried in the fragile loam of our Republic?”
I cocked my head to one side, confused. I had the faint notion that Heather didn’t mean exactly what she was saying. There was a word for that, but I couldn’t quite think of it, not right now. I chose to ignore her question and countered with one of my own: “Why the fuck did she do it?”
Heather eyes widened as she said softly, “To get to the other side?”
For a moment we just stared at each other.
Then we began to laugh.
After the sun had set, as the news broadcasts aired specials about the peculiar psychology of the deceased would-be-terrorist, Heather and I visited the Rite Aid across from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where I first saw Miss Malone.
We strolled through the antiseptic, brightly-lit aisles, hand-in-hand, and with great calmness approached the shelf where the spray paint cans were stacked in precise, grid-like fashion. We bought the generic kind. Nothing fancy.
We walked the night streets, which were oddly humid for November—it felt more like summer, or what summer used to be like before all that bovine methane started eating away at the ozone layer—and found a spot that we liked.
We worked all night, worked like we haven’t worked in years.
By the time the sun was rising over the city, a primitive new mural had arrived to beautify the front of Prospero’s. Those infamously gaudy, green velvet-lined double doors were now unrecognizable.
Ivan had asked us to go back to work for him, so we had … just not in the way he would’ve wanted.
Our new routine didn’t require a stage or a microphone. Comedy isn’t just words, syllables, phonemes. It’s not just parking meters and airplane food and bad weather and tired punchlines. It’s seeing what no one else sees and saying what no one else wants to say.
It’s the crude picture of a dozen or more plastic snakes erupting out of a dead girl’s chest.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the assistance of the following co-conspirators:
Andrew Long, for helping me give birth to a coke whore; Suzanne Greenberg, for her thorough critiques of the initial chapters; Ray Zepeda, for publishing Chapter One in The Chiron Review; Phillip Sipiora, for publishing Chapter Eight in The Mailer Review; Eric A. Johnson, for his invaluable critique of an early version of the manuscript; Chris Doyle, for his much needed legal advice and Prisoner-related percepts; Eric Blair, for last minute proofreading; Jeremy Lassen, for a fine editing job; Cory Allyn, for being a mensch; Catherine Bottolfson McCallum, for reading several different versions of the novel as it evolved sideways over time; the late Mike Webber, for “In This Room” and the strange, impromptu bedroom tour; Damien Watts, for the unforgettable, indispensable jabberwocky; Gary D. Rhodes, for being a constant source of inspiration; all my fellow inmates of CW96; Jack Womack, for going above and beyond the call of duty; Pat Cadigan, for being Pat Cadigan; everyone enrolled in the CSULB MFA Program (2001 to 2003); Steve Cooper, for general bouts of encouragement; Eileen Klink, for staving off Homeland Security agents when necessary; Melissa Guffey, for nearly everything; and Olivia Guffey, for everything else.
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 25