Last week I mentioned my secretary, Mariana. mh to her friends and employer. I was going to talk, this week, about how difficult it is to get through the day-by-day bullshit of nickel&dime-death that society lays on us, without being surrounded by competent, helpful associates. I was going to talk about my mailman, George O’Brien from the Sherman Oaks P.O. branch; about my dear friend and CPA, Eddie London; about my auto mechanic, John Wilkes; about my doctor, John Romm; my agents, Marty Shapiro and Mark Lichtman; my housekeeper, Eusona Parker; my attorney, Barry Bernstein; my travel agent, Linda Wolk; my bankers, Al Court and Syl Bunyevchev. That’s what I was going to talk about. Another of my “Ain’t life beautiful” columns, to try and cheer your asses up.
But today got a blight on it.
Today, the leaves withered and the bush turned black and fell to ashes.
So, instead, you get one of my “You stupid fucking bastard” columns. Maybe you’d be advised to pass me up this week, if you’re feeling good. Or come back to this column when they dump bat guano on your parade.
Last week, a guy came to interview me for his Doctoral Thesis, and he was sharper than hell. He asked me questions light-years beyond the usual “Where do you get your story ideas” questions. At one point he said I seemed to be dichotomous in my reactions to people: on the one hand my writing was clearly humanistic, and I cared about people…on the other I was always railing and cursing “the Common Man” and saying what swine and assholes they are. I couldn’t answer him. It’s true. I am very ambivalent about the human race. Sometimes I weep with joy at the nobility, grandeur and heroism of which individuals are capable…at other times, had I a gun in my hand, I would without compunction riddle the bodies of people who commit such awfulnesses against other humans that my mind and soul cannot contain the pain. So I asked Mariana if she would try and explain me to this guy. And when he re-ran the tape for me, Mariana said something (and I’m paraphrasing) about how I really, at core, was on the side of The People, as opposed to The Establishment, or Big Business, or The System. She didn’t actually say I was a good guy at heart, but she tried to explain to him that my thinking wasn’t entirely fucked. And finally, at the end of her discourse, she must have shrugged (it sounded like a shrug) and she said she didn’t really understand me, either.
Well, here’s another of those ambivalences, friends. Last week I did a number on how good life is, and this week I want to lay on you four things I heard about today that make me want to rush out into the street with bombs!
The CBS news gave me two of them. The first was a story out of South Africa, where they have apartheid…you know about apartheid, right? Blacks and whites are separated. Right?
Well, today there was an auto accident on a road near Johannesburg, and a white kid got all stove in, and the guy who ran to call the ambulance told the hospital, “Hurry up, a boy was seriously hurt, he may be dying.” Well, in South Africa, blacks are referred to as “boy” and what was sent was a black ambulance, and when it got to the scene of the crash, the dumb stupid eggsucking motherfucking asshole cop who was in charge refused to let them put the white kid in the black ambulance! And nobody did a goddam thing to stop the silly sonofabitchin’ pig! And he sent someone to call a white ambulance, and by the time it got there a half-hour later, and they loaded the kid into the meat wagon, he was DOA. That’s dead fucking on arrival, may that cop’s rotted stinking bigot soul fry in Hell forever!
The second, you’ve probably heard about. It’s down to modern mythology already in just the couple days since it happened: a little kid, a diabetic, name of Wesley something, had his life-saving insulin taken away from him, somewhere here in beautiful enlightened Twentieth Century California, by his murderously stupid Bible-thumping parents who believed so devoutly in that crock of shit called a “Good Book” that they had decided he would “get well with the help of the Lord.” So he died! Do any of you know how painful a death insulin shock and diabetic death can be? Think about it! Think about it the next time you run your beads, you blind ignorant moronic superstitious dark-ages bastards! And when he’d died, they still weren’t convinced. They swore he’d rise from the dead, because the father of the kid had read in the Bible that it would happen. They laid hands on him and…guess what…goshwow, folks…the kid was still dead! So the cocksucker told the newspapers he’d misread the Bible, had miscalculated how long it would take, and in four days the kid would rise up and walk and live again. And 200 similar schmucks went on down to the funeral today and they all wept and chanted and prayed and laid hands on the poor stiff in his coffin, and gee golly, nothing happened. But there’s still two days to go. By the time you read this, I’ll either be proved a doubting Antichrist fool without faith…or, more likely…that Mother and Father will be ripe for prison for having murdered an innocent child.
Item number three was one line from Mariana. “Don’t forget the thirty years’ illegal experimentation on blacks,” she said, “using them to find a cure for syphilis.”
Yeah. That’s number three.
And number four is Mariana’s own brother, who got the shit shot out of himself in ’Nam, so bad he’s paralyzed from the waist down…and an Army sergeant came to the house to make Mariana and her family feel better by telling them what terrific medical treatment he’d get in an Army hospital.
What kind of a week has it been? Well, I’ll tell you, gentle readers. It’s been the kind of week that starts out on a Monday with wanting to scream till you fall down and black out. That’s what kind of a week it’s been.
And you can all go fuck yourselves!