Part Two

From The Barricades To The Bar

in all the gin joints in all the world, the ones most amenable to bending oneself completely out of shape had to be in New York City. I’ve spent time in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo, and visited dozens of other towns and cities across the world, and I never found anywhere better suited to toxic self-destruction than the lower end of the island of Manhattan in the 1980s.

Of course, I had a lot of help. The Reagan era was in full swing, and a confederacy of fools and criminals had deemed that greed was (for want of a better word) good, and were willing to risk anything from global climate breakdown to World War III if it raised the Dow, and was good for the military industrial complex. They even re-classified ketchup as a vegetable in school meal nutrition guidelines. The ugliness that would grow into the political right of the twenty-first century was being nurtured and trained, while paper billions were being made down on freshly deregulated Wall Street by cocaine fueled young men who owned Ferraris, but had no furniture in their condos.

On the other side of the coin, the punk revolution was falling back in confusion, ducking the alpha-jerk, if not actually living on Chinese rocks. Patti Smith was still having her photo taken with Bob Dylan and William Burroughs, but Jim Carroll was making a name for himself by showing his track marks, and Johnny Thunders was fighting with Dee Dee Ramone over who ruled the Lost Highway, while Keith Richards drove past in his limo, and Lester Bangs grew more morose. Madonna had been loosed on the culture and it was hardly a happy environment for the artist.

My basic reaction was to retreat to my fortress of solitude and write, but that didn’t mean that I wholly shut myself way. The energy of New York was far too intense to be a complete recluse, plus I had tradition on my side. Ask Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, or Dr. Hunter Thompson. Literature has a long history of scribes who cannot help but head for the whiskey or worse when the pressure of the deadline bearing down on their imagination becomes intolerable, and, never one to argue with a sensible tradition of the trade, many a midnight, and even a necessarily idle afternoon, would find me in the Lion’s Head, Dan Lynch’s, the Bells of Hell, the Park Inn Tavern, Paul’s Lounge, the Grass Roots, or the St. Mark’s Bar & Grill. After the 4am last call, I might repair to an after-hours joint like Sophie’s or Save The Robots, or places with no name where one could drink until well into the morning.

My liver may not have been overjoyed but, in all other ways, this proved to be a very productive alternation between isolation and a barstool. I am in no position to judge if what I created was literature, but I produced a half dozen science fiction novels, a couple of non-fiction books, a slew of magazine stories for publications as diverse as Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Twilight Zone, SoHo Weekly News, Trouser Press, and the East Village Eye, and even a handful of episodes of a TV cartoon show called The Galaxy Rangers. Maybe vignettes from all the saloons and shebeens I treated as second homes spilled over into my prose and poetry, but how could it be otherwise if I was to be true to my craft.

AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN THE BOYS AND GIRLS TALK ABOUT DEATH

’ANYWAY, THERE’S THIS CRAZY GUY WHO JUMPED THE lights in a bright red Firebird. It’s somewhere around 19th Street and Park Avenue South, just a bit north of Max’s, and he just misses greasing this guy who’s crossing the street by the width of a whisper.”

Dolores was already drunk by the time the rest of us got there. She was relating the story to the bartender and two wandering bucket salesmen from the great American Heartland, but, then again, it was that time of night. Dolores’ only competition was a rummy at the other end of the bar who looked like Charlie Mingus in a pork pie hat; he was trying to tell nobody in particular about how he once impregnated a polar bear, but he was having trouble making the words form. When you got down to it, Dolores had the room.

“So anyway, needless to say, the guy who’s trying to cross the street starts yelling bloody Ratso Rizzo murder after the Firebird. I mean, who wouldn’t if you’ve just been almost run over. The crazy driver must have heard him because he stamps on his brakes and starts to back up. Now, if it had been me, I would have taken off running. In a situation like that you know that this guy isn’t backing up his car to hand you any prize for civic pride. The guy who was nearly run over, though, I got to tell you, he ain’t me. He thinks he’s got balls or something. He stands his ground, hollering and cursing. The Firebird gets right up by him, but he doesn’t quit. Then suddenly, BLAM! BLAM! The crazy in the Firebird has pulled out a gun and pumped two bullets into him. Just like that.”

Dolores silently shook her head as though astonished at the depravity of which mankind is capable. The rummy in the pork pie hat had one last shot at the polar bear fantasy and then he gave up. Dolores shook her head a second time. “I mean, can you believe it? There’s people who have sunk so low that they’ll actually kill someone just on account of they don’t like the way that they drive.”

“Some people are kind of touchy about their driving.”

“He was probably one of the Me Generation. They take themselves very seriously.”

“John Wesley Harding once shot a man dead because he didn’t like the way he snored.”

“They use that in some Time-Life book commercial. Great Psychos of The Old West. I guess they think it’s a major selling point.”

“It was different back then.”

“Men were men.”

“And women looked for solace.”

“Everyone was less sane and armed to the teeth.”

“So what changed?”

“Last week, over on the east side, some kid stabbed a guy to death because he didn’t like his face. He was mugging him at the time.”

“It’s like child abuse.”

“I abuse children every chance I get. Trouble is they abuse you back. Maybe shoot you too. Even the kids are packing pieces these days. The cops raided this high school in Staten Island and hauled away over 200 handguns.”

“Love is never having to use wire hangers.” ^:

“Why are you all talking this shit?”

Vinnie took out his gum and parked it on the underside of the bar, leaving it for someone else’s fingers to encounter. Vinnie had moved up close to Dolores and was trying to look down the front of her low-cut, ultra-tight, bright red, Whore-In-A-Babylon dress. Lately, Dolores had been affecting a somewhat overripe look that tended to attract single-minded individuals like Vinnie. The dress was set off by matching red, spike heel shoes and no stockings. She had exceedingly white legs. It was as though Dolores rarely saw the sun which, in fact, was the case. Like most of those present, Dolores pretty much kept vampire hours.

Something about the conversation seemed to have upset Vinnie. He was nervously fingering the gold religious medal that hung around his neck. “What you all want to keep on talking about death for?”

Vinnie looked nervous. Most of us tried to avoid getting Vinnie nervous. When Vinnie became nervous he also tended to become unpredictable. Nobody wanted to be in the same room as Vinnie when he got unpredictable. All except Lennie that is, who, after spending all day in the Baby Doll Lounge soaking up Miller Lite and straight tequila, was drunk and reckless. “Maybe death is all that we got in common—death and not being able to stay sober.”

Vinnie scowled at Lennie and stuck out his jaw. “You saying I’m drunk? I ain’t drunk, just drinking.”

“That’s your loss.”

Dolores—having enough on the ball to realize unless she did something to deflect Vinnie, he was going to start machoing it out with Lennie and anyone else who didn’t share his somewhat primitive world view—slid off her barstool and sashayed over to the jukebox. She fed money into the gaudy BAL-AMi, and, after a few seconds of electronic pause, it started in with ’I Know What Boys Like’ by the Waitresses. The record was about Vinnie’s measure. A small round guy in wire glasses and a duck billed baseball cap, who’d been sitting by himself reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, suddenly looked up.

“They were all on morphine.”

“Who was on morphine?”

Nobody was quite sure what the small round guy was talking about, but the mention of morphine attracted their attention.

“Those old gunfighters, the psychos of the old West.” Lennie sneered. “This sounds dangerously like the theory that everyone’s a junkie.”

“It’s a Burroughs theory, actually. William S. Burroughs, that is.”

“Nobody thought it was a theory of Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“Were they related?” “Who the fuck cares.” “As a matter of fact, no.”

“Burroughs figures that, what with gunshot wounds, syphilis and the general stress of life, most of the old time Western legends were doing morphine.”

“Morphine?”

“Laudanum, tincture of opium, opium. It all comes to the same thing in the end. It probably accounts for why someone like John Wesley Harding could get so bad tempered that he shot a guy for snoring. He was probably coming down.”

The jukebox was now playing ’Fascist Groove Thang.’

“So Doc Holiday wasn’t called Doc for nothing?”

“He had the works. He gave them sweet taste.”

“Burroughs has been threatening to write his magnum Western for ten years now, but he doesn’t seem to be able to get past this thing about the young boys being hung.”

Vinnie slammed his fist down on the bar. “Goddamn it! You’re all talking about death again. What’s the matter with you all? It’s Saturday night. I don’t want to hear about all this crap.”

Lennie was as unconcerned as ever. “To be precise, we were talking about William Burroughs, the writer.”

Vinnie grunted. “It’s all the same thing. It’s all the same stuff that I don’t like. It’s all the same stuff that makes me crazy.”

It looked as though, this time, not even Dolores could distract him. Not that she was trying too hard. She didn’t particularly like Vinnie and rather resented that, as a result of the one charitable gesture of deflecting Vinnie from fighting with Lennie, the whole bar had decided to appoint her as Vinnie’s keeper. Just to prove that he had no sense of tact, taste or timing, Vinnie chose that moment to make a lunge for her. Dolores quit as Vinnie’s keeper and slapped him away.

“Get the fuck off me, you oaf.”

Vinnie appealed to the rest of the bar. “She won’t kiss me.”

“What the hell do you expect?”

“What about Yoko Ono?”

“She wouldn’t kiss Vinnie either.” But the small round guy had found himself another topic. Everyone looked at him in surprise. It seemed that Soldier of Fortune magazine just couldn’t hold his attention any longer. “So what about Yoko Ono?”

“I don’t like the way she’s doing things.” Old Sam looked at him sideways. “So what’s it to you?”

The rest of the bar joined in. “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

“Yeah, she had her old man gunned down right in front of her, what’s she supposed to do?”

The bar, from being maudlin drunk was rapidly turning defensive and hostile. Most of the hostility was gathering around the small, round guy. About the only person who wasn’t staring distrustfully at him was Vinnie. All Vinnie’s meanness was taken up with Lennie who seemed to want to pick a fight and Dolores who had rejected him. The small round guy went on regardless. “I don’t like the way she seems to be promoting herself as Lennon’s widow. I mean, first of all, there was that album cover with the glass of water and the bloodstained eyeglasses, then there seems to be some kind of fuck-up with the Lennon memorial garden in Central Park and finally we get her film of Lennon on Saturday Night Live. It all seems too tacky.”

“You’ve got a hell of a nerve.” The whole bar, with the exception of Vinnie, was looking at him as though he’d just defiled the Virgin Mary. Only Lennie took a reasonable attitude. “You can’t blame her. She’s a natural promoter. What else can a conceptual artist be? She’s doing a lot less to Lennon than they did to Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison. What about that creep Danny Sugarman who seems to think he owns the rights on Morrison’s memory?”

Vinnie stabbed an accusing finger at Lennie. “You’re talking about death again.”

“It’s probably all we have in common.”

“I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

Like I think I said earlier, it was that time of the night.

East Village Eye, 1982

HALF PRICE DRINKS

Half price drinks and the early evening crowd comes walking through

Half price drinks and there’s always one that makes a grab for you

Half price drinks and the band ain’t drunk enough to sound like it was worth a damn

And me?

I just sit here in the corner wondering who I am

Half price drinks and some just use the place to come in out of the rain

Cheat on the wife and get back home on the midnight train

And the secretary trails back to flat and cat and midnight fear

And me?

I just sit here in the corner wondering why I’m here.

Did some fool call this the happy hour?

They never saw the drunks who couldn’t make the journey home

Did some fool call this the happy hour?

They never saw the working stiff, early shift and so alone.

Half price drinks and the jukebox does big business on suburban pain

Half price drinks and the sleazy fumblings that ain’t worth the strain

Half price drinks? Did anybody promise you it’d end up right?

And me?

I just sit here in the corner wondering how to make it through the night.

Written and recorded for the album
Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, 1977

And sometimes a simple song could say it all . . .

COCKTAILS FOR TWO

A DATE FOR COCKTAILS, AT LEAST IN THEORY, CONTAINS all the ingredients for romance. It’s right up there in the all-time big league, along with cigarettes bearing lipstick traces, brief encounters on night flights from the coast, and phone numbers hastily scrawled on napkins from nightclubs or matchbooks from five star hotels. The accoutrements are all in place, soft pink lights, deco decor, a discreetly attentive waitress, and a piano noodling in the manner of George Shearing—at a minimum, the jukebox turned down low and probably playing Bryan Ferry. Side by side on chrome and leather bar-stools or face to face across the table of a secluded booth, with blue drinks in chic little glasses, you let the seductive haze imperceptibly gather. The inhibitions start their slide and the wit begins to flow with a casual ease. You’re bright, you’re amusing, you’re relaxed, you’re even sophisticated. Getting to know you, getting to know all about you. The trouble is that you’re also on the way to being drunk as a skunk.

In other circumstances, after a bath and shave, and with the benefit of clean shirt, a drunk can easily pass as an urbane and authoritative connoisseur.

Like so much that seems to be the height of sophistication at the time, the cocktail tryst is largely a matter of illusion, an illusion that has been primarily fostered by bar owners, the advertising agencies of corporate distillers, and Noel Coward. The ugly truth is that the cocktail is simply a deceitful method of gift wrapping serious booze. At the cocktail tete-a-tete, it’s all too possible to pack it away with the determination of a would-be Jerry Lee Lewis on a shot an’ a beer bender. It’s only the veneer of civilization and the fact that your date is getting as brain-fried as you are that stops you looking equally loathsome. To the impartial, un-hazed observer you’re not that bright and not that amusing. The wit could stand a good deal of editing and the waitress is hoping you’re the kind of insecure lush who tries to impress by leaving a damn great tip. This is the real reason that men traditionally press drinks on women. They subconsciously realize what a ludicrous figure they must present, after a fistful of B&Bs, to one who only sips Perrier.

THE MARTINI

⅛ vermouth

⅞ (although there are those who believe that, actually, you need only show the vermouth to the gin)

When I was young and impressionable, I used to believe that the martini was the ultimately superior cocktail. Chill in its puritan beauty, the martini was the Grace Kelly of alcohol. The way it lay in its conical long-stemmed glass, clear and still with the faintest of opal blooms was close to Zen perfection. Then I started drinking them and discovered what a disaster they could be. Early in the movie The Thin Man, William Powell as Nick Charles announces that he already has five martinis under his belt. Myrna Loy as Nora, who is only on her first, smiles sweetly at the waiter.

“Alright, bring me five more martinis, Leo, and line them right up here.”

Nora, at least had the good grace to collapse while Nick carried on regardless.

Collapse would appear to follow martini abuse as surely as Letterman follows Carson. I once played host, bartender, and token male to a martini party for a group of tailored, cultured women, none of whom was the kind to swill straight gin in public. The idea was to bring a little old-fashioned grace to our otherwise drab lives. The actuality was that, after three each, in one case four, all slid elegantly to the floor. Far from being sophisticated, the martini is essentially lethal.

THE MARGARITA

⅗ tequila

⅕ fresh lime juice

⅕ triple sec

Through the months of high summer, it’s seemed impossible to walk more than three blocks in the city without passing a Mexican restaurant with sidewalk tables filled to capacity by bright young people facing mass quantities of franchised, frozen margaritas that have the consistency of a Slurpee and are consumed with much the same abandon. In the days when it was hip to drink tequila, biker-style, with a lick of salt and a suck on a lime, it was widely recognized that the stuff tended to turn life into a Sam Peck-inpah movie, with all the attendant, slow-motion violence. The bright young people, whether they know it or not, are doing the self-same thing except the liquor now comes in the guise of a supermarket soft drink. (Downtown at El Internacional they make them blue with Curacao, which lends a certain Star Trek ambience.)

THE STRAWBERRY DAIQUIRI

1 handful of fresh strawberries

2 oz. sour mix

2 oz. white or dark rum

When fruit comes into the picture, the retrogression to infantilism runs faster and faster. Now we are dressed in Hawaiian shirts and getting drunk on what amount to milkshakes. The distance from fractious children at a nightmare, now-we-are-six birthday party is hardly great, right down to the fact that one of us may actually throw up. Much the same principles apply to pina coladas, mai-tais, and practically anything that comes with a slice of pineapple, a banana, or a small paper umbrella rising from, or floating on its surface. It most particularly applies to the Brandy Alexander, the chocolate shake of the cocktail lounge. Let’s not forget that it was a nightlong diet of Brandy Alexanders that moved the late John Lennon to storm into the Troubador in Los Angeles with a Kotex tied to his head. That night, little was left to imagine.

LONG ISLAND ICED TEA

1 splash vodka

1 splash gin

1 splash white rum

1 splash tequila

1 splash triple sec

1 splash sour mix

1 splash cola

If any date orders one of these things, the best policy is to immediately get up and leave, unless you were told in front that he or she worked as a road manager for a heavy metal band. Don’t even make your excuses. All through history there have been variations on this kind of instrument of speedy destruction—the kamikaze, the menace, the jive bomber, all were the aesthetic equivalent of asking the bartender to give you a random mix of the first four bottles from the right on the middle shelf behind the bar—and they have no place in romance. In fact they are the stuff of conventions, suicide pacts, and waking in the morning with an extremely obscene tattoo on the inside of your left thigh and having no recollection of how it came to be there.

IN PARTING, I MUST MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THIS IS NO prohibitionist diatribe against the demon rum. Alcohol is, after all, heavily promoted as one of our few legal buffers against the swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune. To drink or not to drink has to be a matter of individual decision. What does worry me a little is that the current cocktail vogue, with the exception of the martini—and the martini is not particularly part of that vogue—contains a certain level of hypocrisy. Hey, look at us, we’re not really wrecking our livers, we’re just having fun. Me? I drink straight Irish whiskey, become drunk, and bore my friends with both the regularity and rapidity of the practice. My only consolation is a certain glum honesty, that you might call truth in alcoholism. When that truth can no longer be faced there’s little point in adding grenadine: AA is that-away.

Village Voice, September 1988

POOL TABLE VIGNETTE

SHE WAS A BRIGHT BLAZE OF IRRADIATED GOLD IN A Rembrandt whiskey haze of soft-focus amber, a fluid symmetry of impossible desire between the electric blue halo above the pool table and verdant green of its surface. The California blonde, practiced and willowy, leaned over the pool table to make her shot. The solid colors of the balls clicked at the command of her stick. She tossed her mane at each fresh position, short shorts, long legs, and when she turned to dust her hands with talc and then chalked her cue before dispatching the frame, the phallic implication was wholly overt. The bartender had either followed the direction of my gaze, or read whatever remained of my mind, because he winked as he poured me another shot of Jack Daniels and placed a bottle of Bud beside it, indicating that it was on the house.

“Catching the show?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ain’t she a promise on stiletto heels?” “A definite promise.”

“She’s a stripper from the Paradise. Calls herself Indira Candy. Does a whole mess of speed and then drinks to come down. She don’t exist for herself unless someone’s watching.”

As she watched her next opponent in line rack ’em, she made a slight disdainful acknowledgment of her audience, the silently staring reptilian drunks, then she pouted, leaned forward, broke with a crash, and straightened in coolly understated triumph. I could only shake my head in open admiration. “And the love child of Fast Eddie Felson.”

“Speed can give you a real focus behind a pool cue.”

“Tell me she isn’t as hot up close.”

The bartender refused with a bartender’s grin. “I ain’t going to spoil your illusion.”

A fragment from a never published novel

The value of intoxication for the writer is that what normally might be a momentary and hardly noticed tableau can expand into a faux significant vision that can be nursed and shakily preserved, and then lovingly recreated with any degree of embroidery when back at the keyboard.

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK’N’ROLL

IAN DURY’S INSTANT CLASSIC REALLY CAME AS SOMETHING of a surprise. The surprise wasn’t that he did it, but that nobody had thought of doing it before.

Since the beginning sex and drugs have been inextricably bound up with rock’n’roll music. In fact, those eminent psychiatrists, frenzied Bible Belters, and rabid conservative moralists who prophesied in print and pulpit that rock’n’roll was a “communicable disease,” that it led to drug addiction, promiscuity, juvenile delinquency and the probable downfall of Christian values and civilization as they knew it were absolutely right. They may have got the reasons pretty ass backwards, but in substance they were right. Wasn’t that, after all, why we liked the music?

Rock’n’roll—beyond any doubt—has always needed high octane fuel. Anybody who tells you different is a damn liar, and about as trustworthy as that godforsaken individual who passes up a joint or a mirror or whatever with a superior smile and the statement, “I don’t use the stuff, I’m naturally high.”

If you don’t believe that rock’n’roll ran, right from the start, on one kind of scheduled drug or another, go ask Screaming Jay Hawkins, or Little Richard, or Johnny Cash or even Elvis (although that would admittedly prove difficult without the services of a high priced medium). Best of all, ask Jerry Lee Lewis.

In the world at large, intoxication, taken to its most ultimate and exceptional levels, had, by the early 1970s at the very latest, become totally synonymous with rock’n’roll. Years later, in the TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous, the unreconstructed, alcoholic, chainsmoking, drug-abusing, fictional former party and Bond girl Patsy Stone would wax nostalgic about how “nobody drowns in their own vomit any more.”

Jerry Lee Lewis has to be the archetype and the ultimate survivor of that time when rock’n’roll was getting born in the back of a station wagon on some backroad of the South, en route to a one night stand in a high school gym or Legion hall. At the start of the sixties Lewis and his band, the Memphis Beats, were busted at a motel in Grand Prairie, Texas, and charged with possession of 700 amphetamine capsules. This was in the days when being busted for speed meant a traffic offence, not a narcotics beef.

Before it had even begun, rock’n’roll was in the grip of its very first amphetamine cycle. It never had a chance to do anything but run the distance. The pattern was, after all, set up in front. At the start of the fifties, Hank Williams had dropped dead in the back of his limousine from too much speed. It was the drug of Dixie, the trucker’s friend, the LA turnround in all shapes and colors. Too many good old boys had come back from World War II with a taste for the big bags of Benzedrine that the US Army and Air Force were prone to hand out to combat troops.

Alan Freed may have tried to shuck the world into believing that rock’n’roll was good, clean, youthful high spirits. The truth was Jerry Lee playing with a machine gun in his hotel, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps crazy and crawling in some redneck town they couldn’t even remember the name of, washing down pills with Wild Turkey or Rebel Yell Confederate bourbon and trying to persuade a waitress or high school cheerleader to come back to the motel and see if the South could rise again. Then having to split town early in the morning before daddy/husband/ brother/boyfriend came after them with a pump shotgun or length of primary chain off a Harley Davidson because Peggy Sue was back home sobbing she’d been raped, after she’d been caught dishevelled and sneaking in through her bedroom window.

Of course, that speed cycle, like all other speed cycles, had to end, if for no other reason than to let another one start up again after a few months of lying low.

In London art schools and the coffeehouses of New York and San Francisco something new was going on. Smoke from a hand-rolled kept under the hand, made from the contents of a foil package bought with the thrill of fear from a romantic street dealer, was filling the air. A new generation of white kids had discovered dope, and was working its way through passages of their minds that mom, dad and teacher hadn’t let on existed, if, in fact, they’d even known about them in the first place. Like all new generations of white kids who discover dope, they got to thinking. One of the first realizations was that Cliff and the Shadows or Bobby Vee were simply not easy on the ear. You just couldn’t loll back and listen to a Dansette portable scratching on about some damn rubber ball going bouncey-bouncey, bouncey-bouncey. It could rot your brain and make you physically ill. It’s easy enough to get sick and ill without having music that does it to you pouring out of the radio or the TV. You couldn’t find it in the High Street Record Rendezvous. It had to be sought after in back alley specialist shops and word of mouth contact. Finding Chess R&B, Prestige jazz, Jimmy Smith, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf or Charlie Mingus could be as much trouble and as much adventure as actually copping the reefer.

With a wind of change blowing through the Dansette’s seven-inch speaker, the decks were cleared for action. The new generation of white kids who’d discovered dope said to themselves, “Why can’t we play music like Jimmy Smith, Chuck Berry et al?” Of course they couldn’t, but they could play something. Change was in the air. It was a new frontier, the white heat of technology; the planet was attempting to drag itself kicking and screaming into the second half of the twentieth century and cheap, red, electric guitars were in the window of the local record store. It was time to move and get down with the change.

Then JFK was iced on Dealey Plaza, and, as the joint went round a lot of people in a lot of basements realized that the faceless men who really run things weren’t messing around. With an attitude of stoned, aggressive, paranoid optimism, a thousand Brian Joneses picked up their Futurama guitars and a thousand Johnnies started mixing up the medicine. Once again, rock’n’roll had to move back onto high octane fuel. Yes, you guessed it. A new speed cycle had started up.

Mod: a new five-ply mohair suit and purple hearts at a tanner, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and going to a go-go. You were part of the now. Know what I mean, John? How many rock’n’roll empires were founded on flogging pills to the kids queuing up outside the Marquee to see the Who on a Tuesday night (maximum R&B)? Blocked was the expression of the time. Stumbling, glazed, stammering, incoherent and young, all style and aggression, but no brains. Go straight for it. The freak shall inherit the earth. Mods and rockers made the headlines in their actions of evolution, Cro-Magnon v. Neanderthal. Blue nylon against black leather. That was something that the tabloids could quite easily grasp. What the media missed was the movement that was formlessly growing in basements and attics all over the Western world.

Even before the hippies hit the streets, rock’n’roll was pushing at its outer limits, both in terms of lyric and musical structure. It wouldn’t be any exaggeration to say that psychotropics had a major hand in the perception that brought about all this new ground breaking. Speed may have been the fuel for the live show, but marijuana was the great aid to the recording studio. A heightened perception coupled with a rapidly expanding technology and increasingly sophisticated recording techniques enabled rock’n’roll to go in every direction but down. The Beatles and Rolling Stones took the simple R&B structures that were the foundation of rock’n’roll and moulded them in elaborate and increasingly baroque directions. Dylan was writing lyrics that would have been scarcely believable to anyone in the fifties. Brian Wilson layered harmony upon harmony, bringing an unprecedented lushness to a simple vocal workout, while Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and, a little later, Jimi Hendrix produced sounds from the electric guitar that were undreamed of by Duane Eddy or Hank B. Marvin.

All this experimentation alone would have constituted both a major achievement and a giant stride in the development of rock’n’roll. There was something about the sixties, however, that just wouldn’t allow things to stand still. Only a couple of short years after the rock generation had first grappled with the new visions and perspectives revealed by marijuana, LSD-25 hit the street market and quickly grabbed half the youth of the West by the synapses. The effect of acid on rock’n’roll was immeasurable. The idea of actually translating the mind wrenching revelations of the new wonder drugs was an elusive prize. Numerous rock’n’roll bands grasped out but only a very few managed to come close to reproducing even a single facet of the psychedelic experience.

Jim Morrison of the Doors freely admitted that he “gobbled down acid like candy” during his days as a Venice, California, beach bum, when he conceived and wrote the major percentage of his songs. Morrison delved deep into the subconscious and used the images and fears that he found there to create a nightmarish, sinisterly erotic fantasy world where mystic killers roamed dreamlike highways, virginal princesses sacrificed themselves to black leather monsters, cities burned, violence was always lurking just below the surface and reptiles abounded. Morrison presided over his strange creation in the role of his lizard king character.

Pink Floyd took an almost diametrically opposed position. Half hidden by the first lightshows, and motivated by the brilliant but far-from-stable Syd Barrett, they produced a cold, aloof music that evoked images of both the glittering icy void of deep space and the chill isolated corners of the paranoid mind.

On a gut level, Jimi Hendrix, another self avowed psychedelic stunt pilot, came close to the jangle, the loop and the curve experienced by the acid saturated brain. Hendrix, more than all the other guitar gods of the late sixties, had such a physical rapport with his instrument and equipment that he seemed almost capable of weaving dreams out of the magnetic fields of his banks of Marshall amps and communicating them directly to the audience. This, coupled with Hendrix’s overt sexuality, made him able to strike all manner of responses from his listeners.

Acid, however, like marijuana, wasn’t the ideal drug for a coherent live show. Maybe the Grateful Dead could tank up on psychedelics and play a five or six hour show of erratic brilliance, but they were definitely the exception. More often than not, a bunch of acid before a show could lead to scattered impromptu outbursts of the kind that Jim Morrison was famous for, or else total confusion and breakdown of even the slimmest musical continuity. A typical case was Eric Burdon who, at a legendary San Francisco concert, spent more than an hour on stage, unable to do anything but wander, awestruck, around the stage gazing at the lightshow and murmuring “Gosh, wow” periodically into the microphone.

Again, amphetamines became the favored fuel for the live show. The useful familiar pills did their rounds, but in addition to the well known Dexedrine, spansules, Dri-namyl and the rest, a new super-upper appeared on the streets. Methedrine quickly proved to be the big brother of all the other forms of speed. Either in clinical ampoules, bootleg pills, capsules or powder, it was more powerful than anything that had previously gone the illicit distribution route.

The major medical use for Methedrine was only emergency injection to revive victims from a state of technical death due to heart stoppage. In other words, it was for waking up corpses. The speedfreaks didn’t see it that way. If taken in sufficient quantity, methedrine could produce a manic, hallucinatory state that might be a whole lot of fun at the time, but could be so physically and mentally depleting that the various hippie ghettos of the Western world suddenly needed to get used to an entirely new breed of damage cases.

At its most terminal, Methedrine could produce extreme and often violent paranoia and hallucinations as scary as alcoholic DTs. From a juddering, stammering mess the wacko speedfreak now had the potential to turn himself into a full blown, wild eyed psychotic. Surprisingly, Meth-edrine claimed only a limited number of rock’n’roll victims. Most of them came from the lower echelons of touring bands. Even before meth mania had reached its peak, the big stars had moved on to the smoother, less instantly damaging and infinitely more expensive joys of cocaine.

The meth ethos did however, produce a wave of suitably demented music. Favorites among the San Francisco speedfreaks were an outfit called the Blue Cheer. A prototype of today’s heavy metal bands, the Blue Cheer relied on sheer volume to punch across their point, boasting anything up to 2,000 watts of guitar amplification. Legend has it that at one concert a dog who happened to walk on the stage dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage. Their music scarcely translated onto record, and even the semi-hit ’Summertime Blues’ lacked the awesome weight of Blue Cheer’s live sound.

Worldwide, the speedfreaks’ favorite recording had to be the Velvet Underground’s notorious cut ’Sister Ray.’ Nobody could deny that it fitted the mood exactly. In its twenty-minute duration the song screeched its way through a high velocity ribbon of the most disquieting jangle the world had ever heard. All across the planet, in grungy basements, with four amps of meth, and an auto-changer set to repeat, ’Sister Ray’ played over and over again. Of course, nobody listened to the music too much, not even the almost inaudible, but oft repeated, lyric line “I’m searching for my mainline.” The freaks were too busy babbling into space. The record wasn’t there for aural gratification, more to heighten the illusion of jagged, high-power madness.

By very definition, the meth craze had to wear itself out in short order. The rock’n’roll narcotic top ten ground round until it was pointing in the diametrically opposite direction. Heroin became the number one fashion turn on.

The downer temptation has always been strong in rock’n’roll. In a world that is always overcrowded with people jostling in search of the magic point that is exactly where it’s at, liable to go crazy without warning and attempting to run twenty-four hours a day, sleep, and a certain measure of psychological space, become premium needs. In the days of Marilyn Monroe, Seconal provided the answer to those needs, but, in the late sixties, the more sensual down of Mandrax or Quaaludes replaced the cruder barbiturates. A handful of downers after the show made the hotel room party easier to handle and the few hours sleep before the car, truck or plane a lot less elusive.

Unfortunately, downers have two major drawbacks. The first is that they just won’t allow themselves to be confined to one portion of the user’s life. They have this tendency to spread out and take over. The second is that downers come closely followed by tolerance. The combination of the two cause too many fine musicians to turn themselves into stumbling, vomiting avocados. Some managed to ease themselves out of this less than attractive mess. Others, like Paul Kossoff, didn’t.

There was another alternative when the daily pill intake got too intense. Heroin was simpler, easier, more to the point and, in the long run, much more deadly. Certainly smack does hold the pressures at bay and gives the user not only mental space but cocoons him in a psychological capsule that pain is unable to enter as long as he keeps taking the medicine.

The one thing that heroin doesn’t protect against is death. The long roll call of dead rock stars can only attest to the vulnerability of the junkie, whatever his or her income or status.

Possibly one of the main problems of the seventies was that no new drug appeared on the streets to jerk the consciousness of rock. For over half the decade, both music and drug consumption seemed to stabilize and turn in on itself.

Experimentation was constricted to flirtations with glittering homosexuality, right-wing politics, and other drugs like animal tranquillizer or angel dust. For the most part the successful consumed cocaine, the unhappy used heroin, the struggling took speed and downers and just about everyone used as much booze and marijuana as they could lay their hands on.

Just as it began to look as if the seventies weren’t going to produce anything of value, the new wave broke. A new generation of feisty young kids marched into the picture with new ideas, new fashions and more raw energy than had been seen since the mid sixties. The music, which had previously been moving through an unadventurous and inward looking phase, became stripped down, energetic and quite prepared to kick out at old or redundant ideas. Once again rock’n’roll seemed ready to face the strain.

The new wave also brought back the need for fuel. Failing to find any exciting chemical innovations, the punks, just like their spiritual fathers before them, turned back to the tried and trusted standby. A new amphetamine cycle started, proving that the direction of rock’n’roll is probably more circular than linear.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “didn’t the title of this piece say something about sex?” True, it did, but this is, after all, a family magazine.

Home Grown, 1979

LOST JOHNNY

You only get a single chance

The rules are very plain,

The truth is well concealed inside

The details of the game,

You can hear it coming,

You can see it from afar,

It’s pale and it glimmers

Like a faded movie star

And up there in the castle,

They’re trying to make her scream,

By sticking thumb tacks in her flesh

And cancelling the dream,

Can you find the Valium?

For chrissakes bring ’em soon,

Lost Johnny’s out there,

Baying at the moon

The time has come for you to choose,

You’d better get it right,

Berlin girls with sharp white teeth

Are waiting in the night,

But keep your weapons handy

It surely can’t be hard,

There’s always trouble lurking

When you leave your own backyard

Underneath the city,

The theme of wretched excess was also the order of the day when Lemmy and I sat down to write this song—me the words, he the music—because he was short of an original track for what would be his last album with Hawkwind.

The alligators sing,

Of how the tarnished crowns remain,
On skulls of ancient kings
Can you find the morphine,
And make it goddamned brief,
Lost Johnny’s out there,
Looking for relief

That Larry looks so evil,
And you know he really tries,
But every time he makes a play,
That vital number compromise,
And Lucretia buys her underwear,
From a store where no-one goes,
She makes it big in photographs,
On the strength of what she shows,
And here inside the waiting room,
The radio still screams,
And we’re all gobbling Nembutal,
To modify our dreams
Can you find your credit card,
For god’s sake make it quick,
Lost Johnny’s out there,
Trying to turn a trick

Recorded by Hawkwind, 1974, and later
by Motorhead, myself and others

THE CONTENTS OF ELVIS’ STOMACH

Codeine—at a concentration ten times higher than the toxic level

Morphine—possible metabolite of codeine

Methaqualone—Quaalude, above toxic level

Diazepam—Valium

Diazepam metabolite

Ethinamate—Valmid

Ethchlorvynol—Placidyl

Much of the romance goes out of the extreme when the extreme becomes part of an autopsy. Elvis Presley is the subject of much more detailed examination in other parts of this book. In this short inclusion the contents of his stomach after his death are treated as a piece of found poetry

Amobarbital—Amytal

Pentobarbital—Nembutal

Pentobarbital—Carbrital

Meperidine—Demerol

Phenyltoloxamine—Sinutab (a decongestant)

Published 1990 as a guerrilla flyer in New York

LENNIE AT THE TOPLESS BAR

LENNIE IS ONE OF THOSE HALF EATEN, DISCARDED CIGARETTE pack kind of people who you figure probably ran out of ambition round about the age of nine. I heard that he had a wife once, but that she gave up on him within weeks of the wedding. Most days, of late, you can find him, afternoons, drinking in a dump of a topless joint called the Baby Doll Lounge (not the Baby Doll Lounge on West Broadway, the other one). He’ll sit in that place half the day, paying double price for his booze just because he’d rather look at the waitresses’ sagging titties than go to a regular joint and listen to the bartender talking about how the world has got itself screwed. Over the years, Lennie must have pissed away a small fortune on sweaty and less than perfect mammaries, which is kind of surprising since Lennie knows an incredible amount about how the world has got itself screwed and could talk to even the most terminally opinionated bartender for hours if he so chose.

Meanwhile, back in New York in the 1980s, and this time at a topless joint . . .

As you can probably imagine, Lennie doesn’t look like much. For as long as I can remember, he’s worn this black, two-piece, thrift shop suit that not even Elvis Costello would want to get into. I suppose Lennie couldn’t really afford to be a dandy if he drops all his money sitting round in topless bars. The pants on the suit are a lot too short. In the summer he exposes an expanse of not-too-clean dayglo sock. In the winter he stuffs the pants into a pair of heavy duty engineer boots. It’s not only Lennie’s clothes that mark him as some kind of jumped-the-rails lowlife, he also has the exceptional repellant expression into which his face tends to fold. There’s a nasty vacancy about it that gives anyone sitting opposite him the impression that he’s about to drool out of the corner of his mouth. I could never quite figure out how the topless waitresses tolerated him.

Both Lennie’s clothes and his vacant expression are, in truth, something of a bluff. Although he prefers everyone to think so, there’s nothing vacant about Lennie. Quite the reverse, he has this straight-edge, razor-sharp, rat-trap mind, and alarmingly accurate sources of information that he steadfastly refuses to reveal. Witness about six days ago, Lennie drags his attention away from Lash Magazine through which he’d been thumbing for a good half hour and blinks pale, watery, Gollum eyes. “You all realize that the suckhead Christians are turning into a full-scale fucking plague. They aren’t fucking around, Jack. They’re out to fuck us, make no mistake about that.”

With that he lapses into a temporary silence. This is one of Lennie’s ploys for attention. Everyone around the table nods with drunken encouragement. It’s not often the Lennie launches into a tirade, but, when he does, it’s usually worth keeping your mouth shut for the duration.

“You hear about Bob Dylan, huh? I mean, Bob Dylan, think about it. He’s forty this year and he’s so fucking hal-lelujahed-out it passeth all understanding. I heard it from this engineer who worked with Dylan in LA.”

This in itself is something of a mystery. Lennie hasn’t been near LA in living memory. “If the engineer wanted to bring beer into the studio he had to keep it in a different refrigerator to old Bob’s Perrier, and if he wanted to actually drink the stuff then he had to do it when Bobby wasn’t around because it seems like the middle-aged born again can’t take even the chance of getting alcohol contamination even by remote. You gotta serve somebody? Shit! And, while we’re on the subject of Christian suckheads, how many of you have caught the act of James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, he’s going to let strip mining rip along with wilderness raping, and all manner of wild environmental unpleasantness because he’s so far gone in Jesus’ Sunbeams that he don’t believe the planet’s worth bothering about. We don’t have to worry about future generations because the Second Coming, Armageddon, Night of the Living Dead, the Day of Judgment, all that Rapture and Book of Revelations shit is only a matter of years away. Check Jerry Falwell and the rest. They’ve got the End of the World down on a timetable. Nuclear war, the whole bit. And then there’s another of Reagan’s boys called Jeremiah Denton who wants to turn family planning clinics into chastity centers where kids get help to keep their virginity.”

Lennie pauses for breath and to flag down a passing beer. “Of course, that says it all. Sex has always been a problem with Christians. Ever since they massacred the agnostics. They’ve always tried to prohibit fucking and drive everyone crazy. They’re suckheads and today the suckheads are back with a vengeance. Trouble is, everyone else has got their head so far up their ass that they should worry about the ring around the collar. Sex is the crux of what the Christians are at . . .”

“We thought you didn’t have anything to do with sex, Lennie.”

Lennie scowled. “I don’t, but that might just be because I ain’t run into Brooke Shields in a garter belt and high heels.” It wasn’t a pleasant picture.

“Goddamn Christians even got the TV networks on the run. They said the word boycott and the networks are running like sheep. They can pull stuff like boycotts, too. They’re the first of their kind getting it down on computer. Bigotry goes cybernetic.”

Did I remember to tell you that when Lennie ain’t sitting around in the Baby Doll Lounge paying double price for his beer, he’s lying in bed watching TV?

“ABC has already announced that they’ve canned all the jiggle shows for the next season. Do you realize what this means? There’ll be nothing on TV next season that can’t get past the Christians, nothing but wholesome, family entertainment.”

Lennie’s face is a combination of horror and disgust. His voice is starting to rise in both pitch and volume. “You know what that means? No tits on TV! That’s what it means, and I’m telling you right now, I’m mad as hell and I ain’t gonna take it.”

He waves his fist at the suckhead Christian wolf packs. “On titties I take my stand.”

East Village Eye, 1981

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND MARIJUANA

SINCE MARCH OF 2003 WE HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO George W. Bush and his surrogates offer the American People a progression of reasons for invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, and the resulting bloody mayhem. The rationales, the excuses, and the all too obvious lies have progressively eroded support for the war, until, as we move into the fifth year of the conflict, considerably less than a third of the country believes what comes out of the White House. As wretchedly disastrous as the falsehoods about Iraq have proved to be—from WMD to spreading the gospel of democracy—they can only pale in comparison to the lies that have been told about marijuana, if only by the duration of the deceit.

Pity the generations of potheads, who—for a full three quarters of a century—have been derided, damned, de-monised, incarcerated, and even killed over a harmless herb, for a sequence of changing reasons, many of which are even less plausible than the ones our current president uses to justify having combat troops in Iraq.

All this concentration on New York City and its 4am closing time should not be allowed to obscure the fact that recreational intoxication has a history that goes back to prehistory and beyond, and—accord-ing to Dr. Ronald Siegal of UCLA—even extends into the animal kingdom. (How else did my cat Finn discover that Japanese catnip is highly superior to American catnip?) I figure just about every possible word has been said about marijuana, and what follows is, I guess, about the shortest herb summation I ever consigned to a keyboard. The tide of possible legalization ebbs and flows. In the UK, dope is reclassified as a dangerous drug. Los Angeles on the other hand has 187 pot shops dispensing “medicinal marijuana,” but also a coterie on the City Council militating to shut them down. But I guess when the stoned are involved nothing is ever easy.

And while Bush had his entire crew, plus the whole PNAC neocon manifesto, to create his lies about Iraq, the decades of disinformation about pot can be traced back to a single individual. When, in 1930, a former railroad investigator, Harry J. Anslinger, was—via family connections—named director of a new division in the Treasury Department, known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, its function supposedly to regulate the supply and taxation of cocaine and opiates. Anslinger, however, seemingly a full blown megalomaniac, dreamed of a vast and all-powerful agency with police powers to rival J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and set about to creating exactly that.

His strategy was simple but effective. He would instigate a public panic in which the innocuous drug marijuana would be mythologized as the root of all evil, and its eradication would become a matter of national security. Thus began one of the longest running exercises in state-sponsored mendacity in US history. The demonizing of marijuana even had a practical side. Prior to heading the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger had been a prohibition agent. Alcohol prohibition was clearly going to be repealed in the next three years, and many of his former colleagues would need jobs.

Anslinger’s propaganda campaign was not subtle, but he had enlisted the sensationalist aid of the Hearst newspaper chain, and was also firmly backed by the pharmaceutical corporations. One of his more lurid harangues told how “a gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and rape the screaming girls. A sixteen-year-old kills his entire family of five in Florida. In Colorado a husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead, and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been proceeded [sic] by the smoking of one or more marijuana ’reefers.’ Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.” His mythic doctrine was encapsulated in the 1936 kitsch movie classic Tell Your Children—later renamed Reefer Madness—in which dope leads to sexual frenzy, dementia, and finally homicide. Today we laugh, and turn it into a musical. Under Anslinger it was a tool in the establishment of the intoxicant police state that still flourishes.

Anslinger was also extremely happy to play the most evil of race cards. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” He even emphasized political horrors as “marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.”

Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962—“drug czar” in everything but name for an unprecedented thirty-two years, during which his almost theological doctrine of marijuana being “evil” shaped all official attitudes. It was only after his retirement, and the massive embrace of pot by the young of the 1960s—both as a recreational high and an anti-authoritarian symbol—that it became obvious Anslinger’s crudity needed modification.

Hundreds of thousands of kids were smoking dope, and the country had not been plunged into an orgy of rape and slaughter, but now demands that pot should be legalized were met with the new argument that this was impossible because it was a “gateway drug.” Dubious government sponsored studies had observed a majority of sampled junkies smoked dope before becoming addicted to heroin, and thus concluded that, while marijuana might cause minimal harm, it was dangerous because it led to the use of harder drugs. What these studies ignored was that most marijuana smokers never used another illegal drug, and also, applying the government’s own methodology to a wider range of intoxicants, the real gateway drugs used by most junkies prior to their addiction were beer and cigarettes.

For a couple of minutes during the Carter administration, the chance of some nationwide decriminalization appeared distantly possible, but then the Iran hostage crisis ushered in the Reagan era with Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign, and a total return to the Anslinger doctrine of the “evil weed.” The Federal Drug Administration issued a flat edict that “marijuana was of no medical benefit,” and maintained that position despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Bush the Elder did everything he could to prove himself the valiant drug warrior, including invading Panama in what became known as the “biggest drug bust in history.”

Even Bill (I didn’t inhale) Clinton did nothing to stop the Drug Enforcement Agency making bizarre claims that marijuana potency had increased ten-, twenty- or thirty-fold since the 1970s and was therefore a much more dangerous drug that must remain illegal. He also did nothing when, as individual states declared medical marijuana legal, the DEA stormed in, arresting cancer patients, growers, distributors, and closing legal cannabis clubs.

Any mention of the Netherlands as a model for an alternative pot policy elicited knee-jerk fury from both Republicans and Democrats, who would bluster that the Dutch experience had been a complete disaster and Amsterdam was a hell of an addiction. They seemed blind to the reality that the Dutch had achieved a healthy tolerance toward alternative lifestyles, were able to protect marijuana users from the marginalization that accompanies arrest and prosecution, and had created a separation between the retail markets for “soft” and “hard” drugs.

Even when UCLA pulmonologist and marijuana expert Donald Tashkin, after conducting the largest study of its kind, unexpectedly concluded in 2006 that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, did not lead to lung cancer, and that the chemical THC might kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous, Federal health and drug enforcement officials still used Tashkin’s earlier work on marijuana—that he had now refuted—to make the case that the drug is dangerously carcinogenic and should remain illegal.

After a lifetime spent with the illegal weed and the lies and deceptions keeping it so, little hope can be extended for any sudden about-turn to sanity. Which is a pity, because the government’s lying stupidity over marijuana has alienated a whole stratum of citizens. And that’s the truth.

LA CityBeat, 2007

LES FLEURS DE MAL

IT’S BEEN MY FAIRLY WELL INFORMED OBSERVATION that opium—for all practical consumer purposes—is almost unknown in the USA, except for a few unconventional and very relaxed botanists who grow dark eyed poppies, and lacerate and milk the fleur de mal for their own consumption. In the haste and disorder of the New World, those with a taste for opiates opted for the hunched, criminal, and always messy life of the needle and the spoon. They cooked their dope and shot, sending the rush from vein to heart, and thence to the receptors in the head. In Europe, on the other hand, opium is a gourmet rarity that showed up every now and again, usually as an unexpected bonus with the hashish supply. Paris seemed fairly well assured of its quota. The city of Communards, Jacobins, the Belle Epoch, Hunchbacks of Notre Dame, and Jean Genet had its special subterranean places.

The following piece was an early note for an erudite essay on historical drug use that was never written because the magazine for which it was destined went out of business.

And opium, unlike all of its trashy, rock-and-powder chemical cousins, whose cheap habits spread from tenements and trailer parks to the palatial homes of rock stars, was too scarce and exceptional to present the problem of a jones. You had it and then it was gone, and there wouldn’t be any more for months, if not years, so get over it. Goodbye Ruby Tuesday and the Lord Buddha bless you. I have always envied those habitues of yore; Coleridge and De Quincey, Doc Holliday playing Fan Tan, and Lord Alfred Douglas chasing the dragon in the dens of Lime-house. A twentieth century boy could grow imaginatively wistful for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a poet could walk the earth with a flask of laudanum in the pocket of his frock coat and a twelve-inch pipe in his knapsack, and it was nobody’s business but his own.

Not previously published

CARVED GODS AND DRAGONS

“I’VE TRIED TO ESCAPE FROM THIS PLANET ON A NUMBER of occasions.”

“No shit.”

“Each time the aliens caught me and brought me back.”

And opium, of course, can be the stuff of highly deviant dreams.

As the woman talked, apparently without end or continuity, Max drew dreamily on the long ornate ivory and hardwood opium pipe, with its carved gods and dragons, and brass mouthpiece. “Motherfuckers those aliens. I hope you avoided the anal probe.”

She didn’t appear to hear him. On the other hand, Max may not have actually spoken, only fantasized that he did. She frowned. “I also escaped from the nuns. A number of times. But they always caught me too.”

Max shook his head as if to clear it. He had totally lost the thread. “Nuns?”

“I was raised by nuns in a Catholic orphanage of great barbarism. The benefits were few and the penalties severe. They administered enemas for our health and cruelly whipped us for the most minor infraction. I’m not sure which was worse, the nozzle or the cane.”

Max didn’t feel he was obliged to say anything. He merely contemplated the images the woman was creating, and

“Those nuns . . .” She shook her head in search of a word strong enough to express her contempt. Her English was poor and her vocabulary small. “. . . those bitches in black and white were enjoying themselves. I used to wonder what they did when we couldn’t see them.”

“Something to wonder about.”

“They had this trick . . .”

“Trick?”

“If two girls were caught doing . . . well, you know . . . what young girls do in a gender segregated school.”

“I can hazard a guess.”

“The unhappy pair would be bent over opposite ends of a table to receive their punishment, arms outstretched, and gripping each other’s wrists. Can you imagine that?”

Max nodded simultaneously drawing on the pipe. Stoned as he was, he could easily and vividly imagine it.

“They would thrash one while the other watched, while the other one could actually feel her reaction, and then. . .”

“The positions would be reversed?”

“Exactly.”

“Perverse.”

Fragment of an unpublished novel

THE PICTURE ON THE MOTEL WALL

JOE GIBSON CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND HIM, AND SAGGED back against it with a sigh. At least he was in out of the night. The room he had rented was in the back of the highway motel, and that gave him a small measure of temporary concealment, although, since he’d discovered that his name and description had been given to Donnie and the Wipeout Gang, no hidden place any longer existed in all of the real world—or even those that were less real—where he could truly feel secure. Apparently the Skull & Bones wanted him so badly that they’d hired the ultimate best to get him. In the long run, no one had ever eluded Donnie and the Wipeout Gang. Joe Gibson didn’t believe that he was going to be the first to beat them, but he could try. He really had no other option. His only consolation was that he was finally out of the state-run mental facility. He had been nothing more than a sitting duck in those neon-bright, rat-maze, disinfectant corridors, where, if he had attempted to explain about the danger that was undoubtedly coming at him, the staff would have instantly had him gurney-strapped, restrained, and under full lockdown.

If he had told any of the thug orderlies or unblinking psychiatrists about the Wipeouts they would have immediately red-flagged him as having succumbed to a bad case of dementia in addition to all the other psychoses for which they already had him diagnosed. The great irony was that dementia was actually one of the Wipeouts’ favorite weapons for softening-up and disorientating the target. They would talk to you from your TV or appear in surreal shimmering color on your own computer screen, or, infinitely worse, make sinister alterations to small and mundane, randomly selected, physical objects, just to let the victim know that they had him or her down-cold and defenseless.

I have never found it that hard to craft fiction from scenes in a contemporary bar or pub. All you need is a half decent recall and a talent for embroidery of dialogue. To enter the mind of the chemically deranged is a much more interesting challenge. Joe Gibson was the hero of my 1999 novel Necrom, in which he was buffeted through the branes of alternate dimensions by all manner of hallucinatory and paranormal entities. In Necrom, the reader was free to decide whether Joe’s adventures were a narrative of the fantastic or just the delusions of advanced psychosis. Revisiting him in this short story, the same decisions have to be made. Is the story really happening, with Joe inhabiting a functioning science fiction world, but seeing it through the eyes of someone who has spent “three days on a strict regimen of trailer-park amphetamine and Wild Turkey”? Or is he imaging what’s happening to him as a side-effect of amphetamine and Wild Turkey. Then there’s the third alternative that he is just plain psychotic in a nightmare of his own devising.

After maybe a minute, Joe straightened up and stepped away from the door and into the room. Joe’s jaw moved as though on nervous automatic, chewing on his most recent stick of gum as though his life depended on the motion, and, in some respects, it did. After three days on a strict regimen of trailer-park amphetamine and Wild Turkey, he had a choice of either chewing gum or talking to himself, and if he talked to himself, the conversation would probably be more than he could handle. He didn’t bother to slip on the chain lock. The thing was so flimsy that it would not hold back any determined assault by a brawny shoulder or determined boot for more than three and a half seconds at best.

Joe dropped the flight bag on the bed. It contained the few essentials he had purchased back along his route of flight, plus the notes, and computer disks he had on the Skull & Bones, all the documentation that had been stashed for so long in the left luggage locker. When he had made good his escape from the state facility, he had not been exactly able to bring much out with him, and if he had not managed to hold on to the late Moriarty’s Visa card, either the Wipeouts or the regular cops would have had him days ago. In addition to being on the lam from the Wipeout Gang, Joe Gibson was also listed as a fugitive mental patient.

Concealing the card through his incarceration had not been easy, and he could never have pulled it off had he not been as wise as he was in the ways of institutions and asylums. It was a mercy in that it meant he had a limited sum of running money, and that the purchases and ATM withdrawals he made along the way were only creating the transaction trail of a dead man. He took off his new sunglasses and the black cowboy hat he had bought—the combination he had been using to hide his face from casual scrutiny. He tossed the sunglasses on the bed beside the bag, but he placed the hat more carefully on the side table so it covered the old fashioned General Electric motel phone. He didn’t need any hats-on-the-bed when so much else was already against him. Finally Joe looked around the room, and nodded sagely. “Bates Motel, Mk III. Definitely Mk III.”

He had been in a great many cheesy motel rooms in his time, and this one was exactly what he expected; dirty paint, a queen-size bed, an old RCA TV probably suffering from color distortion, a bedside table, a small built-in closet, a rudimentary dressing table, one of those frame things on which you could place an open suitcase, and an interior door that opened on a minuscule bathroom. To Joe’s mind, every one of these back-road cabin flops was a Bates Motel, but each came with subtle variations, and, long ago, he had started to grade them—Bates Motel Mk I, Mk II, Mk III, etc. Since the Original Occurrence, he had spent almost all his time in either Bates Motels or institutions. The grading system was one of the tricks he used to keep sane in the face of the unacceptably unnatural.

“Or is this maybe a Mk IV?”

One item, a picture on the wall above the head of the bed, defied the normal Gibson categorization. The framed painting was supported by dirty string hung over a bent and rusted nail that had caused a crack in the plaster, and he had never seen anything quite like it in any motel room before. That a painting hung over the bed was not unusual in itself. In fact, it was fairly standard. Usually they were the mass produced horses in the surf, tropical sunsets, disquieting clowns, or nicotine stained abstracts, castoffs from the next level of lodging houses like Holiday or Ramada Inns. Also they were normally bolted to the wall as he had discovered on the odd drunken occasion that he had attempted to steal one. On rare occasions, he would encounter a more idiosyncratic piece of art, a portrait of Elvis Presley or John Wayne on black velvet, or some daub by a friend or relative of the proprietor. Once, in Detroit, his normally hot-sheet room had been decorated by a nude, honey colored lady sporting an enormous puffball Afro. Gibson had even stayed in a motel near Rachel, Nevada with a portrait of a gray alien on the wall, but that had been locally predictable in a place where the majority of guests were UFO conspiracy tourists headed for the perimeter of Area 51.

This current picture, however, was quite different to all of the above, and Joe found it distinctly disturbing. Indeed, it was disturbing enough for him to turn on the bedside light for a closer inspection. A small child waited at the right of the composition, an unhappy, Cinderella-like, Edwardian waif, in buttoned blouse, tattered skirt and sash, hands clasped behind her back as though miserably anticipating the arrival of some cruel step-parent. To the left of the picture, a bucket and mop stood in a spillage of slopped water. Either the little girl had just finished mopping, or was expecting instructions to commence the hated chore. The wall behind both bucket and waif showed cracks of age and neglect, with plaster fallen away above the line of the baseboard revealing the underlying laths.

Joe’s first reaction was that the picture was a psych-out set-up by the Wipeout Gang, an implanted, shock’n’awe device to cultivate the terror paralysis with the knowledge that they were already one step ahead of him, but then he surprised himself by holding back, with an unexpected reserve of strength, from immediately leaping into the abyss of paranoia. The picture was weird, but by no means weird enough to be Wipeout work.

“Yeah, brother man, you’re being paranoid.” Paranoia was understandable after all that he’d been through in the years since the Original Occurrence, but he figured the picture needed one more element to make it anything more than an odd, but perfectly innocuous painting. He was about to turn away. He needed the refuge of mindless TV, and a hot shower. He needed to go into his flight bag for the still half-full bottle of Wild Turkey, to pick up the phone and see if it was possible to order a pizza, and maybe cop some more speed, because the one thing he didn’t need was the risk of sleep, and the chance of dreams.

Then the first bead of gelatinous green liquid—like the thick and sluggish blood of a reptile nightmare—appeared from under the right hand corner of the picture’s frame. It was followed by a second and a third. A fourth disgusting glob emerged as the first began to viscously run down the wall. As the others followed the call of gravity, each tracking its slime trail, Joe knew that this was the added element he would have expected from the Wipeouts. This was the message that he had dreaded for so long. They had him. Finally he was acquired. They’d locked on. The actual cap-ture—and the unthinkable that would follow—was now preordained and only a matter of time. Joe’s courage tried to rise to meet the inevitable, but it could not hold against the fright-tide of pure panic. For Joe, though, with all of his history, panic did not come in any orthodox form. He didn’t gasp, reel or run. Instead, he carefully pushed his hair out of his eyes, and removed his gum. Then he sank slowly to his knees, and, only when he was settled in that pose of submission, Joe Gibson started to scream with the fullest force of his horrified lungs.

Written for an anthology, Framed, 2003

EXCERPTS OF AFTERLIFE

IF JIM HAD INDEED ACHIEVED HIS XANADU, IT WOULD have to be a stately pleasure dome of night and mysterious mist, as far, far down in Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man as it was possible to go. It would hug the crags and surf and romantic chasms of ice and fire, where Alph the sacred river seethed at the apex of its ceaseless turmoil and crashed into the kraken depths of the great and sunless inward sea.

I attempted a similar tactic of entering the mind of the chemically deranged in my 1999 novel Jim Morrison’s Adventures In The Afterlife, but this was a little more complex than the horrors of the unfortunate Joe Gibson since the two central characters— Jim Morrison and Aimee Semple McPherson—were both dead and occupying multiple afterlives. This is a brief excerpt.

His Xanadu was a savage place and holy, both brutal and enchanted. A beast within a city, rampaging at its heart. Above the ring of Fenders and dulcimers, Bech-tstein grand music loud and long, and the crash of dancing timpani and rocks, the voices of women soared as they wailed for their doomed and demon lovers amid a perfect chaos and a tranquillity of disorder chat even Jim himself had never been quite able to visualize. The stillness of his dope-fiend vision was the peace in the ultimate eye of the hurricane. Why had he never thought of that before, made it his objective! The magic of the pipe had brought it all into such clear focus and sharp perspective. Previously he had only closed his eyes in holy dread and ridden upon the storm with his cold silver-ringed fingers locked into the mane of the nightmare. Around him, all was a spiral of magnificent fury. Fountains gushed scarlet flame and reptiles slithered about their business of corruption and seduction, but at the center of it all, he had finally found the strength and stability of the truly and fantastically free, free to waste an infinity of time if he so desired. Free to regard his right foot for a millennium if he so desired. To reinforce this bold discovery, his own face came toward him, with a woman, the woman, dark curls and pale, ready to reveal, repeating that it was true, it was all true, voice muffled but becoming clear, through the mirage of the ion-charged mist of Avalon and no one cried, “Beware! Beware!” at his flashing eyes and floating hair or wove a circle around him thrice because he on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of paradise

“Okay. Enough, mon ami. You’re slipping into borrowed poetry. Time to wake and move.”

And Xanadu was gone and Jim was out of the dream and into a place of ice and freezing cold. “Fuck you, Hypodermic! I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

From the novel Jim Morrison’s Adventures
In The Afterlife, 1999

THAT BAAAD COCAINE

AS I WRITE THIS, THE TABLOIDS TELL ME WE’RE HAVING a cocaine war in New York City. Not that there’s anything novel about a cocaine war—any commodity that is highly illegal and of such market value that $50,000 worth can be stashed in the lining of a satin tour jacket is bound to cause a few fatalities now and then, but an unfortunate juxtaposition started me thinking. On Saturday night, for my sins, I was watching TV—the first show in the Billy Crystal Comedy Hour series. When Crystal (whose main claim to fame is having played the gay character Jody in Soap) got together with guest star Robin (Mork) Williams, every second gag was about coke—jive-ass stuff about Hollywood homeowners snorting their driveways clear after a freak blizzard—the kind of thing that passes for risque on prime time.

“Standing on State Street, looking down Maine, looking for the woman with that baaad cocaine . . .”

Two days later I picked up the New York Daily News. The front page screamed a story about how a Colombian, his wife and their two infant children were shot dead in an execution-style hit when their Mercedes was pulled over on Grand Central Parkway. Investigating police searched the couple’s Queens apartment and found 140 lbs of cocaine, a million dollars in loose cash and a small arsenal of automatic weapons. At least two other related murders followed, and the media speculated that the drug warfare common to Miami’s demimonde had come north to the Big Apple.

Bit of a dichotomy, what? Within forty-eight hours we have Mork and Crystal (and, at other times: Johnny Carson, Fridays, SCTV, Saturday Night Live et al.) being daring with snort sniggers while whole families are blown away with a cool million stashed in the wardrobe. Something would appear to be a little skewed.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with rock’n’roll, you must have been living in Tibet the last dozen years. Cocaine has been a rock’n’roll staple since before there was rock’n’roll. It was a favorite among thirties swing band members and forties bopsters. It replaced acid as the vogue drug when psychedelic quests into the unknown ceased to be fashionable. (Remember ’Casey Jones,’ the Grateful Dead’s tuneful mea culpa?) Through the rock star excess of the seventies the twin symbols of “making it” were unlimited coke and oral sex from top fashion models. Even puritanical punks took to coke like ducks to water (did someone say like pigs to shit?) as soon as their incomes were sufficiently substantial.

And musicians weren’t the only ones who wanted to teach the world to sing. The powder permeated the whole business. Executives and flunkies, managers and booking agents all seemed unable to start a conversation without the ritual request, “Y’got any blow?” (Check the traffic to the toilet at any rock joints that specialize in showcase nights for business and media.) Cocaine even reached the typing pool, where secretaries tooted it off makeup mirrors.

Cocaine’s appeal is that it is the ultimate product for consumer capitalism. It produces a state of noisy euphoria that can turn rapidly to megalomania. It’s so damned expensive that it provides a natural status high. Despite its illegality, part of the fun seems to be letting everyone know you’re doing it. The rolled $100 bills, the elitist rituals, all contribute to the slightly scary concept that the cokehead (particularly the corporate cokehead who is all too common in most branches of the entertainment industry) is not getting stoned but consuming money in its most refined form.

Cocaine has never attracted law reformers the way marijuana has. The substance has always been bracketed with heroin—probably because both are white powders—and only defended publicly by social extremists. I’ve never understood why past governments were so down on the drug. Rather than turn users antisocial, cocaine makes them more aggressive wage slaves. The only reason this drug commands $100 or more a gram is because wealthy people want it and it is illegal. Cocaine costs pennies to manufacture— and pennies are all that the South American peasants who produce it receive. The big money is made in coke’s transportation and sale. The rationale for such huge profits is that those who make them risk massive prison sentences.

At the moment, coke profits support organized crime and near-fascist Latin American governments. If the cocaine business were run as a legitimate corporation, it’s been estimated it would make number five in the Fortune 500. Indeed, Colombia’s drug-based “black market” economy is now larger than its legitimate coffee-based trade. Without the huge input of drug money, the country would be on the verge of fiscal collapse; the situation has become so blatant that it no longer seems to embarrass the country’s rulers.

The only reason this state of affairs can exist—the only reason a coke dealer can have a million bucks stashed away in his flat like chump change, and the only reason ruthless individuals will stage private wars over these profits—is that the drug is illegal. If cocaine weren’t illegal it would simply be a relatively inexpensive stimulant. No murders, no million-dollar profits, no sensational headlines and no chemical chic.

The logical answer would be to legalize the stuff and regulate its sale the same way liquor sales are regulated. Unfortunately, in the current climate and with the current administration there is little point in talking about logic. Equally unfortunately, until somebody does talk logic, both the killings and risque jokes will go on.

Trouser Press, May 1982

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

But the problem with cokeheads is that they tend to go to extremes—extreme extremes. Remember the bumper sticker? “My other car is up my nose.”

DRYDEN

I once knew this heroin dealer in Istanbul. He kept three king cobras in a glass tank like an aquarium. Big mean poisonous motherfuckers that’d kill you as soon as look at you. Always hissing and spreading their hoods.

(DRYDEN gestures like a cobra spreading its hood.) Son of a bitch used to hide all his dope and his money under the gravel in the bottom of the tank. Figured that anyone trying to rip him off would never have the balls to stick their hand in the cobra tank.

MILNE

When the fuck were you in Istanbul?

(DRYDEN doesn’t look at Milne.)

MILNE

(grins knowingly)

You were never in fucking Istanbul.

DRYDEN

(shrugs)

Actually it was Trenton, New Jersey. The guy was some old time hippie asshole with a big beard, looked like Jerry Garcia with bulimia. I only said Istanbul to improve on the story. Shit always sounds better if you set it somewhere exotic, you know what I mean?

CHA-CHA

What you mean is that you’re a fucking liar.

DRYDEN

I’m a weaver of lurid tales, kid.

(The phone rings, a European-style double ring.)

From the play South Of The Border, 1993

THE CYCLE OF SEDUCTION

With heroin, there’s some kind of ten to twelve year cycle. Things go along pretty much as before and then suddenly—pow! There’s a whole new generation of dope fiends out there, fucking up and overdosing and everything else that goes with the junkie territory. The media gets hysterical for fifteen minutes. Senators and congressmen start screaming for more jail time or the death penalty; you get a brief upsurge of police activity, and then it all goes back to business as usual. This is not to say that both heroin and addicts aren’t always with us. Of course, they are. It’s just that each time a new generation discovers the drug, it produces a fresh blip on the radar, and that’s when the trouble starts up all over again.

Moving from the folklore of one white powder to another—Bolivian flake to Chinese rocks—I thought I perceived a rotating romance.

The romantic image of opiates was in place long before there was Keith Richards or Johnny Thunders, or even Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, Lenny Bruce or The Man With The Golden Arm. From the very moment that opiates first arrived in Western Europe and the United States, regular or recreational users were invested with a certain dark and dangerous romance—Byron, Keats and Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the beautiful and damned Lizzie Siddal, and the rest of the opium consuming Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites. Even the gunfighter Doc Holliday was set apart from the rest by his flask of laudanum. Oscar Wilde’s fictional Dorian Gray not only had a portrait in the attic, but also hung around the opium dens of Limehouse, Victorian London’s Chinatown, to confirm his transcendental decadence.

In the sixties, when the hippies, at least initially, condemned heroin as a drug without the slightest redeeming social or artistic merit, the romance still lingered. Lou Reed may have scandalized the flower children with the song ’Heroin’ on the Velvet Underground’s first album (“I’m going to try for the kingdom if I can/Because it makes me feel like I’m a man”) but, in a matter of months, large numbers of them would be trying for the selfsame kingdom.

Even on the other side of the coin, among the prohibitionists, the lawmakers, and the enforcers, the myth and romance prevail. Far from taking the approach that the problem, whether medical, social, or criminal, is that of a simple if addictive chemical, all too often heroin is portrayed as something almost supernatural, evil distilled to molecular form, the black prince of narcotics. The language used is frequently more biblical or grandly military than medical or legal. The talk is “horror,” “evil,” the word “narcoterrorism” is coined. The constantly repeated phrase “war on drugs” was turned from metaphor to alarming reality when George Bush, determined to arrest an alleged drug trafficker who also happened to be the president of a sovereign country, ordered 24,000 US troops into Panama, and expended the lives of 202 civilians and 337 soldiers (314 Panamanian and 23 American), to get his man. As Tom Wicker observed in a scathing argument in the New York Times: “539 people lost their lives as the primary cost of putting handcuffs on one thug,”

Ed Leuw, the eminent drug policy researcher for the Dutch government, attempted to explain actions like Panama in the book Drug Prohibition and the Conscience of Nations. “The drug war can only be understood as a holy war—and the important thing about a holy war is to fight it, not to win it.” In this context, we begin to see not a law enforcement effort to prevent citizens from socially or medically harming themselves or others by unacceptable methods of intoxication, but millions of citizens being classified as heretics by virtue of their choice of ingestible chemicals. “The level of barbarism has not yet been as widespread as in other holy wars, barbarism is growing.”

From a cover story in the LA Reader, 1994

JUNKIE ROMANCE

The intention of this song was to expose the spuriousness of the down at heel, Sid & Nancy, heroine romance of doomed junkie lovers. Sometimes, especially when I’ve seen the response from the audience when Wayne has played it live, I wonder if it actually had quite the reverse effect.

So you want to act like Johnny
So you want to act like Keith
So you crave some soft cocoon, boy
For your Charlie Parker grief
And you court the adoration
Of the ones with no esteem
In a hollow point delivery
Dope fiend self-inflicted dream

It’s a junkie romance, kid
Alive on Avenue D
It’s a junkie romance, Kid
Nothing ever comes for free

She shoots up through her stocking
See her thighs as pale as death
And you can’t feel her breathing
But there’s frost upon her breath
There’s an old time Rx croaker
The doctor? Yes he’s in
A drugstore substitution
For the thing the priests call sin

It’s a junkie romance, kid
Alive on Avenue D
It’s a junkie romance, Kid
Stone dead on MTV

Written for Wayne Kramers album The Hard Stuff, 1995

TO DRINK AND DRIVE IN LA

THE GIRLS GIGGLE, THE APPLE MARTINIS ARE SHAKEN, celebrities revolve in and out of rehab, and some do token time in the county lock-up. But even in the heat of summer, the bars are crowded with a hard drinking, big spending clientele, and the booze flows like there’s no tomorrow. (Does the booze know something we don’t?) And yet, Los Angeles has a highly ambivalent attitude to alcohol.

On the one hand, this town has a well-promoted pride in its pantheon of drunkards. Any roster of lauded inebriates will include luminaries like Errol Flynn and Charlie Bukowski, Tallulah Bankhead and Jim Morrison, Bette Davis and W. C. Fields, Spencer Tracy, most of the Bar-rymore family, Lee Marvin, and Sam Peckinpah—not to mention visiting lushes like Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and all those famous and legless rock stars at what used to be called the Continental Hyatt House.

On the other hand, LA does not make life at all easy for the intoxicated. For a city this size, it does not have bars in abundance, unlike London, Paris, or New York where, in some neighborhoods, you can render yourself royally hammered on the same street without consuming more than a single gin in the same joint. The real problem, like so many others the LA Basin is heir to is, of course, the great-but-failed, car-culture experiment of the twentieth century. When Ford and General Motors descended on SoCal in the wake of World War II, ripped out the Red Cars and built the freeways, no planner considered the problem of how, when the automobile reigned supreme, one was supposed to get home from the bar after four shots of Wild Turkey and attendant beers without risking arrest for DUI, and a whole mess of jurisprudence chewing on your ass.

But back in the routine groove of alcohol the habitual barfly can talk forever about the commonality of the bars in New York, the cafes of Paris or the pubs of London, but in LA we run into a problem. A bar in LA is very much like a bar in New York or London, except for the blinding sunlight that tends to stream in each time the door is opened. It’s getting there and getting back that’s the problem, and, since a car is required, that will bring you into immediate conflict with the LAPD, the CHP and the LA County Sheriffs. The City of Angels very adequately proves that booze and car culture simply don’t mix.

The answer, in any civilized city, is, of course, a taxi. In Amsterdam or Tokyo, one hardly has to gesture before a cab is at the curb. In LA the wait can potentially be until hell freezes over. Not only are the cab companies a post-Soviet law unto themselves, but are also governed by arcane and unfathomable regulations about where each cab line can and cannot pick up passengers. Even a call from the bar doesn’t totally guarantee a ride. Evil Barbie dolls and their boyfriends, who just happened to be standing at the curb, have stolen pre-ordered taxis out from under me.

The sheer geographic size of LA also exacerbates the problem. If the hotspot de jour is in Silver Lake and you’re in West Hollywood, making the scene constitutes an excursion, even an expedition. The official answer is the designated driver, but, in reality—in any quartet of liquor-loving degenerates—no one wants to be nursing a goddamned club soda all night, and that rare being, a genuine non-drinker who doesn’t mind spending a long evening with a bunch of drunks is a pearl without price.

The outlaw answer is to play the criminal odds, but, with too many black & whites ominously hiding in side streets near popular watering holes just before 2am closing time, the odds are against the DUI in the making, and, of course, drunk driving is hardly ethical.

One reasonably inexpensive system of moving to saloon to saloon is cab sharing. Solo bar hopping by taxi can become prohibitively expensive, but split three or four ways, it starts to become fiscally more feasible. This may actually be the long term answer to wrecking one’s liver in LA and not going to jail for one’s trouble. A super improved cab service catering to the nightlife might be the salvation of all of us who drink, but live below the limo level. Already City Cab are running late night TV commercials stressing they will chauffeur the intoxicated.

LA CityBeat, September 2007

BUSTED

And, in LA, even being drunk and on foot can be a legal matter, baby.

IN THE INSTANT THAT HE SAW THE CRUISER, SAM KNEW that he was not going to melt into the night behind this one. Even a block away the police car spelled trouble; all capitals. The old bull alpha was up and in control and he was determined to accept no shit from any uniform, no matter what the ultimate cost. The rest of Sam’s personality was in no condition to argue. Even without the old bull’s china-shop belligerence, grief was the near-certain outcome of the encounter. Sam was on foot, in the night, lost, and hardly had an excuse with which to bless himself. He was drunk, he’d just fled an after-hours joint where he’d incited a brawl. What more did they need to roll him to jail? That’s why they used to call them rollers. The very state of being without a car was an arrestable offense on a bad night in LA County, and who would call this night particularly good? The black and white slowed to walking pace while still twenty or thirty yards from him, and Sam reflected how the police cars in Los Angeles, with all their lights and exterior gadgets always had an air of an over-accessorized Terminator-mobile. They were designed to intimidate and Sam admitted that, in his own petty-Bolshevik way, he was intimidated. Couldn’t they cut a deal on the intimidation? No chance. He even stopped walking, seeing no point in maintaining the pretence that he was a law-abiding evening stroller, even though, in his own way, he was. Or was he? Did he still have the speed? Or any other drugs. He believed everything had been consumed. Recall was less than perfect, but he didn’t imagine the three barracuda strippers would have left him anything. Otherwise why would they have tossed him out of their car? Whatever the way of it, the moment to be checking through his pockets and throwing out the incriminating was long gone. The cruiser stopped and the high beams and military spot cut in making Sam feel like a cross between a prison break and Judy Garland in concert. He put up a hand to shade his deer-in-the-headlamps eyes, but this must have been incorrect and suspect behavior because the car’s built-in bullhorn boomed.

“STAND EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE AND KEEP YOUR HANDS IN SIGHT AT ALL TIMES.”

All Sam could think of was Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and mutter to himself: “Yes sir, boss. Freezing it up here, boss. Hands in sight, boss.”

The driver’s door opened and then the passenger door five seconds later. A silhouette slowly advanced into the light, hand right over the high holstered Glock that was the prevailing epitome of cop cool, while his partner remained a dark shape back at the car. As far as Sam could see, one was tall, blond and Aryan with a Tab Hunter-style crew cut of a kind that was only worn in the twenty-first century by LA cops and a certain speciality of gay hustler/ porn model. The other was a short, handsome Latino with a pencil moustache and weird eyes. Sam wondered which one would prove to be the out-of-his-tree sociopath-with-a-badge. His money was on the Latino, and he was marginally glad it was the Aryan approaching him. The two cops just radiated paranoia, disguised as methodical care. Okay so armed psychos were all over the place, but how much were they figments of the cops’ own vanity? Or perhaps life was imitating art imitating life imitating art, over and over world without end until everyone needed an AK47. Sam knew his life was probably in danger, but the old bull was belligerent.

“Please step over to the car.” The blond cop gestured to the patrol car with its blazing lights as though Sam might not have noticed it before. Sam gave a slight shrug and did as instructed.

“Please place your hands on the car.”

At least he hadn’t been told to assume the position. Sam had always found it too arrogant an assumption that one knew what the position was. Surely one was an amateur until proved professional? Sam placed his hands on the hood of the car. So far the old bull alpha had played the game and the rest of Sam was grateful. The Latino with the moustache expertly patted him down then stepped back and indicated to his partner that Sam was unarmed.

“Turn out your pockets.”

At this the old bull baulked. Sam kept his hands on the hood, but turned his head to look at the Aryan. The rest of Sam listened aghast as the old bull alpha finally and apocalyptically broke his silence. “Listen. Why don’t you just fuck off and just leave me alone? I’m a harmless drunk with a bad case of culture shock trying to find his way home. I know I should be playing the game but, in all reality, isn’t this a total waste of our collective time, comrades?” At least, that was what he had intended to say. Sometime in the middle of the phrase ’just leave me alone,” his head was slammed hard into the hood of the car, and the rest came out as part thought and part muffled mumble. Sam had to concede one thing to the old bull. He went right on trying to talk, even when Sam was seeing stars, although Sam couldn’t be sure if the real object of the exercise was preservation of pride or attempted suicide by cop.

From an unpublished short story

CELEB-HAB

Or they could toss your sorry ass in rehab . . .

THE STORY GOES THAT SOMETIME IN THE 1980s, ROCKER Jerry Lee Lewis checked into the Betty Ford Clinic to dry out from booze. Early in his stay he was presented with a mop and bucket and informed he’d be swabbing hallways. The Killer immediately walked out and never looked back. Two decades later, VH1 presents us with a very different picture on the reality show Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. In an idyllic setting, showbiz shrink Drew Pinsky—a suave, better educated, and less aggressive version of Dr. Phil—conducts endless soft-centered group sessions with the quasi-famous—including actor Daniel Baldwin, porn star Mary Cary, and Jeff Conaway, late of Taxi, who seems to sign up for any celeb problem show— and the narcissism of the patients is only rivalled by the prurience of we-who-watch. Between these sessions with Pinsky, the participants lounge by the pool endlessly discussing their rotten relationships, or text each other from their rooms. But the reality of this reality series seems wide open to question. I have visited friends in rehab, and the ambience resembled a Ukrainian minimum security prison, not the flower decked luxury spa where Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew takes place. Maybe it’s different for the semi-famous, but, although the participants bemoan their bouts with substance abuse, their primary addiction appears to be an unconquerable need to be on TV at any cost to their dignity or plausibility.

LA CityBeat, 2007

STANDING BY AMY

I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON MY NEW BOOK (ON THE SUBJECT of drugs as it happens) all the livelong damned day, so I don’t have to much to say except, even loathing award shows as I do, I was delighted that Amy Winehouse picked up five Grammy awards, providing proof that, counter to all the fashionable hypocrisy and propaganda, one can still actually be psychotic, stoned, drunk, self destructive, and an all round mess (plus being ratted out by a tabloid newspaper and tossed into dubious rehab) and still produce, if not great art, at least some of the best music around. Needless to say, the sobriety gestapo, led in this instance by the miserable Natalie Cole, is moaning that an alleged and incarcerated drug addict should not be so honored. Nice one, Natalie, let’s lower the poor girl’s self-esteem a bunch more notches when she’s trying to save her own life. Ah, fuck ’em. I’ve had more than enough of the self-righteous dictating what is acceptable behavior for the artist and what’s not, and degrading and diminishing all who disagree. (But get well Amy, we need you.)

Doc40, September 2008

Or you could be Amy Winehouse . . .

DRUNK IN THE MORNING

Certainly this song could not have been written about Los Angeles.

Feels like there’s sand under my eyelids
Feels like I’ve spent my life on my knees
Feels like I should be getting a pension
Feels like I ate some old brass keys

Think I’ll walk off drunk in the morning
Do all the things I ain’t done yet
Singing some song by some old French singer
Singing some song about no regrets

Think I’ll go see crazy Billy
Think I’ll ride the cross-town bus
Maybe I’ll just stay here in the barroom
Run out of money and cause a fuss

Maybe I’ll hide
Maybe I’ll run
Maybe I’ll stagger
In the light of the sun
Maybe I’ll stumble
Maybe wander
Maybe I’ll be back
When the day is down

Maybe I’ll visit dumb sweet Linda
Maybe she’ll just take me in
Mumbling delight in her deep dark cellar
Losing yourself can’t be no sin

Think I’ll walk off drunk in the morning
Do all the things I ain’t done yet
Singing some song by some old French singer
Singing some song about no regrets

Written and recorded for the album
Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, 1977

AGAIN THE LAST PLANE OUT

EVEN THOUGH GASOLINE NOW COST MORE THAN GIN, an olive drab GM truck, belching smoke and spattered with mud the color of dried blood, pulled up in the main square, outside the bar, and government soldiers in World War II vintage helmets, and ragged, sweat-stained fatigues, with the striped shoulder flashes of the Simba Division, began unloading a few thousand red, green, and yellow loyalist flags. The flags were small; just paper triangles on little sticks, the kind handed out to crowds at political rallies. They were left in an untidy heap of open disorganized boxes, stacked against the plinth of the repeatedly torn-down and then replaced statue of the city’s supposed founder. As the truck pulled away to the grinding of a dying gearbox, a twitchy teenager with an MI6 was left behind to guard the boxes of flags. For some reason, the occurrence outraged Lenny the Addict. “Now what dumb shit is this? Who the fuck needs flags? Jesus fucking Christ, half these fuckers don’t have food or paper to wipe their asses on. Flags?”

Although the question wasn’t actually rhetorical, Lenny the Addict didn’t require an answer from anyone in particular, just a general rustle of agreement. While heat vied with humidity as the primary cause of discomfort, he could hardly expect any more animated response from the patrons of the bar at the Hotel Europa. It was hot and the civil war dragged on. Lenny the Addict was drinking the local squeezings, probably the cheapest high in the hemisphere, husbanding his hard currency against the remote possibility that a connection yet to be named might sell him some morphine syrettes. And when Lenny the Addict was drunk—as opposed to stoned—he talked. Yancey Slide, who was drinking maybe the only good scotch in the city, slowly turned his head, looked at the flags, but declined to speak, making instead a sound somewhere between a sigh and a snarl. Yancey Slide was nearing his threshold of intolerance for Lenny the Addict. Okay, so at least one token junkie was needed at the downfall of any city, but Slide couldn’t understand why Lenny the Addict needed to keep him company. It wasn’t as though Slide could be of any use to the skinny degenerate.

Back in the late 1980s, at the end of the Reagan era, I wrote some scripts for a kids’ TV cartoon show called The Galaxy Rangers on my very first 64k computer. It wasn’t the most scintillating work I’ve ever done, but it proved enough of a challenge to be interesting, and, it was very well paid if you worked fast, and, hey, now I had a computer. The only problems were created by the fact that a portion of the show’s funding came from a company in Texas run by uncompromising Christian fundamentalists, who felt a constant need to issue memos that adjusted the show’s moral navigation as they saw it. These edicts from the money men were mostly treated by the writers as irksome wastes of time, but easily bypassed because the fundamentalists were also fundamentally stupid. A near-mutiny broke out, however, when the Texans attempted to ban bars and saloons from a show that was essentially a western-in-space. “Where,” we demanded, “are our characters supposed to interact if they don’t have saloons? Sitting in the bloody street on their ridiculous robot horses?” (Yes, neighbors, the show featured its heroes and villains riding around on robot horses.) Ultimately a compromise was reached. We could have our saloons, but no on screen drinking and no saloon girls. The conflict, however, did reinforce just how crucial the inn, bar, or pub is to so many works of fiction where random strangers need to meet and engage. The circumstances are what make the difference. The atmosphere in a thinly disguised Hollywood shot and beer joint is going to be very different to a hotel bar in an African nation—not a million miles from the Congo—at the very bad end of a prolonged revolution.

Dolores Haze was a different matter. Slide could always tolerate her company. In fact he would privately admit to an indolent and largely theoretical attraction to the woman with the complex and highly unconventional history. She looked over the top of her heart-shaped sunglasses at the arrival of the flags, and then shook her hair loose, creating a sudden waft of unexpected perfume. This week her hair was the most plausible ash-blonde that could be created with the limited resources still available in the capital. Her lipgloss and nail polish were a dark magenta. Slide respected Dolores Haze for two things. She was always able to discover cosmetics no matter how dangerously unstable the political situation, and she was always plugged in close to the heart of the prevailing rumor mill. “The latest is that the Simbas flip-flopped and now the functional majority of the army is supporting Zidika, whatever that might mean. I guess our new president is planning a rally for the CNN cameras.”

Jorges, the one-eyed bartender who looked a lot like a heavyweight, eye-patched version of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, maintained his own totalitarian regime in the bar at the Hotel Europa, deciding absolutely how many drinks a customer could expect in return for a Rolex or a DVD player. He kept the TV above the bar tuned to CNN. Right now, a report on the situation in the capital was being aired. A tall, attractive, and, above all, dry reporter stood in front of the burned-out Opera House. The setting was familiar, but the story the woman with the hair-job and the radio mike was telling to the world bore no resemblance to the situation as observed from what was left of the bar at the Hotel Europa.

Dolores Haze pinned the credibility problem in an instant. “That CNN bitch isn’t sweating. Three minutes of exposure to any reality in this place, and you’re sweating like James Brown. I’ll bet good money she hasn’t ventured out of The Internationale since she got here.”

Dolores Haze was absolutely right. Only The Interna-tional—or, as it was more usually called, the Time Warner embassy—had air-conditioning. Everyone else in the capital was sweating. The Hotel Europa’s AC had been dead for almost a month. It had gone when the building had been hit at ground level by a stray anti-tank rocket during the street fighting when Tetsu’s people had pulled back to the North Side. The air had gone, as had an entire plate glass wall. That they had intermittent electricity to run the TV and watch the disinformation hit the airwaves amounted to a blessed mercy, “I mean, shit, if you aren’t in the relevant temperature, how the fuck are you going to understand anything?”

As Dolores Haze castigated the TV a bead of sweat ran down the inside of her right breast. Slide was drunk enough to happily watch the beads of sweat run down the insides of Dolores’ breasts for hours. Her white cotton dress was damp and all but transparent. Slide didn’t know what to call the garment. He wasn’t hip to couture. To him it looked retro-fifties, like the one Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch. That movie had been set in a New York City heat wave. Marilyn kept her panties in the icebox. High-August New York heat waves were bad, but nothing compared to the capital in a change of regime. Slide allowed himself a short whiskey fantasy. He and Haze were making slick night-heat liquid love on the creaking bed in his room in the middle of an air raid. Desperation and damp sheets sheltered them as explosions blossomed, sirens howled, searchlights probed, and a blast three blocks away blew the windows in, covering the two of them with diamonds of broken glass. It was unlikely to become reality, however. Not that Haze wouldn’t be willing, but air raids appeared to be a thing of the past. All factions in the civil war had run out of even antique war-planes, and the Hueys-for-hire had mostly headed back to the coast, knowing they were unlikely to be paid.

Lenny the Addict interrupted Slide’s voyeur daydream by deciding Dolores’ information was a personal affront. “So the Army’s backing Zidika? So what? What the fuck does the Army mean anymore? Like, where’s that junkie Major who was selling me my fucking morphine now that I need him? Most of the bastards who haven’t deserted are in business on their own account, and some, as I’m learning to my cost, can’t even take care of business. All that signifies now is the AK Youth.”

In this Lenny the Addict was absolutely right. Everyone knew all real power lay with the kids, the AK Youth, as they’d come to be called. The fifteen-, fourteen-, twelve-, and eleven-year-olds; the killer children with the Dracula eyes, and time-release caps of a complicated descendant of Ritalin actually sown into the flesh of their arms. These were the children who detonated Semtex like it was firecrackers at Chinese New Year, and took pride in hacking off the right arms of surrendering prisoners with machetes and pangas.

Here in the capital the very stars in their courses were directed by whether the baby machine gunners had been smoking heroin, or crack, geezing meth, or drinking needle beer, and the rattle of their AK47s was so unpredictably random, Slide figured it gave both unpredictable and random a bad name. Their reasons for slaughter exceeded all in the murky and unfathomable night, and when they drummed and chanted, rhyming in contemporary dementia, they raised dark and ancient gods to sanctify and offer sacrifice. They even seemed to speak their own unique language, as though traditional tongues were too slow and too linear for their wired and tweaking speech centers. All childhood had been lost in the ebb and flow of apparently perpetual warfare. Some of the mercs claimed that on an especially holy day, the AK machine gun kids would eat their own wounded.

“And anyway, who the fuck is going to show up for a rally to honor Zidika, for chrissakes? Who’d dare?”

Yancey Slide didn’t move. He didn’t want to move. He’d been at the bar so long, he had his hunch curled to perfection; elbows precisely rooted, and boot heels hooked into the crosspieces of the barstool just so. He preyed over his Johnny Black on the rocks like a ravaged vulture guarding his own. He had two more bottles stashed in an arrangement with Jorges. That was Yancey Slide for you. Where everyone else was drinking Tikky, or squeezings, or some leftover abomination from the dusty bottom of the bar like bubblegum schnapps, Slide had Johnny Black. Some claimed he wasn’t human except in the most superficial sense, and if it was said to his face, he never argued. “They’ll Shanghai a bunch of kids from out of the bush. Hand them the fucking flags, and tell them if they cheer loud enough, and wave the flags hard enough, they’ll feed them, and, if they don’t, they’ll kill them.” “And then?”

“What then? For those kids there is no then. The concept of now is pretty fucking precarious. They’ll turn them loose in the city with the rest of the scavengers, or they’ll draft them, or they kill them anyway.”

“All for a thirty-second image on CNN?”

“The one thing there’s plenty of is people. You could say the bottom’s dropped clean out of the people market.”

Dolores Haze made the flat and obvious statement. “It’s time we took the hint and got out of here.”

Lenny the Addict nodded. “We gotta get out of here.”

Although Lenny declaring he had to get out of there sounded straightforward enough, it was more complex than many might imagine. Lenny the Addict not only had to get out, but he had to choose a destination with some care. If he wound up in some Hottentot burg where he couldn’t cop opiates within the first few hours of leaving the airport, he would find himself sick, shaking and royally fucked. Slide knew this had to be one of the primary churning conundrums in Lenny’s loop-the-loop, squirrel cage brain. Not that Slide could spare much sympathy for Lenny the Addict. Now that even the Russians were narco-players, dope was pretty much every place that could boast an airport capable of bringing in a 747, and the life of the globe-trotting dope fiend was a hell of a lot easier than it had been a few years earlier.

Lenny turned to face Slide directly. “How long do you think planes will still be coming in and out?”

Yancey Slide shrugged. What the fuck did he know? “Three, four days, maybe a week.”

Dolores Haze had been fucking the door gunner of a freelance Huey crew who’d been looking for a doomed romance before pulling out. He’d given her the inside scoop on the state of Patrice Lumumba Memorial Airport. “The e-vac vultures are lining up on the taxiway. Everything from antique DC3s to piece-of-shit Gulfstreams creaking from hundreds of over-the-limit air miles. They’ve moved everything from cocaine and rock bands to Chinese software pirates. Right now, they’ll take anyone at a price. The real trick is getting out there. There’s checkpoints and roadblocks all the way, HIV-positive regular army looking for a shakedown, technicals who finally ran out of gas, AK kids using passing cars for target practice, or laying mines just to see shit blow up. The highway to the airport is decidedly hairy any way you look at it.”

Slide gestured to Jorges to pour him another Scotch. All the gin joints in all the third world seemed to be haunted by the same ghosts when the veneer of civilization really began to peel. The white mercs had staked out their turf in the far back of the bar, where a boom box was playing death metal. The mercs were mainly Eastern European; Ukrainians and Serbian Chetniks, plus some Libyan-trained Irishmen. The thrill seekers and psycho killers with their Street Sweepers, matched Suomis, and CZ 25s had long been shredded to history. The Soldier of Fortune amateurs with the Death or Glory tattoos never had what it took. They held on to grenades too long, stepped on landmines, were speared by bamboo pongee sticks, painted themselves into impossible tactical corners, or, in some of the more extreme cases, were fragged from this mortal coil by their own comrades.

Slide was surprised Hertz the German had survived so long, and was still one among the slumped figures in camouflage fatigues, scuffed jump boots propped up on tables, trying to drink away the thousand-yard stare. With the mutant Doberman that was always at his side, he was an extremely unpleasant showboat even by Yancey Slide’s expansively lax standards. Slide found conversation with the German close to impossible. He had a habit of sexually juvenile non sequiturs. Out of the blue he’d make remarks like, “The sound of the cane on taut rubber is singularly distinctive, nicht wahr?” According to fairly reliable rumor, Hertz had this game he played with his women of simulated necrophilia. First inducing insulin coma and then, as he put it in his thick stormtrooper accent, “bringing the bitch back with a sucrose shot.”

Right at this moment Hertz was turning his blond-beast, Nazi charm on the stranded script girl from the French documentary film crew who had arrived in the capital a week earlier. As parlor ex-Marxists they thought they could shoot footage of the AK Youth, but had been quickly set straight and, luckily for them, without too much loss of life. While they were packing to go, the script girl had engaged in a screaming Gallic fight with the director, and a prolonged pouting sulk had resulted in her losing her ride out, and now she was thrown to the wolves of her own resources and survival skills. From where Slide sat, she didn’t seem to have many of either, except for a passing resemblance to a dark-haired version of the young Brigitte Bardot. Would she get the insulin treatment from the German? Would that be her supposed ticket to comparative safety? Slide wondered if a single cc of the drug remained in all of the city, unless, of course the German carried his own stash. Slide didn’t doubt, even without the drug, Hertz had plenty more unnatural tricks up his abominable khaki sleeve.

The dark-haired Bardot, as she laughed with the German, head to head, lips close to lips, had no clue what she was really getting into, but in this she was not so unique. What the fuck did any of those assembled imagine they were doing there or really getting into? Some had the excuse they were only doing their job, plying their trade, or following their avowed calling. The mercs would maintain the atrocities just went with the job description. The journalists would likewise deny all accusations of advanced auto-wreck voyeurism, and claim they were simply relaying the story to a concerned world, or recording all for posterity. Lenny the Addict would blame his presence there on some disastrous counter-synchronicity of wrong turns and missed connections because Lenny, a perpetual victim of fate, was never responsible for his actions, and his being in the capital was at least a huge and hideous misunderstanding, if not an actual conspiracy.

In the area of conspiracy, James Jesus Valentine, the Europa’s CIA spook-in-residence, had more than once copped the tired plea that he was only in the capital obeying orders, protecting the vital interests of the United States. Slide was at something of a loss to figure how exactly the vitals of the US were being protected by Valentine’s current and lopsided conversation with Misty Mona, a bizarre, popeyed, drag-queen homage to the post-Supremes Diana Ross. He couldn’t see what concern there might be at Langley, the State Department or the White House with Mona’s whacked-out-on-Tikky-and-Benzedrine reflections on the cosmetic advantage of using Lee Press-On Nails on her toes when wearing open-toed sandals. Valentine was, however, famous throughout the capital as a master of plausible deniability, and for having an answer for everything. If challenged he would coolly respond that he was preparing a report on how the rules of entropy dictated no city could fall without a quorum of drag-queen adventurers in attendance.

Slide had Jorges pour him another shot from his private stash. He hoped the booze would take him past the stage of seeking explanations for what, in truth, completely defied explanation. Back in the seventies, legend told how a couple of New York cops had found a dead gorilla in the South Bronx. They hadn’t even tried to offer reasons or theories, and Slide knew that was ultimately the best way. If he searched for reasons for too long, he would eventually wind up asking himself why he was there in the capital, and that was a question he knew he shouldn’t even consider from a distance, let alone approach.

In general terms, Slide figured the material paradoxes were a part of the attraction. All in the Europa Bar were, to one degree or another, vultures picking over the carcass of an imploded nation-state. A Harry Lime romance of uncut diamonds and tainted penicillin. Just before everything ran out, crude economic law dictated a sudden rush of exotic consumer variables would hit the darkest strata of the black market. An abrupt plethora would occur: Cuban cigars; Beluga caviar; A-list celebrity porn; Durban Poison; Napoleon Brandy; primo flake; cut price gold and gems; and lately, in the modern world, deep-frozen body parts, as the elite of the ancien regime freed up their terminally hoarded goodies to pay the freight up the political gravity well. In the capital this was happening with a vengeance. Word was Zidika himself had personally purchased—from a strange individual who dealt in such things—a pair of genuine French government colonial-issue guillotines, cherry-perfect down to the tall polished oak-beam frame, the steel blade, and the rubbed brass hardware. Formal public executions, with full and bloody pomp and circumstance, could start anytime, and anyone even tenuously connected with Tetsu and the PRP had an unseen, unwritten, but wholly tangible death warrant hung round their necks and they just hadda, hadda, hadda get away.

Flesh would also need to be factored into the equation. A byproduct of any local apocalypse was always a hot and cold human buffet fit for the imagination of the Marquis de Sade. In the ad hoc culture of collapse, where torture and murder were merely items in the tool kit of maintaining power, the strangest of the passionately strange were able to indulge whims previously unimagined. Just two nights earlier a human being had run through the square and past the bar, blazing like a gasoline torch, and everyone had assumed it was the work of the lone and secretive Iraqi, late of the Republican Guard, who liked setting fire to women and teenage boys, supposedly fire-cleansing them for Allah or Zoroaster. Slide’s best theory, though, was that it really had very little to do with either sex or plunder. When order and structure collapsed, a form of energy was released, and this was really what drew them, and on what they all fed.

On television the sweatless and sanitary CNN reporter was explaining how troops loyal to President Zidika were rapidly restoring order in the major cities. This prompted a former SAS man to mutter “Bollocks” in a thick Scottish accent, but then even he fell silent as all eyes turned away from the TV to the missing window and the square beyond. Slide groaned inwardly, and swallowed his shot of scotch, as five ominous figures followed their shadows across the threshold and into the bar. Lenny the Addict let out a short fearful breath.

“Oh shit.”

One of the new arrivals was a regular army captain in a reasonably clean and complete uniform. Simba division again. He led a handcuffed and badly beaten prisoner by a short length of rope tied around his neck. The prisoner’s head was covered with a flour sack. Two eyeholes had been cut for the unfortunate to see out; the traditional and accepted mask of the informer. Clearly the hooded one’s life was being spared for at least as long as he could be led round the bars and cafes to identify his former colleagues and comrades. The captain and his prisoner, however, were not the primary reason the interior of the Europa had lapsed into such deathly silence, and Jorges had even used his remote stealthily to turn down CNN’s audio. The captain and his prisoner had an escort of three young AK kids, the eldest of whom couldn’t have been more than twelve. The tallest and most senior, despite the heat, wore a black PI trenchcoat over VC shorts, and a Marilyn Man-son T-shirt. His Air Jordans looked practically new, as did the Mac 11 held down by his side. The gun seemed to have only recently come out of its Cosmolene. Some motherfucker was shipping in new materiel despite the embargo. His two companions were less sharp in T-shirts and ultra-baggy fatigue pants. One had jump boots and the other was barefoot, although the barefoot one did sport an old A3 flying jacket, and a red bandanna wrapped around his head. Both were armed with battle-scarred but totally serviceable Kalashnikovs.

Taking advantage of the distraction and human silence, a jade-green lizard made its way down the crumbling plaster of the wall behind the bar. As the informer studied the assembled faces, seeking candidates for Zidika’s new guillotines, Slide couldn’t help but make a move of minor defiance. He took one of Dolores’ cigarettes, and lit it with his Zippo, the one with the Jack Daniels logo that had traveled with him over more than half the planet. Doombeam eyes from the black trenchcoat swivelled and focused, but Slide was not about to be stared down by any twelve-year-old, no matter how homicidal. He met them squarely. The youngest began to raise his AK, but the trenchcoated leader made a cool-it gesture, and psycho-speared deep into Slide’s eyes, letting the beam carry its message. This was no child. The kid in the black trenchcoat was as old as Attila the Hun. In his world survival itself was a near-insupportable luxury, and all that remained was feral calculation and random death. Look at me, old-timer, then marvel and fear. You are history, and I am the face of the new millennium. I am primal, but you scream. We are here now, in this sorry city, but how long do you think it will be before you see these eyes in Paris, London, or Patterson, New Jersey?

The hooded informer broke the spell by pointing to a frightened individual with pomaded hair and a Little Richard moustache sitting two stools down from Lenny the Addict. He had once been number three in the hierarchy of Tetsu’s Office of Public Order, but now he was just a fragment of the past, fit only for speedy disposal. The man froze as he was identified. A fly landed on his left hand, but he didn’t appear to notice. As the captain beckoned him to his feet, his bladder gave way, staining the leg of his linen suit, and leaving a moisture trail on the barroom floor as he was led away. Slide let cigarette smoke drift from his nostrils as everyone in the Europa uniformly exhaled. Even the mercs in their paramilitary bravado knew they only lived because the three kids hadn’t been in a mood for massacre.

Dolores Haze turned to Slide. “I think it’s high time we braved the road to the airport.”

“Again the last plane out?”

“You want to stay and see what happens next?”

“It had occurred to me.”

“Are you even human, Slide?”

“Are any of us human, my dear Dolores? Aren’t we just a pack old twentieth century ghosts gazing aghast at the inevitable future.”

Published in the anthology Carved In Rock, 2003

THE LITERATE HANGOVER

“There is only one cure for a hangover, and that is to drink a bottle of very, very dry champagne the next morning”

—Dean Martin

“THE PLOP-PLOP WAS PAINFULLY DEAFENING, AND THE subsequent fizz approached my pain threshold. The morning was one in which even Alka Seltzer was an ordeal.”

Writing about the hangover is amazingly easy. Far easier, in fact, than writing about the drunk that preceded it. The hangover is present, lucid and indelible. With the hangover comes a terrible Edvard Munch clarity. The clarity is what makes the pain so awesome, and the guilt-wracked fog of obscured memory so dark and threatening. The idea that alcohol is nothing more than a chemical analog of Christianity (or vice versa) becomes totally plausible. A peak of euphoria is followed by a deep vale of tears, retribution, lamentation, and the agony of the damned.

Attempting to accurately portray intoxication from the intoxicated’s point of view is hard, since drunks rarely maintain the same point of view from one moment to the next. He or she is adrift on a sea of swaying incoherence, nearly impossible to reproduce except in broken English, or small subjective vignettes of how gravity warps out of whack. The only true grandmaster of literary inebriation was, of course, the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who could reproduce the high drunkard’s logic as well as the hallucinating hungover horrors, but, Hunter was Hunter and we will not see his like again in our short lifetimes.

At times I have seriously considered the possibility that Christianity is really only an analog of alcohol or maybe vice versa. Easy pleasure is followed by the pain of retribution, sure as night follows day, or that old Hank Williams concept of honky-tonking on a Saturday night followed by church on Sunday, although I don’t think Hank made it to too many churches. Whether this is correct or merely the product of atheist prejudice, a terrible price does have to be paid. The more wretched the excess of the night before, the more hideous the suffering that comes with the morning light. The only consolation in all this—aside from codeine and Valium—is the clear evidence that the hangover has produced some fine writing. But isn’t that the way of it with pain? Ask Iris Murdoch or the Marquis de Sade.

The hangover may actually be so easy to write that it represents something of a health hazard to the jobbing scribe. Back in the days when I labored in the salt mines of rock journalism, I and a couple of other scribblers developed a critical technique by which we went to a show, partook of the optimum ambiance, and then rated the performance by the intensity of the next day’s suffering. Maybe imprecise, but the readers understood, because these were the halcyon days when music was still measured by its excesses. Keith Moon drank cognac for breakfast, Keith Richards was still the Witch King of Angmar, and ’Sister Morphine’ was a communique from the front. Later, when too many peers became so grimly clean and twelve-step sober, and health was equated with virtue, the hangover ceased to be anything to boast about. No more the next-day Jack Daniels hero. One risked being talked about as having “a problem,” and suffered in diplomatic silence. Which is never easy, particularly as so many aspects of the modern world are best regarded with the jaundiced eye and toxic glaze of malevolent morning, especially when looking west to Washington.

Best ever hangovers in literature? The alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of The Vanities comes close to the fictional crest, as does the musician Larry Underwood in Stephen King’s The Stand, but my personal, and admittedly highly subjective prize has to go to the monumentally hard-boiled headache with which Mike Hammer awakes at the start of Mickey Spillane’s The Girl Hunters, when Hammer has been a down-and-out rummy for seven years, but must sober up and go rescue Velma from the Commies in the Kremlin. The choice in movies is packed with even more contenders. Obvious nominations have to go to Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, Paul Newman in Harper, and Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty. (Although Nolte is actually suffering the effects of not only booze, but also Percodan, steroids, and playing wide receiver in an NFL game.) The top honor, though, has to go to Jane Fonda as the washed-up actress, Alex Sternber-gen, in Sydney Lumet’s The Morning After, when she confronts every drunk’s worst nightmare—that somewhere in the density of the blackout, she has committed an unre-membered murder.

Best hangover in song? Simple. Has to be Johnny Cash’s ’Lonesome To The Bone’ . . .

The sun is roughly risin

On the roofs of Stagger town

The time for sweatin poison out

Is just now comin round

The mention of sweating poison reminds me that no discussion of the hangover is complete without touching on possible cures. Some swear by black coffee, Valium, or hot showers. John Belushi thought a Turkish bath was the perfect balm, but look what happened to him. I favor a large’n’greasy diner breakfast, Coca Cola, and codeine if I can get them, but the unfortunate truth is that only two things cure a hangover. One is time, and the other—be it the very, very cold dry champagne cited by Dean Martin at the head of this piece, a cold beer, a Bloody Mary, a Greyhound, a Margarita, or a suicidal Sam Peckinpah shot of straight tequila—is simply to go out—call it hobby, habit, or hair-of-the-dog—and have another drink.

LA CityBeat, 2008