EIGHT

 

     John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan. Martin Luther King. The Magic Bullet. Aliens. Roswell. The Mafia. The Illuminati. Plans For A Space Colony On The Moon. Che. Jimmy Hoffa. Government Spending. The Internet. The Rigged Presidential Elections. Taxes. If most people knew what I did, they’d want to talk. They’d go on TV, cause a stir and then they’d be put away for life. You wouldn’t hear about him or her ever again, it’d be pawned off as shock TV, crazy talk, a lark. They’d be made fun of on Late Night Talk Shows and demonized in the press. Most likely they’d be cast out and never heard from again, looked upon as mad crazed attention seekers.

 

     Others who actually know these things might be tight lipped until their deathbed for fear of what could happen, while others, well, they might write a book. Someone may write a book revealing everything, all the secrets of the world that they know as fact and call it fiction. It could happen. Hell, maybe it already did. Maybe they will write a book and say it’s fiction and expose these unkown secrets for what they truly are. They’ll put that book in the fiction section, because if you call something fiction, no matter how true it is people won’t take you seriously. Maybe say, a certain individual will write a book, maybe it is his own life story and it will be so **** up people will think it’s fiction. Maybe. You never know. Maybe he’ll call it Shadowhead.

 

     According to various sources and websites there were anywhere between 75,000,000 and 180,000,000 original books published over the course of history. How many were fiction? They say half. Of those half, how many were true stories? Out of some 38,000,000 to 90,000,000 fiction books how many actually happened or were based on true event? How many authors were just covering their ****? Odd are some were.

 

     I finished my first novel about the inventor of Thought Computer and The Thought Computer Network and how if people knew each other’s thoughts it’d create global genocide. So far I’ve gotten 48 rejections from agents, but I’ve sent out 120 queries so there is still hope, albeit diminishing, fading like a smoldering flame. It took me just over two months to write the thing, but the hardest part for me, from a writing standpoint was making the world implode. If you knew what I did you’d understand. The world, it will implode, but when is the question. The precise date is not known, but how we will implode, how we will “self destruct,” well that I already know. I’ve already read about it. How is a fact. When is the variable. Why? Well, we already know that one. Likely Roget’s Synonyms: Corruption. Power. Greed.

 

     According to the Myan Calendar and many great thinkers, in just four short days, the world will end. Today is December 17, 2012. It is 11: 12 a.m., a good week before Christmas. Some don’t think they will see the Holiday, but I know different. We have a little more than two days left, trust me. In a bar just down the street called The Playright a bartender tells me I am full of **** and I let him. If I have learned anything it is never disrupt the natural order of things. I finish my whiskey and play a song on the jukebox. I look though until something speaks to me. The bar here is almost empty, except for me and Josey, the local drunk. Well she isn’t so much as a drunk as an unhappy housewife. I’ve always been attracted to tortured souls, those who’ve lived hard, had it rough and are now looking for something nice, something real, some little slice of heaven on Earth. To me this Josey, is just looking for someone to call God. Someone to preach and confess her sins to.

 

     Today is my 21^st birthday and Josey is proably just a shade under 34, if I’m lucky. I put on a Bob Seger song, something that reminds me of Michigan. Through the smoky dim bar lights, the one that say Budweiser and past the freshly wiped dark fermica swirled tables with ashtrays lined up, ready for some evening cheer, I look at Josey in her short skirt, high heels, messy top, She reminds me of Dr. Stahl. I tell her she’d look good in glasses.

 

“The only glasses I’m looking through are Bob’s shot glasses here,” she says and looks to Bob, the bartender. Bob smiles and she finished her last drop. “Til’ the day I day,” she trails off, “Til’ the day I die…” I want to laugh or smile, but there is something sad behind that face of livation. Something is troubled behind that sharp wit and rough exterior.

 

     On the juke, “You’re so damn good, no one’s gotten to you yet…” And my hand tap, tap, taps against my thigh. In my backpack, next to my bar stool one over from Josey is all my money in this life, some $43,000 and I buy Josey another Dewars on ice.

 

     This is why she listens to my strange stories, this is why she nods and smiles when I tell her the stories I want to write. These drinks, my money, her time and my secrets, this is what I consider to be my social outlet. This is what

Webster would define as, “Mingling.” Roget’s Like Synonym: Hobnobbing. Letting Off Steam.

 

     I buy Josey a glass of Dewars and she acts like she’s interested. Women and booze. You can’t put a price on that. I tell her about how the world will end and she says she’s heard it all now. Josey in her high heels, older, not hip, more classy, knocks back her Scotch and holds my arm. She wants to dance, cut loose. And so here we are at 2 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, my 21^st birthday, and she is grabbing me and dancing, moving around the bar like a nymph, like a retired sex goddess back on the job. She kisses me. I don’t say it is my birthday, but Josey senses a twinkle in my eye. She says today is a good day.

 

     I order more Dewars, more Jim Beam. Josey is good looking in a raw sexual kind of way. Good looking in a little weathered sort of way, but tough as nails, strong, no **** about her. This is a real woman, sexy, a sharp legged lady who thought she once had things figured out, but now she’s not so sure anymore. I never asked if she was married, but I figured she was. Fact: When you are packing 9 inches of penis a lot of girls don’t take their vows so seriously. Fact#2: Josey also isn’t getting much back at home.

 

     Twelve drinks in and we are in my motel room at Motel 7, half a block away. Josey, me under the sheets, staining the linen, drinking and romping - this must be what heaven is like. Or maybe hell.

We do this mostly every other night, Josey and me and tonight she has to go. Right on cue. It is 7 p.m. and she has to cook dinner for her husband.

 

“It’s about that time sexy,” she barks in an 80-proof voice.

“He gets your cooking and so do I,” I say.

“Yeah well he’s **** his whole secretary staff. He only touches me when he has to, to keep the illusion of love alive for Tim.” Tim is her 13 year old son.

I nod and she leaves. This is probably why I would never get married. For every great wistful, make you wish you were married story, there are ten other horror stories.

 

     So, I’m here, Motel 7 in the heart of Los Angeles and it’s quiet now, no phone calls, no people in the next room ****. There is no polka-rap music blaring from next door. There is just me, wet sheets and the trace of Josey’s jasmine perfume still lingering in the air like a reminder of a better time. I sit up and try to picture her as a housewife, in an apron, vaccuuming, making spaghetti. It does not compute, not the Josey I have come to know. I think of all this and I bet her husband doesn’t even know her. It’s sad, but then again maybe she is lying to both of us. I think of this Josey with a 13 year old boy and her husband doesn’t even know her anymore. Not like me, not the woman that can sling back Dewars Scotch like it’s Fruit Punch. Not the woman who can spin to win. She is the magician and I am her rabbit. Now I’m back in the hat.

   

     CNN is on a low volume 24/7 and I get up, light a cigarette and start to write. Sex doesn’t tire me out like most people. So I write and halfway through the first chapter of my own life story, my new book of secrets and I think this is not for kids. Not so much. In fact, this is probably not for anyone. I mean who wants to hear about some ****’s horror story? About his wretched childhood? About government secrets? Pip would laugh at me. He’d call me a freak. Who would read this? Most Likely Answer: Not Many.

Distraught, I call CNN and ask them if they’d like to interview me again, if they remember me and they don’t. I try to explain, but they hang up on me. Click. I call Fox News, and it’s the same story. Click. I don’t even get my name out.

 

      It’s fifty five dollars a night here, the cheapest place I could find. At this rate I have less than two years to become a writer or find work. Fifty five dollars and they clean it for me everyday between 11:30 a.m. and noon. If I don’t eat or drink Jim Beam, I’ll have close to two years and five months to find work. Fifty Five dollars a night and I have over 65 cable channels to watch. Clean towels. New pillows. I can buy Josey drinks until her husband comes home, until her husband keels over. I have free internet connection and two double beds. By now the pizza delivery guy doesn’t know what to make of me. I’d wager he thinks my wife kicked me out. I’d say he thinks I’m strung out. Google: Smack. Heroine. PCP.

 

     The next day I head out for air. It is close to 11:30 a.m., my favorite time of a Hollywood day, a time when anything can happen. Walking down El Segundo Blvd. I see a sign that says open auditions. I also see a line that says keep walking. I honestly don’t know why I stop, maybe because of something I feel or maybe because my room is still being cleaned, but I stop and take up my spot at the end of the line. It is close to noon and I figure this may take a while.

 

“It’s for some new show they are doing,” says the woman in front of me.

“What show?” I say.

“**** if I know.”

“Thanks for sharing,” I say.

 

     No one knows what this is, but hour after hour, people seem to be getting fed up with waiting in line and they leave. I am no math expert, but when you subtract a large number it gets smaller, it makes the line shorter.

I tell someone that I’ve always thought I could be an actor, but growing up in the sticks of the midwest I never really had a chance. They nod. A writer, an actor, a director, a musician, it’s all connected nowadays anyway. You tell someone you write and act and it’s passed off as the status quo. If you get a job as an actor and get connected, you can get a book or screenplay sold. That is if they like you. That’s life and that’s how it works. It’s a popularity contest. It’s high school on a global scale. It’s what do you have and what can youget me. If you are outside the business of a dream you’re always looking in. Life doesn’t know you. If you are in, the more extra curiculars the better.

Inside the building they say everyone with the last names A-L go this way and a skinny man with a gay porno mustache from 1972 motions to the right. Then he says everyone with last names M-Z, get your aspiring asses against that wall bitches. There are papers to fill out, forms to sign. There are cameras. Lines. Fruit Punch and Cookies. Down a level, what seems like a mile away and maybe it is, people sit on a chair, answer the same three questions then they get into it. They are acting like the host of some new show. And they say their lines. Down a level, a mile away, a chubby man in his mid-thirties is putting on a show, being the host for some big new thing and my back throbs.

 

A guy next to me asks if I want anything?

 

“Anything?” I say.

“Ya, you know?” he says and makes a sniffing sound.

“Coke or a Kleenex?” I say and he frowns. He says, you know to UP your performance. I think about it and comply. Why not? He says, eighty bucks and I’ll be UP for three days straight. He says my woman will be even happier than she’s even been. I give him eighty bucks and he gives me a bag of coke.

 

“Hold my place in line?” I ask and he nods.

 

     In the bathroom of this building/auditorium I enter a stall. Then I snort my brains out. All sixty dollars worth, up my nose. And Woah! Woah Nelly!

Suddenly I feel enpowered, like what I say matters. I feel like I could take anyone or anything. I step back in line and the big man, all 300 pounds of him smiles.

“How you feeling?”

“Like a million bucks,” I say.

“I bet, you do it all?” he says and I nod.

“Oh man,” he goes on.

 

     In line, electricity flows through my legs, my arms, my synapses. Facts, information, dates are all there at the ready. My mind is a Drive-In movie and I’m first row. I am nervous, but it’s a good nervous. I ask this guy his name and he says Rufus.

 

     “Rufus my man, you got a business card?” I ask and he says no, but gives me his cell phone number. This is how I got hooked on cocaine. Anyways standing in line I am nervous so I say with much vigor and intensity, like the whole world is listening to my every word, “Cocaine (benzoylmethylecgonine) is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is both a stimulant of the central nervous system and an appetite suppressant. Because of the way it affects the mesolimbic reward pathway cocaine is highly addictive. Drugs Weekly. March Issue. 2006. Page 20.”

 

     I say this and Rufus gives a look like he just stepped in dog ****.

“Damn. That **** speaks to you,” he says to me.

 

     Two hours later they call my name and I jump up on stage like a spring chicken. They ask me questions and I say my lines. I am a performing army of one. I bounce around, energetic and the world, it smiles.