ÐÏࡱá>þÿ þÿÿÿ”)*+,-./012"ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿþÿà…ŸòùOh«‘+'³Ù0|˜ ¬¸ÐÜèø  , 8 D P\dltä ssMichael W. DeanichichNormal  rm5rmMicrosoft Word 8.0@Œ†G@Ts ZÂ@¶¨1s¸º@te…xÅÔ¹doc@# …xÅ þÿÕÍÕœ.“—+,ù®DÕÍÕœ.“—+,ù®4ð hp„Œ”œ ¤¬´¼ Ä Òä taste neat k½Ì³   Title˜ 6> _PID_GUIDäAN{C3BA7637-D00C-4A36-9C85-33963DDCCF85} The Simple Pleasures of a Complex Girl by Michael W. Dean Copyright ©2005 Michael W. Dean support@livingthrough.com Kittyfeet Press P.O. Box 29704 Los Angeles, CA 90029 www.kittyfeet.com contact: www.kittyfeet.com/mail2.htm “There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars are outrageous anarchists.” -Alvin Toffler in 1970 from his book, Future Shock Chapter one “Dating three men isn't three times the fun. It's three times the hassle.” You tell this to your best girlfriend, Lydia. She tips her glass of wine and agrees. You look at her sitting in front of you at a table outside of the deco-hipster restaurant Fred 62. Lydia looks hot. It is hot. She has a little glow of sweat showing on her cheek and on what you can see of her chest above her dress line. It’s Los Angeles in early summer. Lydia looks pretty and hot and vulpine. Meow. And you don’t even really like girls. You say, “Maybe I’m sick of getting pushed around by men. Maybe I should get pushed around by women for a change.” Lydia laughs and says, “I’m envious of you and your three boyfriends. If I had your problems, I’d be home. They talk in my Zen group about reaching a state of non-desire where you stop chasing things and then they come to you. I know it’s stupid to say, but if I had you’re problems, I’d have no problems. I’d quit wanting. I’d be downright concluded.” You say, “I dunno. In Europe, they call having more than one lover ‘having a complicated life.’ As in ‘She has a complicated life.’ I would have to agree. It ain’t all kittens and ice cream.” The waiter brought the menu. You say, “Can you turn down the music out here? I don’t mean to be a pill, but people are trying to conversate.” The gay hipster waiter frowns, says, “OK”, turns on his heel and is gone. Lydia replies, “Wow... Cali, you sure can…wow.” “What?” you demand. “I don’t know…you just seem to have to take over in any given situation. You picked this table for us, it’s right under that speaker, and then you ask the guy to turn it down. I love you girl, but sometimes you push people a bit.” “He turned it down, didn’t he?” “So? He’s probably in the kitchen spitting in our food now. I’ll bet you’d walk into a Cajun restaurant and complain that the fish is burnt.” You stare her down over the top of your sunglasses, stare at your lunch, then back at Lydia and say, “Babykitty, rim me gently, all night long. If you’re saying I’m a bitch, you are darned wrong, ma’am. I am simply a person with, as you’d say in your therapy groups, good boundaries and hearty, well-developed self-actualization.” “There’s a difference between not getting stepped on and abjectly clipping people’s tails,” said Lydia. “You, California Ann Christensen, snip the tails of others”. You put a pickle slice on your fork and bend it back as if to catapult it into Lydia’s hair. She giggles and you eat the pickle. You both smile, cease to prattle, and you wolf at your food. You consume half your steak in about two minutes. Lydia picks at her vegetarian special. She says, “Woman, slow down. For someone who seems to need to have to control every aspect of her environment, you seem to have very little control over your eating issues. You know, my women’s therapy circle has a meeting for that on Thursdays. You have put on a few pounds”. You snap, “Yeah, and men have seemed to be more interested in me than ever. While you’re out at your goddamned lady’s auxiliary church group, I’m out loving life and living.” Lydia: “How’s all that boy juggling working out for you anyhow?” “OK. The rocker boy, Ajax, is such a boy. He can fuck all night, but he’s not too bright. Although I think I came closer than ever the other night with him to, you know….”. “Having an orgasm? Cali, you can say it out loud. For someone as damn outspoken as you, who can not only say “fuck” in a crowded theater….” “This is a restaurant, dear Lee-do….” Sez you. “….Crowded restaurant….and also tell everyone how to adjust the environs of said restaurant to suit your current mood, how come you can’t say ‘orgasm’ out loud? That’s pretty odd. Come on, you’re a college-educated modern woman of the World.” She pauses and asks, “Did you get those toys I suggested?” “Yes Lydia. I bought a vibrator. Two in fact.” You say the word “vibrator” in a sort of reverse stage whisper—louder than the rest of your transmission, as if to be loud enough to be heard throughout the room, but skillfully modulated to be just quiet enough to not be heard outside your table. Then you got well louder and pointed your loving mouth elsewhere, “WAITER. Can I please have some more coffee? This cup has gone cold.” Lydia rolls her eyes and says, “You’re not really a bitch, right? You just need to control everything.” “Lay off sister. Anyway, yeah, I played with the toys. Alone and with Ajax. I even bought that book you said to get…..um…” “Releasing your Inner Woman-Love…” “Yes Lydia. Releasing your Inner Hippie Love. I read it. Yawn. But I like the vibrators. I call them my ‘simple pleasures’. I may even buy some more. I just don’t think orgasms exist. I think it’s a marketing myth invented by men. Or Oprah.” You actually pry a rare hearty belly laugh from Lydia with that one. She says, “So, OK, there’s Ajax, your empty headed motorcycle boy. How about the preppie?” “Trent is not a preppie.” “His name is Trent. Trent Seward, isn’t it? Sounds like the president of the yacht club.” “Well, unlike Ajax, Trent does have a job. And a nice one, too. Ajax never buys me dinner. His idea of going Dutch is picking up the tax. He predicates everything on the fat check he’s gonna get when his band gets their elusive record deal. I guess no one’s given him the memo that the music industry has been decimated and is no longer signing many people. And the ones they do sign, they aren’t paying much.” Lydia replies, “…Decimated by Trent’s work, if I am to know correctly. What’s he do again?” You say, “He designs and sells distributed computing and peer-to-peer applications. Though he didn’t invent the exact program that’s doing the devastation of the recording and movie industries. He only does marketing now. He’s graduated from programming to marketing. The new program that enables people to share files without leaving any way of getting caught was invented by some guy who got dropped from a major label. The label treated him like shit, so he actually learned programming solely to do it. Anyway, basically Trent sells end-to-end business solutions with turnkey hardware-software e-commerce solutions.” Lydia giggles. “Wow. I thought they banned that kind of Internet bullplop triple-plus-un-good doublesqueak back in 1998 when the synthetic economy died.” “Nope. And Trent’s company actually makes money from repeat business, not from selling stock. Although the RIAA and the MPAA are currently suing them for allegedly contributing to online piracy. But it’ll never stick…it wasn’t even made for piracy, it was made for whiteboarding corporate assets within a given company’s intranet. It’s basically for teleconferencing, but some nifty hacker guy messed with it and changed the security settings and renamed it ‘PlunderTool 2.0’. It’s really called ‘ProductivityTool 2.0’ Also, that Extended Fair Use ruling from 2006 will wipe the lawsuits out.” . Lydia looks where her watch would be if she had one and says, “Being that it’s 2008 now, by my best calculations, are you dating anyone else, kitty fluff?” “Still seeing Vessie, although I don’t know if you can actually call it seeing someone when they’re 2000 miles away. But I have a better rapport with that old redneck than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s pretty nifty. I’d love to kill him and eat his brains to assimilate his serenity.” You laugh. “By the way, he sent me tickets for some band called ‘KTP’ that he’s friends with. They’re from Houston too, but they’ll be in LA tomorrow night. Wanna be my date?” “As long as you don’t ask the band to turn down, I’m there.” Chapter two The next day you’re in your studio apartment, thinking about what Lydia said yesterday at lunch. You know she’s wrong. You do not have a control problem. Things just get on your nerves. Also, most humans are idiots. But you just have a “life goes on, damnit” feeling. You’ve cultivated this all through your twenty years—twenty years of disappointment and emotional, intellectual and spiritual torture. Mom was a drunk who liked to call you fat. Dad split early on. (Can you blame him?) You felt powerless. So you control what you can. Volume, temperature, and you always try to steer the conversation. Yet you don’t feel sorry for yourself. You’ve just begun to live. Things have really started to feel slimmery, xool and nifty as of late. Lydia had told you, “You used to seem so goal oriented in all you do. But now you seem more process oriented. Whatever it is, it seems to be working for you. Funny…maybe you can even do process-oriented dating.” “…Or maybe even object oriented,” you say as you pick up your vibrators and other fun toys from the bed and pack them into an old purse hanging at the foot of your four-post bed. You stand there stunned at how cool your life is. You do feel a little bit is missing. But you’re young you have time for that. Basically, you just want to make sure you don’t die without having done something important. You wanna make a difference. Maybe not even be remembered, but just know someday, know for you, that you’ve changed the World a bit for the better. That’s more important to you than having an orgasm. You like sex. It just never really seems over to you. Sex usually feels unresolved. You wonder what it’s like to cum. Ahhh….flug it. That’s a goal. You enjoy the ride. Who needs the destination. Sounds overrated to you. You stare in the mirror for a spell and pet the short, blond wavy hair on your head. Vessie says you look like a 1940s movie star. You’d tend to agree with him. “Damn, I’m cool”, you say out loud. You don’t feel a slimmer of ego in this. You are thanking some devilishly divine force that cleaved you out of spark and clay. This thing that pooled together carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and a few other ingredients into California soup. Damn. You’d love to know this god. You’d love to meet her and kiss her and slap her on the ass and buy her lunch. Again, today it’s hot in Los Angeles. You look at the thermometer mounted outside your window. It’s 99 degrees. You pour a large glass of good, chilled wine and gulp it down. You think about God. Your concept of God is a 700-foot tall really smart, really foxy woman. You know that it must be more complex than that, but you know that the power of iconography is such that giving a friendly human image to the incomprehensible just works. Ya know? You peel your sundress off and stare at your naked body. Not perfect by magazine standards, but you flucking adore it. And you know you can stop traffic in this dress. Without even dolling yourself up. Yeah, OK. You have a little bit of belly. But you know that real men prefer that to the anorexic magazine pin-up bitches that breed like cloned sheep in this town. Los Angeles sets the standards for the World, and they’re imaginary standards. Basically unobtainable. One can’t be that skinny, that hip, that funny, detached, and whatever else passes for human in Hollywood. And it ain’t the truth. Men who have heart, and often a good mind, like girls with some ass on them. Skinny bitches are two-dimensional. They are cut-outs made from photoshopped head shots. Duotone headshots set to black and warm gray number 11. Headshots vertically stretched by unticking the “constrain proportions” tic mark in the resize dialogue box. There’s not enough Prozac and coke in Silver Lake to make you wanna be a photoshopped cut out. On the other hand, Los Angles does not, prior to common opinion, suck. Most people who hate it contempt it without investigating it. Many have never been here. Or if they have, it was just for a day. Hell, you can’t renew your driver’s license in New York or San Francisco without raising your right hand and renouncing Los Angeles. You don’t know much else. You lived in Jasper, Texas until you were five. You dad was a real Texan. You liked him. After dad left, your mom moved to Los Angeles. She wasn’t from Texas. She hated Texas—considered it beneath her. Mom’s drinking drove you to Al-Anon. (You used to wear a shirt to meetings you found somewhere. It said, “Daddy drinks because you cry.” It pissed people off, but you thought it was funny). You ran into an old friend on the street the other day. He said, “Hey California. How are you? You still going to Al-Anon?”. “Nope. I’m cured.” You laughed. He said, “What do you mean?” You replied the truth: “My mother died last year.” Mom was always out of control. Maybe that’s why you always have such a stalwart desire to be in control. And she drank herself to death at age 49. She looked eighty and in the end had to wear diapers and was on six different medications—liver, brain, bladder, thyroid, etc. etc. But she’s gone. Maybe that’s why your life is going better lately. You didn’t cry when she died. You cried when Hubert Selby, Jr. died, and you never even met him. Bye-bye mom. I loved you, but…. You pick up a different dress. You remember what your first boyfriend, Cash Newmann, used to say. “You want a different girl? Just buy her a different dress”. Pretty damn sexist, but pretty damn true. You wonder how you can be a feminist when you agree with some of the most seemingly misogynistic one-liners extant. Like, “Every man secretly desires two women: a thin one to be seen with and a plump one for the bedroom.” Bingo. Total truth. Probably written by the same swine who said, “It’s good for your complexion baby.” But it’s the 700-foot-tall woman God’s awful truth nonetheless, kitties. You not only believe this truism, but you’d kinda want to be both of those women, at least to some men. You put on a different dress and a hot breeze hits you through the open window. You think about another manism, “There’s nothing as naked as a half-dressed woman.” You are pretty damn half-dressed and you feel pretty damn beautifully naked. You turn on the air conditioner, even though the window is open. You like both. You stare out over palm trees and little quarter-million-dollar tiny houses. And yours is a relatively cheap neighborhood, by Los Angeles standards. East Side, on the cusp of Silver Lake and Echo Park, just off Sunset Blvd. You like the East Side. Silver Lake, Echo Park, even Los Feliz. Heaven to you. Leave Hollywood to the wannabes. West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Venice…they barely exist to you. You have no reason to go to any of them very often. (Though the proximity to the ocean gives them slightly cleaner air.) The hot breeze pushes cool air onto your inner thigh and you feel like humping your God’s 700-foot leg like the little puppy you are sometimes. Damn life feels good. You feel a little tipsy from the wine. You barely drink and you have plans to quit for good on your 21st birthday. Fuck convention. You don’t wanna turn into your dead mother. “Damn I love life”. You pull that purse back onto the bed and follow it in. Purrrrrrrrrrrrr……. You wake up and it’s late afternoon. Your simple pleasures are spread on the bed beside you. It’s fucking hot. You really don’t want to go drive anywhere. You’ve structured your life so you don’t have to. You work about twenty hours a week, if that, doing timecode logging, translations and creation of subtitles for DVDs by independent film companies. You know how to do all the stuff yourself. You’re smart. You are making good money for your friends and underselling all other DVD subtitle creators by half. You work when you like. You sit in a coffee shop surrounded by wannabe screenwriters pecking away while you actually work. At least once a day some guy tries to chat you up. “Whatcha writing?” “Nothing. I’m not a writer. I’m working.” You charge 6000 bucks to do a 90-minute movie, with timecode tables in E-Figs. E-figs stands for “English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.” That’s the languages most DVDs are translated into. Although most individual copies contain only two languages because they make different versions with different region restrictions in a futile attempt to stop piracy. Most people charge ten grand, or even twelve grand, for translating into E-Figs and preparing the requisite timecode tables. You do one movie a month. You make 6000 a month for doing about 80 hours of work. You save money because you speak five languages and do the translations yourself. Sometimes if it gets busy, you farm some of it out to a few people around America and overseas—people that you’ve never even met, pay them well, and still make money. All under the table. You found your first timecode job, and later your alternate translators, on Craigslist.com. You love Craigslist. You love computers. Hell, you met Vessie on MySpace.com. You sent him an e-missive mainly because three women on there (one of whom you know) posted that he had fucked them between six and eight times on their first date. And he did samewise with you. And he tells great stories and consistently makes you laugh your sweet, pink, curvy ass off. Computers fucking rock. These high-tech modern miracles enable you to live the cranky control freak-yet-hippie vagabond life you love. Your apartment is very sparse, and a very fast laptop on a long, empty oak table is most of it. That and a few chairs, a futon, and clothes. Lots of clothes. You put on a different sundress and step on your scale. 150. You’re five-foot nine. Hardly skinny, but not fat. You’re just damn cute. And still smiling from your pre-nap self-loving buzzing. It’s great to be alive. You walk outside and fire up your 1966 Plymouth Barracuda. Surprisingly, it starts on the first try. You look at the musky Los Angeles sky. First time you’ve been out today. It’s about four PM, and the smog is so thick you could chew it. You feel ashamed to be a human being sometimes. We really are decimating this planet. The World population has doubled in your lifetime. That’s why you’re fixed. No puppies fur Cali. Most doctors won’t perform that operation on an unmarried person under 30 with no kids. You lied, brought a friend to play the husband, and borrowed Lydia’s one-year-old niece to take to the first interview. You were damn sure you didn’t want to ever have a kid. You know that like you know your name. Planned Parenthood did the operation for free, at the Marin facility. You had to walk through unruly pro-life protestors and be escorted in by an armed guard. And you had to go four times. Amazing that this World will let anyone make a baby, but they make you take several passes at interviews before you can opt not to have a baby. You feel it should be the other way around. You told this to the lady at Planned Parenthood, and she agreed. A few years back, the Pentagon released data that imply that we may be far more fucked than previously thought when it comes to global warming. We might soon have floods that will sink coastal enclaves like Los Angeles, London, New York and Hamburg. We could be in hand-to-hand street fights over living space in as little as 20 years. And the Pentagon is usually unusually conservative with stuff like this. They sided with Bush, and Bush was the dood who signed the thing that undid the thing that sexy Mister Clinton signed that was supposed to protect us. Your car could be said to be part of the problem, not the solution, when it comes to global warming, but you differ. You keep him tuned to the brim, rocking as finely as he can. You don’t drive much, maybe ten miles a week. And you aren’t gonna sell this thing. You are gonna drive it ‘til it drops and then donate it to science. Or art. You pull out of Silver Lake onto the 101 South freeway at the Vermont Street exit and head North. You jockey for position with lots of other cars. Most of them are either really cheap and messed up or really expensive and fancy. Yours is a rarity: cheap and fancy. You traded a computer for it, a computer that was probably worth a grand, if that. As you chug along the molasses parking lot that is the 101 at 4:05 in the afternoon, you mull stuff over. You think about your recent small claims court case against a client who wouldn’t pay. You won. Lydia had advised against the suit. She said, “If someone else needs it more, let them have. Your 700-foot-tall sexy Goddess will provide.” You have learned a lesson about money: It’s good to have, and it’s good to stand up for, but not to the point of risking an ulcer. You spent 5000 dollars worth of worry to collect 3000 dollars. You think about love. You usually only date artists. They are really the only humans as far as you know. You’ve dated some men with no art in their hearts. They weren’t bad, they didn’t beat you, and they could usually afford better restaurants, but they couldn’t fuck and they couldn’t tell good stories. They didn’t really heat you up you between your legs, and, far more importantly, they didn’t heat you up between your ears. Trent fits into that category. You sometimes wonder why you bother with him. Maybe he’s just easy to push around. He’ll blow you on command, but he isn’t much of a fuck. He’s no Vessie. You love Trent, but like you’d love a friend. You genuinely care about him. But he doesn’t rock your world. “My god. Vessie can fuck”, you say out loud as you pull off the Melrose Avenue exit. You think about your first night together. He didn’t look like someone girls would go nuts over, but you felt better around him than you ever had. And it didn’t seem (and wasn’t) at all phony. He really liked you, and the charm and comfort he oozed was certified by everything he did. Why in this smoggy world couldn’t you keep yourself from kissing him deep within eight seconds of meeting him? And why did he seem like he appreciated it more than any man you’d ever met, while simultaneously seeming like if you didn’t kiss him, he would be equally fine with it? Vessie is short, stocky, a little cocky and slightly overweight and a little out of shape. He looks like he used to go to the gym but got bored with it. He’s got fucked-up teeth and a past to match. He’s got longish brown hair, but he’s balding a little in the front and on the top. (Are you getting turned on yet?) And as an ex-Texas ranger with pension, a misprision retired early under less-than-honorable circumstances who makes his current living running a record store in Houston specializing in country and rockabilly, he ain’t rich. And he’s 39. Way too old for you. But he isn’t. He doesn’t look it. And he certainly doesn’t love like it. This guy has the energy of three eighteen-year-old boys. And he’s far more fun. And he can’t get enough of three things: Telling you how pretty you are in a million different ways. Talking and listening better than any human you’ve ever encountered. Lapping up the kittyswamp where your legs meet. Loving up the lavender of your inner-moist cave. Even when you’re on your monthly. He doesn’t care. He cannot get enough of you. You told him about your “God is a woman” theory. He said, “Then the more I pleasure a woman with my tongue, either from direct stimulation or from telling entertaining stories, the more God will love me. Talking to you and lapping on you are my prayer, sparklette.” You agreed. He told you, “You are a beautiful cat in a room full of gerbils.” So you’re in your cool Detroit Mopar vessel sluicing up the dirty, crappy part of Melrose to get your VD test results. It’s only about a mile, but it takes a while. It’s almost five now. It took you an hour to go five miles. You sigh loudly and angrily out loud. This is why you work at home. Whenever you drive, probably three times a week, you understand why there’s a televised car chase with the police in LA at least once a week. It’s not just criminals, some of them are just folks who wig out from the heat, the traffic and the pressure to “make it”, and go ballistic in their cars. That’s why you quit your day job—network administrator for a pharmaceutical company. That’s why you’ve structured your life and work in such a way that you rarely have to give in to the hell of Los Angeles traffic and heat, the second worst in the country. (Houston is about ten degrees hotter than LA, it’s wet heat, not dry heat, and it’s number one in America for traffic and smog, as well as body fat. Actually Denver, Houston and Los Angeles all trade places for number one, two and three when it comes to smog.) You liked computer administrative work. It was nice work, except for dealing with traffic and an array of bland coworkers and a daily parade of PEBCAKS (admin shorthand for “problem exists between chair and keyboard”). Computers do what you tell them to. They don’t have moods. You like logging timecode for the very same reason. It’s very exact and very absolute. And you like it better than admin work, because you don’t have to leave the house and deal with humans. You sit in the VD clinic waiting room reading a week-old paper. The LA Monthly. Some guy actually tries to hit on you. “Hi. Come here often?” You ignore him and he goes away. The woman finally calls your number and gives you the results in writing. Negative for HIV. Negative for Syphilis. Negative for Gonorrea. Negative for Chlamydia. You actually seem surprised. She offers to counsel you. You pass. You get back in the car and head back to Silver Lake. You stop for gas. You run your credit card, start to pump and accidentally let go of the lever. It’s one of those old pumps where you have to re-run the credit card if you do this. Fuck! You get really really angry. Some guy walks up and asks for a quarter and you yell “Leave me alone!”. You never give money to panhandlers, but you don’t usually yell at them either. It’s just that sometimes life is really fucking hard and simple stuff makes you extremely mad. You run the credit card again and pump. It costs 40 bucks to fill your antique boat of a car. You take the surface streets. Less humans in your way. Even so, people cut you off and risk accidents to be the first one to wait at the red light. That’s Hollywood. Which is why you live four miles east of Hollywood. Jesus Christ it’s fucking hot. Even for August. Oh wait, it’s only May. Man, your brain is baking in this heat. It’s hard to tell what month it is. As much as you love life and humans, you pretty much think most of them are blank food tubes who only exist to eat, shit, eat, and shit out more blank food tubes. Most humans are born only to be some salesman’s mark. That’s why you’ve basically become nocturnal. You usually get up around ten AM, get jacked on coffee (or as you love to call it, “worry juice”) and knock out some e-mails and work until around two. Then you usually sleep until five. Crash out naked in the SoCal heat and nap away the hottest and crankiest part of each eternal summer day. Love yourself really well before and after the nap. You brew an incapacitatingly strong cup of coffee before the nap and put it in the fridge. Then after the nap, you get up, love yourself with a verve unbridled in a dozen amateur pornos (the best kind) and three romance novels (yuck) and two backstage trysts with the star du jour of alterna-rockdom (Maybe mrow. Maybe yuck. Maybe both.) Then you drink that cold worry juice and start a new day. Go see one of your two local lovers. (Or occasionally one, then the other.) And then go home alone. You love to sleep alone. Fall asleep around 4 AM watching old movies. You used to have a “one man a day” rule, but screw it. Life’s too short. It’s a perfect situation. Ethical slutdom. If you loved one, you’d pick. But you like having three. A lot. A whole hell of a lot. A whole fuck of a hell of a heck of a lot. Damn, you like men. And your men all know about each other. (Though you try to avoid them running into each other. That’s always a little awkward. There really is no such thing as truly free love). And they’re all cool with it. And they all use condoms with the other women, but don’t with you. And you think you believe them. You are dissatisfied with the ending of most movies and most books. Most endings feel either unrealistic, tacked on, or not like an ending at all, more like the producer or studio said, “We need this thing now. Wrap it up!” Or all three. You want things with more finality than that. But love, and even ethical-slutdom sex, isn’t always that neat. When you date three men, one is always on the way in, one is always on the way out, and one usually is mad at you. Or you are mad at him. But right now, it seems like you’ve learned to control this. You’ve managed to keep all the plates in the air spinning pretty well all at the same time. Minimized the hassle. Maximized the return. For months. The only thing you’d love is a little more love. You’re starting to think you might have it in Vessie. You’re gravitating more towards him and more away from the other two men. Or the other man and the other boy. Trent is thirty—a decade older than you, but he’s a boy too. Ajax is only 22, and also a boy. Even though he’s a damn good artist. He’s an unemployed erotic photographer and a very underemployed and poorly paid musician. In fact, Ajax’s band is leaving on tour in a week anyway. He tried to borrow money from you to help finance it. Things just seem to be swaying you to Vessie. And you think you might actually be falling a little bit in love. What ever that is. You slither your cool car onto Sunset Blvd. There’s a cop behind you. Your tags are expired. It’s not that you don’t have the money. It’s more that you hate standing in lines. You are out of control in that situation. Make a mental note to take care of the tags. Or not. You can sweet talk your way out of almost anything. The next night: Driving down near the 7th Street Bridge in Los Angeles is sort of a scary proposition, especially for two white girls alone. Especially for two white girls alone who look like they have some money. You’ve been driving around the same eight-block area in the golden Devil’s triangle between downtown, Chinatown and the garment district for twenty minutes and are about ready to give up. The alleged address of the alleged concert did not seem to exist. You hate this. It’s hard to tell if the address is in fact extant because this is one of those creepy hoods with constant renovation that never seems to get finished. Street construction signs redirect you in a mousie maze of hazard and uncertainty, and flashing lights on sawhorses throw pernicious silhouettes on the sides of bridges and walls. The walls are bare—no tagging. This area is too fucked up and barren for any gang to even bother claiming. The only thing creepier than being lost in a no-man’s land of industrial decay and being totally alone is when you find yourself not totally alone. Every few minutes, you find yourself at an endless red light and some shadow figure approaches the car. These people look like sad refuse and scare the crap out of you. You and Lydia manually lock four doors and drive on through the red light. It’s not like you’re gonna get a ticket or get hit by another car. There’s no cops and no citizens anywhere in this patch of bombed-out Los Angeles. You’re about ten blocks below skid row. You say, “Let’s just go. That last one looked like a bridge troll from Where the Wild Things Are.” It’s true, he did. Tattered rags, murderous look, and you could smell him with the windows rolled up. He wanted to wash your windshield for a dollar. You screamed “NO!” so loud that he had to be able to hear you. He started “washing” your windows anyway. It only made them more dirty. You drove through, accidentally almost hitting him. Ninety seconds later Lydia points ahead and says, “Is that it?” You see a bunch of cars in front of a warehouse with no address. This might be the correct location for the KTP concert. You spot a see a guy waving cars in. This could have been the address Vessie mentioned, but it also could be a trap where homeless people lure nice people like you and Lydia and force them to make doggy porn for export at gunpoint and then mash your body into a paste to fertilize their opium poppy and coco leaf crops. You chance it and drive it into the lot. The first thing you see are Texas flags everywhere. Except they are not just the normal, standard-issue Texan Lone Star red, white and blue flag. They are that flag with a red circle “A” for anarchy painted over the top white field. Weird bunch. The guy waving the cars in is dressed sort of like the thing that tried to wash your windows, except instead of being of indeterminate age, gender and species, this one is a cute male about 25. He’s preciously gaunt, dressed head to toe in old, worn, tight black leather. He’s wearing a cowboy hat and looks sleazy and cool. “What the fuck is this place?” you ask Lydia. She says, “Dawn of the Dead meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre … Meets Slacker. You both laugh. It’s true though, cowboy attire is everywhere, but these aren’t the cowboys of movies. They are young, slick, hip and look kinda like dirty rock stars. You add, “…meets ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’.” Then you notice a bunch of folks that look like yuppies. They look very much not at home here. Yet they are talking and laughing with the punker cowboys. There’s kids too. Teens. A couple babies. People of all ages. And even a few old hippie-lookin’ folk in their 70s. Odd. These look like people who would not mix. You park the car and hope it’s still there and in a driveable condition at the end of the night. There’s no valet and apparently no security. “I hope that bridge troll doesn’t come back and pee on the car. I really don’t like this place”, sez you. Lydia sez, “I love you sweetie honey, but you gotta live some. You have constant issues with any situation you cannot control. You need to quit grabbing the wheel so much”. You say, “That’s your psychobabble therapy crap coming out, girlfriend. Do you ever say anything anymore that comes from your own mouth, or are you just gonna parrot that dude you give all your money to every week? I really don’t like this place. Let me put it in terms you can grok: When I am in a place with weird punker cowboys surrounded by screeching rag pickers from deep in the night, I feel that my personal safety is compromised. When my personal safety is compromised, I feel that you are not respecting my needs when I want to leave.” Chapter three Lydia kisses you on the cheek and grabs your hand and pulls you through the murder of punkers to the entrance. There’s a guy by the door who seems to be poised for the duty and position of doorman. You accost him. “Hey…who’s in charge here? We have backstage passes and want to go inside.” The tall sleazy cute cowpunk drawls sweetly, “No one’s in charge, honey. We’re anarchists. There’s no generals here. We all wear one stripe in this brigade.” He sizes you up and down. It doesn’t seem like he’s checking you out sexually. It seems like he’s just trying to figure out why you’re here. He seems a little apprehensive. Cowpunk takes your ticket that’s marked “BS” for backstage and leads you inside. He stamps your hand with a cowskull stamp with the letters BS inside the skull. You follow him in. You notice that as soon as he vacates his post, another cowpunker from outside, slithers over and mans the post. It really does seem like no one’s in charge, like these folks slide and sidle in and out and ameba into the space and place they’re needed. You hover for a second and take in a snip of the speak that is conversating outside at checkpoint Charlie. “Sorry, you can’t come in. This is a fragrance-free event and you’re obviously wearing cologne…” You think, “Fucking Freaks.” You ask your cowpunk leader-du-jour about it. He says, “We are not a fragrance-free event. We’re very, how you say in English, (he chuckles) ‘Live and let live’.” “So why turn that man away? The ticket sign out front even says ‘no one turned away for lack of funds’. “That guy was a cop.” Sez your punker. You wonder why a cop can’t come to this concert. Are concerts illegal? You remember what Vessie told you about KTP: “They have the power to change.” And “You won’t get what you want, but you’ll get what you need.” Punkcow leads you through a bunch of makeshift rooms divided by hanging sheets. You hear people working on setting things up, hammering, you see sparks from welding a few spaces over. You accidentally look at it and quickly look away, trails following your vision for several minutes after. Over the PA system by the stage, a tape is playing. Some song you’ve never heard that seems to be called “Big Jesus Trash Can”. Not what you’d usually listen to; out-of-body bass playing, minimalist incendiary drums, fucked-up hard rock with a swinging stripper beat. It’s evil, yet ravishingly exquisite. It chills your spine and makes your nipples hard. It’s difficult to make out the words, but it’s something about oil kingdoms and gospel singers in Texas. But this ain’t gospel. Sounds like the music you’d play at the hanging party of a gospel singer convicted of murdering a child. That song ends and another starts. It’s slow, sexy, spacey and trip-hoppy, but with Hendrixy guitar. The singing has part of that nursery rhyme about “coming round the mountain”, but the rest seems to be a list of how different people died in Texas. Everything about everything here seems to somehow be about Texas. This is a enormous, one-room warehouse space, and these odd Texans have taken it over and made a city out of it. They’ve set up a kitchen, with propane tanks, and a portable sink. Girls and boys are working together on some kind of feast. Everyone seems to look cute, but in a dirty way. Not actual dirt on most of them, they just look like they wouldn’t be welcome past the lobby of a typical US corporation. They actually all look kind of sexy. They exude fukability and ooze kindness. They all say hi or nod to you and Lydia as you pass. They seem so damn,…friendly. Most of the women, and a few of the men, are wearing lingerie. Old slips on top, dresses (or sometimes jeans) on the bottom. Cowboy boots and work boots are common. There’s male cowboy punkers in fishnets, who somehow still look tough. A lot of the boys and a few of the gals are wearing denim work shirts with the sleeves cut off. Printed cloth patches are sewn on many people’s clothing in random places. The patches all have slogans, like “Resist”, “If voting changed anything, it’d be illegal”, “U.S. out of my Uterus”, “U.S. out of North America”, “Property is Theft”, “Your War Sucks”, “No Blood For Oil”, and “The Patriot Act is Unpatriotic”. There’s also a booth set up to sell stuff like that—clothes like they are wearing, patches, self-published books, and home-pressed records. Everything has either that lone-star circle “A” Texas flag logo on it or just the Lone Star in the circle with the circle “A” for anarchy over it. The clothes have these logos silkscreened, the books have ‘em, the records have ‘em, the amps on stage have ‘em stenciled on their grills. There’s duct tape on all the gear. There’s duct tape on a lot of people’s shoes and even mending holes in their pants. Duct tape seems to hold this whole scene together. Your punker stops and asks what brought you tonight. “I’m a friend of Vessie. Do you know him? He sent me the tickets.” The punker brightens up. “I LOVE Vessie. He’s a beautiful man.” When he turns to you, you notice the tattoo on his arm. It says, “Fuck you, I’m from Texas”, with that logo again. He says, “I’m Eli Bowie.” You notice that he pronounced it “boo-ie” like the knife, not “bow-ie” like David Bowie. In fact, he has a Bowie knife strapped to his belt. “I’m in the band.” You go to shake his hand. He keeps his hands at his side and says, “Oh, we don’t shake hands,” and gives you a hug. The hug feels nice, though you think this guy, and this whole scene are fucking odd. You’d rather be home watching “Sex in the City”. You say, “I’m California Christensen. This is Lydia Smits.” “What do you play in the band?” says Lydia. “I actually do the drum programming and some background sounds. A little real drums too. I mainly edit and disseminate the videos. And engineer the recordings. I’m the only person in Texanarcha that uses a computer. Texanarcha is our “ranch”. It’s actually a warehouse. Even bigger than this one. I do all the drum programming, video editing, page layout, DVD authoring, audio mastering, etc. Everyone else has taken a vow against new technology. Most are brought into our group based on understanding of a select skill, mostly old-school stuff. Welding, automotive, construction, gardening, printing, and, um, some other things. But we’ve taken a group conscience to limit the amount of computers in the compound to one.” Great….Vessie’s hooked you up with a cult—a cult with compulsive disclosure. Didn’t he just give you a year’s worth of plot lines? Mister Bowie interrupts this thought bubble with, “Of course, now that I think it up a bit, Vessie did tell me about you. He said you’re good with languages. And Windows network admin. Of course, we’re not on the Internet, by choice, but we need someone who knows that stuff.” Oh wonderful. Now this cult’s trying to recruit you based on your unique skill set. Fucking Vessie. He’s an odd one. You sure know how to pick ‘em. You say, “What time does this start, anyway? The tickets say 8 PM and I know we’re late. It must be nine by now.” Eli sez, “We don’t really consider a concert an event. We consider it a conversation. People get here early, we all talk and work on stuff together and then when the band feels like it, we give our presentation. Then people talk more. “Presentation? Huh?” Lydia retorts. Eli drawls, “Yes. Presentation, ma’am.” Wow. He actually said, “ma’am”. “We’re a little different from other bands. Actually a lot different. We aren’t really here to entertain, we are here to educate. And we might be anarchists, Texanarchists to be exact, but we don’t just get up and jam. It’s a very structured event with a synchronized video presentation. There isn’t a lot of room for improvisation or error. A lot of the loops and background sounds and even drum samples are triggered off a DVD. I do all that work at home, and the band sort of plays to that. I just press play. The singer can stop the flow if he needs to. He just stops the DVD track and starts it up when it’s time. He does improvise a lot of the talking in between songs.” His name’s Harry Jackson Lee. He’s a heck of a fella. Wanna meet him?” You’re thinking, “Do I have a choice?” when Lydia says “Of course” and they start walking away. You follow. Eli Bowie leads you through the labyrinth of hanging tapestries that define the small city within the huge warehouse. You counter Lydia’s prior assessment—“I don’t see a single slacker here.” Everyone you pass seems to be engaged in some sort of work or activity. The aforementioned welding is finished, people are serving themselves the food you saw being prepared. Not lining up, just walking up to the long folding tables and scooping stuff onto paper plates. There are three recycling bins next to the tables and people are coordinating the sorting of retired paper plates and bottles and plastic. There is a small army of Texanarchists climbing all over the stage. They’re actually still building the stage, pounding the final nails into the stairs they built leading up to their handiwork, and checking all the cables, the projector, and such. Some are eating with one hand while they work with the other. You ask Eli, “How many people are in your band anyway?” “There’s five in the band proper, but there’s 35 in the collective, give or take. People come and go. There’s 17 on this tour. We only brought one bus.” He gestures out an open back door at an old school bus. Two people have the giant hood up and are working on the engine. Two more are working on what appears to be another motor on the ground next to the bus. “What’s that engine on the ground?” “Biodiesel-powered generator. So we can play anywhere if we need to. Though we didn’t bring the PA this tour. Some friends are using it for a series of pro-choice benefit concerts Louisiana and Mississippi, and some anti-nuke stuff in Pantex, Texas. That’s where they build the bomb. But we’re fine tonight without the PA. The venue provided one…..” “Biodiesel? Lydia inquires of Eli. “It’s a mixture of soybean oil distillate and grain alcohol. It’s the most environmentally friendly fuel there is for infernal combustion engines. We modify the carburetors to take it and love it. They’ll still take regular diesel if need be. We actually put a little regular diesel in our biodiesel to make it go further. We put instructions to do all this on the liner notes of our records. It’s funny, we’re all sober, but we recently got arrested for running our still. We ferment corn mash to help power our engines. The ATF held us for questioning and released us.” “ATF?” asks Lydia. Eli responds, “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. We don’t smoke or drink but those folks love to mess with us. Have for years.” You are loving his sweet accent and charm so much you just want to keep him talking. You’re actually starting to get comfortable. “How come the bus isn’t painted up like everything else ‘round here?” You can see out the doorframe that the bus is standard-issue yellow, with only the words, “Alvin First Baptist Church” painted neatly on the side. Eli responds, “We actually want to blend in when we travel. We bought that in an auction, and left it as is. Except for modifying the engine, of course.” He walks you away and down a short makeshift corridor. “Here. Meet our singer, Harry Jackson Lee.” Eli pulls a colored curtain aside. It was odd, he “announced” Harry Jackson Lee before opening the curtain. It was like a magic act. The three of you walk through into this provisional room. There is a vibe that sort of resembles a king or sheik’s inner lair. You can tell before the introduction which one is the singer. The whole very temporary staging area seems very much arranged towards one man. It’s punk rock Feng Shui gone awry. Harry Jackson Lee looks sleazier and cooler than anyone you’ve seen here yet. If you were a Hollywood agent and you saw this guy at the Laundromat, you would approach him and give him your card. He has “it”, that indefinable spark that makes some humans stand out in the World. He is good looking, skinny, tall, muscular, dressed in standard-issue Texanarchist black, with a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off, no tattoos, but beautiful and evil features. Slick-back dark-black shoulder length hair, high cheekbones, pretty smile, devilish grin and eyes a-glimmer. He’s wearing a lot of black eye shadow and mascara too, but so are a lot of the other folks here. He just oozed x-factor, charisma, and hip, even while doing nothing. Or very little. He seemed to be fixing a pair of sunglasses with a tiny screwdriver, and was completely oblivious that you had entered the room. But everyone else saw you enter and looked to him to see his reaction. There was none. You felt yourself swoon a little. You didn’t so much feel moist in your panties, it was beyond that. You actually felt your uterus skip a beat. Eli Bowie says, “Here’s some interesting humans I’d love to have you meet. This is Lydia and this is California.” Harry Jackson Lee glances up from his amateur eyeglass repair and looks you up and down. The eight or ten other cowpunks in the room look at you, then Lydia, then Harry Jackson. “Call me Harry Jack. You two look a little lost here. Sure you didn’t take a wrong turn on the way to the opera? Quick. Name three songs by KTP.” Oh Jesus. This joker’s as irritating as Eli is cool. Why the hell is he quizzing you? “I have no idea. I was told to come to your show by a friend.” “Ahnnngnnnnnggg” He makes the sound of a game-show buzzer. “Wrong answer. Skillet, will you please escort and export these two consumers to their SUV and point them back to Melrose?” A large cowpunk with a shaved head starts coming at you. He looks menacing, but doesn’t seem intent on harming you. You say, “We were just leaving. Thank you for the tour, Eli.” You grab Lydia by the hand and pull her back the way you came in. People are starting to funnel into the warehouse. Looks like the show is starting soon. You swim upstream against them, Lydia in tow, and find your Plymouth Barracuda. The red paint job seems unscathed. You get in and start the motor. It doesn’t start. You open the hood and start messing with it. That’s your way. You learn enough about anything that needs to be done to do it yourself so your don’t have to rely on others. But fuck it. Tomorrow this thing is going into the shop. Eli comes running out. “Please come back in. We really want you to stay for the show.” Harry Jackson follows. He looks like a repentant puppy. “I’m really sorry about that back there. Stay for the show, we’ll fix your car later. I didn’t know you were friends with Vessie.” You pull your head out of the Mopar hood. You go to shake his cute hand in a truce. He hugs you. “Will you please come back in?” “OK.” He smiles and says, “I gotta go in and get ready. Thank you, sister.” “OK, Harry Jackson.” He says, “Call me Harry Jack. My friends do. And I want to be your friend. Yours too.” He turns to Lydia and hugs her. You wonder how your part-time old paunchy lover in Houston commands so much respect from these kids. I mean, you understand Vessie’s value, but it doesn’t seem like a cocky self-appointed messiah figure in some sort of twisted anarchic democracy that shouldn’t have a messiah figure would put incredible credence on an endorsement from an old guy who owns a used record store. Harry Jack seems to venerate Vessie. You’ll have a phone call to place tomorrow for sure. Harry Jack says “Thank you, ma’am” and jogs back into the club. Eli says, “Sorry about him questioning you. We’ve just had a lot of idiots lately, ever since our song “I Didn’t Vote For That Motherfucker” got played on goddamned VH1 a lot. That’s what we get for including an open-source GNU license to remix for free on the record cover. And we don’t copyright our material, by choice. They censored the hell outta the song anyway. We hate what they did with it. And it’s an old song. It’s about George W. Bush for cripes sake. But they started playing it for some reason. Made a montage video of stupid shit. Sent us a check for $75,000. We almost sent it back. But instead we gave it to a defense fund for people arrested for online file sharing. File sharing isn’t a crime. It’s a right. It’s just accessing the World’s libraries for research purposes.” You ask, “Why do you care if it’s on TV? Most bands spend their whole careers in futile diligence trying to get their songs on there. And you get on there by accident and don’t wanna be?” “Our music is far more than ‘content’. And it isn’t for everyone. And we hate the music industry. We don’t want to be any part of it. There’s a lot more to this and I’d love to yack you up for hours, but I gotta go do the show. Let’s talk after or at least give me your number. I really want to keep in touch with you.” He heads back to the warehouse. He said it to you, not to Lydia. Odd, but not really. It seems like they are grooming you for something. Lydia says, “Good. Let’s go back in. I never wanted to leave anyway. Fuck that guy.” You laugh, “I kinda wanted to until he turned out to be such a prick.” You close your car’s hood and you both walk back in. It’s cold. You wish you’d worn more than a sundress. Los Angeles can be as cold at night as it is hot during the day. That’s what you get when you build a town between a desert and an ocean. You get in line with the other lemmings streaming back into the one-night-only rock club. You wonder what this place is the rest of the year. Automotive chop shop for stolen cars? Body processing center for the Mob? You are pretty astounded by how many people there are here. And by the vibe. Seems like more reverence and more excitement than you’d see at a typical rock show. And again, you cannot get over the mix of people. About half the folks look like their cowpunk anarchist heroes. A few are totally grubby crust punk squatters with facial tattoos and pierced everything (including pierced foreheads). The rest look like you pulled them out of a mall at random. Once inside, you estimate the crowd to number between 1500 and 2000 people. It’s fucking huge in here. And there’s no one that resembles the “security” you’d see roughing people up at a commercial rock show. Yet everyone seems to be pretty self-policing. The canned music over the PA is Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain”. It’s the first thing you’ve heard all night that you recognize. It’s familiar because Vessie likes to put on Willie and make sweet sweet love to you. He listens to other music when he fucks you hard and mean and deep and gorgeous all night long. But when you are both feeling pure and pensive and almost romantic, it’s Willie all the way. KTP is already assembled in the shadows on the stage. As soon as Willie’s sumptuous and anguished voice finishes, the show starts. Harry Jack stands center stage and yells over the mike, “I HATE LOS ANGELES AND EVERYONE IN IT!” People laugh. Harry Jack adds, “…Except y’all.” They laugh again. For some reason, no one applauds, but before that sinks in, a video display projection flickers in the darkness above the band. A movie starts. It features quick cuts of politicians, advertisements and pop-culture crap. Car commercials and politicians are denigrated. The editing is seamless, and rotates in a rhythmic montage. The audio actually produces a discernable loop and a prerecorded drum machine shatters in on beat over that. This is interesting, you think. You’ve never seen something done quite like this. The lights come up a bit on stage, but not bright enough to obscure the video. The video and the music seem the attraction more than the individuals in the group, though the letters KTP, the group’s moniker, seem to flash a lot in the video presentation. The cutest girl you’ve ever seen in your life comes in on bass guitar, playing a simple but effective throbbing bass line. You wonder how come if there’s one girl in a band, it’s almost always the bass player. “Rock and roll’s equivalent of Affirmative Action” you think to yourself. This chick is the bomb though. She’s very young, probably 18, about five or ten years younger than the rest of the band. She’s plump, probably your weight but four inches shorter, busty, red hair, button nose, sweet lips crimson from lipstick, naturally rosy cheeks. She’s wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and a yellow teddy with a Texas flag and the circle “A” sewn on the back. She makes you feel ugly and too skinny. Damn she’s cute. She’s sweaty, all smiles, and shaking her rump. She’s got a nuclear ass that would make a black girl envious. But she’s white. You grab Lydia by the hand and squeeze closer to the stage, just to look at this gal. The band are all as cute as hell. Grubby and scruffy, but cute as a bug’s ass. You could totally see someone making action figures of these kids. The band is also racially integrated. So much for rumors of all Texans being racist. One guitarist is black and the other guitarist/keyboardist guy seems some flavor of Hispanic. Probably Mexican, seeing as how these folks be from Texas. The music is very good, thought totally not your style. You like the easy rock they play on the radio, usually stuff with female singers. KTP is pretty damn abrasive, some flavor of what the kids call industrial, but has a lot of melody and hooks. The audience is riveted. This concert is half rock show, half worker’s rally and half over-the-top spectacle. The combination of video and music actually seems to take the tools these folks profess to want to destroy and use those same-said tools to push out a new message. The song titles reflect this message. Harry Jack introduces “The Presidential Song Cycle.” He says, “These are old, but still relevant. They’re about the past, but this past put us in the quandary we find ourselves in now. They’re from an album called Don’t Mess With KTP. The cover of this record flashes on the video projection. It has a person dressed as an ATF agent bound to a chair with an American flag stuffed in his mouth. The members of the band are standing around him. Eli has a can of gas in his hand, and is pouring it over the agent. Harry Jack is holding a lit match and grinning like an insane child. Harry Jack says, “Look around you. There’s a lot of people here getting along as family who wouldn’t normally hang. I’ll tell you why. We’re all in the same boat. It’s not about black vs. white, rich vs. poor. It’s about selfish vs. loving. We are loving. And we won’t be fucked with by the selfish. “I remember when I first saw this unification happen. I participated in the anti-World Trade Organization and anti-International Monetary Fund protests back in 1999 in Seattle. You had hippies and lumberjacks, people who ordinarily were fighting each other, locking arms on the same side. I knew there was something up. Then the second time Bush W, the criminal junior Bush, ran for president, we had Republicans voting against him. What’s with that? We are living in strange times folks. And that election featured opposing men who were both members of Skull and Bones, the Yankee Yale old-boy network that helps run this country. It’s more corrupt than the southern good old-boy network we fail to enjoy down home. And they’re actually connected and overlap.” If the choruses are any indication of the song titles, the songs in this cycle are called, “Bush Ain’t a Real Texan, He’s a Fucking Yankee”, “I Didn’t Vote For That Motherfucker”, “Stolen Election”, “Hypocrite from Maine”, “Hat Act: Yankee in a Cowboy Hat”, and “A Modest Proposal”. The songs are short, fast and to the point. They’re about two minutes each minutes each. Ands soon as one ends, the next starts. Harry Jack is the lead singer, but the other four members of the band all scream along on the choruses in egalitarian glee. After they finish “I Didn’t Vote For That Motherfucker”, there’s actually the first break in the whole set and about twenty people applaud. Harry Jack looks pissed. “HANDS IN YOUR POCKETS, LOOK AT THE FLOOR! Do not applaud! We are not rock stars or entertainers. Since you probably saw us on mainstream TV, a place we do not want to be, you probably don’t know our deal. We do not want to be in the media, we want to BE the media. Fuck VH1. Fuck Rolling Stone. Fuck Spin. Fuck all major record corporations. Fuck Houston Implements and FUCK YOU! Do not applaud us. Applaud yourself. Fuck stardom. If you just started listening to us, you should know we have a record called No Applause, No Handshakes, No Autographs. That pretty much sums up our policies on this. We don’t even have a light show.” This was true. The lights hadn’t flashed at all since they came up to medium luminosity at the start of the first song. The people who clapped look at the floor. A few of them leave. It reminds you of the time you were eight years old and your mom’s boyfriend took you to see Parliament-Funkadelic play at the Anaheim Convention Center. The opening act was some black comedian. He did this thing where he got the whole audience clapping and then stopped it. He said, “Woah, woah, wait a minute! There’s one white guy out there and he’s fucking y’all up.” Everyone laughed, even the boyfriend, but you felt guilty. You thought you had done something wrong. Harry Jack continued, “OK. Now that we’ve got that straight. Here’s a little imperialist ditty y’all might like. It’s called, “We’re Not Saying You Should, But You Could.” The band starts up. It’s the first song that they do where they don’t use the drum machine. Eli gets behind an old-fashioned rock drum set and counts off four clicks. The band plays stellar punk rock on nothing more than two guitars, bass and drums. The chorus of the song is “We’re not saying you should kill your elected leaders: We’re only saying that you COULD.” Over and over. The video behind them is mostly camcorder footage of protestors getting hit by police billy clubs. Eli stays behind the drums and they play “A Modest Proposal.” It’s a song about tying up ATF agents and burning them, just like on the record cover art. Man. This borders on sedition, but has such a snappy beat. And you’re pretty sure they’re speaking facetiously, at least you hope so. You love KTP. And you don’t even like punk rock. But the band and their sound and their energy is infectious. This show is less a concert and more an evangelical team-building exercise. Everyone there seems to be digging it, you, Lydia, even the babies and the old people. The yuppies and the punkers. There’s a lot of dogs too. People have them on strings, ropes, and running free. Even the dogs look happy. You’ve never seen a rock concert that seemed so real. It really did seem like they were not entertainers, like they were not just putting on a show. It seemed like a very important event. Like this was actually changing the World in some small way. Mid-song, the vocals cut out. The band stops playing and Harry Jack jumps off the stage and runs to the side. You can’t see what’s happening. You and everyone seem to move up to get a better look and you see some hippie guy on the side packing up the speakers. The band is trying to reason with him. Then they argue with him. But he and two friends carry the speakers out the side door and into a pickup truck. “What the fuck is going on?” asks Lydia. As if to answer, Harry Jack gets up on stage and asks people to quiet down. With no microphone, he has to yell to be barely heard in the large room. People are deathly quiet and listen reverently. He speaks. “The man who lent the PA to us tonight has seen fit to leave before the show is over. We will say this, he will never work for free in this town again.” People laugh. As he’s speaking, the cute bass player gal comes running back in from the side door and hands a bullhorn to Harry Jack. He uses it and we can hear him better. “We can still do this. If the band turns down, we can get through this. It’s all about education anyway. Also, make sure to grab some free pamphlets or buy a book or record on your way out. We make deals too. And if you have no money, steal some of our books and records and make amends later.” People laugh again. The band starts up again, playing softer, and Harry Jack sings through the bullhorn. People sing along. Many of them know the words and help the band get through the set. There is still the passion and fury, just a quieter version of it. The last song is a lovely tribute ballad called, Humans With Technology Are Like An Alcoholic With A Barrel Of Wine. At the end he says, “As you know, we are from Texas. Texas is the last American state. We are free. We were actually a sovereign state unto our own—the Republic of Texas, before we joined the US. That’s why we’re the Lone Star state. We have no income tax. People live there to be left alone. When this country started, only the strongest of the strong were able to make it over from Europe by boat. And only the strongest of them were able to make it to Texas. They moved there because they didn’t want to be messed with. We live in a city, but we ain’t citified. We live. We love. We live and let live. We don’t get all uppity about stuff like folks in most places. But I must point out that we don’t like being messed with. And we consider many of the current policies of these United States, and several corporations that are almost as powerful, we consider this to be a direct affront. We consider our actions to be no more than self-defense. People say ‘Remember the Alamo’, but what we’re really saying is ‘Remember San Jacinto’—that’s where we came back and kicked ass. In self-defense. Thomas Jefferson helped found America and said, ‘God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.’ He knew the truth, that revolutionaries replace the corrupt, but usually end up becoming corrupt themselves. Jefferson couldn’t possibly have seen the way things are going. Around the end of the nineteenth century, an act was passed that gave corporations the legal power of an individual, without the culpability. Corporations can dump battery acid into a river and maybe pay a fine if caught. But no person will go to jail. If I did that, I’d be in prison. And last year, another act was passed that went largely unnoticed, but it increases the monopolistic power of companies to commit mergers. These changes in corporate law further reduce the accountability of companies, and give corporations power that rivals that of a country. Grab some of our literature, talk it over with your kin, and we’ll be back in six months. Keep fighting, and mainly educate yourselves, before that becomes illegal. As you go home tonight, and in the coming months, think about whether your convenience is at the expense of your children’s freedom. People are fucking this planet up. Let’s take a step back and fight for something important. Goodnight. We’re KTP.” The band finishes and room goes dark. People don’t clap. It is an odd hush. But everyone seems happy. You are thinking tonight…thinking how automatic some reactions are. This is a nice change. You and Lydia meander over to the table with the merchandise. You look at the records, clothing and books. All the records are only available on vinyl. There are no cassettes or DVDs. The clothes are mostly lingerie and T-shirts with the Texanarchy logo on them. The whordrobe looks second hand, like they got it at a thrift store and silkscreened it themselves. You think “They probably did.” There are three books sitting out. One is called A Primer on Texanarchy. One is called We Complain About America Because We Love America, and the last is Remember When Sex Was Safe and Music Was Dangerous?. None of the books have ISBN numbers. There are no barcodes on the back. There are no blurbs from celebrities and no quotes from reviewers. All three list the author as “KTP Collective”. You open one up and look at the page opposite the copyright page. Where the copyright would normally be listed, it says: “Proudly published in Texas by KTP Press. This work is not covered by copyright and may be reproduced in its entirety by any means necessary. Feel free to send a dollar or a Euro to the sacred post office box.” Then it lists a P.O. box in Houston. On the back jacket it has their motto: “The press is only free if you own one…. …And we own one!” And there’s a photo of a bunch of ink-stained punkers proudly smiling in back of a huge printing press that looks to be about 50 years old. The merchandise table also has the Don’t Mess With KTP record shown earlier on the video screen, and many others. Titles include New America, Oil is Blood, Deep in the Heart of Bush Country, Compassionate Commerce and Ghost of Davy Crockett. One that catches your fancy is called, Banker Roundup. The cover is a photo of the band hog tying a fat man in a business suit. They’re pulling down his pants and about to brand his ass with a steaming iron with the Lone Star/Circle “A” symbol. The merch table is doing a very brisk business. You liked the music a lot, and think it’s all kind of neat that they seem so self-sustaining. They have their own thing going here. You certainly have to respect these people and their do-it-yourself mentality and work ethic, but you don’t really want to get in too deep. You don’t think that things have gotten so bad as to need a revolution. Lydia buys a couple of the KTP books. When she goes to pay for them, the cowpunk behind the table says, “Pay what you want”. Lydia asks, “Is five dollars each enough?” He says, “Yes. It’s sliding scale. Zero to three-hundred dollars. Ten bucks for two will be fine. Enjoy, ma’am.” You stand looking around while Lydia perused her purchase. You wonder what’s next. About half the people have left, the rest are broken up into little groups of between three and ten people and are talking about the concert, about politics, about world events, music, software, all sorts of things. You hear little snips of sentences here and there as you walk in a little fifteen-foot radius of Lydia, keeping within sight of her. She’s still reading. Eli walks up to you and says, “Hey Cali. So how was your night, sister?” “I fucking loved it. I don’t think I’ll be selling my car and joining the revolution any time soon, but it was amazing. And I don’t usually like that kind of music at all.” He says, “Nifty. Hey…squeaking of cars, want us to take a look at yours? We’ve got some people who live for that kind of stuff…” “That would be delicious. Thank you.” “Back in a jiff, hon.” Says Eli and runs off. Lydia walks over to you, not looking up from the self-published paperback she’s reading and you put your arm around her. She purrs and says, “That was transcendent. I was pretty damned amazed by that show. I’d buy a record but they only have vinyl. What’s with that? I haven’t owned a record player in like ten years. Maybe more.” Eli comes back, and some huge, scary cowpunk with a Mohawk is with him. The guy is a monster. He’s like six-foot seven, very muscular and has a shaved head. His bald dome sports a tattoo of a bullet hole. Eli introduces the Frankenpunker as “V-Chip.” V-Chip is pushing a handcart, on it is what seems to be a very large metal toolbox. “Where’s your Mopar, ma’am?” You smile and lead him out to the car. He doesn’t talk much, opens the hood and gets to work. You and Lydia sit in the car with the doors open. You find an old blanket in the trunk and wrap it around both of you. You sit just enjoying the moment. Lydia’s reading her book and you are too tired to talk. You notice now that the show actually physically exhausted you, even though you didn’t dance. The band and the performance and the event drew you in, nothing ever has done that to that extent before. It was just so much to take, so much thinking. Bands don’t usually make you think, especially not enough to induce drowsiness. After about fifteen minutes, V-Chip sticks his head around and says, “Start it up, please”. You do. It starts immediately. Strong. It hasn’t done that since you bought it four years ago from that old Mexican guy in North Hollywood. V-Chip says, “OK, leave her running please,” and monkeys around up there some more. Then he closes the hood and says, “It’s fixed.” You thank him and he leaves. Lydia is still engulfed in her book, and is actually giggling out loud every few moments with whatever she’s reading. You wonder if you should go back in and say “goodbye” to the KTP boys. You also think about that girl bass player. Yikes. You could almost be attracted to her. You decide against it, throw the car into reverse, back out, put it in drive and head home to Silver Lake. Lydia comes in to use your bathroom, hugs you again, says “Thank you for a most wonderful night, girlfriend”. And leaves. It’s cold. You put the heat on. Precisely 73 degrees, exactly the way you always like it. You fall asleep. Chapter four You wake to pounding on your door. You look through your spyhole. It’s your lover, Trent. You open the door. He seems agitated. He hugs you, “Cali, Cali, Cali, Cali….” You reach under his white-collared shirt and start stroking his chest. You didn’t realize how turned on you are. It’s not just Trent, it was something about the KTP concert, something about being around all those beautiful dirty people too. You think about how very out of place Trent would have been there. “Cali, I need to talk.” He pushes your hands away. You realize that he’s not in the mood. You stop trying to edge towards having your way with him. He takes your hands in his. “Cali…We’ve been dating for a while. And I’ve grown fonder of you. I’ve been starting to think a lot about these other….men…you…date, and I don’t like it. I want to take it up to a whole ‘nother level.” You stare in his eyes, dumbfounded. “Jesus….”, you think to yourself. “He’s going to ask me to commit to him. To commit monogamy.” Those words echo in your silent, mind’s mouth. Commit monogamy. Commit suicide. Commit murder. You don’t like commitment. “Cali…I want you to marry me. Will you?” You’re stunned. You’ve barely said a word yet since he arrived, but now you’re not sure you can. Marriage? Holy fuck, Batman. Holy matrimony. Holey mattress moan-y. You are playing word games in your head. You want to be somewhere else fast. Trent misinterprets your silence for cooperation and collusion. “Is that a yes, baby?” You look him up and down. You check out his perfect fresh-from-the-corporate-gym form. At this moment, you can barely consider going to dinner with this human, let alone going to bed or especially going to eternity with him. “No….I…can’t,…Trent. I’m so sorry. That’s….not…what I want.” You see the words echo inside your head, sort of the way words echo at the dentist’s office when you’re on nitrous oxide and the dentist tries to make small talk, not that you could answer with all those painless torture implements in your maw, anyway. “California, I am incredibly hurt. I can’t believe you won’t commit to me. I can’t be with you unless you will only be with me. I have to leave.” He runs down the hall and down the stairs. You really want to chase him but you don’t. You don’t want to chase him to try to rectify things, you want to just have him not feel this hurt. He seems hurt for no reason. You seem to want, what Lydia would call, closure. You stand in the door frame. Teetering. Stunned. Your phone rings and it jars you out of your foggy uncertainty. The answering machine goes off. It’s Ajax. Wanting to borrow money again. You pick it up. He’s whiney and a little demanding. “Come on baby, my band’s gonna get signed on this tour. Our manager says there’s some labels totally interested in us but that we need to get some national press first, to show we can deal on a universal level. Please baby?” You have the money, but he’s sounding like a child. “I don’t want to” you say. He says, “Whatever.” And hangs up. You think about your friend who won’t let her young daughter use the word “whatever” to her because your friend says that when kids use it, it basically means “fuck you.” That’s exactly what it just felt like from Ajax. The phone rings back. It’s Ajax again. “Cali, I think we need to reconsider our relationship. I don’t care if you see other men, hell, I plan on seeing other women on this tour. As much as possible. But I need my lovers to at least act like a friend. And you’re not being a friend. So I think I’m going to have to stop being your lover.” You actually chuckle involuntarily at this. You didn’t laugh at him to hurt him, you just laughed. “So, um, you’re breaking up with me? Because I don’t want to help you finance your trip to go meet other girls?” “Yeah, basically. I suppose that would be an accurate assessment of the situation.” He says. He adds, “Have a good life.” Right before the receiver slams down on his end you hear the muffled addendum, “Bitch….” in the background. Wow. It’s been a day of change all around. You actually feel a little lighter. Freer. These two men obviously have so little idea what you actually want or need that you are happy to have them out of your life. You do your dishes, watch some TV and relax. You think about men. Ajax wanting to borrow money didn’t really surprise you. Being bratty about it didn’t really surprise you. Calling you a bitch did. But not nearly as much as Trent wanting to marry you. Where the fuck did that come from? And why do men want to marry? Is it love or is it a need to control? To own? If Trent actually loved you, and you turned him down for marriage, wouldn’t he still want to be with you? Why are men so complicated, even though they’re so simple? They feel so damn good to touch and pet and kiss and love and suck and be sucked and loved and kissed and petted and touched by. You love talking to them. So why can they turn on a nickel into such little brats? You’re only 20. Do you look like mommy to these humans? Hell, you look over at your bag of simple pleasures. You pick one out and hike up your sundress. The phone rings. You ignore it. The answering machine goes off. It’s Vessie. At last… a bastion of sanity. Compared to the other two brats you’ve dealt with in the last hour, he’s absolutely balanced. As weird as he is, he’s way more together than the other lovers (that are now ex-lovers). You turn off the noisy, powerful Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator and pick up the phone. “Hey mister. How the heck are you? It’s really good to hear you right now. I’ve had an, um, interesting day.” “Hey honey nipples… how was the concert? Did you meet my friends?” As soon as he calls you “Honey Nipples”, you get happy. My god, there is an invisible silver thread 2000 miles long from your pussycat love pearl to this man’s brain. You love it. He really is the one of the three you’re glad you didn’t lose. You reach into your bag of simple pleasures and pull out a smaller, silent vibrator and turn it on. You rub it along your outer thigh, just testing the waters. You aren’t ready for phone sex, you probably won’t even tell him what you’re up to. But it’s fun to do, probably precisely because he doesn’t know what you’re up to. “Yeah. We went. Me and my friend Lydia. She sort of ‘got it’ more than me. I got it enough to know there’s a lot beyond the music to ‘get’, but I mainly just liked the music. And the people. Eli is a wonderful guy. And one of their troops fixed my car. It’s running better than it ever has.” You look at your clock. It’s 4:35 AM. That makes it 6:35 in Houston. Vessie must be getting up for the day. He is, unlike you, an early riser. “Good,” says Vessie. “Since your car’s running, why don’t you take a drive out here and join us? There’s important things happening here and we could use your help. You could be a part of something really big. Something that could help a lot of people—and change the World for the better. And I miss the heck outta you, sugarkitty. I wake up and really want to be in your space. I want to kiss your belly and lick your lips and talk all night with you about important things, and also about nothing. I wanna just shoot the shit and watch the sunrise with you. I wanna whisper sweet somethings in your tiny perfect ears. I wish to wake you up with my dirty old tongue between your legs. I want to pet the small of your back and I really want to mess up your hair and look in your eyes and mean it. I want to nibble on your nape and encircle your nipples with my nose. I want permission to shove myself into your little girl inners. Fuck, babydrool, I miss you.” You melt. This man really has “it”. You rub your little simple pleasure on your special places in a pretty floral pattern. You coo a little sound at him. It’s not a deep “Arrrrrrrrgh” that you’ve heard women make in the porno films Ajax got you to watch (Or that sound you heard from Lydia that time you went camping with her and her old boyfriend and you and Trent. That sound echoed in your brain pan, it’s etched on the top of your soul and tattooed like sweet salt inside your spine. That made you actually believe that orgasms were not invented by Oprah and might actually exist. The forest echoed with her sound. Man. Probably made the salmon start spawning.) No, your noise is a little involuntary kitty purr. It’s a little-girl noise, not a woman noise. A dirty little girl noise, though. Vessie catches it, “That sounds like a ‘yes’. Is it?” “Um…no. I’d love to see you, but I’m not going to join your hippie club. I don’t really want to overthrow the government. I don’t want to go to jail. And even if I wouldn’t go to jail, it doesn’t really appeal to me. Why don’t you come here and see me soon, though? Your fortieth birthday is in less than a month, if I recall correctly. Why don’t you come here to LA and turn into an old man in a young girl’s mouth? We’ll watch the clock and count down the moments and you can start middle age being expertly loved by sweet little me. It’ll be a California Cooler. Meow……” The word “meow” morphs into another little uncontrolled cummy sound. You feel like you could actually cum for the first time tonight. Is that possible? Probably not, but the place you’re at right now feels deliriously delicious. “By the way honey kitten, did you get the present I sent you?” Vessie had sent you a mixed tape he made for your birthday. You haven’t listened to it yet. “Happy birthday, by the way.” You remember that since it is after midnight, it is officially your 21st birthday. You barely care. Birthdays, at least your own, are pretty meaningless to you. You do know that you decided to quit drinking today. And you have no desire to go get drunk, to have one last fling. You don’t really care about alcohol. Your mother killed any love affair you could possibly have with intoxication of any kind. And you have inherited her genes. You probably are an alcoholic, just waiting to happen. Sometimes your brain thinks a little too much. This is one of those times. You wish you could keep to the conversation without drifting. You make an effort to focus. The little lipstick-sized vibrator flitting around the inner lips of your sweet place is a flirty distraction that doesn’t make it any easier to bring your thoughts back to one place. But you want to find serenity in Vessie’s ears. You know you can. Even from a distance. You have before. “Thank you, you gorgeous man. Yes, I did get the box. It’s in my car. I was saving it for today. I’ll listen today. .. hey… by the way, I’m really curious, what does KTP stand for? Is it an acronym? What’s it mean?…” He replies, “You splendid, luxurious, dirty little kitty. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. KTP means…” You’re ripped out of this dreamy, smart pillow talk with your Vessie by more pounding on the door. You hear a muffled “Cali! It’s Trent. I really need to talk to you.” You tell Vessie, “Oh Jesus. I’m gonna have to call you back.” He asks if everything is OK, you say, “Yes” and hang up. You put your simple pleasure back in the purse and open your door. Trent looks drunk and disheveled. How did he get so ruffled in only a few hours? He looks like he’s been rolling in dirt somehow, even though he isn’t dirty. He just looks totally tense and scared. He looks, as the kids say, like hell. He motions you downstairs and outside on the porch. For some reason you follow him. You can see the first glimmer of dawn licking the horizon. You hear birds chirping. But for some reason birds chirp all night in Los Angeles anyway. But it’s definitely morning. And your birthday. You are 21 as of now. Today you are an adult. You wish you could focus. It’s been a hell of an evening. You wonder how long you were on the phone to Vessie. Couldn’t have been that long, but here it looks like the sun will be up in a half hour. Why did you even follow Trent outside? You want to be asleep. This is his problem, not yours. “California Christensen, I really want to have you in my life, for the rest of my life. Every day. I have committed myself to you and you reward me by being a slut and fucking tons of other men. I have offered to share my life, my love, my money and my future with you, and you are throwing it all away.” You can’t believe how agitated he seems. And how he seems just fucking nuts. You thought you were a better judge of people, but apparently not. “This is going nowhere,” you think. “Where is this going?” you think. Trent is carrying a gym bag. He reaches into it and pulls out a revolver. “If I can’t have you, no one can” he says. OK. This is the end. This madman is going to kill you. This man, that you liked a lot until tonight, is going to end your life because you wouldn’t agree to be his property. It’s funny. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes. You look in his insane eyes and think to yourself, “I guess that life flashing before your eyes stuff is a myth.” Then you think, “I can’t believe I am calmly thinking stuff like that. Shouldn’t I be looking for some way out of this?” Trent raises the gun and cocks it. He says, “This is how much I need you” and points it towards you. The consternation and terror in his eyes is glassy. The panic is pushing your own heart. You imagine hammers pounding inside his head, hammers of red, bright anger, trying to get out. His eyes bulge, he seems close to breaking open. You close your eyes and say something wordless that seems to resemble a prayer. You hear the pop of the gun. You die. Chapter five You die. It’s painless. Yet it’s odd. You don’t feel dead. You open your eyes and see nothing. Your ears are ringing. You smell smoke, but you see nothing. Then you look down. Trent is a lump of lifeless human at your feet. “I guess he shot himself instead of me….”, you think out loud. You seem strangely calm and note that too. You almost seem to be watching these proceedings from outside yourself. In the third person. “Cali saw the lifeless form of her lover on the floor,” a voice says. It’s your voice. Inside your head. “Maybe I’m in shock,” you say out loud. You look at what used to be Trent. There doesn’t seem to be much blood. There’s a few drops on your shoes. You see a paperboy, or actually a paper man—the old guy who delivers the early morning newspapers in your neighborhood with his car, hastily placing a call on his cell phone. Everything seems false. This isn’t happening. You wonder why there’s so little blood. Shouldn’t there be more? And the gun wasn’t that loud. Not like the cannons you hear on TV. A police car pulls up. Two burly LAPD leap into out and draw guns to protect and serve you. Their guns are pointed at you. “Hands in the air. NOW!” You wonder who they’re talking to. They speak again, “MA’AM! LAPD. HANDS IN THE AIR OR WE’LL SHOOT!” Oh. They are speaking to you. You calmly put your hands in the air, wondering why they are saying these things. You sort of automatically comply. One cop runs over and cuffs you. As he’s leading you away, you trip over Trent’s legs. The cop picks you up by the cuffs in one motion and your wrists hurt from the pressure. The paper man is yelling “She didn’t do it! He shot himself! I saw it!” Two more patrol cars pull up. You are taken to the station and questioned for six hours. It is way more mundane and uneventful than you’d imagine. Barely worth mentioning, except that several officers made reference to the fact that is was your birthday. And you mumbling, “You can let me go now. I have closure. Really. I have closure.” But they don’t let you go. You see the paper man at another desk giving a statement. And you see your building manager later doing the same. He said he heard Trent yelling and looked out the window and saw the whole thing. He says you’re innocent. They take your shoes as evidence, and give you a pair of flip flops. They release you around lunch time. They tell you not to leave town and give you a taxi voucher. You take a taxi home. You write a check for two months’ rent, slip it under your building manager’s door. You throw a toothbrush, hair brush, and your simple pleasures in a bag, lock your apartment and get in your car and drive east. Chapter six “After many hours, she stops at a truck stop in the desert on I-10 East and stares at her feet. She notices a book on the passenger side floor. It’s We Complain about America Because We Love America, one of the KTP books. Lydia must have accidentally dropped it there. She picks it up and starts reading.” Why are you seeing yourself from someone else’s point of view? That’s odd. I mean, you aren’t really seeing yourself, you’re just mouthing these words in your head. Maybe in your car. You carefully recompose yourself and restate the words in second person: “After many hours, you stop at a truck stop in the desert on I-10 East and stare at your feet. You notice a book on the passenger side floor. It’s We Complain about America Because We love America, one of the KTP books. Lydia must have accidentally dropped it there. You pick it up and start reading.” The thin volume starts with a bunch of testimonials about how seeing KTP will change your life. How seeing the band live is a magical event and just being in the same room with them is a catalyst for change. The quotes are all attributed to people you’ve never heard of. You think about it, and think that your life sure was set into motion after seeing them. You are pretty scientific though, and attribute this to coincidence. You are sure that Lydia would think otherwise. You read more of the book: “Most rock shows are such scripted events that they’re almost meaningless. Rock and Roll is even used to sell the Army. What used to be rebellion is packaged to sell cars. Cars are destroying the environment. And the Army acts in the vested interests of car manufacturers and oil salesman, those snakes who actually kill little brown people to keep us chugging at the sugartit of petroleum. And advertising is used to lie to you and make you think you are being rebellious, when you’re really just picking between two prepackaged corporate rebellions. Nike or Adidas? Coke or Pepsi? Republican or Democrat? You’re not a rebel, you’re a sheep….. “….File sharing is self-defense. File sharing is democracy at its best. Who needs the corporate middleman acting like Moses with his damn clay tablets keeping you away from your god? The music industry is a remnant of the past—antique bloated behemoths drowning in the tar pits of technology that are spiraling out of control with amazing efficiency. “Criminalizing file sharing is insane. It would be as if horse and buggy manufacturers had sued the first car owners…… “…..The current multinational world of consumer culture has us all strung out on the teat of stuff. They try to humiliate us into buying the latest crap when the crap we have works fine. Stuff is advertised as making you free. But stuff does not make you free…..it keeps you from being free…..and even kills others. I’ll bet you didn’t know that every cell phone, digital camera, computer and PlayStation contains a substance called Coltan that we rape the Congo for, and start actual wars over. And your need to have the latest of everything actually kills actual humans. Look up “Coltan” with “Congo” on your beloved Internet and you’ll see. “….We do not try to overthrow the government of the United States, nor do we plan to. Our beloved country is sick, and we plan to administer the Chemotherapy from within, to kill the poisoned components. Like actual chemo, this will make the host body more sick before it makes it better. We are prepared for this. And we are prepared to die if need be. We do not advocate the use of guns and will only deploy them in self-defense……………………….We chose not to be on the Internet, for privacy concerns. However, we encourage freely the use of all technological means. The advancement of computer technologies has leveled the playing field to where the tools of commerce, art, media, and encryption and communication are freely available to all. We actually have the advantage, as we are intelligent and creative in a way that may of “them” are not. And we are skilled in many old-school lower technologies also, technologies that are being lost in the mad race to send gleaming electrodes glimmering into every home.” You read on. You picture the words in Eli’s sweet drawl. Or Harry Jack’s bark. Or maybe even Vessie’s tangy twang. You wonder if he had anything to do with these books. The KTP collective sure likes him. The book is a quick read. You finish about two hours later. The book ends like this: “….We always believed that the advent of George Orwell’s totalitarian future would come for sure. It has, but we were wrong in how it should manifest. We believed that it would come as a jackboot crushing a human face forever. Who could have dreamt, even twenty years ago, that it would come quite softy, even voluntarily. People are not only allowing themselves to be wired and have their homes and innermost thoughts tapped, but are actually lining up and even paying for the privilege. 1984 has arrived my dear friends, and not in the form of storm troopers. It has arrived through your mail slot as a happy-colored CD-ROM saying “1000 hours free”. You not only permit this infraction, but spend two hours on hold with tech support asking for instructions on how to do it. “When you say, “The Internet wants to be free! Stop government intervention!”, remember that this same Internet was invented by project ARPANET, a division of the United States Army. The very methodologies for listening in are built into the protocols. We do concede that he Internet does seem damn neat, and if you can find use for it, more skill to ya, but we don’t use it. “American’s popularity rating worldwide went from first to dead last within a year of the last president, that fake Texan guy, being elected. Within a year, we went from being beloved to having charred bodies of murdered Americans publicly dragged and beaten in the streets; from being beloved to having random citizens beheaded as they star in snuff films accessible by any schoolchild in the world with an Internet connection. “We want to return America, and Texas, to the glory we once had. We want an America based on freedom, not based on invasion of privacy and disrespect of the rights of the individual. Our elected officials are doing exactly the opposite of what we elect them for. It’s time to forge new paths. “We are KTP. We have been alternately called a cult, a gang, and a terrorist cell. None of these are accurate. We are not insurgents. We are not anti-American. We love America. We believe we are upholding the precepts written by the founding fathers of America, and the Heroes of the Alamo. “We call on you to join us. “Now.” You put the book down. You’re stirred. Maybe you will heed the call. You are not only stirred. You are also turned on. That’s good. You thought you somehow never would be again. You look around the dusty parking lot. You start fingering around inside your sundress. You’ve worn the same dress for two days. You don’t care. Some trucker walks up and you put your fingers back where we can see ‘em. “Hey little lady, I’m looking for a date. You available?” “Jeez…Not with you”, you think. “Um, no….” you say. He slinks off, mumbling some choleric grumble. You go back to loving yourself. You get excited, then finish. Though you never really finish, you just get bored and/or frustrated. You fall asleep. You wake up and you’re freezing. You’re sitting in your car. Man, the temperature changes out here are astronomical. It was way hotter today here then it ever gets in Los Angeles, and it’s way colder right now than night in LA. You start the car and drive until you find a motel. You check in, set the temperature to precisely 73 degrees, and finally sleep. You get awakened by a knock on the door. You look through the curtain. It’s a totally cracked-out looking black transsexual hooker. She’s listening to a Walkman, so loud you can hear it through the window. You motion her away. And lay back in bed. You click on the TV. It’s set to a 24-hour porn channel. The porn looks like it was made with the hooker you just encountered and the creepy people who were out front when you were checking in. It looks like it might have even been made in the room you’re in. You wake up. “Where am I? Oh yeah… cheap motel room.” You can smell bug spray. You don’t see any bugs, but maybe there are some. You think about your friend, a filmmaker who got shown at Sundance, but didn’t have the money for a ticket until the last moment. He stayed in the only hotel available at that point. He got scabies from the sheets. You examine the sheets. They don’t look scabacious. You could afford better, but don’t know when you’ll feel like working again. So you went with cheap. You have lots of credit on your cards but hardly ever use them. You don’t like the idea of them. It’s too much like having a parent monitoring all you do. And you don’t like owing anyone anything. They always want something in return. Credit card companies are the very same as people in this aspect. Maybe even a little more aggressive. Maybe a lot. You look around the room. It’s light outside but the shades are drawn. You see outlines of tacky paintings on the wall. One is a mountain stream, one is an adobe dwelling, old Southwest style. Cacti. You passed some on the way. You remember where you are. Tempe, Arizona. You remember the insane events of the previous day. Then you recall your drunk, anxious mother asking as a child on all your birthdays, “Do you feel older? Do you feel older?” You never did. Today you do. Today you are 21 years and one day old. You feel ninety. You ache and swear you have a hangover, which is odd, because you haven’t had a drink in days. You review and then renew your resolve to quit drinking at 21. You do. You’re done. No need for a last call, final binge, or even one for the road. You’re just done. Memories flutter in and crowd out the calm you’d usually often feel upon waking. You feel a little ill, you think of Trent—deadweight like a sack of money at your feet. You think even more of the calm psychodrama of the cops playing mind games with you, trying to get you to confess to something you didn’t do. You think for a second about Ajax, but in comparison to the rest of that day, he is inconsequential. Hell, in comparison to any day, he is pretty much inconsequential. “He really wasn’t much of a man. Me deleting him as a lover is like a beautiful cat coughing up a hairball.”, you say out loud. You fall back down from sitting up on the bed, you stare at a water stain on the ceiling. “A woman’s view of sex”, you think to yourself. You laugh. Not much of a laugh, but you need a laugh. You find your hands on the candy-coated sex between your legs. It doesn’t make you think sweet thoughts. It feels closed for business. Yesterday, you petted her into a fluffy fury in a dusty parking lot. Today, your sweet cat doesn’t want petting. But you want something. A drink? A fuck? No. A backrub would be nice. You stare at the ceiling more and replay the events. What the fuck was wrong with Trent? Why are some people just wired wrong? He really seemed so boring and normal and driven. Like he could never kill himself, and if he did, he’d have to plan it a week in advance and make time for it in his Palm Pilot. And where did he even get a gun? You stare at the ceiling stain for probably a half-hour. You barely move, other than breathing. You think, “This is my version of meditating”. You sort of barely giggle. You finally get up. You need a shower but don’t take one. You go downstairs to leave and are surprised that this motel actually has continental breakfast. According to the wall clock and wall sign, you missed the cutoff by a few minutes, but no one says anything. You grab coffee, a muffin, and an orange and go back to your room. You eat, and then notice you smell. You really need a shower. It’s not a sexy sweat, it’s a scared, acid-scented sweat. You get in the shower and drink your coffee and eat your muffin while water drips on you. Water gets on the muffin. You don’t care. You finish the muffin in about three bites, choke down the coffee and just stand under the water. You start to feel a tiny bit human. It feels good. You don’t pick up the soap, you don’t rub a rag on your body, you just take in the water. The droplets feel connected to you in a way nothing else has since before Trent shot himself. There, you said it, at least on the inside. “Trent. Shot. Him. Self.” Saying it, admitting it happened, is half the skirmish. It’s hot as the Devil’s whore in Tempe. You really don’t love it. It’s worse than Los Angeles. But the water feels good. You are made of water. Maybe the water is trying to connect with the water inside your brain and body. You rub some soap around on your skin—the bag that contains this water. It’s a half-hearted attempt. You rinse off and turn off the water. You stand in the shower, dripping, cold. Your nipples perk, and your skin gooses, but you don’t feel turned on. You feel barely alive. But barely is some, and that’s better than how you felt when you woke up. You call Lydia. Her message says she’s gone for a ten-day meditation retreat with no phone in Northern California. You knew this, but forgot. You leave a message telling her you love her and you’ll talk to her later. You call Vessie at his store. He can tell something’s not right. He asks if you want to come see him. You say “no.” You’re 383 miles closer to Houston than you were yesterday, but you’re not positive you’re going to Houston. You just wanted to take a drive. Away from Trent’s corpse. Vessie tells you that you are welcome to come anytime. You tell him you love him and you just might take him up on it some day. You get in your Barracuda and drive. Tempe looks like LA, but more boring. It has the same wide streets, palm trees and unrelentant heat, but not a lot of excitement. It’s like LA without the culture. Ha ha. LA without the culture. Most of America would laugh at that, because most of America thinks, and would state if asked, that LA has no culture. Yet, LA sets the stage for the World. Everyone in every town tries to look like what they see on TV. And TV comes from LA. Well, LA and NY. In fact, the “industry” name for Tempe, Houston, and everything in America that isn’t LA or New York City is “the fly-over states”. Funny, unkind and true. But TV and movies will spend millions of dollars making fake sets that emulate every nuance of every cliché of any of those small towns between NY and LA. The Texanarchists of KTP are a new vision that does not exist elsewhere. They are John Wayne on crack. They are new Alamo rebels with buckskin boots, Bowie knives and electric guitars. Punk rock seems like the perfect setting for the new West to you. It just makes sense. And Texas has always been somewhat anarchist. The most southern outlaw of the southern outlaw states. You remember that Vessie told you that the Texas state charter has a built-in bylaw whereby Texas can secede at any time. That was the only way they’d join the union. It’s as if they only joined these United States on a trial basis….a probationary period if you will. And your new friends in Houston seem hell bent for leather to take that charter up on that bylaw. You pull up to an ice cream stand with roller skate-wearing window waitresses. No wonder Americans are so fat. They can’t even get out of their cars to walk 20 feet to get their fattening foods. A girl of about 16 skates up, flashing her smile and ponytail at you. “What can I get you, ma’am.” Ma’am? Wow, you’ve never had someone younger call you that. It isn’t like the Texans who call every female that as a sign of respect. It seems like she thinks you look old. Maybe if you didn’t feel ninety, she would have called you, “Miss”. You order double strawberry in a sugar cone. When she brings it back, you ask, “Where’s the library?” She has no idea. No wonder America has lost it’s way. Students don’t even know where the library is. You see her talking to an older woman behind the counter. You eat your ice cream. It’s fucking amazing. It melts and slithers down your hand. You lick the cone, your hand, the cone again. You consume the ice cream. It tastes better than any ice cream you’ve ever had. Probably better than any food you’ve ever had. It’s as if God made ice cream just for you and this is the first one anyone ever tasted. In fact, she also made rollerskates and pony tailed sixteen-year-old girls just for you, just to deliver same said cone. Man…..life feels tasty today. When it isn’t feeling like a dull achy nothing, that is. The girl skates back and says, “I asked my mom. She said the library is three blocks up and four blocks to the left. Right off Rural Road…it’s not a rural road, it’s called ‘Rural Road’.” She points the direction of “up”. You say, “Thanks, sweetie.” You are probably talking more to the last bite of ice cream than you are to the girl, but the girl smiles and skates off. She feels proud. Girls are so easy sometimes. You surmise that people just want to feel useful. When people don’t feel useful, they become criminals. And not cool criminals, like you guess KTP to be, no. Useless people mature into your garden-variety, the-World-owes-me-a-living-so-I’ll-hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-brick-and-take-your-money type of criminal. You figure that what people really want, what they really need, is simple: something to do and someone to love. People really need to feel important. The girl skates back and gives you one penny. “Oops, I forgot to give you your change.” Sweet. But mainly, honest. And that’s important to you. Meow. You drive to the library. At a stoplight, some dude in a white Mustang sidles up next to you and yells, “Cherry ride. What’s under the hood?” This could be a pickup line, but it’s probably just a car nut being interested in the car. There are a million Mustangs out there, but less than 20,000 1966 Plymouth Barracudas were manufactured. One of the lowest production runs ever for a Detroit assembly line model, of anything. People ask this question a lot. You used to not know the answer, you used to say, “An engine, I think.” But people kept getting pissed. But one day you saw a guy getting into another 1966 Plymouth Barracuda. You stood there stunned, in many years of living in Los Angeles, you’ve only seen one other besides yours. And then this third one. And they are unmistakable. They sort of look like the Batmobile. Sleek, deep fins, huge heavy iron slope-back body, and that trademark fishbowl-shaped back window. You ran up to the guy and said, “Nice car, what’s under the hood?” He smiled proudly and rattled off, “a 273 V-8.” As soon as he pulled out, you wrote that down. So now, four years later, in a different city, you parroted that back to the guy at the red light. He said, “Bitchin’. Wanna go hang out?” You said, “No thank you, I need to go to the library and do some homework for summer school.” He looked nervous, like you might be younger than you look, like he was about get busted in a jailbait sting. He said, “Thanks” and drove off when the light changed. You find the library and just sit in one of the big chairs in the periodical section. You’re still holding the penny you got as change. It’s air conditioned in here. Nice. You stare at more Southwestern art, albeit less tacky than that which adorns your motel room. You don’t read anything. You just relax. The Dysphoria fades. Ahhh……. You stare out the window at the palm trees for a bit. Some thirteen-year-old faux gangsta boys hit on you. You politely laugh it off. Then you decide to check your e-mail. You sign up on the waiting list for one of the computers and read a copy of O—the Oprah Magazine. Nothing on solving any of your problems in there. You guess that you and Oprah have different problems. You think about her for a few minutes. You’re all for female empowerment, but Oprah is the McDonald’s of female empowerment. You would look elsewhere for yours. Maybe from a man….tee hee. After about 20 minutes, your turn on the computer comes up. You log onto Yahoo.com to enter your POP info and password to access your account and notice something on the first page—one of the little “In The News” banner headlines over on the right. It reads “Los Angeles suicide prompts lawsuit”. Could it be?….doubtful. Ah heck….It’s worth a click anyway. You mouse on it and read: LA Man’s Suicide Blamed On Prescription Drugs (AP) - LOS ANGELES - Trent Morgan Seward, VP of marketing at InterSlice.com, the Culver City-based technology startup, died Monday night of a single gunshot wound to the head. LAPD have ruled it a suicide, based on forensics and witnesses. He also left a note. His sister, Regina Seward Klee, has filed a lawsuit blaming his death on the anti-depression drug Calmwell, which Trent was taking. This is the 11th such suit against the manufacturer, United PetroBioChemical. The suit contends that clinical studies producing suicidal behavior were ignored by the manufacturer. United PetroBioChemical is a division of Houston Implements. Experts are watching this case closely, due to rumors that Houston Implements is in aggressive negotiations to buy InterSlice.com. Wow. You didn’t know any of this. And you certainly didn’t know Trent was on psych meds. He didn’t seem like a candidate for it all. But then again, maybe that’s like when someone tells you they’re on a diet and you say, “You don’t look like you need to be on a diet” and they say, “Exactly.” You also didn’t know Trent’s company was being sold. Houston Implements. That seems familiar You click on the link in the article. It says: “Houston Implements, LLC. is a Houston, Texas-based holding company that acts as an umbrella group for over 300 different corporations, and is adding to that number daily. “The main locus is Biotech, but there are branches dealing in nanotechnology, petroleum, pharmaceutical, defense, aerospace, software, mainframe hardware, banking, credit, media, automotive, tobacco, privacy and forestry. Houston Implements, as a parent company, puts no money into advertising, preferring to remain anonymous. They aren’t even listed on any stock exchange. This company employs over 220,000 people worldwide, yet they have no Website, and the only phone number listed anywhere has a cryptic recording with no way to leave a message or contact anyone. Despite this low profile, they are the 11th largest company in the World, based on earnings. “They have recently come under scrutiny with the FTC over what is being perceived as monopolistic practices in several divisions. They are also known for trying to trademark the phrase “HI” with a smiley face, which they use on their security badges internally, and also on all their shipping containers. Some intellectual property advocacy groups have challenged this, saying that “HI” with a smiley face is public domain and should remain so.” This is all a lot to take. You click out of that and go to check your e-mail—offers for Viagra, a PayPal notice for a payment of $6000 owed to you by a company for subtitle work (that you weren’t expecting for months. Yea!), more spam, and a love note from Vessie: From: Vessie@texanarchy.com Subject: “you are my sunshine” haiku Kitty called today. I adore California, too far from Texas. Hey babykitty. You are a beautiful cat in a room full of gerbils. I think if I put my ear to your pussy, I can hear the ocean. I love to slurp on the roof of your mouth. I really want to stay up and talk in your ears, and all your other sacred holes. Under the big sky. Here. On earth as it is in Texas. ========----- you hit “reply” and type: Dear Sir. You are a friend, father, teacher and lover and brother to me. I would love to see you and will some day soon. I love to swoon with you and cummy up my panties with your love. I can’t wait to have you hold me hard in the dark and talk loudly in a soft voice into my hair. If you hear crickets tonight, it ain’t crickets, it’s me rubbing my legs together, all the way from here, while thinking of biting your belly. --yours in Jesus, California. ========----- You delete the Viagra ads, delete the porn and the get-rich-quick crap, transfer the six grand to your bank account, and walk out of the Tempe Public Library. There’s a fountain out front. Weird modern-looking thing. Sand moat around it, filled with purple cacti. You’re probably not supposed to cross that barrier, but you do. You walk up on the incline of the modern sculpture. You toss in the penny you’ve been holding. You make a wish. It actually seems a little cooler outside, which is odd, because it’s mid-afternoon. Or is it late afternoon? In your haste to leave Los Angeles, you forgot to grab your watch. Maybe you should buy one. Or maybe not. Do you really need a watch? You almost never need one. You did bring your cell phone, and that has a clock, but it’s back at the motel. You drive down the huge streets of this funny little town. Your usual internal conversation seems muted—quieter than usual. You aren’t exactly happy, and you feel rather troubled, but you feel a little freer in some visceral and private way. The voices seem a little lower today. You don’t hear literal voices in your head—you’re not nuts. You just listen to the conversation that you notice that you have, that all humans have, you assume. You know that sometimes it can take authority of your certitude. You know that you can get in a mild argument with someone and then walk off and you continue the conversation in your head. To the point that when you see them again, you are furious and start back into the polemic and slam them with your best blow—the most demeaning distillation of your thesis. And they lie there stunned thinking, “What the fuck did I do???!” You love to be right, to the point that it can hurt. You remember in Al-Anon your sponsor called this “that stunning blending of codependence with alcoholic thinking.” Your sponsor was a member of both Al-Anon and AA. What they call in the program “a double winner”. Is that sarcasm? You never figured out. You remember that joke your sponsor loved: “What’s the last thing a codependent sees before she dies?” (The answer is, of course, “Someone else’s life flashing before her eyes.”) You hated your sponsor. You hated more that she was probably right. About almost everything. You drive back to the motel. The guy at the desk asks if you’re staying another night. You say “yes” and sign a credit card form. He says you have a phone message. Odd, no one knows you’re here. You go upstairs and take another shower, then another nap. You wake up and remember the phone message. You call in and listen to the recording. It’s a lawyer representing Trent’s sister. Wow…that’s fucking spooky. How the hell did he find you? You don’t write down the number he leaves. You decide to check out and drive on. It’s a nice night, warm, and you point your Plymouth west on the 10 and drive across the desert. It’s amazingly pleasant out. You roll down the window and turn on the AM radio. It’s the one that was installed in the factory forty-some years ago when this car gleamed of the production line, and this radio still works. You almost think it should pick up 40-year-old AM radio broadcasts, plucked somehow out of the night sky, skipping off the wintry Stratosphere in a transitory & temporal time wrinkle. You settle for a country station and stare at the stars. It’s an illimitable field of ASCII text, nothing but asterisks, all flickering their gleam at you, all made just for you. You wonder how to find the footnotes attached to those asterisks. You aren’t delusional, right? You know that things aren’t actually made just for you, you just feel like they are today and tonight. Something about the events of the past 72 hours—the concert, the suicide, the cops, even your birthday, it all has shifted your knowledge of mortal actuality about three percent into a direction that feels more human. As going human concerns you, you can dig it. You know that having a human brain can hurt. And you know that the things that humans do to each other can hurt. When you read the paper, you see that it’s a more and more fucked up world each day. Your Al-Anon sponsor used to say that most problems come from “self-will run riot.” It sure seems that way when you read the headlines. It seems that every terrorist bombing, every lawsuit, every cowardly act of domestic brutality, ad nauseum, it all seems to be two parties so sure that they are right goddamnit, that they are willing to die or kill for it. And a lot of it even seems to be people arguing over God. And you don’t know much about God, but you know for damn hell crap sure that your 700-foot sexy lady does not want you to hurt yourself or anyone else. You know that she wants you to be happy, healthy, well loved, well fucked, hugged, licked and kissed, and employed doing things that make you enough money to not have to worry, and doing something important in the World. “Self-will run riot”. Giving that up seems to be the goal of 12-step ideology of any kind. It also seems to be the goal of psychotherapy. And don’t Christians preach the value of committing “selfless acts”? And didn’t Lydia say that the basic tenant of Zen is that “the basis of human suffering is desire”? And that the path to true enlightenment is to remove desire? It seems like all the stuff that people do to get better with themselves, their fellow humans, and their creator all involve being less selfish. And you remember hearing somewhere that people that do volunteer work with kids or animals live a few years longer than people that don’t. Somehow the desert makes it easier to think. You have burning access to some sort of spark that feels distant when you’re in a city. You remember Cash Newmann used to say that when he moved into that apartment building downtown on Bush Street in San Francisco, all the other people thinking around him and all the electrical appliances in near proximity hurt his head. Made it hard to write good songs. There were 32 units in that building. His previous apartment, where you’d met him had two units. And he seemed happier there. (That was when you were 16. And you don’t care what anyone thinks. You took advantage of him, not twother way ‘round. You were fully aware of what you were doing and he treated you like a goddess. You cried for weeks when you heard that he’d died of a heroin overdose. In that same building with the 32 units…He was such a sensitive, beautiful man.) Being away from humans seems to make you closer to God, or something. You decide that humans are pretty damn corrupt. Maybe you should avoid them. Maybe you should ask Lydia about that place she goes to spend 18 hours a day meditating. Hell, you could even consider being a nun at this moment. You feel that people are dirty and sick and that you need to sustain this feeling you get from not being around them. You need to stay away from humans. Is this an epiphany? You’ve heard of religious conversion. You have even heard of it being associated with the desert. The Native American Indians were pretty damn spiritual before they needed to be called Native Americans, when they were just “the People”, before your people showed up and fucked things up, introduced them to alcohol and smallpox, and took their land to make mini-malls. Then pushed them into corners and only allowed them to thrive if they let us come in and wager and game. You stop the car. You decide that this is all a sign. You should go back to Los Angeles, pack up your apartment, and go to that retreat where Lydia goes. But not just visit, actually move there. You really don’t want to be around people. You need to go back right now and do it. You turn the car around and head west on the 10. It seems like the thing to do. “California is the place you oughta be.” You know from a TV show you recently watched that California is the only state in the union with all types of stuff in one place: desert, ocean, mountains, cities, farms, even a tiny strip of rain forest up north. You need to be in California. It’s destiny. Hell, it’s your name. You will go back and devote your life to some sort of cloistered volunteer work. Lydia will know where to look. You love Lydia and are damn well glad she’s in your life. As hippie-dippie as she is, you know that she has some answers you don’t. After about a half-hour of happy driving back towards California, you need to pee. You pull over and walk out into the desert. You’ve never actually been on the desert. It looks much more bizarre than it does in movies. In movies it kinda looks like the surface of the Moon. On this night, in the flesh, it looks more like Mars. There’s a huge diversity of plants. There’s little things scurrying here and here and here and there. They’re probably lizards. You can’t see. But you are alert—you know there’s poisonous snakes out here. You find a tall cactus, one of the ones that sort of looks like the ones in cartoons—the ones that have two upturned arms and turn into people in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. You didn’t know that these actually existed. You figured they were the figment of the conjecture of some guy chained to a drawing desk in the scruffy sub-basement animation department of some stuffy studio in Burbank. But no, here they are. Cacti. They’re huge. Like 12 feel tall. You look at one up close in the moonlight. You pet it between its needles. This cactus feels like rubberized leather. The needles are long and hard. You think of all the times Wiley Coyote falls onto a cactus in smoldering pursuit of the Roadrunner. Ouch. You can almost feel that, inside your soul’s spine. While peeing you notice that you’ve just started your period. It’s a few days early. Not enough flow to need to deal with it yet, it can probably wait until you get back to civilization. Not that you are freaked out by your monthly. That’s what your mother called it, so you do too. It’s something that you think somehow should bother you but never did. You were really happy when it finally came, late, at age 14. You lay down on the ground next to the pee-soaked hard packed sand and stare up at the stars. You think of the three times you smoked pot, when you were fifteen. You didn’t even feel anything the first two times. But that third time…..wow. You can taste how everything seemed accentuated and spectacular. Everything seemed limitless and life seemed full of possibilities. Even the very woods you were sitting in seemed perfect. You never repeated your stonage, because when you came down, you were a little paranoid. And you didn’t want your mother to find out. You really haven’t felt exactly that way again until just now. And you aren’t even high. But you feel buzzed by the stars and the warm night air. You close your eyes and seem to look into the stars. You can see them even with your eyes closed, and you aren’t even a very visual person. You usually can’t even look at someone and then close your eyes and see the face that was just directly in front of you. But right now you can see the infinite and utterly immense convolutions of stars and galaxies within concentric connections…constellations collapsing into the inside of atoms, and the fact that everything on this planet affects everything else. It’s a truism that this knowledge is available to every person on this fucked-up and beautiful blue ball, and is probably temporarily shown to every teenage stoner who ever puffs on the sacred kine bud in the glass peace pipe he buys for “smoking tobacco products” at his local “herbal emporium.” You wake up to a sniffing sound. You feel clean and pure. You see the stars. You keep your body down but sit your head up. The sniffing sound is a fucking wolf! He’s sniffing your crotch. Must be the menstrual blood…oh wait, this is a coyote. It’s too skinny to be a wolf. And wolves don’t live around here, do they? And why are you thinking these rational thoughts again? This fucking wild dog of the desert is about to bite you in your sacredest of places. You stay still. He sniffs all around you and all over your body. He comes around to your face. “This is it. I’m dead.” It somehow doesn’t scare you. You pretty much died when Trent waved a gun at you. Maybe you’re already dead and this is heaven. Or a coma fantasy. You accept death. Again. Nope. The coyote LICKS your face. You smell his wild dog breath. It smells like rotten cat food, or even rotten cats, but somehow doesn’t turn you off. You get a look into the eye of this magnificent and emaciated critter and see something. You see God. The dog de la noche doesn’t seem to want to hurt you either. He walks away from you back toward your car. You stand up. He seems to be waiting for you. He goes right up to your car and pees on it! He lifts his leg just like a normal hound dog would. Then he howls. Fucking shudders you to the core of your ganglia. Very old, unused and primal parts of your brain stand erect now. You have a quick flash of the museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, the thousands upon thousands of Dire Wolf skulls in an array on the walls. You get a flash of your mother. But you don’t dislike her. You feel resolved with her. Suddenly you know that she’s here. You feel her, and make peace with her. She feels like a force of love and light. She feels pure. Not drunk, not mean, not crazy. She feels happy—the way she did when you were very little. You thank her and apologize to her. And you receive an apology from her in one fancy and wordless swirl. The Word was. The knowledge is. The Word is. And she saw that it was good. The knowledge is this: Being away from humans isn’t the answer. The answer is being with humans to do good, and that is what God is. God is the fucking kick-ass force that pours though people. You just have to find the right people. You’ve heard a coyote howl before, when you lived in Glendale. There are critters of this same species disseminated all over Los Angeles. They come down from the hills looking for water and food when human development drives them out of their natural habitat. You saw one running down the street in a totally suburban neighborhood. But that one sounded wounded, like a defeated American Indian or Native Indian or whatever fuck the white man is calling them this week. Like someone displaced. The canine equivalent of a small child lost in the mall. This one tonight seems not lost at all. His cry, his blood-rattling, bone-curdling shrill squall is a triumphant herald. He likes you. He cares for you. After he pees on your car, he runs back to you, then back to the car. He points with his nose. The opposite of the direction your car is facing. He points east. Then he looks back at you, howls again and runs along the highway. East. It’s a sign. It’s beyond a sign. It’s a command. You turn your car around and head east. Chapter seven You’re driving the old speed limit for a little while. 55 on the 10. Double nickels on the dime. Driving on the I-10 at night is usually pretty mundane. It’s a seemingly eternal stretch of paved road that used to be a wagon trail. You recall reading a true story about the reason why railroad tracks are the width they are, and it’s that they were built the same width as the wheels on the covered wagons that preceded them, and those were the same width as the horse-drawn oxcarts, two oxen abreast, were before them. They built one right over the other. This also works metaphorically, in a bigger sense. It shows that in transitory periods, people build on the old technology to save work, and that in doing so they sometimes bring over arbitrary aspects, or even limitations, from the previous technology. The I-10 East is no exception. It does not go over the territory that would make the most sense at every turn if it were being built from scratch now. It’s based on wagon paths etched before any modern topography, GPS, satellite reconnaissance, or even the ability to fly a hot air balloon overhead and hand draw a crude map existed. Why route around a hill when you can dynamite through it? You extrapolate this even further. Not only are new technologies built over old technologies, inheriting the blurry fissures in the previous body of knowledge, but the same is true of government. American law borrows deeply from British parliamentary procedure. You heard somewhere that the idea of paying someone a dollar for something that was otherwise a gift, to make it legal, quid pro quo, was originally paying someone one peppercorn, in Ye Olde England. You relate this (as you seem to be relating and interrelating and cross-referencing everything tonight…does your life begin today? Will all things Cali one day be measured B.C. and A.C.?—before coyote and after coyote?) to something you read in that KTP book. Where they expand that thing they said at the concert about one of the founding fathers saying something like “God forbid we go 20 years without a revolution”. The KTP book related this to modern government. How government in America was originally a rebellion against the double-wide wagon tracks of British “taxation with representation”. The founding fathers were anarchists. They were considered terrorists. But then once a system is in place, people get fat, and happy, and damn if they’re gonna give up their cush jobs and their hot-and-cold running slave mistresses. It wasn’t always like this. George Washington had to borrow money to travel to his inauguration. Talk about dedication. Total D.I.Y. ethic. Totally do it yourself. The book went on to say that it is naive to blame the US president for all the nation’s ills (and the World’s ills), “even though we, KTP, tend to fall into that snare.” The President is basically, well, not a puppet, but more like a CEO. Of the most powerful and invisible corporation in the World. And the board of trustees has about 1000 members, and most of them don’t want to be known. Though many of them are on the boards of powerful corporations. And they still have their hot-and-cold running whores, “but are usually way more into money than pussy.” And anytime you see a photo of the President comfortably shaking hands with someone, some well-fed, usually white, man, he’s probably one of the board members. KTP pointed out here that “Jesus was put to death for challenging organized religion”, and he was pure, but some of his followers, trying to secure their jobs in the wagon tracks of modern evangelical dog-and-pony money shows, they’re fucking it up pretty badly. KTP’s self-published mission statement also pointed out that several members of KTP were Christian, a few were atheists, more were theistic in some very personal synthesized cross-referencing of several major paths, and most were kind people but agnostic. They also said that labor unions were another problem—that they are a great idea, a club to stick up for the little man, but they also end up as corrupt gangs with bosses worse than the whip-cracker factory owners they were originally appointed to monitor and curb. And that leads back to corporations gaining enough power to challenge the unions, and recently even occupy and destroy countries. Countries usually full of little brown people. (Although this isn’t about color. The corporate commerce collusion club that the President steers has several black and Hispanic and Asian members. The real lines these days are not drawn on color. They are drawn on money. The color thing is something the money people make up to keep the poor blacks and whites busy fucking with each other so they can’t get powerful enough to notice the real deal—the elite empire club. And again, the President is only the CEO of that new club.) And it’s not just about money. “There a few cool millionaires in the World, rich people that have spilled no blood to obtain it, and KTP salute them.” The book went on to say that “There sure a lot of fantastic people in our beloved KTP fan base music scene. But there’s some unhappy bastards. We’ve finally figured out why a lot of punkers and indie kids are self-righteous. They all hate their dad and just want to be loved. And the President of the United States is the perfect embodiment of the angry dad to them. “Punkers just wanna be told they're good. Hug a punker today. Because some really need to be told they’re good. That’s all they need. Until then, they’re smart, but somehow still dumb as a bowl of mice and twice as cranky.” You remember all this from the book pretty much verbatim. It’s that kind of writing. Stirring and clever, but not self-awaredly clever. Economical. Worthy. “Why am I analyzing things in this manner? That’s not usual,” you ask the air out loud at your newfound brain gymnastics. Yet you feel calm. Your mind seems wiggly and strong, and stretching to get stronger. Doing fun little cerebral pushups, maybe to prepare for some bigger test, up the road a spell. You feel happy and healthy and smart and beautiful. You feel, in fact, like Tempe, that is, “Hotter than the Devil’s whore”. You say that out loud. It’s something Vessie called you one time. “It is ironic”, you think to yourself, “that I am headed east to get to the last bastion of the Wild West in America. Texas really is the final frontier.” You’re twitching to get there. You’re unstoppable and cannot be sanctioned and you are blessed by Providence and resonate the Power of the Coyote in your soul. Nothing can intermit you. You’re golden. You’re blasting down the highway, watching little streaks of shimmering, simmering purple-gold-blue-green-god light peaking over the flat, sandy horizon….slim, flickering and buoyant luminescence that comprises and composes the subtle herald of yet another glimmering day on this beautiful planet, made just for California Ann Christensen. “I’m king of the World!” yells you. You start driving fast. Then you run out of gas. Chapter eight A 1966 Plymouth Barracuda does not have the best gas mileage of any boat on the road. They get about 11 MPG when fully tuned, and yours is not. The gas tank does hold a whopping 35 gallons, but you were so damn high on being one of God’s unstoppable chosen kitties, that you forgot to watch the gauge. And you’re damn far from anything that looks like petrol repository. And even if there were one, it’d probably not be open. You feel a little weak. You didn’t notice that before, it kinda lurked up on ya and pounced. You have slept so little in the past few days, how much again? You have no idea, but a passing-yet-erudite conjecture would probably tip the scales at three hours a night for three nights. Or is it four? Nights or hours? You are cold and now very tired. You rest your eyes and awake again to tapping. Damn it. The world seems bent on tapping at you lately. And the rift betwixt the waking and sleeping worlds seem more and more thin. You don’t remember falling asleep much lately, only being frequently and crudely shaken awake. It’s an Arizona state trooper and he looks serious. You roll down the window. It’s hot as shit. He asks for license and registration. You give him your license. “My registration expired about two weeks ago. I’m about to get it fixed. I’m out of gas though at the moment. Where’s the nearest service station?” “Well, ma’am, it’s 23 miles up the road. I’ve got two gallons in a can in my trunk I’d be happy to give you. Will this thing make it 23 miles on two gallons?” “Maybe, if I drive slow.”. “Well”, the corpulent cowboy cop says, “I’m due for some breakfast, I can follow you there. My wife works at a restaurant, and they have gas. I’ll fill you up and follow you to see that you make it”. You feel blessed. You not only didn’t get a ticket, you got a bump of fuel and a police escort. “Bless you, officer.” You feel blessed. You drive about 30 miles per hour to the rest stop, following the sweet cop. You see him looking into his rear view often to check on you. The sweet sun is melting the hell outta your retinas. You seem to have lost your sunglasses. Maybe the coyote is wearing them. You run out of gas pulling into the filling station, stopping thirty feet shy of the pumps. The cop gets two truckers to help push you to the pump, then buys you breakfast. His wife sits down and eats with you. They tell you they had a daughter about your age who was killed in a car wreck last year. Drunk driver, never caught. The wife cries. The sweet cop holds her and tries not to cry. You fill the Barracuda’s thirsty gas tank. You buy new sunglasses, a gas can, and a huge plastic bucket of bad, strong trucker coffee. You fondle tapes in the 99-cent bin. You buy a ten-dollar walkman, two sets of alkaline batteries, and some tapes. They don’t have anything you would listen to normally, and they certainly don’t have any KTP. You buy the “best of” of the following ensembles: Starland Vocal Band, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and something called “Best Driving Songs”, which has both “Radar Love” by Golden Earring and “Highway Star” by Deep Purple. It also has, “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf, “Taking Care of Business” By Bachman Turner Overdrive, “Legs” by ZZ Top, “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “LA Woman” by The Doors. It ends with a disco remix called “Radar Love ‘99”. You hug the cop and his wife, and drive all the way through to Houston. You stop only to pee, get gas, hotdogs, and once to call and find out the name of Vessie’s record store. You want to see him. Badly. More so even, you feel a need to go see the KTP people. You aren’t even sure why. You know they want you, but you don’t know that that’s it, or even that you’ll do whatever it is that they want you to do. But you feel a compelling urge to see them. But Vessie is first. And you don’t even know where the KTP kids live. And you love Vessie. And you haven’t been fucked really really really well since, well, since you last saw Vessie, about eight months back. Yum. “What the fuck is the name of his record store?” You can’t remember. Your cell phone batteries are dead. You call information for Houston from a payphone at a truck stop in San Antonio. The operator doesn’t know. You hang up. You feel guided by voices as you call back. Somehow you even get the same operator. “Hi. This is Jo Tiffany. How can I help you?” She sweetly chirps at you. “Hi. Yes, I just spoke to you, Jo Tiffany. My name’s Cali.” “Hi Cali. And a good day to you. What can I do you for?” God, she sounds so nice. Sort of like a really straight version of the KTP people. She, and they, don’t sound fake. They sound like they genuinely actually really truly decidedly give a damn. Like if you said, “I’m not doing well, Jo Tiffany. My lover shot himself the other night and died in front of me and I’m really freaked out”, that she would take an hour out of her busy day to comfort you. You almost would take the Universe up on it, except that you are really truly absolutely feeling less and less freaked out with each dying second. Life am good. Arrrrrrggggggggggggggg! You want to puff out your chest and thump it like a monkey. Or a pirate. “Well, Jo Tiffany, is there a college radio station there? If there is, can I get the number for them?”. “I’ll check honey…Yes there is. Rice Radio. KTRU. Hold please for the number and have a wonderful day, Cali!” “I will, ma’am.” You write the number on the back of your hand and call it. You have to go back into the truck stop for more change. Finally you get some guy on the phone. He sounds blissfully stoned. Ahhh… college radio. “Hi, do you know the name of a record store there…run by a guy named Vessie?” “Duuuuude! Yeah! That’s Drunk Rooster Vinyl!” You smile, say “Thank you dood!” and call Houston Information again. Somehow, by some glitch in the Universe, you get Jo Tiffany a third time. Jesus, Houston a big town. What are the chances of that? She gives you the number for Drunk Rooster and hangs up. You didn’t want the number, you wanted to address. You call back. You get Wanda May this time. Wanda May also sounds very sweet, and gives you the address and you scribble it on your hand. You drive to the city, thinking about how Vessie’s store got its name. You remember. He told you in your bed in Los Angeles. You’ve never been to Houston. Well, a few times with your dad as a kid, to the rodeo. You loved your dad. He was always nice, and always told you he loved you and was proud of you. Damn you miss him. Vessie’s neighbor has a rooster that only crows in the afternoon. This rooster is too lazy to get up at dawn. And he sounds drunk. Like, “Cocka-doodle, doodle,…dooooooooodlezyarhagf.”. Thus “Drunk Rooster Vinyl.” Your Mopar baby muscle car boat sails on. You cross the threshold, into the city limits of Houston. You get there in sixteen hours of virtually non-stop driving from Tempe. You only listen to one tape. You wish you’d brought the mixed tape Vessie sent you for your birthday, but the one you bought works fine for this drive. You kill both sets of batteries and learn every word to the eight best damn driving songs ever written. Once past the city limits, you notice that your cell phone seems miraculously resurrected from no charge to a low charge. You use it to call back the radio station and ask for directions. Some other stoned kid says to take the I-10 all the way in and then take the Smith Street Exit. The cell battery dies again before you get the last few turns. You drive on. You find yourself in between downtown and old Chinatown. You stop for soul food, on the edge of this industrial and seemingly deserted (except for crack zombies) no-man’s region. Poor blacks and whites who look like they wouldn’t mix are seated at tables near each other. A sign on the door reads, “No Firearms Permitted on Premises.” You ask for directions. Some polite redneck waiting in line for ribs says you’re in an area called “the Second Ward”, but tells you that the record store you’re looking for is in the “scary-ass part of town” between Downtown, the Second Ward and Old Chinatown. You get directions, eat some quick ribs (damn good!) and drive on. Funny. This Drunk Rooster Vinyl is located in basically the Houston equivalent of the neighborhood the KTP concert was in Los Angeles. It’s the wasteland between skid row, the poor people, and the very poor people. You bet every city has one of these. You pull up across the street from Drunk Rooster Vinyl and sit in your car for a few minutes. Chapter nine Drunk Rooster Vinyl is a double-barrel shotgun shack painted ten different colors in the grayest part of town. Drunk Rooster is an oasis in a marsh of scary fucking desolate nothing. You sit there in your Barracuda. There’s steam coming out of the grill. Overheated. Got here in the nick of mechanics. Mighta burned up your old grandma of a muscle car if Vessie had lived in, say, Galveston rather than Houston. But Houston it is, kitties. Meow. It’s hot as hell in Houston. You don’t love it. It’s worse than Los Angeles. Not as bad as Tempe, but it’s gonna bug you. You don’t need to stay long though. You see people going in and out of the store. Again, it’s an odd mix. Punker types and old cowboys. School kids and even a cop. You finally congregate up enough daring to go in. Inside, all the walls are knocked out. The shotgun shack is one long room. Remnants of the walls are still visible here and there. The ceilings are unfinished. You can see the plumbing and the wiring. You don’t see Vessie, so you decide to lurk for a bit. The girl behind the counter is the bass player from KTP, the flucking awesome plump little slice o’ heaven that you were drooling at when you saw them in LA. You wonder if Vessie has a gal in Houston, and you wonder if it’s this doll baby. If so, you feel a little inadequate and jealous. You don’t say hi to her. You rather just thumb through the record racks. Drunk Rooster Vinyl is mainly devoted to country, bluegrass, blues, Texas swing and Zydeco. There’s also a rack devoted entirely to KTP. It seems to be the only rock in the store. And people are buying it. In your first ten minutes there, four different people come in, go directly to the KTP rack, buy the one KTP record in the “New Release” rack, and leave. The new KTP record is called “Fuck you, I’m from Texas”. The cover is a black and white photo of Eli’s tattoo. It’s Xeroxed and hand-glued onto a blank black record sleeve. Again, it seems to be available only on vinyl. Everyone in the store seems really friendly. You decide to finally talk the cowgal behind the counter. You say, “Hi. I’m Cali. Do you know when Vessie will be in?” You’re pretty damn transfixed by her beauty. She’s so adorable. And young. Again, you feel like you’re too skinny when you’re looking at her. And even too old. She makes being plump look so fucking delectable and volumptuous. “Oh, yeah, you’re his California girl. Hi! I’m Rose.” You go to shake her hand. She doesn’t extend hers in return. “Oh yeah”. You say. “What is it with you folks and hand shakes?” You do your best to not sound mean. You just are darned curious. “It’s simple,” beams Rose. “That’s how people get sick. People in Texanarcha almost never get sick and it’s partly because we never shake hands. And we’ve got too much work to do to be sick. And shaking hands is a really stupid gesture anyway…comes from shaking people down for hidden weapons in the middle ages. But even stupider is that everyone does it without thinking about it. We take a lot of shit for it. It’s a really big deal to not shake hands in Texas. But we stand by it. I’ve seen people with colds sneeze on their hand and then try to shake mine and then be insulted when I won’t. We’re into hugs though. Is it OK if I give you a squeeze?” You gleam at the thought of a squeeze from sweet fleshy foxy goddamn flucking beauty-fuel Rose. You say, “That would be swell, momma.” Did that sound condescending? You found yourself accidentally putting a southern accent on it. Rose barely even has one. You notice that not many people in the store really have one either. Not like Eli and Harry Jack. They damn sure have accents. Rose comes around the counter and gives you a hug that feels like an invitation to carnal romping, a gorgeous promise of possibility, and at the same time, totally non-inappropriate. Nothing in her being feels sleazy at all. She whispers in your ear, “I think you are beautiful.” My gosh, that felt good. Not only the words and what they meant to you, but her sweet sweet voice and her warm breath in your ear. You sort of melt just a little bit. A woman has never done that to you. You close your eyes and squeeze her tight. She smells loverly. Like rose perfume mixed with an orgasm, and a touch of diesel. She pulls away, locks her brown eyes with you and you fall just a tiny little baby bit in love with her. Wow. What a cool welcome to town. You like Houston. And you like Rose. And if you never see her again (though chances are you will), your life is much better for this moment. This filly takes your right hand and places it on her big loverly left boob, held barely in place by a yellow teddy slip frilly baby doll lingerie thing. It’s a different one than the yellow one she was wearing in Los Angeles. You feel her heart beating. She says, “Welcome to Texas, doll.” Some really straight-looking cowboy between the racks looks over, sees the whole thing, and acts like it’s nothing unusual. He holds up a record and says, “Hey Rose, when you get a minute, can you tell me how much this David Allen Coe bootleg is? The tagger fell off it.” “It’s twelve bucks, Jess”, Rose yells. She turns back to you and quietly purrs, “Now let’s see about getting you to your true love.” Rose yells to the room, “I’ll be back in a minute, y’all, don’t steal anything.” A couple people laugh. Rose takes you out the door and turns abruptly to the other door of the shotgun shack. You hear cicadas chirping their bandsaw purr in the trees. Rose stands on the porch for a second and says, “I’m sure Vessie is gonna be elated to see you. He adores you. Talks about you a lot. Does he know you’re coming or is this a surprise visit?” “It’s a surprise.” You say, almost blushing. You stand in the relentless sun on the porch. You look at the doors. Apparently, Vessie lives next door in the same building as his store. Both doors are covered with wild freaky psychedelic paintings. This whole house just vibrates compared to the rest of the tin warehouses and brick abandoned factories around here. You say, “Who painted this place?” Rose says, “Some hippie friends of Vessie’s. I think they like drugs. Vessie doesn’t do drugs, as I’m sure you know, but he has some crazy ole buddies.” As she turns a key in the lock on Vessie’s door, you wonder about her having a key. You munch on her “You must be his California girl” comment. You wonder again if Rose is Vessie’s Texas girl. Rose turns the key and opens the door and says, “Vessie’s sleeping.” You hear snoring a few rooms away. “Just follow the snoring.” She turns to leave, then puts her arm around your waist, pulls you near and hovers as if waiting for permission. You’re not sure what for, but your eyes grant it. Rose kisses you on the lips. It’s not a sloppy kiss. It’s innocent, but not entirely chaste, either. Perfect and precise. The tiniest hint of tongue. You feel it ripple from your still-happy ears to a spot somewhere between your womb and your heart. Or in some nerve connecting your womb to your heart. Your tummy feels warm. Like you just had a shot of booze, but for the soul. Rose pulls away, stares at you with brown eyes. Brown like your mother’s. But not swimming in fear like your mother’s eyes. Rose’s eyes are simply pure…with the innate God-knowledge a cat would have, and the sweetness of a hummingbird. That kiss was meant to be. You don’t know or care if there will be others, and you are satedly satiated. She spins on her cowboy boot heel and leaves. You stand alone in the semi-darkness of Vessie’s front room. You’ve never seen his home. You only ever knew him in Los Angeles. One time for one week and one time for two. The shades are down and the room is cluttered. There’s stuff everywhere, much of it related to music. The couch has boxes of records on it, leaving only space for one person. On the walls there is a big velvet painting of Elvis that somehow seems not ironic, but sincere. And the walls are covered by signed, framed records…Roky Erickson, The Butthole Surfers, even Willie Nelson. “To Vessie and Drunk Rooster, love Willie.” There’s a photo of Gary Busey, signed to Vessie. The walls are lined by boxes and boxes of records, CDs, DVDs, cassettes, even some eight-track tapes. Other walls are lined with books. He is a collector, but you get the feeling he listens to and reads everything he owns. Vessie is far too pragmatic to own shit just for the sake of owning it. There’s also a couple framed commendations and group photos from when he was a Texas Ranger. You look at the fellows with him in the picture. It’s them off-duty, and they look like a tough bunch. Like outlaw bikers with short hair. They also all look happy, and most of them look like really nice people that you wouldn’t dare fuck with. You follow the snoring back to Vessie’s bedroom. The house is long and slim, all connected by a thin, dark hallway. There are four or five rooms other than the main sitting room where you entered. All the doors are open. There’s a messy kitchen. Another room has a computer and piles of mail and a desk and chair. Obviously his office. He said he sells records on the Internet too, and it looks like he’s maybe doing a lot of business. The computer is on and the DSL router is blinking furiously, like there’s a lot of activity, even though no one is sitting at the computer. The office is a blur of frozen activity. The next room is filled with boxes and boxes of records. And mailing containers, and mail bins. Must be the shipping department for the store. One room is kinda empty and has a bed. Looks like guest quarters. There’s a bathroom, nothing unusual about it. Very much a guy bathroom. Not a lot of “product”, just a bar of soap, a brush, shampoo, and conditioner. No after shave. Not even deodorant. Vessie doesn’t wear any, but he never smells bad. He showers every day. Two or three times a day when it’s hot. He always smells clean. Like sex. You love his smell. It’s like beauty and force distilled into one sweet li’l stink. When he was at your house he accidentally left a T-shirt he’d worn for a few days. You slept with it in your face for a couple months, until you’d sniffed all the boy-spunk out of it. You also cried on it some. God you’ve missed this man. You step into his bedroom. It’s fairly dark. He’s naked and covered in a sheet. You stand over him for a minute. You feel your nipples get hard. You drop your dirty dress to the floor and dive in. He’s a heavy sleeper and doesn’t respond much to you kissing him on the cheek. You kiss your way down his relatively hairless chest to his non-beer belly (it looks like a beer belly, but Vessie doesn’t drink—that’s another reason he smells good. Boys who drink stink and not in a good way. It comes out their pores and smells sour). You love the Vessie belly. It is the tabula rasa of your future. You want to worship it. He was a little ashamed of it the first time you slept together, kept his shirt on, tried to hide it a bit. Told you he was going to start working out again. You said, “That’s fine. I want you as healthy as you can be, I want you around for a long time. But I hope you never lose this belly. You know, I love you partly because of this belly, not despite this belly.” You plant about three hundred kisses on his little round tummy. After about twenty-one of them he makes a guttural little manly purr-snore sound and apparently opens his eyes. You don’t look up, because you’re so damn in love with kissing his little paunchy mound. You tongue the inside of his belly button as he moans, “Cali. I can’t believe you made it. I totally adore you, ya little puppy humper.”. You move down to your goal, and take his wonderful, amazing, hard-working and pretty penis into your mouth. You don’t go for the “I’m gonna fuck you hard with my mouth and drain you with my motion” motion yet. You flit around and on him. You don’t spend much time on the tip. You used to a lot because you thought that was what men wanted. Probably because they do that in the couple pornos you’ve seen. But most men, and especially Vessie, don’t love that as much as working the shaft and the balls. The shaft is where the magic is. It’s the essence of the cock, the crux of man. You work it lightly with velvet soothing washes. You linger and put a finger down below and play with his butthole. He speaks in creaks. You love his voice. It’s deep and a little southern but mainly just pretty and makes you damn wet, as if you weren’t wet enough already from the spontaneous girly foreplay in the doorway. You keep working him and you look up. You see his blue-green-gray eyes for the first time in the better part of a year. He pets your head. Most men, when getting blown, try to push your head into it. That sucks, pardon the pun. Actually, and more accurately, it chokes. Vessie has never done this to you. You feel he never would. He makes you feel totally safe all the time. That drives you harder to work him more and love him completely and with every microgram of your fortitude. He strokes your hair and says, “Elsewhere in Texas right now, ten-thousand women, and three-thousand men are doing exactly what you’re doing. But I don’t believe it. I think you invented that just for me.” You start getting happier and elated, even though he told you almost this exact thing last year in LA, substituting “California” for “Texas.” It still seems sincere. Your nervous and horny. It’s a cool combination. You’re manic almost. You work him harder, resting your elbows on the bed. He reaches both hands under your underarms. You’re already slick with sweat. He slides you a little. It tickles a little. He licks the sweat off his fingers, smells it and moans. Resting on your elbows is a little tricky, but leaves both hands free to clutch his cock and jack him, and rub the balls at the same time you suck. You wiggle your ass involuntarily, wanting to be fucked now, but keep the work going. You wrap your left hand around the shaft, and keep it locked to your lips. You suck while working up and down. Your right hand is squeezing and kneading his balls. You’re not gentle with them. You were the first few times, when you met, but he took your hand with his and showed you how hard he liked to be held and squeezed and kneaded. Vessie cums in your throat. He screams like a woman. He’s the only man since Cash to make a sound that intense. It’s wonderful. And his spunk is the food of the gods. Some pumps down directly into your hungry tummy. Some stays in your mouth and you swirl it like a wine connoisseur. You roll it over in your tongue, lolling it. You climb up and kiss him and pass a tiny bit into his mouth. Most men would be offended by this. Vessie loves it. You don’t like giving head. But you love giving Vessie head. You could do it all day and all night. When you’re with him, you make it a point to start and end every day by blowing him until he cums. With most men, this would be counterproductive to you getting the lovin’ you need, because most men can only cum a few times a day. But not Vessie. The more you blow him, the more he fucks you. And he is ready to fuck again about three minutes after being blown or fucked, and as long as you keep purring at him and rubbing your sacred body on his, he doesn’t even lose his hard on when he spurts. He once fucked you nine times in one day. He probably fucked you eleven or twelve times in that 24-hour period (and you guys even slept for about ten hours, waking up a few times to do it more, almost in your sleep) but you don’t know. You lost count. You remember a reprinted article you once read, an interview with really cool bizarro painter Salvador Dali. It was in Playboy magazine, from the late 60s or early 70s. The interviewer asked Dali, “Have you ever taken LSD?” The painter replied, “I don't need LSD, I am LSD”. Vessie doesn’t need Viagra, Vessie is Viagra. Vessie keeps kissing you, slowly and gently and forcefully licking the inside of your mouth. You can’t tell if he’s trying to get back the last bit of his cum, or if he just doesn’t care. He’s wrastlin’ you over and around and lovin’ it all and you’re rolling around and pushing him back. You’re both giggling. You’re like two puppies fighting, with love. There’s nibbling and biting and pushing and shoving and it’s rough and sweet and not a bit violent. He pins you down in some sort of wrestling move and places both strong arms over your forearms and slams you into the bed and pushes his face into your pussy. He says, “mmmmm……Cali pussy….,” while down there, at least that’s what it sounds like. His words are a muffled fluff. You see your now-flowing menstrual blood all over his chin as he occasionally looks up. You used to hate the word “pussy”. Most men use it like a term of violence and degradation, not a term of endearment. But the way Vessie says “pussy” sounds like a dignified and esteemed veneration, an apotheosis of numinous and holy love. And it reminds you not of drunken frat boys, but rather of cats. You feel loved and well-petted and kissed and secure. You want to hug the stuffing out of this old redneck. You can’t believe a man of 39, almost 40, can rock your little-girl world like this, but he does. He’s the best lover you’ve ever had. He climbs on you and finally slides his cock inside your loverly little pussy. You open like a flower, like wings, and fly. He is using you for his pleasure and you love it. He is not overtly genteel like Trent was, and he is not clumsy and too rough like Ajax was. Mmmmm…this porridge is just right. He kisses your ears and lays on you, fucking you close and sweet. You warm to him more. You missed him. You aren’t monogamous by nature, but you could easily spend thirty years being so busy loving Vessie that you wouldn’t notice another man. Vessie nails you to the center of the earth with his cock. He is purring and grunting and calling you “my dirty little kittywhore.” You love it. You are not a whore, you know that, but you are, at this moment, in this bed, his whore. You would do anything and everything he tells you to. And he would never even tell you to. But you’re just transfixed and stunned with the depth of his sweet, addictive kisses. He places his hand on your breast and roughs you up with love. He pulls and kneads your nipple between his fingers. It’s almost too hard, but somehow not hard enough. His other hand is on your head. He is arched away from you, looking down at you. You alternate between watching him, tracing his cheek with your hand, and laying your arms behind your head, closing your eyes and drowning in his cock and the entire flurry of love and sex and kiss and sweat and smell and menstrual blood and semen and joy. He slithers back down to lying on top of you, close, cheek to cheek, without missing a beat of fuck. He whispers in your ear. “May I please have my way with you? I won’t hurt you, but I would love to push you around a little.” You have no idea what exactly he means, but you trust him so absolutely that you can only possibly say, “Of course, kitty. Do anything you want with me.” He keeps fucking you, slow and strong and real. He grabs you and runs his hand over your face and loves the curves of your cheekbones, he pets your ear, pulls on the lobe gently and then kneads that. He kisses you again on the lips. Then he grabs your short blond wavy hair and pulls your hair, hard. It doesn’t feel like pain. Then he pushes your head into the pillow. It doesn’t hurt, though it is incredibly intense. It feels totally respectful, but astonishing. No one’s ever done this with you. Not only does your pussy open up and flutter harder and softer and wetter at him, but you feel even more trusting of him. You make purr sounds. It starts with a invoking intonation like a baby cooing, and gets deeper. Guttural. It’s coming from some primal place in your soul or womb that you didn’t even know existed. He lets go of your hair right before it starts to hurt, then grabs a slightly different part of your hair. He twists your body sideways, holding you only by your hair. It should hurt, but doesn’t. You hips continue to face up and open, but your head is forced, face first into the pillow. He bites the back of your neck while still fucking you. You feel a thing inside you’ve never felt. You are gonna cum. He senses it as you whelp harder. He cums, dumping what feels like a pound of baby juice up in you. He came so hard it must have made your heart wet. It’s completed you and filled you. Most men would stop at this point. He drives on. You know that this is hard for a man to do. But he does. Then he grabs a cock-shaped vibrator by the bed, turns it on and slips it between you and him, resting on your little clitty. You slip over the edge and squirt. You feel like you squirt. You don’t literally spray liquid, but you feel like you’re shedding sweat on the inside. He is roughly pushing your head into the pillow and slowly fucking you. The feeling is like being born. It’s monstrous, powerful and nifty. You are so relaxed and tired and turned on and feel fully safe with this gloriously refulgent man. You shudder and melt and claw the bedboard in resplendent involuntary convolutions. You cry out so loud the people at the record store must hear it, even if they’re blasting music. You rattle the rafters of this old wooden house. You scream, “Vessie, I’m cumming! I’m cumming! I’m finally fucking cumming, Jesus fucking Christ I love you Vessie, fuck…me…now” He just drives on. You swallow his cock with your kitty, you pull his hair and claw his back and make him bleed and try to pull him inside you. Not just his cock, but him. You are his mother, trying to unbirth him, to engulf him. To share not only DNA, but atoms. You want to occupy the same space at the same time with him. You mouth the words, “Stop”, but the words just come out as a long moan. You don’t really need him to stop, but you just feel so intensely you actually think you might die. He slows. You pull at his back fat love handles and drag him into you, pull him face to face and weep. He stops fucking you and your hips convulse every few seconds in little involuntary girlquake aftershocks. You squeeze his cock hard from the inside of your being. You want to stay here forever. Vessie keeps his hard cock inside you until the quakes subside. He holds you and hugs you. After a bit, he rolls to the side and holds you. He goes down to kiss your toes and sucks on them. He says, “I wanna pet your baby kittyfeet.” You swoon. The bed is covered with semen and menstrual blood stains and sweat. He is gushing out of you all over your legs and down to your ass. He puts a finger into your pussy and pets you on the inside. You squeeze him with all your womb. He pulls out a finger covered with blood and uses it as a paintbrush to draw a heart on your chest over your actual heart. You can feel your heart pounding into his fingers as he does. You fall asleep smiling. You dream sweetness and purity. Kitties riding on the backs of coyotes, swimming in formation with dolphins. Rivers of Vessie cum, turning into honey, glistening all over your belly. Birds chirp and lick the honey. Hugs that never end. Safety. You feel protected and respected. You half-wake a few times and snuzzle with Vessie. You moan, he purrs, then burps, then pets you. You can feel yourself smiling, and it is good. You wake up many many hours later, very refreshed, and happy that you are not waking up to someone banging on a door or window. You are waking up on your own. You feel more refreshed than you have in many days. Even so, and even though you are sober, you still feel like you have a hangover. It will probably take a few days of good lovin’ and good food and good sleep to really finally feel frisky and fancy free. Vessie is gone, but there’s a note. It says, “Kittybutt. Make yerself at home. Eat anything, do anything. Here’s a key. When you feel like it, drive down and visit me. I’m three blocks away with some friends. Here’s a map.” You get up slowly, stretching and mewling like a cat. You meander into the kitchen and find some chicken stew covered on the stove. You heat it and eat it. You go out the back door and sit on the porch swing. You gaze with wonder at Vessie’s hidden backyard garden. It starts to drizzle, but remains warm out, even while it’s raining. You sip fresh coffee from a mug that says, “Don’t Mess With Texas”. Drunk Rooster Vinyl is closed, the sun is going down, and it’s warm. You listen to cicadas, listen to the actual drunk rooster crow nearby and feel pretty damn nifty. You think about Vessie. You love this man. You are not a woman who needs a man to complete you. Except for your need to control everything (you’ve finally admitted to yourself that you do, and you are somehow also, on this trip, losing your need to be in control so much), you are pretty damn complete. And Vessie does not seem to need a woman to complete him. You are two complete people who are even more complete when together. And you fucking came today! Yeah! Yea! That’s why you feel so physically and mentally good. It rocked the core of you. 21 years of wound spring just uncoiled. From what you know about anatomy and what you read in that hippie feminist book that Lydia gave you, you had a clitoral orgasm. There is another kind, one that occurs even deeper up inside some women. That is the one that is said to really consummate you. That would be nice. After an hour of luxuriating and gently swaying on the swing, it’s dark. You wanna go see what Vessie’s up to. You lock the door, grab the hand-drawn map. It’s such a nice night, you decide to walk. After walking about one block, two scary-as-fuck looking sweaty black dudes quickly walk up to you from the darkness. One is about six-foot-seven, one is about five-foot-two. Both really skinny. They seem out of their minds. They are wearing clothes that once looked nice, like they had jobs and lives, two or three months ago, but have slept in those clothes since. Or scarier yet, stayed awake in those clothes since then. They have crazed, dilated eyes. Cocaine. Crack. Crack cocaine. Crack heads. You don’t know a lot about street folk, but you know enough to know that this variety of American wildlife can be pretty flucking dangerous. You remember what Cash Newman used to say, “Heroin addicts can act pretty violent when they can’t get their medicine, but once they get it, they go in the corner and nod out. Cocaine addicts are violent when they don’t get their dope, and worse when they do!” One of these twitchy men says, “Hey, what you need, baby? You lookin’? I can hook you up.” You try to muster confidence, but sound nervous as you reply, “Oh, um, no thank you. I don’t need anything.” You wish you were back on the desert taking your chances with wild animals. The other guy says, “Well baby, what you doing down here? You looking for some fun? You wanna par-tay? I sure would love a slice o’ yo’ pie.” He seems like he’s gonna take something from you even if you don’t offer. Or maybe “slice” meant he actually plans to “slice” you. He puts his hand on your ass and you freeze. Flight or fight? He says, “Hey baby, where you headed this time of night.” Something in you takes him at face value and you hand him the map and say, “I’m going here”. You feel like you’re having an out-of-body experience, like you’re watching this happen to some other poor lamb. He says, “Woaaaaahhhhh…OK, little sister, I didn’t know you knew these motherfuckers.” He hands the map to his buddy. His buddy looks at it and says, “OK, we gonna walk you. There be some scary murderfuckers out here dis time ‘o night, yes sir indeedee.” They start to walk. You freeze in place. One says, “Come on, boo, you gotta trust me on this. I’ll get you there.” You follow him. They wordlessly walk you another block and a half until you can see in the distance what your map shows to be your goal. Across the street you see three other scary looking shadow figures under a street lamp. They walk over and say, “Hey Q-Rock, what you got there? I give you a cigarette for dat bitch. Actually, you owe me five fuckin’ dollars, motherfucker. I’m gonna take me summa her for da night. I gonna split dat bitch in two wit my big black dick.” Your appointed guardians shake their heads, “No, man” and one says, “She’s with them,” and points ahead at the warehouse where Vessie is. The man who just tried to buy you for a smoke says, “Oh shit, never mind Q. Sorry bro. And you have a good time, missy. Welcome to the our negrohood.” He sounds like he genuinely means it. Those three walk away, and the first two walk you until you’re across the street from a weird, huge three-story compound with all manner of crazy crap in the yard. It’s all visible under two giant metal sculptures-structures topped with those million-watt mercury lamps that turn night into day. Your crackhead escort looks like he wouldn’t dare step further and says, “Here you go li’l missy. We’ll stay over here until you’re safe inside.” They do. The front yard of the KTP compound is a museum of the unusual. First, there’s three flag poles, probably 20 feet high. Each one is decorated around the bottom with flowers. One pole is flying the American flag, one is flying the Texas flag, and one is flying the circle “A” anarchy flag. They are all mounted on some stiff material so they look like they’re blowing, even though there isn’t enough breeze to really raise them. And they are up at night. Isn’t it illegal to fly the US flag at night? And all three flags are flying at exactly the same height. The huge dirt driveway in front is littered with stuff. There’s five big fiberglass life-size cows, painted a dozen different colors. Some have the anarchy symbol on them, they all have the red, white and blue Texas flag on them, and two have cowboy hats. The driveway is filled with welding gear, posthole diggers and other assorted tools. You wonder why they don’t bring them in at night. Won’t they get stolen? There’s some sort of home made fuel pumps, leading with a hose into the wall of the building. There’s also the church school bus you saw in LA, and about a dozen other vehicles out front. A couple are up on blocks, but the rest look operational. There’s two pickup trucks, some old Mopar muscle cars, and one of those European-only three-cylinder Volkswagens that get 80 miles to the gallon and were banned for US import by the Bush administration. Most of the vehicles in the yard are painted primer gray, except two old Toyota Supras and a new Toyota Corolla that could only be described as “art cars”. They are covered with all sorts of welded- and glued-on knickknacks and bric-a-brac, everything from toy dinosaurs to old punk rock record covers. All the spaces in between are painted many psychedelic colors. One of the pickup trucks has a bumper sticker that reads: “I have nothing against God, it’s his fans that piss me off.” There is a makeshift target range set up, with three life-sized human silhouette paper targets at the end. Most of the shots are dead center to the heart or the brain on two of them. The third is chewed to the point of being barely recognizable by repeated point-blank shotgun blasts. A couple of Peacocks walk around the yard squawking. One is picking at corn growing on the side of the building. The corn seems to go all the way to the back yard, maybe further. There’s a bas relief sculpture on a huge board, about twelve feet high and twenty feet wide, made out of gas masks, rifle barrels, barbed wire, handcuffs and an electric guitar. In the middle are photos of KTP playing some sort of outdoor political rally. In one picture you see a line of National Guardsmen in a line on the side of the crowd, in full riot gear, apparently at the ready. You approach the door. There’s a sign on it that reads, Trespassers will be shot. And cooked. And eaten. You believe them. You look across the street and wave behind to your murderous-crackhead-with-a-heart-of-gold buddies. They wave back. You ring the little door buzzer. Chapter ten After several minutes, the black dude who plays guitar in KTP answers the door. He’s wearing an old leather duster and has a very precious and docile-looking pet rat sitting on his shoulder. You say, “Um, I’m California. Is Vessie here?” He gives you a hug and says, “We’ve been expecting you. Welcome to Texanarcha.” He gestures to the entirety of the room, to this empire under a roof. You follow him in. The cast-iron door closes with a thud. He says, “I’ll give you the tour.” He says, “I’m Carver. This here’s Meow.” The rat sniffs at the air. You look at the rat, smile and say, “Hello, Meow.” On a table to your left by the door, there’s a bowl of one-dollar bills, probably a few hundred dollars total in cash. There’s a sign above it that reads, “Take what you need and leave the rest.” The sign is facing so it’s the last thing you see if you were stepping outside. There’s a sign facing the other way, to be seen as you come in, that says, “Communal Lingerie” above a large cardboard box that seems to be exactly that. Carver’s drinking a cup of coffee, on the mug it says, “Don’t mess with Texas.” Do they buy these things by the case? He stops at the kitchen and scoops up some brown sugar with his hand. He picks up a screwdriver off a table and stirs the sugar into the coffee. You’re overwhelmed by this place. The world you just entered is a good bit stranger than the crackboard jungle you left outside of the door. The inside of the KTP lair is huge and twisted. It looks even bigger from the outside than the inside. More like an airplane hanger. Like Vessie’s store, the ceilings are unfinished. You can see not only the plumbing and the wiring, but also the heating and cooling ducts. There’s duct tape holding the ducts together, but then again, there’s duct tape everywhere holding everything together. You think about how you’ve never actually seen duct tape on a duct. And you think about how most people think it’s called “duck tape.” There are wires and machines and art everywhere. The entire place is one enormous room, but it’s divided into regions by walls made out of gutted upright pianos welded and bolted together. There are probably two-hundred pianos total, dividing the room into seven or eight regions. One “room” holds a huge old printing press, the one you saw on the back of the book. It appears to have been recently used. There are printing films hanging from a wire by clothes pins, and large, smudgy, smeared four-up proofs on the table, but the press is taken apart, apparently for maintenance. There’s ink everywhere in every angle and crevice and wall and orifice of that area. In the corner of this room is a wooden box that looks big enough for two people to stand up in. You peek inside. It’s a photographic darkroom. The room next to that has a huge vinyl press. You’ve never seen one, but it’s pretty obvious that that is what it is. There are 12-inch black vinyl record albums in various stages of being assembled, and big industrial drums of black plastic pellets that you assume would be used as the raw material. The next room is a bandstand with a video screen behind it. There is a low stage, and KTP’s gear is set up and plugged in. You can hear the amps quietly humming, but the band isn’t around. It’s as if they got called up to heaven (or down to hell) mid-song. There’s a pile of old TVs and computer monitors, probably 400 in all, covered with paint. Every surface of every wall seems to be occupied with art or objects. From paintings to photos to sculptures to Texas license plates to giant wooden forks and spoons to animal skulls. And what looks like a few human skulls. The next room is yet another firing range. One room over is a large still. Next to that is a kitchen. Oddest of all is what appears to be sleeping quarters, it’s just one huge room with about thirty mattresses on the floor. They are all pushed together and there’s no division between them. It’s a sea of mattresses and bedding. So far, Carver hasn’t spoken, and you haven’t seen another person. Carver says, “Let me know if you have any questions.” You’re about to ask where all the humans are when he leads you down a narrow corridor defined by yet more piano walls, and you hear talking. You enter the last room and see about thirty people sitting on big fluffy chairs covered with new cheap fabric, and old beanbag chairs. Some are sitting on rugs on the floor. The room is lit by a couple dozen automotive drop-lights and cheap clip-on lights attached everywhere. There is some kind of meeting going on. You see all your usual new pallies, Eli, Harry Jack, and the stunning and wonderful Rose, who is wearing the prettiest slip you’ve seen her in yet, this one red, and tighter than ever. She’s also wearing a very short skirt, high heels, and a cowboy hat. She’s leaned back in a chair with her legs crossed. She’s chewing gum. She sees you walk in, blows a bubble with her gum, and winks at you right after it pops. She’s got her red hair tied in pigtails and has ruby red lipstick on. Jesus. This is the only woman you’ve ever found really attractive, and she seems to like you too. She glows. Several people are holding hands, and sitting in pairs. Most are boy-girl, but a few are girl-girl or boy-boy. There are two groups of three each cuddling. One is three girls, one is two boys and a girl. One boy in that clique has a T-shirt that reads, “I just want to spend time with the two I love.” Vessie is sitting in a chair away from the group. He’s reading a book. He’s the only one not paying attention to the proceedings. You go sit at his feet. He rubs your neck and you quietly purr and observe the punkers having their meeting. “…Point of interest” says Eli Bowie. “The idea of that particular book is to show that the new Texas ain’t the old Texas.” “The old Texas tweren’t even the old Texas”, says Carver. “Even Lyndon Baines Johnson was adamantly anti-Klan. We should mention things like that.” There’s a few “right ons” and “here heres” from the crowd. Some punker writes “LBJ was anti-KKK” as a bullet point on one of three giant dry-erase white boards filled with scribbles and sentence fragments at the front of the room. These boards seem to be the minutes of the meeting. At the mention of racial stuff, you notice that the collective is about 1/3 black and Mexican. “Right on, Eli,” says the Hispanic guy who plays guitar and keyboards in KTP, “…but there’s still a motion on the floor. Let’s see a show of hands. The title of our next book is to be which? And remember, this particular item needs group conscience, not a mere majority. For those of you who are new, that’s a 2/3 vote to ratify, not just 51%. We’ve narrowed it down to two possible titles. They are This Is Not What The Framers Of The Constitution Had In Mind and Get Off My Leg! All in favor of Framers please raise your hand. No, keep them up until I’ve counted them all. Thank you. OK, you can put them down. All in favor of Get Off My Leg! please raise your hand. OK, you can put them down. Framers wins”. “Lastly on the agenda,” says the Hispanic guitar guy, “is the report from the Minister of Propaganda.” Everyone laughs. “I mean the Minister of Information.” Eli stands up. “Thank you, Carlos Santa Ana.” Basically what’s up is that we seem to have a leak.” People get very serious very quickly. “We can’t tell if there’s someone in this room who is fucking up intentionally, or if we’re just getting sloppy. But let me reiterate: We have all taken a group conscience on this, and we need to abide by it if this is to thrive. So, again: We don’t have phones for a reason. And please do not talk on outside people’s home phones. Do not use cell phones. If you must talk, buy a calling card and do it from a payphone, and even then don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to a cop. And for cripe’s sake, STAY OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET! “Thank you. That’s all I got.” “Thank you Eli. That takes care of the docket. Is there any new business?” asks Carlos Santa Ana. “Yes,” Says Eli. “I want everyone to meet and welcome Vessie’s friend, California. She’s visiting for a while. Vessie vouches for her 100% and says that anything you can tell him, you can tell her. Can you stand up please, Cali?” You feel embarrassed but stand up. Everyone gives you a warm “Welcome!”. Carlos says, “Thank you. Meeting adjourned. Let’s all go have pie and ice cream in the kitchen.” All these weird Houstonians get up. You see Vessie walk and notice that you forgot he walks with a limp. You’ve only seen him horizontal and sitting since you got here. Some file out, but most of them come over to meet you and hug you. Someone brings you some pie and ice cream. You walk around getting hugged profusely by sexy boys and girls. You overhear snips of random conversations: “…I look at debt collectors like I would look at a stalking ex-lover. Rip up the letter. Don’t speak to them. Don’t give them any feedback, even negative. When I lived with a phone and they’d call for me, I’d say, ‘That son of a bitch owes me three months rent. If you find him, you give me a call!’ and hang up.” “…That’s a good one. Man, I kinda liked credit cards. It was nice to live like a white man for a few months…” Says one guy, who happens to be white. A black guy and a Hispanic girl he’s talking to laugh their heads off. You keep walking. You hear someone reading a review from a newspaper out loud to a small group. “…They are separatist extremist anarchists from the swamps of Houston, Texas. They swim naked fifty at a time in broad daylight in public beaches in the Gulf in Galveston. They fuck with old-West cowboys by kissing boy-to-boy in front of hicks in bars. Variously under investigation with the IRS, ATF and according to rumors, the Department of Homeland Security, these very intelligent yet blissfully lawless youngsters really want to make a difference. And they do. It’s about a lot more than being in a band. They really want to change the World, and I believe they can…. “There’s probably nothing unique in KTP’s message, only a very eloquent and compelling way of stating it, combined with being very charismatic, and putting on an incredibly tight fucking show. And the band is just great. They inspire a brand of fan loyalty that I haven’t seen since Jerry Garcia died, though their message is far closer to the MC5 than the Grateful Dead. “Wake up, America. If you want to maintain the status quo, and you find a KTP record in your kid’s room, shoot your kid dead.” You walk on. Someone else says, “Can you believe it? He actually thought that KTP stands for “Kinky Toilet Party”. A few people laugh. You walk more. Someone else says, “…..I canceled the interview at the last minute. When I got there, the station door had a little notice on it. At first, I thought it was one of those things that says, ‘This facility contains chemicals known to cause Cancer.’ but it actually said, ‘This facility is owned by ClearChannel.’ I just split. Didn’t go on the air at all…..” “…You have to realize that when you invite someone to do a story on you, you are basically allowing them to make you fiction and bend you to their own whims. The most successful journalists will out and out lie to get a story. My friend who does TV news says people basically have the job of lying if they have to in order to get the story. Tell the victim's family anything to get them to cry on camera. Tell them that telling their part of the story will ‘stop the violence’ etc. It never does, it just gets ratings for the journalist….” You meet up with Vessie. He’s talking with Harry Jack and Eli and Rose. You slide up to Vessie and he puts his arm around you without looking away from the people he’s talking to. V-Chip, the guy who fixed your car in LA, is standing quietly next to Vessie, looking menacingly large, and smiling sweetly. Vessie’s telling the three people from KTP, “Well, yeah, I’m damn well gonna put your new record on the Internet, unless you tell me not to.” He looks at you and kisses you on the neck. Eli says, “I didn’t hear that Vessie” and smiles. Harry Jack covers his ears and says, “La la la la la la la…” to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas. Vessie says, “By the way, here’s the money from this batch o’ vinyl. They’re selling out pretty quickly.” He is holding a satchel and hands it to Harry Jack. Vessie says, “It’s all there. Twenty-two-thousand dollars.” Harry Jack says, “Thank you, Sir”, takes the money, and hugs Vessie. Vessie says, “Hey, y’all wanna come by my place for a spell?” They all nod and you walk towards the front door. As soon as you walk out, a guy who looks very out of place here runs up to all of you from deep in the night. He’s dressed like a yuppie at the end of the work day, after he takes off his tie: khaki Chinos, collared shirt not tucked in. Nice dress shoes. He’s probably 27 or 28 years old. Looks like he goes to a gym and a barber regularly, though his hair is a little ruffled and he’s sweaty. He runs up directly to you and addresses you by your full legal name. “California Ann Christensen?” You say “Yes?” and he throws a thick white envelope at your feet. At exactly this moment, V-Chip pulls a huge handgun out of the tool box he’s carrying and points it at the man’s head and says, “Freeze, motherfucker. This property is a sovereign state. Your laws are not binding here.” Vessie adds, “Yeah, it’s gonna be our word against yours. And I’m friends with most of the judges in Harris County. Those papers never got served.” You’re not even sure what’s going on. You pick up the envelope and open it. It’s a notice to give a deposition as a witness of Trent’s death. You’re ordered to call and make an appointment and show up at some lawyer’s office in Houston within 24 hours of receiving this. V-Chip keeps the gun pressed against the man’s temple and says, “Or we could just chop you up now and use you to fertilize the corn.” The guy is sweating more, but not entirely fazed. You get the impression he has been in a similar situation before. You say, “No, it’s OK, I want to do this.” You shake the letter at V-Chip as you say the word “this”. “What’s it say, Cali?” asks Vessie. You look at the papers and say, “They want me to come in and give a statement in town on Monday. I, um…witnessed a suicide in Los Angeles last week, and the guy’s family is suing the company that made his psych meds.” Eli sounds amazed: “Are you talking about Trent Morgan Seward and Houston Implements? You knew Trent?” “Yes, I…” Harry Jack says, “Wait, Cali, don’t say anything more with this…citizen…here.” You ignore Harry Jack and ask the citizen, “How did you find me here?” He gives you what seems like an honest answer. His honesty may be aided by the gun, which is still at his head. “You used your credit card at a rib joint up the way, and one of the P.I.s hired by Trent’s family went in and gave the waitress fifty bucks and she told him everything.” “Let him go.” Says Eli. V-Chip drops his gun to his side. The citizen doesn’t seem scared. In fact, he gets downright cocky. “How old is that girl? And why do you guys have all that corn? You still making moonshine?” “I’m 17”, says Rose. “And that’s the legal age of consent in Texas, asshole. And I’m an emancipated minor and have my papers. Get the fuck off our land.” The citizen starts slowly walking away. V-Chip shoots at the ground under the process server’s feet. He starts running. Two crack heads across the street see this and physically remove his wallet and wristwatch before they let him get into his car and drive away. You ask, “Why couldn’t they just stick this thing in the mailbox?” you point at the old-fashioned county mailbox they have on a pole at the edge of the driveway. V-Chip says, “Not legal. Then you could deny you got it. When they serve people, they have to have someone do it in person, so he can go to court and say, ‘Yes, I did serve this to her’ if you dispute it.” In a few minutes, you are all sitting in Vessie’s living room. He’s cleared off the couch, and brought a couple chairs in from the office. Some sweet, sad country music is playing in the background. “Who is this music?” you ask Vessie. “It’s a mixed tape I made. It’s all Hank Williams the first and Hank Williams the third.” “Yeah, we just skip the middleman” laughs Eli. Harry Jack picks up an acoustic guitar collecting dust in the corner and does some nice finger picking along with the Hank Williams music. Eli says, “You know, we’re gonna incorporate a little of that kind of stuff in our live show.” Harry Jack says, “We’re also adding some other stuff with that sort of Euro-homo fascist midi danse beat stuff. Like amped-up Depeche Mode. You working that up on your laptop still, Eli?” “Yup. I just got a bootleg copy of Propellerhead Reason.” Rose goes to the kitchen and makes coffee. She brings a pot of regular and a pot of decaf. You drink decaf. V-Chip asks for tea. “Are you going to go to Trent’s funeral?” asks Rose. “I hadn’t thought of it. Probably not. I don’t really have any need to. Some people would think I’m cold for not going, but it’s not really something I want. I shouldn’t have to go, right?” “I agree.” Says Rose. “My friend Edgar was a Satanist and when he died his mother had a Catholic funeral for him. All his self-righteous punker friends got pissed at her for that. Fuck them. Let the lady have her little magic show. She was heartbroken. It was the second kid she’d lost to AIDS. Funerals aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living. You’re still living, and if you’re fine with not going, don’t go.” “Yeah. I am gonna go give this deposition though. I really want to. I think the psychiatric medicine he was taking might have had something to do with him killing himself after all. He was pretty together before that, and he started acting weird out of nowhere.” “How well did you know him?” asks Harry Jack. “Pretty well. We were…lovers.” Eli says, “Oh you poor sweet child…you must be crestfallen.” “Not really…well, I am pretty freaked out because he was my friend and he killed himself. And I was there when it happened. But I wasn’t really much in love with him. I had been thinking of breaking up with him. I guess we weren’t communicating well …He asked me to marry him out of the blue, and that’s the last thing in the world I wanted. When I said ‘No’, he came back later that night and shot himself in front of me, in my yard.” Eli says, “We heard about it from a friend. Trent was on Calmwell. That drug is immoral. Totally under-tested, never shoulda been on the market. Houston Implements is fucking depraved. Totally into profits over people. One of our main goals is to destroy them. They are totally fucking up the World faster than any single entity anywhere.” “Can I help?” you ask. Everyone in the room looks up and smiles. Chapter eleven Eli says, “Well, first give that deposition, but you’ve already decided to do that. And it makes sense. Houston Implements, or ‘Hi’, as we like to call them, are incredibly fucked. They have invoked the new corporate non-culpability laws in terrifying proportions. They are basically big brother crossed with Stalin….but wearing a smiley face. Literally.” Harry Jack chimes in with, “Basically they do a lot that sucks, but mainly they have done three things that we are particularly concerned with. One is project MS 408. They have stolen the Voynich Manuscript from the Yale repository. They fucking made someone do it as an initiation for Skull and Bones. That manuscript has a long and twisted history, and many scientist think that, based on the illustrations, it holds the golden key to life, God, sex, mathematics, science, medicine and more. It may have even been written by Leonardo da Vinci. And it’s apparently untranslatable. And apparently they’ve translated it. And they’re holding it to their chest. We want to get the translation and make it public. It deserves to be.” Eli says, “Second, they’ve also mapped the human genome completely and used it to find a cure for AIDS, and they aren’t letting it out because they are making too much money stringing people along on symptom-treating drugs that don’t cure.” “I thought they mapped that all a few years ago,” you say. V-Chip says, “They said they did, but they only did it 99% and not completely accurately. H.I. have done it 100% at 100%. And it’s not just having it, it’s what you do with it. They used the Voynich Manuscript to figure out how to do everything with it. They are totally using gifts for the World for themselves…not only for selfish ends, but actual evil. They’ve got several thousand top scientists working round the clock with millions of ganged supercomputers trying to figure ways to fuck with people to make more money. H.I. has a long history of dicking people over to make a buck. Or many billions of bucks, actually.” V-Chip is funny to watch, because he’s a tough giant but lifts his pinky finger while sipping his tea. He doesn’t seem aware of it either. “We think that information should be public too.” Harry Jack says, “Finally, they’ve worked a deal with the US State Department to fingerprint and collect DNA samples from every human in America within 18 months. This is being done in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. And they’re gonna do everyone in the European Union too. And they want to be the key holders of this info. And true to the American way, they will be, because they were the lowest bidder. And we want to stop them. And the cryptography they use to protect this is based on the Voynich Manuscript.” Eli says, “There’s a theory that they masterminded the 9/11 bombings as part of their mission statement and business plan. That’s a little farfetched, even for us, but we have friends who absolutely believe it. But we wouldn’t be dumbfounded though if it turned out to be the truth. They have kidnapped and killed children and made it look like random thugs did it, to make mothers more likely to allow their kids to be DNA typed. They also have experimented with paying homeless people to allow themselves to be fitted internally with GPS chips. Yikes!” You say, “How do you know all of this? And how do I fit in? And what’s the plan?” Rose says, “This company needs to be stopped. If I believed in the Devil, I’d think he was behind H.I..” Vessie adds, “There’s also talk that they are cloning humans.” Eli Says, “We have a guy working in security at the H.I. H.Q. here in town. His name’s Rowdy.” You laugh. “No, seriously, that’s the name his parents gave him. Rowdy. Rowdy MacGuffin. ‘Rowdy’ doesn’t fit him. He’s actually quite mellow. Anyway, he’s sympathetic to us, but isn’t linkable to us in any way. He has medium-level clearance there. He can get someone in the door and more. And we’re thinking that someone might be you. Vessie tells us you speak five languages, and know UNIX as well as Windows I.T. shit.” “Yup. True.” Vessie says, “And you can look pretty damn straight if you need to.” “Rowdy tells us that everything is in code, but they have a lot of documents that are just in German and Italian. And some of the UNIX commands for the passwords are partially in those languages. They farm a lot of their stuff out to Europe. He has retrodicted the info with another guy we know who works in a branch in France to confirm where it would all be. He knows where it is, he just can’t get in. We need the skills you have, basically… someone who speaks English, German, Italian, French and Spanish, knows UNIX, and Windows admin, and can look conservative.” You laugh. “So, basically all you wanna do is break into a highly protected private office, steal a translation of a priceless document, make it public, steal all the data regarding an intricate project that has gone on for years, make it public, steal a cure for AIDS, make it public, and then shut down one of the biggest multinational conglomerates in the World?” “Yes.” says Vessie. Eli adds, “Actually, all we need to do is steal the translation of the Voynich Manuscript. And it should fit on one DVD, in data format.” You feel a little emboldened by the proceedings. You laugh and ask, “…And you’re a bunch of technophobic cowboys, and you want to go up against an extremely technologically based enterprise?” They all laugh and say, “Yes” at the same time. You think of the penny you threw in the fountain at the Tempe library. Your wish was to be a part of something important. Wishes do come true. You say, “I’m in.” Chapter twelve The party continues into the night. You sit around amazed at the brilliance of your new friends, and you keep rekindling your love and lust and admiration of Vessie. Such a beautiful man. Such a sexy cool redneck. You love him. But so many mysteries. You feel he would never keep anything from you, but you just haven’t had the time to ask him all the things you’d love to ask. Heck. You don’t even know why he’s called “Vessie”. Snippets through the evening include Vessie saying, “I had to send some KTP records to a store in Wales who sends them out around the UK. I sent them by fourth-class mail. Even so it was 240 bucks. Airmail would have almost doubled that and the guy wouldn’t spring for more. “I'm picturing some twee hairdresser of a British admiralty captain looking out over the icebergs by night through opera glasses and yelling on the intercom down to steerage: ‘We've got a strong headwind, mate. I fear we shan't be in Bumlick-on-Themes by the fortnight. Promptly commence shoveling more Yankee fourth-class mail on to the engine fires.’ “‘Aye-Aye sir!’” Everyone laughs. The conversation slips to dumb jobs. You tell a story: “I was temping at a dot com in LA in 1998, when that shit was flying high. This particular company is now out of business. I was the receptionist. I perused the company Website for 20 minutes and couldn't figure out what, if anything, they did. It was all ‘incentivize proactive magnetic users through transitional clicks-and-mortar web services’ net-speak bullshit. The company had 80 programmers, 7 marketing people, a CEO, and me. I found three programmers in the break room playing Tomb Raider on a big-screen TV with their feet up on the table. I said to them, ‘Um, I perused the company Website for 20 minutes and couldn't figure out what, if anything, we do here.’ One laughed and said, ‘Good, then we've been successful’. Another one said, ‘We enter into contracts with multi-national conglomerates, renege on the deal and then successfully sue them’. I still have no idea to this day if they were kidding.” Everyone laughs more. The party goes on until around 2 AM. Then, almost mid-sentence, Harry Jack says, “Well, tomorrow’s another long day at the anarchy factory.” They all laugh and get up at once. It’s an odd gesture. It seems very unlike what you would imagine anarchists would do. It reminds you more of a VP of marketing in some corporation leading his lemmings away from an after-work beer. Hmmmm…….. Their little conclave marches out the door. They all clock out of Vessie’s with a clip of cowboy boots on hardwood shotgun-shack floor and all hug you on the way out. You like them all and you love hugging Rose. My god, her flesh is like God’s confectionary sweetmeat. You wanna take a bite of her candy-apple body. And she smells so preeety! Like a really light wash of sweat and sex and a tiny waft of perfume. Meow. Purry. Hiss. Kiss. Meow. Pow. Mental note to self: Maybe you’re bisexual, Cali. After the denizens of Texanarcha depart from you and Vessie, you help him in the kitchen with the dishes. At first you help him by putting your arms around his waist and hugging him and pushing your pelvis against his ass. “My God, Vessie, you are sweet. I dunno… I’m just feeling very friggin’ comfortable here.” He keeps washing dishes, grinds his ass back at you a bit, and turns his head half around and kisses you on the hair. You start drying dishes, while still pressed against him. He sweetly drawls, “Kitten, you can stay as long as you like. And it sounds like you have a job now. Saving the World is important work.” He laughs. You say, “True Vessie, but I do need to do some paying work to keep up appearances, and credit card bills, and my rent in LA and stuff like that. And I don’t feel right having you support me. I’m gonna have to do some more subtitle work soon.” “Oh, I won’t be supporting you, kitten. KTP will be. They’ve told me they’ll take care of you in whatever way you need. They take care of me, and I’m not even really a member. The record store is just my hobby.” “What do you mean?” you ask, “Those hippies don’t have any money. I mean, I saw the bowl of ones by the door, but they certainly don’t look like they have enough to put anyone on salary.” Vessie puts the last dish in the drainer and turns around and hugs you. He picks you up and lifts you in the air and kisses the place on your pants where your legs meet. He sets you on the couch and sits next to you. “OK, I’m gonna tell you how all this works. You have to promise, under sentence of, oh, I dunno, say, catapult, to never squeak of this anywhere. Even though you may be tortured at some point to extract this information.” You laugh, but you realize he may be serious. “OK. But first, why do they call you Vessie. Isn’t that a girl’s name? I had a friend with a cat, a female cat, named Vessie. So what is it with you, it is a ‘Boy Named Sue’ thing or what?” “Well, when I was a young man, my pappy sat me down on his dress and said, ‘Son, doesn’t matter what you do in this world, as long as you’re proud’…” “Just kidden, kitten. Vessie is a nickname, from when I was in the ‘Rangers. My full name is Victor Elgin Stokes. My paperwork when I joined up had a number with my initials in it, “6025-VES.” They called me “Vessie” to tease me. But I didn’t mind, and it stuck. So do you promise to protect the anonymity of the project, little sister?” “Yes, daddy.”. “OK. KTP are millionaires. Each one of the members of the band is. Actually though, they administer the money as a collective, so no one person has control of it. It’s all hidden in the compound, and a few other places around town, and it’s mostly in ones, fives, tens and twenties. They don’t care much about money, but will buy stuff with no deliberation when they want to. They buy everything in cash. Last week Eli bought a new pickup truck and paid for it in one-dollar bills. On paper, they gross about 100,000 dollars a year as a band. Not much considering there’s five members, and they support the others in the collective also. They actually file income taxes on that small part of their income, too. They make it mostly from live shows and from selling books and vinyl. I do all the wholesale distribution of their vinyl through my store. I also put them on the ‘Net.” You say, “I thought they were against the Internet…” “They are adamantly opposed to using the Internet themselves, but it’s not because they are against it on principal. They are not really Luddites. They just don’t want to be traceable. They don’t have phones for the same reason.” “I started putting their music on the Internet about five years ago. I encode it from the vinyl the day it comes out. They sell maybe ten-thousand copies of each record. They don’t do CDs or cassettes. But I take their music and make MP3 copies of it the minute I get it. I do every song on every record. They know that I do this and they don’t care. They have sort of a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitude about it. They pretend they don’t know about it.” “After the first year or so of doing this, I got the idea to put a little text line in the meta tag of each MP3, you know the part that shows up in the player while the song is playing. It would usually be the song title, the band name and the record it’s from. I just took the title info and made it part of the file name and made the meta information scroll the line 'Please send one dollar to:' and then I put their post office box address. The money just started rolling in and hasn’t stopped. They get several million dollars a year, all in cash, all in small bills. More and more of it is Euros too. Maybe thirty percent. But it’s a lot of fucking mail. Most of the people in the collective, other than the band, most of them have the full-time job of just opening the mail and collecting the cash. They use machines to open the envelopes, but it’s still incredibly labor intensive.” “I understand that their fans would be into them, but I can’t picture a million punkers each sending them a dollar.” “A lot of people send a lot more than a dollar. After the criminal baby Bush got elected a second time, even a lot of conservatives got behind KTP. A lot of people with a lot of money believe in the band and believe that they’re gonna help save America. KTP are basically reluctant politicians who cause more change than a lot of elected officials, without even running for office. Even a lot of old folks are into the band, or at least their books and ideas. Harry Jack says a KTP concert is 'where the hip meet the hip replacement.' KTP’s music reaches a lot of people, but their books reach even more. I scan them all and put them online. And they already have the request for one dollar written into them. “They don’t spend much money, though they’ll buy anything they want, anything they need to get their message across. They’ll buy a new truck any day of the week, and pay in cash. Mostly in ones and fives. KTP owns the land they’re on, and the building. Got it in a police auction about ten years ago for three-thousand dollars. The deed is in Eli’s name. He actually put up the money for it, back when they were dirt poor. He had money—he used to work at an advertising agency, believe it or not. “Speaking of dirt, they grow some of their own food, and overall just don’t spend much, so they have a lot of money left over for financing, shall we say, special projects. “They even get money from Born Again Christians, because a lot of them believe that the use of bar codes and the collection of demographic information is a portent of the Mark of The Beast described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible…you know…that stuff about how no one will be able to buy or sell food without the mark. And KTP are very against bar codes also. Very outspoken. “The Schwarzenegger thing was the last straw for a lot of people. And KTP were all over that from the start. They were some of the first people to speak out heavily on it.” You say, “My friend Cash Newmann was in the movie Demolition Man. Actually it’s just his face, on a poster on Sandra Bullock’s character’s office wall. Cash is dead now. That film was made in 1993, but is supposed to take place in 70 years later. In the movie they make a reference to 'President Schwarzenegger'—they talk about Schwarzenegger having been president around 2010. That movie was made eleven years before he even became governor, and back when it would have been impossible for him to become president. They even have a joke in there about an act of congress making it possible, since he wasn’t born in America. That’s pretty forward thinking of them to have put that joke in there. Maybe they had a crystal ball. Vessie says, “Crystal ball? Hell. They were looking at their goddamned day planner.” You laugh. Vessie continues, “Anyway, we also have a network for sharing videos….Eli brings me one copy, I dub off VHS tapes and send them to people who show them on cable access around the country. Usually no one watches that stuff, but millions have the potential to watch that stuff. And people actually tune in for KTP TV. This stuff’s intense. It has the power to change the World. Seriously. Words are magic. So is music. Words are spells. They are transmissions from somewhere else. I’m not really a liberal. I don’t usually like liberals. I’m as jaded as any old redneck anywhere, but KTP is fucking magic. I don’t mind going to bat for them.” “They seem so committed.” You say. “I love that. I’ve never been around anyone who talks their talk they way they do. I used to date a guy in a band in Los Angeles—this guy Ajax. He was a big pussy. He was totally into the image, not the music or the message. He had no message. All he cared about was his dick and who was gonna suck it. KTP are pretty fucking different then that.” Vessie declares, “Yup. When asked to play, they play. They show up. They never turn down a commitment. They stay on the road in squats. They totally have money to stay in nice hotels, but go where they are needed. And they don’t care about critics. Anyone who gets in their way gets ignored. They look at folks who get in their way as interference to be routed around. Like the way the Internet perceives censorship of any kind and routes around it. KTP are committed. They look at adversity as static. They just tune it out. “I used to share all of KTP’s media from a Web page, www.texanarchy.com, but the throughput was so intense it kept crashing the servers. And I also used to keep track of everyone, I had a listserve for the band. After you clicked to sign up, you even got an e-mail that said, ‘Your name has been added to the golden floppy disc of redemption.’” You and Vessie laugh. You hug him and make out with him as he talks. It isn’t hot and heavy, it’s a slow burn that might be headed to a smoldering critical mass a few hours away. You like it. Vessie continues, “But I didn’t feel right taking the chance of collecting demographic information from the fans. That information could be captured and later used in a witch hunt. So I destroyed the floppies in a bonfire. Then we moved the dissemination of info all over to distributed peer-to-peer file sharing and quit keeping records. That saves bandwidth and makes it harder to trace people. “When I upload new KTP material, songs or books, or sometimes even videos, I load it to an unlinked FTP site. There’s a core of 20 people with access to it. I send them all e-mails. They download it and I delete it within a day. They put it on their peer-to-peer servers. Mostly using the InterSlice.com utility, PlunderTool 3.0. Within a week we estimate over ten million people have it worldwide. Especially the books. The books appeal to people who even hate rock and roll, people that wouldn’t ever set foot at a rock concert of any kind, even KTP.” “So what does KTP stand for?” “There’s a bunch of theories in circulation. Kill The Patriarchy, Killer Texanarchy Party, Kill Texas Police, even some German stuff, Kontra Terror Pro, Kotze, Tussi, Pisse….” (You laugh, knowing this is German for “Puke, Pussy, Piss”) “…..Konstrukt Terror Pro. Some say it’s something in Spanish, which would be unlikely, as there’s hardly even any words in Spanish that start with ‘K’.” Maybe something in French about killing technology.” “For a bunch of people who don’t use the Internet, KTP are actually very in favor of direct democracy: They hope that most of the government is eliminated and people will vote directly on everything, from their home computers. They even have a pamphlet outlining all this.” You stroke Vessie’s hair and say, “So, why do you say you aren’t really a member of their group?” “Well, I dunno. I really hate Robert’s Rules Of Order…you know, that parliamentary crap they use to run their meetings. I can see why they use it, but it puts me to sleep. And also, I don’t wanna sleep all in one big room. I’m actually not that big on the free love thing either. It’s fine for other people, but I’ve always been pretty much a one-woman dude. Also, those fucking hippies are all vegetarians. Most of them are even vegan. I guess my main beef, pardon the pun, with joining those folks full time, is the fact that I love a good steak.” He laughs. “I’m serious… So yeah, I’m one of their affiliates. I’m not a member, but I know as much as they do. There are probably a hundred affiliates around the country. 101 if we can count you…” “You can count me.” You say and give Vessie a splendiferous deep tongue kiss. You stand up and pull him by the belt (attached to a big “State Of Texas” belt buckle) into the bedroom. You romp for hours. This old man actually tires you out. After fucking you four or five times, he’s still horny. You put his hand on his member and wordlessly tell him to take care of himself. You kiss his chest and huggle him to offer encouragement. My god, he is making the most darling, sweet, sacred cat noises as he loves himself. He’s rolling his wordless Rs and purring and moaning. You get the impression that on any given day this guy has sex when he’s alone that’s better than most people have with their favorite partner on the best day of the year. This man is sex. You nibble on his nipples and fall asleep with your hand in a puddle of sacrosanct Vessie slime on his belly. In the morning he wakes, slides himself into you while you’re sleeping and pulls one off before leaving for the store. You’re barely awake when he finishes, and it feels wonderful. As he’s getting dressed, you say, “Hey Victor Elgin Stokes, so, since you’re a one-woman man, would you be opposed to having a three-way with me and Rose, if I could set it up?” He thinks for a minute and says, “Not as a regular thing. But if you could set it up for just once, for the last day of this month, it might be a nice way to spend my fortieth birthday.” “Thy will be done,” you say as he walks out the door. You fall back to sleep. The next day, you walk over to the KTP compound looking for Rose. She’s out front, wrenching on a car, wearing nothing but work boots, overalls and a bra. Oh yeah, and red, white and blue cloisonné earrings in the shape of Texas. “Hey Rose. What’s up, kiddo?” She drops her wrench and gives you a big hug and says, “Hello beautiful human. How goes the revolution?” You can’t tell if she’s serious. You joke back, “Quite well, comrade.” She slaps you on the ass and says, “Oh, you kidder. Hey… so, I was thinking about all the stuff we were talking about at Vessie’s last night. I’m really glad you’ve decided to join us. I think you’re the missing link in what we’re trying to do. You’ve got the skills we’re lacking. And you’re smart. We really appreciate you. And I’m really glad you’re here.” A black cat comes up from the bushes and starts snuzzling on your leg. Rose says, “Looks like Kit Nubia likes you…..” “Hey Rose. Can I ask you something? I’m a little nervous to ask.” “Sure buttercup. What’s on your awesome, cute l’il mind?” “Well, Rose, do you, um, have a crush on me?” Rose looks you up and down. “Damn, buttercup, you sho’ do cut to the cat, sweetie. Um, well, yeah, I sort of do have a microkitty crush on you. But it’s not something I couldn’t put down if it’s gonna get in the way of the project.” You smile. “I sorta have a huge crush on you too, Rose. And I’ve never been with a girl before. Not that you’d want to, you know, get with me. Am I being presumptuous? Does your crush extend to the possibility of the physical?” “Absolutely Cali. I am yours for the revolution. And beyond. I would do whatever you wanted me to.” She takes your hand in yours and squeezes it. “If that’s what you want, we’ll have to do something first though. Is that what you want?” “Well, actually…” you reply, “What I would really like is for you and I to have a three-way with Vessie. Maybe just for one night. I really like him and don’t really want to share him on an ongoing basis, but I would love you and me and him to get together on his fortieth birthday. It’s in three weeks.” “Yeah, Cali, I’d love to. And we will. But here’s the deal. Everyone in our group is sort of in a group marriage. Well, it’s not really marriage. We’re actually Polyamorous Bonobos.” “What are Bonobos?” You ask. “Well, actually they’re monkeys. But we’ve adopted the name to describe our own ethical slutdom situation. Bonobo monkeys are bisexual and all the monkeys in a Bonobo troop are free to have sex with any other Bonobo monkeys within the troop at any given time. And when they get angry, they just start having sex with each other and the violent urges subside. There is no violence in their society. Interestingly, they also have the DNA that is closest to human DNA.” “So y’all fuck each other?” you ask. “Well, we’re not all bisexual. About half of the people in Texanarcha are. But we only sleep with each other. There’s a lot of different pairings and couplings going on. And they change from time to time. And we cannot sleep with outsiders, we’ve agreed to that. But Vessie is so close to being one of us, we accept him so completely, that it will be no problem.” “Did you ever sleep with Vessie?” you ask, anxiously. “No. I’ve sure thought about it though. And I’d love to sleep with him and you. But we’ll still have to take a group conscience on it. We’re having a meeting tomorrow. I’ll bring it up. But the other thing is you’ll have to go to a doctor and get checked for VD. And bring the results, in writing, for us to see. It’s not that we don’t trust people, it’s just the policy we’ve agreed on. We don’t use rubbers, all of the men in Texanarcha have had vasectomies. It’s another of our policies. We won’t need tests on Vessie. I know for a fact that he had a vasectomy over ten years ago, and he had tests when he slept with a girl in our group two years ago. She actually left and moved back with her parents. She’s not here any more. He was really sad. And I know for a fact that he hasn’t slept with anyone since then, until you showed up. I see him every day in the store and he tells me everything. But you, li’l kitty, we’re gonna have to send you to the vet for a checkup.” “Actually, this is interesting timing,” you say. “I had all those tests last week in Los Angeles, and I have the results, in writing, in my car. Let’s go get them.” Rose sticks her hands down you pants and pets your butt through your panties and says, “It’s on, honey.” Her hands feel awesome. Like candy in spring time. She’s pressed against you and you feel melty and new over the surfeit and superfluity of love in your new life. She speaks some deep stuff: “We are beautiful, but what does all this useless beauty get us? Just a life sentence of men clamoring to poke at us and violate the sanctity of our pretties. We are victims of light refraction, skin-deep tragedy that I wouldn’t trade for all the twinkling gold in the fortress between my legs.” “Rose, you have the soul of a poet. And you’re damn sexy” “Cali, I look at genitalia as the little ports to plug our souls temporarily and temporally into the brain pans of other beings. There is a huge difference between dominance and degradation, and I love one and hate the other. I am going to trade dominance back and forth you with you the way puppies fight with love.” You walk to your car, hand her the papers and then drive downtown to the law firm where you’re supposed to show up. You stop on the way and call them from a payphone and tell them you’re on the way. They tell you they have to get a stenographer and to meet them at their office in an hour. On your way in their office building, you swear you see Harry Jack going into another office building about a half-block up. You call out his name, but the person doesn’t answer. You figure it ain’t him after all. You show up at the law firm and they’re pretty nice to you. They put you in a conference room with a long desk and coffee, juice, muffins and water. They ask you if you need anything. They have you sign a few forms. There is a video camera set up, and a minidisk recorder on the desk. They have a stenographer, she’s using one of those odd little stenny keyboard things, but it’s hooked up to a laptop computer. There are three people in the room—the stenographer, a lawyer, and the lawyer’s assistant. The lawyer has you tell the story of the night of Trent’s suicide. She asks you very personal questions about your relationship. Even your sex life. Suddenly they aren’t so nice. You feel like you committed a crime. It feels like an interrogation. You wonder why you even showed up. They ask you the same questions three different ways. You’ve been there over an hour. Then, when it seems like you’re done, a second lawyer shows up, the first leaves, and you get asked the same questions again. Yikes. Yuck. This is exhausting. But it still feels like the right thing to do. You find yourself looking out the window over the skyline of Houston. The sun starts going down. You finish. They thank you and validate your parking. You get in rush hour traffic and sluice back to Vessie’s house. You notice that for some reason, the heat here isn’t bothering you as much as it used to. On the way, you notice your cell phone on the floor. You pick it up, pull over, get out of the car, and throw your phone into the Buffalo Bayou. Chapter thirteen Harry Jack comes in. “We’re playin’ in Livingston today. Last-minute drive-by show. No permit. Outdoor. In the parking lot of the Wal-Mart, just for kicks.” You say, “Wow. That’s pretty bold. Why?” “We hate that place. Wal-Mart is the low-end end-all of globalization. They are the largest corporation in the World. They not only destroy small businesses, they don’t pay their employees very well. And they put people with good union jobs out of business.” “Kinda like Starbucks?” you ask. Vessie pipes in, “Actually, Starbucks gets a bad rap. They are pretty aggressive on their tactics with small business annihilation, and heck, their ‘we must be everywhere’ aesthetic is baffling. Witness the corner of West Gray and South Shepherd here in Houston—there’s a Starbucks across the street from a fucking Starbucks. I heard that in Seattle there’s four on the four corners of one intersection. They’re literally cornered the market. But Starbucks actually has really good health benefits for employees and they also have profit sharing. But not Wal-Mart. It’s hard for a person working there to support themselves, let alone a family. I once asked a Wal-Mart employee what her Christmas bonus was, and the poor impuissant wretch said, ‘We get one day where we get four hours where we get half off on any one item.’ And Wal-Mart has been repeatedly accused of working people overtime and not paying them for it, and a whole lot of other stuff. And not having health care and not paying vendors to unload trucks. It kinda all started back when Dubya was president. He helped push a lot of the globalization stuff to help his old-boy Texas cronies. Anyway…OK, yeah. Another Wal-Mart gig? Today? In Livingston? We’ll help.” You and Vessie and Harry Jack all walk over to the compound together. On the way you say, “Hey Harry Jack, you got any tattoos? I don’t see any.” “No I don’t ma’am…is that OK with you?” He sounds pissed. “Yeah. I just wondered. It seems like everyone else in Texanarcha pretty much has some.” “Well, I don’t. A man can be an individualist, can’t he?” When you get to the compound, you see all thirty or so Texanarchists scramblin’ to pack stuff onto five trucks. You look aghast. “Damn. y’all are going what, 75 miles away? y’all look like you’re moving there.” Vessie says, “You’ll understand some day when you become a true Texan.” He laughs. “We love to haul shit. My old buddy from Boston would come down to visit, and didn’t get it. Then we’d go fishing, and he’d want something and of course I’d have it. That’s why we drive trucks. And even SUVs. Texans love to haul shit. It’s just what we do.” You help with the last finishing touches of loading up, and the whole gang gets into the five trucks and four cars and head up 59 North to Livingston. Vessie sits next to you on the way and pets your hair. You can see Rose in the vehicle in front of you, you look at the back of her red head and smile. You smell the burning biodiesel in this convoy and somehow it’s starting to work as an aphrodisiac. You like these people and their ways and even their emissions. You are starting to identify and assimilate. You’ve heard of this happening with people who are kidnapped. You were not kidnapped at all, but you feel some affinity to the kidnapped. You feel like you volunteered to be kidnapped. It is kinda cool. Vessie tells you, “Livingston, you gotta understand, is real Texas. Not that Houston ain’t, but Livingston is real small-town down-home Texas. Houston is Manhattan compared to Livingston. I think you’ll have an interesting time today.” The caravan pulls along and you’re there in what seems like not long at all. The band files out of the trucks and goes into commando mode in minutes. It’s still afternoon, so there’s no point in setting up the video displays. They wouldn’t be seen well outdoors in sunlight. The army of punker anarchists work in a flurry of pierced lips and dirty duds and have the band set up quickly. While they set up, Carver plays an acoustic guitar over the PA system while Eli sings a Hank Williams song, “Jambalaya.” He’s got a pretty voice. People coming out of or going into the Wal-Mart stop to listen. A crowd starts to form. He plays another, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” People applaud loudly after each one. Vessie is holding a stop watch. “Eight minutes,” he says as soon as Harry Jack says, “We’re ready.” Eli sits down behind the drums, opens his already booted laptop, clicks a few mouse commands and a pulsing Euro-new wave electonica dance beat pounds out of the speakers. Eli clicks in on the real drums and supplements the beat as Rose comes in on bass. Carlos and Carver smash in on the guitar and keyboards. Harry Jack says, “This song is about overpopulation” and starts in a compelling croon over the sexy, saturated song stylings… “I will welcome the winter cold To drive you bugs back into your holes Too many humans for a planet to hold I wish you'd go back into your holes TOO MANY BABIES! TOO MANY Babies on this ship of fools! I'm top tom-cat, that’s why I got fixed; Can't fix myself by having kids I hope you die before I grow cold Too many humans for a planet to hold TOO MANY BABIES! TOO MANY Babies on this ship of fools! Makes me want to go up in clock tower Every second equaling an hour Sweat, and I'm cumming from every pore You in my sights I do adore! TOO MANY BABIES! TOO MANY Babies on this ship of fools!” A crowd of people forms in the parking lot. The non-band members of Texanarcha run around handing out leaflets protesting globalization. They’re also handing out five-dollar bills. The crowd is mostly fat and a lot of them have more than two children with them. The song ends and all that is heard is the rumble of the generator that is powering the band. Harry Jack says over the microphone, “Hello. We are a rock band from Houston called KTP. We’re here to talk to y’all about why you can’t afford things you want and why people are crashing airplanes into our office buildings. And why politicians lie to you. You basically used to be able to afford more, right? It’s hard to even make ends meet these days, right?” Some people in the parking lot yell, “Yeah!” and “You got that right.” Most just stare. Harry Jack says, “You might think, ‘Who are these damn hippie punkers? And why are they playing in the Wal-Mart?’ Well, I’ll tell ya. We are true Americans and proud Texans and we are here to bring it to the people. We could be in Austin playing at Emo’s to freaky folk like us, you know, preachin’ to the choir, we could be doing a radio interview in Houston on KPFT or playing in the parking lot of Whole Foods—the pierced-lip kids who work there love us. But you know what? That’s not important. We want to talk to you because we care about you. We care about you as Americans and Texans and we feel that you’re getting a raw deal. Grab some of our books and pamphlets, and talk with us afterwards and…” Just then a cop car pulls up, followed by another, then a Texas State Police car. Eight cops run out and yell at Harry Jack, “We need to stop this NOW!” Harry Jack says over the microphone, “Looks like we got ourselves a good old-fashioned stand-off here, folks. I say, ‘Surround the generator!’” All the KTP folks do exactly that, linking arms in defiance. One of the Texanarchists sneaks around behind the police car as soon as the cops step away from it and crouches down. He spray paints “KTP” in big letters on the side of the car. And he gets away with it. More police start showing up. Harry Jack is arrested and dragged away. Eli is arguing with them, claiming free speech. A huge crowd is forming, probably two hundred Wal-Mart shoppers. It’s a good show, even if they only played one song as a band. The whole event, including (or perhaps especially because of) the arrest is quite interesting. The cops threaten to arrest everyone, but only cuff Harry Jack for some reason. They are about to start clubbing people when an unmarked Sedan pulls up with four odd-looking cops. Brown outfits, cowboy hats and cowboy boots. Stars on their vests. Vessie runs up and starts talking to them. They know him. One slaps him on the back. Must be Texas Rangers. The Rangers run over and talk to the local and state cops. The cops stop hassling the Texanarchists. But then one of the state cops fires a tear gas canister in the air towards the corpulent Wal-Mart crowd. They yell a little, grab their fat babies and leave. A patrol car pulls away with Harry Jack in the back, and the remaining cops rather politely ask you all to leave. The Texanarchists pack the stuff up onto the trucks as quickly as they unpacked it, and everyone pulls out and heads back to Houston. Later that night, Harry Jack is released and takes a Taxi back to the compound. He tells Vessie that “Nothing really happened, the pigs were assholes, but I talked myself on out of it.” It all seems so surreal to you. Chapter fourteen Next night, Vessie’s getting dressed up when you walk in. He’s putting on a bolo tie. Says, “Hey hun, we got tickets to go see a cool dance performance. You wanna go?” You say, “That would be delightful, sir” and you realize you don’t have any clothes to wear out. You’ve been wearing the same two dresses for a week—the one you were wearing when you jumped in your car, and the one that was in the back seat of your car. “But I don’t have anything to wear.” Vessie tosses you the keys and says, “Go pick something out from the store.” Vessie has a small women’s clothing section in the record store, mostly stuff made by the Texanarcha folks. You walk out the front door and unlock the store door next to the Vessie door and go inside the record store. It’s kinda spooky in there, yet kinda calm. There’s a bit of setting sun streaming in a window forming arcs on a colloid of dust suspended in the soup of the dry air. You look around this humble room and are amazed that it is the jumping off point for data that is downloaded thousands of times an hour and has the power to change. You are amazed that Vessie does this cool work with this hot band, and does it from this humble shop. And you are further amazed that this work is done with barely any actual permission. KTP more or less look the other way and Vessie helps make them famous. And they don’t seem to care that they’re famous. You walk to the back of the store where the clothing is. You finger the dresses on the rack. There’s one that looks particularly lovely to you, an odd and creative amalgamation of crinoline and gabardine. Even though gabardine is one of the least sexy fabrics on the planet, it still looks great. Simple yet fancy. It’s you. Or at least the you that you are today. It screams “anarchist farmer wife out on a night on the town.” You lay it on the counter and drop your own dirty dress to the floor. You touch your naked body in the warm, dusty air. It feels good. It feels right. You once heard a young man say, “Man, if I had tits, I’d never leave the house. I’d be too busy playing with them all the time.” You sort of feel that way right now. You touch your sacred breast and scrawl a line down your slightly rounded belly to the top of your pubic hair. You don’t really feel like beating off, just like acknowledging that you are woman. Hear you meow. You hear a little scurrying sound. It startles you. Who in the world is in here? Should you scream? Then you see it… it’s a mouse on the counter. He looks up and sniffs the air at you. He looks darned cute. You feel nifty and goofy being naked and having this mouse lookin’ at you. You say, “Hi, mister mouse” and put the dress on. You love the feel of it. As you walk out you pass a mirror and admire your look. “I’d do you”, you say to yourself out loud, then you laugh. You lock the door and go back to Vessie’s. He looks splendid. He tops it all off with a white cowboy hat. He looks totally redneck and totally fine. You say, “So, pumpkin, where we off to tonight?” You both walk out the door and he says, “We’re going to the Barnevelder Movement Arts Complex to see Suchu.” That last word sounds like a sneeze. You feel like saying, “Gesundheit.” “What’s Suchu?” you ask. “Suchu is a very cool modern dance troop from the neighborhood.” “You don’t seem like the type to go see a dance performance, to tell the god’s truth, Vessie.” You laugh. He replies, “Neither do KTP, Cali, but most of them are going…do you think that just because we’re from Texas, we’re a bunch of fucking bumpkins who can’t enjoy any entertainment that doesn’t contain pedal steel guitar or car crashes?” He laughs. “You know, Houston has a very hoppin’ alternative arts scene, despite what you might think. There’s Suchu, there’s Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre, there’s Infernal Bridegroom Productions, there’s Tamalalia, the Aurora Picture Show, the Art Car Parade, DiverseWorks, the Axiom. There’s dozens of great actors here with no head shots. And the Jonx and a lot of other good rock and roll bands. Let’s go.” You both head out the door. You pass your car and Vessie’s pickup truck, so you assume you must be going somewhere that is within walking distance. “Texas is pretty damn misunderstood. Most of America kinda lumps it in with the South which it really isn’t. Especially by you folks from San Fralangeles.” “San Fralangeles?” you ask. “Yeah. That’s what we call California. The state, not you. Anyway, a lot of Americans look at Texas as a bunch of hicks with no culture, education or intelligence. I really resent that.” You feel dumb. You feel like you kinda were presupposing something about Houston that might not be true. “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to, you know…insult your culture…I’m sure Houston is totally hopping.” “Texas is full of hardy, hale people. Hearty folks who would rather live in the wild west and its unpredictable lack of comforts than the cities in the East and North. The only Yankee corollary might be Vermont, who tried to secede from the union at one point. Their flag even says, ‘Don’t Tread On Me’…That’s a Texas sentiment if I ever heard one. Anyway, we’re pretty educated and progressive… hell, Texas put a man on the moon. The saying ain’t ‘Los Angeles, we have a problem’. It’s Houston. And the computer industry basically started here in the seventies, to a degree. This is the fourth-largest city in the nation. We ain’t all inbreed and illiterate. Houstonians aren’t all hicks. Most don’t even really have much of an accent.” You disagree with that last one. Most of them do seem to have an accent to you. including Vessie. But it’s not as thick, you concede, as most “movie” Texas accents. The two of you walk in silence for a few blocks. You feel bad. You’ve never felt bad around Vessie. “I’m so sorry, Vessie. I didn’t mean to insult you. And I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.” “Well, Cali, I do. But I won’t bring it up again. Thing is, I’m starting to think that I’d like to spend more than a little time with you for quite a long time, and if that’s to happen, I have to know that you respect me and what I am.” You reply, “I totally get you, Vessie. I’m totally willing to give Texas, and Texas art, a chance.” You really feel like you are willing to check your prejudices at the painted door and do whatever it takes to give this exquisite man a chance, to give his taste in art an opening, and check it out and maybe even dig it. About this moment, you both walk up to a medium-sized one-story warehouse-type building with many cars parked in the lot. It’s in basically the same neighborhood as Vessie’s place and the KTP compound, probably eight blocks away. The people going in look quite fancy, like they are out for an evening at the opera. Maybe a little more casual, but you feel silly. These people seem very cultured and smart. You get in line. Once inside, you see a lot of the KTP people. They are already sitting in their seats. The place holds about two-hundred people, and every seat is full. You’re sitting two seats behind Rose. She’s sitting between Carlos Santa Ana and Carver, and holding hands with and making out with both of them. This somehow makes you a little jealous. But you’ll live. The lights dim and a single shaft of light curves out of the corner and hits the floor. A stunningly pretty, muscular male dancer with a Mohawk runs and stands under it. The light moves. The dancer chases it to its new location and stomps on it, then holds a position that is awkward and complex. People laugh. You’ve never heard people laugh at a dance performance before. This is pretty cool. The performance goes on for almost an hour. The people in it are beautiful, young, hip and energetic. It’s not like some dusty old ballet thing. This is rock and roll energy expressed in dance. The music is deep and some of it hurts your ears. The dancers rarely bother following the beat. But it all works somehow anyway. And the lighting is amazing. Like a Broadway musical, but more creatively executed. You find yourself almost crying at one point because the movement is so pretty. But more often you laugh. These dancers do some pretty fucking zany things. At one point, one woman comes out and throws scarves and fake roses on another woman, and they both pull out children’s noisemaker toys and chase each other with them, making duck sounds. You are particularly taken by one sprightly dancer, the redhead. She looks like she could be Rose’s older, more slender (but still curvy, for a dancer) sister. When the performance is over (to thunderous applause), you wish it kept going. You had no idea that dance could be fun. You always thought that going to a dance performance was something you’d do because it’s good for you, you know, because it makes you cultured. This was more like seeing a good movie. It’s something you’d do because it’s entertaining, not because you’re supposed to. In the reception area, Vessie introduces you to some of the dancers, but you make a beeline for Rose. You run up behind her and give her a hug. She turns and whispers in your ear, “We had our meeting. It’s all good to go, lover. By the way, I love that dress. It looks good on you. Of course, I think it would look better on the floor.” You giggle. She adds, “Hey, today’s my birthday.” You kiss her in the ear and wish her a happy birthday. You say, “But I really can’t wait for Vessie’s. That’s gonna be the best day of my little young life.” She kisses you on the lips and say, “Totally.” You add, “Hey, if today’s your birthday, that means that you and me and Vessie are all Geminis!” You thank your 700-foot god for little girls. Some of the other KTP folks are there, and they are talking to the dancers from Suchu. You finally find Vessie and both file out. He walks proudly despite his noticeable limp. On the walk home, you tell him you really liked the show. “And thank you so much for taking me. I would love to do that again any time. I think you helped me understand Texas a little tonight too. I was wondering… what’s it take to be Texan? I was born in Jasper, but we moved to California when I was little.” “Well, my friend used to say that if a guy dated a Texas gal, or any number of Texan gals, for two years, he was an honorary Texan. We call it ‘A Texas Green Card’. Or you can just do something to honor Texas in some way… make it a better place to live. I think you’re on your way to that.” “Do you have to keep doing stuff that’s Texan to be a Texan?” you ask. “Well, I don’t know. I joined the Texas Rangers to try to help Texas.” “Why did you leave the Rangers?” “Well, it came down to a choice. Basically they were called in to quelch a standoff with Texanarcha. I didn’t know the KTP folks yet, but I’d read about them and supported them. I just didn’t want to help raid their compound. I refused an order and got canned. I was already in trouble a bit. I’d also refused to go head to head with some hippies in a protest in Austin.” You say, “Wow. For a fairly conservative guy, you back some pretty freaky causes. What was the issue in Austin?” “Well, the hippies were actually just there in solidarity of a labor union dispute. The union didn’t want them there, and actually attacked them. But the hippies held their ground and stayed to protest the union’s treatment by the company, despite the union’s wishes. It was the Austin office of Houston Implements, actually. H.I. has since de-unionized all their operations. “You like unions, Vessie?” “I am pretty torn on unions… They exist to protect the little guy, which is good, but they often end up being just as corrupt, or even more corrupt, than the company bosses the unions were originally started to monitor. But I really think the working stiff is getting stiffed. More and more by the “man” than by unions.” “How do you mean?” “When my dad got married, he worked on an assembly line, and made enough money to support a wife, two kids, and buy a house. A guy working that same line today can barely afford to rent an apartment and feed his kids. It’s pretty fucked. And it’s the corporations, not the unions. And as a member of the police, I would get called in to essentially protect the interests of fat cats—the companies—that are the problem, not the solution. That’s not what the Texas Rangers were formed for originally. We started out almost as anarchist vigilantes on the side of the underdog, back in the Alamo days. I got no problem with the Rangers, I just didn’t want to be a cop any more. It didn’t seem like the best place to put my time.” “Why do you feel that way? Was there a certain moment when it hit you? Or did it come over time?” “It happened over time. I just feel like big business has gotten way too big and it’s taken the fighting chance away from the little guy. I think it insults us as Americans, and as Texans. Remember Enron? They were based here in Houston. Big business really has killed the American dream. If you can’t afford to live on a full-time job salary, how you gonna get ahead? How you gonna start a business when you can’t afford your own mortgage? I feel like helping KTP is fighting back, like they’re doing this all in self-defense, to fight for Texas and for America. For what Texas and America used to stand for.” “How did you hook up with KTP?” “It’s funny. My SUV broke down one day, right after I quit the Rangers. It stalled in front of the KTP compound. I went in to use their phone, not knowing they didn’t have one. But they came out and fixed my engine. They also painted the words ‘Polluter Scum’ on the back of the SUV, which I didn’t notice until the next day. But they pretty much told me their whole thing—gave me their rap—while they were working on my ride. It just made sense. I was kind of looking for something, and I didn’t know what, and something kind of put me in their path at the same time. I guess it sounds pretty hippie. I really don’t consider myself a hippie, but I guess it did make sense to join up and help KTP.” You add, “Do you like everything about them? I love their ideas, but some of it seems a little, um, I dunno…” you are hesitant to speak your mind, for fear of pissing Vessie off again, but feel you’d rather piss him off and show him that you are independent than risk losing his respect by just mewling along with everything he says. “….Self-righteous?” Vessie laughs. “Yeah. It is. And they are. I’ve met a lot of anarchists, all over the World, since I’ve been with KTP. I roadied for them in Europe even. A lot of anarchists have similar traits, both good and asinine. They really have a reliable idea of what is wrong with the system. But very few of them have an idea of what they’d replace it with if they were to somehow overthrow it. And most of them come off as completely foolish and whiney, like they shouldn’t have to work. Like it’s enough to just yell. And they have no idea of, I hate to say it, but the value of money. Most of them seem to think that money is evil. But then again most of them I’ve met either live with their parents or squat and eat out of dumpsters. And a lot of them think that not bathing for months at a time is a political statement. Yuck. By the way, it’s only a political statement if you ride first class on an airplane, and none of them do. And a lot of them have the hubristic presumption that the World owes them a living. They scream ‘Workers of the World unite!’, but most of them have never worked a day in their life. Armchair liberal intellectuals. They have an opinion on everything, but never do anything that matters. And they reduce all issues to black and white. I think the World is a little more complex than that. And I’m not really talking about KTP. But with people that hate corporations outright, I think they should go live in the woods. I'm like, ‘How did you get to the punk show? If you drove or took a bus, you're supporting corporations. Who made the guitar you write you protest songs on? Who made that computer you're running open-source Linux on?’” “KTP don’t strike me like that,” you add. “But I dunno, I’m afraid to say it out loud, but I’m not sure I trust Harry Jack.” “I know what you mean, Cali. He’s a good kid, but I think it’s all gone to his head. Anarchy isn’t supposed to have a leader, but then there’s Harry Jack. I’ve seen this happen in all sorts of worlds. It even happened in the Rangers. It happens everywhere. It starts with a problem, and that problem involves power. Then a group forms to challenge that power. Naturally, a leadership forms, usually based on whoever is the most charismatic. Then when the problem is solved, the leader likes the perks of his job and won’t give it up. I could see that happening in KTP, with Harry Jack. They even talk about that in one of their books, in that ‘hot-and-cold running slave mistresses’ part. I helped write that. “I thought maybe you helped with the books. I got that feeling. They’re great, by the way.” “Thanks.” Vessie blushes and pauses for a few seconds before continuing. “Anyway, I think that Harry Jack serves an amazing purpose at this point, to galvanize those kids. But I wonder what he’d do with things if he were to actually eliminate the status quo…” “I just don’t get a great feeling from him.” sez you. “I’m a very good judge of character. I love everyone else in that troop. I totally dig Eli and Carlos and Carver and V-Chip. And I don’t have to tell you how much I like Rose. Speaking of Rose, she’s into it. You sir, are going to have a very happy 40th birthday.” “Don’t they have to have a meeting on that or something?” says Vessie. “They already did. You are going to turn 40 in two pretty young girls’ mouths.” He beams a handsome smile, takes his cowboy hat off and holds it over his heart and says, “Yum.” You and Vessie walk up onto Vessie’s porch. You walk through the house. Vessie makes a pitcher of lemonade and walks out onto the back porch. You follow him, and sip and swing and cuddle. He continues the previous conversation. “…People are in a codependent relationship with their cultures and society. No matter how fucked up things are, they cling to it. Only fear of death will allow change. Same with drug addicts and Cancer patients. If they live, they are changed for life, and even bring useful knowledge back for others. All heroes must taste death, and a hero has to do it for others, not himself. Harry Jack is not a hero. He’s a leader, but not a hero. There’s a difference. He’s in love with power. And pussy. And he wouldn’t sacrifice anything to save others. That’s what makes a hero, you know, is being willing to die to help someone else.” “Are you a hero?” you ask. “Not really. And I have no desire to be a leader. It’s not for me. The hours are too long.” You both laugh. “But seriously, I really have lost interest in that. I’ll do what I can to help. I might have been a hero when I was in the Rangers. It was that kind of world. And I’ve made some buddies for life because of it. And got shot in the leg by a bank robber in the process. But being happy to be willing to die is a young man’s game. I’m not looking to die. I wanna live to be old and cranky and feisty.” “And still be able to fuck,” you add. “Sure. Why not. I don’t see why that would diminish. I’m in better health than I was at 20, and my libido, as well as my longevity, is only getting bigger. I actually had a doctor want to study me for that. I went in with my old girlfriend once when I was 37. We thought she had something seriously wrong because she was bleeding a little in her womb when it wasn’t her period. Turns out I’d just fucked her raw. And she loved it. The doctor wanted to sign me up for a paid study. I didn’t do it. I don’t care. They just wanted to figure out a way to bottle me, and then I won’t be special. I like being one of the only ones…” He laughs and walks out the room. He returns with a stack of literature. You can’t see what it is. He says, “A noble leader doesn’t reap benefits. He ultimately steps aside. Moses said goodbye. You meet the Buddha and kill him. A true leader starts things that grow and become bigger than him. Then he steps down. If the thing is meant to be, it outlives him. So, do you have any interest in being a hero, ma’am?” “I don’t know. I’ve always felt out of place, a left-handed girl in a right-handed world. Literally and figuratively. But doing something heroic doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility to me. But mainly I just want to do something important with my life I wanna be more than a plip on the golden screen of history....” “Good,” he says, dropping the pile of papers and books on your lap. “Let’s get started.” Chapter fifteen “You’ll need to study and memorize all these to get the job done,” he says. “Eli and Rowdy and I have worked this out, and this should be enough.” You look at the pile. The documents include six hand-drawn maps of the grounds and inside of Houston Implements, a list of the naming conventions of H.I. documents and files, a list of sixty passwords that might be in use at any given time, and some internal communications and an old mission statement from H.I. The books are Unix Unleashed, Steal This Book, Voynich Manuscript—an Elegant Enigma, Advanced Cryptography, Mainframe Mysteries Revealed, Windows I.T. Secrets, A Primer on the History of Anarchy, The Texas Ranger Handbook, Houston Implements Notes for New Hires, and $30 Film School. There’s a computer printout of a typed document called “100 Ways to Disappear”, and even a thin government pamphlet called “2008 Texas Statutes on Commercial Burglary” You laugh and say, “I can totally see the reasons for most of these, but a few seem ridiculous. Steal this Book? $30 Film School? Steal this Book is totally outdated, even by anarchist standards. I’ve looked at it before, for a college assignment. And what does $30 Film School have to do with any of this?” “Steal this Book actually has a lot of low-tech survival tips that you might miss otherwise. I know it’s laughably dated… It’s never been updated, it even has long-disconnected phone numbers for hotlines that were active in the sixties. At this point it’s more of a historical document…But it has a lot of useful information, especially on evasion and hand-to-hand combat. And $30 Film School actually has tons of stuff on life skills and, dare I say?…spirituality, that have nothing to do with video production. Everyone in Texanarcha has read it. It’s a great book. And a very quick read, even for a book that big. And it’s also what Eli used to learn to do the KTP video projections, by the way. The same author also wrote a book called $30 Music School which is where I learned to put the meta tags in MP3s, which is the reason we all have enough money to do what we do. And that was one tiny random section.” “But a lot of these books are over five-hundred pages.” You flip through them. “This UNIX book is over a thousand. And I already know UNIX. How much time do I have to study for this little outing?” “Four weeks. Rowdy says the best time to do this would be around the time they release their quarterly report. Security at H.I. gets pretty slack at the end of a quarter because they have a huge blowout and everyone’s hungover the next day. It’s not always on the same day, but Rowdy will know. But you have around four weeks. And you need to read the UNIX book. It’s up to date. Is your knowledge of UNIX current?” “No.” “OK. And one more thing, Cali. I don’t think we should have sex until this is over. You really need to concentrate on this full time.” He thumps the pile of books when he says, “this”. You can feel yourself getting pouty. You’re a little kid who just got her favorite toy taken away by the teacher. You watched the teacher put the toy in the drawer and she says, “You’ll get this back at the end of the semester.” But you know there is no use to argue. No sex makes sense. But then you remember something. “But your birthday is in two weeks…We have plans, remember?” “Oh yeah. OK. We can make an exception for that night. But no other. And you’ll need to get in better shape. You can take my bicycle. I actually have two. You’ll need to ride it to the job. A lot of people ride bikes around the H.I. research campus. It will attract less attention than a car. Can you ride a bike?” “Of course.” “Well, you’ll need to start riding it every day, and do some exercising. You really need to get into excellent shape for this. You might end up having to do some running. Or according to this map, climbing.” He points at the blueprint of an internal sector of H.I. He points to a ladder on the page. “Are you up for all this?” “Yes, sir. When do we get started?” “Right now, Cali. Let’s go get you some running shoes. Oh yeah, here’s a present from KTP.” He hands you a gym bag. It’s full of money. “Cali, you need to stop using your credit cards if this is to work. Pay the minimum balance, but don’t use it any more, cool? Pay cash for everything.” “All right.” As you get in Vessie’s truck, you start wondering if you’ve gotten into something a little too intense. Naw, it’s good, it’s all good. It’s all for good. It’s all for the better good. Keep telling yourself that. Vessie takes you to a sporting goods store. You get four pairs of running shoes, two for you and two for him. You get two twenty-pound barbells, a backpack, a chin-up bar for a door frame and inversion boots. You also buy a cheap digital watch, for twelve bucks. It’s a pink one with the Powerpuff Girls on it. Vessie picks it all out, and you pay for it with your new stash of cash. The guy who sells you the shoes hits on you while Vessie is over looking at guns. The kid’s cute, but you’d never consider sullying yourself with a DNA smear of someone like this. And he thinks Vessie’s your dad. You start finding yourself thinking in a different mode. It’s all about the project, all about the goal. You even start talking less with Vessie. You spend the ride back reading the pamphlet called “100 Ways To Disappear.” You don’t talk. He seems fine with it. When you get back to the house, you put on your running shoes. He puts on his. You wordlessly step outside as the sun is going down and run. You run about four blocks until you’re totally winded. You’re choking on oxygen. You stop and hug him. He starts running back. You follow and choke more. Back at the house, he makes you a smoothie. He puts fruit, vegetables, protein powder and bee pollen in the blender and hits the switch. You catch your breath and blot off sweat with a towel as you drink it. You think about politics. You say, “Most lefties can be hard to swallow. I believe in their causes, but they usually turn me off. I remember sitting in a café one time, listening to the staff of some liberal magazine talking about laying out the upcoming issue. They were so loud it was disturbing everyone in the café. I really agreed with almost everything they were saying, but I hated listening to them. They sounded so goddamned self-righteous. And totally humorless. And if they have trouble convincing someone as open-minded as me as to what needs to be done with the World, how the hell are they gonna change the status quo?” Vessie replies, “‘Anarchy’ to most people, means ‘chaos’. That is not what it really means. Anarchy means, if you take it from the Latin roots, it means ‘without government’. Literally. So it does attract a lot of people who, like we said before, just don’t want to be told what to do. But they also don’t know how to live without rules. A lot of anarchists are basically just brats who don’t wanna have boundaries. And they don’t know what to do without boundaries. They don’t know about that thing that the Yippies used to say, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” “Vessie, I don’t know if I’m up for this,” you say as you look through the pile of books on the kitchen table. Vessie kisses you on the forehead and says, “I know you can do it. I believe in you and I’m proud of you.” His words swim into your heart like a thousand kittens pouring honey into a vacuum cleaner. You haven’t heard that since you were five. You love it and you want to hear more. You are quickly reassured and somehow sure that you can do this. You start getting really turned on. You grab him by his Texas-shaped belt buckle and try to pull him to the bedroom. He pushes your hand off and hands you a book. “Let’s focus, and get to the task at hand. There will be a lot of moments for that. Millions of moments.” You start to read. You read until you fall asleep at the kitchen table. You wake up to a vague memory or sensation of Vessie carrying you into the bedroom. You awake in the middle of the night and reach over for him. He’s not there. You walk through the house looking for him. He’s asleep on the couch. He wakes you up at 6 AM to take you running. When you get back, he coaches you in your reading. After running, he says there’s a movie he wants you to see. You sit in his living room and he pops in a DVD. He has to climb behind the old TV set to hook up the DVD player. Everything in his house is kind of like that. Everything involves a little extra work. He doesn’t seem to mind at all. The DVD is a documentary called D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist. It’s only about an hour long and has all sorts of inspirational interviews with a bunch of really cool starving artists. The D.I.Y. stands for “Do it yourself.” You’ve never heard of any of the artists, but they seem happy to be starving. They all seem really humble too. It shows you that it ain’t about the artist, it’s about the art. You begin to see why Vessie is handing you books that are not directly about the technology of the task at hand. He’s giving your spirit and your motives a fine-tuning. And it’s working. Rose takes over running Drunk Rooster Vinyl for a spell. Vessie becomes your trainer and your mentor. You become incredibly horny, but every time you try to seduce him, he shoves a book in your hand. Vessie’s house becomes a boot camp over the next few weeks. You wake at dawn every day to run with him. Your treks become longer, and your lungs become stronger. You feel calm and strong as you watch the purple gold green yellows of yet another day streak the waking sky. It is the closest thing you’ve had to a spiritual experience. Well, the coyote was pretty damn cool, and the results may have stayed, but the moment was fleeting. This moment is repeated every morning. Eli Bowie comes over and brings you a present. It’s a super-slim pink iPod. It’s jammed with songs to listen to while you run. There’s hundreds of songs on this thing, including everything KTP ever recorded. But you find yourself only listening to three songs over and over on infinite repeat. They become your soundtrack. One is “Blue Monday” by New Order. One is “Love Gun” by Kiss. The other is “Barracuda” by Heart. You run in the rain. You run at night. You run before dinner. You practice climbing a rope on a tree in the back yard. You get blisters. Then they turn into calluses. You eat good food. Lots of veggies and lots of meat. And those damn blender smoothies. You do sit-ups. You become more focused. Vessie gets in shape too. He still has his belly, but it’s harder to the touch, not that he lets you touch him much. Every time you try to lay your hands on him, he says things like, “I’m proud of you, and I lust you beyond words. But I don’t want you wasting energy on this right now.” Then he hands you a book. You spend the rest of your time reading and memorizing all the volumes on the kitchen table. Vessie quizzes you with the reviews at the end of each chapter in the tech books and has you draw the maps from memory. When Vessie has to go check in on the store, Eli comes by and quizzes you on more computer information, and teaches you about mainframe protocol. You work on his laptop. He runs simulations of UNIX and other environments you are likely to encounter. You learn the Novell interfaces that Rowdy says are used to access the mainframe computers. When your head gets full and starts to hurt, you get in the inversion boots and do upside-down sit-ups. Eli comes over one day, takes a digital photo of you and leaves. Says it’s important. After about ten days of this, V-Chip takes you to do a drive-by reconnaissance of the Houston Implements research campus. It’s out of town about 20 miles south on 45, in Clear Lake, not far from NASA. You don’t risk actually driving up to the gate, but you get a good idea for the layout of the place. You also have a new piece of data: a photocopy of a satellite photo of the grounds. You carry it with you and try to match it to the topography of the actual place. You try to mentally catalogue anything that may be useful… bushes, a railroad track in the back, woods behind that, the highway past that. There’s a small creek running along the side, disappearing into the woods. The entire place would take maybe ten minutes to walk, end to end in either direction. Maybe three minutes to run. You try to picture the map you’re looking at as the land you are surveying. It’s difficult. As intelligent as you are, spatial relationships are not your forte. Your strengths were always languages, your weakness was math. You understand software design because your brain sees it as poetry, not math. Maps are difficult for you because you look at them as art, not math. And to have the map make sense, you have to actually orient north on the map physically north as you look at the land in front of you. Then it works. You actually have V-Chip turn the car around more than once to align you and the map to the land in front of you. V-Chip drives a quarter mile away up you up to the little ridge to give you a better view. It’s maybe one hundred feet higher than the industrial campus of H.I., but gives you a better look. You can see that the place is a maze of one-story windowless buildings. Now you can really relate it to the satellite map. V-Chip says, “OK, ready for a challenge?” You say, “OK, I suppose.” He stops the truck and says, “Get out. See you back at Texanarcha in an hour.” You say, “Which way is it?” He says, “Figure it out, fast.” You get out, and use your best wits to conjecture the trajectory. You know that there’s a railroad track along the back side of Texanarcha and you guess which direction it is and assume that it’s the same track. You start running along the tracks. You are pretty impressed with yourself about how your body has gotten in shape in a few weeks. You run for about thirty minutes until a train goes by. The train slows down a bit for a moment and you grab on to the back of it. You ride it into town and jump off running when you see the water tower that you can see from the back of Texanarcha. You’re at the compound in an hour and five minutes. When you get there, exhausted, Vessie hands you a smoothie and takes you for a bike ride. They are kicking your ass into shape. You mainly notice it aerobically. You can do almost anything without getting tired. You get slightly more buff, but actually gain, not lose, weight. You like your body though. It just feels more solid and alive, but still has a little nice softness. You touch yourself often, fluffing your kitty to a frenzy. You hear Vessie in the bathroom cumming just as hard, loving himself into making screaming noises that sound more like a woman than any man you’ve ever heard. Damn, when this is over, you’re gonna fuck his brains out, for years. You’ll use your new skills and resolve to burn that man down, motherfucker. The funny thing is, when he cums, he sounds heavenly. But right after cumming, he often makes a sound that is extremely not sexy. It sounds like a cat being poked in the ass with stick. As you are taking a bath that night, wishing Vessie would touch you, you stare at the cracked paint on the ceiling of Vessie’s bathroom. You think, “These people are fucking odd. They’re sitting on millions of dollars, and their houses look about one degree nicer than the house of a welfare recipient would look.” But those priorities are starting to make sense to you. You think about something you read in $30 Film School. The author ends the book with the statement “I am far more concerned with the eternal than the external.” You think about the events leading you to this point. You think about your first encounter with KTP. You think about Trent’s blood on your shoes. You think about your coyote encounter. For some reason, you think a lot about the penny in the fountain at the Tempe library. You think about the Texanarchists, and how they seem more real than most humans you’ve met in your life. Most humans don’t have anything to live for. They live to amass bullshit—material stuff and societal approval. You think about how a lot of people you’ve met who claim to hate materialism seem like they’d change their tune if they had anything material. Like a lot of punk bands that yell “Destroy the major labels!” would be on a major label in a second if one ever came calling…Most of them would probably be in a Nike commercial in a hummingbird’s heartbeat if they got the offer. Most people who swear they’d never sell out never got the chance. You think about one guy who you read about, actually read an interview with…a guy who probably does have integrity. Steve something or other…the guy who produced one of Nirvana’s records. Except he hates the term “produced by” because he feels it elevates him over the bands, so he had them put “recorded by” on the cover, and in doing so, voluntarily gave up several million dollars in producer royalties, just to put his money where his mouth was. You like that. And you like KTP. You totally respect them, and Vessie. You love the fact that these folks are sitting on millions of dollars but sock it away god knows where, like Howard Hughes. KTP don’t have big-screen TVs or nice cars or pet tigers or any of the crap people with a lot of money usually have. They seem to only spend money on stuff to spread their message. And even then they seem to be in love with old and/or simple technology. They do have nice musical instruments, but you’ve seen bands with a lot more, even bands that play to far less people. They do have some really high-end video projection equipment, but it’s not brand new, and seems a little bulky. There was a much smaller and more expensive-looking digital projector collecting dust in the corner of the conference room in the law firm where you gave your deposition a few weeks ago. Even the stuff KTP use to make their videos with is a few years old. Eli once sat you down and showed you all of it at Vessie’s kitchen table. He had a used one-chip consumer DV camcorder, the kind you could get new at any consumer electronics store for about two-hundred bucks new, and probably half that on eBay. It had duct tape on it and was pretty banged up. He had a microphone that he said he paid a hundred dollars for. He had a laptop computer. They were all laid out on the table. He gestured to them and said, “This is a TV studio. With this gear and nothing else, I am able to make movies that change the World. I make all our stuff with this. I shoot on this camera, I use this FireWire cable to load it into the laptop. I edit on a bootleg version of Adobe Premiere. I output for the Web using a program called Cleaner. I encode DVDs with a free grandmaware program that came with the laptop DVD burner. It’s called ‘MyDVD’. A child could use it. But a child probably wouldn’t think to make the stuff we do.” Eli gave you a one-hour lesson in using this stuff. At the end of that hour, you and he wrote, starred in, shot and edited a three-minute movie that told a complete story, and had a beginning, middle and end. You did it all in about 45 minutes, then output it to an MPEG file that could be burned onto a CD and uploaded to the World by Vessie. Pretty damned cool. You lie in the bath and think about the level playing field of technology. But you think about how, even though the Internet technically gives everyone an even chance to be seen, people still look at the CNN Website more than they look at Joe Schmoe’s Website. But it’s because CNN has money and the power of old media behind them. Their URL is on billboards and every TV in the nation. But then you think about how KTP have captured the World through this technology, even though they apparently don’t spend money on getting this stuff seen. People bend over backwards to see it. They just make it and put it out there. It spreads itself like a virus, because it’s something people need. That’s something the corporations can’t do. They spend billions making people buy shit they don’t need. KTP spends nothing making something people want, and have almost as many clients as Pepsi. You are starting to look at technology in a different way. It’s a means, not an end. You used to get twitchy if you didn’t check your e-mail for three hours. You haven’t checked it in three weeks and you don’t care. You hear Eli arrive. He’s in the living room talking to Vessie. You towel off and go say hello. “Hey Cali. We got it. We got a missing key to get into Houston Implements. It was terribly easy and involved some pretty simple technology. See, we found out from Rowdy that the guy who is in charge of the cryptography in the sector where they keep the manuscript keeps his pass codes on his fucking Palm Pilot. And he keeps that, of all places, in his Cadillac Escalade a lot of the time. We surveiled the motherfucker for a few days and realized that he uses keyless entry in his SUV, you know, one of those coded infrared thingies. So we had one of our grubbier members just dress like a freelance recycling technician…” You interrupt: “Freelance recycling technician? What’s that?” He laughs. “You know, a homeless drunk pushing a shopping cart full of cans. He parked right by the guy. Our faux bum used a Palm Pilot, well, a Handspring actually, to collect the guy’s infrared codes from the other side of the SUV when the guy was getting in after going to a restaurant downtown. Then on a later day, I just went down, played the codes back and got into the car. I used infrared again to copy the contents of the dude’s Palm into our Handspring. We got the crypto codes for the inner virtual doors of H.I. That’s the one thing we were missing. It’s on.” “That’s beautiful,” you say while toweling off your hair. “So when does this happen?” “Probably in a week. Think you’ll be ready by then?” “I hope so. Let’s work more on this stuff. I want you to quiz me on all of it.” He pulls his laptop out of a backpack and fires it up. You work long into the night. When he goes to leave around three AM, you feel confident that you’ll be ready in a week. As he leaves you say, “Hey, tell Rose to come by here tomorrow around ten AM for me, please? Tomorrow’s Vessie’s birthday, we’ve got plans.” He smiles and promises he will. You don’t remember falling asleep but you sure do realize it when you wake up. You wake up to Vessie’s tongue between your legs, petting you with sweet little lapping kitty strokes. My god…you fucking missed this. But the sensation isn’t what wakes you up. It’s that you are moaning is so fucking loud. It jars you awake and your back is arched. And Rose is sitting next to you on the bed holding your hand. She’s wearing a red, white and blue State of Texas teddy, pink high heels, red lipstick and nothing else. She has the prettiest, deepest brown eyes ever. You wanna lick those eyes. You arc your back again and start to cum. You have never cum this quickly from being blown by Vessie, but then you’ve never gone two weeks without being blown by Vessie since he first made you cum. Holy fuck, Batman. You camber and scratch the bedboard and Rose slips her hands under your arched back and starts kneading the flesh and muscle and little bit of fat on your back. It’s amazing. Your orgasm spreads out into two, into three, into four, it’s a rolling thundering orgasm, you can’t really tell where one seize ends and the next commences. You’re riding the purr train. Vessie is driving and Rose is your coach. She keeps kneading your back from underneath and leans down close to whisper into your ear. “You dirty fucking cat. You wet little whore. You exist for my pleasure, sister. I’m gonna hold you down and push your pussy into the bed. I’m gonna suck Vessie’s cock and pull cum in my mouth and kiss you long and deep.” When she says this, she starts licking the inside of your ear. She moves one hand to your shoulder and rubs it and rubs your neck and sticks a finger on her other hand into your mouth. You suck on her finger and get incredibly even more fucking turned on. Vessie is fully naked, and still blowing you. He starts humming while he’s licking you in special places. He’s humming “Happy Birthday To You”, but he says the word “me” where the word “you” would normally go. It’s muffled by your wetness, but you get the idea. The humming feels extraordinary. It adds to the whole thing, the whole ride. Meow. It’s the icing on the cat. Rose looks so damn pretty and keeps hovering over you and pushing her big boobies into your hair through the fabric of her teddy. She smells so sweet and special. She smells squeet. You squeeze her ass with one hand and push Vessie’s head harder into your river with the other hand. You’re about to cum again. Is that three? Four? Who knows. Vessie slides up on top of you using the sweat on your belly as lube. He slips his cock inside you. It feels perfect and exquisite and big. It feels like it was cast from the inside of you. He is petting you on the inside and you feel pretty. You feel swollen and perfect and pink and passionate and nifty and he’s kissing you. He is petting your hair and rubbing under your neck and looking you into the eyes up close. Rose lays down next to you on her back and purrs into your ear. She rubs her pussy with one hand and reaches the other hand under your neck and hugs you. Vessie fucks you and Rose starts kissing him. Somehow this does not make you jealous at all. It turns you on more, in fact. She says, “Fuck her, Vessie, fuck that dirty sweet sacred little whore. I wanna see you pump a gallon of sperm into her hot little box. I want you to nail her so hard that cum comes out her mouth, so I can kiss her and lick it.” Her saying all this pretty much does exactly what you think it would do. It makes him cum inside you instantly. And there’s so much of it. Feels like gallons. Feels like it could come out your mouth. Rose playfully shoves him off of you. Her hands push him on the side of his ass and he goes tumbling and giggling off of you. He lays next to you kissing your cheek and humping your leg and still humming “Happy Birthday To Me”. Rose goes down on you and slurps his cum out. She doesn’t spend long down there… It seems to be a collection mission only. She does precisely what she said she’d do. She gets his cum out of you. Or at least a lot of it. You love it. You’ve never had a girl’s face down there. It’s pretty damn special. She climbs up and lies face to face with you while she forces her pelvis between your legs. She grinds into you as if she had a cock. She looks so pretty on top of you. You pet her face and neck and pull a little on her red pigtails and pull her closer to kiss. She slishes about two tablespoons of sweet sweet 40-year-old man cum into your mouth. You love the taste of Vessie’s cum, always have, but you like it more coming out of Rose’s lips. You two lie kissing for a long time while Vessie still hums that damn birthday song. Then Rose kisses him and slurps a tiny bit of his cum into his mouth. He likes it. He bites your neck and smears it on you. Rose spins around and puts her sweet sex into your mouth and begins licking up your pussy more. Her cat is hovering an inch above your mouth. You aren’t really sure what to do with it, but you figure it out. You lick her petals outside and in the same way she was just licking you. She tastes wonderful. Slightly nutty, very glisteny. Cat juice dribbles on your chin. You start to let out little involuntary screech noises and it seems to drive her more. She’s tonguing up a storm. She’s awash sliding on the slick sled of your li’l pearl. Rose’s toes are curling, almost violently. You think about an episode of “Cops” where they shocked a barefoot guy with a Taser. He was in pain and curling his toes and making a sound somewhat similar to the sound Rose is making in pleasure. You remember hearing somewhere that the actual place in your brain that perceives sex is physically located between the place that perceives pleasure and the place that perceives pain. By this time, Vessie has had about three minutes to refurbish his manly desires and is hard again. Well, actually he never lost his hard on, but he’s ready to fuck again. He slips and slides his cock into her pussy from behind. You’re on your back licking her, she’s on top on all fours licking you and he’s behind her fucking her hard. You can see his cock moving in and out of her. You reach up and rub his balls and lick her matted wet kitty parts and use your newly athletic arms to pull her thighs apart more. He goes limp for a minute and doesn’t care. He’s so confident in this lovemaking that it all works. It’s all good and it all moves forward and pushes you both, even with him limp. You both just double team him hard. You go down on the shaft, Rose licks his balls and plays with his butthole. Then he masturbates while you each lick and suck one testicle. Oh my god, there should never be so much pleasure in the World. This could go on forever. You want to marry both of these people. You want to forget about the project and the Voynich Manuscript and Houston Implements. You want to just stay in this bed for the rest of your days. You tell them this. You tell them that you only want to leave to eat. Screw that. Who needs food? You love sixty-nineing Rose and you love that Vessie is fucking her while it’s happening. It seems perfect. You want to be the thing that he blows his liquids on and wipes his joy with. You are his rag of desire. You are his imperfect and beautiful chipped china. Being his whore is not like being his property. You can leave anytime. It’s hard to explain but you are a feminist, and yet you love being fucked by this man and you love serving him in all the ways you can and in any way he’d like. Vessie fucks her and touches your hair. He pushes your face into the pillow and says, “I adore both of you Manxes. I wanna hold you down and tie you up and splay your legs as you struggle in mock horror just a tiny bit. You squimmery little whores, you wiggle and moan as I slide inside you.” He warms you with that ineffable quality that comes in him in large quantities. You sniff Vessie’s armpit. It’s enough to make a cowgirl‘s heart flutter. Then you sniff Rose. You love every fantasterrific, glistening, cum-covered frilly moment. You lie between them, rolling one to the other, snorting their heady loverly sex sniff. You dote on these companionable critters. You think about how you met Vessie. You met Vessie on MySpace.com because you liked his profile. He seemed cool, and more than one girl had posted about what a great lay he was. With testimonials like that, you were convinced. You checked out those girls too, typed to them, got replies. They spoke well of him, not only of how he was in bed, but also how he was in person. It seemed like he was just a damn sweet man. You sent him a message and he sent one back. He was funny and respectful, much unlike most of the men you’d met on the Internet. You liked the idea of meeting men on the Internet, it seemed to give you more control, in theory. But in reality… You got off MySpace with Vessie and switched over to e-mail quickly, as you are likely to do with someone you think you can trust. You started flirting right away, but he wouldn’t let you continue it until you scanned and e-mailed him two forms of government I.D. You did. You exchanged hundreds of e-mails with him over a few weeks. Many were only a sentence or two long. You and he both like e-mail better than instant messaging ….because you are both always busy with several other projects at the same time, you little multitasking smarties. Multiple windows open on many worlds. Instant messaging just seems too… invasive. It demands attention, whereas e-mail is asynchronous communication…you answer when you want. Although with Vessie, you wanted to answer him as soon as you could… Even though you had a fruitful and blustering life in Los Angeles without him, he became an extra reason to get up in the morning. You would jump out of bed and turn the computer on. You loved e-mails from him…they were sweet presents and special offerings. Loverly fun stuff to start and make your day. Vessie was keen and respectful and just damn nifty. You exchanged more photos, you both liked what you saw. He wasn’t gorgeous, but he wasn’t ugly and had a certain rugged redneck charm. His personality was wondrous. You started talking on the phone, and within ten days he’d bought an airline ticket to Los Angeles. He came for a week. He stayed with you. Lydia told you to have him come for a weekend and make him stay in a hotel room. She couldn’t believe you. She said it was risky. She was right. She said it wasn’t like you. She was right. But your initial contact with him went beyond unusual for you. It was downright crazy. Crazy fun that is. One of Vessie’s other MySpace girls said that he had fucked her eight times in 24 hours, the first 24 hours they had met. You told him you thought that was impossible. He challenged you. You both came up with a script. You loved it. He was to meet you at the door, having taken an aeroporeter directly from the Burbank airport. You were to meet him at the door. You had never met and you didn’t say a word. You’d agreed to this request ahead of time. He walked in the door, shook your hand, pushed you into the bed, hiked up your skirt and went to work, kissing and licking you. You went straight to bed and you didn’t talk at all until he had cum in you eight times. He kept track with a black Sharpie, writing hash marks on your belly, small, right above your hip. He did it. He fucked you and came in you six times and you blew him until he came twice in the first 24 hours you knew him. It actually only took about 14 hours, and four of that was spent sleeping. You were amazed and happy and wonderfully grooving. Yum. After that, you showed him around Los Angeles, went fun places, ate cheap burritos, went to the beach, the LA River, East LA, old Pasadena. It was an easy, breezy time. Made you like him an awful lot… You remembered all this as Rose bucked her hips into your mouth and you looked at Vessie kissing her on the lips and gently pulling her hair. You adore him. You adore her. You lick the tattoo of the cowboy boot she has on her inner thigh and she giggles. Yum. She has a tattoo of a hummingbird on the other inner thigh. Rose says, “That cowboy boot…Everyone in Texanarcha has it. Except Harry Jack….” “What’s with him?” you ask. Rose ignores that and says, out of the blue, “I was nastybaking for some action, raking the coals of her soul as I brushed her shuddering breast with a perfumed feather. It got me all goofy and spiritual. I made her get up on all fours to pray with me.” She actually gets you up on all fours to pray. She says, “Here sweetie, let us pray for all the kitties in the world….” You do. She says, “Step into my orifice.” You do. Rose keeps saying “Love me baby kitty, love me baby kitty” and pushing your face into her pussy. Vessie cums inside her and more slish slides down into your mouth. He lays next to you as you and Rose continue to 69. He kisses you and says to you, “Slurp my lip as I force myself lovingly on you. I will break you with love and pressure and push my cock and belly against your cheek. I’ll bite your neck and sniff your hair and nibble your panties and encircle your nipple with my tongue.” He proceeds to do all the stuff he just described. You don’t yell, “I’m cumming” anymore when you cum. You yell, “Happy birthday, Vessie!” He rolls off you and says, “I dig it. Today, life’s more fun than a barrel full of strippers.” He nuzzles your hair with his nose and whispers sweet nonsensical somethings into your ear. About five minutes later he is ready again and pushes Rose off of you and starts fucking you. Rose walks away and comes back from the kitchen with a plate of little mini-muffins. She shoves one in your open mouth while Vessie continues to fuck you slow and hard and sweet and precious. Even though you are hungry, after all, you’ve been awake for a few hours and haven’t eaten, and had a long workout last night, your body doesn’t really know what to make of a muffin during sex. You chomp on it and giggle and say, “That’s just confusing.” You laugh and they both laugh and Rose shoves another mini-muffin into your mouth. She almost chokes you with it, but somehow you’re comfortable with that. Vessie pushes your arms up over your head and drives on. He holds your arms pinned to the bed and Rose puts lipstick on your lips. She ties your hands to the bedposts with scarves. As she’s doing it, she asks your permission. You look into her infinite brown eyes and say, “Of course. You can do anything you want to me. And with me.” You look into Vessie’s blue-green-gray eyes and say, “And you too, sir. You can do anything you want with me. And not just now. Not just on your birthday. Always. You can always use me as your little whore cookie, because I trust you implicitly. Do with me what you will. I am your canvas and your pet. I love you as you approach my inner moist cave. And you always get to be in charge when the three of us are together, because your age will always be a number one more than the sum of her age with mine. Do the math, babydrool.” He pulls his cock out from between your legs and masturbates and cums all over your belly and tits. A drop lands on your cheek and he licks it off. He says, “Most men try too hard to make women cum. The way to make a woman cum is to respect her but not care if she cums. That’s how I make women cum.” You’re still tied up and you love it. You’ve been tied up before and didn’t love it. You didn’t even like it. It seems to be a matter of trust. And here in this room you feel perfect and loved and petted and cared for. Rose jumps off the bed and grabs some pantyhose out of her backpack. She slides them over your legs and hips and onto you. Then she unties your arms and puts a pink antique teddy on you. Then she re-ties you. As she’s doing this, Vessie slides his cock into her from behind. He keeps slipping out because she’s so wet and also busy moving over you to get her tasks done. She puts a spray of perfume on you, then sets the perfume on the bed stand. She has a little porcelain angel statue in her hand. She holds it to your cheek and says, “We are loved. This angel will watch over us and comfort us and keep us pure.” She keeps clutching it while Vessie works her from behind. She’s facing you and she reaches down and strokes and pets you all over. She rubs her matted wet fur on your pantyhosed leg while Vessie delivers his sterile DNA inside her. She rips the crotch out of the pantyhose and reaches up inside you. You almost feel her touch your heart. You say, “Sho’ nuff, lollipops. A thousand thanks for making me so lovingly crazy, sweeties. You are the only two for me. You have me fladangled into a frenzy! Tell your mommas they did a good job with you.” Rose says, “My tongue on your clit. You are my sharpie of desire. Funk you, and you are right; I won’t hear a peep because I will ball gag you and suck and lick and vibrate you for three hours. Dream of me. I love you, my sweet future-ex. My little baby chicken. Thanks for lunching me with kisses. Lick my gurl-balls, babycat.” You look around the room for a little bit of inspiration, something to trigger the trap of your tongue to flow a waterfall of rivuleted prevaricative truth on your little lovers. You are squeaking in tongues as she tongues you. Sunlight, liquid gold into your veins. Her tongue is conspiring a slow-burn cascade of emotive pink pleasure as your orbs spy a corner candle shelf nest next to the bed. Lolling her love around in your mouth, you feel her purr. You wipe the warm spittle onto the pillow and caress Rose’s face. You regard her in the candlelight and approve of her nascent form. You saw that it was good. You feel the warm push of perfume all around. It envelops a loving blanket and bath of glistening pleasure in the warm, dimly glitteringly glimmering room. The curtains are closed and you listen to rain. It just started and you three are silent for a minute and all hug. You protect each other from the rain. And even more you adore your lovers’ souls flowing through her mouth into his mouth into your squimmering pussy, up your spine and into the Nectar of your little brain. You feel her lips soothing away the damage that this ugly world had stolen into you. You are safe, she is safe, he is safe. You three are one big impermeable kittyball. Morning passes into afternoon and into late afternoon. You see the streaming lines of the sun going down. You feel a spirituality—you feel a bond forming. You feel that this is the most wonderfulific moment of your life, drawn out over eight or eleven hours. You feel that maybe this coupling of three souls is something you would not be rancorous to the possibility of having happen again. Hell, you could sit down daily with these two for the rest of your life. You hope that’s what they want, but that’s occasion for a sit-down conversation later. You sully the World with your collective souls. You are a flurry of perfume and pussy and love. The dirty girl sheets sniff sweet, they glow of poetry and work and two girls and a lubricous, sweet old man. Happy 40th, sir. It’s a swamp of boy cum and girl cum and love stuff and muffin crumbs. And you would never kick them out. Rose is tied down now and Vessie is fucking her with joy and impunity. She’s literally purring. This is probably the fifteenth or sixteenth time he’s fucked today. And he’s been blown eight or nine times and blown to the point of cumming (by both of you at once) twice. All three of you are oozing charm and comfort. You slap and you moan. Rose is tied up and you are on all fours now, licking her. All over her body. She reaches under and places a vibrator on your clitty while Vessie fucks you from behind. She is nibbling on your nipples, looking like a baby and living in love with your flesh. Purring and groaning. You start to cum and it’s going and going and going and lasting longer than that one you had this morning, then it progresses beyond that, you feel a secret storm rising inside you while Vessie keeps fucking you. You have two orgasms at once, one on your clit, like all the others you’ve had, and a new one, one deep inside. It feels like you’re being born. Not even born again, but born for the first time. You’ve never felt like this before. The moment rises up in you. You are a woman. It’s brought out of you for the first time by this dirty sweet old man and this little barely eighteen-year-old girl. You fucking dig it. You savor and lick the sensation and ride it and surf into eternity. You ride Vessie’s cock. Even though you are face down on all fours, you are riding him. From the inside out. You are fucking him more than he is fucking you. And Rose is purring your pearl into place with her magic wand and her kisses. You love her flesh and feel it through her teddy top. She hasn’t taken it off today. Maybe ever. You try to pull it up over her head and she pushes your hand away. She slups you into a slupping good time. She kisses your lips deep. And it really feels that way. Deep. It’s almost an out-of-body fuck. You float above and watch his pretty ass pump Rose and me with joy…I mean watch his pretty ass pump Rose and you with joy. Most men cum in a way that does not come near that of a woman. But Vessie is a good match for a woman. Or two. His cum is not that of the normal man, not the puny squirt. Vessie is the gods thundering through us and moaning and kitty fluffing us. When Vessie is spreading our legs and rubbing us in special places and petting us, we squimmer and smile and fly. Vessie says, “We’ll fuck in the photo booths at Amy’s Ice Cream and kiss, my creamy li’l playdolls. You are so fucking futteringly right, ma chèries. Both. You are secure, California, and you too Rose, in the fact that you are you and there is not another one of you on this entire big, blue dirty ball. You are special, not only in your individuality, the fact that you are both you, but also in what it means to be you. You are both such smart, creative little rocking spermtraps of beauty and joy and such. I favor you all, all night long.” Late afternoon slides and slaps and spanks and slurps into night. Night purrs into late night. One by one you fall asleep. Then throughout the night, one or both wake up and slide tongue or cock or finger into or onto another. You are awakened from sleep several times by licks or moans or being fucked. You’ve had three internal orgasms and eight or ten outside, and some lasted probably eight or twenty minutes. Moreover, you feel perfect. You feel joined, wordlessly married. To two people. You want to have an unbelievably smutty, slutty, healthy wondrous kitty-life with them, for only a few decades short of forever. Your pantyhose are ripped and your soul is forever redeemed. Chapter sixteen You awaken to banging on the door. Well, it’s been a while since that’s happened. You are lying in a beautiful heap of your two favorite lovers. It’s dawn and you focus and realize that you’ve been compiling joy in this futterfest cum pile for about 24 hours now. Vessie gets up and walks naked into the front room to answer this rude door. You hear muffled talking. Vessie comes back with Eli. Eli speaks, “Hello Rose. Hello Cali. Hey Cali, there’s a change of plan. Rowdy says that today is the day. They’re changing all the codes tomorrow and we won’t be able to pull this off after today. Can you please get dressed? I totally apologize, but we’ve gotta get you motivated now. We have to have you dressed, fed and at Houston Implements in an hour. Think you can make this happen?” Yikes. You’ve slept about two hours, if you’re lucky. And you just, a few hours ago, said something to the effect of, “I’m never getting out of this bed again” and probably meant it. You feel hungover and you didn’t drink. Again. You feel sapped and slapped and meowed and rung and slurped. Can you actually walk into a place of business right now and pretend you belong there and pull off the mission you’ve been training so hard for? OK. You get up. Save the World. It’s worth doing. You quickly get dressed. Vessie makes you an omelet wrap and a to-go cup of coffee. You grab the page of codes you were given earlier by Eli. Rose kisses you on the lips and says goodbye. You jump into Vessie’s truck. Eli hands you a cell phone and an envelope and two blank DVDs. He says, “Don’t use the phone if you don’t have to. Don’t even turn it on. They can trace you with it. And destroy it as soon as you’re done. And there’s three-hundred dollars in twenties and seven hundreds, in case you need some cash. Cool?” You nod, “Yes.” You get into the pickup truck. Eli drives. There is a bicycle in the back of the truck. It is very early morning as you are driven to the Houston Implements industrial park. It’s gray out, lightly misting and threatening to rain. Houston looks a blur as you stare out the window. You see shapes and colors that are probably cars, but you feel like you’ve checked out a bit. You savor a really strong pathos that is the exact feeling you felt as a child on the school bus when it would rain. The feeling is somewhere between nostalgia, déjà vu and fearful anticipation. The unusual thing is that this is the exact combination you felt on the school bus, fifteen years ago, your first week at school. And what in the heck does a six-year-old kid have to be nostalgic about? Thought you probably already even knew what “nostalgia” meant. You started reading when you were four and were well into multisyllabic words by age six. You got teased for this, because you became the teacher’s pet. Always. In every grade. You always got along with teachers more than with students. And didn’t have a lot of friends, and were kind of looked at as a snitch. You kinda were a snitch. For some reason, you thought that having rules made sense. Odd…because your new friends are people who abhor all rules of any stripe, and you are about to break a whole lot of very serious rules. But it’s all for the better common larger good. And you can might be able to get away with it, but there’s a lot of places it could go wrong. You will need some luck and maybe some grace and a whole bunch of other good stuff. Eli doesn’t talk much on the way. You eat and wonder if he doubts the feasibility of this plan. You wish you had the extra week of planning. Eli hands you a badge. It has the Houston Implements name, the smiley face logo, a magnetic strip and a photo of you. The one he took a few weeks ago at Vessie’s. The name on it is Crissy Jo Austin. He says, “Clip it on your shirt.” You do. He says, “So, I’m gonna get you about a mile away and then let you ride the bike in. It will attract less attention than driving you in. Ride the bike to the gate, have them scan the badge, go to the main building. Say you’re there to meet your husband, Samuel Austin. They’ll sit you there, and then someone will come get you and show you the rest. And good luck. And what will you do if you get caught?” “Not tell,” you respond. “I read the statutes on commercial burglary and am willing to face the years and don’t wanna bring y’all down.” “If you get arrested, we have a lot of money to commit to your defense, Cali. And you know we will.” “Thank you, Eli. I’m ready for this. And willing.” Eli pulls over by a wooded area. He says, “End of the line, sister,” and helps you lift the bike out of the back. He hugs you, a very genuine and loving hug and says, “Good luck.” He pauses and then breaks that moment with, “This little path goes right up to the gate. Should take you about ten minutes to get there.” You ride off into the hazing rain. You go along a little path barely etched by feet into tall wild grass on the edge of a field by some woods. A little stream intermittently meanders between you and the woods. It seems to be flowing in places and stagnant in other places. The mist wets your face and you listen to some frogs chirp. Or are they crickets? You don’t know. But again it reminds you of grade school. You have a very vivid memory of napping awake with your head on your desk at nap time in third grade. You were having a whole world of communication with the silence and light and shadow that your eyes focused on—the cast, intensity, shade and brilliance playing across your desk. Snips of small luminous trails slunk under your folded shoulders and hands. You smelled the lead of the pencil in your hand. You were supposed to turn the pencils in before the nap, but you snuck and kept yours. It was a totemistic little thing to link you to infinity. You knew that if you had a pencil you could be a writer and you knew that writers were immortal. Their books reach far and take strangers to special places and even live past the author’s death. You held your pencil and felt the silver thread from your heart to that pencil and on to the entire World. It flowed and still probably flows through that pencil lead. You could smell the pencil, you could smell the future. You ride up to the gate of Houston Implements. It doesn’t look very high security. You flash your badge at the little old guy in the booth. He waves you through and lifts the gate. You enter the parking lot full of mostly expensive cars and see a place about fifty feet away with a bunch of bicycles. You head towards it. There is a lock attached to the bike but you don’t have the key. None of the other bikes are locked, you don’t bother or worry. You just push the front wheel into the rack and start walking towards the main entrance. The guard that just waved you through yells to you, “Miss? Miss? I need to talk to you please. Miss!” Shit! You feel like running but don’t. You freeze and he walks over to you. “May I see your badge again please? Will you take it off your shirt?” Shit Shit Shit Shit. This is over before it’s started. And you probably will go to jail. You could feasibly run into the woods and get away. But you don’t. You unclip the badge, hand it to him and follow him back to his little hotdog stand office. Now you’re six years old again and going to the principal’s office. Which you only had to do once… because you got such a high score on a test that they thought you cheated. They made you take a different test while the principal’s secretary watched you. You aced that one too. The little man makes you sit in a folding chair in the mist while he calls his superiors. He runs your badge through a card reader. He asks you who you’re there to see. And how long you’ve worked there. And why you’re coming in late today. You answer the questions based on your training and intuition. He’s on to you. You feel like you’re screwed. He makes more calls. You study his little skinny body through the open door. His gray hair. He looks about sixty, but he’s probably fifty. One punch would probably kill him. He looks so feeble. “Policing people probably makes you older more quickly,” you think. You wait for the inevitable younger, more burly rent-a-cops that somehow never come. The little old man comes out and hands you your badge. “Sorry”. He says. “I called the I.T. department and I found out that this is the new type of badge that we have. I didn’t recognize it. It looked fake to me. No one had told me we had a new badge style. Oh well, sorry about that, Missus Austin. Your husband told me to let you in. Again, I’m very very sorry. My name is Gus.” He extends his hand to shakes yours. You almost refuse, force of habit from Texanarcha. You shake his hand, put the badge back on and start to walk up to the main building again. No one stops you. The building is pretty darned foreboding looking. The main room you’re about to walk into has all glass doors on the front, but it looks like there’s not a single window anywhere else on the whole industrial campus. They probably chain scientists to desks in subbasements there and pump them full of hormones and amphetamines and keep the lights on 22 hours a day to keep them thinking and working. You run your badge over the card reader and the door beeps and you open it. There is a receptionist. She says, “Hello Missus Austin. Someone will be out to get you in a moment.” You stare at the fluorescent lights and you look at the plants. There is someone from an industrial plant maintenance service, some tired and pretty woman in her forties tending to them with the same sterile meticulous care you would attend a complex machine. She looks as if maybe she’s an artist… she has that vibe, but you gotta pay the rent, ya know? You thumb through magazines, mostly scientific trade journals, and glance at the Wall Street Journal. You feel a little overdressed. You feel like a slightly used trophy wife. And you wonder if anyone would wonder why a wife of an executive at H.I. would pull up on a bicycle. Shouldn’t you be in a luxury automobile? But no one seemed to care. You sit there forever. The receptionist is at a huge oak desk, barren save for a laptop and a cell phone. A cell phone? That’s odd. This place has a very “temp” feel somehow. The plants even feel temporary. They’re probably rented. The foyer is cavernous and intimidating. It feels like a cathedral gutted by atheists and sanitized and secularized for the state or something. Sort of a Big Brother vibe. But a tastefully appointed Big Brother vibe. You sit for a while, soaking in this vibe. Soaking it in and soaking in it. Seconds stretch to minutes and soak into several minutes. You figure you’re there for a long time. Twenty minutes? Twenty-five? People come and go and you sit. And wonder what jail is like. Finally an odd-looking person comes and rescues you from your process of counting tiles on the ceiling. This person is Rowdy. “Hi, I’m Rowdy MacGuffin. Are you Missus Austin? Your husband asked me to come and fetch you.” This guy is tall and skinny with straight blond hair down to his ass. He looks like he’d be more at home doing bong hits and playing Dungeons & Dragons in a paneled suburban basement rec room than working in a corporate environment, except for the fact that he’s wearing Dockers and a white pressed long-sleeved shirt. Actually, he still looks like he’d be more at home playing D&D. You follow him through a door. He holds his hand up to a screen and it beeps with a small green light and opens the door. Biometric verification. Shit…how are you going to beat this later, deeper in the corporate cave? Once in, you walk down a corridor. It has a look much like any dot com you ever worked at, except with more locked doors and cameras and biometric checkpoints everywhere. Rowdy leans into your ear and talks quietly to you as you walk. “What’s your real name?” “California Ann Christensen.” “Good. OK, California, here’s what’s up. We need to keep walking while we talk, because anywhere we go into an office, especially mine, there will be cameras with live audio feeds. They’re out here too, see there’s one, but if I talk close and we keep walking they won’t hear us. I can delete some stuff but not all, so the less mopping up I have, the better. So, I’m going to take you into my office. We won’t talk much. I’m going to scan your hand and make a new security profile for Crissy Jo Austin. And make you a new badge. This one got you in the front gate but won’t do much more. And this profile will only be good for 59 minutes. After that, it will stop working and disappear from the system also. No trace. I can do that. You don’t have a watch, but that doesn’t matter because there’s clocks everywhere.” Darn it. You flash on your Powerpuff Girls watch, back on the nightstand at Vessie’s. “I can also monitor you via security cameras. I can probably get away with that and help you remotely if need be, if I don’t get busy elsewhere. So, basically you’re going to go three levels deep, that’s three biometric checkpoints, into the Berners-Lee Executive Library. That library is only available to very high-level security personnel, basically CEO and VPs only. It’s easy to tell them because executives don’t have badges. Scientists have blue badges, security have yellow badges and everyone else has white badges. Your badge is red, that means guest of an executive. I’ve created a fake executive and you’re his wife. It gets you in anywhere. The wives are in on everything. Just as fucked as the VPs. “I’m not even allowed in the library, and I’m one of the heads of security. But you’ll get in. You will pick an empty terminal there and log on, using a password I’ll make for you. There you’ll go in through the Novell interface, hack through the UNIX shell with a terminal emulator, gain root and enter the X drive. That will have an encrypted copy of the manuscript. It’s probably an invisible file called ‘manuscript.tar’. And some of the UNIX commands will be in German, some in French or Spanish. The file is gonna be a couple gigs. You can’t e-mail out or upload from anywhere in H.I., though you can download from the Web if you need any tools. But there should be a burner. Copy the archive to a data DVD and get the hell out. OK?” asks Rowdy. The walls in the halls are dotted with those fucking stupid motivational posters that say things like “Teamwork” and “Persistence” with stupid new-agey photos of whales and mountain climbers and crap like that. Otherwise, it’s all pretty barren. You’re both walking down these corridors and he’s doing all the yacking. You’re assessing risk. You glance into doors, through rectangular safety glass with chicken wire in it, small windows on thick metal high-security fire doors and look into cubicles filled with happy busy little drones. Scientists used to wear white coats work in laboratories with beakers and oscilloscopes. Now they wear Dockers and work in cubicles in corporate cube farms. If anyone makes a loud noise, they all pop their heads up like prairie dogs, then go back to their statistical analysis of whatever…. Rowdy finally gets to his office, holds his palm up, gets the green LED light, but also has to type in a code, run his card and hold his eye up for retinal scan. It seems that the security office is a little more high security than the rest of this place. This room looks quite unlike the others. It’s far messier, for one, with old computers in various states of disassembly. There are fast food containers, Chinese takeout and pizza boxes scattered around. A Star Trek poster. There seems to be three workstations or work areas, it’s hard to tell actually. They kind of seem to overlap. One has a bank of about twelve computer screens, each screen divided into twenty sections, five across and four down. Each one displays a different security camera’s output, in color. There’s one other person in there. He virtually ignores both of you. He’s online playing some sort of multi-user text-based game with someone somewhere on some network. Or maybe he’s playing some machine. Rowdy says, “Hey Giles.” Giles grunts a hello back, not looking away from his screen. Rowdy sits you in a chair that has a camera pointed at it. It has a blue background. He adjusts the height of the camera and says, “Say ‘rectum’”. You smile and a flash lights your face. Then he sits you down at a chair next to his workstation and hands you a thing that looks like the thing you made in kindergarten…where you put your hand in clay and dried it and then painted it and brought it home as a present for your parents. (Mom got drunk and used yours as an ashtray, possibly by accident.) Except this one is bigger and made of plastic. It apparently scans your hand. He doesn’t talk, and appears amazingly focused. A minute later, a new I.D. card falls out of a chute on a machine on his desk that looks rather like a large fax machine. He takes the badge off the clip on your shirt and clips the new badge on. He drops the old badge into a shredder of some kind. You hear it being shredded. You see it turn into dust that flies into a clear bin. The dust looks finer than powdered sugar. Rowdy stands up and leads you to the door. He says, “Go to the left” and you start walking. You know where you are. You’ve memorized the floor plan of this place. After fifteen feet, you find your first checkpoint. You timidly put your hand up to the biometric authorization hand-shaped thing. The light turns green and beeps you in. You hear a solenoid pull the lock open with a hearty “thunk”. You pull. The door is heavy and has a sense of finality when it shuts. Like a prison door. You wonder about that. You also wonder about the safety of the workers here in case of a fire or power failure. You pass a couple corporate scientists in the next corridor. They don’t say hi. They don’t talk to each other. They just walk. This corridor is endlessly long, and devoid of posters. You pass a woman, then a man, then another woman. The people in this area seem to be more serious than the folks you passed earlier on. They are better dressed and you get the impression that the deeper you go, the more important the workers are that you are passing. You finally get to the biometric thing and put your hand on it. The red light flashes. The door does not open. You try again. Another of the same. Shit. You freeze. What to do? After a few moments, a scientist comes up and puts his hand up. He gets let in. You try to follow, and he stops you by placing his arm across the threshold. “We can’t let people in on the same hand anymore. Authenticate yourself. I could get in a lot of trouble and there’s cameras watching us.” You try to think of an argument and he pulls the door shut. He’s on the other side. You see him through the safety glass pull the knob on the other side to make sure it won’t open for you. You contemplate using the cell phone. You aren’t supposed to use it unless it’s an emergency. There’s a clock on the wall. You see that you have forty-five minutes left. A man walks up to you. He looks unassuming, kind of hippie, kinda redneck. This is truly an odd corporate environment. He’s wearing cowboy boots, has long brown Jesus hair, jeans, a white wife-beater shirt. He looks like he subsists on whisky and okra. He could be the rocker lead guitar player in an otherwise hardcore country band. “Hello, Ma’am. Are you having problems?” “Yeah, my biometric isn’t working on this station.” “Hmmm…we don’t call them ‘biometrics’, we call them ‘scanners’. Are you a guest here? Or do you work here?” “I’m meeting my husband, Samuel Austin.” The Jesus cowboy grabs you by the arm. His badge says ‘security’, but it looks like he’s a subcontractor of H.I.. It has the H.I. logo and another logo, Something Security. You don’t get a good look at it. He grabs you by the upper arm and says, “Come on. I’m gonna take you in and check you out. No one told me about you, and you might be in some kinda trouble, Ma’am.” He’s quite forceful with you and you are alternately pissed off and terrified. He practically drags you back in the direction you just came from. “I really am supposed to be here. Can’t you just let me go? I’m supposed to meet my husband. I’m late.” “Ma’am, I am carrying a gun. I am also proficient in several forms of hand-to-hand combat.” You melt in his hand. It’s over and you’re not only going to jail, he’s probably gonna beat you. Or have his way with you. He’s pretty fucking foxy, and on some other day, you would not be entirely adverse to that possibility. However, there is something to be done. “Sprolmojgiahasdf hello…Boilerhead one, Boilerhead one, come in, this is Rowdy.” The corporate walkie-talkie thing that the guy has on his belt next to his gun crackles with Rowdy’s voice. The sexy hippie grabs it. “Hello Rowdy. I have an interloper in hallway 17, area 34.” “Yes, I have visual contact on camera 96, Boilerhead. I just signed her in. She is permitted to be here. Please escort her through the checkpoints in area 34, 35 and 36 and on to the library.” “OK, over. Wow. The Library. Um…OK. Anyway, you got lucky, Ma’am. We have had some attempts here lately, well, never mind. It’s not particularly for public consumption. But I’ll tell you that we do not always play nice with people who shouldn’t be here. And since you apparently should be here, you should get security to make you a different badge, or get a security clearance that is more than day-to-day. Those new badges suck anyway.” Wow. You lucked out beyond lucky. And wow…this is a pretty odd place already. Everything seems temp, no windows, and the security force seem like they were pulled at random out of a bar, sobered up and put to work. You surmise that they must have skill sets that go far beyond the apparent and that this company doesn’t care what people look like. It is a meritocracy. But that seems not the case with the folks working at the cubes, with what you’ve seen through the chicken-wire glass windows. They all look normal. The big sexy hippie redneck takes you up to the door that would not open before. Rowdy says over the radio “Opening door to area 35.” The little light flashes green, the door buzzes and opens. You walk for two minutes down another long hall. You pass more executive-looking folks. You take a right and come to another door, that looks quite exactly like the last one. The walkie-talkie phone thing in the redneck’s hand squawks again, “opening door.” You turn to the right again (counting turns to memorize the way back…mental bird crumbs…he’s taking you a different route than your studies of the blueprint would have suggested), come to another one, the same sequence unfolds. You come to the end of a line, and board an elevator. It has thirty floors, all down. He hits “30” and you drop, fast. The elevator door opens and you step out. you’re standing before an unassuming door with a small plastic plaque on the side of it that reads “Berners-Lee Library. Room 668.” The redneck with the nice ass says, “Have fun.” Rowdy says over the handheld, “Opening library door.” You step in. The redneck leaves and the door shuts. Chapter seventeen You feel exhausted. All this to get to the beginning of this task. And you feel as tired as you feel after you’re done with most tasks. More tired. You really wanna have this be over, you really wanna be lying in a kitty pile with Vessie and Rose, basking in splendiferocity. You want to be using Rose’s breast as a pillow and Vessie’s tummy as a foot rest. Now you know how people must feel when they have to get up and go to their damn day jobs. You’ve worked your ass off at your jobs, especially at the DVD translation stuff, but at least you didn’t have to get up every day and go somewhere and deal with office politics and all that crap. People are so damn dumb. The library looks somewhat like a public library anywhere. There’s a desk at the front with a woman sitting at it. But again, she has a laptop and a cell phone. Actually, on closer examination, it’s one of those phone/walkie-talkies like the sexy redneck had. But still, there is no landline. And no wires coming into the laptop. Everything seems wireless. Odd. Doesn’t seem like the best choice for a corporate security solution…. There is a swinging bar you have to walk through to get in and another one to get out. More security. You try to walk through the swinging arm and a buzzer sounds. The librarian says, “You forgot to sign in” and points to a paper sheet on her desk. You pick up a small golf pencil and begin to write “California”. You cross it out and write “Crissy Jo Austin”. The librarian buzzes you through. There are stacks of books and rows of computers. But the computers are all laptops. With no wires. There are a few cubicles with TVs, DVD players and headphones. Some people are watching movies on them. Or training films. Or something. The thing that makes this a little different than most libraries is the atmosphere. There are very expensive-looking antiques everywhere. It is an amazingly luxuriously festooned place. There’s a bar serving drinks and food, and people eating and drinking. Drinking alcohol it seems. The main thing that makes this library a lot different from other libraries is the strippers. There is a corner where a girl is silently dancing naked. She’s dancing with no music playing. She looks bored. Languid. And very young. Probably sixteen. Maybe fifteen. Very fucking young. Not over 18. There are three or four men watching her, even one woman. They are not totally paying attention to her, but rather talking amongst themselves and occasionally looking up at her. After about five minutes, she walks off the five-inch-high three-feet-in-diameter round glittery stage and goes through a curtain into another room. Another dancer comes out. This one looking as bored as the last, and just as young. The first dancer comes out after a minute and walks out to the people watching. You are astounded by this. And even more astounded that other people in the library are not paying attention to this. Most of them are drinking alcohol, but a lot of them are on computers. They seem to be not working, but rather watching media. Mostly porn and clips of people being tortured and killed. This place is more a demented executive clubhouse than actual library. Another dancer comes out and stands in front of the people. One of them grabs her arm and pulls her close. She goes without resisting. It’s an old executive, probably sixty. He starts fingering her vagina. She moans, but looks bored. Drugged? Naw…just…you don’t know…. She seems like she’s somewhere else He gets tired of her and sends her away. Fucking bizarre. These people are evil. You sit down at a laptop and type in a user name that Rowdy gave you. You are in. Sort of. You wonder why you had to physically come to a location like this to access something on a network. Rowdy MacGuffin didn’t explain that, but it does seem that membership in this particular library does hold certain privileges. The laptop has an unusual interface. It seems to be some proprietary version of Novell NetWare running over what seems like a proprietary (or maybe even hacked) version of the Microsoft Longhorn interface. And certain functionalities seem disabled and certain others seem to be present. For instance, there is not the normal “my computer” interface, and it is not even accessible through the browser. But there is an additional utility on the desktop called “throttle” that offers some of the scalability you would normally find for accessing other drives. You look for the X drive, and of course find none. This is not surprising. You go through the Novell interface and pull up a command line prompt. After the initial attempts at logging in, there is a series of screens with questions in German. The queries are about mundane things, but you have to answer them to get to the next screen. After seven of them, you get a prompt for the password and username combination that Eli gave you—that he got from the Palm Pilot thing. You type HI688_86:eok8KluT55Pmi=38k44amol and you’re in. This is where it gets interesting. The requests for information you would usually get at this point are in French. Then Spanish. And some are in Italian. And they ask for things in a different order than you would usually have in gaining root. But you figure it out. You gain root and get access to the mainframe. Then some guy sits down and starts trying to make small talk. “Hey pretty lady. I’m Tully. Care for a stem-cell smoothie? This one has cocaine.” He offers you a drink. “What’s your name? Do you want to go take a pleasure bath with me?” You feel confused and angry. He gestures to a corner of the library where you’ve seen people coming in and out of a door intermittently the whole time you’ve been in there. The last thing you need right now it some asshole trying to fuck you. And this one’s not even cute. He’s creepy and old. We’ll, he’s probably Vessie’s age, but he’s creepy. He says, “We can grab a clone and pull one off. I don’t have to be back for over an hour.” Clone? What the fuck. “Um, no. You’re attractive and I’d love to, but I have work to do.” “Work? No one works in the Library.” “I do.” Suddenly your screen goes black. You try to reboot the laptop and it won’t go. “Shit,” you say. The creepy guy says, “Oh, are you new here? You know you need a library password. Didn’t you ask for one when you signed in?” “No. Sorry.” You both look over and the lady who apparently gives out these passwords has taken her lunch break.” “Listen, can you help me? I need to get some work done right away and the librarian’s gone.” You stroke his arm and lick your lips. (and try not to vomit.) He says, “Sure. Here. You’ll have to log onto a different machine. They boot off after fifteen minutes of no library password, and won’t come on for 59 minutes after for some reason.” He slides over to another machine and says, “Here, I’ll give you my password.” You say, “I don’t recall having a place to enter a library password.” “See, when it turns on you have to press the H key and the I key at the same time.” He does that and a prompt comes up. He types in a password. You get a quick window that says, "“authenticated into Berners-Lee Library system. Time on system: 00:00:00:03"”and the last digit is rising, showing time in use. He presses the H key and the I key at the same time again and you are back to the same Novell-Longhorn screen. You have to fucking start over. He starts stroking your hair and says, “When you finish this, come meet me in the back stacks. You kind of have to, you know. There is a policy in the library for new women, you know.” You shudder internally and tell two lies. “Yes I know. And I'll meet you back there in an hour.” He kisses you on the lips and walks away. You want to vomit. You hastily but accurately repeat the same sequence of events to get back to UNIX root. But this time you are thrown some curves. It’s almost as if the system is learning your behavior, and trying to trick you up. It responds with changes in a pattern that seems a lot more like you’re instant messaging a person rather than interfacing with a machine. And this time the commands contain no English. They are in Italian and German and Portuguese. You don’t know Portuguese but it’s enough like Spanish that, given your comprehension of Spanish and UNIX, you get it. You get in. You get to root and show invisible folders and find the manuscript. You try to copy it to the desktop. Even with root, you can’t. You can’t figure out why. In a storm of ease of thought, you download a hex editor from shareware.com and you try viewing the contents of the file. Success. You can’t copy the file, but you can view the code and then copy and paste that from the hex editor. You do, pasting it into Word. It’s a fucking huge file, probably 10,000 pages. You save it to the desktop. While you’re in the X drive, you see some other hidden folders with cryptic names, and decide, “What the hell” and view and copy them too. One is so big that it breaks the file size limit for the older version they are running of Word. In a breakthrough of low-tech thought, you realize that spreadsheets do not usually have such limits, and paste it into one. You’ve got some huge word files on the desktop and you get out of root. You zip them and check the file sizes on the documents and they total nearly five gigabytes. Gosh darned, it’s 300 megs too big to fit on a data DVD. Even the manuscript file alone is too big for a CD. You go to check the DVD burning utility on this laptop to see if it contains some smart compression algorithm. Oh my god! There’s no DVD burner on this computer. Only a CD burner. And you only brought a blank DVD, no CDs. You walk back to the library desk, and the lady still isn’t there. You look around. It looks clear. You start going through drawers. You find a spindle of blank CDs and grab them. Two men walk in and you pretend to be the librarian and ask them to sign in. One of them says, “Hey, wanna grab a clone with me later in the pleasure baths?” You giggle. “Maybe. Come find me in an hour.” You say this knowing you will be out the door in far less than that. Or maybe in jail. You look at the clock. You have twenty-four minutes to get out of the building. You hope this CD burner is fast. You sit back down at your terminal and download a utility to cut the almost five gigs into seven CD-sized batches. The burner’s very fast. In minutes, your stuffing seven CDs down your pants. A woman comes over to you, “Hey beautiful. You’re new, no? Wanna grab a bath with me?” She runs her hand through your hair. You try not to let her see you shudder. “No thank you.” “That’s a shame. There’s some new clones I think you’d like. One’s a ten-year-old boy. Quite talented.” She puts her hand between your legs. “I said ‘No!’”, you say at the risk of attracting attention. She looks mad and storms off. You finish up the burn, log out, close the computer and walk out of the library. Your biometric gets you through all the doors back, and it seems like a smooth trip until you get out of the labyrinth into another room that is not where you thought you would come out. You took accurate notes in your head on the way in, you should be back at the door that leads to the lobby. But you’re not. You’re in some shipping department. Damn you’re tired. Must account for the wrong errors in misjudgment. You’ve probably slept only about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. You could literally curl up here in the oil stains and sleep immediately. You are in this loading dock kind of place and there are three men putting boxes on a truck. There are no markings on the truck. It’s about the size and shape of a UPS truck, but black and anonymous. You look at a clock on the wall. You have one minute to get out of here. By then your biometric will not work. Your profile will evaporate and disappear and be snipped from the giant computer, the "man behind the curtain will not recognize you…your magnetic ink will evaporate. You see sunlight from beyond the hanging thick rubber strips forming a sort of door that the trucks have to drive through. You’ll just walk out of here. In theory. One of the guys walks over to you and says, “Hi”. He has a hand-held scanner and scans your badge with it. You eye the clock on the wall again and notice that it’s past the 59-minute deadline now. His scanner seems to notice. “We have a no-scan here, boys.” Two other guys walk over and leer at you. One grabs your breast. The other grabs you from behind in a full-Nelson. “No scan, not supposed to be here, that’s the rule,” says another one. He starts to feel you up between your legs. This fucking company is a bunch of pernicious rapists. The third guy says, “Let her go. Remember that guy that didn’t scan and it turned out to be a glitch and all those dudes got terminated? Not just fired, but, you know…” The first says, “Nope. They totally fixed that glitch. All no-scans are fakes. She’s a corporate spy. Let’s fuck her, then expunge her. We’ll throw her in the reclamation tanks. She’ll just dissolve and slurry out and no one will ever know. And the company encourages that sort of stuff when we catch spies. Hell, we’ll probably get a promotion. And H.I. only gets police involved if it has to. And in this case, we don’t have to. You’re a fucking spy, aren’t you?” He’s ripping your shirt and squeezing your breasts through your bra. You feel absolutely furious. You wanna slurry this motherfucker and destroy this company by any means necessary. You want to run all three of these men through the little powderizing machine in Rowdy’s office. “No, I’m not a spy. I’m the wife of an executive here. And you three are going to not exist at all.” You then turn to the one who had doubts, the one who seemed to have a conscience, and say, “You can get out of this. You seem like a decent guy. Talk your friends out of this. Or go get help.” He’s silent. Then he puts a hand on the back of your neck and tries to kiss you. You turn your head. He smells like tuna fish and cigarettes and you wish you and he were both dead. Fuck… these people are slime. This corporation has a very odd view of human life and consent and bodily boundary and such. Apparently from the highest levels all the way to the loading dock workers. “Hey, you whoring, spying little bippy-twat, I’m gonna nail your tits to the floor while my buddies hold you down and take pictures. And take turns. We’re gonna have you every which way.” Another says, “I think she’s pregnant. She’s got a little bit of a belly on her. Are you pregnant, missy? Don’t matter none. I’ll fucking do you anyway.” He’s pulling up your shirt to expose your non-pregnant belly when he says this. Then he unbuttons your pants and slides his hand into your pubic hair. And feels the CDs you stuffed down there. “What’s down her pants? She is a fucking spy!” OK. It’s fight or flight now. You choose both. You kick one guy in the balls and flip the one in back of you over your head into the third one. You don’t know where you got that ability, but you have a momentary flash of children who summon superhuman strength to lift cars off their parents and such. You actually entertain that thought as you do the act. And you have a quick flash of the last couple weeks, of all your athletic training. You realize you couldn’t have done this without that. And you seem calm in the face of trouble. And you seem to have lost your need to control things that don’t need controlling, and you’ve gained the sagacity and prudence to know the difference. And you know that this is a situation that needs control. All three are on the ground, one stunned in pain clutching his balls and one more or less just surprised and the third, the one under him, only in a state of indeterminate injury. It takes you a moment to realize you can run. You did it. You run through the rubber slats masquerading as a door and out into the sun. But you aren’t outside yet. You’re in a big room that looks like and airline hanger. It’s full of stretch limos and SUVs and unmarked panel vans. A few mechanics are working on a few of them. There’s a huge open door with sunlight coming through it and you head toward that. You run. No one tries to stop you and you get out to the parking lot. You are on the back side of the building. You don’t know how to get around to the front, or can’t see which way would be shortest. Not that you can go through the front gate either. Two of the men that were trying to rape you, the two that you didn’t kick in the balls, come running after you. You’re fucked. They’re gonna get you. Just then a little electric golf cart-type thingie appears. It’s being driven by Gus, the guy who you met at the front gate when this thing began, a little over an hour. Gus is adorable to you right now—the cute, sweet little old guy who got you in, and might get you out. The two rapists are about to grab you when grandpa security says, “Hello Mrs. Austin. Would you like a ride?” “I would love that, Gus.” You hop on his little cart and he whisks you away from death and worse. In three minutes you’re at the front of the building. Gus says, “I’m going off duty, but I’ll drop you off.” There is another man sitting in the little hotdog stand. This man looks younger and sharper. You say to grandpa, “Hey, can you please wait here until I’m out?” He says he’d be delighted. He scans your badge and of course it doesn’t work. He says, “Damn these badges. I’ll get you out, Mrs. Austin.” You get your bicycle and button your pants. Gus tells the other guard something, then comes back and says, “You’re good to go through, Mrs. Austin. Have a super day!” You wave and say, “Thank you, Gus.” You get on your bike and ride out of Houston Implements, with their most valuable asset down your pants. It’s hard to ride a bike with H.I.’s most valuable asset down your pants. You stop and take the CDs out and put them in your purse. You have a little cut under your pubic hair from one of the CD cases. Then you hear the sirens. You look back and see about twenty police cars screaming into Houston Implements from the other direction. You ride to the railroad tracks, and carry the bike over the tracks. You ride into the woods and pull out the cell phone. You call Vessie at home. No answer. You try the shop. Rose answers. “Vessie went to the bank. He’ll be back in a minute.” “Well, shit, tell him to call me at this number. And I love you, Rose.” She loves you too. You say you gotta go. You get off the phone and sit next to your bike in the woods. You look at the sky and think about jail. You sit in the woods and listen to the driving jackhammer din of cicadas. It ebbs and falls and you wonder how any insect can be this loud. Maybe they just save it all up for seventeen years. It must be intense to live your life in suspended animation, serving out most of it in a little underground cocoon, only to come out and crow to boast this loud. You start thinking some poetic thoughts about this, until you remember that you hate poetry. Well, some of it is alright, but even the good stuff doesn’t rock your float. It’s rarely the icing on the cat. And the stuff that isn’t good is abysmal. The only thing worse than most poetry is most poets. Anyone who saddles themselves with that job description is asking for a hard life, and deserves it when it shows up. Aside from the obvious fact that there’s no money in poetry…you recall a high school English teacher telling you that there are less than 50 professional poets in America, poets that make an actual living just publishing books of poetry. She said that most poets, even the well-known ones, usually supplement their income by teaching or from grants or some other manner of subsidy. Or by writing ad copy or, God forbid, greeting cards. Aside from that, poetry is just such a yucky form…the domain of lovelorn pimply twelve-year-old girls and suicidal thirty-year-old male virgins who still live at home. And thanks to the Internet, these people can share their poetry. And probably bodily fluids. Yup. There’s someone for everyone. Yikes. Yes, and with even good poetry and poets being wretched, bad poetry is worse. Horrible and deleteable and not worth the pixels it’s displayed with. Chum for emotionally wrecked nothings. Go cats go. Keep going. Until you’re gone. Write an ode to death then walk your talk. You’ll be taken more seriously and you might even get published posthumously. OK, poets deserve to be allowed to live, you suppose. You’ll just sidestep them, karate style, and let them topple under the weight of their own apprehension of misfortune and foreboding. Then you think about pot. These woods sort of remind you of the woods in California where you first smoked the kine bud when you were about fifteen. You can’t believe you actually cared about that shit for a summer. You gave up liking it when a stoned boy you liked told you, “Dreaming is better than doing.” That line seemed such a lame sentiment. The thought of pot seems absolutely mundane now. Getting loaded, on anything, seems like the ultimate cop out. You have things to do, and most of the pot heads you’ve met never do anything. They have notebooks full of good ideas, but they never take any of them to fruition. They will simply dream of how someday, their notebooks might magically manifest into a career or fame, or somehow cause them to do something important. And it ain’t even that hard to do something important. It only takes a few friends and less than a month of training and planning in your case. You think about the friend you turned on to pot when you were both 15. You gave her a joint later to smoke at home. She actually got busted by her parents for that first joint, and thrown out of the house. She also got pregnant the first time she had sex. Some girls have all the luck… The cell phone rings. It’s Vessie. “Hey kitten. Where you at?” “I’m in the woods near Houston Implements. I’ve got it. I got the thing…whatever it is. And it’s more than what we thought it was…I got more data than just the manuscript. But I got that too.” “OK, babe. I’m listening to a police scanner. You gotta get the fuck out of that area. They are totally on to you and know what you look like and there’s about fifty cops looking for you right now… as well as H.I.’s private goon force. And from what Rowdy tells me, you’d be much better off getting caught by the cops. So check it, sugarpuff. You can’t come here. There’s a patrol car parked out front. And I can’t leave, because they’ll follow me. And the KTP compound is getting raided as we squeak.” “What should I do, Vessie?” “There’s a white pickup truck about a quarter mile up the road, if you take a right outside the H.I. main gate, you’ll run into it. It’s unlocked and the keys are under the passenger-side floor mat. Get in there and go somewhere, anywhere, an Internet café or something, and put what you’ve got on the ‘Net with PlunderTool 3.0. Then call me. Then ditch the cell phone and the truck. We’ll find a way to get you out of this. And Cali? You’re a fucking true Texan now. Can I call you Cali-Ann?” “Yes Vessie. I like that. OK, I gotta run.” You ditch the bike in the woods. You realize that you can’t go back near the entrance of H.I. to get to the highway, because you’ll get busted. You walk through the woods, about three-hundred feet away from H.I. There’s a large sound-insulating wall between you and the highway. It’s covered with vines. You climb it—another place where your training has proved important. You fall a few times getting over the wall, but finally make it. You use the ivy for friction for the designer sneakers on your feet, though you cannot pull on the little vines with all your weight—it can’t hold you. You use little pits and cracks in the wall to wedge your fingers in. You first throw your purse over. That way it won’t get in your way, plus that way you’re committed. You fall over the wall onto the shoulder of the highway. You bruise your side, but it doesn’t feel fatal. But you feel stunned and the wind is slapped outta you. You lie there trying to moan, but you can’t. There’s cars streaming by fast about five feet from your head. Grass is itching you, the noon sun is burning your face, your arm landed on gravel and has little cuts. You have no sunglasses. You wish you did. You start to regain your breath and see some homeless-looking guy scurrying off with your purse on the other side of the four-lane highway. He’s dropped his “Will do anything for food” sign and is in full sprint. You take off after him, risking death dodging cars. “Hey, sir, that’s my purse.” He runs faster, so you run. Your body hurts, and you’re on your fifth or sixth wind, and it’s fading. You summon more of that superhuman strength and chase him for a few hundred yards. He is fast, but hasn’t been training. And probably smokes. Actually he does, you can smell it on him when you finally knock him to the ground. He puts up some struggle, but not much. He finally calls you a bitch, throws the purse at you and walks away. You grab the purse and make sure it still has the CDs and the cell phone. It does. One of the CD cases is shattered, but the CDs seem fine. You have actually run towards the goal. You see the white pickup truck not far ahead, right across the street. You walk quickly and purposefully towards it, almost getting hit in the process. The door is unlocked and the keys are in it under the mat. Finally… a bit of good luck. You put the keys in and it won’t start. You try turning the wheel. It still won’t start. It’s one of those stick shift trucks. You don’t know how to drive one, but you know that if someone doesn’t know how to drive one and they do drive it, they can drive it, but will probably destroy it. But you don’t have far to go. And trucks are expendable, especially to KTP. But you can’t even start it. You call Vessie. It rings off the hook. You have no one else to call. You could call Lydia, but she probably doesn’t know what to do. You do make a mental note to call her though, as she’s probably fucking worried about you. Poor Lydia. She loves you. She’s probably very sad. Or maybe she’s so Zen that she didn’t notice. Or maybe she’s still at that hippie ashram thing. You could totally see her staying a week or three extra without batting a lashing. You panic. Or is it that you brainstorm? Regardless, you run out of the truck and run ahead in the direction that the violent bum ran. He’s hitchhiking. You yell across the highway. “Hey! Slow down, mister.” He starts running. You run across the highway again and tackle him again. “I don’t want to hurt you. I need your help. You know anything about cars? “Yeah, a little. Why?” “And can you drive a stick shift?” “Um, yeah, why?” “If you can get this truck started and drive me a few miles up the road in this truck, I’ll give you the truck. It’s totally not stolen, and has a full tank of gas. And I’ll give you a hundred bucks. “Um, OK. But why?” “Just drive me.” He gets in the truck, puts the key in and starts it right up. “How did you do that? I couldn’t even get it to turn over.” He says, “You have to push the clutch when you start it. You probably didn’t do that, did you?” You have him drive you into Houston, to the Montrose District. On Westheimer you ask him to pull into the Copy.com copy center. You tell the bum to take the truck and go, you hand him a hundred-dollar bill, and you jump out into the parking lot. You say, “Oh, and it’s probably supposed to take biodiesel, but if you can’t get that, regular diesel will work. Have fun.” The bum hesitates. He doesn’t know if he’s being set up. He tells you through the window, “If I got to jail, I don’t really care. I could use three hots and a cot.” You smile and he leaves. You go inside. Chapter eighteen You go into the Copy.com. Amazing place. Nice arty design, cute hipster clerks, and surprise! There’s stainless steel coyote sculptures on the wall! You prepay six hours of computer time—the higher rate for the design station, as it affords privacy, and buy a soda. The cute emo boy behind the counter says, “For what you’re paying for that many hours, you could almost buy a computer!” You laugh and take the password card he gives you and log on. You go into one of the little private rooms. Very nifty. And the Copy.com is air-conditioned. Ah…that’s damn nice. You copy the contents of all three CDs to the desktop. You rename them HoustonImplements1.zip HoustonImplements2.zip HoustonImplements3.zip HoustonImplements4.zip HoustonImplements5.zip HoustonImplements6.zip HoustonImplements7.zip You download the PlunderTool 3.0, no problem. It’s downloads instantly, as it’s only 120 Kilobytes. But you can’t install it. You get an error message: “You do not have permission to install programs on this network. Please contact your system administrator.” You don’t really feel like contacting your system administrator. You have a better idea. You write “do not touch” on a piece of paper with a Sharpie and put the paper over your keyboard. You walk across the street to the Radio Shack and buy a 256-meg thumb-sized USB drive. You walk back over to the Copy.com and stick the drive in the USB slot in back of the computer. Once it’s in, you drag the downloaded PlunderTool 3.0 onto the USB drive and install it. It runs from there fine. Then you use it to file share the stolen zips on the desktop. You look at the progress bar. People start downloading them in minutes. You decide to check your e-mail while you sit there. You have 1,459 messages. Most are spam. You select all, then unselect the thirty or so that aren’t, and delete the rest. There are four from Lydia. You let her know you’re OK and tell her that you love her. You quickly look through the rest. Most are people wanting to hire you for subtitle work. You create a “Sorry, I can’t take on this work at the moment, may I recommend a friend of mine, here is his e-mail address” letter and copy and paste it to all of them. One is from Ajax, it’s a mass mailing with his band’s tour schedule. He’s actually going to be in Houston tonight, at the Axiom. You couldn’t care less. You hit “delete”. You sign out of the e-mail and check the progress of the downloads. Fifteen people are already downloading it worldwide. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but you know how things go with things like this. A seed of fifteen people could make a hot commodity like this saturate the World in a few days. You check headlines on Yahoo news. You click on “Houston Implements Burgled”: Houston Implements Burgled (UPI) - HOUSTON – The world headquarters of Houston Implements was broken into this morning. Police have deployed personnel from several jurisdictions to try to apprehend the thief, who was seen leaving the facility with highly sensitive data that was stolen from the executive research department. Police have a possible suspect but no one has been apprehended yet. You check a few other things on the Internet, and check the Plunder progress. Six people have completely downloaded the files (Damn, you love T1 lines!) and 34 others are in different phases of downloading it. You put your “do not touch” sign on the keyboard and walk out. On the way, you ask the kid behind the counter to not let anyone touch your computer. You lie and say you’ll be back. You walk outside and walk a block up the street. You try calling Vessie again, both at the store and at home. No answer. You throw the cell phone down a sewer. You throw the CDs in the trash outside Taco Cabana. You walk up the road more. You hear five or six cop cars scream by. They pull into the parking lot of the Copy.com. You put out your thumb and get a ride out of there within 60 seconds. You get let out at a cheap motel and try to check in. He won’t let you without an I.D. You say your wallet was stolen, but he doesn’t believe you. You hitchhike to a cheap junkie motel and check in using cash. You sleep. You wake up and figure you’re going to get arrested anyway, so you call 911 to turn yourself in. The operator says it’s not an emergency and routes you to the non-emergency number. You tell them who you are and where you’re staying and that you want to turn yourself in. They tell you that they’ve had twenty people claim to be California Christensen in the past hour. Jesus, you can’t even get arrested. You hang up. Chapter nineteen You consider hitchhiking back to Los Angeles. You walk to the road and stick out your thumb. You can’t think. It’s almost dark and you don’t even know which direction you’re headed. You just want out. An SUV with tinted windows pulls over. You get in. The driver is a middle-aged guy, a kinda athletic hick-looking black dude. He actually has a shotgun rack in his SUV. You’ve never seen that. He says, “Howdy ma’am.” He doesn’t ask you where you’re going. This worries you. He picks up a cell phone and auto-dials a number. He says, “Yup. I’ve got her. I’ll bring her by location B. Thank you. Goodbye.” Oh Jesus. Does this guy work for H.I.? Is this one of the goons you were told to avoid by any means necessary? He extends his hand. You don’t shake it. “Hello, Cali-Ann. Are you OK? My name is Dew-RON. It’s spelled D-o-r-o-n. Dew-RON” “Who are you?” you ask, shuddering at the possible answer. He looks familiar, but you can’t figure where you’ve… He interrupts your thoughts, “You’re Vessie’s girl, aren’t you?” “Who are you?” “I’m Vessie’s friend from way back. I’m a Texas Ranger. There’s nine of us driving around right now looking for you. You’re in a whole mess o’ trouble and we’re trying to keep you out of it. You’ve done a great thing as far as me and my friends are concerned, and we want to help you. At least we wanna keep you out of the way of the H.I. death squad. Those motherfuckers have caused more unsolved deaths and disappearances in the past five years than anyone in Harris County.” You feel stunned and happy. Then you remember where you’ve seen this guy. You saw Vessie talking to him at the Livingston Wal-Mart. He really is Vessie’s friend. Vessie was slapping him on the back. You feel very relieved. “So what should I do now?” “Well, Cali-Ann, you should probably turn yourself in. You’re gonna get arrested either way, eventually, and you’ll have a much better time at it if you go voluntarily, especially if you go in voluntarily with ten Texas Rangers.” “ I tried that. I called 911 and tried to do that and no one took me seriously.” He says, “We had dozens of women calling in claiming to be you. It was a diversion to get you out of H.I.’s reach. Sent the police all over hell. But they’ll believe you if we bring you in.” “I’m going to jail?” “You will no matter what. But you probably won’t stay long. You’re pretty much looked at as a hero by a lot of folks, including some pretty high up in the government. Especially by the lady who’s running for governor and will probably win. She’s my friend.” “Um, OK. I’ll go to jail,” you say, looking out the window, lost in thought. After a long pause, Doron says, “You wanna get some of your clothes Cali-Ann?” “Is it safe to go by there?” “Yes. We’ve got some men out there. And the police and H.I. already went by there. Vessie got out before that even. With your friend Rose. They’re at a safe house. You can’t go there right now, but he’s fine. We can’t call either, my cell phone calls are probably being tracked. But trust me, he’s fine. So is your friend Eli. He’s with them.” Doron continues to drive towards the record store. You ask, “What about Harry Jack and the rest of the band?” “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Harry Jack was a government plant. Motherfucker wasn’t even a Texan. He was from Connecticut. He doublecrossed y’all. He was in on it from the beginning. Ever notice that he didn’t have any tattoos? He was fucking ATF. I hate those people.” “Jesus, Doron…Harry Jack? Wow…I….I don’t know…Didn’t he even write a lot of the stuff in KTP’s books and all that? He seemed so … committed.” “He was at one time. And his message is still good. It’s the message, not the messenger. The message lives on.” “How did he end up a double agent?” “He got busted a long time ago for manufacturing Meth for some Aryan biker gang and turned them in, in exchange for not going to prison. He was into the Naughtie Nursies.” “Who are they?” “It’s not a who. It’s a what. A Naughty Nursie is a sex act. It doesn’t even have to involve another person. It’s shooting speed while you give yourself a warm, soapy enema. He was really addicted to the whole Naughty Nursie thing. And it’s a hard habit to quit. Any time you mix sex with drugs, it’s so psychologically reinforcing that it’s extremely hard to beat. He got so into it, he ended up stealing ten kilos of crystal meth from some Aryan biker gang. And he absconded with some of their women. He got busted for the drugs, and was facing 20 years. And the gang would have killed him in prison. The only way was to basically work for the feds undercover. Word is he got such a kick from being a narc that he kept doing it even after his deal was up. Also, various government agencies were paying him an obscene amount of money. And he liked having sex with, how did he put it, ‘hot young anarchist pussy.’ This is a complex inter-agency thing. A lot of people wanted to tap the underground and keep a pulse beat on it and eventually fuck it over.” “Are you sure of all this?” “Yes, Cali-Ann. We found out late last night and leaked it to Eli. That’s why he got you out of bed to break in to H.I. a couple weeks early. Had you gone on the day you were supposed to, you would have been busted red handed in the library. But the feds didn’t know you were going today and weren’t prepared.” “I’m just having a hard time swallowing all this, Doron.” “It’s OK, ma’am. And you know what? You are a hero. Not just with the Rangers, but worldwide. There have been thousands of downloads of your liberated data today. The Copy.com got raided pretty quickly, but the cow was out of the barn already. There ain’t no puttin’ her back. Everyone has that data now.” You say, “That’s great Doron. I love the Internet. This is like Napster for politics.” “Yes, This shit all started back with Napster. It was beautiful. One teenage stoner kid acting alone in his dorm room put a serious dent in the bloated major labels. It continued with Kazaa. And it’s PlunderTool and Cali-Ann this month. You are the hero of the moment. But this is much bigger than free music. Apparently you got more than you thought you did. You got the complete Voynich Manuscript translation, but you also got their genome stuff. Those two things are going to end a lot of diseases. Probably including Cancer and AIDS. And you also got a bit of video. It’s only about 45 seconds, and it’s grainy—we think it was shot with a camera phone—but it’s enough. It’s the CEO of Houston Implements and three other high-level employees there having sex with a ten-year-old boy. Only it’s not a boy. It’s a clone of the son of a federal judge. Those fuckers are going down. H.I. deserves to go down. They are evil, and until today, they have been above the law.” As Doron is pulling into the neighborhood with your home, you see smoke and fire lights the night sky. You hear sirens. You wonder if it’s Drunk Rooster Vinyl. as you get very close, you see that it’s not. Doron takes a detour to the source. You see the Texanarcha compound, or what’s left of it, in flames. It is collapsed and a pile of melting rubble. The firemen seem to be taking their time about putting it out. “Jesus,” you say, “What the fuck? And why don’t these assholes do something? They’re barely moving!” Doron answers, “Neighbors have been threatening to burn that place down for a decade. The compound was raided this afternoon. But everyone had a tip, from me actually, and all got out. The firemen probably aren’t hurrying because they were probably told not to. I’m not sure who, but there are some folks that would love to see that place gone, and I supposed they’re happy. But the stuff you did today, it’s more than just talk. KTP talked a great talk, but today you walked the walk. And it’s already worldwide and cannot be stopped. You, in conjunction with your pals, pulled off the perfect heist. All for good. For the little guy. For the common man. And woman.” You laugh. “I’m not that kind of feminist. You can say ‘common man’ and I’ll know what you mean.” You pause and look at the flames. They look pretty. “Let’s go get my clothes.” Doron flips a donut with his SUV and drives you over to the double-barrel shotgun shack where you live. There’s two cars parked out front. “Are those plainclothes cops? Or ATF? Can I go in?” “No, those are my buddies. This place is on 24-hour off-duty Ranger guard until further notice. We’ll make sure no one toasts it.” “Shit,” you say. “I don’t have my key. Vessie’s always here, I forgot to bring mine.” Doron hands you a key. “We got your back, ma’am.” “Do I have time to take a shower, Doron?” “Yup. I’ll wait here.” You run in and gather a couple changes of clothes. Then you wonder if you can even wear your own clothes in jail. Oh well, bring ‘em anyway. Vessie’s house looks very calm. You don’t turn on the lights. You can hear the fire sirens and smell smoke from a few blocks away, but you feel like you’re in an oasis of serenity here. You take a shower. You feel like you’re scrubbing extra hard. You feel dirty. Not because you stole something from H.I., but because you even set foot in H.I. That place is filthy and debased and should be the location burned to the earth, not Texanarcha. You air dry in the bedroom and look at the bed. You savor memories there. You can smell pussy and man cum lightly in the air. You lay down and masturbate. You touch yourself for love and danger and death and life. You cum, inside and out, both kinds, totally powerfully, without the aid of your friends or your simple pleasures. You lie there soaked in sweat and eventually muster up capacity and put on a fresh dress and walk out, adoring this house and its ghosts. You pause in the living room before leaving and hear a squeaking sound. You look up and see a mouse looking at you. He pauses and doesn’t seem scared. It looks like that same mouse from next door. It probably is. It makes you happy. “Bye, mister mouse. See you in a few years.” Doron and ten other Texas Rangers accompany you as you go to turn yourself in at the State Police station. Doron makes it clear to them that you were not apprehended, but that this is of your own volition, that he and his pals merely escorted you. Newspapers and TV networks are trying and vying to get a sound bite. You ignore them. The booking process is fairly quick and within two hours, you are asleep in a cell by yourself. You wake in the morning to someone bringing breakfast and a woman introducing herself to you as your lawyer. She said Vessie paid her. In cash. She’s nice. You like her. Houston Implements is facing heinous charges, and is being dismantled. The CEO and several higher-ups are in prison, and likely to stay there, for a very long time. You spend five weeks in jail. For safety reasons, you get your own cell. They also let you keep your clothes. You spend most of the time reading, writing, and exercising. And masturbating. You are asked repeatedly to rat out your friends. You don’t. Vessie and Rose visit you. You agree to all live together when you get out. Vessie and Rose are not having sex until you are with them. You tell them to go ahead and start without you, but they say they don’t want to. They want to wait for you. You are arraigned, and most of the charges are dropped. You are released on bail, which Vessie pays. In cash. Vessie jokes about it and tells you, “The bail bondsman had a sign on his wall that said, ‘Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part.’” He said, “I’ve seen that sign before, but it made me laugh, seeing it up there.” Six months later, the new governor pardons the final charge, commercial burglary. She’s a big fan of yours. You move back in with Vessie and Rose at Vessie’s house. When they pick you up, Vessie pins his old Ranger star badge on your shirt, kisses you and says, “You’re a real Texan now, Cali-Ann. You earned this. I’m so damn proud of you that I could pop.” Vessie has about two million dollars in KTP Cash. He gives one third each to you and Rose, and you basically live happily ever after. You don’t spend the money extravagantly, but you never have to worry again. Vessie tells you, “Life begins at 40. We make our own families if our families don’t do us right. That’s a privilege of the modern world. That was impossible in an agricultural society—you’d starve to death if you divorced your family. But today it’s not only possible, it’s has to be done, for sure. And you and Rose are my family.” Most of the Texanarchy kids get very disillusioned when they find out that their fearless leader is a double agent. Many grab handfuls of exit cash in backpacks and move back to Ohio, Orange County, Vancouver, Mississippi, Salt Lake City, rural Virginia, Jersey City, Michigan, etc. But it doesn’t matter, because the thoughts and files and books and records are still out there in the World and are still taken very seriously. Eli still believes, and still lives in the neighborhood. He still owns the land that the compound is on and is living there in the Alvin First Baptist Church bus. He has tons of cash too, but holds on to it. He’s starting another band and making a documentary film about the whole event with you and H.I. You’re totally for that, because he says it will help people. He’s the only person you’ll give an interview to. You shoo away the reporters when they come by. You just wanna make love and sip lemonade with your husband and your wife. Your god has blessed you. Your 700-foot tall really smart, really foxy woman god has smiled on you and blessed you Eli says that after the compound burned down (actually ‘melted’ would be more accurate, it was filled with flammable things but was made of corrugated tin), the only thing left was the mailbox on a pole out front. In a surreal bit of fun, the postman still delivers to it. Eli brought you a letter that came to you there. It was a request from the law firm that took your deposition. They thanked you and told you that your statement is helping prosecute H.I. for negligence in pharmaceutical manufacturing. The firm has a class action suit and needs your signature if you want to be included in the suit. You throw the letter away. The next day, you pull it out of the trash, sign it, and tell them to give your share to the Texas Ranger Retirement Fund. You dig life with Rose and Vessie. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close. Y’all kiss and fuck and laugh and love non-stop. You don’t even mind the heat in Houston for some reason. Y’all love to talk all night long. You take little road trips. Rose teases you for not being able to drive stick. She teaches you. She says, “I learned when I was nine, driving a tractor in East Texas.” You love camping. You avoid the press, who still sort of follow you around, but it’s getting less frequent as time passes. The story is still current and hot (and more so as different firms, small and large, continue to base amazing innovations on the data you liberated), but the press is resigning more and more to the fact that you won’t talk. You have Lydia close out your apartment, which you give up. You send her money to ship a few of your favorite dresses, and some books, and you let her keep your laptop. There’s nothing on that one you can’t live with out. You really don’t feel like being on computers for a while. And if you do, you’ll just go buy one, in cash. You send Lydia a ticket to fly out and see you in a few months when she has some time. She’s psyched. And on the phone she says you seem a lot more mellow. Life at the house is mellow and sweet. And y’all now have a pet. It’s Kit Nubia, the black cat that used to live at the KTP compound. Eli found her wandering outside after the fire. Kit Nubia actually becomes friends with the mouse in your house. You often see them playing together in the kitchen. You pet Kit Nubia and stare out the window. You feel odd, part hero and part pawn. Maybe not pawn, but randomly steered and ultimately somewhat powerless. But you like the hero part. And not from an ego sense. More from a sense that you always wanted to do something important. And now you have. You feel useful. You make a little promise to yourself to not play it up… to be a humble hero. The thing that’s important here is that something got done, not that you did it. Death loves a braggart. Death takes the loud talkers. It ain’t about the hero… It’s about the heroism. P/s By Eli Bowie. (Cali-Ann asked me to write this. She’s busy.) The postscript of all of this is that the Voynich Manuscript being released onto the Internet did in fact change the World. A cure for AIDS was found as a result, with progress being made toward a cure for Cancer. Also corporations were watched much more closely and their power was limited in America by an act of Congress. Several other major players in the World theater followed. Restrictions of personal freedom went down, and the world popularity ratings of America (and Texas) went up. People struggled to find a place in society for the human clones produced by Houston Implements. All together, one-hundred-and-seventeen clones were found. Most were in the corporate campus of H.I., but a few were serving as sex slaves in the homes of H.I. CEOs. They had been cloned from thirty-one different people. The people they were cloned from were mostly Houston Implements employees. Some of those employees filed lawsuits from their jail cells to attempt to have the clones destroyed. Interestingly, the federal judge whose young son was cloned as a sex slave became an advocate for compassionate treatment of the clones. He utilized social services and private donations to help provide for them. The clones were of indeterminate legal status, since they did not possess social security numbers. Some of them were cloned from adults, but mostly from very young teens. Even the ones cloned from grownups came under the care of Harris County Child Protective Services because they were all under five years old in calendar years, even though the appeared to be adult. None of them had any schooling, training, or life skills and required extensive help in learning to adopt to life outside the laboratory/whore house setting of H.I. Cali-Ann and Rose and Vessie all lived happily ever after in one big kitty pile in Vessie’s shotgun shack, and still ran the record store, though they greatly reduced the hours they were open each day. They decide to take two years to have a sort of honeymoon. They only occasionally open the store during that time. They do buy a couple air conditioners for the store and a couple for the house. All the major networks and many mainstream newspapers and magazines called and came by to try and get an interview with Cali-Ann. She turned them all down. She finally relented to give one interview, with the small, local independent music and culture magazine, “The Houston Press.” It later got reprinted worldwide in all the above-mentioned major media anyway. The crux and conclusion of that interview is reprinted here, with permission: “…In cooler weather, scarves appear and end up draped over everything. In squats it’s the same, but hand washed and hung by fires and everywhere, like a grade school with no teachers and no rules. But it’s different, there actually are a million tiny rules that no one ever articulates. “No society ever actually exists on a sense of freedom. It’s always on a river of rules, even if they are written by looks and glances and held in place by ghosts. No society, from the most savage to the most evolved, is free of rules—rules forged by taking chances, and held in place by glances. “Every society, from apes clubbing each other, to squatting punk anarchists, to the technologically advanced mecha-utopia, has these bodies of law. There may not exist a papyrus etched with their proof, but they exist just as true. “If you wish to inspire action in the heart of your fellow man, you must remember… “You are a beautiful cat in a room full of gerbils.” thanks: Tiffany Couser, for introducing me to her love of Texas, and for being an excellent friend, and also for having a cat named Vessie. And for going through this with a red pen. Kaia Johnson, my left-handed Texas pal. Lydia Lam, a “Left-handed girl in a right handed world”. Brandon Baca. Michael Woody. London May. Mike Kelley. Ryan Brown. Todd McNeill, my Web god. And especially Tracy Hatfield, my very good friend in Houston, for help with story details. And Carla Segurola for overall proofreading. Front and back cover photos, and design by Chas Ray Krider www.MotelFetish.com Model: Ginny Hogan ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael W. Dean is a filmmaker and writer living in Los Angeles. He directed the films D.I.Y or DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist and Hubert Selby, Jr.: It/ll be better tomorrow. Michael is the author of the how-to books $30 Film School, $30 Music School, and $30 Writing School; the novel Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women and this, his fifth book, The Simple Pleasures of a Complex Girl. 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