2006-09-13 - 12:43 a.m.
Blah, I need coffee. Garcon! Some coffee, if you please! No coffee? Oh lord, now what am I to do? Pfft, there is always coffee, though. There’s a Starbucks every 20 feet in Los Angeles. Some Starbucks even have little mini-Starbucks inside their Starbucks, like those Russian dolls that are one inside each other, getting smaller and smaller for all infinity.
I have come to West Hollywood today, as I have a block of time between an appointment with my asthma doctor, and an evening screening at Raleigh, the studio across the street from Paramount. I actually haven’t been to Raleigh for a screening in years. I seem to remember they have the most delightful, overstuffed chairs. The movie – well I am not even sure what it is. It could be anything.
Before coming here to West Hollywood, I found myself in the blazing white examining room of my asthma doctor, who subjected me to a blistering battery of tests. I have been having a little trouble breathing this past week, you see – just a little bit. In fact, it was so minor, I would have suspected that it was merely my imagination, if I didn’t keep coughing every so slightly all the time.
Well, as soon as I arrived at the doc’s office, he hooked me up to this machine into which I was supposed to exhale quite harshly. And what do you think we discovered? Why, it turns out that my Air Flow Spirometry Readings were no better than sixty seven percent!
Goodness gracious, with numbers like that, it’s a wonder I wasn’t flat out on my back, with an oxygen tube up my nose, just like my stepdad was in Wyoming. I can’t figure out why I wasn’t in a coma or in a state of mental retardation, my lungs having kept oxygen from reaching my brain.
In fact, do you not think it odd that my asthma flaired up so assiduously such a short time after my stepdad’s pneumonia (and emphysema)? I think it’s strange, I have to say. That little urchin at the Utah Preacher’s home must have been afflicted with every germ known to Jesus himself. Only the holy seemed to be immune to its unpleasant effects.
It is, as you know 9/11 – or, rather, by the time you read this it will be just a day after 9/11 since I do have trouble getting off my ass to finish anything, even an entry to you, my dearest long suffering Big Blue Blog-a-roo. And I have been gaping in astonishment over the media’s shrieking and howling, hair pulling, and self indulgent sentimentality.
I was not writing this here blog back in 9/11. 9/11 was pre-blog. I suppose like the rest of the world, if I had been blogging on the date, my blog would have been full of tedious drivel like, “Who would ever imagine that this would happen!” or “Oh my oh my oh my – those poor buildings! So gracious and tall – and now, such rubble!”
I was on Gay.com talking to Flloyd on 9/11, just when the planes hit the tower, I believe. And as soon as I sensed that something whacky was going on, I switched on the radio to the station that I always get my news from – Howard Stern. And even Howard Stern was shrill with horror and shock. I ran over to my folks’ house and shook them awake.
“A plane has plowed into the World Trade Center!” I shrieked, switching on the TV. At that time, the TV was showing a fire burning at the Pentagon.
“You stupid boy,” my mother grunted. “That isn’t the World Trade Center. That’s the Pentagon! See?” The fact that planes could hit both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was beyond my imagination, really. And when that second plane hit the second tower – my goodness, even the news anchormen were babbling and gibbering.
What I remember about 9/11 was thinking that this was a day that would essentially mark a shift of understanding between those who lived in New York and those who lived everywhere else in the world. Even former New Yorkers who moved to other cities, such as myself, were on the other side of the rift: There is no way I could understand what it was like to see the World Trade Center turn into Ground Zero.
As for the thing that I found most horrifying on that day – well, it wasn’t the buildings toppling down, actually. It wasn’t even the sight of the second plane plowing into the second tower, which I was actually watching live and at the time. It was when I was watching the fires burn – and then I saw the poor folks leaping right out of the window, flopping 100 storeys to the ground rather than die in the flames. No one had ever seen anything like that before, at least not in this generation. It was the most appalling and monstrous thing I had ever seen.
I mean, what fate could have been so horrible that folks would have chosen to leap out of the World Trade Center rather than to experience it? I cannot even imagine the Hell of what those upper floors must have been like. One moment, you are in your nice little corporate office, the air conditioner going puffa-puffa-puffa, and you perhaps sipping a nice cuppa tea while listening to NPR over your computer headset while keeping one eye on the stock market numbers and the other on Miss Murgatroyd, your boss’s hot secretary.
And then – WHAM! A gigantic airplane smacks into your building some five or ten floors below you. The building turns into a blazing inferno all around you – and there is no way out! The smoke fills the rooms, the flames crackle, your skin blisters and turns to agony. Women and men scream, their heads being sliced off by metal spikes and fang-like shards of glass falling from the ceiling. And there is no hope of rescue! You have been left to die. No, the folks below you assume you are dead.
What would you do? Would you sit there and let the flames roast your flesh, agony singing every cell until your skin bubbled and your bones crackled? Or would you take your life in your own hands and leap out of the window in one final action movie star gesture of “fuck you” to God and to the fates that had dealt such a hand. The despair of such a deed! Oy gevalt. Those jumpers, dressed in their yuppie suits and ties, leaping from the skyscraper into the nothingness, knowing that they were jumping to certain death from certain death – can you imagine the thoughts in their head?
Can you imagine that the last thing they were able to do was to pick whether they’d have a slow death from burning or a quick death from falling? And these people were just silly old American yuppies, working in the same kind of offices you and I have worked in all your life. It boggles the mind to think of it. And that, of course, is why we are at war. Because, believe it or not, Islam delights in killing civilians and innocents. And their hatred of us is a hatred that cannot be negotiated away. There is no peace possible, except through stamping them out like disgusting filthy bugs.
Anyway, I did not mean to rant. It is the fact that the sixty seven percent of my lung capacity is making me light headed and giddy. As I think you realize, as of late I have become very twitchy and quick to irrelevant ire. My life, such as it is, is quite mad. Surreal, even.
As I continue this bizarre journey of downward mobility in the land of the business we call show, the most bizarre and outlandish things occur. For one thing, I found myself in the awkward and unpleasant position of having used up almost all of my savings and having to borrow money from my mother just to pay the rent! I haven’t done that in years. Decades, really.
To my credit, there is money in the pipeline and checks will probably come through in a week or two to cover my debts – but really, I haven’t lived so close to the edge since I was a college student. It’s annoying and appalling, because the privations one is willing to endure at age 22 seem truly revolting when must endure them the second time ‘round when one is 42.
I only moved back to Los Angeles because I was told the market for folks who do what I do for a living is omnipresent and ever-increasing. Why, I was told, most readers are never out of work for a single day. And so it was for almost 15 years. But then the market has changed, and fewer people are doing these jobs. And since I am on the just-hired fringes of every single gig I get, the jobs are quick to depart first thing.
But that, in and of itself, is not actually “surreal” per se. Everyone has money troubles and everyone complains about them. So what? Truly, how boring and plebian! What is odd is that I spend my days searching through my sofa for quarters, like a bum looking for cigarette butts, but then I find myself going on these ridiculous vacation trips that are fit for Prince William or the CEO of Microsoft.
Why have I not written to you this past week, you ask? Well, I shall tell you. I have been out of town at this absurd backcountry tent camp high in the Sierra Nevada mountains outside of King’s Canyon National Park. Here I dined on Three Star four course dinners overlooking a vista of larch pine and deciduous spruce. Here I slept on 1000 thread Tuscan sheets and listened as the deer and the marmots cavorted outside my cabin doors through the night. The backwoods camp hotel cost hundreds of dollars! And there I was, wondering if I could use this credit card to pay the minimum on THAT month’s credit card.
This is how it happened. You see, my mom was planning to go to this incredibly upscale camp – The Sequoia High Sierra Camp, a backcountry hiking camp that has just opened for the first time this summer. The plan was for her to go with my stepdad, and it was going to be a tremendous romantic weekend for them both. The place is quite amazingly situated in a strip of privately owned land wedged just between Kings Canyon National Park and Kings Canyon National Forest.
Hunting would be permissible in this tiny strip of land and so are things like plucking the flowers and (if you were thusly inclined) fishing the lakes. The tycoon who happens to own the strip of land, being enterprising, has decided to open an upscale backcountry tent camp. It’s like Bearpaw, the venerable tent camp 11 miles up the High Sierra Trail, except this camp is only a mile up a moderate dirt trail from a road. It’s at 8,000 feet, but the walk is fairly mild.
It was a delightful weekend, I must confess! Can you imagine going out on a long, seven mile hike, and then coming back to these tents in the middle of nowhere, for hot showers and a delicious dinner of Moscuvy Duck, sliced thin and pink, with new baby potatoes and a chocolate ganoche for dessert? Quite unreal. The chef, this fellow named Ryan who was educated at some fancy culinary institute and has cooked at many fine restaurants in Rome, whipped up this simply amazing dishes that would have been incredible anywhere, let alone in the middle of a forest, with only a dirt trail leading 15 miles to civilization.
He was quite a chef, too, though I think he might have taken on more than he was anticipating with this assignment. One thing Ryan was not was a mountain man. Unlike Bearpaw, which is a camp set up by hikers who do a bit of cooking, this place is a camp set up by a chef who really knows nothing about the wilderness. And his eyes were kind of bugging from the weirdness and isolation of the location.
On our second day there, my mom and I climbed this mountain – up to 11,000 feet it was! And the final 200 feet were actually a total scramble up these sheer boulders to an incredible peak that overlooked an IMAX-theater-like wraparound view of the High Sierras. It was quite amazing. I keep thinking that, if everything falls apart, as it looks like it is going to, I really must try to remake my life so that I spend more time in the woods, and less in the disgusting city of Hell A.
During our drive home, we passed through Fresno. It was a hundred and ten degrees there! Who would live in such a place? But at a gas station, we and the family friends we were camping with, The Sillies, stopped off to fill up our tank. As I pumped the gas, I saw this run down, dust-covered pick up drive into the station.
The driver was this horrid old coot, with a shaggy white beard and saggy blue jeans, held up with a pair of suspenders. He was accompanied by this slutty, white trash gal whom I assumed from her body language was his sister-wife. She was dressed in nasty, stained orange jogging shorts, a dirty red-haired pony tail, and a black, sweat-soaked tank top which did not hide her greasy bra straps. She looked hard, man – and when I say “hard,” I mean it looked like she had done “hard time.” This was a real white trash couple, and that’s a fact.
And then I looked on the side of their pick up, and I saw that, stenciled on the side, was a gigantic swastika, above the name “The Gaede Ranch.” The grizzled old coot and his white trash were Nazis! I beckoned my mother and The Sillies to my side and quietly pointed out the swastika and then the couple. The Sillies, a pair of ultra-lefty baby boomers who really would not hurt a fly, were, I think, most horrified by the Nazis. In fact, they gaped and they blanched, trembling like little bunnies.
A later Google search unearthed the fact that, yes, the Gaede Ranch is run by a group of white supremacists, deep in the freaky mountains outside Fresno. They are, in fact, Nazis! And, as wacky as it sounds, two of their children, an adorable pair of little blonde Aryan teenagers are renowned – in Germany, natch – as Prussian Blue, a pair of pop singers who warble white supremacist lyric-filled song. I presume they do that between bouts of slurpin on granddaddy’s wizened Nazi old coot cock, because, sisters, that old man was getting some and that’s a fact.
But, even though I was a Jew, I could not be that dismayed by the silly Nazis. If that couple of filthy, rag tag white trash skanks is the best that the Nazi party can muster these days – well, I feel sorry for them, really. The Jews own Hollywood, so the Nazis can keep Fresno.
