2007-08-01 - 12:33 a.m.
Jesus Christ, this is just about the stupidest thing I have ever done. This week, anyway.
No, seriously. This just about takes the cake. You see, here I am, sitting in Duttons bookstore at 11:20 on a Friday night, waiting for midnight at the moment that the Harry Potter Book becomes available for purchase. What am I? Retarded? I must be. Good grief.
I have never seen so many teenagers in stupid pointed hats in all my life. I have never seen so many Harry Potter nerds! They should just be ashamed of themselves. The only thing I loathe more than a Harry Potter nerd are those sanctimonious people who hate Harry Potter, but approve of it because it “interests kids in reading.” Oh my aching ass. As if kids who are “introduced” to reading through Harry Potter will ever read anything else. Yes, I know, “Harry Potter” on Monday and “Finnegan’s Wake” on Tuesday. That’s always how it works.
So many spotty and bug-eyed teenage boys! And so many miserable looking parents, glumly standing around in their jeans and button up shirts, watching as their brats run around shrieking and yowling, waving their magic wands and getting all stoned on the strawberry cupcakes. And what about the fat spinsters in their 20s, wearing de-colletege black gowns that show off their huge, fat lady boobies? Oh my lord – that isn’t a magic wand in some of those 15 year old boys’ pockets, it’s their little boy erections.
I just picked up a glass of something at the counter that they are dubbing “Butter Beer.” I asked what was in it, and the clerk only winked, “Oh, we’re not supposed to tell!” As though the contents were some kind of magical delicacy. Well, I took a sip – and the vomit nearly rose in the back of my throat! What the Hell IS that? It’s like a disgusting Apple Juice that has been flavored with vanilla pudding. It’s unutterably REVOLTING!
Naturally, sitting here, waiting for midnight, I feel quite a bit like a child molester, even though my nose is quite appropriately buried inside my laptop so I won’t cause any trouble. God help me, some of those 15 year old boys in their Harry Potter scarves and little round glasses are rather sweet. It is the final elevation of high school prep – even though it seems to me Harry Potter books are anything but preppy.
I am not even going to buy the Harry Potter Book tonight: Mine is being shipped from England because I insist on the British edition of the book. The American edition is usually gone over by computer to remove all references to lollies and lorries. No, I am here to help my MOTHER pick up HER copy of the book, which she needs to have at one minute past midnight, for reasons past imagining.
Oh – the hoardes of screeching horrific brats! How they howl and shriek and caterwaul, running about, yelling and drooling and spitting. I am told that some folks who ordered the Harry Potter book off of Amazon.com got their books this afternoon. I swear, that if I had been one of them, I would have just sat right here in the Duttons coffeehouse, quietly reading the book and smirking.
And now it is midnight. And my mother has presented the little clerk -- a sweet looking boy in his early twenties in a Harry Potter scarf and wearing a badge that declares he’s a resident of the Hogwarts house of “Duttons-dorf” -- with her pre-paid tag so she can get the book. The book, I am pleased to say, has been purchased by the story department of the movie studio she works for. And that’s a good thing, too, for they ordered it from Duttons for 35 bucks, while at Barnes and Noble, you can get the same volume for 18.
And now my mother holds HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS above her head in a gesture of triumph! With its tacky orange cover, the book looks exactly like those awful orange marshmallow peanuts you get on Halloween. And the book is probably just as junky.
How the children around my mother are shrieking and howling! One teenage girl with brown hair and freckles, her pearl white fangs glinting in the moonlight, makes a shark-like dart for the book, her claws outstretched.
“Let me touch it! Let me touch it!” she howls, her voice harsh and rough, a result of her having screamed all night long.
Outside the bookstore, in the parking lot, I spot two nasty little girls -- one a blonde child of around twelve who is dressed as a princess, and her friend, a sugary black girl dressed as a witch. They have their copies of the book clutched in their hands, but the blonde girl is hurriedly flipping through the volume, turning right to the back of the book to see if Harry dies at the end.
I can’t help myself – the inner library mouse suddenly takes control of me.
“Don’t do that!” I gasp at her. “Don’t turn to the back of the book first! You’ll ruin it for yourself that way!”
The two little girls look up guiltily and giggle – they know I am right and act as though they’ve been caught at something shameful. They close the book and behave themselves. Or did they just look at me like I was a total freak?
I must say that all my life I have wanted to be a freak. I have wanted to amaze and startle and shock those around me -- just as I have wanted those who are dreary and plodding and odious to loathe and eschew me.
Well, of course, I AM a freak, but it’s just that don’t look like one. I look like the sort of fellow who should be playing the President on TV. But you and I know the truth: Deep inside, I am as freaky as the mongoloid girl or the flipper boy at the circus. These are, of course, the thoughts that are on my mind as I sit here at the Novel or in the library. These loons that you see around you – they are my people!
Just now this fellow at the Novel came up to me and told me that he recognized me from the library. It’s a funny thing: I always expected to be “recognizable” for other things – for my writing or my witty reviews, for instance. When I was younger, I thought I would be recognized for my acting.
Instead, these days, I am now recognized all over Santa Monica for being “the library guy.” I can’t tell you the number of dribbling barkers, the shrieking howlers, the tin-foil-hat wearing droolers, who all come up to me and grin, leering gleefully, “Oh! You work at the library! I’ve seen you there! You’re the famous library guy!”
Ah fame. Isn’t that the most marvelous thing? Mind you, I have to confess that a weird thing has happened to me since scaling back my time in the movie biz. Not only am I writing more, which is a miracle in and of itself, but I am also NICER. No, seriously: I have become seriously kind and pleasant in my old age. I have oddly enough discovered that I enjoy helping people, whether it’s an old woman who wants to send an e-mail via Yahoo to her hep cat grandson, to the German gentleman looking for kids’ videos about lizards.
I should note that we are all a-twitter at the library today because of the article that ran early this morning in the New York Times about the pedophile who lives in Los Angeles. If you read the article, the story concerns a creepy fat fellow who lives in his car and has created this website that’s sort of a paeon to molesting little girls. Mind you, in the website he goes to great length not to advocate or condone child abuse, which is a crime even in an abstract way. Instead, the website is full of “little hints” on where a “fan” can hang out at places where there are tons of children. It’s basically a guide to Family Night at Disneyland, to just the right time of day to hang out in the parks, and precisely the perfect moment to hang out in the children’s library.
Anyway, it turns out, of course, that the pedophile is a resident of Santa Monica, and that, living in his car as he does, the place he comes to use the computer is the Santa Monica Public Library. So, when I came into the library, on the day that the article was published in the New York Times, what did I find is that the library supervisors had plastered “wanted” posters all over the building.
“Have you seen this man?” the posters scream. “He has been known to hang out at the public library, loitering in the children’s library and using the computer! If you see him, please alert the authorities IMMEDIATELY!”
Anyone reading the poster would assume automatically that this filthy brute were some kind of a vicious criminal. However, small letters at the bottom of the poster read, “Please note: This man is NOT guilty or wanted for any crime. Yet, he is desirable and you should guard your children carefully if you see him in the vicinity.”
So, then, if the fellow isn’t a criminal, what is the point of the poster? The guy isn’t guilty or even “wanted” for a crime -- but the poster will ensure that he is to be hounded and terrorized if he dares show his face in the library. I guess that’s the point. To create a witch hunt so that if the admittedly loathsome child diddler shows up, he will be dragged into the stacks at the children’s library and ripped to pieces, gnawed by angry moms and dads until the flesh is shredded from his bones.
Now that I have a job “working for the city,” it is an interesting thing to see how folks in power at such jobs think. The poster was whipped up, not because of anything wicked the pedo had done in particular, but because they HAD to do something for reasons of PR.
If you must know the truth, I find the whole thing rather sad. I was chatting about the pedophile to one of the periodical librarians, and I noted that I had seen the fellow using the computer in the computer commons, which really, I have – he’s just one more goofus sitting at a station watching porn. At any given time there are three or four of them.
The periodical librarian shook her fist and roared, in a library roar, “Oh my lord! If I evah see that pedophile, I will KILL him! I will beat him and push him and bite him!”
And so all this publicity is only going to serve to create a witch hunt feeding frenzy that will probably result in the poor fellow being lynched for not even committing a crime – though I daresay the fellow deserves to die for being nine kinds of a fool and being so blatant about criminal activity.
I don’t get pedophilia, because it’s just so easy to find men who are of legal age. And believe me, I am just as much of a perv as any pedophile, I just am lucky that none of my compulsions are illegal, except in Iran or Mauritania.
For instance, take this amiable new regular fuck buddy of mine. I have written about him before, I think. There is this lovely young 19 year old boy, an intern at the music studio downtown, who shows up regularly on my doorstep for a quickie when he goes out to run errands in Santa Monica. You will remember – I was the one who took his cherry, and I guess the experience was implanted on his memory, like a duck fixes on the first thing he sees when he’s born as his mamma. This is like the fourth or fifth time he has come back for more!
It’s quite charming the hunger with which he shows up, rips off his clothes, and throws himself on me, gobbling my cock and moaning. Today, it was just oral – but, boy, he was so damn horny. He slobbered on my dick, licking and kissing it, and taking it into his young mouth. He had long, but well tended hair, done in a top knot, like a rocker, so I would gently ever so often move it aside, so I could watch him as he sucked me off. It was really rather inspiring.
At one point, his face was buried in my lap, but he had one leg up on the bed and the other on the floor. His young pink and rather large cock was rock hard and slapping against his stomach. Every so often I would reach over and finger his hole and play with his prick, but he would gently move my hand so he would not cum so quick. After a while, though, I gently moved my foot, so I was pressing against the back of his balls and his t’aint – and I moved my leg so one toe was pushing against his sphincter. And suddenly his eyes rolled back his head – and, even with his mouth on my cock, his own penis twitched and spurted a huge line of jizm all over my leg and stomach. It was fabulous!
And, I should point out, utterly legal. Who needs to be a criminal when there’s enough consensual fun to be had?
