Los Angeles was having to watch your parent suck up to other people's children who think and know they are superior to your parent.
And there are things you aren't supposed to like, but you like them anyways, like your attractive cousin or the smell of gasoline. I once read a woman journalist talking about going to war torn area risking her life and still packing condoms. There was something about that that I appreciated. And if karma really existed, any feeling of vindication would not seem so delicious. And the modern world now escapes itself so indirectly, but ever so adamant, and the woman you are going to marry in the future is going to have an affair on you even or especially after you have had children—and the rapport she has with her paramour will always be conspiratorially quixotic precious beyond marriage. It all tends to give one a very odd idea of American wives, but there is some advice you simply cannot get from your mamma. I'm Jake Belane, and I'm a private Detective.
But that was the thing, or the thing about Delores—I didn't even get the luxury of having her cheat on me, if you think about it. It was worse than being twice removed.
But the other night I was stopped at a red light at a desolate intersection. There was a tree lined on one of the corners and the tree's un-pruned limbs extended way too far out right near, almost touching the red light, and the leafed limbs, like scrim of stage decoration, were incidentally lit into a red screen shield of foliage, and it was a charming delicate space in time, before the light turned green and the green light fell slightly back, and I had to pull away.
The girl at Tower gave Rooney the plum rest of her change in all coins because they must have been tiller out of bills. Rooney, not knowing exactly quite what to do with it all, just placed the change right about the naked counter and left it there, and then walked skittishly back to my dirty uninspected Porsche.
Roon had on a black and white classic Gator print Vision Street Wear baby doll dress for small boobies, it had a big tag on the back with black Vision block letters, she wore white knee breeches beneath which looked like they could be used for fencing, navy blue t-stock Saucony, knife hair cut black Betty Page Parsons Bauhaus.
Lorrie told me or Lorrie told me a conversation Lorrie had with Jasper Johns, he was talking or talking about solving the problem with the whole ghetto by what Johns proposed some redistribution of wealth as a, or through some systematic application of chance, that Lorrie said she could not help but think to an actual inhabitant it probably looks as if chance was already well operative . . .
But I love it how the whole LA scene, just constantly rides Jason Rhodes to t-bone Los Angeles' self sense prevalence onto outsiders—I mean whatever, Roon sits passenger inside the car, excitedly chopping slopes, You can't be Frank O' Hara, the coke poems he wrote probably embarrassed the hell out of who he wrote them to anyways,
But I also remember Rooney once also says, There's no electricity in dreams—which means if you try to turn the lights on in a room in your dream, it doesn't work—your subconscious as a mechanism does not have enough power to facilitate, or even mime this earthly technology. Which, there is no electricity in dreams, ended up being that one line off Dormers, on Goin' Back To Art School.
Another one, if you don't know if you're dreaming for sure, just look at your hands—because in your dreams your hands are never there.
Usually a grain of Eskatrol in Roon's coffee was enough to get her going though—she and Joaquin would sit in the kitchen listening to opera and smoking cigarettes and talking about whatever. Their help, one of their maids was usually around, and the rooms still got cleaned.
And the reason why WXYZ are the last letters of the alphabet was because they was the hardest letters to un-bendy say, and certainly, you need to practice the beginning letters in the alphabet long before mastering all the preceding bits, at least that's what I would assume if I was learning the alphabet for the first time today, and that's why, or why I was the Detective.
But I did feel safe snorting air drugs there with Roon in the 914 clackling in the idle hour of the parking lot of Tower Records on the dank of Tuesday morning. To listen to the CD player, the engine of the motor car had to be on. But we just now both heard I Don't Want To Know for the first time, we went specifically to pick up a physical CD immediately. Roon and me or me and Roon were both simply despairing practically over our very recent shared discovery revelation of track—buttoning the song back right to beginning just as soon it was plum over—I Don't Want To Know was on repeat for while, both of us just sitting there. We kept bumping it back to beginning right back to that intro—A, E, D - E, D, E, A - E, D - E, E—sooo good. We had it on full blast practically, loud enough to relish in the indexical incidental squealing strings shrieks off the acoustic from the sliding fingers coming on through to that intro. We both just relished in that sqweech slight imperfection detail, which was like being in the inside of the track, soo perfect.
But the rush of us now being both immediately inordinately hypnotized in the burnt tire syrup smell parking lot Tower Records, me and Roon both hypnotized by I Don't Want To Know, was our shared ecstatic joy, our shared response, as if to actively listen was to reach out,
I was Belane splainin' how the song was just driven by that super groovy bass line, really—grounding and punding the song like a bouncey screen of pochoir, permitting a field for which the singing of Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie so to float.
It's just kind of perfect, Roon just went soberly, some essential innocence in her voice.
Rooney sat charmed in cloth passenger seat, sat in some objective reverie, slight trepidation in the characteristic even keel of her voice that came with her taking the song so seriously. It was like, or like we both had just discovered the vaccine to chicken pox, practically. There was Roon Dawgg, as she was also stealthily preparing the next celebratory mini line on the surface of her silver cigarette case (Roon wasn't really a full time smoker.)
And what do chords have in common with our passions, Roon then bethinking out loud, as if raising the cloth roof of the car. Roon cooly looks out the hard window of the parked car, song still going, background all blurry like an old golf photo.
When I inhaled it was like a lumpless pillow in my chest, as if wedged on a calm over-salted ocean, such in a state of stimulated contentment were we, two of earth's children, when anything could seem interesting and well worth warranting any close examination now, but we had this bonus miracle of song with which to so be hypnotized by and now essential eye obsessed with. It was the unnecessary bonus miracle that was LA, and LA was the unnecessary bonus miracle.
Ta go down into song, to wander in the studio, is to change space, one on enters into communication with, with, like space, the space that is is, psychically innovating, Rooney sounding flakinly winsome, over serious, but totally meaning it. Roon pauses in self assured resolve, then sharply puts the cigarette case up to her face and snorts up the changa—Roon Dawgg's long daddy legs spindly skinny fingers curling holding the straw up to her nose while also keeping in palm position the silver case that her sister Kate, begrudgingly gave her.
Indeed it was baffling, so unlikely we were just so possessed in equal measure by the track—I just could not believe it, but then again, we both could not believe it, even, or especially or practically really, even me now. How have we not heard this before.
Rooney was like Kirchart and it sounds facile to say Rooney is or was the Kirch of actresses, but such was certainly true, if you think about it, but you really don't have to think about it that much, anyways. Ask anyone. Ask Mike Graham. Ask Pat Brennan, ask Adam Mcnatt, ask Chad Vogt. Ask Ray Underhill. Ask Colby Carter. Ask Bryche Knights. Ask Lowman Dolphy. Ask Powell era Jeff Taylor even. Or did it even cross your mind to ask Nick Lockman. But don't forget Rooney wasn't the type who would say Halloween was her favorite holiday, like every other dopey mopey girl in Laren's Canyon probably always did, and I was thinking how months ago, my sassy clueless niece rudely saying back to me she had never heard of the Archies. And maybe it was just the way on the phone, or it was that way, overhearing how Rooney said to one of her girlfriends once over the telephone, What is it this time.
In the still of parking lot, right next to the big empty of the Sunset Strip, I was complaining about video editing, You know all us old pro-ams, we're, we're like, just like old titty dancers no one wants to watch anymore anyways,
Why, or why would you say that Jake, Rooney, genuinely now with her attention so held for a tiny mound of time, punctiliously rubbing powder on her gums.
All us out moded ams are all just titty dancers on the weekday lunch shift at Gilley's, vying for all attention, any attention, not really answering Roon's question, indulging myself out loud in the overstimulated of flush.
Like . . . Mickey Gilley??? Roon the passenger sat, repeating in incredulity of amazement, a pre-cracking up look of inanity in the pert of her baby face.
Roon buckled back in fit of hysterics, almost spilling the angel dust completely. She laughed so hard like it could get us in trouble. I grabbed the cigarette case just in time from her lap, as she was stricken in spell of uncontrollable hysterics, her hair fluming in a very specific seductive flamingo-ing sprig of incidental chaos. Roon rose in the bucket seat extending her arms down and spushing herself up—Roon Dawgg's dada cut out laughing mouth dangerously a détourné so close to touching the ceiling of the rag top.
Roon, relax, Roon, chill, chill, chill, c'mon now,
Roon's gigggling, allowing me to needlessly take on over bossy assurance, like I was now handling Rooney, even though I really wasn't for the most part—no one could really ever handle Roon.
And if you ever seen Rooney in the mart, or one thing to realize about Roon was she kind of was sublimation and all that—Roon wasn't country when country was never cool—but then again, Rooney was never country, but she sure as hell was now, cause that's it, and that's the thing, and that's the thing you got to do, and that's the thing you got-to know now. Population Ex was following up Dormers, with a full blown boot stompin', bass drum clompin', hand clappin', cowbell 'a clankin', guitar sassn', honky tonking tonk'd bassed Kountry Korner album in all it's splendid meandering hypocrisy, that you did never ever or never did see. Kate was officially in the band also now too.
Don't get what you wished for they says, and sometimes they's right—Kate now smugly brings her ergonomic tambourine to the sessions, well that, and kind of bringing also along with herself a silent self vindicated sense of superiority, which I do notice, and to think, when I had actually been the one up to bat for her to be included in Pop Ex for christsakes.
But it seemed wide open or it did seem open.We knew ourselves better than the rest of them. Because of this found Fleetwood Mac song so brought forth now, our situation, the universe, whatever, it was entirely like we had struck a vein into the wilding eternal California country consciousness sublime. So hypnotized and possessed were me and Roon in equal measure, almost fatally contaminated, and simply transported into state where not only was it possible, but it was natural and just so easy now, as if we were in video game chomping the magic mushroom pill and when the villain background jack about characters in the game touched us they would soon die while we were still bullet proof also too—this was all temporary of course—but that is us, and that was us now—Population Ex.
A world war could have been announced sitting next to Roon in the parking lot of Tower, practically. Sometimes being with Rooney was boring, or it could be boring sometimes—Roon kind of acted like she didn't know, and then she would make pains to engage way too interestedly in way too normal things, like we would always come across some real random stranger, someone one wouldn't necessarily be exactly too bothered to talk to, but you know Rooney would go out of her way to act over charmed, over-taken in interest by them all so suddenly, and so unlikely over interested in them, but you could kind of tell it was just using this otherwise unappealing rag picker person as occasion to prove just how normal and interested in the most ordinary things Roon supposedly was, in a way that you could also tell Roon was also just exuding in some self sense eclecticism.
Or Rooney would say something like when it was time to retire, she'd go, it's sleepy time, in a way that was maybe over ideal and quaint, and you could tell people were probably kind of all sick to the tattoo of her. I'm not saying Roon was the girl, but I'm saying she's the type of girl who automatically implicates herself, in making you think or wonder about what her recent run around of gang gone through probably thought about her. Roon didn't exactly have a stable of girlfriends.
We took a break from Boomers and then just had the radio on innocently playing for amplified mile,
The song ended and then a couple of others must have played, KROCQ Radio with that last track, a new track called Erotic Machinery from, the Jackabots, the disk jockey fast talked about some song anyways, which we weren't really paying attention to by now.
The last song was—was Jackabots? Rooney now for once, genuinely curious about a band,
No, I wasn't, catch that,
Me neither, Roon sitting innocently, like some sort of dislodged object.
Boy, Roon must have been pretty wired—she didn't say nothing now, but I could feel her mind chattering about the still,
Well, it evidently made very little impression, if neither of us can recollect it, don'tcha think, Jake? Roon finally, her voice sounding like it was recorded and broadcasted through a tiny miniature amp.
Yeah, well, everybody these days, less Cannonball Adderley and more Cannonball Adderall, I comment back with the liberty, as if in a scene in movie.
Oh, you did not just come up with that—Roon snipes back, as she always pays attention, reminding me she wouldn't let that slip through un-noticed.
I did! No, I did, did, promise—a dig dug little in too much defensive, I counter back,
Whatever, Bee-lane, whatever Jake Sprack—Rooney with the last word, saying it like some Natalie Portman tomboy who just hangs out with the guys all the time—it seemed like Rooney always got the last word.
I looked away shyly, out at the enticing spectacle jamble of buildings, I looked on over at the old signs attached to the buildings which seemed to bring everything into some simulacral order so nicely, as if we were now in some non-linear psychic time, Savoy, Lenox, Theresa.
I heard or heard Phoebe Wolfskill is, or was in Jackabots, didya know, or no, what do you know about that sour note Detective . . .
I mean—, I respond sternly in some seriously over-considered fatherly consternation, which seems attached to my role of driving now.
All these normies or with those normies—they bound to only get bigger—these nambies about to became, well, anyways, mark my words, Belane,
Lamely engaging the subject, trying to get on a roll, rushing to redeem myself to Roon from yesterday, Well, think about it, the niche populism Doctor Dread of it all, all or all, like, to think, Charlie Charlie Black has even wrought upon us—
I then lost my high dramatically, thrown back to the thicket of earth, and couldn't finish my sentence with the enthusiasm it had once started off with.
As a roll of the dice never abolishes chance, Roon said 'a nothing also, but I may have been about unconsciously kinda still trying to get to her, I used one of my fav lines on the so come down,
—and I've seen Indy death a thousand one deaths . . .
There's just certain things you don't know though, Rooney in the usual default skeptical attitude she took with me,
Well, I'd like to know everything, I affirm in a myopic optimistic defiance, without really thinking, probably not making much sense at all.
Everything? Rooney, now sounding sober as a pig on the side of the road.
Well, wouldn't you?
I'd dunno, I'd be scared to, really I guess, Rooney looking out at the sidewalk vacantly, as if as innocent as a goldfish.
Rooney always kept a matte black metal snork straw in her purse that looked like it was made out of plastic because of this rubbery powder coating. Sometimes I thought I figured out her like thing—how Roon rearranged forms of convention. It was like how Rooney kept potato chips in the ice box. Rooney could be watching a football game on the television, but sometimes it was like Rooney was just mostly keen in upsetting assumed expectations about her and it was in that exact space where she seemed to get dwell—you could tell she got too much attention, mostly.
One day Rooney had returned from the laundry mill, as if this was not in the least bit peculiar, seeing that Joa and Roon had a washer and dryer in the utility room of their casa casita. But being fun-employed was super tough though sometimes, and I well knew that.
But she goes where she goes, and Roon pretty much does what she does for the most part.
Roon always acted like there was something secret going on behind the scenes, that she was keeping to herself. Once you notice, you can always tell. Around Roon it struck me, reminded about the idea about utopia not being possible, but also really Roon reminding me that we have just probably been thinking of utopia all wrong, really—the bigger the utopia, the more likely it is bound to never ever work out. Around Roon you could sort of tell she was living in her own micro climate, though—everything in plum order, everything in Roon's prefered peach pit place. So well such was cultivated, that she seemed to bring it along with her wherever she went, but it would disappear with her as soon as she was scott gone.
Wonder love, Roon sang like she was in an elevator.
Hey Belane, do you like Winger?
Not terribly,
Ah, well tsk tsk. Ingrid Superstar?
Indy superstar?
No, Ingrid.
What can I say, my girl just wanna party all the time, I responded in playful defensive, my usual defacto mantra—looking forward onto the road with all the expectation that driving brings.
Roon wasn't really listening nothing, steered the conversation back onto herself, Well anyways, one way or another—I don't think my leave quickly is strong, or like that strong, or in any direction, really.
Stop, Roon or you'll get a contusion.
Well, think about it, we have like limited minds, we shant reduce things to grandest narratives just to put, or put order, or imagine how things are . . . But poems help us maybe, Roon forlorns unremarkably, saying my name twice like there was two of me.
Sometimes poetic justice is not only not possible, but if it were, it would probably be dangerous, especially in this town, I remind Roon in an all too handy Detective's expertise.
Roon cocked her head sideways, her way of asking if she could light a cigarette,
Everything is just going downhill, Jake—you know if Bruce Lee was in his prime today, he'd probably just as well have like full sleeves, ya know, a straw plaid fedora—but it was, or it really was seventies basics fashion just keeping him in order, in check, just helping him look timeless icon or whatever, but his other instincts was probably just as bad as everyone's was, really. People, people need to be saved from themselves and that's where culture comes in—culture saves people from themselves.
Or it does quite the opposite, Roon paused as if analyzing and exploring, so entertaining what she just said out loud.
Though or I think, or you know what I think? Some ultimate autonomy, the idea of, leads, leads to an inevitable conclusion of suicide in men, of self annihilation for some, even . . .
It happens. Rooney—but that's nothing new.
The motley crew of the Jackabots came up, sous rature, under erasure they probably needed to be. Joa and Roon had caught on—finally. Penny or Penny had alluded, or I don't remember how it came about actually, but Samantha was somehow associated with the Communes maybe—the Jackabots were an industry prop, or not industry—the recording industry had been withered and simultaneously bigger than ever, though to some extent still perilously atomized and consolidated, and was practically non-existent it seemed, yet prevalent, as if such a thing was not or was no longer possible, but the Jackabots were like an industry pseudo event if one was even still possible to register by now, which in the town that pseudo events were invented. Although pretty much all centers were all but destroyed and left in ruin, the Jackabots still seemed to reside in some place within it all that was hard to imagine or really describe, but probably had something, I suspect, to do with exploiting the river economy of need that brought people out here in the first place, the same economy of need surely only self reinforced even more, once they arrived.
Roon was talking about the thugging J-bots frankenbiting Pop Ex now—as if just as of very recently they were not not on her radar, as if I myself wasn't the one to bring it up to Joa and Roon. Roon would kind of do that. You would tell her about something she didn't know about, and when you were telling her she would be giving a contrary air as if what you were saying wasn't true. And then when it finally registered, she would tell it back to you like it was her discovery, and now she's telling you. When Roon says an animatronic mannequin humping a grey cube space was au courant, I added that, to think, if the spiky Jackabots expanded their activity into a multidisciplinary like thing eliciting them beyond just being a band, and if they did supplemental sinister animatronic mannequins, that would seem even more fitting for them, thus possibly usurping not just the romantic subjectivity of Pop Ex but also Joa and Roon's piddly home gallery. We actually thought for a sec to beat them off the chase, and to quite possibly start plying in large doll parts ourselves, but then we decided to follow up the faustian poetic conceits of Dormers with a pure California country album instead.
Surely Roon signaled some shift, or maybe she never did (and to think Roon still didn't pay no attention enough to grasp the concept of my recent discovery of all Samantha Ai electricity descending onto on ink printed letter, which the exact letter, we still did not know about, all Samantha Ai floating on one real life paper page somewhere). Yet, though also in a way, next to Roon, graffiti seemed even more especially dated. Next to Rooney, all graffitti was dated even before it was splayed on the brick blown by blown. But this wasn't completely the entire thing, as all archetypal events are epitomized in all Los Strangeles, and actually all did happen in Los Angeles first (the first teenage hot rod race, the first college threesome, the first teen mass murder)—it was as if Rooney was within it and beyond it.
I put my hand against my nose driving, my fingers randomly smelled like metallic Big Mac sauce, like it sometimes tends to, as if life is a one way journey through a world who's meaning lies elsewhere—except for here in LA, and it was this aggressively firm sense of placeness and eternal embodied time that caused so many problems here.
Jake, is there any chance we can stop for a can of Shasta soda? Roon asks peppermint-eyed, over-cautious.
There was never an absence of detours. The car was antechamber, a tiny moving room of idealism now. Red rear lights read, like endless stream of caution signals now taking on some valence glow of some promise of some technological evolution connected to glow bugs nature, or no, technological evolution and nature were now the same thing.
I was still going on about something—another one of my inventions was lines of tape on the ground next to the ledge. You space two lines of tape on the ground, like mini gap and if you hurl over the gap enough, you wind the ledge, and it's considerably more consistent than jumping out onto the bald blind we have all our lives, practically. I gave them a name, the lines, they were called signals.
I was also telling Roon about another term I invented, Zero Tries.
Zero tries, Roon went blankly, still barely with her attention held now, like she was thinking about something else.
Yeah, yeah zero tries, zero tries—it took zero tries. It naturally alludes to no tries, like you didn't try, zero ties, but it means, or it means, or you know what it actually means, is no trying, like no trying—such an embellishment, ha ha . . .
I don't get it. Rooney blankly, as if she had gotten all the birthday presents on her birthday list and still was not content.
Rooney, you did the trick, but it was easy and hence you didn't even try. Zero tries—but doing the trick it self is exactly one try. . .
Oh, got it, thanks, Roon, Roon going nothing distantly, as if someone just told her they had irrigated the moon.
Roon sat a loft like a luke warm piece of cinnamon toast whirligig. Next to Roon, she made Patti Smith lyrics look like Richard Simmons. Dylan needed Woodie Guthrie to become his higher self, but you could tell Roon musta came out fully formed, in such a way that all activity should be situated and organized around her—at least that's how it kinda now seemed.
'The industry' was or was, or you know what the industry was—it was an occasion, for which some modern semblance, some bubbling sprig to kinda live for a sec, it really was. But Carroll, Carroll, Carroll practically went out of his way to snatch defeat from the jawls of victory—but such is the story of California, anyways, or anyways.
Well, that doesn't sound too terribly intelligent to me, Roon vacuously, with her usual un-helpful. Roon Dawggg was innocently inspecting her nail in the vein of what seemed if seen by some audience could be some collectively dreamed idealism.
Well no, that's the thing Roon,—it wasn't, it wasn't exactly too terribly intelligent, Roon—I mean. No one talks about plagiarism ever being necessary, but it is, it is . . .
Oh, right—Roon replied gregariously, peer like, as if we were both two meddling teenage detectives, and I was reminding her about an important clue we had found together.
The cascade of hierarchical symbols vomited was just the beginning, otherwise they were, or were all as blank as a flyleaf, saying this in a pestering fashion perhaps, like I had already told her.
Geez, that's a snobbish thing to say, Roon in a quick veer, this coming from the very person who once said she didn't eat Mexican food. Roon all suddenly registered like she had salt water in her lungs practically, even though you just knew she thought the same as I—she always did that with me.
The jagged hills in the distance looked like torn construction paper or a trembly grin. Before we reached the entrance ramp to the 405, we saw a hideous but very likely funny car—as if driving in this city out of necessity wasn't enough, everyone and their libidinal impulses needed release into bizarre ancillary grotesquery. This was the city that invented people roading unnecessary crafts for professional recreation.
Roon's gooseberry eyes pitied and despised from the bottom, Roon went on about how some movie stars were archetypes set to embody the innaiety and overt stupidity that had to find its own sublimated expression for the general populace—it was no surprise a rude, wiry, crazy, rubber faced, cartoonish buffon, that flouted all decorum and insulted other characters, would be the biggest movie star in the 90's. When white people still laughed at the buffoon Will Ferrell, they were really laughing at how consciously stupid they so allowed themselves to be, through Will Ferrell was an occasion, at how infantile and childish and hideously cute baby brained silly the self enabling mainstream ruling class allowed for themselves. That was Roon's opinion, at least.
But then I got to something, was explaining or sharing about to Roon, about the insufficiency of guitar tabs, how I learned about poststructuralism through reading guitar tabs. The tabs were the text and it was assumed by me that they were the exact notes in order and sequence and the only way to be played—if I could teach myself and work through strictly adhering to this sequence, the song would be fully realized correctly, and mastery would be obtained. Then I would see the guitar player live, and their playing resembled sorry nothing to what I had learned—it seemed like they were even going out of their way to keep the song safe as mystery. There were so many avenues and even new devilish details added to the song, details which may have been invented or added after the recording. For the song not to die in the hands of the player, it needed so to shift and change after it had been realized. My little tabs seemed pathetic now, and completely vamping the guitarist's skill seemed ever the more so hopeless. There was the alien method they used, created on another planet presumably, that was now improvised and even further developed and improved upon through traveling and playing live and special unreplicatable conditions, that my endlessly faithful bedroom strumming could never quite approach (but that definitely sometimes did)—and how I felt about that, the unrecognizability of the playing after devoting myself, and the undermining multifarious variation I was now witnessing, later I would realize was it's very own form of poststructuralism.
Oh, right. What got, or rather what brought you out here, Roon barely registering interest, just politely asking a question, totally changing the subject.
The second Roon asked me, my brain unrelatedly flashed to the thought I usually thought about, about Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway's romantic relationship being doomed anyways from the start, even if she would not have gotten killed. You got the idea, upon meeting in rendezvous in Mex, and then when the heat died down and they coming back to the city, one gets a feeling Faye Dunaway would have been simply just impossible and high maintenance to deal with anyways. It was probably best she got gun down by the pigs in Chinatown at the end.
Roon seemed to wait respectfully for information, while I distracted, paused by the clacking signal turn sounding like a rolling turnstile—I eventually turned left onto Hollywood Boulevard, noticed the old Crusader Charger Records sign that they never took down.
Even just thinking about my life when I was near Rooney, any details about me in relation to her seemed about as significant as an ant orgasm. It was as if everybody was just waiting for someone's attention with which to project themselves onto—anybody's attention, it didn't matter who, everybody needed an audience. A good detective never revealed much about himself—that was required, but the more extension cord I was given though, even I knew, I, Jake Danielson Belane, could and would do hang myself on my own parched words and weathered personality, even in front of Roon Dogg, or no, especially in front of Roon Dawggg.
Jesus was crucified because we watched too much TV, that's what my uncle told me and Kate, when we were kids . . .
That does sound about right Roon,
For sure, Rooney scrunching in a casual comfort all the expectation a ride in the car brings.
Then for once Rooney was not talking about herself. Most of the time or all of the time, everything was just in relation to her snared glare of everything, which you kind of could not have blamed her too much for anyways.
What brangs you out to the coast Belane . . .
I don't know—I was always repelled by the notion of New York subject hood—become an orphan to the city, get beaten down by the city, and then with whatever strength you have left, and if you are still willing, now you can be as free as you want on the centimeter of square space you are now so afforded.
Well I don't think New York is like that, or, Roon being needlessly contradictory—you see, I told you she did that. Most of the time she couldn't even agree with you on anything practically, it's like as if she agreeing with a statement something about her was getting compromised, or worse, something about her hidden would soon be known.
I was a teenage runaway,
Me too, I was too, Roon quick to loam, and clearly such was well known not to be true about her, but she gave herself so much latitude that anything she said she would allow for herself to be true and you felt like you were now far past point of no return to even refute it somehow, and you just let her her keep going with it.
So you were on 'peintre maudit' Girl, Roon taking a sheer'd bump with aplomb and then lighting up a cigarette in productively, settling herself into conversation. It was like just another one of those times where Rooney was getting the facts about you mixed up in conveniently glamorous way that wasn't really true, but made you silently proud, and then making you silently distraught about all your own deficiencies once it settled in.
No matter how much you drove the lanes, they were still deceitful and you could miss your exit, Grand Ave 1, Beverly Glenwood 3/4, Vermont 1/2, Figueroa 1/4.
Yes, but no. I mean, I guess, I just went to Transparent Earth demo at the indoor, or I talked to Jason Phares, it was Jason Phares, or got his number, or actually I didn't get his number, but I sent them my xerox tape somehow. Anyways, one of their filmers came back to town months later, I showed him around, maybe filmed a couple of treatments. I don't know—John invited me to stay in his empty shadowned room in his condo right on Tamarind Lane, like right by La Conte, like, where Eve Babbitz went to elementary school, ya know. It's funny because being around John in my town, being with him, his presence seemed to open and activate something, activating some coastal sense of, or like expanded field atmosphere of idealism—I noticed I was appreciating the places I took him to extra, more than usual. It was like finding a secret backyard behind your backyard that you didn't know about, but it was there the whole time 'a waiting. Tripp asks me if I want to come out to the coast, and it was like the idealism of the coast knew I was coming out to it and now it brought itself to me, transmitted, projecting itself, activating itself onto my town ambiantly just through showing old John around. I mean it wasn't too terribly hard to decide to leave, as my folks were hardly doing me any favors really, so I just packed a couple of bags and a suitcase, and rode or rode back with John. Sayonara. From then on, me and John smoked grass everyday, and when I say everyday, I mean all day. John always had really heavy smoke—he once never was not not holding, always on the looks when he had a baleful, as if it was all going to be extinct soon. Anyways, or anyways, Johns like worked part time at a printer, so on those days I took it upon myself, spend days without him, bussing over, taking the bus on the charterless streets to Bergthold's vert. I had never really skated vert, or didn't skate vert, but since I was out here and had very precious little to do, I took it upon myself to basically just like camp out on the vert, and learn how to actually turn vert, when John wasn't breaking his neck practically from driving me around to location spots all over the damn place. Let me get a line—line me up Roon. But so also, John had a helmet or knee pads and elbows, that he had in his Civic Wagon pads that he never used, that for some reason he begrudgingly let me use, and I just co-opted them, took them over and went like full deal. Anyways, or anyways, what seemed, or seemed like what would have been a chore, vert, the vert that is, was actually a really, or you know what it was?, it was really an extraordinary thing. I soon discovered the vert ramp was my own private canyon sometimes, giant walls of solitude—the shadows on the top near the coping were their own wilderness. Learning vert was starting from scratch, but I felt if I had sacrificed my life to move the dang out here, I may as well go full head hogg and lantern vert anyways. Dropping in was the price of admission. Dropping into the tall wall, taking a plunge—a plunge into the waterless baptism of wave, a plunge into the great California transcendental, a dark wave plunging into all possibility of a richer more rider me. Anyways, all the greats could skate vert, ya know, and that was a handicap I always had, or had registered in the back of my craw—not skating vert hindering me, or a hindrance—not to mention the subconscious effect it must have had on my general practice, just knowing I could not skate vert my whole life. Anyways, the thing about vert is, is the speed. That's like the thing—you are going max fast on a vert ramp, in a way that rarely happened on the streets. Anyways, I really got into vert, just basics, and like, like what I said, what started off as a chore, came this wild, like real wild blessing. A real California wave ride! Surf was always up at the vert, and I would then be sitting on the bus just fiending to jump on the ramp. Then I started getting rides, and got rides or rides, never had to take the bus again. But before I got free rides, when I was taking the city bus, I stumbled upon a place in Korea Town that did energy work—kinda like acupuncture adjacent alternative medicine enterprise. The guy there was really brilliant, he really was, he or he said a thing, he said, or I remember he said we can charge the depth of our sleep—we die every day when we sleep, but we can program a depth charge with our subconscious making our sleep stronger somehow—so when we are born in the morning when we wake, somehow this activating our waking life stronger upon Fine-again wake, giving us more bounce back force and intention and clarity. I had never heard that before or since, but I may have practiced this. All really so unexpected. And I was skating vert adding to this. Vert is the secret to blowing up. The means was, or was like really the ends—you see, I thought if I skate vert, it will make me, or give me an advantage, which it well does and kind of did, or did. But it was just fun, so splendidly fun, which, I mean, I didn't really anticipate, really—the vert ramp was a room, a room outside into some new reality, vert room, unlocking a hidden, unrealised part of me. The audacity of my falls opened up parts in my psyche and gave me new confidence to fall. I was actively also trying to manipulate my subconscious into depth charge. I was experimenting with my subconscious, in programming it when I was not skating. Anything I could do, no matter how silly to activate the subconscious, in a way that opened me up. And then like the air I hovered on over the surface of the ramp was new unoccupied territory, like looking at a mountain off in the distance and seeing the parts on the mountain no one would ever scale or ever touch. Sure, other people skated the vert and occupied the territory of air just high off rise of surface, but not that many people did, and in a state where people moved here precisely to occupy whatever the hell they damn well could, vert was where I could and did find my place and made a place. I quickly realized it was that wild Californiacana transcendental, a form of it I must now just have been experiencing, though I couldn't put it into such certain terms—just the beauty of the ramp after five o' clock pastoral even—it was like California gave me, and California wanted me to skate vert, that was the wild gift I was rewarded with for coming way out here. I did that for a while, but you know I still did street shots. But one thing, or one thing, or the thing is is, vert really cuts through all the noise. At street spots, I was now stomping through things, with a much richer, and even more economy of speed, and all my best clips were just luck combined with this expanded perception, this indescribable grip I kind of gained from vert. The hardest things I got, were the easiest in a way—it's not like I ever had anything much locked down, really—being able to get something is still so luck of the draw also, anyways. It was all lined up, though, it really was. People were noticing me, and I was out and about on the town just hanging out, with a smile on my face, not trying to juice nothing. When I got around pros, I would just smile and listen and try to be comfortable—or just glad being in the background of the scene. And then people recognized me, but I was just operating as someone just hanging around and having fun and I think, or I know that impression of lifestyle somehow bled into my skating, and that atmosphere I cultivated around me even somehow transferred onto the clips, photos I was set up to get. And so that was my general take on skateboarding, being able to transfer some idyllic atmosphere from my new life, converted and distilled through sparked new media forms. John gave me these green army surplus cargos and I cut them a trifle too short, but then they looked good with these white on white stripe Pumas I bought new for ten dollars at the pit—but even my navy blue socks incidence complemented it—a stray heathered grey Zoo York shirt with the Pelham subway sign, that I found—the incidence of my outfits so ringing out, from the chance operations of all my navigated circumstance—that's real fashion. Everything in my modest life out here was picked and selected with intention, and I discarded all the rest, discarded with all the dead X-mas trees out there in the landfill. I would prefer to wear my blown out shoes, over some dreadful new random kinda lame ones that were a pair for free, unlike damn everybody else. That was the difference with me, I guess. My refusal and standards, and what I accepted to carry with me, as relics of extraordinary great California zenith. Someone's idea to go up to SF, sure—not my idea, I got nothing better to do—an accidental put together outfit and then I got a photo Sanch grinding a cemented barrier on a super grey day over near lonely EMB and then it was a Thunder ad in Slap. Even my two day stubble complemented the entire set up. That's the thing or that was the thing. Pictures meant so much back then, they could or and did go a long way, they really did—think about it: all the shirts, pants, the apartment I lived in, the girls I now hung out with, the strange I chased—that was the almost subconscious import, or that was just my thing and people sensed it it seemed, or were into it, or like cottoned onto it, they really did. The invisible things of my life beyond, outside of the photo were somehow inside the photos I got. I came in at the tail end of the clean era. I had the X-Girl pale blue jeans, the medium Haynes white tee shirt, the Airwalk 86's, I was reading a lot. I was learning how to enjoy beer. I was happy not being on a team and just having photos taken of me freelance—I was making decent commissions from the magazines, back then too. I just saw the commissions from mags as vehicle for not having to ever get a job so I could devote all my days to ride rip, but then I was also semi popular because of it all, and people now used me as an occasion to now throw their soft and hard goods situations at me, and posh rooms too easy to rent—all my needs were taken care of and then more. But the thing is is, I just had a knack for selecting the right pieces to keep with me—and the knack extended or even extended as so far as creating chance operation ensembles that were unforgettable and that was all the allure of the street shots in the mags. In Portland, I was practically living in these dirty white 501's, a Gotcha t-shirt and a sky blue coach's jacket tied around my waist and got a photo pole jam back eighty right outside of Burnside fence pretty easy—another grey day that complimented the outfit. I mean, it really did. In Seattle, they took a photo of me not even skating and I got a commision from the photo landing in the gossip section of Slap—I had on 80's norm core super basic grainy 80's kid-blue jeans, a button down Plam longsleeve that was made out of experimental recycled plastic tucked in, the the shirt was made out of nice disposable thin plastic recycled shopping bag material and then I had a bright yellow butternut cashmere sweater tied around my arms and torso, this photo taken of me productively day drinking in a dark bar in a dark day in super splendid Seattle. I met the most amazing girl in Seattle too and maybe I could have stayed, but it's like I would have lost my powers if I stayed with her and then she would have broken up with me in Seattle and I would be left with nothing, so I had to just sadly keep moving. I still always think about Heather, and I know she never thinks of me. But listen: this is the thing, this is the deal—this is my secret, what a label means to me—Heather, basically. You see I was talking about transcendent incidence manifesting as details in an ad or photo. Heather was that supplement, Heather was that detail in the background. And it's that one detail of incidence, that's what I am looking for as a consumer—that is the full weight of what a label articulates and projects. It's the exact same with the blond short haired receptionist in the Zoo York industry section, not only is she my hallucination of the embodiment of what's all at the crux ultimately about Zoo York. To me Harold Hunter supports her, so that she can exist for a half second on video film. Its the invisible girl in the window. That's my Zoo York—the receptionist. There's no female Mozart because there's no female Jack the Ripper—that's why I'm the detective. So anyways, I was to get by not having any formal sponsors and just surviving off checks and checks from Slap and mags and selling things and direct cash paid demos—I was photogenic alluring because I didn't have a one brand putting a gun to my head to wear some inane Shorty's hoody, even though I could still appropriate a hoodie the right way sometimes—it was like, or no, it was, my strength back smithing a marble ledge against the wall in the financial district on Sansome in basic Levi's black 501's and maybe a Mr. Bungle Disco Volante shirt and waiting until the almost evening to get the shot that one day. You can't concoct that, or you can't buy that. A pair of lush life Greenwich green denim, with a dark navy sweater and white t-shirt underneath at the premier like I just fell of the truck from Nantucket, when everyone else is wearing blubbering misguided pride parochialist Giants jackets and hats. I was the hippest skater in SF for a sec. To make a long story short, Carroll wanted to put me on payroll—Carroll, Carroll, Carroll promised I would not have to wear his olive-drab trophy shop gear, but then Bill Evans came along and then ended up deemanding, just simply demanding I was not allowed to ever wear anything else besides all of Carroll's co TJ Max, when before, my fits made Carolyn Bessette Kennedy look like Steve Aoki, they really could. I tried and tried and tried explaining to Bill by not wearing Carroll's clothes and my own costumes, the street intrigue around me would even better be built to spill off to kids just then buying the gear, any whatever gear we sold because of my proprietary stoke—it wasn't necessarily so direct linear. Every normie rules the world retail logic, wear the clothes they sold in the promo and kids will want to buy exactly X hat or exactly X t-shirt from promos, and that is how everyone else thinks, and was a massive industry wide lack of imagination. Even how Supreme makes all the people working the floor wear only Supreme clothes—if you hire the right people who look and dress like extras from the 1970's, they damn well don't have to necessarily wear Supreme and people will just buy Supreme anyways and if they are really effective, even more so—that's real cachet. A magical moment in nature spings on it's own, and it cannot be touched or usurped or even compared to—that miracle happens in California and that's why labels matter—even the label itself has no control of the magic. I still worship Supreme, though—that's just or just a minor critique. But it's better in fact if no one at Supreme is even wearing Supreme. Where's the subtle mystery? Why does, is, supposed sophisticated commerce not able to grasp this? And so that's the problem with the industry, I'm the only one that was aware of this possible dynamic and that's why or why I became a detective. If I got to wear whatever I wanted to wear, or wear, because of me in extraordinary situations that go beyond cheap tricks, this would create maybe some aura of unattainable intrigue and kids would buy just whatever was plum associated with Carroll's co now any damn ways, they really would have. What's the point in even having a label otherwise? That's why you hire a pro for your co. So you have labels like Ponda Cherie, Tombstone, whatever, economizing off the success of the skaters who originally rose to prior prominence looking fabulous with wearing charming rando street clothes, but these brands actually reproduce new clips of them with gear looking sorry nothing like the fits in those og clips, in order now for the new brand to try to scurry the imagination of the public in a kind of schizophrenia of displacement and it's all depressing—and it all churns into skateboarding anti aesthetic. People try to start their own fashion label, but end up buying sweatpants from overseas that look like they are sold at a bowling trophy store. Rassvet stans now also, fake Indy. And anyways, skateboarding has been colonized by the phone book now—it does sorry nothing matter how ghastly anyone just looks, the cardinal virtue now is the hypertrophied progression at the peril of anyone allowed to look as cell phone store salesperson unacceptable as possible. Never mind no interesting people exist at all anymore. In an industry that prides itself on innovation and thinking outside the krook, none of the managers in action sports understood this simple concept. Oh so, oh so, their invitro businesses, a form of pollution carrying on, capitalists so firmly unqualified. A label should capture a moment in time that is unrealizable to no one else, and the label is a direct visual expression of that—the brand sells memorabilia about it, not the actual t-shirts in the promos. That 1:1 treatment state of mind, labels in better times were well assumed beyond. You can blame millenials and millennial brand managers and everyone else for death of the skateboard video. But one day I just stopped, or I stopped paying attention, or I actually never stopped paying attention, but one day you haven't worked in years, you have a girlfriend with a leg monitor, and you can't hold in your head what even quick strike means, even though all your friends ply in quick strike and they have explained it to you many times, but you still cannot remember, you still don't know for the life of you what quick strike even means . . .
Rooney skulked a line and lines were now making us interact in all the weight of cosey stimulation.
One day you have a girlfriend who has to blow into her car? Rooney surprisingly still sit listening.
There was, is only remainder, I blinked back uselessly at Roon, now unsentimental as hell,
But you still seem to know, I say unnecessarily, breathing hard, too intentioned in my breath, realizing I'm probably feeding into her like thing, in a way that's too easy for one to bail gun into.
What, yeah— I am, I mean, I am, but you know what I mean,
Roon bent her head for what for her constituted as a nod, If it were all so marred with logic anyways, it all too would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail,
Roon and I sat like two hardboiled eggs, edging along the concrete barrier at a consistent wumping speed.
Talk about incest—everybody gatecrashing. Sure. But, I'm, or I'm the only one who's keeping, still keeping tabs—and to the wrong audience, mind you. That's, or that's the thing. I got my feelers, and I, like, no credit—you know Rooney, I keep record and I keep my files well in order, or in order for the most part, but everyone mis-reads the most obvious out in the open clues so incorrectly, everyone, everyone projects themselves onto the facts when all they say is they's want the facts. When I was a kid, you know I would imagine that as an adult I would have to cultivate the skill in describing some subtle situation confused that was so subtle that you had to really break it down delicately with tweezers practically and precisely and like surgically describe and settle the nuance of logical fallacy to whatever conflict would be at hand, but the conflicts now are the exact opposite, painfully obvious now, giant, egregious cesuras, the almost deliberately colossal gulf of ill-logic that it is so so so otherwise obvious that it just all just becomes baffling, and stumping from being so gapingly obvious—I could not have predicted being stumped over the over-obvious, I could not have predicted, predicted, I needed the skill to just jump in and cut through it, swiftly rather, with the least amount of effective words—Don't be silly, You're Crazy, You're tripping, Whatever. Everybody gatecrashing. There's a point when good faith accommodating turns into being manipulated, and before you know it, the general public is manipulating you in their all arriviste right to exist ignorance—everyone, boxes of people, all take a bite out of skateboarding you know—school shooter BMX bikers come to our parks and bastardize any integrity and whatever dwindling aesthetic cachet we had or still have, trampy self serving tramping rollerskate girls who need a hobby this month don't build nothing,
Roon, gazed out past the glass with her head propped up uncomfortably on her hand, elbow on her lap, some dimension of resilience in her nihilism—even the reflections on the window's surface contained too much movement to register, too much information was everywhere . . .
Most, just, people live on myths and magical thinking and over-sentimentality, Rooney amped hopelessly, but you are saying skate instruction videos should be treated like movies where the skaters wear the costume outfits and that, that, more effective, in selling their like t-shirt and pants and pajama tops and bottoms or whatever.
Looking forwards at the road, as if it was the road's fault Muska dressed like he bought his gear at a trophy custom embroidery store in a strip center,
Corine? Roon registers to whatever I was talking about.
Yeah,
The glare emanated off the too close window to the dust jacket of Roon, Roon, in true fashion of the immediate manifestation of distance however near one would be, said 'a nothing, but then turned it around, opened up.
Jake, you know when I was young I wanted to be a foley artist, but when I was young, even as teenager, I figured all the foleys jobs was taken like by the unions. I loved looking for items, and seeing what would make the best sounds from just banging them and hitting them about. It became compulsive and I did it for years. I would take all my lolly popps and all the Halloween candy sours and fill them in a blender and press all the punch buttons, to try to make a unique sound. I would light firecrackers and try to record it with a mini-corder. I would go to hardware stores and play with door stoppers going all boy-yo-yoing. I mean, could you imagine being a young girl and even knowing what a union was? Little did, or little did I know, I would have to become an actress and then I snuck in my own foley stunts, palling around with the foleys on the sets—and then I got to insist, and then later demand upon doing my very own foleys all the time and I created my own role, my own job—this, like five hundred years ago, practically . . .
Just as I had assumed I heard it all from out Roon's mouth, Your own foleys?, I reply a bit bojangle'd.
Roon had the silver cigarette case pressed against her face, let out a snort and passed it to me with team work expedience, there were two lines remaining, looking like two little white lies, Yes!, she goes twisting the tip of her nose, finally we were talking about her.
What does that, or even mean, or?
It mean's I's responsible for all my own damn sounds that aren't dialogue, that's what it means—people don't, or people don't, or people never pay attention to my foleys, ever say anything—but I know, I know, and I know better than anyone—
Adds a richness or something,
Oh gosh, it really does Jake, and you wouldn't think, but it really really does, Jake—it lends an unexpected valence of authenticity—it can't save a bad movie, but acting can and my custom foleys just simply or add to that . . .
So you go from foley to Population Ex, that's interesting, fascinating really, I'm lamely rhapsodizing practically, overindulging a smiggen now reaching, a little too high, a little too interested in the immediate.
When most women seemed to be all too equipped to say the quiet part out loud, trap-tackle Roon you could tell wouldn't do that or be that way usually, but now her mind was humming along silently in productive stimulation.
I mean you hear what I just said, Roon Dog . . .
No, no, I did—I did, it's just, I have an acting background—your thing is so . . . different.
The video is the advancing of media forms, more real that a movie, but also kinda the same, if ya think about it. It's about representation. I mean have you ever seen Flay Meter?
No, no—I'm terribly afraid I haven't, Roon for once in her life, at a loss.
A long patch of silence remained. I did what I usually do when I'm alone and start listing the logical fallacies in my head as expediently as possible: Ad Hominem, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Ignorance, Appeal to Emotion, Bandwagon Fallacy, Begging the Question, Cherry Picking, False Dilemma, Hasty Generalization, Red Herring, Slippery Slope, Strawman . . .
Ya know, they should have called the album Boomers, Rooney finally, as if her thoughts were led bee thousand ways.
What,
The album, Belane, I says they should or should have named it Boomers instead of Rumors, Roon genially, as if something was returning to her.
Oh, yeah, totally, ha ha . . .
Thunder only happens when it's raining—which is patently untrue . . .
What, of yeah—
Thunder, you know—thunder happens sometimes kinda before the rain runs,
I'm pretty sure thunders strike only when it is raining, I replied, sounding like a grocery shopper asking for a refund at the the grocer's office, just to contradict Roon—not the first time I heard this theory, because it was my mine, and not only did Rooney co-opt it, but she forgot she got it from me, and was now Roon-splaining back to me.
Jake, come on now—get a grip, jeez, Roon goes with inaccurate points adding up against me. I was beyond trying to refute with Roon and how you just had to let her viewpoint win.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure the lyric is about Thunders reigning, anyways Nicks a Thunders, some tryst, Johnny at LAX—something like that.
Roon shifted in her seat listlessly, You know in art school, the teacher or the teacher taught, or you know what the teacher taught Jake, or she says? She says or said you remember the notes by the way they sound phonetically. A is aaaaa, E is eeeee, D is duh duh duh duh duh, Rooney in silly-billy shift, lightly punching me doing her duh duhs, you could tell she was now excited to go to Dan's now.
What about C#maj?
Roon went nothing, like I had not asked a question—no response to an asked question was something quite common for detective and I was used to it. Roon did it all the time though, anyways.
Ah, I don't think that's how music notation was designed, Roon Dawggg, I reply abscently, but still with the requisite hectoring, otherwise paying too much necessary attention merging on the Ventura Freeway North.
Well it most certainly better be, because that's the only damn thing I learned, or learned in art school, for that matter, Roon with an innocent helplessness, causing her to cough after she says.
I'm sending you back to art school Rooney, though still concentrating on the road, I didn't miss an opportunity to point my finger mock authoritatively, also referencing the track 'Going Back To Art School' off Dormers, Going Back To Art School, which ended up being the single.
Honestly, I had totally bonked out but still went to class, but then if you think about it, I never went to class or class, and the more or the more I missed, then made it harder, or just hard, or it was simply, virtually impossible to finally come. People gave me generous feedback on crits even, and then I missed all theirs, everyone's or practically everyone—after withdrawing, then I got sent to treatment.
Art school, rehab—like what's the difference?
Totally.
Roon doing her best in what constituted the completion of a vocalized thought in stim-versation, And anyways, all art school just teaches is is how to name check anyways, or if you can take the most dreadful things, put them in the right format maybe they come out looking maybe not so, or not so bad . . .
Dust doesn't necessarily keep secrets, it's sometimes just the naked truth, Rooney,
Well we are a good live band, well, once we play live eventually, Roon in the full pull of believing her statement.
Oh, for sure, for sure, totally . . .
All was clamoring, we motored through the way, down Alvarado past Wilshire—Roon grabbed a cigarette from my pack without asking, which I liked, but should not have liked. She had a lighter in her purse, but didn't' find it and while driving, I rose out of my seat and innocently pulled the lighter from my trouser pocket and tried to light her up, but the conspiring air in the car would not permit such gesture. Roon kinda rudely grabbed it from me, flicked the wick with her cat's paw.
You know Jake, I had not the faintest idea, Joaquin even played piano up until or until, or not until after we were even married . . .
I don't mean to jock Rooney so hard, but she sat there like all of eternity's handiwork work culminated to her just sitting there. It was hard not to and also I wanted too. The later being the source of most of my problems. I was always bad at always being too psyched at the things who I liked said. Roon shifted in the seat, like a too comfortable troon fraggle now, languishing in the view from the passenger window, looking out of skeins of bread clouds, the clouds a trifle like botanical and avian forms.
Even though she was right next to me, I felt a pang of yearning, somehow still feeling like I was missing out on all the fullness all around Rooney, and all of Rooney's 1950's segregation LA comfort, that which I kind of wanted to experience more and more.
That was, or was, or for that matter, when me, or when me and Joaquin, or me and Joaquin, around when we were first married—that summer near Scialojas, you know we stayed at the Franchetti family castle in the Dolomites—
Dolomite?
Jake, can you be serious for once . . .
Well, I've never been married, but I do certainly feel divorced,
Nevermind, Belane,
We stopped at the intersection of Wilshire and S Serrano Ave, the back of the stop sign across the street was spray painted in twee cursive 'Noir,' as even graffiti was exacerbated by too many people colonizing every possible variation of everything.
An attractive girl, not even a jogger, was walking from across the bow wow wow street, kind of coming off towards us, which I didn't notice.
Ow, Jake look at that girl, Roon tugging my arm, in some surprising take, like as if out of nowhere she was interested in women all out of the sudden.
What, I reply back in all the exhaustion of being skeptical about anything Roon introduces.
The girl over there, with the giant boobies, look, Roon clarifying in all its implication, like we were brandy mist swingers couple on beaver hunt for some third woll to pull. I couldn't tell if Roon was slang 'a tang testing my response, or she was implying such form of social engineering in half serious way, or she was too wired and thinking out loud and just acting and getting real ahead of herself.
I had lost my tongue to the so quiet, you could practically hear a peso drop in value. Pause pause pause, and nothing at the light.
Rooney, c'mon, now . . .
Ah, got ya!
There's that line from Alien Lanes, I've waited too long to have you, well Rooney, I've lived that lyric a hundred thousand times on over, if measured a certain way . . .
Roon interupted what I was getting at like she always does, Hey Jake, if insects on earth don't even use arabic letters to communicate, then what would make people think tinseltown alien toons from outer space ever would?
Because, on alien lanes that are similar to earth, the Occam's razor of simplicity would make the aliens design the simplest geomtetric alphabet and phonetic forms, which would be the exact same as e-z designed on earth, that is if they were not underwear. That's why aliens have accents like they are from Burbank.
Underwear, Roon smiling ribald.
I mean underwater.
Roon paused for a smatter, and thoughtfully regrouped and rounded back, and responded out of order of my previous statement, I got aliens in my underwater underwear, and well that's why, or why you are in Population Ex,
I now didn't know if was the doors, or it was the curtains, I don't know if it was the surface, or pictures, or the planes of glass, or I don't know if it was Rooney.
Cause when you're a celebrity, it's adios reality Belane—I used to sing that to myself whenever I would go to Barton Springs, when or when I had a break in Austin shooting Song To Song.
The girl at the studio flat flat out told you she thought Song to Song sucked, ha ha . . .
Roon didn't register what I had just went,
I just wasn't too big on or, filming. I mean I was, and I did—but, or only to like a certain point. I wanted to film when I wanted to, or rather under the conditions I wanted to get my clips. Terrance Malik is a fuckin' idiot, anyways. A lot of filmers and filmmakers are like completely madd—they encourage you to perform under such corny conditions. I mean or like, I mean, I'm speaking, speaking in general. My squad was all right though, no, no they were really great, actually.
That sounds exactly, or like you are talking about my street team, or after we still were still . . .
Roon didn't even pretend to register, and then just went real coked out, You know what I always wondered. What I always wondered was was, why, or like, why do they like call it the 11th hour? Shouldn't it be the 23rd hour?
Rooney, you dope . . .
No, but I told Kate, or you know what I tells Kate, I says you're a drug addict, and then she says, or she says, or you know what she said, Jake—No, you're a drug addict, which clearly I am not . . .
Even though Roon had tall grain in her purse, I could kinda tell where she was coming from,
I mean, that's not exactly how it works, Babe—you can't just like reverse one's proclamation and like use it against, or against someone unless it's actually or like true, Kate always does that, and I mean always, sometimes she can be just hysterical, Rooney without pause.
With Rooney I was always listening to her, but simultaneously fatally concocting what to say while I was listening to her, Yeah, yeah, you and Kate . . .
Another pennys a yard tune carried itself, for a world mesmerized by novelty, coming out the faithfully glowing CD radio on the hard black foreign fibrous surface of the textured plastic dash.
I love how boomers still go around saying they stopped the Vietnam war, Rooney looking out the afternoon window passively, expressing some vague cloud of privilege in her unconscious way, Rooney now nestled in inspecting the landscape.
I sat sate driving, not knowing quite what to add.
Like, the Vietnam War was going on for two decades and finally the war was over—all those love-ins musta finally fuck kicked in, huh Dolomite?
I drove too entirely preoccupied with the freeway, the driving conditions seemed so tempestuous now, so much I felt that even Rooney should be paying attention with me, as if her attention would be at least some show of solidarity. But she was hardly doing that, Rooney Aerosmithed like she was on permanent vacation practically, and I kinda pinned for her luxury now and pined for all her luxury. Rooney, sitting there with her cruel humour stored inside resting for now and giving the world a break for now, and if Roon could make the most jot simple things sometimes seem kind of intriguing, well then—
Palm trees like lazy jail bars sailed sideways in the Santa Anita wilted winds, Roon shifted in the pail of the seat in her rasping sharpness, seemed the center of Los Angeles, Live Divorce Capital, and Roon again,
Look at this Tina in the teal Mitsubishi—if that doesn't help her obtain a personality, then I sure suppose nothing ever will, Belane.
Stop Roon—you're being negative.
The collective mantra in the art sphere is all normies saying they's feel like they's have's imposter syndrome, and nobody quite ever sees the irony, Roon states in a helpfully nihilistic way that seems to express that of such nihilism, the bourgeois have full domination of anyways.
Rooooney,
I says, if you naturally feel you are an imposter, I mean, maybe just go with your first gut instinct, like just go with it Babe, I mean really . . .
I remained driving dutifully, as some ostensible function of being a guy—I was edgey from driving the speed racer a go go freeway, my capacity at the moment to indulge in convo was v low again, even though I wanted to indulge. Rooney with her physical countenance so established, especially now, she was really keeping herself so shape taken entertained, though. It makes sense it was that thing where she was on a different plane altogether enjoying herself naturally at the ofcourse most inconvenient and fraught moment of me driving too preoccupied sitting right next to her.
Roon got out of the car, took a paper pad from her purse, went up to a parked Pontiac, bent down and took down the number of the metal license motor ID placard.
Roon, the shit are you doing.
Roon always on location, like whatever, didn't answer, she then gathered herself from crouching and headed up towards the tranning co-op.
Let's go, Roon commanded, and I could not help but think she was taking on some of my detective identity, that kind of thing, which, I wouldn't quite put past her.
You said you want cash? The girl, asking Rooney impossibly, as if the co-op wasn't a tender bakery practically.
Yeah, that's what I says, you act like this the first time you done this, that's why we like come here anyways, Roon still looking for her ID in her purse, showing very little forbearance.
The girl took a stack of incidentally weathered bills from a shelf beneath the counter where she teller sat, counting the K as if something much greater was somehow at stake. It was too apparent Rooney thought a bank should make it seem too easy and not a big deal, and that would be a metric in expressing the bank's success—the way that clerks painstakingly over-methodically always counted back every little peso'd dollar bill, unconsciously making it seem like the establishment was not doing so hot, or had fallen on tough times, banks acting like if a thousand dollars was somehow misplaced they would go out of business.
Why you wanna give me dirty bills, Rooney bearishly, interrupting the girl behind the counter counting her withdrawal, and Roon live like a suicide, out so nakedly without buffer, and Roon again, barking at the shins as if stricken.
Excuse me, the girl paused counting, her hands still resting on the counter in counting position like she was a card dealer in Vegas.
The bills, they look hella ran through, Roon in very unnecessary rush, Roon was at the bank and it was her bank, and it was a bit entertaining seeing her when the logic of her expectations steadfastly not met. It was a novelty probably in it's lack of familiarity to me, and it was easy to admire from my onlooker vantage, but surely I could not help but think it maybe would not be too entirely entertaining when such similar hostility would come inevitably banking back in my direction.
I wanted to interrupt now, but I figured it wasn't worth the trouble, or I should save my energy tanks for probably something better, though that never works out either, because you have to stay on top of every little pesoing infraction or the infractions get so cemented stacked into normalized, and Roon was Joaquin's problem for the most part, anyways.
Roon Dawgg was still in a tizzy over the cash on the counter, It's all good Shiloh and Dan don't care, I rushed to reassure Roon in the moment.
Yes and if one should see what matter they? No, but well Jake, you see, I do care—what exactly kind of place is this, Roon with a motherly scoff, acting now like garden-variety Los Angeles based neurotic,
Walking out of the co-op back to the car, the weather in Eden was perfect in a way that said, how could anyone possibly be un-happy here.
Jeez, what a Lollapa-normie, god whata drip, Rooney, her fist clutched to her side, walking like disobedient teenager onto the next scene upon which to disrupt and wreak further havoc.
I had not much to add in the gale of all of Roon's annoyance and didn't say nothing.
That forelock tugging supplicant, I had to practically come to beg for bones, I mean really, I called her looser in my head and you know, you know what happened? You know what happened Jake? You know what she did? She, or she musta looked back at me right when I like did—that's the thing, some around here, around here, are psychic and they use or really use it to their immediate little grubby advantage, Roon telling me as if explaining something commonly accepted as universal within a Los Angelian enlightened super-femme gaze,
I kind of understood and did know this to be true, though—the good news for psychics was they's would get to be psychic, the bad news was the nature of the doggerel information they received was so banal they could never get to economize off it to gain any significant advantage, and on the contrary, it just estranged them further from general society, probably—they had to paint it in red letters on a sign to advertise it freakishly to even make some little dough. I knew all about this because I used them in a couple of cases. Sure they could profit, but even they still needed a detective to bring them business.
We stood stalled in front of the innocent parked car for a sec and then got in.
Boy, she sure was counting money like she just got back from a long walk, Roon settling herself with her villainous purse in lap.
Rooney,
Like she just crossed the Mojave on foot, practically, ya think?
Rooney, okay, it's like whatever . . .
It was Powell Peralta LA. In LA there's never no signs and we veered onto Exit 14 Laurel Canyon Blvd 1/2 mile ramp, the day really had perked right up but it was getting hot. It reminded me, or it didn't remind me, but I was just thinking, my mind flashed to the worst vacation I had ever taken to Tulum with Delores, flashed and lashing me now like it usually does—
Roon knew Tom Penny was the Beatles. Rooney's first movie, she played a young extra in Whitt Stillman's Metropolitan—Roon had no direct lines, or no lines, but she's taken—taken immortalized in the scene so delightfully well coiffed (Metropolitan, being a low budget indy, all the extras were simply instructed to bring and wear their own costumes to the set). In Metropolitan, where Roon as sky child, running and runs and runs on down darting the hallway on the night of the Deb's ball all along with the rest of the party's attendee harried extras, young Roon seen in the scene where someone pulls a boner, a prank, and activates the bell ringing ancient fire alarm at the Plaza Hotel.What's so funny in the scene is the old timey antique fire bell, in comparison to fire alarms of now, sounded so charming and quaint and benign, that you got the idea that if they would have kept the old bells in with today's ADA standards, them's bells ringing now, hotel occupants would have all but burned to death from never ever evacuating. Still though, what I have not figured out is exactly how they did the old timey light high bell sound in post. But the tableau of the hilarious shot of the 80's debs evacuating in perilous fright to the safe ringing of the fire bell, it cannot be overstated, was a seminal moment in burgeoning 90's Independent cinema. This scene was filmed at the Plaza illegally too, and the lighting and treatment look noticeably off kilter from the rest of Metropolitan, as the lighting in the hallway was not bright enough and that's the movie's only flaw, besides Roon being in it, just kidding. Though Rooney's inevitable later culty deferred association with Metropolitan would be a bit of a slightly misunderstood identification with the depicted archetype of some generalized idea of old abated aristocratic landed haute bourgeois depicted in Metropolitan, but was also kind of correct for the most part. At the end of the day, Rooney had to impress Whitt and that's exactly what she did. Five years later, Rooney was cast in a completely different treatment in Larry Clark's eye opening (or rather, more like eye splitting) depiction of the breakdown of the family unit pulled apart by the drowning city of the 35mm film blue saturated street medians of mid 90's disease floating everywhere in the air New York City—that growlers movie was called Kids. There was even a curious coincidental thematic through line in Kids even echoing the plight of Tom Townsend's character in Metropolitan, Tom Townsend's character being abandoned by his father who get's remarried and Tom Townsend's father now lives in a different night time brass handle tube'd cap-artment (carpet-apartment) building with his new family somewhere on the Upper East Side. In Kids, Roon played Tamara, who, with her parents seemingly ever absent, hosts a party in a very nice, conventional and notably upper middle class posh-partment (which was shot somewhere on location in a real apartment), but Tamara in curious haircut becomes ensnared by the unlikely downtown hooligans now tyrannizing her small soiree (this was the party Telly and Darcy go to at the very beginning of the very fraught night)—lip service torturers CSG, Macaulay Culkin, Rita Akerman and even a cameo by a then-now unrecognizable Punky Brewster. In Kids, Rooney barely deigns lines (but images of her, the stills have since been featured in photography monographs and beat box galleries throughout the years). Roon in Kids, looking all troon, Roon afloat in front of the gun, jangely Gangstar playing in the background (you get the idea this exactly wasn't her character Tamara's music), Tamara noticeably 'whelmed by the downtown group, where Roon has the line, so saddled in the scene there she is, where she says to one of the other girls there, she remarked very quietly, 'What are you even entirely talking about,'
Roon, flagrant through the underpass—the heat caused her scent to become more noticable, whatever she was wearing was unknowable, bitter, and earthy, and I'm not sure I liked it, but figured it cements itself eventually.
Hey Belane so watcha' favorite movie? Rooney glicked, Roon whilerifling through the contents of her scar purse, then taking out a hot mini strawberry soju can.
The ultimate LA movie? Roon, you're not gonna believe this. A movie, my favorite movie, a movie that could only be made in LA—
What.
Howard the Duck.
Oh, c'mon now—get serious, Roon assumedly unimpressed, scrawling tralled, now trying to pop the thin of the can with the metal straw,
Turning my head from the road in innocent sincerity, I get serious.
You're such a namby, I thought you was going to says something like Dead Ringer.
What, no Howard the Duck. Howard the Duck. Ya know, How Duck is is the real spiritual sequel, or to Back to the Future. Howard the Duck is, is the real Back to the Future II. I mean, think about it—so far in time Michael Fox goes, I mean so far in time he punched the land line phone buttons in the car so so far accidentally, so distant in the future that time simultaneously repeats and simultaneously advances and morphs into a, some complete surrealist alternate reality, we talking millions of years, probably—so far, or like so far in the future, Marty is now morphed into a talking midget duck and Ellaine his mom, is a post post punk Brix girlfriend instead of like being his mom, but her jinx band is better, Cherry Bomb—Cherry Bomb is kind of better that Marty's battle of the band audition, which is actually pretty good also, but Cherry Bomb is definitely way better than the Chuck Berry covers at Fish Under the Sea Dance. So, so far into the future it is, it just so happens the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that guy, returns and becomes a colossal existential threat overlord of like the universe. As if everybody when given a chance becomes a monster, surely.
You know it's annoying when I feel like I'm getting pitched, Roon, two minutes out of time, not really taken in.
Relax, nobody's pitching nobody, Roon . . .
Well, I hate Back to the Future—I never got it, never made no sense, Roon wisps.
Back to the Future.
Yeah,
What, what didn't make sense—I think that that it made so much sense was its—
Roon distracted in all innocent interest, The thing I's didn't get, understand was. Or you know what I never got.
What, I bark back loosing patience.
Okay, so you know in the beginning he's getting pulled by cars and the soundtrack is playing The Power of Love or like whatever, it's the power of love . . .
No, it's, and that's the power of love, anyways,
What I don't get is . . .
What.
So the next scene when Michael Fly is auditioning his band . . .
Marty Fly,
He's playing the theme same song that was used in the opening credit soundtrack—it doesn't make sense.
Rooney, you dope . . .
One of Roon's breathtaking non-response earlier still bristled, but maybe I was trying to act like I wasn't silently vexxed—maybe even beckoning silent internal dialogue hectoring of myself, because, whatever, I may have been trying to impress upon her. Directly frustrated at Roon too also a bit—I, playing it off, changing the flow now, Uh, so what's yours?
What's my what?
Movie. Favourite. Yours. Rooney.
Roon sits back, and thinks for too long at peril of supporting the convo, Um, none, I think—actually, I hate movies.
Oh, ofcourse, and why would you ever like movies, oh, I forgot, you're an actress . . .
Roon paused, then had this kind of strange Roon moment, just right off the cuff so sternly proudly announces, Well because, I never met a miller who was in love with his river wheel.
Roon nods to helself with such proclamation now that such be so firmly established.
Roon shifted to leaning her elbows on the dash, Cheating on your husband is like quitting cocaine, anyways—it's barely pleasurable if at all, and try quitting for good—
I replied nothing, Roon may have sensed unease,
C'mon Jake, it's okay—I'm not speaking from experience . . . I have girlfriends, or at least when I did usta have girlfriends, Roon punched my arm in a way that still hurt, and good thing I was a detective, because I could tell she meant girlfriends as in buddys, not lovers. There was something about when a woman you liked but didn't have a chance with, flaunted their past lovers conversationally, but I was used to this.
Jake, I'm not speaking from experience, don't worry. It's like ok-ay.
No body's worried about anything, you can relax, now.
The I don't want to know of I don't want to know the reason why love keeps right on walkin' on down the line lyric, that me and Rooney were hypnotized by was, or musta been, or at least I thought now was —is the chorus, how the chorus made manifest, seemingly unknowingly solving the answer to it's very own stated problem—the paradox of if the person singing don't wanna know the reason why love keeps on walkin' on down the line, then perhaps, maybe they can never change because they don't know or even wanna know why and then love just keeps on walkin' right on down the line again. But what really lands and makes the chorus of the song, is the funny human comedy futility of it all, that you know in theory, if the singer or the singer just went ahead and finally found out why love keeps right on walkin' on down the line, it probably wouldn't make much difference either anyways. The song bounces along in its own hypocrisy and innocent, almost child like ignorance—the universality of it all, the human condition so, and you get the feeling, you kind of know even Stevie and candy colored catastrophe Christine don't much know what's goin' on either, even they, Stevie and Chrinstine are still black time gate keepers and black time key masters.
No, no, no, Freud said women are only partial subjects, meaning that even inside state patriarchy they have more autonomy than men in general—some do at least.
Well, we all know the world tends to have a sick sense of humor, Honey Bear, Rooney murmured, almost expressing herself as an evocation as an agent of such injustice, that, in a way she may or may not have been quite aware of.
The speedball car ride hit a tidy stride, a room in space along. Maybe I had the first Pisschrist Ep on, or maybe it began somewhere at North Western Ave,
Women could prelate and be priesty, or women sometimes saved you from another woman just from the sheer power of their sympathy. For once, I wasn't belly aching about old too good to be true Delores now though, I went back further. Stretching out, time alone enough—maybe a rare fecund moment of grace, Roon sat all along and must 'a been listening.
Roon, hear me, I am a gate crasher,
I am a stalker,
I've been a fight fan,
I am a friendly pornographer,
I am a copy cat,
I've been called a coward,
I've been a stropper,
A panty sniffer,
Roon, when I was like in eighth grade I was living in an apartment complex, or where I was living was this real big apartment complex called Cambridge Oaks. In an apartment somewhere near my unit, I could tell or I noticed, or I could tell new people, or a family had just like moved in. I saw Tara or would see Tara, and notice, or noticed her—she was my age, but like I said, I wasn't sure exactly where she lived in the complex, or where in the complex she lived—though, somewhere in the complex, maybe by the lonesome pool, which is where I rarely went, but she lived in a part, some part of the complex, some part existing beyond my vantage. Anyways, or anyways I always noticed, or I did notice Tara—she was really really skinny, like some slightish boy, and had this like awesome drab trad long super straight exactly brown hair—I thought she looked like Julie from the first Deluxe store, or like young Julie. I also thought she looked like an unformed uncooked scrawny Kate Moss. I always thought that, I mean I really did. Tara had a big family, or they were large, and they occupied a larger unit, or like the max large unit you could like live in in at Cambridge Oaks—two sisters and an older brother, or an older brother who was so older I never ever talked to him. Oh, I totally forgot, I once bought weed off him! Oh wow! But anyways, again, I never talked to Tara's sisters much. Tara did have a wild older sister who was really cool though, and a younger sister who was really mean. Anyways, or anyways they always had kids over, or like after school hang outs and their apartment or the area around where they stayed seemed to be like the spot now, now like teeming with kids from school, practically sometimes. Tara didn't have to do nothing and she was in the cool crowd just by effortless proxy. Not too long after ninth grade started, I saw Tara at Winchell. I think Tara, or Tara did come up to me, or I don't really remember, but we talked like non-stop practically, or I mean immediately. I was maybe a bit passive, but she would or you could tell, she really liked to talk to me. We could go on and on, even and it was no big deal. I really didn't or I didn't think much of it, actually. Tara would call my apartment on the telephone, it's so funny at the time we had a student directory, and, or, I would take the phone into my room and me and me and Tara, or Tara and I would talk for hours, practically—like face print, the whole thing, or the thing where you're on the phone for so long it gets to a point where you are living on the phone together. I mean, there was something kind of quaint about Tara, or like Tara calling me from another part of the complex—I imagined her voice through a wire going miles away, and then returning routed right back to my apartment next door, or practically next door, like even though it also felt like a direct kitten string from her family's unit to mine. There was just something, or something about that, like the feeling of going to the laundry mat room and using their vending machine no matter what hour because it was always open and available, coinage lights on. The change machine always on. Just the, the, like living in a perpetual commerce zone of it all that never closed. I got off to that, or I always appreciated that when I was young, maybe I still do. Just having everything there at Cambridge Oaks. I liked that, I really did. But, or anyways, but on the phone all the time now with Tara, sitting in a closet on mists of idleness with the light on, I mean, I was like passive, it's not like I got nervous, or I was never nervous with Tara, but I was always superficially interested, or I just liked to passively talk to her—there where other girls, or one, one in particular, who for both our sakes I'm not going to mention now, whatever. I don't know, the underlying, or like this basis or the basis for all of our conversations was the unsaid of how or how I was interested in that other girl. Tara would bring her up, that girl, she would mention her casually, but it was just a major theme of our conversational habit—Tara either telling me who that girl is like talking to, or Tara criticizing her, but sometimes she would indulge me in talking about her or telling me something funny about her, charitably. Anyways or anyways, but then Tara would check me, or she did check me once—she'd make a statement or some statement or say something like, too bad we aren't attracted to each other, and I didn't think much of it, and I'd just agree or go along with whatever she said—maybe, or I don't know, I was or was not aware this may have been a form of checking my response. I usually played it just normal, not because I was in complete control of myself with girls, but because I was so in friend-zone zone state of mind with Tara, anyways. One day we were at her apartment and there was no one from her family at home. Out of nowhere she said, do you want to see my pussy. Tara totally blindsided me. It was the last thing, or like what I expected—I was innocently, I mean really honestly, just hanging out with her not thinking anything. I thought she was a virgin but, I then, or she then told me, that, that she actually wasn't and I was surprised, or not surprised, shocked but or because I just assumed Tara had never had sex. At that very point I realized we never talked about it. We were now conversationally, me and Tara in vertiginously new territory to say the least. It was too much, too much an unfamiliar anxiety. That's how I felt, it felt like too much. The thought of her not being a now virgin hit me like a punch in the face though, like out of nowhere, and I for sure lost any cool that I had assumed with Tara. Tara telling me she already had sex, made my body feel like it was in danger somehow, and I was slightly shaking and shiveringly nervous. I remember getting catastrophically nervous, or I was just shook, I mean real shook. The fact, in my face now that Tara now telling me she had sex with someone else before she met me now really now suddenly bothered me, and so totally like out of nowhere. Tara ended up taking my virginity and then we, or we had sex, or three times over the course of the month—always, when no one was at home at her apartment. It was that way, or I didn't question it, kinda just assumed those were the necessary conditions. But then, and get this, then one time, or the fourth time, I suggested or asked if anyone was home at her apartment, so we could, ya know practice—I still was learning. But not, or not that long after, or Tara would preemptively complain out loud that her family being home, her family was home. Tara complaining like it was a half nuisance, which I went along with. I remember a bunch of carnations in a green vase on Tara's nightstand. Then it had been a week since, and I remember being so consumed how a week ago to the day we were together and I felt this intense fit of despair now in the thicket of exactly one week passing. So happy—no, beyond happy—I was in actual heaven a week ago from today, this Friday, a week ago from today. We never had sex again and Tara was like scarce or scarcer but you know she always, or had just some excuse to temper me from freaking the fuck out. After the second week, not only did we not have sex again, but I barely heard from her, or no, I didn't hear from her—such a striking contrast from the good old days when we were constantly on the phone. I was really fucked up, just now, now trying to just keep it together. I almost went to my mom and told her I needed to see a doctor—my body was in a constant grueling state of acute sickness and dread, maybe a verge of breakdown, I wouldn't be surprised, I mean I wasn't going to have an actual breakdown obviously, you know what I mean, but it felt like emergency, a real emergency or some emergency, and I honestly needed something, something to get me through it—I didn't, or never took antidepressants, but I was desperately wanting them now, thirsty desperate for an antidepressant, when this was something I never never even ever thought of. I was so in state of despair, I could not even smoke pot at all, as I know it would probably make things worse, even though, it would have probably made things a little better. I didn't hear from Tara for like three weeks, three weeks in the throes of radio silence. I didn't have the nerve to knock on her door of her apartment, I'm just not like that. It was so fucked up Roon, though. It was messed up, Tara knew. Then one afternoon she skittered, called my apartment and my mother answered the phone and very tenderly my mom goes it's Tara, Honey, and I harried right into this acute wave of insta hope that washed over me like an opiate, an explanation maybe, or an explanation, some explanation or apology and maybe something even just came up, but that was over now though, though actually, even that notion, so desperately extremely unlikely and delusional, to think that flawed identification, but we could move forward maybe, or maybe start over again, and then our bond would, could be stronger after all the nonsense—or it could be a test? Anyways the way my mom registering hope handed me the phone for me to bring into my room—that, thinking back on my mom's misguided optimistic sympathy is even heartbreaking, the hope I clung to, and the perfume drinking pain I was jumped right out of, quickly obliterated—but glass of sour that now Tara had sex or was still having sex maybe with one of her older brother's friends, now, I found out. But here's the part that messed me up real bad, even worse than I was before she finally called—Tara being full bullwhacker girl now, and on, or over explainer of her guilt, and also trickle truthing too, I could tell she still maybe kinda sorta missed me or was somewhat sympathetic, but then again, to which degree really is or was really unknown—but here's the thing, this was what was so sordid, she told me she was deigned having clicks of the load sex with her brother's friend, BUT also, dashed her on the ground, covertly, while people were in other rooms at her family's apartment. She actually told me this needlessly, like we were still buddies. That's what hurt the most, or not the most, but that was a pretty good one too. Fated to suffer, I ended up withdrawing from school in emergency, went to day treatment at East Center Hospital and could finish the rest of the year off in out patient, my grades could transfer to Winchel at the end of the year, felled by Sagittarius, I did never want to go back.
As is the destiny of corpses to remain buried, Rooney, just sat in the passenger seat like a pile of prune tree limbs, like an old pale pile of roast beef bones,
Roon not hastening to reply, went 'a nothing to my flood guts. It was like I whelmed her, but then it was okay though, the way she sat silent, Roon sitting still there in some slight silent recognition.
A door, a table, a blank sheet of paper—after the catastrophe of Tara, everything seemed infected with a profound futility, that I was not smart enough at the time to articulate, but I sure did feel it. If only we were smart enough we could get what we wanted. The world is both dumber and smarter than us. But then if we were smart and got what we wanted, we would be beyond it and would not so care. Tara was now kind of ugly, but then again it seemed like most people were ugly. Everybody was ugly. My body was in acute pain, my like stomach was all tussed up—I could not beat off and when I did, I found myself beating off to Tara cheating on me—I was truly sick and depraved now.
Like sex to a nympho, Roon, referencing the Nas lyric, blithely diagnosing, and her saying exactly that, returned me to the exact nervousness of Tara from decades ago then again.
Masterbate in your clutches, Roon jostling unnecessarily the Ghostface lyric, auguring me back to realizing we were in Roon's clutch of world now.
Just thinking about even the fictional possibility of Tara of being a nymphomaniac, was just about the worse thing the obliterating touch of Rooney could have says practically, but I guess it was kind of now no big deal, really. In the kisser someone should get hurt, word is fjord, but now it was just a few sordid details to fall back on.
Wested Cahuenga Boulevard, Lilian Way, then up towards the motorway off to the boulder hills. Districts were at the feet of the hills, baby shambles cloaking a frack a lot of money, perfectly good plots of capital abandoned becoming so untamed, as so their shabiness nettled, it was like no one could ever come up with a follow up with second idea. And the land was filled with lack of second ideas everywhere. And the blank drive-in screens had the lost plot. The once arrived portmanteaus that carried the name of such ventures left exhausted, but their signs still faithfully harried the word of trace, and the signs looked lonelier the more you motor car'd past them, because the portmanteaus did their job after all, portmanteaus faithfully never failed to stop working. A business plan should include the inevitable need for exit strategy, but they never did ever pace out folding up the tent. Ruins remained everywhere molested, feeble strikes of titans and wanna-be titans of all land's end depressed shams. Capital was never wedded to imagination and never will be, and in fact, it was quite the very opposite. Only the poor could be talented and were, because their plot was small and they reluctantly had better nothing to do than ply their sorry best. When you have a lovely woman by your side, your only job is to laze and graze and leisure with them, and it was then when men silently knew they were retired, even though they may have still been actively working everyday. It was exceptions to these rules that made people believe it was all actually otherwise. Invention, it was claimed came from war, which is a lovely idea, but really it was spawned from desperation and desperation made people do very funny things. All the great formalists started off as bums. Nothing came out of the academy, sure there are few exceptions, and again, those four exceptions made everyone think otherwise. It was a relief to drive yonder up the canyon roads though, and the city simplified itself making it all seem splendidly worth it now.
Suddenly we came upon a dead body lying on the winding desolate road and stopped abruptly. You could see the blade of blood puddle soaking up the ground from inside the car. We unwisely stopped, got out of our car to check it out.
Pocked like aleatory tarry mark, the road wore rash,
Some Beverly Rexroad lain dead on the pavement in the weight of the so innocent day. Most likely she had fallen and rolled down the side of the canyon it looked like, though her body was not as fucked up as you would think from the rumble bramble on down.
The labile body lain there sadder than a gladstone. The girl went in weighing probably seven stone six, was wearing black cargo pant like capris, a black halter top, ragged white socks with luna logos and new but retro design courts with an un-retro woman-better color gay. One of the lenses had been broken off, but her glasses but were still attached to her face. You could tell her hair had been recently bleached in a way that made her probably look exactly seventeen percent more attractive—someone would miss her, or either someone was definitely not missing her.
That dildo, I splutter, with not much disgust to buss, and I had seen more than my fair share of dead bodies. And one thing I know all too well is dead bodies are known to be a major inconvenience, some times in more ways than one.
I eyeballed the young woman's body, it looked medial carnage, I guess. A dead body could sometimes look overdetermined, a dead body could also look as incidental as a fallen leaf. Some shock of recognition was vaguely absent. You could tell the body was breathing minutes ago, in a way you were not exactly quite sure what would make it seem exactly so.
I don't know why, but when I looked at the body my mind thought, thunderbolt, nightingale, turbine, knots, thunderbolt, Dash Nekrasova's black Krooked t-shirt lain on the floor,
Don't, don't look at it, don't look at it, I commanded to Roon, Roon who now scanned about with firmly distanced curious cold coolness, as if alien tourist.
I walked back to the car, corporally encouraging Roon to follow from my cue.
Roon, let's go.
Roon stood looking down not saying nothing.
Roon!
Right, Roon finally registers, and replies back in a tactical air, as if I gave her instruction during our bank heist—
Inside the cabin of the car tearing away, we now sate as if in distant scene, full remove from what he just witnessed, and the air took on immediate lightness. Roon productively sprinkling angle dust out from the long brown glass vial, casually arranging on the surface of the silver case, as if each line would eventually form an exclamation point. This was masterclass collector coke for heads only anyways, even better than the snow stolen from the hospital. It was no big deal really, and besides, it felt such a relief to get away, thus strengthening Roon now revelling in camaraderie—figues the most cheerful Roon would be was after seeing a dead body.
Ya know, I've always had flashes on my eyeballs nightmares about giving birth—ever since I was little, Roon informing me then huffing down while casually railing up. The innocence of middle of the day speeding on to the side of her, made her come off vaguely neo-futurist.
Marcell Broodthaers died, died you know, Marcell Broodthaers like died on his birthday—I mean, what could be more poetic than that? Roon wandering out loud optimistically while still holding the razor cake between her fingers.
Fucking-cousins, Rooney as if answering her own question, her expression flickering with common sense resolve.
The city sometimes became a sallow stammer stage for which those to project. As if dissipating in a cloud of be-de smoke, the dead body just seemed like some pseudo event now anyways. Contacting the pigs would only cause trouble, as other people's calamity contaminates. Just stopping to look at the dead body already could easily implicate us. I didn't have to say nothing to Rooney. Roon was talking about being at an opening, and she said someone said, this show's very German, and Roon said she said ahe replied to them, What does that mean? Earlier she said her gallery was assembled how one picks flowers she supposed, that's all, and, and maybe that was a German thing, or at least that seemed German to me, the flowers part. And honestly, I didn't know too terribly much about Rooney and Kate—it was the newcomer's fresh perspective logical fallacy I was stricken with. Most Joe Blows or Henrietta Stackpoles didn't know know Oscar Kokoska from a Koosh ball. Once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, so now I'm usually reluctant to say nothing. Jobs sometimes required one to be unctuous, the jobbing-hazard being accidentally having had respect lost from bubble gum strangers anyways. D sounds lite as if when struck causing clouds, G sounds exactly like Vitamin C.
Hey Jake,
What, I reply, my private thoughts adding up exasperated, even though abracadabra I could care less about the girl's stunted and gaunt body, but if someone took a private dick photo of us just looking at the body with the car on over to the side it could easily be incriminating, carnations on Tara's nightstand, whatever, I was just kind of parched by now—Roon may have kind of sensed this.
Hay Jake, have you ever seen Ghostbustas?
No Rooney, I have never seen Ghostbusters. Where you think I was born in Mexico?, exasperated, I turned my kurtness now towards Roon.
Roon helpfuly held the case at my face and I beaked the straw in a slurp, like it was solving a bigger problem or a few problems. I said nothing, just reinforcing the hit with tiny valiant air snorts coming off still bitchy.
Oh, well, I've always thought, always thought Ghostbusters was such a good show.
Roon sits up straight in the seat and turns ever so slightly like corrupted concubine to tell me in the full bloom of her girl like interest now.
Ok, so or so you know, the part, or you know that part in Ghostbusters or the part in Ghostbusters, Bill Murray, Venkman early in the movie, Bill Murray is doing a free Ghostbusters consultation at like single Sigourney Weaver's haunted Central Park apartment ya know? Rubber eggs on counter.
My hands pasted as igloo on steering wheel just in the exact position the department of motor vehicles wanted as if it is somehow making it safer. I remained driving not saying nothing, the car innocently puttered motored as if the dead body never happened, the background of the cliff road looking projected onto a careening sunny screen, the gaggle dope kicking in like a teenager's trigger switch breeching.
The projected background, instead of projecting the road we were driving on, switched to black and white all histories failed flying craft test crashes archival footage—each clip, a punctum of all's invention's fly car misfires.
Ok, so the consultation, then the consultation quickly descends from professionally unprofessional, to unprofessional unprofessional where Venkman, Bill Murray, just left to his very own devices goes and up and says, Bill Murray says I'm madly in love with you to Sigourney Weaver, Dana—Dana Barrett.
Now Roon seizes what she was finally trying to get at, like something skewered out from her mouth,
And then it's the part where she justs say, 'Your'e odd' and then Bill Murray starts like narrating himself, as if from a novel, or it's like a novel, where he's like the main character—'And then she threw me out of her life, she thought I was a geek, she probably wasn't the first.', he goes. Like that. That was, or that was a good one,
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