"Any Action?"


When I was young I didn't bother with reading Burroughs (except for Naked Lunch). I read De Sade and The Story of O and Henry Miller and so on, but percentage wise they didn't make up a lot of my reading matter. I think I had to get older before I could really appreciate Burroughs as a humorist, and not gauge him by a community standard.

I know I've written some of this before, but it is the habit of men to begin to repeat their stories as they age, because they are trying to hold on to the thread of their life, and certain stories are energized by an associated emotional state. The emotional state has the capacity to not just recall that something happened, but to create a replica of it. Maybe you can rebuild in the Western Lands.

The reason I recall Burroughs is that I recall the books in the window of City Lights, in North Beach, when I used to live in that neighborhood. I'd walk past and see this strangely compelling book cover art. It was like some old west photograph, but with a surreal quality, an old photograph of a cowboy and a bunch of Native American boys.

One day I went in and bought the book. It was, "Place of Dead Roads." The photograph on the cover was from the Colorado State Historical Society Library. Other than that I don't find any information of who the people are, but I assume the cowboy represents Kim Carsons. "The horse is as much a part of the West as the landscape, but Kim never really made it with the horse. He tried at first to establish a telepathic bond with his horse, but the horse hated the relationship and tried to kill him at ever opportunity."

I especially like westerns which aren't confined inside the genre story of the code of honor and the silent killer just doing his job. These proliferated after WWII, and they are similar in tone to the old Chinese plays during the same time period, where the triumph of agrarian communism over intellectual decadence would be expected, and delivered, on stage, one more time. Another favorite of mine is Deadwood, by Sacramento writer Pete Dexter. I guess the HBO series was built over the top of it, but it can't compare to Dexter's book.

So where was I? Repeating my stories? The onset of Old TImer's Disease?

I was visiting with Jim and Louise the other night, and Louise mentioned that her father, who was a doctor, was doing mathematical equations in his head just before he died. A musician makes music and the Singing Detective searches for clues. Men have these stories. Some women do but other women seem to know when they've already told you something, and they aren't going to hunt the magical boar tonight that comes magically back to life in the morning, like the sun.

The news, meanwhile, is filled with the image of a great American hero, General Petraeus. Not only is he a great American warrior, he is a brilliant entrepreneur. God bless you, General, for helping George W. Bush figure out a way to pass this ungodly mess off to somebody else. And it's like, all of a sudden, the lights come on and America slaps its collective forehead and says, "Oh, yea. This is what he always did. He stays just ahead of the consequences."

It's his pattern. It was there all the time, which was why he suggested we move away from reality, and the cold facts, and fly away with him into a Faith Based America. You just close your eyes and click your heels three times and Oz was all a dream. When the General testified I could hear heels all over Washington just a'clickin!

Today Jim and Arnold are coming over and we're going to play around with some production. Arnold is an engineer, and he does a lot of work on big construction projects, doing cost analysis and environmental planning, cost savings, that sort of thing. Arnold was an early pirate radio broadcaster in London, and a huge fan of the sixties, when he came of age. One of his stories, which I've heard at least twice, was about when he was traveling across America on a motorcycle, and crossed a bridge full of buffalo assuming they would part and let him through.

Jim and I see things through a similar window, I guess. I remember back when Bush and company went into Iraq. Jim and I were drinking coffee and shooting pool at the senior center, where he is a gerontologist. We shoot pool after he's done working. He said that these guys (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) are gamblers, and that they are the kind who will double down as long as they can, and then bluff as far as they can, before they admit they don't have a hand. But basically they're finding a way to move massive amounts of wealth from the public treasury into private hands.

That seems to be a good description of what's been going on. Bush has an ungodly mess on his hands and he has no idea what to do next, except manipulate the public perception of it and pass it off to somebody else to actually deal with the reality. "Hey, I told you I was faith based." Reminds me of the old story of the Indian girl who took the frozen snake home and brought it back to life. It bit her. "Hey, you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."

I see Jim's picture of it as a poker game. My own picture of the situation emerged from Burroughs. It's why I was thinking of him when I began this piece. As I watched this entire mess unfold, I continually referenced the Bush administration to a sophisticated ring of con men, with the public as the mark.

Burroughs is the master of connecting the wild brain in the gut to the structuring brain in the head without cleaning it up and putting it in a witness protection program. Because he can give voice to this other brain, he is the most brilliant satirist and social observer since Mark Twain. This is from my favorite of his books, "The Western Lands."

"It was the fake murder scene with a bladder of pig's blood, where the Swindler pretends to kill his accomplice, who has bungled the deal they were all going to clean up on, into which the mark put his life's savings. Now the mark is an accessory to murder. They spirit him out of town and go on bleeding him.
"Afraid I have bad news. The relatives are screaming for an autopsy."
"I thought that was all settled."
"So did we."
First they have to pay off a doctor to sign a "natural causes" death certificate. Next thing, the doctor has been indicted for faking death certificates, all his certificates are under investigation. Fortunately, we've been able to shake hands with someone in the record department to pull our file. A surprise witness bobs up, a scrub woman passed out in a broom closet was awakened by the shot. All these people need to be "paid off."
The mark fears the con man, and he wants desperately to be part of the dangerous, glamorous world of Yellow Kid Weil and the High Ass Kid. The carrot is ruthlessly dangled, and the marks comes back moaning for more. And sometimes the mark comes out ahead.
"I tell you, Henry, I just can't stand it. He keeps calling me up, 'Any action?' I change my address, he gets a private asshole to find me. He's even got marks lined up. Good ones, too. I don't want his marks. I don't want his money."
"Didn't you say once you were looking for the perfect mark? Well, it figures, you found what you were looking for. I think your phone is ringing."

I wonder if he got the idea for that from "The Ransom of Red Chief?" It has the same gag. While I was driving back last time, before the iPod ran out of juice, I was listening to Frank Zappa reading from Naked Lunch, the bit about the man who taught his asshole to talk. He related that he asked Burroughs about this piece, and where he got the idea. Burroughs said he got it from a movie in which a ventriloquist's dummy starts taking over the ventriloquist. I don't recall the old movie but it's the same idea used in William Goldman's "Magic."

Some stories bear repeating, though it's always nice if they have a makover once in awhile.

Posted: Wed - September 12, 2007 at 02:47 PM