The Western Lands (22 page)

"Two minutes, sir."

He returns with a dark brown vial. "That will be ten pounds, sir." The chemist knows there will be no argument.

He is the only passenger on the tender. They hoist anchor as soon as he is aboard. His room is perfect: a bed, a writing desk, a chair and dresser. He shoots an eighth of a grain and goes to sleep.

He wakes to the movement of the ship and the smell of the sea. After breakfast he unpacks his books. Where else but in London could he have acquired exactly the books he needs? In Paris perhaps, and many of the sources are French, but then the books would never have arrived in time. It's all here . . . analysis of the centipede venom, case histories, illustrations of the three thousand varieties. He opens his portable typewriter case.  . . .

8

Thanksgiving Day, Tuesday, November 24,1985. A future city called Leukan, a compacted complex of red brick tenements with balconies and fire escape ladders. On a cot covered by a cheap army blanket I am cuddling a white baby. It is white all over. Even the eyes are white. I can't see the face clearly. The child has long white claws. The eyes are glittering white like diamonds or snow, a musky hot animal smell, nitrous film scraps lighting up little theaters of incident before they burn out like Coleman lantern mantles.

A street like a float, corner of Pershing and Walton . .. the corner floats away through the trees, anglers fishing from sidewalks, mild jerk of leaves, a squirrel shifts to freeze into a still, the old sets are brittle, falling off the page, waves dash against sea walls, old photos curl and shred. The Veiled Prophet Parade floats in the hot summer night. . . yellow glow of lights, giant leaves, eating pink cake, the cardboard around the edges blowing away in the rising wind, piers crumbling into the sea's waves, wrecked house, rain, gray sky.

Take a look at this craft, like a secondhand car or plane riddled with hidden miles and tragic flaws. Good for a one-way trip, you hope. Hope It Gets Me There is its name.

"Joe, I think the wing is coming off."

"Both wings, boss."

"Well, fix it!"

(He used to be some kinda tycoon can't adjust to a precarious spacecraft, and precarious isn't the word for this horse's ass.)

"Fix it? What with, Boss Man, a Band-Aid and chewing gum? Why'ncha strip to the waist and pitch in with the men? Get out there and fix it yourself."

"Me?
Uuuhh . . ." It begins to sink in. These old power-and-"finance models is the worst, worse than KGB Colonels.

Kim is camping around, doing a parody in a yachting cap. He is already in Space, very far out there in icy blackness and at the same time here in this prop town. The whole town of Lawrence is for sale, perhaps the Russians or someone is buying up the town. His only link with the living Earth is now the cats, as scenes from his past life explode like soap bubbles, little random flashes glimpsed through a Cat Door. It leads out and it leads back in again. Touch the controls gently for serene magic moments, the little green reindeer in Forest Park, the little gray men who played in my blockhouse and whisked away through a disappearing cat door.

The doors are all around you ... a pond at twilight, a fish jumps, the cat snuggles against me and raises his paw to touch my stomach. . . .

This heath, this calm, this quiet scene . .
.

Did Wordsworth drink at all? Was he a closet opium addict? Shingles, you know. We are men of the world, we understand these things. Was he in plain English a child molester, a short-eyes?

"And here's a farthing for you, Lucy."

"Cooooooo . . . a farthing, sir, and all for me?"

"Yes, my little honey duck, all for you."

(All for you if you let me in.)

"What's the matter with my little sugar bun?"

"Oh, well, winter coming on and I need a new coat, you know."

"But I bought you one last year."

January 4, 1986. Dream that I was sharing a room with Joe Stalin. The room was an alcove off a corridor leading to a restaurant. This is in Chicago. It don't look like Chicago. It looks like a prop town of cardboard under a gray haze. East St. Louis is across the river, weeds growing through cracked sidewalks, a little pocket of the 1920s . . . air lines here and there, a whiff of riverboats and hobo jungles.

I am looking at Stalin, thinking here is a man with the deaths of millions on his hands. No doubt he'd think no more of killing me than any other decadent bourgeois. But he is friendly, and it isn't the Joe Stalin I used to know in newsreels and pictures. Both are short, but this Joe has no mustache. He is unshaven, sloppy looking, middle-aged, dirty and greasy.

"The lair of the bear is in Chicago."

That's a cut-up or dream sentence from 1963 Tangier. It didn't mean anything at the time. Still doesn't. Here's another: "Captain Bairns was arrested today in the murder at sea of Chicago. Witnesses from a distance observed a brilliant flash as the operator was arrested." "Life is a flickering shadow, with violence before and after it," Ian Sommerville told me in a dream.

And what the bloody hell is Joe eating? Some sort of black meat pie, blood pudding perhaps. I can't take my eyes off it, as though I am looking at him to see the lineaments of multimillion murders. The first hundred thousand is the hardest. After that it's all downhill, they tell me. Nothing shows in his greasy dish, just nothing good or bad. He isn't even repulsive.

But he does have the look about him of someone who was somebody.  . . . "Look, that's Al Capone, or John Barrymore, or Jack Buck, or Manolete." Somebody who used to be somebody . . . there, in a shirt without a collar, and even a brass stud sticking out. But yes, he was somebody ... no doubt about that.

It isn't even a private room. Through a window I can see the cash register and the hostess leading the patrons to tables. Middle-aged men who call their wives "Mother":

"Now, Mother and I was in Mexico and we didn't like it at all. Mother's piles flared up and we couldn't get any soothing Tuck and I said right out, 'When are you folks going to get civilized?' And the druggist said, 'We don't want your syphilis, got plenty of our own,' and he shoved an opium suppository up Mother and it did ease her a bit."

The hostess looks like Olive Oyl, a long neck and a chicken head. I look at Joe. He knew the secret of power: sit long and move fast. Hitler could move, but he couldn't sit. Stalin could sit like any peasant can.

Ignore a dog and he gets desperate, whimpering and showing his teeth in little dog smiles like Gary Cooper when he is being a cute millionaire, certainly his most distasteful role. He's this eccentric millionaire, see, when he buys pajamas he only wants the tops . . . now, isn't that cute?

"Only the tops, sir? Well, I'm afraid—" Frantic signals from the manager. "Oh, yes, of course, Mr. Wentworth. I understand perfectly . . . just the tops."

Here he is at the piano, putting the make on a working girl.

"Looky looky looky, here comes Cooky."

And he keeps looking up at her with these loathsome little smirks. But she eats some spring onions and holds him off.

"Put that ring on my finger . . . and until you do, I'll fight you with every vegetable at my disposal."

Fight him with puke. It's what he deserves. You see the difference between a star and an actor. An actor can play any role. But a star always plays himself. There is that special something that only Gary Cooper can bring to a role, whether he's hanging his best friend for cattle rustling, or being Mr. Decent American.

Yes, a star sure does play himself a piece at a time. Look at John Wayne in
Red River.
Now, they'd all signed on to see the drive through . . .
moo moo moo
.
But when the going gets tough, two yellow-livered skunks deserted the drive.

They is apprehended and brought before the Duke, sprawled against his saddle, shit-faced drunk as usual and nipping away as he mutters, "I'll show them all something to remember."

The varmints whine out, "All right, go ahead and shoot us!"

The Duke takes a long pull and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then it comes out, ugly as anything I ever sawed, "I'm gonna
haaannng
you!"

He is, of course, prevented from doing so by his PR man.

"Bad for your image, Duke. We'll have to call in the Old Man to shoot you in the leg and stop you."

The deserters slink off like the coyotes they is.

Later, in an interview, he defended his original position.

"Hell yes I'll hang the sons of bitches! I may be portrayed as a hard, cruel man, but never as a mean or petty man."

Well, now, a little pettiness might be a lot prettier. Don't rightly see how it could be any uglier.

Hollywood has filmed the species right down to the bone. There is not a dream of man that Hollywood hasn't cooked down to a hideous travesty. The human mold is broken and this you gotta hear . . . out crawls a monster centipede with the head of a Hollywood Jew and plops itself down on the front page of the
Völkischer Beobachter.

Nazi movement compressed into three minutes of film time. The beer hall putsch . . .
Mein Kampf 
. . .
Olympic games . . . concentration camps . . . Blitzkrieg . . . the Russian front ... the Bunker... executions at Nuremberg ... the Executioner is trying to rig up an electric chair in Samoa ... a blast of current reduces him to a cinder.

Old Sarge does a hula dance.

"I'd like to see some moa of Samoa."

There comes that moment in a blinding flash of bullshit when he suddenly
sees
everything, and the way it all fits together as part of the great whole. He is everything and everything is him, and there is no aloneness, no separation, just endless love. He knows all the questions and all the answers, and there is only one answer, so he wrote "Nature Boy" and got cured.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return."

The Charge of the Light Brigade: We have the advantage of surprise. The virus enemy cannot comprehend elasticity. They cannot believe we can survive their seemingly foolproof broadcasts.

Scrambles.
The craft are made of light and you have to keep yourself completely empty. Any solid thought will be blown to atoms by the velocity. Target is located in southern Utah ... all squadrons zero in . . . SU coordinates 23 . . . drawing a blank . . . keep looking . . . dishes . . . a network moving up and down and sideways like a huge mechanical toy . . . magnetism in reverse . . . they can pull thoughts out of your brain and pull them in . . . wall ahead . . . very narrow pass . . . wall is black . . . the pass is like a crack . . . rowing out into Lone Star Lake . . .

The lake is empty, the marina in ruins. A few broken hulls full of water. I launch an aluminum rowboat and row out into the still black water. Frenzied attacks of screaming demons from Bosch intercut with nigger-killing, fag-bashing rednecks and snarling dogs . . . barbed wire . . . dogs . . . towers . . .
Achtung!
Machine-gun fire . . . bogged down in old war films.

I recall a game from childhood that we used to play in the school bus:

Child 1: "I'll put a copperhead snake in your house."

Child 2: "I'll put a hooded cobra in your mother's electric."

Child 1: "I'll release black widowers in your granny's outhouse."

Child 2: "I'll put piranha fish in your bathtub." 

Child 1: "I'll put sulphuric acid in your Listerine." 

Child 2: "I'll put nitric acid in your eyedrops."

Miracles are made from the most unlikely ingredients. And miracles are the deadliest of all weapons. When all else fails, the final, the last resort is a miracle.

This is the Age of Miracles or the Age of Total Nonmagic, Nonmiracle, a completely predictable cause-and-effect universe running down to Nada.

Orgone balked at the post. Christ bled, Time ran out. Thermodynamics has won at a crawl.

The Miracle of the White Cat:

The White Cat has a million defenders who will fight to the death for their white cat.

"Death to the Board!"

"Death to the Nuclear Conspiracy!"

"Come out and say what you are doing!"

Wimpy jumps up: "You trying to kill our White Cat?"

Wimpy in my lap now, purring loudly. He has such a need for love. My little brown Wimpy beast.

Unexpected ingredient? How can any danger come from an old man cuddling his cats? Danger comes always from the most unlikely direction. Huge black cats are lapping up the Milky Way.

Come out from under the table, you Board members, and face the White Cat, and the faces behind the White Cat.

Do they fear a harmless, necessary cat? No. They stand in deadly fear of the Gods and spirits that the White Cat represents. "That male cat is Ra himself." And many other powers as well, large and small—powers they thought long dead, blocked out or blockaded.

"I tell you nothing could get through that blockade . . . nothing . . . but here it is . . . the White Cat."

A radiant cat glowing with a pitiless white light, light on secret files and ops, light on directives and memos, light everywhere. No corner of darkness left. Power shrivels and turns to dust in the light.

Light on lies and contingency plans for drastically reduced personnel, a self-chosen few who will survive the holocaust they have themselves unleashed.

Operation Clipper: Space sailcraft propelled by the blast that reduces planet Earth and its inhabitants to a smoldering cinder. It isn't good PR, not good at all.

A. J. Crump was a philanthropist. He had not always been one. Years before his conversion, he had discovered that it is more profitable to give wages than to receive them. He was too stingy to pay an accountant, and did all his accounts by hand and kept them in huge ledger books in his dingy office, from which he ran his multimillion-dollar hardware network coast to coast. Going over his accounts one Christmas Day, he decided to extend the maxim: It is more profitable to give money away than to make money.

So, he launched the Crump Fund. His first act was to endow a turkish bath with a horse trough in front of it. Why did he do this? He was clean himself, a clean old man? No, he was not clean, as he could not bring himself to bathe, for fear of sustaining a loss. But he approved of cleanliness in others. And why the horse trough? He loved animals? There is no reason to believe that he did, but he was never seen to abuse any animal in public.

And that was only one of the civic things he did. He set up a home for homeless animals. Cats he dug special. And he didn't practice euthanasia: "Can't see as you do any cat a favor by killing it." When neighbors complained that his cats escaped and killed birds, he set up a network of bird-feeding stations. And there were soup kitchens and dormitories for homeless folks. All these establishments were graced by a life-sized picture of the Founder.

So he cut his taxes to the bone. The house he lived in was the Office of International Nutrition, which specialized in food packets containing vitamins, minerals and proteins in a special Crump package, no bigger than a cigarette box and therefore easy to distribute.

It is Christmas Day. Old Crump is reviewing Christmases past. Well, he'd always enjoyed giving things away. Sure, virtue goes out, but it comes back with compound interest.

Christmas present . . . he pets the white cat on his lap. Christmases to come . . .

Some fifteen years ago I conceived a TV show to be called
On Call.
Characters are summoned to appear
On Call
and answer a battery of searching questions. The subjects may be celebrities, they may be unknown. If the subject fails to appear, we ask our questions of a dummy got up to look like the subject and supply his answers. Don't be a dummy. Come when you are called.

The idea lay fallow until this morning. It sometimes happens that a communication can put one into such a tizzy of annoyance that Satori results. This is the Crank Satori, and one of the more difficult routes, as witness Ezra Pound. One does not as a rule thank the irritating instance that has accreted a pearl. He did not intend it to do so and will, almost certainly, recoil from the Satori it has ignited.

This morning I conceived a TV program based on the White Cat. The White Cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The White Cat is described by the Sanskrit word
Margaras,
which means the Hunter, the Investigator, the Skip Tracer, He Who Follows the Track. He is also the killer of forces that lurk in darkness. All hidden motives and beings stand revealed in the inexorable silver light of the White Cat.

The show could be called
Cat's Eye.
Subjects are summoned before the Cat's Eye. Like the old game of
Truth or Consequences.
It works like this: Here is a worthless shit in Warwick, Rhode Island, who killed a stray cat in his microwave oven. We find his name and address. We photograph him and his house. We interview local people.

Now we summon him to appear. TRUTH. He refuses, of course. CONSEQUENCES. We put it out on the air. We use a hideous dummy. We show his picture. We show his house. We invite the viewers to phone and write in comments. Better he should appear on TV. The consequences we can evoke are deadly. He moves. He changes his name. The White Cat will find him. We never give up.

Another program is called
Truth and Recompense
.
Neglected artists, unrecognized merit, forgotten inventors and ideas and concepts, unobtrusive workers for the Djoun forces, the Little People.

Case in point are homes for animals where they are maintained in perpetuity, not killed. Oh, sorry . . . "put to sleep" is the phrase. Would
you
like to be put to sleep? Animals don't like-it either. They know Death when they see it, and so-called Humane Society Shelters are death camps. I couldn't work there for any money. Oh, yes, they are doing good work. They do find homes for some of the animals, etc. Granted.. But not on my show.

There are two permanent shelters outside New York City, and one in Chicago called Tree House. So we show the work they are doing, we invite contributions and make suggestions. We seek out the unknown, the unrewarded. The man who stopped and helped. Those who take in strays. The Johnsons of the world. We sanction the shits and reward the Johnsons.