Filling Rocinante's tank at a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, Owen admitted to himself that he felt ill. He'd tried to ignore it all morning, tried to shake it off. A hangover was no reason not to travel, he'd thought rising before the rest. He had packed the bike and driven to the gas station, preparing to head out for Highway 1. A hangover. Sure, that's it. He had looked forward to riding the stretch on a touring bike for years. Dreamed about it. Now, moments before cruising the eight hours up the highway, he felt feverish, nauseous, achy and delirious. Ragged out. Rocinante seemed to have gained half-a-ton during the night. Picking her up off the kickstand first thing this morning proved a struggle, his shoulders wincing, aching deep in the muscles. Yes, ill indeed. And there remained nowhere else to go except forward: forward, towards San Francisco. Landing there, so to speak, and recuperating, appeared the only feasible alternative, but one must make it there first. He bought a Mountain Dew¨, paid the attendant, walked back to the bike. Lifting one leg slowly, stiffly over Rocinante's saddle, he sat, winced again.

"Shit," Owen Dunum muttered, started the engine. Rocinante ran smooth, that was the only positive thing he held in his favor. The rest of his favor looked something like dog shit. Owen felt something like dog shit. But Rocinante sounded up for the trip, so he drove along Santa Monica Boulevard, overwhelmed with disgust at the obscene display of wealth -- sterile white roman columns, pillars, black bent rod-iron and brick fencing with fifteen foot hedges and gold-plated driveway gates -- same old vulgar routine, he thought, drew deep inside his mind and focused, focused, focused preparing himself for the trip. Harnessing energy wherever and what little he could of find it and squishing it into a tight little ball about the size of the Universe, held in his head like a secret about to blossom.

There she blows again, again, the ocean, like a favored old whore. I can make it if I can drive alongside the ocean, look out across an endless horizon. That will work. Removal. Indifference. Disassociation. Splintered atoms. Separate body from mind. Turn right here now for highway one. It won't be long now and I'll be cradled by the bay and I can rest -- oh! for respite! Reverie! Bliss! but no, only lonesome roads and cold, moisture-riddled wind. The heart races too fast, skin feels hypersensitive, the moisture in the air makes it sting like striking gravel. I need to stop and put on long pants and a sweater or I'll be hypothermic in half-an-hour.

The gas station bustled with people, a 76 station on the outskirts of Los Angeles painted hunter's orange, but Owen was too delirious to care and he pulled in and changed clothes right there in the lot and people looked at him like a service station sideshow.
Showbusiness.

Even with the sweater I'm freezing. Christ! I can barely hang on to the handles. My back hurts and my arms feel weak and my head -- spinning like a carousel and my eyes ache in their sockets and shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. You lock your mitts around those grips and don't you let up. Not for a second. You need to get yourself and this bike eight hours up the road and god-damnit, that's what we're going to do. A little fever never hurt anybody. Well, that's not entirely true, but it will have to work for now because you don't have the money to stop and stay the night in a motel, and making camp is out of the question. Be there before you know it. Whining will get us nowhere. There'll be women in San Francisco, and parties, and good pot, think about that. Things will be just fine, just fine. Relax. Forget those muscle cramps and concentrate on this view. It's astounding, don't you think? The road carved along a mountainside, trundling aside the Pacific -- a thin grey strip, ugly among all this beauty. It scars it. I hate it. But the ocean. Yes, the ocean. You'll want to be on the ocean someday. Return to it, like you'd been there before. Another life, no doubt. That's it. Run off to explore the other lives and leave the driving to us. But I've got to pay attention. Can't just space out on the scenery or I'll become a part of it. Besides, the wind is still colder than a blast freezer, seemingly, and I'm shaking all over. What the fuck is holding me up? Surely not gravity. Inertia. That's it. That is all. As long as I don't stop I will tend to remain in motion. But I'll have to stop. For fuel, if nothing else. Fuel. That's what I need. Food. But I don't feel up to eating anything. Blood sugar no doubt scraping the bottom of the barrel. But stopping means a little loss of inertia. Every time you stop it will become more and more difficult to start again, to regain motion. But it really doesn't matter anyway because I'll always start again, or die. It's that simple. I can work forever.

Forward never straight; forever moving forward.

"Wheel is turning and you can't hold on, can't let go and you can't stand still . . . if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will."
Very near to thunder. Not. Very near to dog vomit. It feels like a test. A passage rite. Intensely painful mind and body fucking to gage your worthiness. The first thought primordial: Ouch. That must be it. The City wants to see how strongly you desire her attention. She feels you coming, looking for a tangle, and so she knocks the wind out of you to see what kind of gumption you posses. Well I'll tell you this, you can beat a little illness. You could drive all the way to Eugene, if I were so inclined. What's a fever got to do with it? Focus in and beyond it and you'll find power. Pain exists only as a dream so go ahead an just dream it right the fuck out of your head. Beyond it lies power. The old power. If you could hold on long enough, you wouldn't even realize where you were, and you'd wake up and be there. But you need to concentrate. Total concentration. Either that or chew your way through it like a barbarian. That works, too. Stoic indifference. Sheer granite intentions. Yeah, fuck the Buddha. What did he ever do for you? Nothing. Nothing left to do but pillage. Rampage forward raging. What the hell are you thinking about? Buddha gave you all kinds of worthwhile ideas. He gave you your first novel, shithead. And now you've killed him. Smooth move, smarty pants. Real classy. After all these years of learning the metaphysical ropes and rungs and girders of the weltanshuang and now you're going to prove to all those people you fooled for so long that you are really nothing more than a punk. White trash. Where the hell is this coming from. That's not what I intend to do at all. I'll hear back from the publishers and then I'll decide what path to take: self-destructive or not. We shall see. This wind is way out of line -- gusting like a banshee. Maybe I should stop. Camp? It's only another seven hours. Nothing at all. Don't be stupid. If you stop you'll be down for days and you don't have enough food. Seven hours. You can pass the time. What, you've nothing to think about? You've always been able to entertain yourself. Prided yourself on it. Where are all those thoughts now?

Think about Daytona Beach. You always felt good in Daytona. People were uneducated and violent and the fodder was perfect for studying deviance because most of the people who lived there ran away from one thing or another and no one really cared about anything, except not going to jail, and you could go to the bars everyday and eat for free and drink cheap beer and watch the boats glide along the Halifax and you worked at night and could look at the ocean any time you wanted to. Yes pleasant, indeed. There was the Crooks Den and you and Kamper would go and drink whiskey there and ogle Kelly, with her large breasts nearly falling out of her thin spandex tights and you could always see the curves of her butt cheeks. The walls of the bar adorned with pictures of famous outlaws on pooltable-felt-green backing and you and Kamper made plans for getting on that wall someday. Crime spree across America. That was it. The theme of the bar, that was the topper: "Crime doesn't pay." It reminded you of a Ford Galaxie 500 you saw once in San Francisco with four Mexican boys inside strung out, nearly comatose, listening to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack with a 'Just Say No to Drugs' bumper sticker on the rear. Yes, that was Daytona in a microcosm. And you felt good there, quit smoking cigarettes, drank only on occasion, swam in the ocean nearly everyday . . .

. . . you need to get back to the beach, any beach, and lay in the sun and feel good because you don't feel good now and this scenery is stunning with the whisps floating in and out of the mountains, fresh and mystical, and you can't enjoy a lick of it because at any moment you could lose it and you need to think about the drive -- highway 101 will be quicker and this is the last exit so fuck the ocean, go inland where it's warm because you can't keep shivering forever. Let it go. No shivering, shaking, one form, one piece -- bike and rider conjunctured -- remaining upright. Solid. Unbending. Moving forward towards the abyss at deafening speeds with a grin the size of the Grand Canyon, vibrations whanging deep in the elbows and across the shoulders throughout the tendons and cartilage but they will not fluctuate. You pull them tighter until they snap never breaking to disease nor wind nor fatigue.

Not even Death.

It simply must work that way for now.

Say, say oh playmate, come out and jones with me, and bring your needles, three, smoke up my apple tree. Shoot up my rain barrel, piss on my cellar door, and we will live on junk forevermore.

Inland California rising and falling, rolling fields bursting into sudden crests, crumbling back to flatlands in a heartbeat. Mountains, rivers and oceans converging into sea. Like the Hegelain dialectic: Thesis, Antithesis: Synthesis.

Synthesis. Cynosure. Convergence. Nirvana. Splendid reigns the landscape! Combining all those brilliant features of the planet into one compact ball. Intriguing how simply it can be done, how tastefully. The sun shines, as usual, puffy tufts and thunderheads come and go, but the wind is still freezing. Or maybe it's me. I've got all my warmest clothing on and I'm still shivering like a Chihuahua. Damnit, if my arms and back didn't ache so bad I could live with it. Well, live with it, I will, but it would better without the pain. . . when did I turn so damn sensitive to cold? I delivered papers when I was young and it never bothered me then, hell, it was fun to run around naked in the snow. Well, I suppose I'd still do something like that. Maybe it was Alaska -- cold and damp for weeks, except for the few hours you slept, quiet and warm in the sleeping bag, maybe it was there. Whatever. I just don't seem to able to ward it off as well as I used to. It's aging. You know it deep down and as much as you refuse to accept it, you age just like any other human being. I don't care how strong you think you are, you're older now and there's no denying it -- you live hard and with time start to wear thin like every other organic being on the planet. No. No, no, no, I will not have anything to do with this aging business. It doesn't make a shitlick bit of difference. It's all in the mind. I'm just as strong as I was four years ago. Stronger, in fact. More knowledgeable. Oh, do watch that. That will get you in deep. Deep, indeed, to think that you know anything at all. That is the start of it. You go and get cute and find yourself racked up against the wall with the rest of them. Maybe that's what it will take. A nightstick up your ass. Maybe that will help you out. Oh, stop it, will you. It won't end up like that at all. This isn't a self-destructive thing, not yet. Oh, no not at all that's why you're driving out-of-your-head at high speeds. Oh, yes, that's quite a rational decision making process you have there. Shut up. We've discussed that point already. Let's talk about something else. Remember that time in Petersburg when you worked for sixteen hours and you were so sick that you had to vomit all day into the drains and your puke mixed in with the blood and salmon grey-pink guts -- you could barely stand but you stood there at the machine all day and never missed a beat. The breaks were the hardest part because you had to stop, stop, yes, stop. Please, stop. The bike needs gas . . .

The station so typically Californian, with an eclectic collection of bright, sunshiny idiots, but you can't even be pleasant. But it doesn't matter. Pay for the gas, don't stop so long that you relax or there'll be all sorts of trouble, hoist yourself back up on that bike and get the hell on down the road. The longer you don't move the longer it will be before you really can stop moving, moving forward no longer for a moment. That will be fine. Besides, it's better with the drone of the engine. You can focus on it, use it as a mantra. Isn't that better? Yes, I think it will be alright, but as soon as it gets up to speed the wind batters, banters, screams , but what can you do about the wind, again and again. Ignore that. Focus on the engine. Hear how steady? Four pistons, multiple gears and springs and valves and rods and bearings and gas and air and electricity all combined to produce this so soothing sound, purr, whirr, chirr, gurr -- losing yourself in the sound the hammering no longer matters. Flow with it. Don't fight the wind, figure it out, when it changes, change with it. Fuck all that. The wind strikes from every direction and the only course remains to fight it, I tell you, try to flow with it and this body and bike will flow with it right the fuck off the highway and into a ditch. No one reaches immortality by going with the flow, I don't give a shit what Buddha says, he had to fight like hell within himself to produce all those efflorescent images. And it won't do you any good to flow right now. Now it is time to struggle. Now it is time to fight like hell because if you don't you become another roadside attraction. Yes that's it. Laugh like hell and fight like a wounded lion. That will get you through. Ranting on, aren't you? Like the bleat of a throat-slit ram gurgling it's last act on Earth -- bouncing about spraying blood on the mud-brick walls of some adobe-pagan-church built just below the treeline -- with the mist hanging in the air and the morning sun splayed through the trees highlighting the crimson puddles on the thin forest undergrowth. Yes ranting now, it's the only way to get through. You can't feel your hands, really. Just trust them. They've served you well, your hands. Assume they know what they are doing.

Where is Narakajapa when you need him. I guess I'm not underground, so that's no good. In the forest just below the treeline. In the Sierra Nevadas, perhaps, or Klamath. That's where I want to build it some day, my abode-pagan-church for one. I'll have a set of gods all to myself and we will romp through the forest doing godlike things -- making mountains from molehills, willing deep-slit creviced lakes with chasms cut into the mantle -- the wind ripping and the clouds whipping by like cars on a Californian interstate when it's not a rush hour. During the rush hours nothing moves, like time held still, and the gods and I would go back to the adobe and slit ram's throats for fun and cut the horns off and run rampant through the forest with ram's horns held to our head and butt horns to see who was the strongest and I would win some of the time, and when Bacchus wasn't too drunk he would win, and Bes, and Buddha, Pan, Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, of course, we'd keep her around for the rites of intensification. There are others, but she's our favorite. She gives good head. Sometimes we let Elvis sing, but not often. It's pleasant now because there's not many cars, and almost no tractor trailers. I don't think I could stand another convoy . . . Rocinante feels thick and heavy but it's only another four hours and this will all be over and the wind will be away for awhile.

Whip it away.

Yes, fling it astray. That's the idea. Go to the source and tap it. Suck the sap, suckle the leather teat. So few truly find it, so many try. Like the Theory of Relativity. Energy equals mass times velocity squared. All those years, sitting at the source, like a pebble, like a lichen, waiting, and one god after another passes by it, until Einstein. So simple. He picks it up, smiles, knows he has found a bonafide chunk of the puzzle. Not all of it, mind you, but a chunk. No one god has ever assembled the entire construction in any one reign. Close, mind you, though the bull's-eye source of the Qualitative Quantum Ideal remains in tact, guarded. Shrouded from most, shown to mere bucket of mortals during brief flashes of omniscient brilliance and luminosity and unattachment. Few return unaltered. The cathexsis , the catharsis, the cognition, precognition, post cognition grilling time-space causality to the point of dogma overloads the mind and it increases density in order to try and retain what it touched upon. Retention to no avail. But to touch it! To cringe, exalted at the surge as you place the ideal to your belly convulsing and it takes it in like a lover, like a whore. And you receive the gift and you know, for a moment, all there is to know and it really does boil down to one simple set of principles waiting one by one to be shone and it is when gods come across the planet that parts of these principles reveal themselves to the masses via the progenitor and the idea grows over the centuries, over the millennia, traveling at the speed of rumor towards decay. Growing new shoots while the original roots remain forgotten, rotting. So it goes. Because it's only part of the whole. It cannot live on itself alone without the others. Entropy. So the fundamental idea remains to assemble all the pieces given thus far into a new cohesive mass capable of sustaining its own existence without the aid of an exterior source. Entropy defied. Perpetual motion. The odds, however, never run in your favor.

But if you win.

Big money! Big prizes!

Yet at the source the only wealth is wisdom.

And wisdom is the key ring to power. And power is a queen bitch, standing chess-like in front of king death -- slow, ruddy and unable to move yet so integral -- the queen, lightning-fast , defending his honor, then death comes in to take all the credit when it was power that actually wore the mortal down, ground to dust from the mud whence they were made. Mud. Mud is about it. Mud is all I feel. Mud is all I see. Murky, moldy, sluggish with apathy. Lethargy reigns when the tired man is broken, like a swamp plowed under. But I am not broken. Not yet. I'm still breathing and I'm still moving forward, still able to navigate. The wind is bearable but the landscape appears droll. Maybe I should cross over to highway one. Fuck that. Fuck that imbecilic idea. Just haul your ailing ass to San Francisco and find Kara. She'll be there for you. She always has been and with any luck always will be. I wish I were there now so she could nurse me. I could do with a bit of nursing right now. Two more hours. I need to stop for gas at the next station. I'm pushing the tank too far. Need to find gas . . . and a soda. And can I sit for just a moment without motion? May I breathe? Only for a minute or two. Any more and you'll be space garbage. I feel like space garbage right now. There's a gas station, it's off the road, it looks open. Yes, gas now, and soda. Rest. It looks crowded and I've got to piss. Came on all of a sudden, didn't it? From out of nowhere: one tank full, one empty.

These other touring bikes. I look at them and then I look at Rocinante -- how very different they appear. They gleam with the dollar sign shine of chrome plating polished ad nauseam. All flash, no guts. Rocinante has as much chrome as any of them I just won't polish it. Her headlight held to the fairing with duct tape, no windshield, worn saddle. Looks like she's been rode through hell and back, yes sir, and I like it that way. Cultivating the look, if you will. I Bike looks like shit, people assume it runs the same. Little do they know that I ride the most faithful bike in the world. I've got to piss. It's only a walk across the platform to the station and the fucking men's bathroom has an out-of-order sign hung on it and the only one available is the women's. I'll just use that one. Nobody around. Piss fast. But the fucking door opens and three girls walk in and I'm standing there with my dick hanging out. Smile. Yeah, it looks good standing here with my penis in my hand smiling and blushing and I'll just zip it up after the shake. I'm too fucking tired to say anything. All I can offer is a smiley face and a shrug and a mumbled apology. Where the hell is that soda machine. . .

Say, say, oh playmate, come out and jam with me. And bring your guitars, three, rock up my apple tree. Drink from my rum barrel, kick in my cellar door, and we'll be superstars forever more.

Feels fine, this sun, beneath a tree in the middle of nowhere in particular. The breeze on the run, in and out, breathing easy. I have enough to make it there. Just enough if I conserve. So stop thinking so damn much. You'll wear yourself out. Zen out. Stoic out. Do something out and focus and finish the soda and roll. Maybe listen to a tape. Pick some good driving music, something like Camper Van Beethoven, that will work. Back to the bike. Two more hours. It's hard to stand but I can still do alright in the saddle. I just wish I weren't so damn dizzy. Nearly hallucinating. Great, that's what I need. Where are those windmills, anyway? And the bridge. What about the Bridge? Where the hell is that Bridge? You know you look, and look and search and seek and quest and envision and dream and martyr yourself on the mantle of humanity and you still can't find that fucking Bridge. But it's out there, always, you know this and in this one point find a sphere of reference. That's the point where Tibetan Buddhism and Western stoicism cross paths inadvertently: a working relationship with death, and an indifferent attitude towards the inevitable. Stop it. Shut up and drive. But why focus on the driving? If I think about the driving it makes it worse. If I think about holding the throttle steady and the bike upright the ache throughout my arms and back stand out and I start shaking and that's no way to make it there in one piece so I'll drift off if I want to. Thinking all the way to the core if need be. The landscape is picking up a bit now, passing through a stand of tall, white birch trees the air warm and clean-smelling, if it stays like this I can make it there easy. I want to remember these trees. That's it. Write it. Write it all down. You don't want to forget a moment of this. It would make a good story. It makes the whole scene very theatrical, don't you think? Those aches and pains are all in the name of showbusiness and story-telling. Isn't that the idea? Makes it surreal. A movie. Sit down and hold the bike steady and enjoy the movie. You can almost see the grains of the celluloid pass before your eyes, if you look, unfocused. And the whole countryside is idyllic -- townships made from myths and legends each taking a character all it's own. Gilroy: garlic capital of North America, and so on. You want to remember all of that and the birch trees and the fact you feel yourself becoming a character in a play which you are about to interrupt. All very poetic. That won't mean a damn thing unless we haul it all together. You need to concentrate. You're relaxing. Well, relaxing is good, but not too much. Stay surly. Surly will see you there.

Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn't I come in feeling good? I guess it wouldn't be, what, appropriate? Why? Why the hell did I have to get ill today? Christ! I stay in Mexico for days and I feel great and as soon as I come back to this hell hole I feel like a freshly-cut eunuch. No anesthesia provided. Field dressing. The skin removed slow, sawing, tearing the sack with a dull knife and blood fountains from the crotch as testicles become exposed, falling out, dangling, the muscles desperate to pull them in, they convulse, release, cut away with that same dull blade, that same sawing. They lay there on the ground like chicken guts, maybe stomachs. Bull fries. Bailing wire wound tight across the laceration with a pussy willow for a patch -- a tourniquet seeping, legs stomach covered with drying blood, in delirium rubbed all over yourself like jisim and the pain is so much you puke, piss and pass out. You no longer feel your groin, your sex. Adrenaline makes it all painless. . . Adrenaline all I need now, to keep it going forward . . . I can't sit up anymore.

Shut up.
I can't hold the bike up any longer.
Go away.
I'm freezing.
Stop whining.
I'm dying.
Isn't everybody?
You're so full of shit.
Life is like that.
Don't you care?
Caring will get you nowhere. Nothing really matters.
You're a bastard.
Who said it would always be painless? You said we could pull it off easy.
I lied.
You said it would be more like a victory lap.
Mortality is the best joke of all time. Had you forgotten?
I thought I knew.
You know nothing.
But I've learned . . .
You've learned nothing.
But you told me . . .
I lied. Life is like that sometimes.

Say, say oh playmate, come out and die with me, and bring your poisons three, jump off my hangin' tree. Wrists on my razors, lay on my cellar floor, and we will haunt lost souls forevermore.

Staggering to fill the last tank and so very close now. The traffic turned thick and more and more it looks like a video game. You feel nothing. One ship remaining, expect no quarter to return. I should be upon the skyline soon. Yearning for this skyline, I am, shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, ear to ear a dazed grin on my face. It's always most interesting at this point when you've broken through the wall and adrenaline overrides all systems and everything is fine. I feel fine. Never felt better. Where the hell is that skyline? I can do anything. Maybe I should ride a wheelie from here on in. No, maybe not. Half an hour if I can avoid the rush hour when nothing moves. Nothing moving, right. Everything squirming sounds more accurate. You can see the bacteria in the air and the thick carbon monoxide haze from the interstate turning the horizon dusty rouge. The road grows wider by the turn. Where am I anyway? I've never been up from this way and I don't want to stop again, no, no not again. Follow the signs. Can't miss it now. Sniff it out. Sniff your way to Kara. It doesn't matter whether or not you can see or not or think or not. Sense it. Seek the wolf bitch. If you can make it you're stronger than most and that means you've still got a chance to make it to Spain. Still moving forward, still smiling, covered with road scum, skin tight, guts knotted and the remnants of entrails hanging from your grinning mouth and bleeding groin, but you still look good. Still cultivating that certain look. White trash royalty. A guise to keep the morons off your back, throwing rocks and bottles at academic belltowers, belittling government, peddling anarchy to all who will buy it. Selling snake oil. That's what a proper god sells, bottom linewise. Because they only have a component, yet it's always taken for a whole. It's a lie, like snake oil, like truth. Into the traffic and the rush hour is here and nothing moves. Ten miles away and still no skyline.

Where the hell is that skyline? If I drove in between the lanes I could keep moving. I wonder if that's alright. Considering, I guess, that I count five or so other bikes doing just that I could, but can I drive that chute in this condition. Wobble, wobble, stumble stagger, roll. That image draws no pretty picture. Fuck it. Riding the chute is the only way to travel. A world of hurt. That's what we said as high school kids standing around a Defender¨ video game, skipping school, fighting mutants on alien turf to save the humans, the helpless, defenseless, stupid humans standing on the surface bawling their brains out waiting while some grotesque alien life picks them up and transmogrifies them into raving mutants. You had ten humans and if the aliens picked them all off the surface the screen exploded and all you had was black space and rabid mutants. Shoot and run, shoot, shoot, shoot, run, run, shoot, run, run, run, shoot, run-run-run-run. Shot. Wham. Game over. It was truly an image of a world of hurt. But you love it. You live for it. Life holds no existence without it. The hardship, the pain, the struggle, the distant-running odds, to push further when you've gone as far as you can go because you can always go beyond and beyond with the impatient taillights everywhere I live now in this world of hurt I'd thought only existed in a game, in theory and now here it writhes around me. Surprised? It was a gift. I thought you might like it. Better than those silly tourists, is it not? Why would you want to come in all happy and soft-minded. This queen bitch may take quite a pounding before she turns over her treasures. Ah, there's that fantastic San Francisco skyline. Fine. This is fodder for preparation. As the highway winds in and out of the smoked-purple hills lush where there are no houses the chute lays itself out before you but you need to watch fifty cars ahead and watch all of them. One swift lane change is all it takes. I like that. It's better than sitting in one place waiting in line. I'll take my chance with the morons. Which exit was it now? Seventh street? No, she said something about an exit on down where the earthquake broke up the highway. . . Seventh street will work though, I'll just go through downtown. If I can just ride through the city. Forward never straight. Gods die grizzly deaths. Riding a reflexive impulse now. Sleep soon come. Waiting for a bus, looking for a bridge, abandoned on a roadside -- a tabla rosa looking for bandied thoughts and worthwhile paths to power.

Market street, San Francisco. I want to spend time getting to know this place, such a fine excuse for a city. I can sense the insanity in the air, the polar cohesion adorning the streets and sidewalks and statues and fountains and I feel so out of place that I lower my antennae so nobody notices me, though I can see that I stick out. It looks as though I've been riding for a hundred-thousand-miles. Funny, I feel like the same way. Polk street, that's the turn. Then on up to Broderick. Yes it's all still here, the thin Victorians, the street life, the thick urban coating of soot, sweat, the rubble and decay, the splendor, all here. If only I could see. But all I feel vibrates from my other half guiding the way. Rest and relaxation, for awhile, that's all I want. Some time to breathe, sleep, drink, eat, perhaps sex, a shower, culture, pagan style. A little satisfaction after the burnout of a first novel is all I want, just a little satisfaction. Where the hell is Broderick? It should be up over anyone of these hills here, I remember climbing these hills. I'll get to know them. A few days and back on my feet and I'll knock-the-shit-out of this city. People everywhere dressed in gala revolution post nuclear garb, I see, and I no longer feel so out of place. Home. This is home. This has always been home waiting for my return.

I'm home.

And there are other bikers here, other people riding wheelies in the streets, no one innocent save for the half-dazed tourists taking pictures of it all. They are ignored, shooed like houseflies. Shoo. Almost there, just another hill or two. I can't keep it all straight anymore. What am I doing out here? Who do I think I am, anyway? Some fucking king? I am shit. What the hell? Where am I? Who am I, there now, I see it now and all I want is off, off this fucking motorcycle, rest: satisfaction, at my beckon. Is she home? Has she kept the soul kettle warm so that I might make feast. No feast. Sleep. Please sleep. Ring the doorbell so that she might answer, say hello, then sleep. No answer. No god-damn answer. Just like the bitch to be out gallivanting about while I'm standing here waiting for her. Put the bike up on the center stand it makes a great chair . . . just a spatch of respite, that's all I want, just a hint of satisfaction . . . to let me know that I am on the right track . . . the pursuit . . . so easy to live . . . so hard to live up to . . . and yet . . . without it . . . without the struggle . . . the conflict . . . the fear of impotency . . . the insomnia . . . metaphysics and lysergicacid dithylmide . . . marijuana . . . decadence . . . vice . . . without it life would be a bore, like a children's song.

Say, say oh playmate, come out and hang with me. And bring your hookas, three, dance in my apple tree. Bathe in my rain barrel, sex on my cellar door, and we will live like Pan, forevermore.
Just a little satisfaction . . . that is all I ask.

Part II:
Duct-tapped Boots and Jesus Suits
(a.k.a) San Francisco Star Search


"Your request for satisfaction is denied: open wide."
-- the Meat Puppets.

Whip it away! The maudlin days of burlap bouquets, stolen sans pay, punished sans say, dealt the venomous maze of slipshod array then stung with a blaze of Gilgamesh craze, like a hot-brazed bat bellied in the boiler's embrace.

Wings of fire flick the mortal shackles and the spirit soars, released.

And dead men need no shoes.

Sling it aside! Hypocritical pride, demonic abide, harnessed to pull like a bull. Kick it in gear, find flow without fear -- for no mere beau with lean towards the Show gleans banter and praise from his peers. Payment in full, insanity's cull, fastened so thin to a life of chagrin, the haggering din, that a life without sin would be null.

Showbusiness in the end.

And dead men need no cowhide.
So if you should glide on the black leather tide of gilded cage and beguiled rage, remember inside, your spirit to hide, stowed like a noose after trial.

Dead men tell no lies?

A hanged man cut down, paraded through town and eaten by hounds, slain shown to decree that all can agree on just what will be, or find without plea knotted rope on a tree, leer the pedigree words of wisdom.

Dead men tell good stories.

And they will ascend the best of their friends to heights of rift and fury, then allure them again with contract and pen and hang them for the jury. Dead men don't spend royalties.
So pillage and rape, you remnant of ape, you soul left lost on the roadside! For the longer we wait for the incarnate gate, the more we deny what our skins say innate.

Dead men shed.

AND NOW! LIVE FROM THE HALLS OF VALHALA IN THE TEMPLE OF ASGARD COMING TO YOU VIA TELEKINETIC SATELLITE! HERE'S THE SHOW THAT MAKES MOUNTAINS FROM MOLE HILLS AND TURNS CHARISMATIC MORTALS INTO TEEN ICONS! IT'S THE SHOW YOU LIVE FOR! THE SHOW THAT'll GET YOU RICH QUICK WITH ONLY A FEW STRINGS ATTACHED! BIG MONEY! BIG PRIZES! WE LOVE IT! AND HERE HE IS, YOUR HOST OF SAN FRANCISCO STAR SEARCH, THAT MASTER OF DISASTER: THOR, GOD OF THUNDER!

(Applause.)

And now a word from our sponsor.

"And so it came to be, friends and enemies, that your humble narrator, Thor, God of Thunder, God of Oak, Master of the Battle, Elder God of Strength and head of the Elder Gods council on mortal physical fitness, came to reside in the body of a young and dying man traveling planet Earth under the alias of Owen Dunum. It was the last time I would tour the planet as a mortal. After this passage ended it was omniscience or bust. And bust doesn't fit in my vocabulary, unless it pertains to something I desire to conquer. I will never 'bust'. It is not becoming of a god.

It is not fun to be a god.

Throughout the eons I have been an angry god, so to speak -- shattering the sky, splitting the ground, battering any who might seek the railings of my wrath, flinging thunderbolts on a whim, on a binge with Bacchus, a close friend of mine -- all those things associated with godliness. All these feelings I have known as power. The power of the immortals. But the usage of all that power over the years runs a tab of extraordinary magnitude. Imagine not paying your electric bill for 400,000 years.

We're not talking chump change.

Thus, as the Universe exists in a dynamic and reflexive manner, I have a bill to pay before I may leave the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and so on, and continue gallivanting about the cosmos, pillaging and what not. But before that there is this bill, this damned big bill. And I must pay it. So it is, was and always will be. I will perform this one last gig, the grand finale. I'll make it striking, awe-inspiring, decadent -- but it will not be pretty. It's never pretty when a god pays the tab.

Gods die grizzly deaths.

So faces up! Smiles on, everybody look insane. Act surly, superior. Let's make it look like it's the best thing since chocolate covered donuts. There's a show to put on. The kids in the barn -- the children of the babyboomers -- grow restless with anticipation of the end of the decade and the decline of the Christian Era. New gods sprout left to right, left to right, filled with regal rage and mysticism. Performance: intensity and duration and a total lack of fear are three of the keys required to turn the locks of fate. A three-lock box holding the questions to the answers we propose? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know. Just remember this as you screw-up during the avatar command performance:

It's all just showbusiness, anyway.

That's the most important rule. So here we go, off deeper into never-never land. I think to the words of another god friend of mine, Albert Einstein, God of Knowledge, who said this:

"Imagination is more important that knowledge."

Imagine that.

Imagine this:

The lights come up and no one is innocent anymore. No place to run, no place to hide. The city brims with early evening activity. The day girls going and the night girls coming, as usual. The whole place wreaks of carbon monoxide, patchouli oil, urine, ocean air, avocado trees, pigeon shit and curry powder. It smells uniquely human. A large, black, beat-up motorcycle sits in front of a cubist beige-brick apartment building on the corner of Haight and Broderick, an intersection in the middle of The Haight, between the upper Haight and the lower Haight. Haight street flowing like a Tigris or Euphrates with a waterfall between and the black bike sits there in the middle of urban whirr and the large blonde rider crashed out on the seat, clandestine, asleep, descending, leaning against the bright red Himalayan-sized pack.

"Owen, what the hell! You look like shit."

"Kara, good to see you, too. You want to give me a hand with this crap."

"Where the hell did you come from, anyway? "

"South, from Mexico. I got sick in Los Angeles."

"I've never seen you this beat before."

"I pushed it pretty hard," he says and swings a leg over the saddle and on to the sidewalk his legs feel like rubber and he staggers for a moment then bends over and puts his hand on his knees, feels her hand massaging his back and gathers the strength to carry the pack up three flights of stairs.

"Let's get you upstairs, you look like shit." "You're always so positive. It's one of the things I've always admired about you." He's standing straight now, a subtle sway, he begins to undo the bungi cords holding the pack to the touring seat. "Yes, ma'am, sure is good to hear that aggressive sailor's tongue of yours. It's rare in a woman and you pull it off well. Where the hell have you been?"

"Come on, now grumble bear, we need to get you into bed."

"A bed would do me well, at this point." She gently pats his back and he finishes undoing the strap and they remove the gear. He refuses to use the elevator. Stubborn to the end. He hardly makes it up the stairs. When they get the gear into the room he collapses on the floor. Kara hoists him into the futon in the middle of the one room apartment. A tall window runs along the north wall out on to a channel-iron fire escape revealing the skyline to the right and the towers of the Golden Gate ahead but he's too tired for looking now. She unties his shoes and pulls off his shirt, feeling drunk but he hasn't had a thing and yet he is paralyzed supine as though on the wreckage end of a three-month cocaine binge. Owen lays on the futon, exhausted. Absolute. Absolution. Absolved into a light mauve futon and drifting in and out watching Kara up off the bed and making soup for him in the open kitchen. She is beautiful, with thick dark hair, well-defined birthing hips, brilliant hazel eyes and large swaying breasts that he's only felt once in his life and he may never feel again, though he sure would prefer it if he did. But they were 'loving' friends, and both of them knew that if they slept with each other they would lose respect and the relationship would end dissolute so he lay there unerect while she made him soup feeling very much in love. It was the exhaustion. Nursing syndrome. Lust for female compassion, there on the bed deep within, disoriented, confused, subconsciously curious, grabbing at ideas withering, blossoming within reach, a toddler to some, the ones who live here. He felt it all around him, the collective energy, infantile and volatile, carefree, calling him, playmate. That god-damn song, he thinks, if he thinks of the song one more time he'll puke so he thinks about nothing except resting on the bed, ceasing writing for a moment, sneaking a moment to spare. "Here, can you eat this?" Thrashing the moment to motion, energy required to move to suck down the warm broth. Impossible. "No. Can you just sit with me and talk to me? Tell me about your life now. You look different , I see it. And that tongue of your's. Tell me what's been happening."

"It's the buzz works, Jack, I've been on a binge. I haven't slept with a guy since I broke up with Cleland but I've been looking. Looking a little, drinking a lot. Just out pulling off the 'party girl' routine. I lost my job a month ago and I've found some temp shifts, but I haven't been looking for a job. I've got to start. But I don't care. I'm poor as shit right now and rent comes due in like two weeks and there's no way in hell I'm going to come up with five-hundred dollars by then, so I figured I'm fucked, you know, so I've been drinking. Because you know, Jack, it really doesn't matter."

"So I've heard. Why do you keep calling me Jack?"

"It's just the generic name I decided to give to all men. Men call me baby; I call them Jack. What's the difference?"

"I don't call you baby; you don't call me Jack. We've been friends for along time and I'd really prefer it if you called me Owen, or something like that. I'm not too fond of this Jack crap."

"Well, that's the way it is . . . Jack," her face up into his, almost touching, looking him right in the eye, smiling, kisses him on the cheek. "It's so good to see you. I knew you'd come out here before you went to Spain." "Well, I thought you might show me the town . . . I thought I might like it here, thought I'd check it out . . . may not be back this way for a time . . . going all the way around this time . . . that's the idea . . . something to pass the time . . . always moving forward, you know . . . never straight. Nothing left for me here, now, everything's fucked, I want out . . . start with Spain, move on from there . . . never return . . . it'll be easier to publish in Europe. Everything's fucked on this continent . . . government wants to jail the lower class . . . not a good sign . . . Spain needs English teachers . . . I could bartend . . . everything's coming to revolt and I want to go to Spain and teach English . . . figure that, will you? Waiting for the revolution and here it comes and all I want to do is duck. What the hell kind of attitude is that?"

"Shut up and sleep," she says, brushing his head, calling reverie.

And reverie came like a call girl to a cancer patient.


The phone rings a couple hours later, she answers and it's a friend of her's: Anthony. "Do you want any acid," she says, Owen comes out of unconsciousness just enough to ask her if he knows about pot and with a simple "how much do you want," he scores a half. It's good to know it's there, he thinks, that's the way you want it. Gifts offered. Showing me her treasures, offering me the top shelf. That's the way you like to be treated in a new city. Set you up, show you the happening spots, find yourself a job, rake it in and go. It's that simple. Absolutely affirmative. No. Absolute Aberration. It's a feigned attempt and you know it drifting off here like the butthead king when there's work to be done and spending two-thirds of what you have left on marijuana. That's a skillful move. Oh yeah, you'll be moving on quick with money management like that. "Can't you sleep," and she's there again, stroking his forehead, stroking him in spirit only. "No, I'm too tired." He sits up and from the bed he can see only the tip of the skyline but it's enough to start his insides tingling. He knows there is much to do. The first of which would be sleep.

The last of which will be sleep, too, he thinks and smiles to himself. He made it, felt that sense of accomplishment in the pit of his stomach and the top of his head staring out at the skyline and feeling far away. Acts like that, he thinks, turn mere mortals into legends or roadside pyres, whichever comes first.

And it was no secret anymore, Owen Dunum desired above anything else to be a legend, a myth, a god.

He thought of it as a lucrative career opportunity, felt it in every atom in his body, and then some.

The benefits appear plethoric, but the job sucks. You gain a great many things if and when you become a pop idol or a teen icon or a prophet or a winner of the Nobel peace prize or a bodhisattva or, yes, even a famous game show host, but you lose the right to yourself. You gain social stature, critical esteem, monetary gain, and a lurid and fanatic following of doglike humans who find you so irresistible that they'd love nothing more than to take you home to their ramshackle way of life and hold you hostage -- you and they coupled, sharing in their misery and misplaced aggression, entertaining them, making them laugh forever and ever and ever and ever.

But in the end, Owen thinks, finally drifting again, the orbit deteriorating, in the end it's easier to write a book, or make a compact disk, or paint a picture, or just give them a stand-up cutout of your image. Michael Jackson and Ed McMahon and Clint Eastwood and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and The Beatles, they all used stand-up cutouts.

It seemed more functional than actual captivity.

It cost less, too.

In the morning she rises before he's coherent and he hears only movement and the radio playing soft rock. The whole scene feels pleasant and he draws into the covers, curling into a tight ball, snug for the first time in days. "The office number is on the desk. Call me when you get up and we'll go to lunch." Wind rushing over him as she opens the apartment door, sudden pressure as she closes it, he hears her turn the lock and he is alone. Finally alone. It's a near perfect moment, and none too soon. Satisfaction, relaxation, the need to unwind a tightly-wound brain through work and culture and fast-paced living, those are the goals. He stands up out of bed and strips down and stands naked in the window facing the city with a giant erection. He feels at home. The sky hangs low and puffy but it doesn't look like rain -- Owen takes care of the erection, takes a shower, throws on some clothes and goes outside to check on Rocinante. She sits there still, unharmed. Bliss. He pats her tank with affection walks down to the corner market. There are corner markets everywhere in San Francisco -- it's one of the things he finds attractive. They exist as nothing more than quaint convenience stores, but they're family run and once you get to know the owner you're in. Not so corporate, makes all the difference, he thinks, walking into the store on the corner of Page st.. Sam is there, vaguely recognizing Owen from his last visit and acknowledges him with a nonchalant, disinterested nod. He is Greek, with a fantastic belly, short, stout with olive skin thick black hair. His wife sits behind the counter cradling a child and Owen walks for the back of the store towards the soda section. He winds up with a Calistoga¨ and two spinach and cheese piroshskis, buys a newspaper, heads back for the apartment. He wants to withdraw, to not speak with anyone. Quiet time. The air cuts into his skin and insides still feel weak, low, his mind is gone -- an empty dock along the river and one left lost, standing there watching the boat pull out into the narrows, the water churning and who-the-hell-knows when another might come along, missing the boat watching the wake as it leaves you there, defenseless, broken down. The loss of inertia, gumption hissing slow like viscous bubbles from a leaky hydraulic line ready to blow and the boat is nearly around the narrows now and out of sight, out of mind. What the hell sort of a city is this anyhow. He wants to know. He takes the tools out of Rocinante's fairing compartments and walks the stairs to the apartment. He's left the door unlocked because he doesn't have a key. He needs a key.

The apartment looks small and comfortable -- his former stereo and steamer-trunk-speakers taking up the corners in front of the window wall. He'd sold them to her when he'd first left to travel, five years prior, and it was always a pleasure to see them, to use them. Dire Straits amongst her records somewhere, he finds it, puts it on. Always Dire Straits first thing out of bed. It seems fitting. The piroshskis taste divine with the view and the clouds beginning to break and cars honking at delivery trucks stopped in traffic. The city runs at full tilt. He would need to jump into that tilting soon. Today, tomorrow, the next day, and the day after, and so on for at least two months. At least. Spain would wait. The journey could be put on hold, indefinitely, could it not? He thinks this staring out the window, the wind feels chilly and he has goose bumps but doesn't know if it's from the wind or this looming obstacle in front of him now and the inertia is lost and will have to be rebuilt over time. Time. It was going to take a great deal of time.

There is time aplenty, he thinks, begins to unpack his Himalayan-sized backpack, the clothing tightly-rolled, the unused compass, whet stone, cassette tapes, books, a journal, a Frisbee¨, it is all in there defining his life for the duration, for the time. He hates time. It's the secret proving hardest to fight. There's so much of it, you're only grasp a blink. Too much time. Oodles of time.

Yes, lots and lots of time and fate and irony, and humans lasting long enough to bat but an eye at the drama unfolding. Surely there is enough to keep everyone busy.

Time always brings enough for everybody, like a potato salad, like Jell-O¨ brand gelatin.

Forcing the jettison, outward contractions shove the pod into traffic. The streets writhe, livid with movement. Owen feels like he's on stage. Energy and theatrics dominate behavior. People yelling, shouting, singing, laughing, jogging, working, moving with ease and as fast as possible from one place to another performing the acts they've given their lives to create. Tall lanky Victorians with seaweed bound vines, and school bus yellow bahaus ghetto boxes full of frustration and lion's eye wisdom create the serenghetti city to the suburban masses living on the fringe. It's always that way. They like to come in for the culture and the money, then flee to quiet, cop-ridden neighborhoods estranged in a vulgar display of ignorance and arrogance; returning only when they feel feisty to find the action. But now it's daylight and the tourists squirm and office slaves shuffle themselves sick as Owen drives toward the bay on Divisadero. She's working for some wheeler-dealer on Union street as a temp trying to work herself into a full-time job being faithful, working herself dead. The bay opens up at the top of the hill and you can see the entire expanse. It looks stunning. He thinks of the first people who climbed the hill, reaching the top, filthy, panting, see the bay and their hearts fills with blood and they never-ever want to leave that spot. Union lay forth or fifth down from the crest, the houses looking well-kept and built right into the grade so steep that Rocinante's brakes heat up by the third hill and he uses the gearing to slowly work the bike down the slope. A 45 degree angle, it seems, steep, throwing the rider from its back, slammed to the ground a thrashing hoof lays the midsection wide open just below the diaphragm and the rider's guts spill onto the sawdust -- the bull shredding and goring at the sight of blood and the clowns charge in to distract his frenzy so medics can haul the carcass out of the ring. One of the clowns picks up a chunk of entrail, throws it off to the side . . . sawdust clouds and drifts and the houses disappear and there are small shops and coffee houses -- he takes a right onto Union and above the Victoria's Secret shop he finds her office, walks in.

"Is Kara working?" and the three office slaves look up at him, react with fear, as usual. He sees it in their eyes. Owen smiles. "She's upstairs." He nods and walks up the stairs and Kara is there at the desk buried in computers and paperwork.

"That's it. Keep it up like that and you'll be dead by thirty-five."

"Not like it matters anyway."

"Are we going to eat?" The office is well-lit with sunlight with a balcony revealing the Golden Gate and the mountains across the bay.

"Yes, we're going to eat. Don't fret, hungry boy. I'm almost finished. Did you see the roof? Isn't that an incredible view?" "I was just noticing."

"Go take a look. I'll be done in a couple minutes."

Outside the air is cool and he smells the salt. "This is why I miss the ocean," he says, thinks about Florida, Alaska -- both by the ocean, though different oceans indeed, but always there to remind him of his moot existence. Standing off the right-of-way feeling gravity dragging you into the earth watching the tide on a ferrous agate six thousand miles away slowly tearing a beaten sand shore to shreds and the cars come by only once in awhile but they ignore you because you're just staring off into the water wanting to drown, quiet, reflective inhaling hypothermic liquid filling lungs and freezing and you sink slowly to the bottom -- food for marine life. That's why he likes to live by the ocean. San Francisco sits by the ocean, by the bay, by the mountains, by the primal flora, prostitutes and HIV and young boys who suck dicks for twenty dollars, jack-off parlors, crack cocaine, Dimethyltriptamine, exotic women, junkies, street schizophrenics, rock and roll, it all exists here and he feels like he can take it all inside himself and turn it into something grand, something eclectic and beautiful and wicked. If he can find the story . . . cut it to the base and see what makes it run . . .

"What are you staring at?"

"Nothing. Just thinking."

"Are you ready to eat?"

"Hell yes. Pardon me while I gnaw on the railings."

Union street bustles along with yuppies feeding and spending and tourists taking pictures -- Kara looks like one of them in her nine-to-five she-monkey suit and he looks like a road warrior. The scene feels pleasant and he smiles as she mounts the Rocinante on the raised touring seat. He enjoys having her on the back of the bike. She is beautiful, which lends him an air of credibility.

"Where do you want to go for lunch?"

"Mmmm . . . Sausilito. Let's go for a drive. I haven't been on a bike in a along time. You be careful, though. We better not wreck."

"We'll be fine. Trust me."

"I do trust you. If I didn't trust you I wouldn't be sitting back here. The last time I was on a motorcycle the guy dumped it. We slid along on the highway for fifty-yards. I still have gravel in my legs and my butt from it. I figured it capped the modeling career. Nobody wants to see gravel chunking out of some chick's legs, I mean, there's always air-brushing . . . but you can only do so much." Owen starts the bike and drives off the curb into the street and Rocinante roars off weaving through the traffic towards the Golden Gate Bridge. It is noon and every idiot with a car is out for a drive. Running home or to seal rock or the beach or Golden Gate park to eat lunch, they drive to hide-a-way denizens to escape the office for an hour. It feels almost noble. Almost like skipping school. But there's too much honesty. They'll return in an hour to quiet run-of-the-mill office jobs and sit quietly at their desks while their life leaks away in a swollen pustule of fax machines and office gossip, drug tests and bureaucratic nonsense. It was no way to live a life. No pathway to immortality, to be sure. It was a purgatory, indeed. Designed to nab a cult catholic conglomerate and cull them into senseless sensation. Catholics, he couldn't stand them. Christians, in general. It wasn't that he disliked them, he just felt better when they weren't around. Jesus came along did his gig and left and that was that. He must have put on one hell-of-a show, so to speak. Give Elvis two thousand years and see where he ends up.

There just might be a book to write, he thinks as they drive towards the bridge . . . The Way of Elvis: taking care of business. Taking care of your tribe. On the bridge the wind blows hard and the traffic is slow so they shoot the gaps and turn off towards the Marin highlands. Elvis always cared for his entourage. He gave them sports cars and houses like fish and bread and money like wine and when the blood flowed thick within there was not one of them who would betray him. He gave his followers all he had. He sung of love, heartache, Las Vegas and lemonade. He buried his chin in every woman's crotch he could wrap his hands around. That's true devotion. And they rose him up to iconoclastic heights of fame and held him out for all the world to see so proud and they killed him and cherished him in his younger image forever.

Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll -- a Jesus story.

One with the wind and the bike and Elvis they navigate the winding highland road and she is wrapped up close to him with her hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, he feels good with his two favorite women and the bay and the city and the pitch and dive of the road. "Fuck lunch," she says, "just ride the highlands. Will you be alright if we don't eat?"

"I'll be fine." The pangs in his stomach growl, he ignores them. They lie. Elvis ignored them when he was young and lean. It was the latter years that cranked him sideways so obese that he had to have his doors widened.

And then there were the drugs. Yes, the drugs. How could you forget the farewell drugs. No incarnation would be complete without them. The road dives in a stand of tall spruce and hemlock trees, a stand in the middle of the Muir woods and they ride past a road leading to the 'Zen Center', an appropriate place for a Zen center . . . Zen was a first-class door to the backstage.

The real show goes on backstage. That's where it counts. On stage everything is fine and everyone smiles or grimaces on cue and with a pelvic thrust runs off stage for another shot of whiskey . . . or Dermerol¨ . . . or methylamphetamine -- then back to rock and roll. It's all showbusiness. Elvis knew that better than most. Live to perform, perform to live. The Atman is the ultimate junkie. Heroin holds not a red-hot cinder to the high of being a god. No high ranks close to uncut omniscience. The pure stuff . . . the stuff that makes legends from mere mortals. The feel of the swell as you step into the spotlight, the uprising swelling from silence as you poise your mental balance wracked out at high-speed then hit them for all you're worth and then seeing how they move in time with you, focused on your every twist and grind, every word coming out of your mouth rings of pearled gospel. The savvy-tongued gospel of rock and roll:

Taking care of business.

Elvis may be a god of Rock-and-Roll, but he's no Zen master.

We pause for a message from the Council of Elder Gods: makers of the finest in qualitative deities for an eternity, and then some.

Listen:

Gods come in all shapes and sizes. We create gods for people who pray, play, sit, dance, bow, chant, wail, laugh and think as role models and superparental icons. There simply are no limitations. We create whatever we want. But we create them with human satiation in mind. They are not for our pleasure. Pleasure is a physical sensation. We create them for you. When humans cried out for gods of the sun and moon and Earth and stars we created a plethora of gods to please. When humans demanded gods and goddesses for the virtues and vices, we reciprocated. When they asked for one god everything, to keep things simple, we returned with the generic: the Lord. Buddha and Allah and Jesus all have unlimited gigs. We stand behind them all. In The Catalog of the Atman, spirit guides and hoary wonders, party animal rock stars and scientists, warring fanatics and peacekeepers, the river-setters and street-corner cacklers all sit side-by-side in perpetual theosophical cacophony. The choice is yours. Or, after searching through the 10,000 page catalog, you have not yet found a god that fits your specific religious or spiritual need, merely say the word:

Abracadabra.

Abracadabra is the toll-free hot-line to Atman central. Operators are standing by. Order a god from the catalog, or request a god of your own design. Again, the choice is yours. It may take a couple thousand years to reach an atavistic moment in time, but we'll get it there.

And if you act now and order before the year 2012, we have a special on entertainment superstars. Guaranteed instant stardom. Television is a good market for gods. Business is booming. Entertainers are inexpensive and simple, economical to create because the body need only last several years, maybe a decade or two, and you just toss them away with a drug overdose or a plane wreck before they grow old. Disposable deities: the latest concept in atavistic procreation. Just another facet in the infinite number of services we provide.


Here at the Council of Elder Gods, sleep is not an option.

Working harder for you though the millennia for well-transcended human spirit.

Your in link mind for mind with the station of creation: K-T-H-O-R. Thundering to you live from the halls of Valhala. We now return to "Duct-Tapped Boots and Jesus Suits."

She walks into the apartment, sees him sitting cross-legged on the futon, staring out the window. He doesn't acknowledge her entrance, so she makes one by jumping onto his back and slamming her elbow onto his shoulder, bouncing him off the futon onto the floor. "You ready to go do some drinking, Jack, I could sure use a drink. This fucking job. This guy Jacob is some high-roller who flies around in his airplane pulling corporate piracy, hostile takeovers and shit like that. He calls me today and says I'm going to have to work on my proofreading. Rags at me for ten minutes, then hangs up. He's a real prick. I really want to work for him."

"Sounds like we'd get along fine."

"Oh, I'm sure you two would hit it off quick. You'd be pounding on him in no time at all."

"Well, I'd thrash him intellectually first, then kick his ass just to drive the point home."

"So you ready to take in a drink with me here in my city, big guy?" "I've been waiting for you all day."

"Did you go out and look for work?" "No. I'm going to take a week to recuperate. I'll start soon."

"Well, let's go down to the Golden Cane, you'll like it there. It's right in the middle of upper Haight, but none of the tourists go there. I wind up there a lot. It's one of the few places that the bartenders are friendly and the drinks are cheap. Let's go have a drink then stop over at Anthony's and pick up that pot."

"Well, let's hit it."

"Do you want to walk down there, or what?"

"I want to take the bike," she says, "well be looking good on upper Haight. You'll fit right in."

"There it is, then."

Lights come up at dusk on the streets, the kids at play: the hookers and junkies and hippies and manic preachers and metal heads and hard-core punks, deadheads, winos, speed-freak-schizophrenics, small time petty thieves, Stephen King-Ronald Reagan conspiracy consultants, macrobiotic California homeboys, angst-riddled thrashers -- anarchists all abuzz as the road warrior and his beautiful sidekick ride up the street and onto the scene. The two of them and the bike draw attention, there's a new kid on the block and even in this mass of eloquent lunacy, people still want to see who's showing up. That is, if they want to be in the show . . . if they're just a tourist, just passing by, nobody cares. But if you hang around they want to check you out. They sniff your ass as you walk by searching for that mysterious scent that makes us all insane, that separate us from tourists. It drives us crazy. It rags us out, winds us up, spins us around and sends us chasing our tails snapping and howling, frothing doglike at the olfactory stimulation. It reeks of Pan, damp with rank musk and jisim. Exploited fecundity.

Showbusiness.

"It's up here on the left. Just a hole-in-the-wall, The Golden Cane, but you can come here and sit and just drink." He finds a space across the street from the bar and backs the bike up to the curb. He feels the eyes from the sidewalk, enjoys the attention. "We're making a splash, Jack. Just look surly."

Inside the bar appears small and traditionally Irish with pennants and pictures and rusted road signs and other sorts of memorabilia. A woman wearing a faded yellow wool overcoat sits at the near end of the bar next to the door with a glass of wine and a shot of vodka or gin in a rocks glass. She gazes through the one-way window revealing the street with the people walking by and her stare is lonely and a thousand miles away. A cigarette burns away in the ashtray aside the glass, turning slowly to ashes, like her life. Two drunks at the back of the bar jabber away and a bleach blonde hangs out by the bathroom smoking, apparently waiting for the phone to ring.

"What do you want, Jack. I'm buying."

"I want you to stop calling me 'Jack', first off. After that, I believe I'll have a Grand Mariner up with a Becks dark back."

"Grand Mariner, a Becks dark and a double vodka martini, extremely dry," she says to the toe-headed bartender, blonde hair hanging on his head like a mop and his eyes looking soft and stupid. "Vodka," Owen says, "I remember slipping you Kara water on those football Saturdays when we worked at Macleods. You remember? It was so fucking packed that nobody could move and there was only myself and one other bartender that knew a damn thing about what was going on. God that guy was fucked up. Couldn't even hire a staff that knew what-the-hell it was doing. Can you get over that? Why would you open a semiformal jazz club with a bunch of flunkies for a complement. It's no great wonder the place fell flat in six months."

"What kind of beer did you say you wanted."

Owen looked the bartender square in the eyes, "Becks dark, please."

"That's right. Sorry about that."

"So tell me about your book, Owen. You've got it at the publisher now?"

"Yeah. I had a buddy that had a buddy at Harcourt press and he's reading it now."

"Do you know when you'll hear from him?"

"It's hard telling."

The bartender brought the drinks, Owen lit a cigarette, lit Kara's and the two sat smoking in silence for a moment. "I'm so glad you came out here before you went to Spain," she says smiling that beautiful smile of hers, red lips and eyes asparkle. Owen barely contains himself from kissing those lips.

"So you think you'll stay a month or two?"

"A month. Six weeks at most. If I don't I'll get stuck here. I like San Francisco."

"It's quite a place. I'm going to have to show you around. When I left Cleland I was so confused. My life was over at age 26. He had traveled the world and I had fled Nebraska and fallen into his arms. I didn't get a chance to live and when I wanted to come here he was understanding, though concerned. And rightfully so, I guess. He got jealous, started acting childish, so I dumped him. I don't need that shit in my life. I'm just starting to discover who I am and I need to do that before I let some man come in and run over my life. He'd had his turn. What about me? So fuck him, huh? I've got a whole new set of friends now, Owen, you'll meet them tonight. I hope you like them. They're rockers, but they've got good hearts and they take care of me. I've been hanging out there a lot lately. Tonight we're going to see Field Trip at the Paradise. That's Jimmies band. They've got an album coming out with Warner Brothers in a month or so. I think you'll like them. Jimmy's such a good guitar player. But you'll see. Let's have a toast, Owen, to you. It's damn good to be drinking with you again. I knew you wouldn't leave without saying good-bye."

"Well, it's damn good to see you, too. Salude.

"Hey, dude, you from Norway or what. You look like a Viking." It was one of the drunks. Owen saw him get up from the stool and look at him. There was nothing futive in his eyes, just simple fascination. "I know a guy who looks just like you. He be coming down in a few minutes. You got to meet him. You guys will get along great. Where the hell you from anyway, Scandinavia?"

"Nebraska."

"No shit. I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. What the hell is there in Nebraska?"

"Nothing. That's why I left."

"Sure as hell. I came out here for a vacation from Louisiana twenty years ago. Never left."

"It's that sort of a place," Kara says, "I'm from Nebraska, but I moved here from Lake Tahoe to go to school and never made it to school and never made out of The City. I'll never leave here. I'll travel, but I live here for the duration."

"That's the way it is." "Well, I'm only here for a month or two." "Yeah, we'll see about that," Kara smiles, "this place is addictive." "Can I buy you a drink, Thor?" The drunk is grinning at him. Owen looks at him carefully to see if he'd missed anything the first time. "Dude, you are Thor," he says, "At least you look a helluva-lot like him."

"And who might you be?"

"Robbie Bains. What do you want to drink?"

"A beer would be fine, Robbie."

"It would be my pleasure."

The door opens, two college boys and a coed come in and sit at the bar a couple stools down from Owen. They look like tourists, they won't stay around long, he thinks, turns back to Bains, but he's back talking to the blonde who systematically ignores him. She looked sumptuous once, now faded, and she'll be forever waiting by that phone for someone to call and ask for a blowjob, or a quick fuck. Such is life. Always waiting for one thing or another and never able to get on with whatever it is that gets you out of bed in the morning. Owen couldn't think of a reason, sometimes, but he kept getting up anyway. Maybe simply to avoid bedsores; maybe because he felt if he stood up and went out into the world and looked as hard as he could that somewhere lay a bed of wisdom in the female form who would take him in and understand the weight that he felt, ease his suffering. But that was all a long-shot pipe-dream. Humanity had fucked itself over time and time again and appeared now to be rising to a crescendo and the only thing he wanted to do was find a mate and get the fuck out of the way. But it would never work out that way. It was balderdash. He was standing in the path now and he knew it, and there was no reason to move because that was the only thing that interested him. Business didn't interest him, nor politics, nor any of that shit where you tossed your identity into an office pool and drew names to see which clone you got to be and who's asshole you'd have to suck to get anywhere. No sir. Writing mattered. That was all. And to write you must live on the lunatic fringe and gather experiences like morrels and bring them back to your hole and write them as well as you could but you knew that you might never be able to write it like it happened but you could try . . .

"Where the hell are you, Owen?"

"Just thinking."

"You want to share?"

"Oh, you know, the usual lunatic fringe metaphysical horse crap."

"You might as well get over all that. Action is the only response. Thinking only gets you in trouble. Make your decision and act, Jack. You'll never get off the barstool if you sit and think about it all the time."

"I thought you wanted to know what I was thinking?"

"I did. I was just feeding you shit."

"That's it. I guess I need to be fed some shit."

"Oh, lighten up."

"Okay, babe."

"Watch that babe shit, Jack."

"What you going to do? Beat me up."

"I'll kick your ass and you know it."

"My but you've gotten cocky."

"It's the only way to go about it. You try to be nice and these people will eat you alive."

"Ooo, you're so worldly."

"Kiss my ass."

"Bare it, babe." She smacks him hard in the shoulder and they both laugh and light another cigarette and talk about old times. You could always talk about old times. They were safe. Removed with a vengeance from the here and now and sealed in a bell jar like butterflies and you could take them out and talk about them and all the lugubrious emotions that had then clogged the funnel felt nonexistent. The kill resided in the memory, not the moment. It was the here and now that felt painful. Owen could feel it inside him. Nestled in his gut like a womb, the seed of his demise. He felt the tired ache across his back. "Let's go pick up that pot."

A large steel gate blocked the entrance to Anthony's door. It was a tall Victorian off Golden Gate and the ride revived him for ailing. He loved driving around this city. It was all showbusiness. They pulled up to his house and rang the bell and a buzzer allowed them through the gate.

"Hi, sweetie," Kara says, gives him a hung and a kiss on the cheek. "This is my friend Owen from college. He's on his way to Spain and he stopped out here from Nebraska."

"You know you're going the wrong way?"

"So I've been told." The two shake hands and walk up the stairs to the flat. Three guys sit in the kitchen drinking beer and talking, a gaggle of Jewish-American princesses roam about the house in and out of the bathroom and the living room. None of them say a word to him, they look when he walks past them behind Anthony into a bedroom towards the streetside of the flat. On a drawing table in separate packages are two huge, green indica buds. They are packaged. Packaged, he thinks, scoffs, "Nice packaging. Quite a place, this San Francisco."

"Hell yes, dude. You're lucky. These are the last two I have left."

"They're fine looking buds. How much?"

"Fifty dollars apiece." Owen takes a hundred dollar bill from his pocket and hands it over to Anthony, picks up the packages and puts them in his leather jacket. "It's really excellent. I think you'll enjoy it. You guys going to hang out for awhile?"

"We've got to go down to the Paradise pretty soon," Kara says, "Field Trip and Bourbon Deluxe are playing and I want Owen to meet the rest of the gang" "You'll like Field Trip. I don't know about Bourbon Deluxe, though."

"What do you mean? They've just got they're own style"

"That's for sure. Drink and puke and play."

"Well, I know they get carried away. But Mike is a helluva drummer. I want you to meet him, also. I've got a crush on him. He's kind of a greaser. But I think it's just an act."

"Are you two sure you don't want to stay and have a beer?"

"Sometime, sweetie," she says, pinches his cheek, "but not tonight."

Whip it away! The vulgar dismay, the cellulose grey that frightens and weighs and coaxes you into the chute. And then with a grin, get set to jump in to the oncoming din, attacking said 'sin', deemed a race to accumulate loot. Throw grave shrouds to ceiling, leave the proud braindead reeling with vague feeling of their lives being moot. But remember, my friend, with a yin towards the end, craving heights to ascend in superstar trend will leave you with a passion dilute.

Or a once-gilded tower left leaning.

Wisdom begat: It is easy to be a holy man on the top of a mountain. Surely, this is no joke. Here in the Great Hall of Asgad I find holiness an undemanding life-style. The only one here is me, for now, but the others will surely return, as they always have. Holiness, then, will prove difficult.

Gods party hard.

In the realm of mortals, however, decadence is the chosen way of life. Decadence is human nature. Innante. To deny decadence is inhuman. Living for decadence, that nature suits many. Holiness remains on the mountain tops and in the ethereal kingdoms and multidimensional chasms of the immortals.

Holiness downtown doesn't pull the monkey off your back. You'll starve.

When amongst mortals, party with the vehemence of a god. This is the way to salvation.

You're in link mind for mind with that rockin' kingdom of the immortals, station K-T-H-O-R. Thundering to you live from the Great Hall of Asgard. Stay tuned for another metaphysical rock and roll assault.

It was reason you traveled, the reason you made mecca to the city: the night life. Paradise lounge, a two-story factory-to-club convert awaited on 11th St. The club was one of those reasons. Three stages, no waiting. Heaving leather clad breasts and spindly witch babes decked out in see-through teddys with black spandex beneath, hard-core rocker babes, imploded introverts, exploding extroverts. A pagan melange'. It was the intensity you came there for. Lunatic fringe. Devianance embraced. Radical fanaticism. Artsy revolution. Pantheistic intoxication. The Bacchanal flasks smashing against the walls in riotous glee. Whiskey bottles over Jesus. Whack him in the head with it, in fact, then pick up your guitar and jam.

The two of them walked through the club, Kara like an ice breaker through the winding hallways looking for her friends. Owen feels tired. He is here, he thinks, finally, and he feels tired. It is no fucking good. That was no way to go into it. Kara finds her table of friends, introduces Owen, he nods to each of them but says nothing. Field Trip takes the stage, begins to play. Nothing special, he thinks to himself and considers going to bed. His eyelids feel heavy. Owen closes his eyes. The band sounds loud and Owen feels stupid sitting there ready to fall asleep. "I'm out of here Kara, you coming with or you going to stay here?"

"What the hell! We just walked in."

"I'll finish this beer and then I'm out of here."

"Whatever. Let me know when you're ready." Well, off to a bad start. Couldn't even whoop it up a little. What the hell happened to all your energy? Used to be able to party for hours on very little sleep. What the hell? "I'm sorry about this Kara. I just can't keep my eyes open"

"No problem, babe." But he hears the pissiness in her voice. Pissy. He's taking party girl away from the party. "You can go back if you want to."

"Owen, don't sweat it. I told them you were tired from your ride. They understand that shit. It will be fine. Let's get you into bed" and they were off down the street like Don Quixote and Sancho, together again. "I'm your faithful sidekick Sancho. I could never let you leave without me."

"Oh you'll do that soon enough."

"You're probably right."

"Most of the time."

"Oh, shut the fuck up and drive, road warrior."

Cheers to the city of the weary traveler! The Statue of Liberty holds not a lumen to her mother's milk bosom. Swooning across the bridge. Falling, exhausted, into the soft silkiness of her swollen breasts. A whore-worn hand caressing your skull, the smell of stale musk, whiskey and tobacco. Her tits leak the nectar of the gods. You suckle the nectar. It tastes earthen. She kisses you and you taste the sex of millions in her spit. She rubs your groin and entices you with exotic women. Everywhere you look, the most beautiful women. She licks your balls almost to orgasm, then sends you off to party. She knows what you came there for. We all know what we came there for. It's why we show up. Realizing home. Only a handful of cities cater exclusively to Pagans, witches and the wicked. Amsterdam, Rio De' Janero, Bancock, Las Vegas, San Francisco, regal around their fires. The metal frenzy banging against your brain like a tree stump until the pressure is so great and you no longer become intoxicated from the nectar and you bite the tit for wont of more and she slaps you aside the head for greed, then changes you to the other breast. She coddles impurity, radiates brazen decadence. She is what you live for. What you would gladly die for. Once suckled, she owns your soul for life. Denial is useless. Struggle makes it worse. But to fight her. Violence creating conflict. Within conflict, immortality reigns. Absolute peace exists only on mountain tops. Save peace for the mountain tops. If you live in the city you love her, fight her, beat her or be beaten. Cum on her face and wipe your dick in her hair. It's the pagan way. Life is struggle. Sadistic. Pillage and conquer remains the most solid foundations of human existence. Remove that, you remove the will to live.

Life should not be mistaken for a theme park.

"No, that would be a dire miscalculation," Owen said.

"What?"

"Nothing, just thinking."

"About what?"

"Finding a job."

"You really need to start working," she rose and put a robe on. He noticed the gentle curve along the base of her breasts, put the thought out of his head. "If you don't start working you get depressed. That happened to me when I first got fired. I would go down, get a paper and sit in front of the television all day. You get lazy. You look like shit, feel like shit"

"I know, I know, I just want to take some time off. Just a moment to recuperate. Jesus, I really knocked myself out to get here. I'm going to have to work like hell for eight weeks and I just need a few days to get my energy back. I'm still on vacation. Give me a break."

"Well, wise up, Jack. Vacation's just about over," she walked into the bathroom, closed the door. He heard the shower, sat up and turned on the radio. Paul Simon sang about the days of miracle and wonder, about staccato signals of constant information. A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires. Lasers in the jungle. Owen couldn't agree more. He walked to the kitchen to make coffee. He heard her in the shower and he pictured her washing herself, shaving her legs, rubbing her gorgeous tits. Subtle arousal growing stronger. Again, he dismissed the thought. It would never happen.

The sky was overcast, the skyline hidden privy with whisps of moisture, but you could still make out the tower of the college, the Golden Gate, the looming financial district. Owen opened the window to the fire escape and took a hit from the hooka he fashioned from a mason jar, rubber hose and brass pipe fitting. The hooka worked well, he thought, went and poured two cups of coffee. The shower was off now, she could hear the radio and sand along with it. Kara couldn't sing for shit. She sounded like a braying mule. At least she's not perfect, he thought as he walked back to the window. She's a mere consort in the realm of gods. That's a comforting thought, to have a consort. He hit the hooka once more then lit a smoke, sat smoking, enjoying the view. Getting off on the view. Subtle arousal growing stronger, undenied. He was in love with this place.

"That's no good, that's no way for a traveler to behave. Never fall in love with anything."

She emerges from the bathroom swaddled in cotton towels, goes through her closet casually exposing herself, unaware, Owen tries to ignore it and looks out the window acting uninterested. "Do you want to try for lunch again, Owen?"

"I don't know. I'm going to go wander around a bit. I'll call you before noon."

"Well, call by eleven so I know what the hell to expect."

"Fine. I mean, I'll probably show, but you never can tell."

"You don't have to tell me. I live here. And I bet you, I just bet you that you won't be able to leave. I'm going to try and keep you here. You won't be able to resist. I know you too well." "We'll see. I want to hit Spain something fierce."

"I just bet you'll get hooked."

"You're probably right."

"Everybody who lives here gets hooked. You'll see."

Things look different off the street walking along the sidewalk . . . maybe it's the decrease in speed, more time for attention to detail. Convenience markets, tourist shops, art galleries, coffee houses, apartments dwellings, one family houses, bars and clubs, restaurants, used auto parts and Wicca supplies, Jamaican marijuana markets, soul food, African tapestries, book stores, head shops crammed together in a jumble with no sense of organization. No zoning. No fucking telling anybody where to put what. There's too many more important things going on. More pressing matters . . . it's a small town, San Francisco, only seven miles wide . . . Chock full o' looneys . . . you can sense that easy enough. Sixth sense. Ha! Who needs hypersensitivity to figure out the place is an open-air insane asylum. True asylum. A shelter, for some, a prison for others, and a palace for the few who can afford her brotheled pleasures, her rich sensual allure. Dangling indulgence all to see for few to appreciate and appropriate. Most of them are dead. Coldhearted dead. They work to keep the pleasure coming. They cannot afford to indulge, only to produce. The middle class is the biggest rip-off scam since Moses plied the desert. He really had them going. Convince them they've got something, have the chance to have everything, and you'll have to beat them off with a rake. But it's just a scam. A socioeconomic puppet-facade. Compliance required. Failure to comply will result in harassment, degradation and ostracization and incarceration. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. That's where it lands you: on the street. You can read it on the sidewalks. Litter, grease, oil, blood, puke, piss and pentangles. Lift the story off the sidewalk and put it into words . . . sidewalk is more honest then most, oil-blood stains concrete, making it difficult to lie with fig trees planted alongside Divisidero, some living, some dying, where do they get off planting trees alongside arterials. Ignorant torture. That's government for you. It's like when a woman feels comfortable, she forgets you need attention, runs as though it's business as usual and then wham! Neglect, disparity, infidelity, incongruency: revolution.

Wham, bam, slam, slackers steal the ram, and the junky's on the lamb from the po-lice man, that's living in the shit for sure: "Just business as usual, says the cop to druggie, "Nothing personal, up against the car and let me shove my finger up your ass. Why? Because Uncle Sam said I could. Probable cause. Have a nice day, keep your hands on the hood. What's this? Marijuana? Well, place you hands behind your back please and I will now temporarily impair your rights as a human being . . . you retain your right to silence, you have the right to retain an attorney, we'll foot the bill if you're broke, you have a right to stand in front your fellow human beings and be humiliated before we send you off to our criminal care facility where we will turn you into a more manageable entity. If you fight, we will just make it worse . . . wait, don't try to run . . . now you've done it -- now I can beat you within an inch of your life because you tried to run away from me. Silly human -- pound, pound, pounding flailing blows to the arms and legs and back look at what you're forcing me to do -- don't you know you shouldn't run from cops. . . we're your friends. Now look what you've done! Who's going to have to clean the blood up off the sidewalk? Me, you little scum. You made more work for me by bleeding all over the sidewalk. And the fucking paperwork when they haul your beaten body from the wreakage! I ought to pound you some more for that little stunt. Now stand up and get in the back of the car and let's get you down to prison so we can start you on the road to righteousness right away!"

And still the freedom pool of blood remains, staining the concrete until the whole city falls deep into the mantle of the planet. Taking the righteous and the wicked alike. Decay. Everywhere you go that is the one consistent quality. Decay. Beautiful decline.

"Sidewalks tell the story," Owen says to himself, walking up Divisidero, sunshine and blue sky all over the place. He feels refreshed. The air smells less polluted. It is good to get out walking, he thinks, gives a man time to think. Time to sort things through.

Transfer market on the corner of Folsom and Divisidero looks like a good stopping point. Just another convenience store, it is, with grey walls and black trim and a beer sign in front with the name of the store. Owen walks in, grabs a soda, strolls up the aisle towards the cash register. A rack of magazines catches his eye. Woman, he thinks, I want. He picks out a copy of Hustler, pays the merchant, heads back for the apartment. Simply carrying the sack home arouses him. All these beautiful women around him and the only option at this point is a whore, a beat-off palace or the magazine in the sack and it is the cheapest and safest way to quell these urges.

For the moment.

Women bitch about estrogen, but they have no idea. It makes them moody and gives them cramps and makes them retain water, not to forget the whole birthing thing; but they still don't have a clue. Testosterone drives you mad. You wonder why a bull charges? He can't help it. It's in his blood, literally. Why do teenage boys constantly feel the need to smash and destroy? Testosterone. Why are the majority of serial killers male? Testosterone. Science and religion feign ignorance. "Put that shit in a closet and forget about it," they decree, "because it's just a silly little hormone and the rational human being should be able to control it. But stay away from steroids." Bullshit. Even without steroids the rage can be uncontrollable. You are unable to stop yourself. The urge to bash your way through a cinder-block wall and come out covered with fired lime and snatch the first woman you see and penetrate remains undeniable. But you can masturbate. Keep your sperm count down and that keeps your body busy so you can concentrate on more universally removed matters of satisfaction. Females, by and large, radiate eroticism and beauty; but it proves less of a hassle to simply keep them in a magazine. That way you send them away when you finish with them. You don't have to please them, baby them, abuse them, fuck with their heads while they fuck with you back. No sir, merely close the magazine and put it underneath your mattress and that's the end of it.

Bliss.

In the apartment he looks through the magazine slow, taking in each raunchy page with drooling arousal, finds an erotic picture of a women they call 'Delilah', and jacks off. Laying there afterwards, looking out the window, Owen feels the tension draining away inside. He cleans up the remnants, closes the magazine and calls Kara.

"What are you doing?"

"Just sitting around. I went for a walk to try and figure my way around a bit."

"I've got a map."

"I saw it on the table. I'll take a look at it after lunch."

"You want to come and get me?"

"I'll be there in half-an-hour."

"See you then, hon."

There is no such thing as a simple ride across San Francisco. You flirt with Death the moment your tires leave the sidewalk. And those who flirt without hesitation emerge from raucous traffic the survivors. The reticent, the cattle of society, eventually end up at the knacker. Glue fodder. Not vice versa. You hit the street and the traffic is moving along at a rabid clip, it's best to have a motorcycle. You make yourself more open, but Death prefers an open, honest relationship. With a motorcycle you shoot in and out of the traffic, wheedling your way through thin chutes between cars and trucks and buses and trollies. Every motion reflects commitment to action. If your going to shoot a lane, shoot it with confidence . . . all it takes is one miscalculation and you eat car door and then pavement and the ride is over.

Game over.

Total concentration, he thinks, working his way up Divisidero towards Union. Up a steep incline to the peak revealing the San Francisco Bay. A supremely stunning view -- whisps of fog woven within the cables of the massive dried blood-colored bridge, hanging out in the harbor like ethereal dinosaurs loitering on a street corner with the highlands in the backdrop. Down the sharp incline, either side lined with mansions and the bay and the heating brakes and the bike whines loud in first gear slowly down the hill so he doesn't lose control. Near the bottom, Union levels out into that sleepy little yuppified business section. He looks out of place, as usual. Everyone looks at him like he's aiming for robbery. Fear and ignorance will get them all, he smirks, a human creates their world around them.

Foolish mortals. You are asking for robbery. Pleading for a mugging or a shooting. Your whole life centers on domination and fear. And you'll never understand even that. You won't know what hit you. Merely the vague sensation that you missed something along the way. You'll never learn about power. Strange how you all can live in this power center and never realize the potential. Truly crazed human potential energy -- it happens when a million looneys get together and make a home for themselves. Inside he feels it growing already, after only two days. Just a sprout, still green, very green, but growing black by the moment. Extremely green mind. Fertile for febrility. But the power exists now inside, gaining intensity each moment. You will harness it, as usual, and take the city by storm. The prime directive of Owen Dunum: gain knowledge of your adversary, befriend them, then attack their fatal flaw and destroy them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes you ran out of a town fleeing for your life if it backfired, but it beat the hell out of playing bridge or pinochle. Better than poker. If you're going to play a game make it a good one or give it up because you'll never be a contender unless you play hardball.

Again, life is not a theme park.

"Are you feeling a little more rested today?" She had a little pizza grease on her chin, he let it lie there.

"A tad. I just feel weak. I don't have any energy. I sit around and I get up and walk around outside and I always find myself heading back to the apartment to sit on my duff and get slow. I don't know what the hell my problem is." "I think you pushed yourself too hard."

"I didn't think I could do that. I always wondered when I would discover my limits. I never thought I had any."

"Suprise, suprise."

"Shut up and eat your pizza." Owen picked up a napkin, wiped the grease off her chin. "Why the hell didn't you tell me I had grease on my chin! You bastard. How long has it been there?"

"Only a few minutes. I was going to wait and see if you noticed."

"Dickhead. I'll get you. What do you want to do tonight?"

"I don't know. Sit. Sleep. Smoke. Maybe I'll go back to the apartment and take a nap."

"That's it, babe," she said, "get your disco nap in and then we'll go out and have a cocktail or two. Bourbon Deluxe is playing down at the Blue Lamp tonight. I've kind of been hanging out with the drummer, Mike. He's a greaser, but I think that deep down he's kind. Besides I have a fond spot in my heart for greasers. He just acts stupid sometimes. We slept together once and then in the morning I heard him telling his buddies out in the living room that he couldn't even remember what happened. I walked out into the living room and tore him a new asshole and walked out right in front of his dirt bag friends. I'm sure he laughed it off. But deep down it hurt him. He sent me flowers and asked me out for dinner a week later and I blew him off. But really he can be so sweet, in a stupid sort of way."

"Sounds like a real lady killer." "He's just a greaser. I kind of like greasers."

"So you said. Sounds like a real winner."

"Shut the fuck up and eat your pizza." They laughed, finished the pizza and walked back to where she worked, the office just above the Victoria's Secret.

"You come and get me at five?"

"I suppose I could do that."

"Bring my leather jacket and we'll go for a ride this time. A good, long ride."

"Sounds like a plan. See you, hon." He fires up Rocinante and roars off down Union, turns right on an arterial a few blocks west and heads back towards downtown. When he crosses Broadway, he opts to turn left and ride into Chinatown. Down the street and through the tunnel. He loves the sound of the engine prattling away in the long concrete passageway. Rocinante sounds healthy and solid. Ready to run. He watches his headlight vibrate in the fairing, suspended with duct tape. It needs another taping, he thinks, makes a mental note to do so.

As you enter the tunnel the landscape remains traditional San Francisco. Victorians set high on cliffsides, Irish pubs, Bahaus-style office buildings, Western-based antiquity shops. Brownstones. Traditionally American. Then you cross into the tunnel and it's just the roaring whoosh of the wind and the engine and you emerge in an entirely different land. The street is crowed with humans of eastern-Asian persuasion, locals and tourists, the street is thin and the store fronts have no windows. The billboards scream propaganda in Mandarin or Cantonese dialect, the air smells of white pepper and garlic. You might as well have driven underneath the ocean and come out in Hong Kong, or Canton.

The traffic moves slow, sharing time with flooded sidewalks, the street winding down and spreading out, revealing a strip of Burlesque theaters and pornography stores. Owen drives through slowly, admiring the facades advertising nude dancers and live sex acts and porn-film stars, video tapes and accessories, dildos and vibrators and jellys and rubber dolls and Chinese cock rings. It's all here. Anything you need. This was why he loved this city. Complete abandon. Beyond recklessness. Wafting the pungent musk of the proud Pagan. She's like that, San Francisco. She knows what you came here for.

He wants to pull Rocinante over and go into one of the theaters, but just can't seem to bring himself to do it. Too self-conscious. "Going to have to work on that." He fires the bike down Washington into the Financial District full of glass buildings and monkey suits. Bankers, stockbrokers, money mangers, greed mongers, panhandlers, lynch mob makers, investment analysts and window-teller whores in tight skirts flirting to free themselves from the middle-class. Gambling on finding some young financial counsellor with a semi-stiff dick who pulls down a-quarter-million-a-year handling escrow accounts and moving to Sausalito to savor the fruits of wealth, that's their idea. All of them strutting around from bank to bar like a bunch of mating loons.

Market street comes up and he goes with it, cruising slowly in and out of the living maze of cars, taking it all in. Becoming accustomed to the surroundings. He sees himself staying here for long time, theoretically, and that particular thought makes him nervous.

Don't fuck with the travel plans. Strange things happen when you change plans in mid-travel. But how do you know? You've never really done it before. Doesn't matter. You know the rules. Same set of rules apply, always been that way, will continue with these tendencies, no doubt, throughout eternity. Gather all you can and get out. That's one of the tendencies. If you stop you lose your momentum, then whammo! You're stuck in a the same damn rut you got caught in last time. No sir, you need to keep moving. These people out shopping on their lunch hours, they're stuck. The dudes hanging out in the arcade, they're stuck like nobody should be stuck. Market street is grand, however, with the statutes and monuments, pillars and fountains. Market street reflects San Francisco's cultural diversity. The street where it all comes together. Probably one of the most anarchistic streets on the planet. Demographically wholistic. The burnt-blanket -homeless dine with middle management. Junkies with millionaires. Tourists walk through it like it's all a movie. A fucking theme park. Few realize the potential danger. The potential threat. The leather coalition. Tourists are prey. They huddle together like deer trying to protect one another. Forming a circle. And all so they can ride the trolley and take pictures of the whores and the homeless, the travelers, the statues and skyscrapers, the bridges, the bay, the houses and parks. All a slide show video theme park. And those who live here are the show. Street performers are only the beginning. An opening gig. Playing at the entrance to the gods gig. All the gods. Every last one of them reside here in one form or another. Omniscience is useful that way. And they always get the best gigs.

Gods always get the best, at first.

Later, of course, they find themselves martyred, denounced, humiliated and released from the burdens of their flesh.

Then they become postage stamps and pin-ups.

It's not fun to be a god. Reaching for immortality in a mortal world could never be painless. Gods live for showbusiness. Junkies for it, they are. And if you can't get a gig in a bar or a club you can stand out in the street and peddle your particular bent. Usually the reason you can't get a gig is because you suck. And that's who plays on Market Street. On the street proper. If you're good you play the Warfield. And the ones who can't get real gigs? Flopping gods. That's who the tourists take pictures of. Incarnate car wrecks.

Owen turned onto Page and heading back to the apartment, feeling blown-out. All sensors overloading. The wind blows in under his jacket and he loses his heat, locking his arms, curling in, trying to hold the bike upright and make it back.

Why the fuck are you so tired? Why the hell can't you get over it and get on with it. Whoop up on it, my friend. You can't burn out now. You've only been out for two weeks and already flaming out at the seams. Relax. Get some rest. No. No, I shouldn't be going home to take a nap. I should be out feeling my way around. But you can only take in so much at one time. Trying to absorb it all at once proves overwhelming. Fuck that. You can take it. You'll get used to it. Learn to feed off it. That's it's nature. You'll do fine here. You always do well. Always a happy ending right? Always time to sit around a campfire some years later and tell your cropped and edited versions of what happened, in the name of literature and story-telling. That's what you live for. And you've never found anything you couldn't beat. If you really, really wanted to. So cinch up those oil skins, laddybuck, put on your horns and get on into the shit. Because it's not going to go away, and you are stuck at the moment. But only a little stuck. If you stay . . . well, just get on with it. Drop the kid gloves and play hard ball. That's the game now hotshot. Let's see how you fare.

We'll see what kind of god you make.

He first saw Rochelle bouncing into her apartment. She actually bounced as she walked. She looked perky, a little overweight, but cute in a bubbly sort of way and he knew immediately that he could nab her. She was an easy kill. The deliriously happy ones were always easy prey. A Cheshire-cat grin, a simple, wholistic conversation, and then you threw them to the floor.

"Are you Kara's friend from Nebraska? She told me you were on the way. She gave me some of your writing to read. You're a great writer, and I think it's really cool what you're doing. Hi, my name's Rochelle. Do you guys want to come over for wine and cheese a little later? I'm having some friends over and it should be pretty crazy. My friend Andante' is coming in from New York. He's really wild. You should talk to him. From what Kara's told me I'll bet the two of you would get along like mad. You are Owen Dunum, right? I'm not giving this spiel to a total stranger, am I?"

"No, you're pretty much on the money. Rochelle, is it? Kara said she'd made a neighbor. I wondered when I'd finally meet you."

"Well, now you've met me and we really should talk. She showed me a couple of your stories, like I said. I thought they were excellent. I write for a trade publication down in the financial district, but I've written stories and poetry. Maybe you could look at them. But anyway I've got to go and get all this stuff ready. Why don't you come over later. You could help me open wine bottles," she says, backs towards her door.

Whammo.

Owen smiles, unlocks the door, "Yea, sure. I'll come over in a bit. Give you a hand with your bottles. I think a shower would feel good first. You know how good showers feel."

"Nothing better."

"See you soon, Rochelle."

"I MET ROCHELLE TODAY"

"OH YEAH? WHAT'D YOU THINK"

"SHE'S ALRIGHT. PERKY."

"TOO PERKY. SHE GETS ON MY NERVES SOMETIMES."

"I COULD SEE THAT. WE'RE SUPPOSED TO GO TO HER HOUSE FOR WINE AND CHEESE."

"WHAT?"

"WINE AND CHEESE."

"I'M NOT REALLY HUNGRY. I COULD GO FOR SOME WINE, THOUGH."

"TONIGHT AT ROCHELLE'S."

"TURN LEFT HERE. What about tonight?"

"She wants to have us over for a wine and cheese conversational with a buddy of hers from New York," Owen said, accelerated. "DID YOU HAVE ANYTHING PLANNED?"

"I WANTED TO GO TO THE PAPA WHEELIE HOUSE AND INTRODUCE YOU TO EVERYONE WHEN WE'RE NOT AT THE BAR."

"WE CAN GO IN, SLAM SOME WINE AND BAIL. HOW DOES THAT SOUND?"

"WHY THIS SUDDEN CONCERN FOR ROCHELLE? YOU WANT TO DO HER DON'T YOU! DON'T YOU! TELL ME THE TRUTH. BOY, YOU BETTER NOT DO HER IN MY BED YOU USE HER GOD DAMNED BED. THAT'S A RULE WE'RE GOING TO HAVE. YOU DON'T FUCK ANYONE IN MY BED." She jabbed her fist playfully hard into his kidneys.

"DON'T WORRY, BABE. YOU'RE THE ONLY WOMAN I'LL EVER SLEEP WITH ON THAT FUTON."

"LIAR. YOU'RE GOING TO FUCK SOMEBODY IN BY BED. YOU BETTER NOT. I'LL BE SO PISSED OFF. THAT'S DISGUSTING."

"OH COME ON. IT'S NOT THAT BAD."

"TURN OFF UP HERE. LET'S HIT THE MUIR WOODS. THEY'RE EXQUISITE. WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO GO OVER TO ROCHELLE'S? OH LOOK AT THOSE TREES! I MEAN, SHE'S ALRIGHT BUT HER FRIENDS ARE SUCH CONSERVATIVE PRICKS THAT IT'S REALLY BORING TO TALK TO THEM AND I USUALLY END UP RIPPING THEIR HEADS OFF ANYWAY, SO WHY GO IF WERE JUST GOING TO START A FIGHT?"

"WHY DO WE HAVE TO START A FIGHT? WE COULD JUST BE PLEASANT, DRINK WINE, EAT CHEESE, SMILE, LEAVE. SIMPLE."

"YOU FUCK HER IN HER OWN BED. OH, THAT'S PRETTY, LOOK OVER THERE OWEN, ISN'T THAT BEAUTIFUL." "STUNNING."

"OH, DON'T GET PISSY."

"I'M NOT."

"YES YOU ARE. BUT IT'S OKAY WITH ME IF YOU LIKE HER I JUST DON'T WANT IT IN MY BED."

"I GET THE IDEA."

"TURN DOWN THIS ROAD. OH ISN'T THIS ALL SO INCREDIBLE! LOOK HOW THOSE TREES HAVE GROWN INTO JUST THAT ONE DIAMOND-SHAPED STAND. I CAN SEE WHY JOHN MUIR FELL IN LOVE WITH THIS PLACE. IT'S MYSTICAL, DON'T YOU THINK?"

"WITHOUT QUESTION."

The two of them toured through the backroads of the Muir Woods, humbled by the splendor of the landscape. The crack in Rocinante's exhaust pipe cackled off the rock face on their left. Owen let her wind lazily down the thin park road with the lush green fauna on either side. You could sense the age of the forest. Something very, very old and wise. Prehuman. Not as wise as a mountain top, perhaps, but more easily heard and much more talkative. Pagan, generally, he thinks, driving through the forest, trees talk a lot more than mountains. Trees dance and sway, lithe and limber when no one is looking. It felt food to get away from the city. Breathe some real air. The air in San Francisco smelled strange. He'd never noticed it before. It was almost tired air. Fresh Pacific air blows in past seal rock and Golden Gate park an by the time it hits the Mission it is exhausted. Yes, good to get out once in a while.

They toured the park until the sunlight faded, then turned and headed up and out of the valley and back across the bridge, down Folsom to Divisidero.

"Let's cruise lower Haight before we head back to the apartment. I want to see what's happening at the Papa Wheelie house." Owen turned left, down the hill into lower Haight. "There's a real seance down here," she says, "The whole flower child thing all happened on upper Haight. Lower Haight was a ghetto. Now all the rocker kids are moving down here, because of all the tourists. Tourists don't come down here very much. Too seedy. I think it's incredible. There's so much going on down here. It's nice to be living here when all this is getting started. If you stay here with me we can see the birth of this thing together."

"I've been waiting a long time for this revolution. I'm glad it's finally coming on. I was wondering. But I can see it starting to happen. Something beautiful, righteous and wicked."

"I don't see any lights on at the Papa Wheelie house, let's go up and drink some wine with Rochelle, then come down here later."

"I think Chagall was overrated. He and Picasso and Gaugin with their childlike sense of line and color. Salvador Dali, he was an artist . His understanding of the sublime put the others to shame, save, perhaps, for M.C. Escher. The rest of them are trash," Andante' said, swirling his Zinfandel around in the glass and watching as it whirled in the crystal.

"I don't know that I'd call Chagall, Picasso and Gaugin trash. I'll admit their notion of form was simplistic, but what's so despicable about it? They could illustrate with the best of them, had they so desired."

"They were unable to illustrate."

"Rubbish. But what the hell difference would it have to do with their art?

"Technical prowess. Unless, of course, you believe that artists need have no technical, formal training. Is that what you believe?"

"I don't believe it's completely necessary. Helpful in some respects, perhaps, but surely not mandatory. I think that's been proven time and time again via the idiot savant . There's a fine line between genius and idiocy. And the best ones are generally considered crazy. But whether or not they can illustrate is more a matter of medium, or expression. Wouldn't you say?"

"No, I would not say. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am a realist with an appreciation of the surrealistic. If you're an artist, you need to know how to paint. What, do you believe that writer should not the construction of sentences, understand the workings of grammar and mechanics, know the difference between simile and allegory, or even know how to spell?"

"It is important to learn only so you can unlearn it. That's why I started writing. It would take years to learn and even longer to unlearn. Too much technicality in any idea distracts from the original intentions. Ideas must remain intuitive. It's part of their nature."

"I think Andante' has a point, though, Owen," Rochelle says, bouncing about the room filling the wine glasses like a muse-in-waiting, "Art is the same as writing. You need to learn it so you can forget about it and paint."

"If you consciously concentrate on the form during the creative process the idea will be stilted. The idea must choose it's own form. If you try to shape it too much it will mutate. Just let it happen. Technicalities only hold you back."

"That's absurd."

"Do you paint?"

" I produce graphic art for an art magazine in New York."

"Graphic artist, that figures."

"And what is that supposed to mean, my overgrown writer friend? I've read a couple of your stories that Rochelle sent to me, you know. I think your style is fresh, but a little immature."

"That's not surprising, coming from a guy who reduced his art to picas and column inches. Talk about simple. I've worked as a graphic artist and I suck at art. That was the other reason I chose writing."

"Don't quit your day job."

"Don't have one yet, thank you. But at least what I produce is literature and not copy."

"Okay, okay, come on you two. Let's keep it pleasant."

"It doesn't have to be pleasant, merely rhetorical. Andante' and I will probably not go fist to cuff. We're merely having a debate. Right, Andante'?"

"I don't see myself throwing any punches. That would be ludicrous and you know it."

"So we have our understanding. We were debating which was more respectable: art or illustration. Can you draw, Andante'?"

"I do well. I'm still learning. Like anything it takes years to learn. It's a technical practice."

"So you've said." Owen could feel the wine. He was getting cocky. This guy, he thinks, looking him dead in the eye. I want to tear this guy up. Arrogant sonofabitch. "Do you have any of your work with you?"

"I'm on vacation."

"Oh, you can walk away from art. That's real dedication"

"You have to step away sometimes to refresh your perspective."

"True enough, but you can never really leave it. That is, if you're one of those driven for greatness. Passion is not on the drawing table. That is where you flush it all out. The piece itself is nothing more than the idea in a suspended state. Frozen. Metaphysical cryogenisis. Gaining an understanding for the nature of an idea, only then is art taking place. Production is mechanical and requires only discipline. Perhaps then one's technical training matters. But if you don't fully comprehend the magnitude of inspiration, you might as well stick to writing copy for cereal boxes. And, of course, there's always journalism. Any body can write journalism. It takes passion to write literature."

"And you are passionate?"

"Some days. Other aren't quite so enjoyable. Someday you wake up feeling bright and witty, other days despondent and dull. I've always thought of it as making a difficult satellite link with a galaxy a hundred galaxies from here. Sometimes the reception is better than others. You never can tell when it will strike."

"Well, I don't see it that way. For myself, to be able to look at an object and draw it with such incredible detail that from a short distance it could be mistaken for the object itself. But I must have an object."

"I see it as creating what you cannot see, noumena as opposed to phenomena. That way you can take a good long look at it in a timeless state."

"Would you bickering boys like some more wine?"

"One more glass, then Kara said something about going down to the Papa Wheelie house."

"Oh. You two are going down there."

"We'll stay for a while longer, honey," Kara says, shooting Owen a sharp glance.

"I told Betty we'd be down tonight so they could meet Owen."

"I suppose. We're going to go out drinking later. Would you like to meet us somewhere? We're probably just going to the pub up the street. Why don't you meet us up there."

"We'll see."

On the bike, then, with the wind blowing moist and cold. She sits in close behind him. The drop down the street takes only a moment, down past the dark Victorians with iron gates across the front door, the dark and dying trees blocking the street lights, down past the convenience stores and coffee shops well-lighted and full of people dressed in black, past Jimmie's bar, past the junkies crashed out in front of the burned-out warehouse, past the crackheads and homeless selling garbage on the sidewalk, down to the Papa Wheelie house.

"You want a beer?"

"What are you getting?"

"I was thinking a six pack of something dark. Maybe an oatmeal stout."

"Get me something light. I'll be inside."

"Of course, Mem'sahib."

"Yeah, yeah. You want some money?"

"I have some," Owen says, walks across Haight street proper to the convenience store. Yet another corner market. They're all over the place, he thinks. Convenience. A large Turkish gentleman in a maroon stocking cap stands behind the counter watching television. Owen smiles and nods and the guy shrugs him off. He ponders the beer, selects a six pack of Red Tail Ale and six of Rolling Rock for Kara. To nice to her, he thinks, it will bring nothing but trouble. He pays the surly Turkish clerk for the beer, walks back across the street and rings the door bell outside the gate.

"Yeah, whaddya want!"

"I'm Kara's friend."

"Oh yeah, sure, she said you'd were here. Boy, you sure are a burly thing. I suppose you want me to come down and open the gate for you."

"Unless you want me to climb over."

"Ah, don't bother. You've got an armful and besides we don't want anybody getting any ideas. Hellfire! They'd be scampering over all the time. We'd have to start shooting! Fuck all that, I'll just open the gate." She hops down the stairs to the gate. She has medium-length bouncing blonde hair with a darker spot along the part. It is dark and she wears sunglasses. Owen likes her immediately. "Come on in, there, monster man."

It was a tall, thin house, with a hallway to the right and stairs to the left. Two bedrooms on the right-hand side of the hallway, the first door sports a word cut from what appeared to be a magazine. The word is this: SAMSARA.

Owen smiles, walks down the hallway past the second bedroom with the Janis Joplin covered walls, to the living room, filled to the brim with two couches and a large, old-style comfy chair. Couch potatoes accompany the entourage, Kara slumps down in the chair looking owley. "You look like you need a beer."

"I'd love one. Thanks, hon. Everybody, this is Owen, my friend from college. Owen this is Betty, Faye, Cami, Tim, and Kristin, Terry, Ted, Jeff, and Andre. There is a great deal of nodding. No one says anything, or offers handshakes, they simply nod. Owen squats down in the doorway and pops the cap off an oatmeal stout with a lighter he picks up off the coffee table. "Anyone need a beer?" Ted nods, Owen hands him a beer.

"Thanks, dude."

"No problem."

Everyone sits there watching television. The whole scene seems pretty familiar. Too familiar. All too damned familiar. You come all this way to a great city full of adventure and land in front of a fucking television set. That same dull expression, lifeless eyes hypnotized by a cathode ray. It has become a staple. Owen thinks about how much he hates television. He lights a cigarette and carefully looks around the room. It is a woman's house, without a doubt. The built-in china cabinets skillfully decorated with Eastern-Asian figurines, vases, and a large hooka, woven Asian throw-rugs on the near wall, a tapestry on the far wall says it all. Definitely a house dominated by women. Cami sits on the couch beside the china cabinet, her long straight blonde hair hanging across her shoulders. She looks thin, almost anorexic, small mildly perky breasts, but out of shape -- a despondent look on her pallid face. She might be pretty if she smiled. Faye sits next to her curled up in a blanket. A brown-haired freckle face, he thinks, kind of snotty, sort of cute, lips a bit too thin, witchlike. Ice queen. And Betty. Now Betty. Yes, Betty, she's an interesting piece of woman. Curled up in the far end of the couch wearing sunglasses, snarling grin, full chested, nice ass. And a personality to boot. She would be interesting. Ted sits on the edge of the couch across the room drinking the stout. He looks your run-of-the-fringe bandoleer-wearing brahman of the nineties. Bottle in hand, leader of the pack. You can see the lion in his eyes. Tonight the lion looks sleepy. Tim slumps up and walks into the kitchen, his thin frame cutting the narrows of the couch and coffee table.

"Oh, that's a nice outfit, Teri," Kristin says to the television. Beverly Hills 90210 rambles on about some worn-out, insignificant yet well-dressed topic.

"Hellfire!" says Betty "Tori Spelling's such