“You are my angel/come from way above/to bring me love….”
I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow.  I awoke outside of LA, outside of Barstow, outside of civilization, outside of intention, outside of desire, outside of myself.  I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat.  It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare that I had to escape by waking up.  I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis.  Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors.  I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace.  Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner.  Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together.  I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response.   I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely.  Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico.  I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills.  In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz.  Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground.  I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself.  I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest.  In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise.
Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire.  Oh to be cold…  The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep.  Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat.  It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning.  There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life.  I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere.  I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness.  
There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace.  I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god.  The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire).  I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure.  The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth.
Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away.  I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity.  I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek.  I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you.  God it was hot.  And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas.
Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea.  He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure.  There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla.  Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world.  The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it.  We humans can move what!  I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever.  Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour.  The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing.  You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again.
The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books.  A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity.  Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels.  I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives.  The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard.  We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it.  Bastards.  The idea was to go and keep going, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
	Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up.  We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura.  Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom.  The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life.  The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures.  The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions.  To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow.  Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars.  I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow.  Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe.
	Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year.  I jumped down and we headed back out on the road.  I lit a cigarette.  Life was going bang!   The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut.  Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast.
The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex.  I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.  True what!  
I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me.  “How ya doin’?” he asked.
“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.”
“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…” he smiled mischievously.  I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer…
“Ah, so you knew?”
He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.”
With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable.  Heat radiates out from within.  I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food.   Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond.  Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency.
Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there.  My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California.  When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips.  My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate.  I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car.  I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes.  In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a Palo Verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe.  Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain.  (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you).  There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday.  The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do.  That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do.  There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died.  I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice.  But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is.  There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams.  What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere?  Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life?  Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea?  My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned lysoled suburbs.
Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing.  She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck…  I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’ I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply.  Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums.  It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go.  If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun.  Stay clear of me.
Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down.  In and out.  Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder.
	You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain.  The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture.  You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say.  Lust for what?  It’s all gone from now.  Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves.   
I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint...  The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion.  The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond.  Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin.  Smooth blue skin.
	I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion.  Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind.  Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time.
Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges.  Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers.  Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film.  Scar tissue that languishes eternally.




We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas; things are amuck amuck as the man said.  First there is Rachel.   Rachel is a cool-mom.  In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom.  Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own.  Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle.  She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more.  Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures.  The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs.  Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty.  Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up.
Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of all right guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes.  These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking.  Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash.  Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot.  Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him.  Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice.  I thought about it every time I see him.  I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the Alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile….
True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally.  I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them.  From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes.  He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knew how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished.  There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb.  There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime. 
I avoid him like the plague, but its difficult to avoid someone when you live with them.  Bob was a constant nuisance, he was always knocking on the door to Dean’s room where I was also staying for the time being and after a while he realized that we weren’t always asleep so he took it upon himself to barge in and offer us ‘a cold one.’  Now that doesn’t sound like such a bad man, but the problem lay in the fact that a cold one was rarely anything better than Pabst blue ribbon and he never just had one.  He would perch there on the end of Dean’s bed with his bog construction boot on my pillow; it was his unsubtle way of reminding me that I was not welcome in his book.  He would sit there and out of the blue launch into his troubles; work was working him to hard, alcohol was no longer solving all his problems (ya think? Dean and I would say), and worst of all was when he told a story.  Bob had no sense of timing or point to his stories, they were uninteresting, delivered in a chaotic disjointed way that made no sense and they never had a point or an end they just kind of tapered off or led to a completely separate story with no relation to the one preceding it.  My favorite were the ones that went… “I went down to the strip last night….”  The middle parts changed according to the night but the end result was always the same, bob sitting somewhere too drunk to know where and trying to remember if a taxi was on its way or if he just thought it was on its way.  Then there was the tapered ending in which he tried to remember where he lived and his voice would train off and he might say something like “did you ever meet my sister Bonnie?”  Or what’s the score anybody know what the score to the game is?”  Dean and I never even knew what game he was referring to let alone what the score was.  The score was that Bob drove us out of the house to saner pastures where no one bothered us. 
Dean had a nice little racket writing for the Vegas Gazette which was owned by one of his schoolmate’s father or something like that.  He wrote inane little articles about the various society happenings of Las Vegas it was inane, but it came with perks such as the pretentious parties we had to attend; Dean as the writer and me as the photographer.  We were the press.  Or at least we were supposed to be, but we spent more time at the open bars than we did interviewing and photographing people. 



Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean.  Day’s pass like strolls through airport lounges, arrival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, the interim’s are spent waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. Typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away.  The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock.  The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight.  We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar.  In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care.  This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas.  It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, and the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core.
Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert.  The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned.  Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime.  But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. 
Th puritan preachers of the four-headed beast abstinence are the only humans that don’t like Vegas, but they don’t like anything except God so that should come as no surprise.  These are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the Moral Minority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have.  I only bring this up because another old casino was razed this afternoon, another shoddy rundown beautiful den of corruption and vice.  What will replace it will no doubt sparkle and have a romper room for kids to play in while there conservative sort of middle class sort of middle of the road sort of white family fantasy parents gamble and “cut loose.”  The very same people that vote republican and unconsciously model their morals after Alex P Keaton.  They may not be religious but they are damn sure they no what is right and wrong —gambling and drink is right; whores and drugs is wrong.  Therein they support the further degradation of the human animal that has been propagated by the Moral Minority for what seems like eternity. The American west was humanity’s final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of belief and repression, but its lost, all is lost… you know the story… odd isn’t it that the land of liberty has more citizens in prison than any other country on earth?  Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas.  Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up.  The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations.  Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts.  Who the fuck wants to see tigers, even if they are white?  We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight.  To live more or less the way god intended —happy. 
This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanine of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore.  It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much?  In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots.  What goes through you mind when you do that all day long?  Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there?  Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving.  They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something.  More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide.  It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of iridescent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows.  Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars.  The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity.  The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger!  By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?!  He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want?  Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more...  He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob.  We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?!  I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?!  And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more!  We want new!  The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny!  We want clean!  The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter!  We want to be happier!  The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky.  Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine.  Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show.  The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something.  He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him.  He locks the door and starts sketching….
Boredom.  I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth.  Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore; I can see it in her eyes.  The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination.  She’s right, but it’s only half the story —her half.  The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and depravity.  I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color cauterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure.  There is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland.  Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins.  The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs.
They want to eat.  New needs, hierarchies, sex after food.  Leaving there is whirlpool of words like white and dark chocolate swirled together atop a brownie of callous confusion.  Words can not hurt me… but have you heard the words?  Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Outside is America; a cop lights a whore’s cigarette near the corner.  I laugh realizing that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together.  Information potential exists —it’s an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?  Where does the word go?  In the beginning to be sure… but what about at the end….  In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention an awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind…?  Outside is Las Vegas.  Everywhere the neon glows; the giggling Hyenas tourists are dressed in black and high on somatic stasis —looking to turn you inside out. Tongue-tied whores scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."


Chloe knows a diner, just a short drive… drunkenly Dean careens side streets and alleys while Chloe and I discuss the finer points of her profession.  The oldest profession in the world fascinates me and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to get the inside dope.
“For the most part I fuck who I want… I have my regulars… guys that come into town every month or two for recreation….”
She takes a drag off her cigarette and whips her nose; it’s a gesture of annoyance.  I know that she doesn’t want to talk about work, but I press on because I have to, I have no shame, no bloody words reach me.
“Most of them are married, nice guys… I don’t work the streets… that’s where it’s dangerous… I used to work at a brothel but everyone treats you like a whore when you work in brothel.  I got tired of it and when I left it turned out I was popular…” she laughed a hearty little chuckle.  “So I just got a pager and now I go to them instead of them coming to me….  But why do you want to know all this stuff?”
Sharp words bloody words.  “Uh I don’t know… isn’t that what you do when you talk to strangers.... Ask them about there work?”  She laughs.
“I guess its just that when your job is sex most people tend to not ask… its impolite maybe I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to stop you I was just curious… so what do you guys do?”
“Umm… drink?  Nothing I guess.”
“Hmm how do you afford it?”
“A carefully constructed world of lowered expectations….”  Dean speaks.
“Hmm.  But you have goals?  You don’t seem like the types that would just hang around, you know barflies or are you on some kind Bukowski trip.”
Entirely inaccurate synopsis; I must defend us, but what is there to say?  What is there to do?  “Well I actually haven’t read any Bukowski, but yes I guess you could say that… I mean this is Vegas what the hell is there to do?  ‘We’re writers’ sounds stupid because neither of us had actually published anything.  I mean I guess it depends…”
“No I don’t think it does.  You don’t have to published to be a writer, just like you don’t have to charge money to be a whore.”
And there the conversation reached a philosophical point that required further thought on all our parts, but the diner appeared and we parked and it was lost for the time being.  Dean went in to get a table and Chloe and I finished out cigarettes in silence.  I was marveling at the edifice of the place.  I am a connoisseur of diners.  Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind; in order to qualify as a true diner the outside must be painted white and in a state of decay.  This place fit the bill admirably; it looked like the last coat of paint probably still had lead in it, which would put it pre 1980 at least.  Lead is what produces those strange patterned of flaking that leaves the look of weathered desert rock on stucco walls.  Dean leaned out and yelled at us, “we can smoke inside you morons….”  Inside it still lived up to the diner images; hard formica counters rose out of cold concrete floors scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes. It calling up visions of lost highways long gone past; dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete.  We sat down in a booth by the side window. Dean went to go spin a few tracks on the jukebox; Chloe looked even more ravishing sitting in the red vinyl cushions her hair was auburn and looked best in the state of confused disarray she wore it.  I fell in love with her the way every man falls in love with whores, a totally false way in the eyes of the cynical world and a totally real way in the eyes of the endlessly recreating universe.  Music floated across the room burying the concrete
highway traces of noise, the freeway semi trailers flinging themselves through the night headlights dragging the past into the future and we sat, Chloe and I, here, now.
I was at piece by the time Dean came back; lazy houseflies crawled up the wall behind him and Chloe which set the diner off in league with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken.  I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left.  About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate.  There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn.  I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted.  After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table.  I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at.  Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be.  I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town.  Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one.  I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about.  One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life.  I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts.  We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep.
	I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean and Chloe over double cheeseburgers.  I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs?  They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there.  Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken.  Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Flagstaff and often went to Vegas for the weekends, but it’s a big city and then even in Vegas how many diners?  How many nights?  What are the odds?  All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken?  I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me.
	I watched Clay for moment without him seeing me.  Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years.  I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him.  I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him.  I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise.  We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth.
	“My god what are you doing here?” 
	“I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?”
	“Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living in Wrightwood, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Vegas?  Last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!”
	I racked my brain.  Where would he have gotten such foolish ideas?  Who was behind this?  “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?”
	“I forget maybe Robert.”  Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago.  Which, it dawned on me now was one of the many things I had given away by leaving LA.
	“How is Bob?”
	“Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.”  Clay and I both laughed.
Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it.  Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes.  The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship.  That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish.  When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept.  It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition.  We were a lot smarter back then.  I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood.  I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him.  He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word.  He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say.  And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm.  He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence.  When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up.  
Clay had left LA years ago living in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school.  Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him.  Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it.  Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory.  We all came from adventurous sort of families.
Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here.  And then there and now back here.  Now we just crisscrossed paths occasionally with each of us making plans for trips we knew we would never go on.  The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead.  I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay.
	“What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?”
	“Ya I’m with some friends of mine,” I motioned to Dean and Chloe that they should come over.  Dean didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA.  I introduce them and Dean went back to our booth, retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner.  I introduced Chloe, but she had turned suddenly quiet and I wasn’t interested in her anymore.  She and Dean fell into a conversation separate from Clay and I.  I wasn’t sure but I thought that they were discussing sex and money in that nonplussed way that only a whore can do… so much for a handjob, so much of a blowjob, so much for what ever you want….  Clay was telling me about Anna, his girlfriend and asking what had become of my marriage.  I was sober by the end of the burger and I had a sudden urge to run.  Run away from everyone and everything that had ever been familiar to me and start over by reinventing my personality.  It occurred to me that my initial nostalgia was misplaced, that Clay and I would not always be friends, that I was not who I used to be, that one day Dean would be a stranger as well.  I was feeling quite lonely and wholesome when I came to.  
	“A rave?  Hey Sil!  Are you listening to me?”  Dean was staring at me as if I was ill.
	“What?”
	“A rave.  Chloe knows where a desert rave is… you up for it?”
	I glanced at Clay and he nodded “just gotta go pick up my girlfriend.”  Damn.  I wanted them all to disappear; I wanted a director to yell cut, to take a break from this strange role I found myself cast into.  “Uh ya sure… you drive and I’ll be there.”
The four of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around).  I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one now would care about.  And Clay filled me in because I didn’t hear stories or if I did I never remembered them anyway.  It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the impending move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing.  
Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle).  I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things.  Subtle reminders were dropped here and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation.  At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within.  I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed.  I was the propaganda of hedonism.  I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong.  In fact Clay working at the Christian summer camp that we went to in high school.
	I got lost in myself again as he talked.  As I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed.  He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor.  He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments.  He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else?  I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited.  I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing.  This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation.  Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I knew Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do.  I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people.  The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man —now there is an odd one.  Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it?  Who would have made such a thing?  I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs.
	When I snapped out of it they were talking about books.  Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be.  This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs.  I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates.  He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack.  I could never do it.  He had lent me some books and then wham! in I went to the world of the totally bizarre.  Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then I found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying.  I have always read that way —being more interest in the whole scope of author’s life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do.  Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way, total consumption and digestion followed by a big healthy brown shit.
	When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up.  I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me.  He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again.  She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets.  She could have been a model, but she wasn’t, she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten.  I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone.  I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang.  I went up and introduced myself.  Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.”  If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna.  She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know.  I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn.
	Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry at once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else.  When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music.  Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). 	
	Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea.  The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the others will swoop in and feed on your weakness.  Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it.  Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she knew it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and go with us to the rave.  
But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight.  She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom, as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs.  Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves.  Chloe said we were deranged.  We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, “how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add “and how she loved it.”  As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again.  You will understand from experience.  The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess.  We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew —wouldn’t you?
	I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this rave.  Chloe and Dean were already groping at each other in the car and Clay and Anna seemed to be having a bit of a spat in the front seat; I watched Anna’s face in the reflection of the side rearview mirror.  She had a elegant sort of beauty that was all in the sharp line of her jaw and the way her chin met with the smooth luster of her neck; she felt to city born and refined to be with Clay.  She wore a thin spaghetti strapped tank top shirt that made no effort to hide the silky black straps of her bra and a long flowing shiny skirt that danced across her ravishing legs when she walked.  We were all walking and had been for some time the rave was in a campground outside of Vegas; to add to the irony of the evening the campground was a place called Red Rocks which during the day was a popular rock climbing spot, one that I had last visited with Clay.  We talked about that as we walked toward the sound of pulsing techno beats and the smells of perfume and marijuana.  Dean, Chloe and Anna walked in silence.
	The rave was set up in a barren sandy expanse that served as a dance floor and was ringed with canvas tents serving alcohol and herbal ecstasy.  It looked like a Bedouin settlement around an oasis in the desert.  The largest tent was elaborately decorated to play up the North African vibe the walls were covered in Moroccan tapestries and the floor was scattered with pillows and people.  The only light was from old oil lanterns that hung in the back corner.  It cost ten bucks to get into the tent.  Dean and I paid and the girls dragged Clay off to dance.  Dean and I were more interested in getting drinks and whatever else might be lurking like cockroaches in the pillows.  The tent was enormous and looked like it had been borrowed from the circus.  In the rave culture of Las Vegas this was the grandest of all raves and one of the only that bothered to get permits and whatever else it takes to be able to dance legally in the desert.  On the way in we passed limousines and Rolls Royce’s; this was not an underground affair.  To the side of the tent, backlit by purple Christmas lights was the makeshift bar, actually a few tables pushed together and manned by a blond haired kid who never stopped bobbing his head to the beat.  Dean and I secured drinks and found a space back in the darkened corner to relax and be anonymous.
	We were half way through our drinks before I noticed Crowes.  Not more than ten feet from us was  a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes.  In either case he crawled over to us with what appeared to be a great amount of effort and sat cross-legged facing us without uttering a word.  Dean greeted him coldly and then we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint.  We graciously accepted and Dean got up thinking we were to follow him outside but Crowes lit it right there in the middle of the tent and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it.
“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.”
	I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing.  Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo.  But from the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here.  My toes got tingly and my hands heavy.  Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it.  Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one.
	“You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.”
	“I hate it when that happens.”  Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply.  “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms.  I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs.  I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me.  Then my sister through her out of the house.”
Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn.  Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else had or maybe that was the entire story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. 
“What was that like man, I mean being married.”
“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.”
	“Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.  I mean what does that feel like?”  He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response.
Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands.  “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head.  It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control.  She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom.  It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.”
	This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch.  Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid.
	Still nothing.  Hmmmm.
	“You want to get something from the bar?”
	“Ya that would probably be good.”  I got up and went to the bar tent.  I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma
	Eventually Clay and girls find us; they are tired from dancing and welcome Crowes’ offering except for Clay who didn’t smoke pot.  I thought maybe we should warn them, but I was already lost seeing not a tent but an underground bar in France.  I am underground.  Anna’s face blurs into Nina’s, into Amy’s into a thousand different hybrids of herself like a shape-shifting shaman.  I smile at her and she smiles back. Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable.  My mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest.  And resting only with the throb of the music that drags us up and down over sand dunes and through thick stands of palms to water.  Dean and Chloe go off to dance.  Clay is gone too though I had not noticed it.  I am lying on my back in a delicious see of cloth, sound and touch.
“How are you doing?”  Anna attempts to drill through the ice.
	“Just lovely how are you?”
	(laughing)  “Lovely I guess… So how long have you known Clay?”
	“I dunno a decade or so, maybe more… it all runs together… how long have you two been dating?”
	“Six months.”
	Dead-end.  Conversations that are substituting for sex are never any fun, nor are they easy to maintain— its best to get the sex out of the way before you start talking.  Anna came to the rescue.
	“Would you like to dance?”
	“We could do that….”
	“I’m a little stoned to go outside… why don’t we dance right here?”
	I propped up on my elbows and stared right into her eyes searching for some hint of double entendre but she only stared back like a somnambulist.  But she kept getting closer and closer and closer like a slow motion film of the casino collapsing and then we kissed.  Her lips were warm and soft; they were full pouting lips and then they left.  I opened my eyes slowly.  Crowes walked by laughed and dropped a bag beside us.  Inside was a gooey gray substance known to most as opium.  Anna and I fumbled around through Chloe’s purse and found a pipe, which we filled with the roach and heaped on a healthy amount of opium.
		The taste of opium is sweet like Nag Champa incense; it perfumes your lungs and wraps them it its warm hand, a delicious felling and then I exhaled it into her mouth.  This is not Clay’s girlfriend nor do petty questions of loyalty or moral clouds of right and wrong concern me; this is simply life and it is beautiful.  All the opium dreams I have ever had come back in desert windstorms, monsoons of the coast of Mandalay and this is no longer Nevada this is everywhere and the music is undulating in time with her body dancing lightly swaying on her knees hovering over my chest. It was a house beat the kind of palpitating serpentine rhythm that you can not help but move to; over in corner a young boy no more than eighteen is standing with his back to the wall watching, a non participant I am thinking and then I notice that he too is swaying almost imperceptible to the music, the virus of movement.  His movement is both awkward and unconscious, but it has a naturalness to it that belies the sense that he is insecure, I am watching him, but in my own perhaps distracted way I too am awkward and in my distraction honesty has taken the reigns… my hands roam her body.  I look up suddenly with what must be a face of horror as I realize that I am groping at Anna’s flesh, but her head is thrown back and she seems not to care so I continue my explorations.  Her stomach is soft, tightly stretched skin like a drum, a jimbe with her breasts like two percussive bongos, her nipples are hard and feel like raisins sunk into the sink.  And the music switches beats, this one exhaustive, tribal, jungle pulsation’s in juxtaposition to the Hindu décor it attacks like a jaguar tearing at me.  I am exhausted.  My head collapses back between and pillows and with the last bit of reason, last bit of will I pull her up and over my face.  Her dress envelopes me in a sea of darkness and smell her musty and sweet like pungent orange blossoms sprinkled over seas of future dreams.  The music sways in time with her body and all sense of place and time vanish.  There are only temporal dreams lived out in paint in slick tempura of desiring swimming under her dress.  I blow softly onto her cunt through the barrier of satin; as my eyes adjust to darkness a damp circle of humid desire becomes visible and tactile in its stickiness.  Her juices flow freely and she moans softly over the music; she shifts slightly and her hand reaches down caressing my face and pulling her panties to the side.  It leaves and she sinks down on me until her cunt covers my mouth and breathing through my nose I begin to worm my tongue up in her.  Slowly probing and then when the flow of juices is too much I lift her ass in my hands forming a stool out of my hands and painting her clit with slow glazing strokes.  I am lost for what seems eternity, not thinking about Anna, or the rave or any of it, but simply becoming cunt.  Shape shifting as the shaman can I feel it from the inside coming out in waves pulsing waves so different than my own orgasms, waves that very in size and strength, waves that crest and break and other that I let roll by undisturbed.  There is no tsunami, no end point, no differentiation no beginning no ending only fleeting twinkles of a glittering amaranthine orgasm.  I am drawn back by her stillness and the sharp pain of her nails digging into arms.
	She rolls off me and lies down beside me kissing and licking her come off my face.  She is smiling, but does not speak.  Minutes pass like hours.  Clay returns and they go off to dance, as she leaves her hand moves behind her motioning at me to follow but I don’t yet.  I lay there with out moving just feeling tangential mix of sex and opium.  Sex.  The feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed sweating breasts stuck to my skin, kissing, chasing her tongue around her mouth….  There is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it.  They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from us, but it is not.  It is in us —we are sex.  Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it.  I want to celebrate it; I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world.  I want men I want Women I want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy.  No words for it.
	Dean and Chloe return.  They found the opium and pack themselves a bowl.  Anna seemed slightly embarrassed and excused herself to look for Clay.  Dean Chloe and I are lying like pictures out of the room of some Chinese Laundry joint; blank faceless bodies reveling in the glory of our own nervous systems and in the elastic beauty of each other.  
Chloe roles on her side facing me and kisses me.  She tastes it.  I put my finger to her lips and she smiles.  “Hey Dean… Sil saved you the trouble….”
	Dean sits up “You fucked her?!”  
	“Not exactly”  Chloe kisses me again this time plunging her tongue down my throat and then grabs Dean and kisses him.
	“Oh I see.  Wow that’s really odd… that right there I mean… you ate Anna… Chloe kisses you… and then me… so I taste Anna… I’m not sure how I feel about that… should that gross me out?”
	Chloe laughs, “why would it gross you out, because it originated in Sil’s mouth?  But it didn’t… what is with you men?  You all want to be with two women and yet you can’t even stand to be hard around each other….” 
	It’s not that….”
	“Yes it is, trust me if there is one thing I know it’s the sex habits of men.  I can’t tell you how many guys freak out at the thought that I might have just had a cock other than theirs in me… it makes no sense at because that’s what I do, but even if I wasn’t it still wouldn’t make any sense.  What is so revolting about men?  What is so revolting about cocks?  If you ask me I don’t think any of our hang up are from women….  Its men that can’t stand the sight of themselves.
	“It’s not that….”  Dean is at a loss for words.
	“What do you mean its not that?  What is it then?  I mean if your so comfortable with you body why didn’t you want to fuck me in the middle of all those people?  What is your hang up then?”
	Dean is silent.  I feel the need to defend him, but I can’t the girl is right.  
“Down at the bottom of all the strange America hang ups about sex lies the sad truth that men are not comfortable in their own skins.  Maybe a hand full here and there....  Freud would say its penis envy or a modified version of it that deals with size, but its more than that.  Men have inherited genetic memory or past life memory or something handed across more than cultural boundaries that carries with it guilt. I have no idea why, but it’s there you can hear it in between that words when men talk about sex.  There is a different language employed by men.  Men always talk about sex in terms of women or a woman… like ‘we had sex’ or ‘she was sexy’ or whatever, but there is no talk of the self —everything sexual is transferred to the woman.  She is the one that made him cum, she is the one that bent over, and she is bearer of all things wanton...  Men dream of a wanton sexual woman, but they don’t want to be a wanton sexual person themselves.  Everything that is desire is always ‘aroused’ that’s why they come to me because I am wanton or at least that’s how they see it.  I don’t exist for them and that is the most wanton thing you seem to be able to imagine this abstract fantasy girl that is everything all rolled into one and doesn’t have to be dissected and pulled apart… just put the money on the dresser when you leave….”
“Does that bother you?”  Dean lights a cigarette and props up on his elbows.  He raises his eyebrows at me when he notices that I have been fondling Chloe while she talked. 
“No it doesn’t bother me… but it doesn’t turn me on either….  I mean men like to think that whores don’t feel anything, like because money is involved we suddenly can’t experience pleasure of something, but that’s a load of shit….  If anything I have had better sex since I have been doing this… some of the guys I fuck are gorgeous, I would be intimidated to talk to them in a bar… but most of them still seem to think that being a whore is an odious task… that I must be faking because I couldn’t possible cum if money is involved….  Like this one guy who likes me to masturbate while he watches and then he’ll start masturbating too sitting in this chair.  (her eyes close)  at first it kind of crewed me out but then I started getting really turned on by it and he was telling me what to do and how fast and it was weird like I was masturbating, but he was in control… that turned me on big time, but he will not believe that.  He still tells me that I can fake an orgasm better that anyone… but the thing is that usually I’m not faking it….  I mean I don’t want to get into it... its probably boring but….”
“No I’d be interested to know what strange things you have done… what’s the weirdest thing somebody has asked you to do?”  I am intrigued.
“The weirdest?  Wow um, probably the guy that wanted me to rape his wife, but refused to do that… the weirdest thing I have done….” Chloe’s face seemed refracted; split apart as if she were tapping some memory far removed from now, from this self.  I wanted to attribute that to some reflex of her profession, some need to detach, but it seemed untrue in her case.  Chloe had that relaxed ease of one who can change personality at will not simply out of necessity, but on whim, anything arbitrary that might have set her thinking. She was far too intelligent to do anything she didn’t want to do, at least to do it for money.  “I guess the weirdest was this guy who liked me to take a shit in front of him.  He had this warehouse/loft thing downtown and there was nothing in it except for a little bar on wheels that he kept against the wall by the door.  The elevator opened right into the place which always reminds me of the forts my brother used to build in his room… he would stack pillows up so the when you opened the door and went inside you were automatically in the fort.  But anyway this guy would send a limo for me and then I would go up to the loft in a French maid getup completely with the little feather duster and I would clean the place while he sat in the chair and watched.  He would get furious if I acknowledged his presence… the place was clean to begin with so would just kind of wander around and bend over here and there and pretend that I was doing something.  And then after about ten minutes of that I would get a silver platter from behind the bar and lay it in the middle of floor in front of his chair and take a shit on it.  Then I left.”
Dean shook his head, “what did he do with it?”
“I have no idea; I don’t really want to know, but he paid me a thousand dollars to do it once a week for about six months and then he just disappeared.  Probably found someone new… I dunno one day I was all dressed up waiting for the limo and it just never showed.”  Throughout her story Chloe had her back to me and I was absently stoking her ass at first and then I moved in on her cunt, it was warm and soon wet and I was fingering her without reserve by the end of it.  She still did nothing to acknowledge it.  Dean told a story about his ex wife who had been stripper for some time.
“She did some er extra curricular stuff, but it used to bother me for some reason.  There was this one guy though that liked her to come over… same kind of set up she showed up in a French maid outfit and made him a sandwich, it was even on a silver platter if I remember right… then she served it to him and she set in on his lap and straddled him and pissed on the sandwich.  Then she left.  What a weird fucking thing to want….  I mean most fantasies I have heard I could if not relate to at least understand, but that one is just lost on me….”
“It used to be lost on me too until I realized that it had nothing to do with me or with sex or anything, I think it was a way of touching some part of him that was sealed off in memory, something too painful to access everyday and he needed that intimacy to remind him….”
“But what’s intimate about watching someone take shit?”
“Well think about it Dean… I mean how many people have you seen taking a shit?”
“Not many.”
“Exactly, so if you saw me doing it it would likely remind you of someone you knew well, well enough to watch them going to the bathroom.  At least that’s what I think… who knows though maybe there is some Freudian explanation… maybe they were hung up in the anal stage….”  Silence drifts on reflection of the idea.  
“Do you enjoy sex outside of work?”  I had to know does making sex your job make sex into work?”
“Sil, what kind of question is that?  Of course I enjoy sex even when I’m not getting paid… I mean its sex… just because you make money at it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun when you're not… am I making sense?”
“Sort of.  I think the opium might be crossing a few wires.”  I smiled at her and she lay back down.  The three of us stared at the top of the tent.  
Chloe started off talking again slowly at first.  “The thing about me is that I have been exposed to some rather extreme forms of sex in my professional life and I keep trying to drag what I like out of them into my personal life, but it freaks men out.  They can’t handle women who know what they want.  I scared the living shit out of my last boyfriend.  We had been dating about two months, having sort of vanilla sex, you know missionary, me on top, doggy, run of the mill stuff, so I thought maybe I should expose him to something more…. (laughing fits over took her and she paused for a minute)  I’ll never forget the look on his face when I walked into the room wearing skin tight rubber boots that go all the way up my legs… I had on nipple clamps I was holding a dog collar and a chain.  I told him ‘get on your knees and lick my asshole.’  He wouldn’t do it, he left me standing there... he just took off and I never talked to him again….”
“That’s a travesty….”  Dean clearly would have stayed.  So would I.
“Ya men are good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when it’s your perversion and you degrading them.  That is why I prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you….”
“How long have you been bi?”  Lesbian chic fascinates me, one day it just became perfectly acceptable for women to have sex with each other.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just seemed to have happened one day.  Odd.
“I’ve been sexual since I was born that’s that thing I don’t like about saying I’m bi, it like one day I woke up and liked women?  No it doesn’t work like that… sex is this thing inside us that has to come out.  Some people let more of it out than others that’s all….  I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men.  I know women's bodies; they are my own body.  By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other.  There is no Other.  And women are adventurous than with men.”
I was about to ask if she had a girlfriend when out of nowhere Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled my fingers out of her cunt with such ferocity that I thought I had offended her; she didn’t even look at me.  Then I saw Anna and Clay approaching and I understood.  
They were leaving; Anna looked disappointed, but I didn’t trust my instincts just then.  It was around four and Clay had to drive back to Wrightwood.  We all walked back to his car and headed for the diner.  The ride was in an awkward silence.  By the time we reached Dean’s car I was on the brink of madness from the silence from the unquenched longing and more than anything from the wan of opium.  I hugged Clay and then Anna automatically like they were statues.  And then they were gone.
I had a forlorn look on my face to which Dean made a point of saying, “poor Sil.  That’ll teach you to let’em cum first.”
“Oh and you did any different?”  Chloe raised an eyebrow at him.
Dean shrugged and replied, “I must have done something right you’re still here….”
“You are both morons of the highest degree… luckily for you I took the liberty of taking care of you… you seemed like you needed it….  Come on we need to go get a room at the kldjlkj hotel….”
“A room?  What for?”
“Because that’s where Anna is meeting us after she gets rid of that Clay guy… what was with him anyway?”
“I dunno he’s an old friend… not his scene I don’t think….”
“Well come on I need to smoke some more of this opium.”


The room was small, two double beds crammed in between a closet and a window, the mattresses sagged and looked like they had been fucked to extinction.  I called down to the lobby and ordered extra sheets which we laid over the bedspreads and only then did Dean feel comfortable enough to lie down on the bed.  Chloe was on him in seconds and I was left to sit and wait.  Waiting as I have said before is something I gave up on so I decided to go for a walk.  We were on the outskirts of Las Vegas the budget travelers’ paradise where the rooms are cheaper than the cover charge at the clubs downtown.  The area was artificial from the get go, no thought had been put into it, no planning councils, no zoning arguments, it wasn’t even within the city limits.  Outside the familiar dry desert heat washed over me like a napalm bath.  It was acrid air; it stunk with the worthlessness of lower middle class mediocrity, not rich, not poor, not anything at all —stale.  The moon was just disappearing behind the White Mountains somewhere off near the horizon with its glow being the only thing visible from this side of the overpass.  I walked up the embankment and watched cars on the freeway screaming past.  The rush of the wind as the semis passed at ninety was strong enough to lean into.  Lighting a cigarette proved impossible so I headed back.  When I turned around I saw them.  Or I saw it, which was a freight train at near crawl as it came around the bend and headed east out of Vegas.  I was transfixed for moment and then a passing semi sent a blast of air and dust that sent me down the embankment and back to the hotel.  
Anna bless her heart was not there when I got back.  There was only Chloe sitting in bed smoking a cigarette.  It seemed natural that she should be doing so and sat down next to her and smoked a cigarette too, neither of us spoke.  About half way through mine, she crushed hers out and still without saying a word unzipped my pants and fished out my still flaccid prick.  She pulled the covers over her head and I felt her warm mouth on my stomach.  Her hands worked at my belt and she pulled down my pants and I kicked them off unto the floor, then she swallowed my cock whole.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  I relaxed and smoked.