Sixteen.

Sheik Europa was waiting for me, one day, sitting in a topless Hummer parked at the edge of the desert, where the sand began to trickle into Mags’ patch of green lawn. I was going out to pick roses from the bushes along the path to put in the vase in the front hall. Mags was asleep in the big bed on the second floor, a clean white sheet draped over one perfect thigh. I was going to fill the vase and then make a picnic for us to eat together in the garden.

The Sheik was kicked back in the driver’s seat of the Hummer, bright noontime sun flashing off the lenses of his aviator shades, twinkling off the zippers and snaps and studs of his leather jacket. He slowly aimed the sunglasses towards me, turned on his million-watt grin.

“Hey, Davey. What’s up?”

I squinted down to see him better past all the pinpoint light coming off him. “Not much. What’s up with you?”

“Not much.” He stretched out an arm and crooked a finger at me. “C’mon, man. I’m here to give you a ride.”

I stayed on the path. “A ride where?”

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back into the wasteland. “Into town.” The grin cranked up a couple of notches. “You’ve got a package to deliver, right?”

I shook my head. “Nah. I gave up that shit.”

The Sheik sat up and shrugged. “All right, man. Catch you around.” He threw the Hummer in reverse, whipped it around and barreled off into the desert in a plume of sand. I ran back inside and woke up Mags.

“Baby? There was this guy just here, all dressed up in leather and shit.”

She yawned and arced her arms over her head and I watched her breasts rise up, smooth and perfect and pale in the endless dusk of the bedroom. I slid my hands around them, leaned in and kissed her. Her arms came down around me, pulled me close. I fell into her and we were together until the moon came up and I forgot about the Sheik.


It rained that night, a brutal thunderstorm that rattled the windows and shook the floorboards. We woke up together and sat up against the headboard and watched distant lightning strikes that lit up the room like daylight. The cat bolted through the open door and leapt into the bed with us and threw itself against my chest. I wrapped my arms around it and held it close, feeling its heart stuttering away.

“Jesus, baby. Do you get storms like this a lot?”

She leaned into my shoulder, kissed the side of my neck. “Sometimes. When there’s things going on.”

“Like what?”

She nuzzled my ear. “I don’t know. Things. Stuff happening in town. Things I don’t care about.” She took my earlobe between her sharp little teeth, bit down and pulled. Lighting flashed in the sky.

I smiled. “Horny girl.”

Her breath tickling my ear. “For you? Always.” Her hand slid across my thigh, fingers trailing down the length of me. She ran her tongue down my neck, across my shoulder. Her fingers curled around me, softly stroked. I peeled the cat off my chest, set it on the floor. Mags leaned in, kissed my throat, my chest, flicked her tongue against my nipple. I pulled her on top of me and thunder raged across the desert.


The Sheik was waiting the next morning, when I went to pick fresh roses for the vase in the front hall.

The storm had pummeled the garden, flattened the flowers and washed away the beds. The neat brick borders had been pushed askew by tiny mudslides. The trellises of grapes and tomatoes were in tangled heaps on the ground, broken vines already drying out, going gray in the morning sun. I went around front to see how the rose bushes had fared, and saw the Sheik sitting in his Hummer, basking in the sun, one gloved hand draped over the steering wheel.

“Hey man.” He grinned at me. “Ready to go?”

I smiled back. “Toldja, man. I gave up the messenger gig.” I walked down the path and stood at the edge of the edge of the desert. “If you want, I’ll give you the package and you can give it to whoever.”

He shook his head, still grinning. “Nah, I’m just the driver. It’s your package.”

“Seriously, I’ll sign off on it. I really don’t care.”

“S’okay. Not a big deal.” He started up the Hummer. “Don’t worry about it.” He threw it into reverse, pulled a wheel-spinning u-turn, and drove off into the desert, a cloud of dust following him across the dunes.


That night it snowed. A blizzard as bad as I’d ever seen, sheets of wet snow sleeting down past the windows. Arctic winds, killingly cold, whipped across the eaves, found their way into the house, chilled us to the bone, forced us into sweaters and socks, Mags raiding the linen closet for a down quilt she’d never had to use before.

We huddled in the bed, Mags and me and the cat, shivering and cuddling close, trying to drum up a little warmth. We didn’t sleep, just sat with the quilt pulled up to our chins, watching the snow come down. Around midnight I went to the kitchen to make tea and saw that the snow had drifted halfway up the windows, and watched, spellbound, as another inch of glass was covered. Back upstairs, mugs of tea rapidly cooling in the freezing room, I asked Mags if it had ever snowed that badly before.

“It’s never snowed at all, honey.” She stared through the window, eyes wide. The snow whipped and circled and blew. “Never.” I pulled her close, and we watched the snow while the cat squirmed between us.


The Sheik might have been waiting the next day, but I couldn’t get out to see. The drifts had climbed above even the second floor windows. We stayed in bed all day, huddling, watching our breath. We didn’t fuck, we didn’t talk. We just held each other and watched the blank windows and listened to the drip-drip-drip of the melting snow. By sunset the drifts had melted enough to allow a hands breadth of clear glass in the bedroom window. I got up and scraped away the frost with my fingernail and peered out.

Snow everywhere. At least six feet on the ground. The path, rose bushes, all buried. It petered out at the edge of the lawn, where the desert took over. Out there, I couldn’t see anything but hot dry sand. And, I could swear, a plume of dust just disappearing over the horizon. I went back to bed and curled up with Mags and the cat and the three of us fell asleep.


The creaking woke me up. It was that loud. It woke up Mags and the cat, too.

“Davey?”

That creaking. Old wood that’s taken too much, that’s bowed and sagging, cracking at the weak points in the grain. Getting ready to let go. Shit. I jumped out of bed.

“C’mon. Out. Let’s go.”

We ran down to the living room, me dragging the quilt and Mags carrying the cat, and curled up on the loveseat. The creaking went on and on, sounding like every bad ship-in-a-storm movie sound effect you ever heard. It had just about gotten boring when the whole thing let go with a shriek of nails pulling loose and the flat snap of broken bones. The floor shook as God only knows how many tons of shingles and roofbeams and wet snow collapsed into the bedroom. A moment of silence, and then the drip-drip-drip of snowmelt trickling down the stairs.

Mags leaned against me and cried small, quiet tears. I wrapped my arm around her and held her until the tears stopped and she fell asleep. I leaned my head back and looked at the ceiling, wondering if it would hold. Eventually, I fell asleep too.


It took me from dawn till noon to dig a path from the front door to the edge of the lawn, where snowmelt trickled into the desert and formed a ring sandy red mud that circled the house. I used one of Mags cookie sheets for the digging, and the path I made crooked around buried, dead rose bushes and the tumbled cobblestones of the walkway. The edges of it were easily seven feet tall. I waited at the edge of the desert in a sweater and my $20 shoes, the package in my hands. I waited, and waited, and prayed that the Sheik would show.

The Sheik pulled up at dusk, his Hummer announced a mile away by the drone of the big turbodiesel and the blue pinpoints of off-road driving lights. He skidded up to the edge of my path, throwing up a spray of sand the way skaters throw up a spray of ice, and grinned at me from the driver’s seat.

“Ready to go, Davey?”

I tossed the package onto the sand next to the driver’s door. “Just fucking take it, all right? You can have the fucking thing. I’m done with this.”

The grin turned into a smirk. “Davey, brother, I told you,” he pulled a lit cigarette out of the air and took a drag off it, “I’m just the driver.” He blew smoke into the fading light. “You’re the delivery boy.”

I turned and headed back up the path to the house. The door was open, Mags watching me. I smiled at her, some attempt at reassurance, I’m all over this, baby…don’t you worry. Her face wrinkled, she dropped my bag on the front stoop, and slammed the door. I heard locks that I hadn’t even realized were there clicking into place.

“Baby?” I ran up to the door, tried the knob. My fingers slid around it. I knocked, lightly. “Honey?” Harder. “Honey, what’s going on?” Hammering with the edge of a fist. “Honey? Mags, open the door.” Beating at the door with both hands, screaming, godammit, Mags, OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.

The Sheik’s voice, lilting across the snow. “Davey, I think maybe she wants you to come with me…”

(There’s more, but Jesus fuck, I’m tired. I’ll pick it up when I get back from Vegas.)

(This is older stuff that'll probably get reworked later on, but it gets Mags on the scene, and, fuck, she's gotta get there sometime doesn't she?)

Fifteen.

Mags Verbosa was sitting at a bus stop when that fat fuck cabbie decelerated his Lincoln down from a buck-fifty to zero in the space of about twelve feet and kicked me out the back door before I’d even managed to get myself all the way untangled from the seatbelt. She was sitting on a wooden bench in the shade of a corrugated steel lean-to, reading a paperback and looking just as pretty as a picture. As pretty as any picture; as all the pictures that ever were or ever will be or were ever even imagined. I got that in my first sweeping look around.

She glanced up momentarily when the Lincoln peeled out, then back to her book without so much as blinking my way. I got up off the blacktop and pried some pebbles out of my palms and stood on the road, panting, swinging my head this way and that, looking for what I don’t know. I think I was just doing what people in movies do when they get ejected from the backseats of unreal cars. You look around, try to find something to focus on, something that makes sense so you can get on to the next plot point.

Which would be Mags Verbosa, The Pretty Girl. Of course. Who would have all the answers, of course. And just happened to be waiting for me in the middle of the desert.

“S’cuse me…”

She didn’t look up from her book. “There’s a big goddamned truck due through here in about three seconds, so you’d probably better get off the road.” Her voice, of course, sounded like bells. And I should have been entranced and enchanted, of course, and stuck fast to the spot with stars in my eyes and bluebirds going tweet tweet tweet around my head, but I’d been through enough bullshit in the previous couple of days to know when good advice was being tossed my way, so I got off the road.

And yes, thank you, it was one big goddamned truck that cruised past just as I stepped from the highway to the sandy shoulder, a truck with all the physical attributes of a small skyscraper except that it was riding on a few dozen monster truck tires and doing an easy two hundred miles an hour. The vacuum in its wake sucked up all the available oxygen for about a second-and-a-half and then hit me with at least a ton of high-velocity road grit, sand and sun-bleached candy wrappers. I ended up face-first in front of the bus stop with my nose just about touching one of Mags Verbosa’s black suede high heels, certain that all my clothes and most of my skin had just been blasted away into the hot desert air. I got my chin up enough to look down the road and saw the truck disintegrating into the distance, a bright red speck on the horizon throwing smoke and sand in its wake.

“That kill you or what?” Bells from on high. I tilted my head to the right, following the voice. And I did mean to address the voice, but got caught up in the view of Mags’ legs, which are, by design, the most perfect legs ever. I forgot about the voice and tried to look up her skirt.

“Hello…” Mags Verbosa’s black hair and wide blue eyes slid over the arc of her knees. “Dead, alive…do you have an opinion?” The smallest, cutest, loveliest smile-lines ever appeared next to her eyes. I gave up on the skirt and tried to skooch back so I could see her smile.

She reached down and put her hand over my eyes. “Relax for a second and tell me whether or not I should call the coroner.”

Darkness helped. Her skin was cool in the heat, but not cold. Just right. Perfect. “Alive, I think.”

“Well, it’s good that you’ve got some feelings on the matter.”

“I think I’m in shock.”

“I doubt it. Most guys act like this around me.”

“I mean from the truck. All the sand and shit.”

“Ah.”

“Although, yeah, you’re…”

“Please don’t. I’ve heard them all. Seriously. All of them.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Neh.”

The tone was enough to just shut me up and make me lay with my cheek in the sand and simply breathe for a while. And feel Mags Verbosa’s hand over my eyes, which made me think of her hand on my cheek, my chest, sliding down over my stomach, slipping into my jeans…

“Seriously, just chill or you’re gonna end up humping the sand.”

It was embarrassing, but I got over it once she told me about herself. I guess when you’re Mags Verbosa, the distillation of every straight male fantasy on the planet, it’s pretty easy to tell when you’re giving somebody a monster hardon.

(Yeah, this is very, very first draft. Mostly scene-setting and a tiny bit of exposition that'll probably get taken care of earlier in the story. Enjoy!)

Fourteen.

I spend a lot of time sitting in the JC’s waiting room. A lot of time reading magazines, drumming my fingers, a lot of time stepping outside to have a smoke, letting the chipper little receptionist know where I’m heading and that Ill be right back. She looks up from her computer and smiles and says okay, thanks. I smile back and think about bending her over the desk to pass some time and go outside and sit on the steps of the Big White Building and take a cigarette from the silver case I lifted from the Sheik and I light up with a book of matches that seems like it’s never going to run out and I smoke.

The steps of the face out into the city, looking out over a ring of squat marble houses that form a semicircle around the Big White Building’s courtyard. The pages live in the houses, which are pretty much just monk’s cells with a small toilet and a cot and a couple of reading lamps. The pages don’t spend a lot of time at home. Past the pages’ cells you can see the T-intersection where the two broad avenues come together, the east-west road forming the crossbar, and the north-south road making a short run from the Big White Building to the Little Gate. The east-west road, you can’t see the end of. It just goes and goes to either horizon, a straight shot of pure silver that fades out of sight at the limit of perception. The Sheik claims that it girdles the world, that, really, it’s only an east road or a west road, depending on which way you start moving on it. That if you took one of his Ferraris and punched the gas and just held the wheel straight for a few weeks or a couple of months or some years, you’d end up where you started. But the Sheik says lots.

The north-south road is paved with cobbles made of gold and it shimmers, waxing and waning as clouds cross over the sun, and you can cover it with one hand, if you’re looking at it from the steps of the Big White Building. But that’s where everything that’s worth doing here is laid out. All the bars, the brothels, the restaurants, the clubs, the stores, the car dealerships, shooting ranges, opium dens, the arcades, the casinos, all the fun times and bright lights lay just under your hand, a straight line of pure, mindless, guiltless hedonism running from Little Gate to the steps that I’m sitting on. No shit, you could break every one of the Seven Deadlies within a hundred yards of the gate, free for the taking, anything you want, just for the asking.

It’s one of those things that justifies the feeling that I’ve always had that the JC’s playing a loaded game with his faithful. I mean, you jump through all the hoops, say the right stuff, do the right stuff, die in a state of grace, all that shit, and then as soon as you’re within sprinting distance of your just reward, boom, everything you’ve denied yourself for a lifetime is right there, waiting for you. I haven’t yet seen a soul make it even halfway down the north-south street without a pair of perky tits or a perfect ass or the clink of coins luring him aside, the doors opening wide, swallowing him up, slamming shut, and that’s chalk one for the Other Side. The Sheik says that there hasn’t been a reason to open Big Gate, the one on the other side of the JC’s waiting room, since the Middle Ages.

Looking down the north-south street, past the cathouses and the mostly nude street dancers and the bar carts, you can see Little Gate, just big enough to let in two or three people walking abreast, simple oak posts entwined with old, silvery ivy. Little Gate opens a lot, confused souls stumbling through, still crying from their death agonies, clutching at streetlights and storefronts to keep from falling. I think that’s what diverts them from the Big White Building, really. Not the desire for a giant fattening meal or a fast fuck, but the hope of a chair or a bed or something they can collapse on until everything starts making sense.

I keep thinking that if I were a better person, I’d wait by Little Gate until some deserving-looking person came through, a sweet grandmother type, a nice old man, and take them by the arm and lead them past all the cavorting whores and the sizzling steaks and walk them up the steps of the Big White Building and through the waiting room and let go of them only once Big Gate had swung wide and pulled them in. That might make this whole thing worth it, really, that look of pure, absolute, serene joy on their face as they floated off to the heaven they’ve been promised all these years. But, I guess I’m not that good a person. And there’s this one cute redhead in a schoolgirl skirt that I can never pass by. Sorry, grandma. Maybe next time.

And past Little Gate, past the wall that tracks parallel to the east-west road, you can see out into the countryside, the desert and the wasteland and the vast chasm the breaks this place in two. And off in the distance, just at the edge of sight, a tiny, tiny patch of green grass, a little white house. Where I find my gaze going, most of the time. Drawing on my smoke and staring at it, trying to make it come closer, trying to pick out details, any hint of movement. Anything.

That’s Mags. Or her place, anyway. Her perfect little country cottage standing in the midst of her perfect postage stamp lawn, a front path lined with roses that are always in bloom, a bench swing on the porch and a massive feather bed on the second floor that smells like lilac. And she’s there, right now, hanging her white dresses on the line to dry in the soft summer breeze or picking flowers from the garden in back to arrange in a bouquet in the vase in the front hall or just sitting on the swing, curled up like a kitten, sipping lemonade and reading Jane Austen. Something like that, something sweet and innocent and utterly alluring. Waiting for me. Or so I tell myself.

Tossing my smoke, heading back inside, wondering if this’ll be the day that the JC finally wanders out to sign on the line and get his fucking package and get me the hell outta here. And knowing that it won’t, and wondering what the Sheik’s got planned for tonight.

Thirteen.

Texas was Texas. It was dry and vast and it leaned in on you, let you know what it was all about. Billboards for gun shops, for strip clubs, for all-you-can-eat buffets. Car dealerships with nothing but AmeriCan pickups for sale. 7-11’s the size of strip malls. Neon signs for family-owned hotels coming at me from ten miles down the unlit Interstate. State Troopers cruising by in Hummers tricked out with bull bars, off-road light racks, 10,000-pound winches. The Lone Star flag hung in every window, trailing from every CB whip antenna.

I cruised through the Texas nighttime in my pristine blue BMW, pegged right on the speed limit, Chevy trucks and Ford sedans whipping past me and cutting back in with their brakes locked up, trying to force me to rear-end them. I can’t tell you if it was to force me out of the car, make it easy to gut-shoot me with a concealed .45, or to pick up a quick insurance claim against a wealthy out-of-stater. Texas’s mix of home-orientated xenophobia and severe poverty let me assume it could’ve been either, or both. But I can guarantee it was the CT license plate on the bumper that inspired it.

I drove into daylight, heading south. Traffic got heavier, oil tankers and commuter minivans clogging any lane they wandered into, half of them twenty miles over the limit, half of them ten miles under. I took a random right, some state highway tracking dead East even through desiccated farmland, empty except for the occasional teenager blazing down the road in a jacked-up old hunk of Detroit iron.

I stopped for gas here and there, made small talk with old men who forced casual friendliness into their voices as they asked where I was from and what brought me to their neck of the woods. I bought Mountain Dew and drip coffee from insulated aluminum carafes and packages of chocolate cookies and Fritos and the occasional plastic wrapped egg salad sandwich. I paid cash and smiled and offered compliments about the rugged beauty of the landscape, the majesty of the open sky, the astounding tranquility brought on by the countryside’s solitude. You don’t, I said, smiling, get this kind of stuff back East. They smiled back. I made small, short friendships and managed to keep myself from getting lynched across five hundred miles of shitkickers and rape-‘em-‘fore- ya-eat-‘em rednecks. Wearing earrings, glasses, and chinos, no less. As survival skills, bullshit friendliness and transitory charm are highly underrated.

I drove away the daylight and into twilight. The landscape got harder and angrier, flat plains of brown sand and red boulders, the road a wavering strip of cracked blacktop threading its way over dunes and around mesas the size of NYC office blocks. I drove under stars as bright as diamonds, under a sky as dark as tar. I drove past the silhouettes of collapsed farmhouses picked out by the bright stars. Tumbleweeds moved across the road, appearing for a brief moment in my headlights, thrown back into the desert by the wall of air in front of the BMW. I saw smears of fresh roadkill appear a moment before I rolled over them, my tires going shushshushshush over the leftovers of the rabbit or whatever that was just a tad too slow getting across the highway.

I drove into the night, no radio, windows rolled up tight in their frames, listening to the wind slip around the BMW’s skin. I don’t remember really thinking anything. I was just there, in small moments, watching the dashboard, the road, occasionally taking in the spray of pulsing stars spread against the horizon. Just driving.

Passing a sign announcing that I had just entered the Fort Stockton city limits, pop. 400, est. 1874. I wondered, momentarily, if there would be 7-11 or Circle K in town where I could pick up more cigarettes & Mountain Dew and then the BMW blew up.

Y’know, I’d given up expecting subtlety from the Voice, but, still, I’d figured there were some rules. Number one amongst them was to not kill my fucking ride in the middle of fucking Texas. I hadn’t articulated that out loud, but it seems obvious, doesn’t it? If you’re in such a rush that you go to the trouble to hire a messenger and send out into the middle of nowhere with all possibe haste, it seems self-defeating to destroy his means of transport.

The BMW blew up about ten feet past the Fort Stockton city limits sign. Mental recreation allows me to consider that it actually blew up precisely at the Fort Stockton city limits sign, and that the forward momentum produced by two tons of German steel travelling at about 65 mph was enough to delay evidence of the explosion till about ten feet past it. Given the unnaturally precise way things had been happening, that the car blew right at the sign seems likely, but in any event, I didn’t notice anything until about ten feet past the sign.

And when I say the BMW blew up, I’m, perhaps, exaggerating. The engine blew up, not the whole car, and even it didn’t really even blow up. What it did was, apparently, shear off the bolts that connected the pistons to the crankshaft and then throw every one of those pistons, all eight of them, through the cylinder head, through the hood and as far up into the sky as it could. So, yeah, KAPOK KAPOK KAPOK, eight times in a row, the ka being, I guess, the initial impact of a steel piston driving up through an inch of aluminum cylinder head and the pok being the noise that’s made when the vacuum created by a couple pounds of machined stainless launching itself into the deserts of Eastern Texas at a couple times the speed of sound fills in. I heard a sonic boom at sea level. How amazing is that?

I know that I screamed. I know that I yanked the wheel to one side and sent myself into an ass-first skid into the sand off the edge of the highway. I know that an empty coffee cup and my Red Sox cap and a few cigarette butts flew across my field of vision and bounced off the inside of the driver-side window. I know that I didn’t actually piss myself, but that I could feel a gallon or so of cycled caffeine pressing up against the inside of my cock as the car came to slewing stop in the sand. I know that I was holding my breath and bending back the steering wheel and refusing to blink for a good minute after everything had come to rest.

And then I noticed the flames licking up through the holes in the hood. Because, of course, the electrical and fuel systems were working just fine and aerated gas was being sprayed into the torn-open cylinders, the spark plugs were igniting the spray and I had a remarkably sudden and complete realization that my fine, beautiful German driving machine had just become an incredibly expensive gasoline-fueled bonfire machine and that I was about to get roasted alive.

I grabbed my bag, the package and my cigarettes, shoved the door open against the sand that piled up against it and starting running. Twenty strides down the road I heard the whump of the gas tank going up. I was not showered with burning debris. I couldn’t even feel heat from the inferno behind me. I slowed to a walk and shook a cigarette from the pack, dug a book of matches out of my pocket. I lit up and started walking towards Fort Stockton while the leftovers of the finest car I’d ever possessed crackled and popped and melted behind me.

Twelve.

I don’t remember when the first email showed up. Sometime late in the fall, I think, when I was starting to get that nesting feeling, the sun going down early, spending my nights online, making little chatroom friends, getting very opinionated about whatever. October, maybe, around Halloween, lotsa talk about parties and costumes and how to make orange beer. I had my blog, and I posted in it, pasted up the articles that I could find that managed, however slightly, to criticize the government, made pithy comments about Constitutional rights, about term limits, about what terms like “state of emergency” actually meant. We discussed Jr., and how he really didn’t look any different than when Osama torched Cleveland, promoted theories that he was getting botoxed, that he was making illegal clones of himself and transplanting his brain into a fresh body every couple of years, that he was, as we’d suspected all these years, nothing more than a robot fueled by greasy barbecue and Old Testament scripture.

Those articles, the ones that managed to have some voice of dissent, a ghost of the first amendment floating through them, they were my gold. Proof that I wasn’t the only one who felt that Something Was Wrong. That it’s not a free country when public debate about lost civil liberties means jail time, when the Feds can wiretap you for making overseas phone calls, when your car can be pulled over and searched by any random DHS drone. That it’s not a democracy when you don’t get to vote for who runs the country.

But they were hard to find, those articles. The New York Times ran it out for a year or two, until their reporters started getting jailed for refusing to divulge sources and their overseas stringers began to die almost daily in hails of purportedly misaimed rounds from GI M-16’s. They folded once the Editor-in-Chief got busted on a kiddie porn charge, gigabytes of ten-year-olds giving blowjobs found on his laptop. The scathing editorials ceased. The pointed front page stories were blunted, turned, refocused to praise the ‘heroic actions’ of troops moving into Iraq, Iran, Syria.

CNN, The Washington Post, all the west coast papers, most of the networks were denied passes to the White House press conferences, unable, according to the FBI, to produce even one reporter from their ranks who could pass a background check. The wire services, blocked from any real access, began to run Oval Office press releases almost verbatim, barely bothering to point out that those missives were unmitigated by any sources beyond those who produced them.

And the thing was, is, whatever, is that we all knew. There was nothing particularly secret about the whole thing. The White House, Congress, especially the Supreme Court, they locked out the reporters, literally, with a door slammed in their faces. The friendlies stayed in, ran stories that relied heavily on ‘government sources’ and little else, criticized only those who criticized the government. You could practically hear Rupert Murdoch laughing and lighting a fat cigar.

And so I posted what I could find, added in my own comments. Ranted and raged and spit electric bile out into the void. Surfing safe, oh so I hoped, behind an anonymizer, listening for funny clicks and whistles on my phone, the Feds having found me out, tapping me, looking for info on the Al-Queda cell I was almost certainly a part of. I wrote my vicious words and screamed for change and called for rebellion in the streets. And sat in my apartment, chain-smoking and swilling beer and wondering why everything stayed the same.

And then, one day, sent to the freemail account hosted in Iceland:

Hey-
Like what you’ve been saying. I think maybe you’re on to something. I’ll be in touch.

Jesus Christ

Generally, you ignore things like that.

Which is what I did. You would have, too.

People who pretend to be Jesus, they’re best disregarded, I’ve found. People who think they’re Jesus, they’ll talk big so long as you’re listening and then go away when you go blank and start looking over their shoulder. It’s a test, so far as I’m concerned. If you’re Jesus, you should be able to blow my mind enough to keep me listening, or perform a couple of miracles to get my attention back. If you’re Jesus, I shouldn’t be able to walk away from you.

Heavy Christians, like my folks, they’ll argue that one with you. They’ll point out that people walk away from Jesus all the time, every day, every minute. Some poor schmuck decides that Christianity is a sham and turns away and boom, straight to hell, boy. The whole free will thing, that nebulosity that keeps people on the hook. Hmm, they say, you say, the whole thing might be bullshit, but maybe…

And as soon as you’ve made it that far, you’re hooked. You can run, but there’ll always be a little bit of Jesus bumping up against the back of your brain, pushing at you. Could be, really, could be. It’s not so far-fetched as some of the things that I’m willing to buy into. Really, is Jesus any stranger a concept than UFO aliens ass-raping cows in the Midwest?

But Jesus sending emails? Dude, c’mon. That’s hardly a burning bush, now is it?

Eleven.

The passport checks slow you down. Every time you cross a border, stacked traffic, a half-mile of tractor trailers and delivery vans and soccer moms idling in front of the concrete liftgates. The tedium of the wait, the radio dissolving into static as you pull into the steel-reinforced cement Customs Dock, swiping, drumming your fingers on the steering wheel for the thirty seconds it takes for the little light to ding green and then the fucking endless shink shink shink of the gates sliding up and down. You’re in a rush, you gun it before you’ve got clearance all around, your tires bumping over the lip as it’s sliding into its little crevice, the antenna catching the overhead and bending over and sproinging back into place as you rev up through first, second, third.

You can, if you’re a courier or a commuter or a service guy who crosses all the time, get a radio chip slid into the back of your hand that’ll call the checkpoint as you’re pulling up, that’ll run the checks before you’re even in the Customs Dock, give you a green light without you having to slow down. But, y’know, the idea of giving, well, whoever, the ability and the right to look you up and check your position whenever they feel like it…I dunno. Call me paranoid, but the fuckers know too much about me already, so far as I’m concerned. I’d rather lose a few minutes of my life when I’ve gotta slide into NYC.

And Heaven help you if you’ve got passengers, ‘cause then it’s an automatic spot check, a beer belly cinched with a web belt, a pair of sunglasses sauntering out from the bulletproof box, squinting at photos, scanning the SSN bars with a wireless checkout gun. Gum-cracking, unsmiling, ignoring your banter, your well-intentioned inquiries into the state of the day, the well-being of this particular frontline soldier in the DHS army. The Customs Dock filling up with the smell of exhaust, the sun cut out by bombwalls above and before and beside. The nervous sweat of wondering if the computer has crossed you over with a name on the no-go list, if some sneaky Mujahadeen has decided to take your name as their latest alias. Knowing that there’s some grim Tac guy hidden away somewhere on a clear sightline with your forced smile square in a 20X scope, waiting for you to twitch the wrong way so he can erase you.

You hear about it happening, but it’s only on the rumor circuit. Yeah, I knew this guy, Albanian, his name came up wrong and he started to argue, got shot in the chest ‘cause he started yelling. Yeah, this lady, shit, had a car fulla kids, reached into the glove compartment for a juicebox or something, boom, right behind the ear. You tell yourself that it’s gotta be bullshit, that the Feds are better than that, that they don’t just flake and start shooting for everything that’s not perfectly five-by. And, yeah, when you’re eating dinner or taking a shower or pushing your papers across a desk in a highrise, you can be sure that all is well and all is well and that all is well on God’s green earth. But, fuck man, you’re sitting in the box and a pair of sunglasses making 30k a year is one hand signal away from killing you dead, well, your faith starts to waver.

But that’s traveling, and the risks of doing it regularly, and that’s why an uneducated monkey with no real prospects and no real ambitions can pull down a grand or two a week for the seemingly simple task of taking confidential interoffice memos from Stanford, CT to Parsipanny, NJ. Shit, that’s six borders in a couple of hours. A half dozen chances for a flat crack from the shadows and your brains sprayed across the dashboard. You think about it that way too much and you’ll drive yourself buggy. You think about it at all and you’ll drive yourself buggy. So you just listen to radio static and close your eyes and wait for the shink shink shink and then punch it back out into the sunlight.

(This is a little bit of newly written stuff fluffed out with a WHOLE lot of the 16,000 word failure that preceded it. If it comes off as lumpy and nonsensical, well, shit. There is a reason. Enjoy)

Ten.

The Sheik and I, we’re sipping cocktails at The Broken Promise, and he’s looking over my shoulder while I’m writing, and he’s feeding me bad story ideas.

“Dude,” he says, lifting a glass of something that’s blue and swirly, “you need a fight scene here. I can feel it.” He sips from the glass and tilts his head back and the lights that hover around the bar’s ceiling reflect back in the mirrored lenses of his aviator shades. “A fight scene,” his lips stained blue by the whatever in the glass, “or a love scene. Just a kiss or a shove would do it.”

“Something subtle like that, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He nods and the lights pick up the gel he uses in his hair, pure white sliding through jet black. It’s very, very movie. Very arranged, planned, very much figured out in advance. The Sheik doesn’t take a breath that wasn’t calculated for effect a week before he took it.

“A girl. Or a bad guy. Either way, you’ve got desire, right? And desire is what?”

Desire is the meat of the story. Sheik Europa Story Lesson #1.

If you believe him, the Sheik is the one responsible for Baywatch. Not the heroic-lifeguards-having-drama-on-the-beach part, which could have come from anywhere, but the slow-motion-running, silicone-injected, Playboy-Bunny-meets-Calvin-Klein-model part of Baywatch.

Also, he’s responsible for the lingering American fascination for feng shui. Probably also for the almost complete confusion as to the purpose and point of feng shui for most Americans caught up in the fascination.

Also, for one of the asteroid movies that hit a while back, but not the big one with Bruce Willis. The other one, with Morgan Freeman as the President. And he claims that he came up with Die Hard. “Man, I knew that was gonna just kick some ass. Had Bruce in mind the whole time. ‘Yippee-kayo, motherfucker.’ All me, Davey.”

I don’t blame the Sheik for feeding me shitty ideas (“Davey, listen, cyborgs, right? But not just cyborgs, a cyborg love story. They’ll just eat it up.” “What about Blade Runner? That was all cyborgs and love.” “ Yeah, but that was like twenty years ago. Who remembers?”), ‘cause that’s what he does.

Some of the Sheik’s movie ideas:

An alien comes to visit Earth in the guise of a travelling salesman and interacts with a human family that’s in a very rocky situation (divorce is looming for Mom & Dad, sis is becoming withdrawn and refuses to go to the Big Dance with the not-handsome but sensitive poet-boy because she’s afraid that the popular girls will laugh at her and Jr. is getting in fistfights and has been clipped by the cops for spraying graffiti on the school) and the alien, in the course of his interaction (under the guise of selling them aluminum siding for their twelve-year-old split-level ranch), shows them all sorts of fantastic things about themselves and manages to compress about fifteen years worth of family therapy into three wonderful days and saves them all (Mom & Dad kissing and giggling like newlyweds, sis coming down the stairs in her white satin gown, jr. learning to channel his adolescent angst into community-help projects and shifts down at the soup kitchen). The last scene shows the alien riding in his spaceship, announcing to his leaders back home that because the human race is so wonderful, they shouldn’t be destroyed by a screaming invasion fleet armed with h-bombs & death-lasers. The Sheik considers this to be “a tender story about real family values, with an unexpected twist.”


We open with former Green Beret/current CIA operative Eric Savage in the final stages of a covert anti-terrorist mission (allowing an opening montage set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city that incorporates a car/motorcycle chase, a daring leap between a mosque and an office building, a gunfight in which six swarthy men with heavy beards are blown apart in unique ways [primarily in slow motion with many squishy sound effects] and a last-minute escape hidden in the back of a crowded, smoking bus that is filled with old women in head scarves [who are somehow blissfully unaware of a 6’3” blonde-haired, blue-eyed spy crouched among their bundles of cloth and caged chickens]). He arrives at the American embassy only to find that his girlfriend (a scientist working in the secret anti-WMD lab in the embassy’s basement, played by uber-hottie Rebecca Romjin) has been kidnapped by members of the terrorist cell Eric has just been working to destroy. Eric’s boss briefs him, tells him that other agents are already searching for her and then sternly warns him that “any action you take against these bastards will be considered an act of insubordination, so just stay put.”

“But how the HELL can I sit still when Courtney is out there, somewhere, going through God only knows what kind of torture?”

“You can sit still because you’re a professional, Savage, and a professional knows better than to get into a situation where the heart is involved.”

Grudgingly, Eric admits to his boss’s wisdom, leaves the office and makes a beeline for the lab where he finds Skye, Courtney’s bestest pal in the whole world (played by uber-cutie Kirstin Dunst) weeping uncontrollably, bent over a beaker- and computer-covered lab table. Enlisting Skye’s help, Eric secures about his person the most sophisticated armament and ordnance the U.S. of A. has to offer and sneaks out of the embassy, right under the noses of two Marine guards who’re deep in a discussion about the new girl at the reception desk.

This is followed by forty minutes of almost random violence and no fewer than twenty-two homicides perpetrated by, among others: neck-breaking by hand, neck-breaking by impromptu hanging, asphyxiation by plastic shopping bag, asphyxiation by nerve gas concealed in Tic-Tac box, skull injury by fountain-pen laser gun, skull injury by brick, skull injury by commandeered AK-47, chest injury with CIA-issued 9mm, grievous bodily harm by high-speed automobile, grievous bodily harm by martial arts, grievous bodily harm by impact with plate-glass window, grievous bodily harm by flinging from top of twenty-story tenement, and, my personal favorite, grievous bodily harm by hand grenade suppository.

Skye is in radio contact the entire time (for some reason, the radio she’s using to contact Eric is situated in her bedroom, in which she apparently relaxes by putting on a tank top and a pair of thong underwear and curling up on her bed), telling Eric when the cops are coming and feeding him key bits of information from her laptop (which, if one uses deductive reasoning, must have a direct landline to the CIA mainframe, the Building & Planning authorities for most of the Middle East and the Anarchist Bible’s database of common household products that explode when mixed together properly).

Somehow all these killings lead Eric to the terrorist’s base, where he spies the love of his life tied to a chair, her skirt torn off at upper thigh, her white blouse soaked with water (a nearby car battery and set of alligator clips explains the need for moistened clothing and keeps a clearly defined nipple in the closeup from being gratuitous). She’s bruised over one eye, but is in otherwise okay shape. And, amazingly, stays in okay shape when Eric starts shooting up the place with a top secret shoulder-mounted machine gun that (the Sheik had a stroke of genius here) fires spent-uranium slugs. Like tank shells, only little (and, one would think, dense & therefore quite heavy, but Eric’s pretty fucking strong). And that’s pretty much it except for a swordfight (“A swordfight, man?” “Sure, Davey. Because sometimes, you can’t do what’s right unless you’ve got bare steel.” He said that. I swear) with the terrorist leader after all his minions have either gone to that great training camp in the sky or run off, screaming for Allah and dropping their rifles.

End with a tearful, hug-heavy reunion between Eric & Courtney (followed up by another between Courtney & Skye [who managed to appear on the spot about thirty seconds after Courtney had been cut free from the chair], allowing just that slim chance that Eric’ll be getting himself a three-way at some point in the very near future). In the Sheik’s words, “Bound to be an action-adventure classic, if we can just secure the financing.”


Clarence Badge is a former gangstah from the South Bronx who gave up banging, went back to school, graduated top of his class from Columbia Biz, made a tidy fortune on the stock market and then, to give back something to the city that spawned him, joined the police department and immediately shot up to the rank of detective, due to his amazing skill at figuring out the movements of killers and dealers (I would guess that his time “on the streets” gave him an edge over all the cops who’d spent years walking beats and learning what passes for proper police procedure in NYC). Jimbo Honor is a fresh-faced twenty-something from Oklahoma whose previous police experience included chasing down cow tippers and giving the town drunk a ride home after a hard night at the local saloon, but his uncle (the NYPD police Commissioner) thinks that he’s got what it takes to make it good in the Street Crime division. Apart, Clarence & Jimbo are just a rich guy and a hayseed. Together, they’re BADGE OF HONOR.

Yeah. That’s as far as I got. The Sheik kept talking, but, really, I was done listening.

And, finally, there’s the story of a kindly old grocery store owner who gives out lollipops to the kids in the neighborhood and knows all his customers by name. And who hears voices in his head, and when those voices get too loud…out comes the meat cleaver.

Wish I were kidding.

So, yeah, as much as I appreciate all the Sheik’s done for me since I got here, I’m pretty sure his continued presence is putting me through some sort of dumbing-down process. Christ help me if he is, as he likes to hint, my muse. What happened to muses being pretty blonde nymphs who spoke in poetry?

Nine.

“Base, Davey, base, Davey.”

“Davey to base. Go ahead, man.”

“Got one at Richardson-Anders. RICHARDSON-ANDERS. Copy.”

“Yeah, okay, Richardson-Anders. Where to?”

“Uh…hang on.”

“Copy.”

Tap tap tap.

“Okay, I don’t have the address yet. DON’T HAVE THE ADDRESS YET.”

“Okay, so, what? Do I pick it up and wait or…?”

“Pick it up and head for the City. HEAD FOR THE CITY WITH THE PACKAGE.”

“Uh…okay. Hey, do you know that it’s like four thirty? I’m gonna get hosed in traffic.”

“Yeah, you’re on time, not distance. There and back. You’ll do good on this one. YOU’RE ON TIME, YOU’LL DO GOOD ON THIS ONE.”

“Okay. Call you when I’ve got it.”


“Davey to base.”

“Copy, Davey. You’ve got it on board?”

“Yeah, no problem. Getting on ninety-five right now. Traffic is moving at about three miles an hour.”

“..skkkk…”

“Base?”

“Sorry. Yeah, I know. Ten-ten wins is saying the Hutch is better. TAKE THE HUTCHINSON PARKWAY.”

“Copy. Got an address for me yet?”

“…skkkk…”

Tap tap tap.

“Sorry. Yeah, no address yet. Head for midtown. MIDTOWN MANHATTAN.”

“Right. At rush hour. I’m gonna die out here, you know that, right?”

“…skkk…”

“That’s a joke, base.”

“Right. Take the Hutch and call when you hit the Bronx.”

“Copy, base.”

Tap tap tap.

“Davey to base.”

“Base, Davey. Go ahead.”

“Hey, what’s the hourly for this gig?”

“Uh…hang on.”

“Copy.”

Tap tap tap.

“Base, Davey.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“THIRTY-EIGHT an hour. THIRTY-EIGHT AN HOUR.”

“Yo, what?”

“Told you that you’d do good on this one. TOLD YOU YOU’D DO GOOD.”

“Jesus, no kidding. Okay, I’m heading south just as slowly as I can get away with.”

“…skkk…”

“That’s a joke, base.”

“…skkk…”