Man in purple glasses
reflects the twilight in his gaze.
Boys with skateboards lounge so fiercely
they are exposed
and naked as their tawny cheeks,
their swagger clinging closer than skinny jeans.

Drizzle makes dark dots dart through
the gray pavement.
Evening drapes his cloak over the bungalows.
It is the hour when coffee shops look their coziest.
Large cups, foam, steam and neighborhood camaraderie.

Antique stores beckon, oozing nostalgia, the sweet kind
that makes centuries palpable, through the feel of worn velvet
or wood polished by frequent use.
They conjure other people’s memories
nights on the town, long cigarette holders and crystal ashtrays,
furs and pearls, stockings and bowties.

Bougainvillea bushes shiver and drop
fuschia blooms on a bearded man in brown.
He spreads out his fingers, palms up
and views the neon brightness there.
They fall through his fingers like sand.

A statuesque black man with the presence of a bull
wraps his lips around a joint.
He throws away his pizza crusts and greasy paper plate
but hangs onto his coffee.
His blond companion’s hair is below her waist
and curling in the rain
her hand, and his, encircle the same cup.
They smile the same way.

Bicycles glisten, cars splash and honk.
Everything feels quiet.
Pizza and patchouli,
wet moss and cigarettes.

The evening becomes eclectic.

JP-

I hope you receive this fax in time. I’m still sitting in the lobby of the Citizen Hotel, just outside the Capitol building where the Governor is arguing with the Senate about how to remedy this massive fuck-stain of a deficit. I’m frozen in catatonic horror at the rumors spewing across the Capitol lawns. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to produce any coherent sort of material on deadline for this issue as commissioned. If you were to witness first-hand what I have, however, you would understand. You think this state is in the shit bath now? Wait ‘til the good Governor and his henchmen get through sucking the blood veins from California. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We’re all turning into zombies, and the next generation will be a slum of bumbling fools and thieves. We’re doomed.

News out of the war room is that first to go will be education. $3.3 billion. Slashed right at the throat, left to bleed like a stuck pig. Massive cuts across the board, from salaries and programs to basic educational “niceties” like libraries that keep the lights on past 6pm, combined with higher student entrance fees in state and community colleges as well as fewer student admittances. In my humble estimation, cuts in higher education should be the last thing to go. But the Governor’s list is upside down. Top is bottom. Straight is sideways. And the bottom now shows a pig-shit gang of phony bureaucrats and former hand-puppets in cushy positions getting paid big money by “staff seats” on bullshit committees, like the seven-figure Waste Management board I told you about earlier…or the overcrowded cluster-fuck discussing budget reform in the room right now. Why are there so many people trying to make a decision here? Why do we need so many goddamn legislators in high-paid positions with lofty per diems and petty cash lockers? Let’s take a look at cutting some of those expenses, huh? Instead, we’re going down headfirst into the concrete ghettos of undereducated, underpaid, underhappy, underbusy Californians—just where these politicians want the next generation, it seems. And this frightens me half to death. Certainly into the liquor cabinet, as I can see no other comfort when thinking about the dreary future of non-educated American citizens taking the reins when future workforce generations emerge.

Can’t any of these short-sighted cronies see the big picture? Am I the only one? I know you can, my friend. You’ll agree with me when I glare into the future and predict more crime, more drug addiction, more illegitimate children, and a host of other problems that will undoubtedly cost the state just as much in maintenance, enforcement, and rehabilitation as these suits think they’re saving now by forfeiting people’s right to better education. Can’t they even grasp that fewer students in community colleges translates into fewer transfer students, meaning less tuition taken in by state universities, AND translating perhaps to fewer high-paid executives and fewer entrepreneurs qualified by banks and investors, which means ultimately less taxable income to the state? Where are the long-term trickle effects? As it appears now, the youth’s education will be little more than video games, iPods, and Twitter blogs.

What happened to California’s “Master Plan,” written in 1960, espousing the notion that all people have a right to Higher Education? Anyone who wants to go to college should be afforded this ability—indeed, the very reason for the Community College system. But now with less funding and higher fees, there will be perhaps millions of wanting students without that ability. Oh well. As long as these bloated Capitol freaks have jobs, and as long as the long-passed-retirement, drearily-teaching professors of tenure can’t be kicked out, and as long as everything looks good in the short-term, let’s make some cuts. Cut Cut Cut! Like the doctor’s bloody scissors after an American Birth, snipping loose the wailing child of Generation Next. Drop the kid into the dumpster. Kill the mother. Wash the shears and get them ready for another go around. Let’s see, what can we cut next? How about our basic right to health care?! I get a feeling these scheming butchers aren’t done yet.

Anyhow, as you can tell by my demeanor, I’m in no general mood to write anything of lucid merit or suitable length. That being said, I hope you can find something to fill in the pages you will inevitably miss by the absence of my 4000 word piece on the deficit debate that you requested. I’m off to De Vere’s down on L Street now for Ambien and strong drink. And then to sleep. Hopefully to wake in three years when a new administration is in the state office and the now graduating high-school alumni have turned into hardened criminals. Perhaps then, I’ll finally have the motivation and grit to move to the mountains like I’ve been talking about all these years. ‘Til then.

Your friend,
Wayland

Post-Script: If you publish this letter, as I know you’re fond of doing just to screw with me, be sure I will hang you, you bastard. I’m not joking. – W.C.

Illustrations by Yuri Elvin (Forth Artist)

Tending rattlesnakes is a tricky business, but an important one to any man looking for answers. Grab the neck. Control the head. And urine does not kill the venom in their bites, though for some reason, the mescaline-whiskey hangover confused my mind into thinking that all slithering poisons can be cured with the antidote to a jellyfish sting.

I’d lost track of time certainly, but I was half-positive it hadn’t been more than a week since I’d made my way east from L.A. to Indio, California for the annual Coachella music festival—three days and nights during the last weekend in April of total energy mayhem and sonic weirdness; vast oceans of skin and faces and beat-dilated eyes; heavy jams and bass from bands across the board like The Chemical Brothers, Glasvegas, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Fleet Foxes, The Killers, and Leonard Cohen; whippets in the parking lot at 2 a.m.; all-night desert snow-parties poolside at the Ace Hotel; girls named Annie or Jade or Osa in bikinis made of neon and moon glasses much too large for their faces; hazy, strange-glaze dawns in all directions. When it ended and the crowds dissolved, I was among the few who refused to believe it was over. I’d gotten hooked into some sort of free-soul lunar trip, living on the grounds owned by an Indian I’d met one night during a party at the Anthem Ranch mansion. His given name is far too difficult to pronounce, and certainly too confusing to spell, so we ended up calling him Gonjo, who—after a night of firewater and cactus mud—offered me free board on the land he inherited from his Cahuilla ancestors in exchange for my help on his growing rattlesnake farm. The farm was on the edge of a fan palm oasis called Andreas Canyon, just outside downtown Palm Springs.

Why not, I thought.

It was dusk on a Monday (I’d found out later) when Jason [Forth Editor] called. He wanted 5000 words on California’s spending crisis, and he needed me at the State’s capitol for the results of the Special Election for Propositions 1A-1F, taking place on May 19th…which was tomorrow, he informed me.

Jesus, I thought! How the hell long had I been stuck on this snake farm in the desert?

Jason had already booked me a suite at the Radisson in Sacramento and scheduled an interview at 11 a.m. on Tuesday with Teresa Casazza, President of the California Taxpayer’s Association, regarding her organization’s endorsement of Prop 1A. No sense in sleeping now, I figured. I’d already been up for 36 hours on some sort of peyote-snake venom hybrid tea that Gonjo drinks like a staffer on coffee. At that point, I was still seeing vibrations and movement in the ground, which probably didn’t actually exist…but there would be no trouble driving, that much I was sure of.

Washington is chock-full of sociopaths, thieves, and drunks—and certainly mutant combinations of all three. But you probably wouldn’t know it by the looks of the well-dressed, old men, chatting and smiling in Statuary Hall just hours after the Inauguration. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies has hosted the post-inauguration luncheon for more than a century, and by the general jolly ambiance of the crowd here at noon on a Tuesday, you’d think at the very worst you were at some two-faced, slightly twisted Bradbury-manifested carnival in rural Illinois. The truth of the matter is that most of Washington is so far removed from the common folk, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to bleed. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an anti-statesman—not officially anyway. I love this country and consider myself a true, blue-blood patriot. But when the nation is led into a war for no good damn reason that actually exists, and when bank reps hustle people into signing loans worth less than the ink of their signatures, and when some schmuck in New York with ties to the highest levels of the SEC steals 50 billion and no one bats an eye for ten years, I start to wonder about the fortitude of our free world. Perhaps that’s why I’ve bought into the crude national conception that our new Head of the Union can bring some “change” to the Capitol. It’s a long shot, but a real and decent American hope… Or maybe I’m fooling myself into some new national pipe dream after a long and wretched double-term fuck up. God knows anything seems better than the last eight years. I figured the only way to find out was to get a private moment with the newly elected president, maybe shake his and ask him a question or two, and see what sort of energy I get in person, what his eyes tell me, what his three-piece, million-dollar smile has to say up close.

It took me two months to sneak into the Inaugural Luncheon. All because my shit-for-brains editor couldn’t muster me a press pass… Again. (Thanks, JP!) No matter, though, I knew I’d get in somehow, even if it meant wearing a white suit with white gloves and a tiny bow-tie, which I absolutely despise.

Design Cuisine is a small but prestigious catering company out of Arlington, and had the honor of catering the post-inaugural luncheon. I received this information in November, after which I traveled to Virginia and applied for a position as a server. I came up with a slew of great references and experience highlights: Three years serving at The Ivy; Two years in Sacramento at the Governor’s mansion; and so on and so forth. All fake, of course, along with my employment name and the social-security number I took off some report I stole from the local B of A (long story). After all, I didn’t care about getting paid, and I certainly wasn’t about to be hired with my criminal record… I just needed to get in, and this was the way, certainly.

After three weeks of post-interview follow-ups, I was hired and worked through December for these busy bastards, serving at an array of high-country gigs from corporate to private, martinis and ties, from the Hamptons to Reading. Nothing better on a Saturday night than serving these ungrateful fucks, let me tell ya’… But I knew where I’d be on January 20th, and that’s what mattered.

The traditional attire for the Inaugural Luncheon was: White jackets, black pants, black bow tie, and white gloves. I imagined fifty years ago, with Kennedy sitting at his table being served by a team of southern black folk in all white. And now, we’re all switched up.

An hour later, I arrived at my motel in Paradise Valley, just minutes from the heart of Phoenix. There was no reasonable place closer for less than fifty bucks a night, and this place didn’t require a credit card—just another fifty in cash for deposit. So I handed a hundred‐dollar bill to the young Mexican woman at the desk and checked in under a fake name. Just in case the Gods turned against me on this one, just in case I had to scramble back weary and defeated while authorities combed the streets in search of a W.C. Jennings.

At 3:30, I was in a cab on my way to the Biltmore, where McCain would be conceding in just a few hours. I had two more Vicodin stuffed into my jacket pocket, the one without the hole in it. Should I be detained and need to sleep in a rusty cell, those would be necessary. Also, fake eye glasses for special effect, and a pocket‐size flux compression generator, which would generate an electromagnetic pulse, thereby impeding all electric activity within 100 yards of the device. I was convinced that John McCain
was indeed a cybernetic organism, and one shock from an EMP would stop him dead in his tracks on national television. I also wanted to see Sarah Palin for myself. I didn’t believe she was an actual living person, more like a CGI apparition created by the Television Christian Right, modeled on soccer‐bag‐toting, moose‐hating northern women with wild daughters. Someone created her out of nothing. Probably Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity in a dark room somewhere in upstate New York.

All I needed now was a press pass.