The Golem of Los Angeles

The Suckee, Fuckee, Blowjob Sutra

74 The Suckee, Fuckee, Blowjob Sutra Suckee, fuckee, blowjob? call the prostitutes from the mouths of shabby shacks, and i am fourteen and now my uncle Jack is offering a woman ten bucks, five bucks, to do my brother and me together, trying to make us squirm. And now i am forty-five, typing black words across a bright screen in the five a.m. dark, because night presses the window with so much erotic promise and something that feels important has been eluding me and the face that peers out of the dark window at me is the face of an old man i don’t recognize. And now i’m twenty-five and i walk downstairs into the cavelike dark of a Berkeley pizzeria where the line of video games chants come-ons like hopeful wallflowers at a teenage dance, with mirror-ball lights in their eyes. And when i’m in the game i’m the kick-ass king, the one-armed warrior of the wasteland, Jean-Paul Sartre with a strap-on shotgun, blasting my way across the No Exit stage, jiggling myself towards the climax that comes when the pattern comes clear. But beyond the pattern is another pattern, beyond each level is another level, and i’ve lost quarters, faith, and patience and so i turn from the machine and sprint into the numinous white rectangle at the top of the stairs. 75 And yes, i’m overeducated, so it reminds me of the Parable of the Cave when i leap like Nijinsky through glass doors into to kalon, into the mysterium tremendum, or at least into the pastel light of California, leaving the basement level and reentering the world of messages gabbling on the far side of sense: digital phones diddling with satellites, mouths and tongues playing the wind instrument of the throat, streetlight grammar conjugating traffic, panhandlers panhandling, handbills posted so thick the telephone poles have inch-fat paper vests, and all of it so hopeful, and all of it calling suckee, calling fuckee, calling blowjob, though i censor it out. And yet, just now, when i look down at my feet one message spray-painted on the concrete slips through: “Who really needs a red wheelbarrow?” And, as my mind wheels that question back and forth, trying to decide if it’s empty or a load, an open Jeep yowls up, loaded with whooping frat boys in baseball caps and wife-beaters, and one pumps his fist and in perfect Californese shouts to me and no one else in the world, Carpe diem, Dude! ...