Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Freud
Would that the people had but one neck!
Suetonius, Life of Caligula
Coakes stood on the gangway, looking out over the sweltered tarmac of LAX. He took a deep breath, and another, tasting the fumes and pollution. The people behind him, waiting to disembark and see loved ones after the long flight back from Europe, started to make discontented noises but Coakes didn’t care. He hefted the thin, some what frayed, laptop case and walked slowly down the steps. His hair was tied back in a tight pony tail and you, if you cared to look, could make out the clear definition of his cheek bones. There was a wickedness in his eyes. Coakes was home.
Waiting at the foot of the stairs was a Hot Pink Cadillac, some monster from the 1950’s. Good, his publisher had come through, as well he might. Greece had changed Coakes. Made him whole again, added to him a bit, maybe. Ever since that moustachioed prick of a waiter had raped him, well, the world owed Iago Coakes, and he was going to get everything that was coming to him.
Coakes and Baseman met up at Baseman’s place. It was a large mansion, a huge mock post-rococo leviathan of a building, swirls of pink marble and monolithic columns wrestling for supremacy on the riotous façade. In the centre sat a pair of vast doors, brass bound and burning gold in the pale Californian sun. Baseman was standing out front, leaning against a pillar, wearing his Toby suit. Coakes’ Hot Pink Cadillac, top down, music up, roared up the avenue, past rows of poplar trees, and came to a dramatic stop in front of the house. Baseman smiled his smile, the permanent shiteating grin of the conman, and popped the costumes head on. The massive black and white cat toy thing climbed into the Caddy, and Coakes put his foot down, spraying the front of the building with marble gravel.
“For fuck sake, Coakes, watch the house”, the massive head spake.
“Shut up Baseman, how did you afford that place? You can’t be making real money, aside from what you’re charging me.” Baseman had recently taken on the unenviable task of counselling Coakes’s.
“Well, I don’t actually live in there…”
The chrome pink monster powered down Santa Monica Boulevard, towards the Lighthouse. French dance music by Sebastian and Kavinsky blared loud and obnoxious, totally unlistenable.
“Why the hell did I meet you by someone else’s house?”
“No it belongs to me, only, it isn’t a house. I live in a trailer behind it. Its a façade. You know, part of the image..”
“Well its fucking impressive none the less. I’d like to show it to Bill-O one day. He’d shit his ring red.”
Behind the cat mask Baseman laughed. It was an eerie sound. Genuine. The Cadillac sped on, past lines of traffic, powering along the pavement, causing people to jump out of the way, to swear, but Coakes didn’t give a fuck, he was out driving with Toby, who knew all his secrets and loved him, and his money anyway. Up ahead, silhouetted white against the pinking sky, the Lighthouse, then a lighthouse, now a restaurant called the Lighthouse, grew large as they neared.
“Baseman, you’re fucking priceless”, he said, out of nowhere.
“No Coakes, I’m not. That’s the point, I’m always for sale”.
The hot pink Caddy pulled into the carpark, and Coakes, his long blond hair smoothed back, and a white cotton jacket, shirtless to best show off his golden toned chest, vaulted out athletically. Baseman, in his vast sweaty Toby suit climbed out slower, but no less dramatically, a vast cartoon cat thing, with red fez and huge phallic nose. They walked in, arm in arm. Baseman had made the reservations under Christian Bale’s name, and did the talking. The maitre d’ was nonplussed by Coakes casual arrogance, but soon relented, thoroughly unnerved by a mad giant toy silently mincing Queensbury Rules like Bert Lehr’s cowardly lion. Furries were so common now in LA, it could be Pitt in there, or Geffin, hell, it could be anyone. Coakes ordered a bucket of shrimp, Baseman the heroine.
Over dinner, Baseman set out his position. It was what Coakes was paying to hear, Baseman’s expert topic, Objectivism. It hung fat and heavy in the air, like a trapezists balls. Baseman had been head of the Ayn Rand Institute in Northern California, before realising it was in his rational self interest to make great big truck loads of money. So he’d quit and become Toby, the absurd cat-thing that sat opposite Coakes today. A conman all his life, Baseman had taken upon the characteristics of the clichéd homosexual, the camp voice, the effete mannerisms and all, to get closer to women, so he could fuck them, with his penis. He had mass produced his twisted little Toby dolls, the Dunnys made by others ‘far more talented’, selling them for obscene money, building an absurdest narrative around his creation, painting twisted landscapes and preadolescent hypersexualised girls, all of them named after his first babysitter, each birthing Toby, eating Toby, fucking Toby. Even the unsettling darkness was fake, another façade, like the mansion front, like the huge black and white suit, designed to disarm on a general level by giving an obvious target of which to be weary. One side effect was that Baseman had become literally two dimensional. Coakes marvelled at this Machiavellian brilliance, his wide eyed willingness to lie and cheat for money.
“You see Iago,” said Baseman, over his third misty Pimms No.1 on the rocks, “We humans interact directly with pervasive reality. We do not shake in impotent fury at the shades of dreams, as that cunt Kant might have you believe. We as rational objective actors, must live for our self interest, anything else is madness”. Taking a great huff of powdered heroin, absorbing it somehow through the distended nose of his suit, Baseman continued. “Twenty years ago I was nothing - giving to others, worrying about the opinions of looters and moochers. I tried everything to fill my empty life with booze and pussy - Christianity, Dianetics, Neuro Linguistic Programming. Now I possess a nice-sized Baseman organization creating really profitable films, TV, books, toys, and apparel. As the great lady herself said, happiness is the moral purpose of life, there is no morality which does not promote the selfish interest of the individual. It is by following our rational morality we rise above the animal, the socialist.”
At this Coakes’ face sunk, and he began to stir his Vodka Seven despondently. “Rising above the animal Gary? That sounds suspiciously Spartan”.
“Coakes my man”, said Baseman, leaning back in his Louis XIV chair, his suit pouring out over the sides, it’s face eearily static as Baseman carried on, stuffing paw fulls of foie gras entier into the mouth, where it hung for a moment then fell, pooling in his lap. “You’re missing the true beauty of objectivism. Each of us is a rational selfish actor. We each get to decide what makes us happy. Anything, anything at all.”
The night degenerated into the usual wildness, first at McDowells and then out in the desert, a tired edge to it all, now, for Coakes. Since returning from Greece, there was an oil of ennui covering everything. He hardly bothered to bring the little dictionary of sexual perversions with him. He’d done it all, now. Baseman was wild though, fully raving, pouring drugs into the nose of the suit, where a small, built in, electric element burned them as he breathed deep, freebasing whatever came his way. Halfway through the usual arguments with Arabian princes and blond, dead eyed Eastern European girls, Baseman lost the bottom of the suit, and ran bare arsed and paper thin round the basement, drug fug pouring out of the chimney red hat, a massive black and white cat-thing, weirding out the regulars, who frantically checked their pupils and blackberried their dealers, until he found the suits legs; they’d wondered off for a piss.
Coakes sat in his usual place, deep on the antique leather sofa, waving away the Mexican drug waitress, his hooka still filled with the patented McDowells Mix (1 eighth Afgan Gold hashish, 2 parts peyote, a hand full of Harribo gummy bears, a sprinkling of crystal meth and some Rajestani Saffron, for flavour), nearly untouched, as he spoke quietly to the owner. McDowell, once a reputed and infamous Irish politician, was a beast of a man, he appeared as though jellymolded out of canned ham, blotchy pink and deep set piggy eyes, nearly totally bald. He talked endlessly about the “old country”, and some sort of tiger he’d built, which had turned on him. He was clearly insane, but he owned the finest whore house in LA, and had an endless supply of drugs and girls. Only the finest. He looked up to see Baseman threaten some Saudi royal with his razor thin penis…
“I’ll cut your fucking face off! Fucking sand hoarder!”
The prince looked furious, his friends laughing at him behind their beards, and his hand was gripping the hilt of the curved dagger at his waist. He was simultaneously trying not to look at and keep an eye on Baseman’s cock, a long two dimentional cartoon threatening to slit his throat…
“The fuck is that guy”? asked McDowell, as Coakes took a long suck on the jelly drug mixture, bubbling great clouds of sugary red smoke through the Evian.
“That my friend, is the best amongst men. Its his first time here. Leave him be. Remember my first time?”
“Coakes, you evil fucker, I never want to remember that. Tucker Carlson is still banned because of that night”.
“Yeah, he wanted me to talk to you about that…”
“Fuck him, he can come and talk to me himself”.
By now, Baseman had wondered off, leaving the Saudi white with fury, his hand still clamped on the knife, as his friends, all young Arabs, laughed at him. McDowell went over to smooth the situation. Coakes stood and wondered to the corner bar. It was self service, and he grabbed a long neck beer, and cracked it open in Anna Nicole Smith’s mouth. She’d been plastinated and propped up on the bar, a triumph of Gunthers craft, adding a bit of celebrity magic to the joint when Bono wasn’t in. In the corner, Baseman was wailing on one of the young black poors McDowell had hoovered up after Katrina, plunging his huge smoking nose in and out of her, her eyes glossy and unfocused, a crowd of minor celebrities and politicians standing around, hollering and clapping…
Later, in the desert, Coakes burned the soiled Toby costume, tears forming in his eyes from the acrid smoke. He’d already folded Baseman away, securely, in his note book. Under the pile of flaming cat-thing shaped, black and white cotton and foam, the leg of an ex-prostitute, or perhaps an ex-Arab, poked out. It was Baseman’s first time at McDowells, so of course they’d murdered a subhuman and hidden it’s body in the cold blanket of night. Leaning on the trunk of his hot pink Cadillac, Coakes pulled his gloves back on and poked the leg deeper into the fire with a long stick. He placed the tip of one of the foul Russian no-filters he favoured at moments like this between his lips and crouched to light it from the bonfire. He’d come a long way. He hardly even shook any more when he did this. The deep grey brutality of the smoke hit the back of his throat and he smiled, sucking deep again. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but the details were irrelevant. It was the worlds doing, not his. Coakes was totally without blame. No one would ever blame him again. It felt like home, out here in the desert, the crinkling of a bonfire, the high sweet smell of roasting meat, the cooling skin of the convertible, Bill-O’s voice trickling out of the stereo. “There is a liberal cancer in America today, and President Guilani is a cure for these far left loons, now…” Coakes loved how Bill-O pronounced Am-mare-icke-ah. America. Home of the rich and free, the brave and the selfish. Everyone was a king here, Coakes amongst them. They didn’t know his secrets, didn’t care about him, but he was a king. He warmed his hands on the fire, the desert chill enveloping him, as the last of the burning mass ceased to be recognisable. He took another deep drag of nicotine laden smoke, then threw the butt carefully into the fire. With gloved hands he sorted through the ashes, burying the big bones and skulls a further sixty yards into the dull grey sand. Coakes had been awake for eight days running. He took a breath of cold desert air, and loosed a fury of poetic greatness, scrawling rough words ten feet high into the crusty blood red sand.
‘How like a statesman or a clown
Sleep is, ridiculous
Sleep is a Charlie Chaplin prat fall into silence
How cheap a slut is sleep
How easily she comes, when
She is easily afforded
Sleep is a cellar door
Hung like a trap beneath a convicts feet
Sleep is a threat
A ninja in a cowl
Deep in a cave, slung
In a distant hill
sleeps a terrorist
With a wake up pill’.
He breathed easy. Once again he’d based his rhyme scheme and thematic concerns on early formal Lu shih T’ang era verse, emulating a high German shift with his plosive macrons, the poem speaking implicitly of man’s, any man’s, metaphorical wanderjahr. Valiantly he had avoided schema atticum, and mentioning recent traumatic events in the Mid East. ‘Events in which I had no part’, he found himself screaming into the night, tossing the stick to ricochet down the frosty bank of a gulley. Night was at its darkest, an hour or two before dawn, and he hurried back, a string of sweat darkening a patch between his shoulder blade of his cotton jacket, and he raked the ashes again, half burying them in sand before he carefully re-lit the bonfire, using an old tyre, some petrol, and a few bits of scrap wood, throwing cans around. He always carried these in his trunk, went out collecting them especially. Hobo’s had been here in the night, drinking, and if anyone cared to look, killing. He had only had one daughter. He was breathing quickly now, blood in his ears, Melody’s eyes on him in that cell, the thin whine of air conditioning, Schwarzenegger laughing for the cameras as he flicked the switch. The Governor had hung out afterwards, signing autographs and posing with the victims family. Coakes kept the framed autographed picture of the two of them together, mock checking her vital signs, in his bathroom. He smiled now, calmed enough to light another cigarette, to laugh again, to climb back into the car and pull away, out of the desert, leaving a cloud of sand heavy in the air, and a bum’s fire, as close as he’d felt to home in God knows, to drive back up the hills, to his house, past the ranting red eyed Nicholson, to his divine black window into god, to his television.
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