IMPERIAL COURTS

The master no longer says, "You shall think as I do or you shall die". But he says: "You are free
to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess, but you
are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be
useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and
they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will
be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being;
and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in
their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
 3

1. February twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-one marks the

end of the Vietnam syndrome. Outside the red room window,

a brass band from Texas plays Offenbach’s Gendarmes duet

from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. At

half past midnight, blitzkrieg accompanies the president’s

declaration of an end to bloodshed. The aerial target

field and state-of-the-art weapons ensure precision

conflict and minimal collateral. Cobra attack helicopters

equipped with one hundred fifty-five millimeter howitzers

shoot Kawasaki front-end loaders, a school bus, a Mercedes

supply truck. Coalition warplanes drop cluster bombs over

the Persian Gulf, the shrapnel raining down in Apollonian

arrowheads through sisal fiber targets. The US Navy

Silverfox bombing squadron flies ten close air support

 4

planes over the retreating army, dropping five hundred

pound incendiary bombs and white phosphorous on sand-

covered tanks and M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles.

They crush Iraqi fifty-fives and sixty-twos and Republican

Army soldiers returning home from the nineteenth province.

You have to explain it to people the way they want to hear

it. I tell Baker it will be like Super Bowl seventy-eight

at the Louisiana Superdome, when the Cowboys whooped the

Broncos. Do you remember? I can already hear the

trumpets. I want to nod complacently just to give him some

satisfaction, but he cannot see me, there is no televisual

link. Now he is talking about Newton and saying that we

never had a name for the falling until he came to us with a

law. The secretary says it reminds him a childhood game of

emptying bags of feathers from the tree to see where they

would land in his sister’s chalk-drawn hopscotch game. If

it landed in any of the boxes without floating onto the dry

earth below, he awarded his friends with Monopoly currency.

I rush back to my office to put on a fresh pair of

underwear and sprinkle some talcum powder on the psoriasis

on my neck, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I toggle the

remote control to change my monitor from the rhinoceros

themed nature program to the United States Airforce thermal

surveillance device image number one. It is the final air

 5

combat of the war, and estimates run from the hundreds to

the tens of thousands of casualties, corpses of retreating

Iraqis, Palestinian refugees, guest workers from the

subcontinent hiding in the sand, and anyone else enlisted

by the Republican Guard to annex of the nineteenth

province, non-combatants on the road to Basra traveling

from one point to another to oblivion in stolen vehicles

powered by bootleg non-OPEC gasoline. The elevator doors

open and I am in the press room in Langley. I tell the

corps this is the last operation and if everything goes

according to plan we will begin immediate stages of

withdrawal. Bugs asks me about covert participation in the

Kurdish rebellion. I tell them the uprising proves to the

world that the Iraqi people are capable of taking this into

their own hands and do not require further allied support.

As far as opening the discussion to cover the liberated

cities of the north, Dohuk or Kirkuk or Sulaimaniya, to be

totally honest with you for another moment, first, I do not

think the CIA was created with this in mind, and second if

a covert operation were involved I would not be standing

here talking to you about it. These are names on a map.

You can draw a triangle of influence but you cannot use my

laser pointer. In this case indirect intervention has

never been in our interest and now peacemaking begins.

 6

Right here in the National Security Act is says the Central

Intelligence Agency shall have no police subpoena or law

enforcement powers or internal security functions. But I

have been debating this point for years and I am prepared

to answer all charges against my government from domestic

journalists. I tell him this specific policy remains

unchanged from the last administration. In addition to

remind you any central intelligence capabilities are

outside of my jurisdiction and all questions should go to

Bob Gates. Yosemite Sam asks were you not National

Security Advisor when these changes occurred. What

changes? I answer her by saying there is nothing new in

any of these policies. Privately I consider the repeal of

the Clark Amendment but these are only minor differences

with the Carter administration. They believed in a cease

fire. We believed in covert strategy. They had a problem

with using Cambodian aid money to fight the rebels. We

believe it was the only solution. We believed support for

the rebels was the unique option available to us at the

time to end the Cold War. The Cubans and Soviets have

vanished from Africa and now you will watch apartheid

unravel. It is possible to fight from both sides of a

conflict. You can see that on the ground. In a few years

we will no longer hear reports of the white body count from

 7

Pretoria. The dead will be counted equally with every

absence laid out side by side according to number under

wooden crosses lacquered to resemble ivory safari trophies.

Burial rituals, reincarnations and transmogrifications we

will leave to any number of monotheistic belief systems.

Someone from the Washington Times stands to ask if I

believe that all the war dead will live together on

adjacent land. I am careful to avoid the appearance of

intolerance toward the Reverend Moon, but when we are

fighting a war we should not go around talking about

theology. We have passed under the golden bough and I am

keeping my private beliefs to myself. Someone in the back

asks me about the Iraqi body count and I tell her he should

direct that question to Paul but as far as I know we are

not compiling that information and if we were it would

remain classified. Think about it. We have used a minimum

of men and women and only a small portion of our defense

capability. Go ahead and estimate a body count if that is

what you want to do but please direct your question to Dick

Cheney’s office. I have long argued for containment

instead of war and now that combat operations have ceased,

we will continue this course. We know that the

displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a

centimeter at one moment might make the difference between

 8

a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or

escaping. It is my feeling that the policy of economic

pressure works. What we can do is regulate international

exports to potential procurement programs within Iraq,

chemical weapons, long-range missile, even nuclear

programs. Porky from the New York Times about Matrix

Churchill and the Commerce Department approving sales of

glass fiber technologies to Nassr State Enterprise. I tell

them I have not heard anything about it. I return to the

office after the conference, bite into a Rome apple and

push the power button on my communications console. Word

comes on the fax from Central Command that pumping stations

have failed in Iraq, forcing raw sewage into the Tigris and

Euphrates, the main source of Iraq’s drinking water. I

take Norman’s call from the theater of operations. He

tells me he has ordered the destruction of the dams to

allow allied land forces to obliterate the Republican army

in retreat across the border on the six-lane road. Norm

congratulates me on my fortitude and wisdom in suggesting

descent into the valley of death as in the Battle of

Balaclava. Now our men can all go home before spring.

There is a great intake of breath and he shouts great news

we have sent them out to drink in it. What was that? We

flooded Baghdad with sewage, he says. They are up to their

 9

necks. Norm is so gleeful that only his Montecristo

coughing can stop the laughing. This is some kind of

practical joke. I want some kind of verification that the

person on this line is who he says he is. Destruction of

the water reclamation infrastructure is always a last

resort and he knows I warned against it. I tell him I

can’t hear but he is saying something about destroying the

water supply of the hordes. Genghis Khan say hordes

advance never retreat into forest general, he says. I have

learned to ignore this kind of speech from officers, the

witty impersonations like this one of the broken speech of

a fictitious Mongolian invader. I do not believe this is

Norm. This is a Schwarzkopf impersonator. I tell him the

war is over before he can start the ballyhoo. From where

and how it comes into this discussion I do not know. In

some way I would like to tell him that I always respect the

people I kill and there is always a mourning process.

Death has meaning to me. I do not want to give him any

excuses to bring us closer together than our positions

require and if it looks like I can hear him I am not

listening. It is best in this situation that we are not

meeting face to face. I want to remind him of his Mensa

status. He convinces me this is working and we can declare

an end. I wonder about the soldiers who may be caught in

 10

the rising tide of sewage from the destabilized reclamation

facility. Schwarzkopf tells me they are safe back at the

encampments far from the river. My Lincoln sedan drives me

from Langley to Pennsylvania Avenue and I enter the White

House escorted by seven agents. I ask my assistant to see

if the President is available this morning. He sits in the

map room, where according to the schedule he discusses

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talking points with

Sununu. I want to hear his consideration of the second

plank of National Security Directive fifty-four. That is

and has never been the point, he says. This effort has

already gone on too long to be assured of minimal coalition

casualties, he says. To stop while we are ahead is the

only way to market the planned triumph of this American

generation, and Marlin will deal with perception. All we

want you to say now is that military operations have ended

successfully in the gulf and the troops are coming home.

He says listen to me once because I am not going to say it

twice. Our military authority is restored and after the

Gesamtseig in the Arabian Desert we will reorganize the

world. There are still some questions I want to ask. I

feel that someone is not forthcoming on some events outside

of my purview. Was the flood part of the plan? What about

the failure of the pumping stations? Why is CENTCOM

 11

playing games with me? You don’t need to worry about it

anymore what is done is done, says the President. We are

in the clear. I understand your sympathy for people who

have been at war for thousands of years with catapults,

battering rams and sappers, but enough is enough. I tell

him I know what to expect. When I return to Langley, the

fax machine spits out a press memo reiterating the

President’s instructions to stick with the talking points

and not to stray into detail. I open the newspaper to an

overturned High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle at a

concrete barricade on the ground in Kuwait spray-painted

with a graffito in the valley of death rode the twenty six

thousand. Some Palestinian has been reading his Tennyson.

USA Today predicts sun and fifty-five degrees tomorrow.

The President is in my ear again via hands-free headset.

He says he never understands my lack of confidence in the

military, not during Grenada, not in Panama, and certainly

not now. The phone is on the hook and my hands are on my

forehead as I stifle my memories of My Lai. I swivel the

chair back to the desk and I am reading from my list of

rules on my cork bulletin board. Number one is it ain’t as

bad as you think. Also on the board is the resolution. It

confirms the post-war plan to continue the ongoing

promotion of the security and stability of the Persian

 12

Gulf. Also a quote from a computer scientist involved in

cryptanalytic work for the Allied forces. He was a

homosexual who ate a poisoned apple and died. I call Alma

and tell her I am coming home and we will do the ant

proofing soon as soon as I can finish this business. I

tell her to cut out the sugar so we won’t have this problem

in the pantry in the spring when it gets hotter, Langton’s

arthropods, cellular automata everywhere. Haplodipoid

thoraxes and chomping mandibles fertilize the next

generation into plastic bags of farina. Looking through a

window, Vico will write infinite recursive histories.

From his bedroom, Hegel will observe Napoleon Bonaparte go

out from Paris to survey his realm, concentrating on a

point, stretching over the world, dominating it. Coup

d’état will empower a third Napoleon. The Chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff quotes Marx quotes Hegel quoting

Vico. The Powell doctrine means refusal to believe in all

or nothing, all, nothing, zero, one, one, zero, farce,

tragedy, tragedy, farce.

2. Three miles from a Sufi holy site, we search the spoils

to scavenge the remaining stolen goods from the

protectorate. We carry souvenirs from the looting back

with us to our respective Birminghams. We take whatever we

 13

have not incinerated from under a field of ash and sand,

electronics, toys, watches, perfume, batteries, stereo

equipment. Metallica rattles the High Mobility

Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle and all I can think of is the

black and white video. We don’t have cable here but at

home I watch the Night Tracks I taped the night before

every day after classes at New Horizons. In the video

there is a blind deaf and mute soldier in a straight jacket

writhing on a bed. You can hear a voiceover of his

thoughts although he is unable to communicate with vocal

cords or gestures. In space no one can hear you scream. I

guess I like Metallica as much as the next guy, I like it

almost as much as I like Merle Haggard but the shift from

balladry into high speed guitar riffs feels like

teratogenic mustard agents. It would be nice to listen to

this in another place with some cunnilingus involved. I

would tell her we are starting slow so we can make it to

the highway. Driving through the desert I feel like I am

in an advertisement that will be edited for content later

to give the impression of an action movie. Be all that you

can be. Get an edge on life. Win one for the Gipper.

What is the other thing Reagan used to say? Where is the

rest of me? It is all a little too much sometimes. This

is a one-year tour then I return on Staten Island Fresh

 14

Kill a metal detector on my back and a day-glo fanny pack

with a palm tree design round my waist at the belt buckle

so I can see my worth at all times. My belief is firm that

with some industry I will succeed at turning garbage into

money. The military is only a means to an end for me. For

the third time today I think I have malaria or tuberculosis

or some shit and whatever it is I am sore when I sit down.

On both sides of the sand mound where I squat there are

corpses in quiescent carbon. If the wind has not scattered

the ash you can make out the size and shape and facial

features of the dead. This one kneeling here in the sand

couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. We see

babies burned into carbon effigies of themselves, memento

mori sisters, brothers and cousins. The smiling severed

heads scattered around the remains of the trucks and

militia of Hussein’s army. This is a Bosch painting of

Pompeii. On the transceiver my captain tells me the tiger

brigade is already in Subiya, carrying carbon prints of

thermal image sites to identify the treasure. He wants me

to speed it up so we can find some auto parts for the

cavalry and I take another methamphetamine tablet. If I

ask a question the captain gives me a paragraph of

inconsistencies and what ifs. I look at the remains of one

of the bombed out jeeps with Arabic painted in green on the

 15

passenger door. I draw a line in the sand. Tangent to the

line is a circle of wreckage expanding to the north toward

Kurdistan, incorporated in Iran, Syria, Turkey. Stormin’

Norman is on Voice of America from the stereo in the jeep

talking about the test, how there is only one answer and

you know we are going to get it right. I am in the sand

with hand held communication device, gripping my hat in the

whipping wind as the speed hits. There are canine eyes up

ahead, a hybrid of a mountain lion and a Great Dane. The

animal growls and bares its teeth and there is another on

my right and on his left, then they scatter into the wind.

Through the sound unit I hear a voice asking me to describe

the wreckage. Into the personal communication system to a

voice stationed in Mosul I confirm to my captain that it is

like Spring break here. I tell him we have not seen

chivalry like this since the song of Roland. What’s it

like out there, Gerry, he says. Fucking Fort Lauderdale,

surf is up, here comes a wave followed by a monsoon. The

cluster bombs have detonated so the ones remaining are all

inside the vehicle and then this one guy outside the

vehicle with his arm poised to throw a grenade. I tell him

we have a convoy up here in retreat, flags still waving

from the vehicle. I hear something through the receiver

but I do not know if it is static or explosions. The dogs

 16

stand in front of me in silence. They are not growling and

do not appear vicious so I take another step. The three

dogs are doubling and tripling in single file, six, nine,

twelve. Through the blowing dust they appear in a

holographic flicker as if Scotty is beaming them up. They

materialize in front of me, drifting in and out of essence.

I hear a growl. I press talk to tell the military I am a

goner. He says to me there is no way you are dead or you

would not be talking to me right now. Another dead soldier

listens to the radio in a Kowitzer. His corpse is a pillar

of charcoal, obdurate as a statue of Saddam in a Baghdad

square. I hear the Voice of America, the droning voice of

the President, a quivering, stammering Jerochiam strung

through a tin wire. The voice splinters through the

speakers of the tophet as the wind scatters the remains of

the incinerated Kashmiri soldier and the dogs close in

around me, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one. The President is

declaring victory again. Americans today can be confident

of our country, confident of our futures, and most of all,

confident about you. We promised you would be given the

means to fight, we promised not to look over your shoulder.

We promised this would not be another Vietnam and we kept

that promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried

forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

 17

Today the promise of spring is almost upon us, the promise

of growth and renewal, renewed life in Kuwait, renewed

prospects for real peace throughout the Middle East, and a

renewed sense of pride and confidence here at home. And we

are committed to seeing every American soldier and allied

POW home soon, the first test of the new world order has

been passed, thank you, congratulations, and God Bless

America. The war will not happen, is not happening, never

happened, over and out from Gehenna.

3. I am calling you from across the street from the

Mountain Back apartments. I have the feeling I have seen

this before without knowing where or how. I always say I

never dream and you always tell me I do it is just that I

cannot remember. I know I will remember this time. This

is like one of those moments when we both wake up at the

same moment screaming. It feels like a dream but I know I

will remember it because this time we will have a VHS

videotape. If you are at home all you have to go out to

the balcony to see this. Bring your binoculars and look to

the right toward Terra Bella. I only want you to know that

I am here and you can see me if you look out the window.

Do you see me? I am waving to you now. I am no longer

 18

waving. Now I am waving again, do you see me? I guess

not. I am wearing my tan overcoat with the belt, the one

you bought me for Christmas. There are these eight-foot

high Toyota hatchbacks carrying trailers each with its

purpose, wardrobe, costumes, props. There is a palm tree

in a cement base. There is a table set up with sandwiches

and soft drinks surrounded by a yellow line with the words

do not cross. The reason I am calling you is because not

one hundred feet in front of me is Arnold Schwarzenegger

and someone with his arm pulled up into a white canvas one

piece and a hook for a hand for further digital

manipulation of the image against blue screen background.

When you ask me later if I met him I will say no. I do not

want to interfere when there could be shooting at any

moment without warning. Mostly I am calling to remind you

it is Tuesday, the new trash night, and whatever you can

take to the bin for reclamation we could use the extra

change. They have raised the redemption value to five

cents a can. It is important to do this because my beer

consumption is at a new high and I have not found any

freelance videography or editing work for at least a month

now. I do not even remember when the infomercial job

ended, but I think it was some time in the first month of

the year. There is a sense of proficiency and confidence

 19

on this film set I have not seen since the time we saw

Victoria Principal filming that television movie. Do you

remember when you said you thought Paul Sorvino had lost

some weight? Everyone is running around with clipboards

and wheeling racks of clothing. I flag down a man with a

clipboard to find out more about what is going on. Do you

mind if I shoot some video? Go ahead, he says, this is an

open set, we want the word out. He says the movie when it

is complete will mess me up permanently but he will not

tell me the title. He tells me his job is to sketch and

photograph information for future manipulation mutation and

superimposition over the photographed scene in post-

production. He studies my disbelief for a moment, nudges

his shoulder toward my camera and asks me if I am a video

enthusiast. I tell him I take it with me wherever I go

because you never know what you might see. He tells me if

I really want to see something I should head over to Hansen

Dam next week for the explosion sequence. I realize where

the sense of déjà vu is coming from. I tell him I think I

can guess what it is and it is probably a sequel. He says

just wait and you will find out. There will be marketing

campaigns. I will see the trading cards from Impel. I may

play the acclaim entertainment video game. I may smell

the male fragrance Hero from Fabergé incorporated, the

 20

company that makes those eggs that you like. It really

gets me thinking about what I want you to get me for our

anniversary this year. He asks me if I eat at any fast

food restaurants. I say sometimes when I do not bag my own

lunch or when I am at home waiting for my promoter in

Arleta to call. He says then you will see the eight week

meal deal Pepsi promotional cardboard display of the star

of the movie as you eat a sandwich. He says you had better

lock up your daughter because this high octane and it is

coming at you. I tell him I will be sure to do that but I

do not have a daughter. For a second I want to tell him

about our fish but I think better of it. This isn’t the

time. I jab him with my elbow and say every day must have

an explosion right. He tells me just wait around you may

see something. Do you think this will be in three

dimensions? If so, I will bring out my glasses and see

this one in the theater. I want to find out if they are

using this location because the movie takes place after the

apocalypse but I also want to make him comfortable so I

quote Revelation in my best Austrian accent, the dog is

turned to his own vomit again and the sow that was washed

to her wallowing in the mire. I am unaware that my

creative contribution is unnecessary and New Testament

references have already been incorporated into the script.

 21

I am waiting for two hours in the hope that something will

happen. Things that could happen include the Terminator

flies through the sky on a harness, or a motorcycle leaps

through the caravan of big rigs and dragons extinguish the

flames from the collision with magic saliva. But right now

all I see are people sitting around on folding chairs with

their names and they are not even recognizable. Who is

Joseph P. Lucky? I did not come here to see a bunch of

nobodies. I wait until eight o’clock and nothing. I am

going home to watch the end of the war. Wolf Blitzer

introduces footage shot by a forward-looking infared

thermographic camera with a broad wavelength spectral band.

Thermal image sites reveal themselves in luminescent red

drops. Marine corps jets release five hundred pound bombs

into the smoky air. The Silverfox bombing squadron

launches close air support warplanes from USS Ranger

clusters. We can see the aerial view of wherever they are.

Sometimes they will show you the view from the ground in

daylight, concrete highways lined with burning President,

Republican guards waving automatic rifles, Iraqis tied to

stakes and blindfolded, bodies swelling and drooping like

butcher shop sacrifices. Spectra drift into my pupils as

my ears pick up the frequencies of lee greenwood singing

and I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m

 22

free. Would you pick up the Cassingle for us at The

Wherehouse? There is a commercial break. There is nothing

wrong with a sense of pride in who you are and where you

come from. I am watching luxury sedans sliding past fiery

hunks of aluminum on CNN and eating cheese flavored potato

chips from a bag with a smiling man wearing a sombrero. I

suppose I should be happy just to catch a glimpse of the

Terminator. I wonder what he is doing back at his mansion

in the hills at three am. The television is off now and

the pillow is fluffed. I dab aloe vera and hydrogen

peroxide on my knee like you told me to do so that it can

heal. I am falling into a deep sleep enhanced by a

Percodan and a glass of vinegar Gallo from a box. Where

are you?

4. I do not like the police shows afternoons on KTLA and

this one is impossible to follow with the roles of the

officer and the arrest blurred and my grandmother Rose is

muttering bid one dollar bid one dollar. My grandmother

complained once about what she called the obscenity of the

color. I helped her downstairs on her walker so she could

talk to the attendant. That morning was the day after the

war started five months ago. The administrator was

watching Woody Woodpecker and wearing overalls over red K-

 23

mart leggings with stirrups and bedroom slippers. She

asked him what the color was called and he answered

dandelion. She said it was more of an ochre more flesh

than flower. These moments were the only times my

grandmother felt a part of anything since the congregation

developed ludomania and the church stopped the trips to

Laughlin, Nevada when general poverty refused to trump high

rolling myths of slot machine fortunes. I think she has

given up on trying to change things because I can see her

through the window, the premium basic cable turned to

Sanford and Son, Redd Foxx in the mid-seventies answering

Carol O’Connor. She is flipping through the channels,

landing back on the same police program after another

thirty-five depressions. The station is running the video

without time base correction and the shifting of shadow and

rolling lines contribute to my grandmother’s sense of

hopelessness and frustration. The signal is so weak from

the antenna that you cannot read the values of the bids and

occasionally the sound goes out in a wave of white noise.

The commercial suggests after the war Arcadia by the sea is

the only city remaining after the Edict of Cyrus. The

officer suggests do not even think about going to Babylon.

An electroluminescent white chalk drawing of Brahma Parusha

stretches out in a banner over the city as the crowd of

 24

military wives sways hands while singing along ruidosamente

to Oleta Adams I don’t care how you get here just get here

if you can. Neo-Churrigueresque and streamline moderne

facades line the universal void, the backlot. Jack Webb

provides the voiceover narration now careening off stucco

balconies, ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to

see is true the names have been changed to protect the

innocent. Behind the officer a Calder rebus hangs over a

Robert Stacy-Judd cast concrete used for the capitals and

ornaments in the Aztec revival hotel lobby to simulate the

destruction of Atlantis. The interior is the exterior of a

pueblo revival with walls extending inward as parapets with

protruding fir vigas as beams supporting pink tulle clouds

and gold flowers. The actors take their places among the

boom microphones and corrugated aluminum accordion camera

risers to enact a sting operation in unexpurgated form,

real time, incorporating censored footage shot in nineteen

sixty-five of a simulated encounter between assailant and

police officer. The actors are in beards and tunics and

carrying staffs but what comes out of their mouths is

contemporary English spoken in American accents. They

address the camera in front of a parked sanitation truck

and a Los Angeles police department vehicle with the motto

to protect and serve. This is not special weapons and

 25

tactics because I do not see Robert Urich or Balacavas or

Heckler and Koch MP fives.

REC/PLAY. What are you talking about, man? You want to

write me a ticket, write me a ticket. Don’t mess with me,

man. Listen, I got a right to pat you down, and I’m gonna

fucking do that. I do not know if you have got a knife or

weapon on you. You can pat me down, but do not mess with

me, man. Turn around and put your fucking hands on your

head now. Why? Do it cause I am fucking telling you to.

What are you gonna do? You gonna hit me with that stick?

Yeah, I just might. For what? Put your hands on your

head. For what? I do not know if you have got a fucking

knife, nigger. I do not have a knife. Put your fucking

hands on your head and turn around.

STOP. The car radio is playing the Chic song from seventy-

nine these are the good times but the actors’ hairstyles

suggest it is no longer the Carter administration. The cop

has a Tom Selleck thing going on with his moustache and

tufts of chest hair pouring out of the top of his uniform.

The victim looks like my father, tight coils of black hair

modeled in Murray’s special, a gold medallion of a

scorpion, a red polyester jacket. There is something about

 26

the pantomime that seems like it is for the camera, and the

air quotes suspended above the heads of the actors suggest

the possibility that this is not a re-enactment but news

footage. Behind the image is a shadow of something

occurring on another signal, a bullet haired French woman

scraping a metal bowl with a spatula. I have had enough of

trying to figure out where we are in this cop show. In a

sybillant flash of electricity the screen goes blank and I

am outside walking back to the courts. I close the door

but leave it unlocked because my mother is in the bathroom

fumbling with curlers and blowdrying her hair with wet

hands again. Someone will need to hear the electrocution

to call nine one one, but it won’t be me because I am

outside in blinding sunlight in Imperial Courts. Imperial

Courts is smaller than Nickerson Gardens down the street

where my aunt Margaret lives. Nickerson is where all the

candidates for congress and city government and Jesse

Jackson go to grandstand to prove they speak for the

people. Imperial Courts is mostly a glorified lawn that

never gets watered and some cheap institutional buildings.

It is home but it is the kind of home you wish would burn

down so you could move somewhere else. It is the kind of

place that if you were Kenneth Hahn you would want to turn

it into a luxury condominium, but you would have to bide

 27

your time and build new malls along the interstate instead

and hope others will invest. Next to the patch of

dehydrated field a swallow bounces on the dry patch of

grass under the fire extinguisher and stretches a spider

web between two weeds with its beak until it snaps, sending

the bird stumbling onto the asphalt. Through a corridor

between the bungalows a lane of traffic snakes down

Imperial Highway. On the side of the east bungalow there

is a new mural, the latex still wet on the stucco wall over

a draft in pencil of a welcome wall to residents and

visitors. The full outline of the Reverend Martin Luther

King, Junior is drawn over the still hardening paint. His

feet are planted toes pointing forward in welcome, an

avatar appearing to the flock of untouchables. His left

arm reaches out toward a line that could be the horizon or

the beginning of a garden or the top row of a hedge. In

the background a Mayan woman walks by with a cane in one

hand and a tan ceramic pot of hibiscus in another. The

background color, still a wash covering most of the

unfinished wall, is an off white like the flesh of a

banana. A swarm of paratrooper gnats fills the courtyard

and I watch them float from above through the telephone

wires against the cerulean. The sky rains insects,

insecticide, the occasional drop from the clouds rolling in

 28

from Long Beach. The voice of a blue jay sustains its

melody over a gentle snare rattle of motor vehicles in

pulsating procession along Imperial Highway. Another

uninterrupted drone comes from a unit window, where a dust

covered screen muffles the voice on the radio an angry

masculine sound emerging at times from behind a heat and a

sample from the seventies rhythm and blues catalog,

Funkadelic or Mandrill, impossible to discern from here.

Only the beat travels through the diseased eucalyptus at

lot’s center through car windows and then the high

frequency of the female singer hits or another police siren

and if you are lucky you recognize the song. The next car

is playing a Dre jam with Honeydrippers impeach-the-

president drums, a piano vocal break and Ren rhyming on top

and in the dayz of wayback I couldn’t be laid back. The

swallow rests near a discarded condom, its lubricant

resplendent in the morning sun through high haze into the

plaza reflecting glimmering ooze onto the wall. Two ninth

graders at Dominguez appear at the edge of the field and

the swallow levitates onto a telephone wire. The boys are

talking about how you could shit into a jimmy throw it at

the cops and they would not know what it is until they got

out of their cars to touch it. They duel with imaginary

lightsabers. One says to the other the force is always

 29

savage that is why it is called the force. He says to the

other come over to my house I have the freshest tapes like

the new Brand Nubian. They yell something about how my

mama is up waiting for me at Walgrove and Lucille swinging

a rhinestone bag and leaning into Cadillacs through rolled

down tinted windows. I ignore all of it because I know she

is inside getting her makeup on. They are yelling pendejo.

I tell them they do not know what they are talking about.

The noise at ten am comes in peaks and valleys, until a

siren comes and the dogs in the warehouses across the

street poke their snouts under rolling metal doors and howl

at the police. An ambulance drives past and one of the

boys pinches the ball in his gloved left hand and holds his

right forefinger out to wind, scrunching his lips together

in a cowl or as if to blow a kiss. I cannot get away from

them and so I stop here on the remainder of this telephone

pole. The x-form of a wood beam perpendicular to the pole

is shadowed in a single unbroken line on the painted

asphalt. I want to write something down in this Poochie

For Girls spiral notebook that my mother bought for me at

Pic ‘n Save. I do not know why she bought it unless crack

was involved in the decision. When she gave it to me first

I painted the cover silver and layered it with electrical

tape to disguise the pink-furred cartoon dog in sunglasses

 30

because no one needs to see that. On the back of the front

cover I have written in red marker please return to

Jefferson Davis. The counselor at school wants me to

record all of my feelings since the incident in shop class

last month with the kidnapped squirrel and El Hoja and the

pregnant girl. They had to send her away to another

district. The superintendent permanently removed El Hoja

from shop and into the physical education department.

These days I see him only through the blinds of the

teacher’s lounge off the boys’ locker room. I write in my

journal why does fear make me hard and does dialectic break

bricks. There are open brackets to indicate it is

idiolect. Footsteps from one hundred fifteenth street

interrupt my concentration and I turn the corner into a new

landscape. When I look at the tracks I imagine one of

those silent movies when men in a moustaches tie white

women to the tracks. For a moment I think about what it

would be like to hijack one of the freight cars and take it

to the San Bernadino Mountains. I am walking across the

line facing the trains coming from the east, turning my

face to the left, where I can watch for intruders. I can

see a car parts shop with Coca Cola moderne moulding.

There is a Bentley elevated above a mechanic on the

concrete floor. The mechanic wears overalls and a cap like

 31

the one Mister Rogers wears when he plays with his train

set. All around him there is oil, swirling rainbows in tar

puddles, discarded canvas gloves. I pause at the rolling

aluminum door and clutch the concrete wall. The mechanic

slides out from under the car on a wheeled dolly and looks

to me as I regard myself in my baggy jeans and Jacksons

Victory tour t-shirt in the mirror behind him. I hear a

beeping and the distant rattle of an alarm, muted as if

hidden in one of the trunks of these cars. I am an

apparition caught at a barricade laid out at his feet in

green laser. He is looking like he wants to give me what I

need, something brutal and drawn out so I can feel it. He

pulls out a wrench from his pocket with one hand and waves

it at me to indicate that if the laser doesn’t get me, he

will beat me into submission. A helicopter chops overhead

and I look to see if it is police or from one of the news

stations but against the sun I can only identify the

elliptoid shadow, its center severed by a trompe l’oeil

halo of churning blades and sulfur dioxide. When the blade

rotates as high speeds it looks as if you can put your

finger into the halo like popping a soap bubble. But you

can’t. What happened to El Hoja is the living proof. I

look over my shoulder and they are all hunched over an

Ulama game for Nintendo and I walk across the green laser
 32

beam toward the mechanic and out the back door into the

street. In the Acme auto parts store on the other side of

Imperial Courts where they are listening to the President

the first test of the new world order has passed the hard

work of freedom awaits. On Power 106 Cult Jam chants yes,

baby, yes, baby . I feel a tumescence in my Superman

underoos and dash across Imperial Highway under the long

shadow of the cruciform telephone pole, encrusted in bent

nails and staples. When I get home, my mother will be

wearing a green towel over her hair and a hotel bathrobe

monogrammed in forest green on white terry cloth. In her

right hand she will hold a remote control, white with soft

plastic red buttons, waving it at me like a pistol. My

brother will attend an Amer-I-Can meeting out in

Northridge. My brother will miss out on aerial helicopter

views of civilian assassinations, dissident Shiites, their

bodies tied to wood poles in vacant lots near Baghdad, ammo

from the guns of Hussein’s army fired into their bellies,

the crimson dripping into pixel ribbons. If they want to

know why I am home so early I will tell them there was a

shooting at Grandee today and they sent us home. In the

mirror my pajama top with iron-ons my mama bought at Pic

‘n’ Save says the letters backwards left to right YNIT. I

Polaroid myself in the mirror but it doesn’t come out from

 33

the aureole of flash. The reflected flash decorates my

face like a tin star on our dead Christmas tree. I will

spend the rest of the morning in my bedroom with action

figurines. I will look around at the cluttered space,

overwhelmed by dirty clothes, most of them white or white

stained pink during washing, the bed covered with pens and

paper and an old plastic toy representing the overlord of a

phalanx of mutant robots and or phantasms manufactured

under the trademark mortuary command. I will clear the

pile of briefs from off the bed and sink into the polyester

encased microfiber simulated down.

5. The stereo is on when I turn the key and it is Zapp

Computer Love where they do that thing with their voice so

it comes out of a Sonovox machine. I want to get one of

those so I can strap it to my neck and use it on my wife.

When she is in the toilet I can shout out get your fucking

hands in the air and she will fall for it the first three

or four times. She tears the roof off and I as the hero

bring it back from Oz. I am on surveillance at the Gan

Eden Circle K on Washington with Freddie Dolemite Holmes.

Freddie grabs a package of Funyuns and turns it around in

the crook of his arm to read something on the back about a

contest where you can send in ten proofs of purchase and

 34

win a new Hyundai. On the active signal we watch Saddam

under a red and marigold banner and the fronds of a

roystonea regia. He announces that Iraq is withdrawing

from Kuwait in compliance with UN security resolution some

series of numbers. The titles under the image tell us in

numerals six hundred sixty six hundred sixty two. There is

a man seated at a red and white cheesecloth covered table

by the window. I cannot understand any of it because it is

in their language. Under the headline is Payne Stewart

squatting in argyle on an Astroturf mound. I am looking at

a man who is staring at me while waiting in line at the

store. He says how you doing. He is wearing coveralls

over a colt forty-five black t-shirt. The white man sings

the colt jingle to me in a strange accent. He says he

comes from Scotland and he wants to talk to me. What is a

Scottish person doing in Sun Valley? I got to cut out of

here so I walk out with the bottles to the parking lot and

my eighty-five Toyota. Freddie is looking at me from above

his sunglasses model t. I toss my legs into the company

van, slide the bag between the seats, and we drive out of

the parking lot into an empty Mount Gleason Avenue. On the

radio I switch from the Mariah Carey and the announcer says

in today’s economy, only oil-and-gas investing brings you

the surety and safety of public awareness during the

 35

Persian Gulf crisis. Sheik Yamani says that oil will go

above sixty dollars per barrel within sixty days. I

accidentally pushed the AM/FM button and push it again and

turn the dial away from Mariah’s Vision of Love. We drive

under the powerful flashlight beam from a security officer

on the second floor of a brutalist bank on Ora Vista. We

are driving through Sunland where the neighbor children

swing under yellow-ribbon pinned oak trees and overstuffed

shopping carts populate weeded lots and lamp-lit trash-

lined vacant alleys. When we pull into the driveway I

notice a cat on the roof above the door. I push the garage

door opener and roll the van over a new oil stain from last

night. I will have to check it for a leak in the morning

before the drive to health and human services. We are

inside now trying to get last night’s clippers game on a

three-foot zenith television with a closed-circuit antenna

Glen got from a Mexican on Baseline road who had fenced it

down in Miraleste from his dealer in Rancho Vista. Glen

gets extra points for speaking some Spanish words like hola

and puta and basquetbol even though the doctors say he is

functionally retarded. The Clippers are down again this

season and I don’t know if I can watch them fail again

tonight. When we get to Lakeview Terrace, he says come on

in man we got catfish for dinner. In the kitchen there is

 36

an acrylic on red velveteen Margaret Keane painting of

Beverly Johnson. There is framed blue yarn embroidery of a

cop with a pig’s head and hooves. There are the oversized

wood utensils with porcelain vegetable handles we bought at

Kitchen Corner. There is a photograph of three monkeys

with the caption see no evil. I don’t know how you can

afford the gas, he says. He wants to know if I looked at

that job he was talking about and I tell him his business

is his and mine is mine. Next time I find some shit for

you you’ll be grateful I’m doing it and not down in

Chatsworth or at Rocketdyne, he says. Work at home people

come to you you never have to cross Roscoe if you do not

want I'm going home to pay that debt I owe and that’s it

man no double jeopardy. Freddie has the balls to try to

catch me on it like I owe him something. You had benefits

they paid you good, he says. From an armchair I snap the

rabbit ears with a wet towel Angela uses to catch the run

off from the potted plant. I tell him this is a recession

and we should stop worrying about it. We do not even know

what the traffic will be like in the morning when we go

over there. Freddie wants to know about Glen. Makes you

turn into a pillar of salt. Listen what’s up with Glen,

motherfucker wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true and I know

you know you know I’m saying he can’t tag team me like he
 37

used to. You know with Glen when he talks to me about

Crystal it’s the fear in his voice when he says it. We

both agree he is the only one who can do it. And to tell

you the honest truth it may be the best marriage I have

ever seen in my life, she gets the jewelry from Rancho

Vista and he gets all the bruises, clumsy bastard. I

change the subject to music we can both agree on. I made

you a tape. George Clinton, some Zapp, shit I taped from

this radio show I told you about, some fucking Meters, and

Luther is all up in it. Bryant walks to the sink with the

straps from his suspenders hanging loose at his waist.

Hands grip the water pipe. He dries his hand and puts the

tape into the stereo and he turns it way up and you can see

the dogs and birds moving in and out to the new jack swing.

I change it from the trivia game show to the beginning of

the basketball finals, the half-time ceremony, the salt-and

pepper static as the knob clicks, the noise of the blank

screen empty of image fading from gray to black into a

skipping silver line. We get it from Ron, not free,

Neigborhood Watch, you do something for me, I do something

for you. When we go in together we get HBO and Spice. The

signal comes in and Freddie says like nine cans of shaving

powder. The game is on, homes. It is going to be the

Pistons and the Bulls this year. There is no chance

 38

against Jordan, he says. I tell him I believe in Magic and

the Lakers can win. Channel five is the former sports

announcer huddled over a card table against a pyramid

backdrop with reversible clear plastic carousels. Nobodies

describe the events and trivia of the day to each other

with the expectation that Bert Convy or Bob Eubanks or

Vicki Lawrence will answer. The money goes to charity. I

think it is the man from the New Year in one of the

hydraulic pyramids and then the announcer says Dick Clark.

On channel thirteen Vanna White turns polymer carousels lit

from within by halogen lights to reveal letters of the

alphabet. Spinning plastic on every channel, revealing and

obscuring clues. I want to know when the game starts.

Freddie says shut the fuck up and look at the police siren

I got at Spencer Gifts Panorama City. I ask him where he

got the money to buy that. He says to me something about

how it is always better at the moment of purchase before is

gathers dust on the coffee table. We see surveillance

images of gangbangers in tricked out Cadillacs rolling

through parking lot stretching to the horizon. I thought

there was a truce but it was only temporary. Freddie

thinks the footage is from AM/PM where he works in La

Crescenta on Orange Avenue. I tell him it must be stock

footage because they are too afraid to videotape it

 39

themselves. There must be a coin toss. The blue light in

the ovoid steel cage on the console begins to spin, and we

hear a siren. If I knew the way it would sound without any

audience participation, I do not know that I would have it

in my house right now. I tell him you know when I doubted

you, you remember what was it the car alarm and I gave that

tape away to my friend. Freddie’s wife Angela walks in

carrying two videos and a cat and I know there is going to

be a fight. Freddie tells me he will catch him tomorrow,

sometime after things are worked out. He slams the door

and their wedding photograph staggers on the wall. The cat

darts from Angela’s arms and runs to the closing door, its

claws scratching at the nylon carpet. We cannot be

adopting anything right now and the same goes for most

everyone we know, Freddie says. She says it is already

here, it is too late, and now someone needs to step up and

take care of it. She goes into her room and slams the door

and leaves the cat out to meow and sharpen its nails on

their new couch Freddie bought at Levitz. Freddie says she

is going to have to declaw it or he will do it himself. He

says if she wants a pet she can go down to her sister’s

place in Long Beach and catch a fish off the pier with the

neon Santa Claus even though it is February and the waves

can eat her ass for supper.

 40

6. On the tape deck, drifting above the freeway into the

charred hillside, guitar shards fade into a deep house

beat. It is enveloping my ride so much I am forgetting I

am here. I am thinking about what to tell my mom at this

late stage of our move. You can see the Tujunga Canyon

from our apartment. How is Phoenix? There is barely

anything here but when the lights come out in the Santa

Susanas in the evening you can see them reflected in the

puddles in the brush and it is beautiful. I feel like I

must have been here in the twenties when all was darkness

and in former life Natalie Wood dressed up Navajo for John

Ford westerns. Do you know they are filming a movie across

the street? Sometimes I see Sean Young walking around in a

powdered wig, right across the street. Life goes on with

or without us. Drainage winds blow coarse sand and pebbles

at the windshield. The imperious mountains straight ahead

indicate Mongolia is there on the other side. You can

always tell it is the winter when we have one day of rain,

sometimes two. Then comes the fading dry and the fires to

tell you the rainy season is over and that spring is here.

We have been lucky. The fires do not come to us in the

hills and it is easier than Lancaster in the recession. It

has been fine but the commute is long. I don’t watch the
 41

news until late and I’m not going to turn it on tonight. I

have decided it will be the way it is when I walk in the

door tonight. If it is Freddie, fine, and if it is the

rest of them, then at least I can sleep tonight knowing he

is home. The headlights of the automobiles crowd together

in white red and green flashbulbs like radioactive kelp

collecting and dispersing its branches in the surf. If you

cannot see the stars they are invisible tonight in the

waxing moon. There is almost a sense of the sea and you

get it mostly from the sound of the tires. I wonder

against any unexpected visits from relatives in Arizona. I

drive the Yugo off the two ten at Foothill and drive past

the Sunland Park and Recreation Center, and the empty lot

after Floralita. At the light I turn right into the Garden

Court and park. The sign is missing the R-D-E and they

still haven’t removed the vacancy sign after the turnover.

I notice someone else through the linens on the curtain rod

even after I warned my nerves are shot today. I open the

door and it’s only Freddie sitting on the recliner naked

under my mother’s burgundy terry cloth robe. On the wood

footrest are the same magazines I placed there yesterday

afternoon to create an environment of clutter, Ebony,

People, Jet, National Pornographic. I picked up a cat

yesterday from off the street lounging under a tire in the

 42

parking courtyard and today is his first day with us in our

home. I follow it with my eyes as it brushes against my

body and tries to climb the door like Linda Blair. I fed

you. Stop looking at me. Shoo. My husband walks in from

the bedroom and catches me talking to the cat. You talk to

that now before you talk to me, he says. I tell him he is

all toe up and nobody is going to give him a job. There is

some wine on the carpet but it is still shag and will be

replaced after we move out. They will renovate it to look

like a fifth-floor office building downtown, with ceilings

and walls free of asbestos and other carcinogens. Bryant

finds something on the carpet from the cat and is yelling

about how this is feral behavior. I am not a fantasy maid

played by Marla Gibbs, Esther Rolle, or Nell Carter and I

tell him to get off his black ass and do it himself. To

tell the truth I didn’t know how hard it would be to take

care of it. It always is wherever I want to be even when I

get down to cat level and lecture it. I tap the cat on the

head with the calendar section of the complimentary Los

Angeles Daily News. Then I place the paper on a stack next

to the nightstand to use later for the litter box, filled

to the brim and stinking of the shellfish we gave her last

night and the rodenticide hidden behind it next to the

avocado green refrigerator. Look at the paint peeling off

 43

of that underneath the House Party magnet. I do not know

what is worse, having an avocado green refrigerator or

seeing that it was originally puce. We need to change this

situation. These appliances are starting to fuck with me.

Freddie is not working and Bryant and Glen have no contacts

so I cannot eat until we get these stamps. I am looking in

the pantry for Similac for the baby. There are condiments,

bread crumbs, Tobasco sauce, cans of chili, fruit in heavy

syrup. The one box of Rice-a-Roni will provide dinner for

the two of us tonight but I do not know yet about the cat.

It may have to go back on the street. I may feel guilty

for a moment but the baby needs to eat. Where is the baby?

In a dirty diaper she runs past the plastic gold winged

horn-wielding angel from the holiday display and hides her

face in the wallpaper pattern of black and aluminum

diamonds. I pick up the water bowl in an automatic motion.

As I carry it to the sink to refill it I look inside and

jump. The spider, in the center of the bowl, appears to be

drinking the water from the bowl, undulations filling up

the water around its mandible. I put the bowl down on the

counter and turn off the faucet. I shake my hands in the

air in disgust, but I do not want to kill the spider. I

dump the insect into a potted evergreen shrub next to the

ashtray and enter a fugue state with my eyes resting on the

 44

salt-and-pepper shakers. The cat is chewing on the plant

now and the spider crawls up its nose. It is at this point

I realize it is time to rid this house of invaders. When I

get home from work tomorrow this will be my project.

Tomorrow I’ll bring back what I need from work for dinner

and I will go ahead and make some sense of these tax forms.

I have had enough so I sit down and switch on the

television. There is a Johnny Gill video on BET showing a

model in a tight pink Gaultier vinyl dress dancing the

running man atop an e pluribus unum one-dollar bill

pyramid. This is a slow jam but this sister is busting

moves like the pyramid is on fire or she has ants up her

cooze. You have heard of black and white but this video is

entirely in a green color scheme. I have heard this song

enough today on the Muzak system at Albertson’s so I change

the channel. The feed from C-SPAN is a desert storm

dedication from Washington, baseball caps over hearts, Dick

Cheney saluting, country music bleeding through the

speaker. I think I need to go to the toilet during the

McLaughlin Group. The host asks will it retain its

tenacious dominance or will it yield to value-fragmentation

by race class and language. I am not sure what the it is

he is talking about. The host calls out Al Sharpton for

response. A wheel-spoke Tylenol rolls past an orange Advil

 45

and Wilford Brimley tells me how much better it is to

swallow a smooth pill instead of a chalky white one. With

the remote in hand I rush to the bathroom from the pain in

my bowels and leave the door open for a view to the living

room. In the bathroom there is a porcelain paper holder

supported by a caryatid of an ebony nude with her genitalia

painted in cotton candy pink. It is out of toilet paper.

I wish someone had told me and I could have picked it up at

the market. I am hearing the voice of Don Cornelius. Yes,

it is still on. My sister watches it. Right now the Soul

Train done left the station because they got Michael Bolton

up in here and it’s Entertainment Tonight. Mary Hart says

his name and introduces the Time, Love And Tenderness

video. I am wondering why they make his hair like that

with the Z shaved in and how he always has to pose with his

shirt unbuttoned. He is not Gerardo and everyone except

Nicolette Sheridan knows he is bald. There was an article

about it in the National Enquirer last week all about his

hospital stay for electrolysis and his obsession with hair

transplants. I wipe my ass with cotton balls from the

cabinet and flush the toilet and walk back into the living

room. I put in the Guiding Light I taped and it makes

sense again. The cat stands in front of Rick Bauer on the

television. It is intentionally blocking my view of my

 46

favorite cast member. First thing is to get it neutered

and then we will see if we catch it humping any neighbors.

Freddie does not know if it is male or female. We still do

not have a name for it.

7. Twelve-thirty in the morning on Sunday and the lights

of the cars on Interstate 210 through the north-east corner

of the San Fernando Valley look like sapphires and emeralds

hanging from the rear-view mirror above the felt green tree

air-freshener. Wo wo wo, we got that guy one hundred

fifteen. An ‘88 white hyundai speeds past our CHP car,

stopped on the far shoulder of the freeway. When the car

comes up from behind we call the Radio Transmission

Operator and report a white Hyundai, driver black male,

late twenties. License plate 2KFM102. The six-foot three,

two-hundred thirty pound man emerges from the vehicle with

one hand in his pocket and the other pointing at the LAPD

helicopter and he feels a taser in his belly from the

electronic spinnerets in my right fist. They dangle from

his body like Aramid gossamer drifting in the wind. My

husband says not again why did you do that. I thought you

agreed to chill out for a while. What did he do? He

didn’t even answer you yet man I say over the police radio,

inaudible above the sound of the helicopter. I pull Koon

 47

away from the suspect with one hand while shielding his

eyes from the spreading helicopter floodlights. Back at

Foothill station a fat, red officer in rubber boots pulls

on his jacket and tells us he’s going to go check out the

code four under the freeway. They brought out the

whirlybirds for this one, saying he may be dusted. I’m

gonna go check out the zoo. It’s monkey slapping time, you

coming, Stace? He radios me that it is gorillas in the

mist out there bro. This is a reference to a movie that

came out this year with Sigourney Weaver. I haven’t seen

it but it is about Dian Fossey and I guess that would make

us the poachers in Rwanda. Yards from the scene a gaggle

of officers gather to watch me and Powell and Wind and

Briseno, their batons ready. We got him on all fours

slapping the ground. The friend of the driver is trying to

lunge away from Larry so kicks him about six or seven times

in the abdomen. Koon says Find out who this black bastard

is and take him. This time Stacy gets out of the car and

offers a few rounds of his own. Then we have the usual

procedure with this dude stumbling out of the car and Stacy

yelling nigger hands behind your back! Your back! I have

the taser out but I do not want to use it and I can see

Stacy nodding to me again and the man looks up at him with

bloodshot eyes, straining against the ground as though he

 48

is chained there. He says stand clear and we move back for

the voltage delivery. Stand clear! With Larry pinning his

legs I fire the electricity into his belly and he moans and

his eyes roll up to the helicopter. I would have spared

him had I not already fired the taser. Stand clear! The

taser wires are hanging off of him now like Doctor Octopus.

We radio it in, suspect at Foothill and Osborne. Suspect

recovers immediately and resumes his hostile charge in our

direction. I draw my baton to defend against his attack

and strike him several times in the arm and leg areas to

incapacitate him. He is swinging and kicking his arms at

us. Stacy kicks him in the abdomen and he is down on the

ground again. You faggots got to remember to recharge, he

says. Stand clear! With the flash of electricity a red-

eyed stray mutt crawls out of the saltbush and yawns. A

woman with a shopping cart picks up from the sidewalk cans

of mountain dew, Cactus Cooler, Pepsi. The suspect is on

the ground now like El Toro Negro after the forced

lobotomy. He pissed us off so I guess he needs an

ambulance now. My wife and I drive in silence in the CHP

car. I know most officers have problems working with

female officers and dislike working with them because they

don’t believe women have the physical stature for the job.

Larry says they don’t want to do anything but collect a

 49

paycheck. Once I got a message on MDT telling me I am

getting a new boot from Academy, a breathtaking blonde with

huge kazoopers. This is the way it happens. I am not

making this up. This is a big deal. No, no, this is no

big deal. But that is okay we have been together for eight

years still going strong. I cannot stop the payments so we

ride in this posse together. We are officers of the law

and we both can preserve. When I put it that way she

accuses me of saying she is not a good cop so I do not do

it anymore. I am tired of hearing him tell me how she has

internalized every command since his first morning roll

call that response comes to her instinctually. I generally

learn from baton use seminars. What have I learned? For

one the weapon does not interpret the law and there are

repercussions. You can break the code of conduct but never

under any circumstance break the blue code of silence. No

matter what happens. It comes back to you when you are on

to something else like how to get this fly out of the car

without opening the windows to deafening air blasts.

Sometimes you do not even know it is on because you forget

to turn it off. Sounds like felony procedure to me from

what I am hearing coming in. Stand clear! I am really

feeling this tonight with my husband. We are moving in on

a black guy in a Hyundai. I say to the radio transmission

 50

operator to clear the code six three hundred thirty one to

three hundred five we got a hot one here, possible driving

under the influence, possession of marijuana, pcp. The

driver is a black male in his late twenties licence plate

two k fm one zero zero. We think he may be dusted. I slam

down the receiver and breathe a long sigh to signify what

we are facing and to release the tension I feel in these

months. If what we are talking about is a race against

this fugitive we are making good time on it. I want to get

this guy in felony kneeling position for the evasion if we

can wrestle him down. I can usually give up the freak even

if it is late after a shift unless something goes down

tonight and we can drive sixty-five again. Stand clear!

It is my belief that violence is the founding principle of

law and law must be maintained by any means necessary and

that is why we work under the color of authority. I tell

them we are going for swarm technique if he refuses. When

we get there we see this guy is already out to lunch so the

two of us stand there and wave our batons assuming there

must have been resistance for it to get to this point. He

is in an NBA championship t-shirt and sweats slumped in

this dust, staring at us with bloodshot eyes, quivering

from the advanced taser electro-muscular disruption in his

belly. The LAPD helicopter follows the patrol car back to

 51

the station overhead, its clatter via telecommunications

reaching throughout this corner of the valley near the

foothills. Stacey Koon says to me he was huge, he was like

a football player, a refrigerator. They should know better

than to run, they are going to pay a price when they do

that. Laurence Powell MDTs the station, It was like

something out of Gorillas in the Mist. Let me guess who be

the parties. You guessed it. I haven’t beaten anyone this

bad in a long time, says Powell from sixteen-a-twenty-three

after the Radio Transmission Operator clears the broadcast

frequencies after the Code Four and the eleven units.

Twenty-three of us came out tonight. Yep, someone learned

a lesson tonight. I’m feeling pumped up tonight. All of

my thoughts of stress pension are out the fucking window

tonight. There is something about hot pursuit. On the

terminal keyboard, he types something in all capitals to

receiving Sgt. Stacey Koon. P-U-M-P-T-K. Powell swings an

imaginary bat in the air like a little leaguer. We played

a little baseball tonight. What does he mean? We played a

little hardball tonight and he lost. We played a pretty

good hard game ourselves, didn’t we? Sure did, didn’t we.

Yeah, yeah, you guys had a pretty good game. You played

pretty good hardball tonight. Yeah, you know, we played a

good game tonight, and we hit quite a few home runs didn’t
 52

we, big time use of force. I haven’t beaten anyone this

bad in a long time. You got him good, Larry. I have a

feeling that we will experience the usual round of warning.

This will not progress to admonishment official reprimand

suspension or removal. We will be exonerated in a time-

stamped flurry of infrared image modeling. Everyone stand

away from the dog and the man on the balcony with the

camera.

8. I am under my Rainbow Brite sheets dreaming of the

nineteen eighty-four Olympics. I have only seen the still

photographs but it is possible I experienced it the way I

see it tonight. Everything running through my mind while I

am sleeping occupies the same shallow depth of field and

each image is indistinguishable from the next. I have a

good memory and they are all in color. If I don’t remember

it then it fits into place as if it may have been at one

point true. First it is a parking lot and there is a

toddler with a lollipop leading us into a door stenciled

opening ceremonies. We are in a stadium with a series of

cylindrical risers in the ionic order sprinkled across a

football field. On one riser a Marilyn Monroe impersonator

sings Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen in the voice of

Marian Anderson. After the song there is a puff of smoke

 53

and she is lowered into backstage. A Madame Tussaud wax-

figure of herself appears in her place on the column and

the spotlight slides to another column. We are all

compulsively staring now. A backdrop of cerulean is

lowered from the eaves. A man calling himself the former

mayor Marion Barry addresses the incredulous audience. He

proclaims his innocence and delivers the same speech from

months ago at a stone laying ceremony for a memorial to the

victims of the draft riots of eighteen sixty-three. I am

aware this is reconstituted from something I witnessed, but

occasionally the time code will flash in red at the bottom

and when the colors remain distinct I can read nineteen

ninety one on the light emitting diode. Peter Uberoff

conducts me on a sidestage before the real show begins, the

tiered dais with eighty-eight pianos playing Rhapsody in

Blue. I remember it but not well. I remember feeling

lucky to be there but I am also beginning to recognize a

fluctuation in how I perceive colors from grayscale to

Technicolor and points in between. Above me the sky is

clear but my view is tinted as if seen from behind

sunglasses. It doesn’t look like summer but sweat is

running down my arms as I stroke the harp. There is a red

banner with hangul. The mayor says he can tell everything

from the sound of a voice, its cadences, the phrasing and

 54

choice of words. He tells us to love the sinner but hate

the sin. He finds his moment of righteousness amid the

confused stares of those in the audience by dialectically

quoting Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. The arbitrary

segue between Union and Confederacy happens in mid-sentence

and no one notices. Someone in the front row is waving a

red white and blue polyurethane hand on a wood stick. The

mayor takes a puff of a glass cigarette and says, do you

see the same man or do you see a changed man speaking these

words? He holds up the dog-eared pleather-bound book and

the earth opens into a chasm in front of the podium. I

cannot see if it is a ravine or some kind of falling off of

the earth. When he begins to praise my work I am almost

starting to feel sorry for him as if there is nothing for

him to say that is not teleprompted. He points in my

direction but it is still like I am there and somewhere

else, watching but somehow participating, like I am sitting

in the control room for my own nervous system. I am

clearly inside of myself but I could be anyone. When

people address me they stare at me into what would be my

eyes. I am only assuming I am myself. Now the man, not

sure if it is the mayor, is saying and let’s hear it for

Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah who made it back from over

there in one piece, got to salute our people fighting the

 55

fight out there in foreign lands. I wake up screaming. I

am opening my eyes on a view of the stucco ceiling and my

Elvis Costello posters. Whitney Houston is wailing on my

alarm, something about a man who fills her up or feels her

up I cannot tell. My mother comes into my room to tell me

the bus leaves in an hour. My mother says wake up it is

time for school. My mother always pretends to smile while

looking at the photo next to the door of me from the

Olympics in nineteen eighty-four in my star-spangled

Unitard next to the mayor and my white laquered Steinway.

She runs her finger along the harp on the way out the door

and checks her finger for dust. It is not every moment I

wake up with such lucidity so I should really thank her for

the second stage in waking me up. My school counselor says

dreams are essential to identity formation. It is possible

that I need to be on some kind of medication to improve

them. If I continue to have these dreams I will not wake

up feeling rested. I am tired of being confronted with

ugliness everywhere, all this food for romance served up

because beauty is too painful or too difficult. When I

turn on cable there are logos in every corner. There are

no moments anymore. It is like this constant red white and

blue balloon waving in our faces reminding us leading us

down Vermont all the way to the ocean. The question for me
 56

to escape or choose to confront is how to interpret this

dream stunted by objects and people I do not recall other

than knowing from the photograph on my wall that I must

have witnessed them. On the way to school I am yanking the

steering wheel left and right out of my mothers hands but

the car drives past the carousel and the carnival games and

off the Santa Monica pier into a shattered horizon. As

water, algae and syringe fill the car I pull the handle and

push out but the pressure keeps me here in the passenger

seat. Who is Jefferson Davis and why is he inside me?

9. Tonight I stay home during the first, possibly last,

storm of the year since February when the zigzag moderne

English cottages in Malibu mudslide onto Pacific Coast

Highway with the greasewood and rhusovata. If you go to

the back deck you can see the coal black Santa Monicas lit

up in oozing magmatic heat and light veins. If you look

out the front window you can see the private contractors

tearing out of the pipe to fix my corrupted sewer drainage

system after the incident last week with Maria, the egg and

Gato’s hair ball. I told her never to force organic

materials through any of the drains anywhere in the house

including those in the basement. The men are carrying a

severed pipe segment, corroded and filled with what from

 57

here resembles a poodle, the tangles of gray hair with

attached debris give the impression of a small protruding

face and paws. I tell them to keep it at least ten feet

away from me please and do not go anywhere near the house.

Now that I think of it I am going to lay out some plastic

wrap from last holiday on the walkway and you can walk over

it without damaging the walkway. Does anyone want any

lemonade? My home in Bel Air is composed of unified

horizontals. There is a dropped ceiling with recessed

lighting. There is polyester and graphite sculpture by

Honegger. To the right of the horizontal windows

overlooking the chaparral is a painting by Chicano artist

Carlos Almaraz called Suburban Nightmare. For distraction

from the work outside, I sit on one of the Charles Eames

leather and polished aluminum chairs and gaze at my photo

albums, each example from my past rubber-cemented to a page

within a canvas covered notebook. I hold a letter opener

in my right hand to cut through the new pages, and I throw

the reproductions of old photos, developed last week at the

savon on Santa Monica. I stood for a half-hour behind a

woman in line, with dyed strawberry bangs in her eyes and a

Def Leppard t-shirt. She talked to me about someone else’s

images as they slid through a display. She asked aloud if

the photographer knew of the violation of her privacy as

 58

the roll filtered through. There was a dog sleeping on an

embroidered pillow, an adolescent girl smiling through the

rain in a tropical scene, a set of teeth clenching a chrome

orb, the opal buttons on a leather jacket, a closeup of an

anus. I grabbed my photographs and left, while she was

still talking to the rotating display. Almost half a year

after Ted’s death and still the uncertainty, like waiting

for a letter that will never arrive, something intercepted

by the secret service because of an image of an inverted

flag in the corner, or an image of an automatic weapon seen

through the transparent envelope wrapped in a yellow bag

with the words because time goes by. I wonder if I have

received all of the condolences after sorting through

stacks from admirers several months ago, in such a state of

what my doctors called emotional shock. I couldn’t read

the signed names on the cards, all of Ted’s old friends,

family and acquaintances from the last ten years whose

addresses and phone numbers I kept locked away in my desk

for months. I kept their addresses without calling anyone

because I couldn’t tell them anything they wanted to hear.

Now the pigeons gather on the balcony of Ted’s studio,

strutting, cooing as the rain raises the motor oil from the

asphalt into my nostrils as I shuffle through these photos,

window opened to the pouring rain, keys in hand, unable to

 59

unlock the desk. At the top of the roll there is a

photograph of my granddaughter Jessica posing with her new

piece, a neon sign, USSR collapses, and some Duchamp

inspired optic disks. The wind whisks through the coast

live oaks and coyote brush, threatening Beverly with fire.

The sky rains flecks of gray ash. Just past the mailbox

down the rock landscaped court, developers surveying

McMansions on Somma Way mutter something about building a

gate around the lot. I recline on the glove leather bed

and cover my body with a chenille throw. I don’t know how

they can think about building when some of us are still in

mourning. Over the mountains of the moon, down the valley

of the shadow, ride boldly ride, the shade replied, if you

seek for Century City.

10. REC/PLAY. How are things with the drilling happening

off the coast, everyone happy, things good? How’s the

family down there. Ever since this nonsense in the press

started about you I’ve been wanting to check in to make

sure you didn’t need anything. So, son, talk to Abdullah

Taha Bakhsh today about Harken, he expressed a few doubts

to Anton about the gas units. He said Pharaon had some

words with one of your exploration team. Talked to Charlie

about settling things with Khalifah bin-Sulman al-Khalifah,

 60

but I wasn’t sure if those accounts had already closed, and

I have more important things to do here today. What is

going on with that anyway, Junior? You didn’t jump out of

that one too early. We’re trying to get this thing started

and the investors know not to expect immediate returns and

I got my hands full right now with this new thing, they

already marked the position to market, we were using it to

pay down the debt and for the horizontal drilling. Listen

we lost forty million and shareholder equity was down to

three in the shitter from seventy last week. Ameen told

me, called me the other day from outside his fort on the

ocean in his dhow near Suq al Khamis where we were last

time when I get the pearls for your mother, but Ameen told

me he is fishing again. Can you believe that? Our country

sure has done some clean up efforts down there, something

we can really be proud of, but I want to get back on this

Harken thing George since we’re running out of time here

and Soros dropping out of this was a good thing for the

Bahrainis, seems that trust was low there on the ability to

follow through, you got to follow through on this son, the

window is only open for a short time, do you remember that

time I walked through a window in Dallas because it was so

clean and your mother had to call an ambulance? That was a

heroic moment. And that reminds me, I just want to make

 61

sure the same isn’t happening to you, that you’re losing

sight of what this is all about, I mean this business is in

large part speculation. It might occur to you that I have

some advice to present, having experienced this myself,

relieve the pressure for you about this pipeline. It’s

everyone’s concern, because that is the extent, the reach

of this project. The pipeline is America’s concern, we’re

talking about jobs for the future. Ask Soros, there are no

hard feelings. And I also want you to get in touch with

Quasha again, to tell him that there is nothing to worry

about with the field, I have talked to the analysts and

this energy reservoir is good to go. My lawyers talked to

ghaith about paying down the debt. What do you mean when

you said you thought you could escape exchange controls by

banking with this black ops conglomerate, we can’t have

that kind of pressure on this office. It’ll have to stop.

You need to be aware that someone is listening to you at

any moment, microphones everywhere. I’ve made plans to

resign at the end of the month. This is a campaign year

and we can’t have you and Neil taking up this kind of

negative attention, there’s too much at stake, especially

with all that we have accomplished we don’t want to have a

connection to this fraud. I don’t even want to say it on a

secure line because just saying it out loud. Confidential

 62

phrases and statements. Are you on a secure line. I’m

always on a secure line. You know your mother is worried

about you and she has the best intentions and she may be

monitoring this phone conversation for information control.

She is your mother and you know how she feels. I want to

make sure that you are well set here and you can move

forward. I am looking into viaticals because it’s the most

surefire revenue. I have confidence in your ability to do

well, son, but I’m still waiting to see you live up to your

potential. And you’ve got to find a way to provide

working. We’ve been talking to Quasha about capital. All

I’m saying is you don’t want the attention to focus on,

they’re calling it a radical third world bank. I know

that’s not right but that’s what they’re calling it.

Alright, I’ve got to get back to work. Your mother sends

her love. Dad, you’ve been making appearences with the

terminator, right? He’s on board for ninety-two? Arnie is

Chairman of my council on physical fitness and sports, and

I can’t think of a more great all-around guy, long time

Republican. Much more of a Goldwater kind of guy than I

ever was, bless him, good old Barry. Could you introduce

me? We can invite you to the twenty-one gun salute for the

emir, but I’m working on a new posture right now with the

Governor of California, they’ve got some real hot spots

 63

right now down there, but there will be time for all of

that we got a campaign coming up, papers to shred,

paperwork to sign, it would be better without the---

STOP. The editorial page in this morning’s Washington Post

convinces me it is time to cancel complimentary delivery

services. When you have been a mother for so long, it is

always difficult to make the new transition away from

nurture into nature but I am loving it. The only problem

has been stepping into a great lady’s footsteps. First we

had all the crimson Camelot trappings removed because we

wanted to give the impression of the country, arid steppes,

something more rural. We have always admired Andrew

Jackson for his forthright commitment to a peoples white

house. None of this red. Let us see muted colors to

suggest the prairie where the buffalo roamed, the muted

earth tones, the heartland where each oil rig rising above

the gulf coast sunrise is like the tower or Babel red white

and proud, the fertile soil of the heartland. I want to be

as likeable as Betty or Marilyn but I can only do so much.

I want to be as likeable as Betty or Dan’s wife but I can

only do so much. They call me the silver fox because I am

not afraid to redecorate in Jugendstil chrome. If you do

not believe me when I say that the first thing Marilyn did
 64

at number one Observatory Circle was to cover every window

with scarlet carnation patterns then you are kidding

yourself. There is no way I want Mrs. Reagan and Michael

Jackson in a gilded frame above the mantelpiece in the

Green Room. No offense to all her accomplishments in

drugs. Or his in music but it scares me to look at it with

the sequins and his face with the knowledge of what it

looks like now. It is equivalent to the experience of

seeing the extra terrestrial emerge from the child’s room

in a lace gown and lipstick. It is not funny and to

glimpse at it repeatedly is to risk a descent into an

absurdist existence. I place my forefinger on the thirty-

eighth parallel and spin the globe. Because before there

was Washington there was nothing and before there was

nothing there was Washington. Washington was created in

six days, Washington was planned by Pierre Charles l’Enfant

in one year. Washington evolved from Carthage, Capua, and

Numantia, Washington evolved from the mud and from Paris.

Washington sprang from the mud of the Mekong river delta,

Manila bay, Gulfo de Mexico, Bahía de Cochinos. Washington

fulfills the circle, the highest emblem in the cipher of

the world, its compass trace around the center repeated

without end in cycles of historical progress. There is a

marching band on Pennsylvania again today, blowing

 65

Offenbach and Sousa and deep purple mockery into the oval

office. My husband complains to his Secretary of State

after a conversation about pre-Madrid strategies. Jim, he

says, I can’t get the song out of my head, you would think

these panes would be thicker what if one of the

neighborhood kids threw a baseball through these windows.

The thought reminds me of Reagan, now suffering secretly

from Alzheimer’s on Saint Cloud in Bel-Air. This was a man

who confused his cabinet and secret service with members of

the House un-American Committee. This was a man who called

his wife Jane or mommy and thought the oval office was a

room at one three two six Londonderry Place in Los Angeles.

I find myself unwilling to go along in my heart because

that is not where I came from. So how can I say it is what

I believe. When my husband visited China as vice President

we saw millions scrambling at opportunities. I am not

suggesting eugenics but why is multitude necessary in the

new world we have created. All I am saying is sometimes

you recognize they have it right to limit reproduction.

There are enough ears. I can privately admit Deng Xiaoping

showed some foresight but it is his wife I most admire. So

I keep it to myself but the word gets out. My campaign is

literacy and heavens to betsy I still believe in

enlightenment values as guiding principles in my life.

 66

Some Phyllis Schafley beltway type came up to me at the

gridiron. The US Marine Corps band played O Sanctissima,

Piissima, Dulcis Virgo Maria, Mater amata, Intemerata, Ora,

Ora Pro Nobis. She asked me do you believe in God. I said

if you begin to feel the weight of the stupidity of human

beings when you believe too much. She said start to deepen

your understanding of the capital H him, for the sake of

the country. I said it wasn’t until I read Balzac that I

began to understand my own upbringing within the church. I

told her there is a little bit of the scoundrel all of us.

You need the French to tell you that, she asked

dismissively. I turned it into a statistical scenario of

prose literacy scores, letter-sound relationships and

sight-word recognition. I think I remember saying to her

also to never hesitate to include yourself in what it is

you are reading. If you read it you can notice the

figurative and the literal and you can choose either or

both or none. They are both there staring and that is why

I love the Bible. She looked at me with this earnest

expression when she was looking at the Christmas ham on the

table carved by the Reagans. Thereafter they gave to me

the label secularist and Jerry Falwell called me a heretic.

I try to balance any offensive with words we both can agree

are true and we discussed the donation for ninety-two. She

 67

knows I am not the President and we cannot change that. We

do not all have to agree, but this election we will work to

cement the partnership. We have some great people working

for our family. Tonight we can breathe a sigh of relief at

the end of the war and tomorrow we can both go outside to

the Rose Garden. We need to work that into the schedule

more often. My husband is on the phone again saying he

needs more time. He says into the receiver eighty dollars

a barrel and the Sunshine State strategy and but I thought

you preferred Aruba or St. Tropez to Jerusalem. He comes

into bed wearing an Ichabod Crane stocking hat. Tonight we

are sleeping in the queen’s bedroom because we would like a

vacation but it is too early to leave the capitol. We

sleep in revolutionary pink and tan linen under the staring

portrait of our cousin Jane Means Appleton Pierce, the

replacement for Nancy’s Grace Coolidge. I say to him as he

falls asleep are you going to have another go at it in the

holy land, Mister Lawrence. Before bed my husband says to

me you joker how can you sleep. We will see how long we

can keep the plates spinning.

11. We have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and

sweat. From the look on her face, I can tell Margaret

thinks I am quoting Richard Nixon. I am telling Margaret

 68

not to listen to the criticism. Don’t read the papers.

Listen to your own voice for a second and do not worry

about falling out of grace with your boss. Don’t you think

we crossed the threshold? For me, certainly, there have

been times, I am thinking of my performance on Meet the

Press when I said the war was about jobs. Not even Jack

Kemp could cover the following week. When they ask me

about the reason for the war I can no longer tell the

American people this is about jobs. Let’s limit our

discussion to the list of questions for the king and

consider how far we are willing to go in stating the terms

of realignment outright to our allies. Then after that I

may head out to the golf course if the temperature in

Riyadh falls a little this evening from the one hundred

mark. I have said before that I am interested in any kind

of gadget that would slow down time for a second, and right

now all I have is a handheld golf course with silver ball-

bearings and five holes. It is primarily for the under

five set but something about feeling the weight of the

rolling balls helps me to relieve the stress of diplomacy.

I am walking into the Towaiq palace to have lunch with the

ambassador. He is running late to our meeting after a

flight delay from Jeddah where he is dedicating a new

autonomous drilling zone. An outdoor reception tent

 69

encloses me with stained glass motifs. The attaché ushers

me past the marine guard under the great seal of the US

into the chancery building and encourages me to sit in a

leather-upholstered sofa. There is a photograph of King

Fahd and Reagan and on the low table a cobalt sphere

sculpture. I am once again sitting across from the son of

his highness the king of Saudi Arabia. I point to the

communications system on the table and warn the prince that

my Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Margaret

Tutwiler is listening to this three-way. The prince is

eating mashed potatoes and gravy from pioneer chicken on a

silver platter. He says to me, Jim, only a Sunni military

dictator in Baghdad would be stable enough to provide a

balance of power in the region. A paging device interrupts

Bandar and he drifts into advocacy. We are here to point

the people in the direction of taking things into their own

hands. He says to me if we continue now a US-imposed

democracy might split into three nations. I tell him I

agree, this is not a time for nation building, when we have

got a potential geopolitical crisis of the first order in

the USSR. Once Gorbachev feels the pressure enough to

dissolve the party the Cold War is over and perestroika and

glasnost will flourish in open markets. Verum factum

propius, let freedom ring. We will no longer speak the

 70

language of détente or rapproachment. Look, we just had

Baghdad lit up like a Christmas tree and if that doesn’t

send the message then I don’t really know what else we can

do. As much as there may have been opportunities for total

defeat, that was never the objective, and I want to assure

you that indeed he and the President continue to respect

the threshold of war. Liberation is not our goal here, of

this I am ninety-five percent sure, but I have not ruled

out covert strategy. There will be no removal of Saddam

Hussein from Iraq by military force. Our voices overlap as

we discuss price controls, economic consequences, price of

oil by the barrel. As we are about to leave the compound

and it is the two of us again, I put my hand on the

shoulder of the prince. Let me reassure you that his

highness has nothing to worry about. I say this with all

humility to you and to your people and to his majesty

please know that this operation here in the Gulf in your

has been performed in one interest, ours and yours. The

nineteen twenty-one boundaries will remain then, he says.

We are not anticipating a time when they are no longer

necessary. The communication of homiletic strategies

crosshatches the globe in latitude and longtitude and I am

on a plane again back to Jerusalem. Back at State Margaret

takes a message from a staff member of the Senate Foreign

 71

Relations Committee urging me at this critical post-war

moment to consider Kurdistan as an opportunity for regime

change. She phones me from the plane and tells me we are

about to go three-way with the White House. I plug my

other ear and squint my eyes trying to make out the

communication but the voice on the line is distorted. From

the department of defense, voices are encouraging a

completion to the conflict. Someone says with Talabani and

Barzani determined to defeat Saddam, it is time for the US

to follow through with the stated goals of operations

desert storm and desert storm, the liberation of Iraq from

tyrrany. He says Kelly translated a Mossad document

confirming the Kurdish have control of the cities in the

north. I think it is either Paul or Dick speaking to the

room but all I hear is a conduit of waves emitting only the

hint of a voice warning of a coming civil war. The voice

says to me, sovereignty is an artificial soul and we must

not fold democracy in the napkin of an implicate faith. I

tell Dick that Bandar and the king know that we are on sure

footing here, and we will not proceed with any kind of

overt overthrow to upset the balance of power in the

region. The last thing we want is anything like bay-of-

pigs brinksmanship played out with the Kurdish and the

Republican Guard. We all thought the troops could make it

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out of Playa Girón but we were wrong. That’s all we are

doing here is playing Nostradamus, looking into the future

to accommodate any shrapnel until Madrid. We don’t want a

Yankee solution to the problem in the middle east.

12. It is the Sunday before school starts again in earnest

after the first week of orientation ceremonies and

paperwork. My father takes me to the river where he drag

raced in high school so I can take some photographs for my

composition class tomorrow of our river, El Rio De Nuestra

Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula. He says he just

wants to help out but there is something in the flat bed

underneath a potato sack and I think he is only doing this

so he can make a delivery. After my visit to the

Rocketdyne plant in South Gate for career day last year, I

wanted to discuss the radiation, the nuclear power. I

assumed he knew about it from his days at the plant and his

activism in the eighties. He told me nuclear power is not

as much of a threat as he thought, that it is every bit as

safe as solar. I could not believe him and still can’t.

On this trip I want to find out more about the aqueduct

system. I have told my father I have no interest in

becoming a contractor I just like to know about the

elements composing my environment and how they fit

 73

together. He says they do not always fit together but then

he encourages me to think about engineering as a career.

We are looking at the sky at a bank of cirrus clouds

rolling in from the coast. I want to know what happens to

us if a hurricane comes. My father says it is impossible

and that what we need to worry about are earthquakes and

fires. I am thinking about the time a vase fell on

Marcia’s head during Whittier. He explains to me the

amount of fire insurance we have on our house in Baldwin

Hills but this does not interest me. I know the rules.

Never leave candles burning unattended and always be

careful to turn off the stove. We see a steamroller driver

across the bank lurching his Caterpillar across the shallow

water. My father says it looks like it fell in from the

industrial zone to the east toward Pico Rivera. The driver

takes a swig from a bottle of Mickey’s and shifts the gear

and the roller revolves thirty degrees. He slumps into the

steering wheel. When I ask my father if there is something

we can do to help the driver, he says don’t worry about it.

Look at the shadow of the clouds in the water, he says,

isn’t that what you are supposed to be looking for. But

there is no water. This river is bone dry except for those

few moments, usually in February, when there is a current

from all the run-off in the hills, and you can see Vons and
 74

Ralphs carts and plastic bags and diapers rushing through

the concrete aqueduct at warp speed. I want to talk to him

about the Sylmar earthquake, if it was bigger than

Whittier, and how many people died. He tells me seven

people died during the earthquake. Only two deaths were

from earthquake related causes. We are discussing the

clouds. I insist that one looks like Whitney Houston with

a headband and a Nike track suit singing Francis Scott Key.

Now it looks more like Carmen Miranda because you can make

out the bananas and apples in her hat. I notice the

steamroller driver is lifting up binoculars to stare in our

direction. It turns out that my father wanted to bring me

here to announce the separation from Marcia. He tells me

he can no longer be happy with a white woman and one of

these days I will sort these things out for myself. He

says sometimes you wake up and realize it is time to be

true again to the things you once believed about the world.

He tells me I was adopted from a family who lived on

Slauson. They kept my first name Jefferson and changed my

last name to Davis to match theirs. I want him to stop.

This is too much to absorb at once. I always thought my

name was chosen out of irony or ignorance. He says some

people are able to pick up and go and escape disruption at

the same time. He says he is too much affected by memory

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so that with everywhere he goes he wants to return. He

tells me if you can forget you will retain yourself

whatever you thought you were. This must be some kind of

mid-life crisis. On the way back to Baldwin Hills we stop

at a gas station and I help my father carry the burlap bags

from the trunk into a cedar shed behind the air pump. He

tells me not to ask any questions and that it will only

take a second. He smiles at me for a second then sniffles

sharply, his eyes darting. He believes I am telling him I

want to listen to all of his stories and have none of my

own. This and only this would please him. It is clear

from last week’s rain and I see at least one of the stars

of Ursa Major to the north west but a cloud moves and it is

no longer there. My father points to the sky and asks me

why I am not taking any photos. The problem is he is

pointing to the corrugated aluminum ceiling of the tool

shed. My answer to him is that there is no way to get the

blue to look like that and that is what I would want it to

look like.

13. It is one in the morning and after a long drive home I

am in my two-bedroom home in West Covina where it’s far

enough away from Hollywood that I can at least remember who

I am and what it means to be alive. I despise the smog but

 76

we have some space in the backyard for a barbecue and a

place to let the smoke drift and Chaka run free after the

pitbull attack controversy has died down. I pull up my

magenta Oldsmobile and say lights keys so I can remember

these things. I walk to the door and pick up the newspaper

I forgot this morning. I think I’m going to make the

delivery Sunday only because I only look at the TV guide.

I do not need to hear about war and crime anymore. I am

hoping for the day they can call me desensitized. By the

door there are cups, newspapers, plastic bags. I have to

write a note. It says remember to put all the shit in a

bag and take it to the cans outside, love, Crystal. When I

return, I am on the phone with Glen’s sister, Angela.

Prone out? What the fuck is that. She says that’s when

you get down on the floor with your hands behind your back.

So what’s the scenario, I ask. Freddie and Bryant just did

what they were told and they’re fine. They went down.

They’re fine. That’s police tactics don’t tell me you

haven’t seen that before. And Glen? He is in the

hospital, fucked up beyond all recognition, that is why I’m

calling you Crystal, they have me as a contact. Why the

fuck is my husband in the hospital, Angela. He’s in the

hospital where did they take him, why can’t he call me,

cause he ain’t at no Drew-King that is too far away or they

 77

won’t tell me. He’s at Pacifica. They dropped all the

charges, they got his ass so bad they dropped the resisting

arrest and DUI, driving with that shit in his brain. I am

all, Glen doesn’t do drugs, they only smoke the green,

Angela, will you go there with me, to the hospital? Will

you tell me what you know what is this all about. Sshh

just sit here for a minute and try to be calm, call me

later. I imagine the hospital as one fluorescent light at

the end of a wallpapered tunnel, like death on Unsolved

Mysteries with Robert Stack telling me about my husband’s

viaticum. I hang up the phone and mutters through a bitten

fingernail You tell me they went down and they are going to

be alright alright now which one is it. My nephew is here

and he is all Crystal you look high your eyes are all red

take your contacts out sit down. Talk about sass. I am

looking afer him while his mother is in rehab. I tell him

my name is auntie or if he doesn’t feel like it he can just

call me ma’am like Emmanuel Lewis. The television is

blaring loud and my head is killing me so I take another

Excedrin and wash it down with some Budweiser. The kids

are the ones who control the television and the one time I

can watch it is Saturday when they have their cartoons from

six to eleven. Kaleila gets up at five on Saturday to

watch the signal go on and the national anthem but I can’t

 78

get the girl out of bed any other day but what can you do.

She watches these unicorns beavers and Belgian alien elves

and it is like she can feel their suffering. I caught her

crying in front of the Smurfs last Saturday. Tonight I

cannot sleep from too much coffee in the breakroom so I

turn the thing on and there is a report about the risk of

heart disease for various ethnic groups what they are

calling minority communities and guess who is on top. Then

comes the tape and for the first time I see the white

newscaster with the big hair introduce the beating of my

husband. I scream and the dog starts barking and Keleila

is in the living room asking me what’s wrong and I’m trying

to rush her out the door so she can’t see the tape and tell

her not to wake her cousin. Tomorrow morning she will turn

on her Saturday morning cartoons. We won’t talk about what

we saw tonight on the news. We will watch something about

two legged amphibians with periscopes attached to pink and

yellow heads. We will listen to a giant green sea urchin

Bigweed tell tooter Shelby to stay out of the discussion or

Daffney Gillfin will be chained to this post same time next

week. Months later, after panel discussions, talk shows,

police commission meetings, official resignations and

Glen’s slow recuperation, I will file claims totaling

eighty three million dollars against the Los Angeles police

 79

department for loss of consortium and companionship due to

the physical inability of my husband to interact with me

and establish sexual relations and I will lose the lawsuit.

14. Through the laughter the A/V assistant carts a

carriage on wheels holding a television and VCR on elevated

zinc platforms. Today there are too many papers for me to

grade and next week is report card week, so they are

watching two videotapes in the classroom for a lesson on

civics and government. My aim is to merge this lesson with

the Drug Abuse Resistance Education lesson from the en

route LAPD to provide some pedagogical continuity. They

have their coloring books, and they can color the marijuana

joint, or the crack pipe, or the long-haired man jumping

out of the burning library building downtown eyes widened,

clutching a daisy. It looks as if all the materials for

the DARE program were designed in the nineteen seventies at

the height of new age cultism and the Manson scare. All of

the women look like Charlie Manson and the women like

Patricia Van Houten. They can color the hippies’ hair

mahogany, Indian red, periwinkle, depending on how many

crayons remain in their boxes after their mid-afternoon

parrafin snacks. A minute passes, as they say the Pledge

of Allegiance, everyone except Janet who is a Jehovah’s

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Witness and takes no false idols before God and believes

human governments are instruments of Satan. I sink further

into my chair, eyeing a stopwatch, its face decorated with

the image of Martin Luther King as photographed in nineteen

sixty-three at Selma against a wall of dogwood branches.

Alright lift your heads, sleeping is not permitted in my

classroom. The television begins to chime, the logo of the

station returns and the molasses voice of James Earl Jones

introduces a Ted Turner produced documentary, told chiefly

through tableaux and pans of textbook images. Jones

declares it is provable that things cannot be otherwise

than as they are for as all things have been created from

some end, they must necessarily be created for the best

end. I stand between the chalkboard and the television

set, watching the pink and glassy reflection of the

television in the eyes of my students, the squares in

reverse succession, the Parthenon, the garden, the

barricades, a bust of Leibniz, radiated in blue across

their faces. A car drives by outside the open window and

the blaring horn rattles the blinds and I watch as the

children jump in the seats, some turning their heads to

look for something until they realize it is no longer

there. Two children by the window watch a car race out of

a convenience store parking lot, where three men in

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camouflage uniforms and red baseball caps picket a layoff

at the Gemco down the street. James Earl Jones rumbles

through the script, teaching us that the enlightenment

turned into the twentieth century the personal article

replaced the object of reason non-pareil. This video is

putting me to sleep in the back of the classroom and the

LAPD comes in to save me carrying a bag of drug

paraphernalia so the students apprehend the danger and say

no. Officer Fletcher, blond hair in a scrunchie, passes

out the latest DARE coloring book with a glossy cover and

tells the students to open to a black outline of a burning

building, the flames and smoke rising in black wisps

tumbling over the First Interstate building library tower.

The officer says, now turn it to page twenty-nine we’re

going to talk about drugs. Tell me something you know

already about drugs, come on, I know somebody has

something. From the back of the classroom, I am staring

across Hooper Avenue watching a man wash his car in front

of a stucco bungalow on the Manchester avenue side of the

school. It is late now and I am packing my scotch tape and

paperclips into my bag so I can work on the sample drug

week diorama at home tonight. It displays in a shoebox a

brontosaurus in sunglasses hunched over a pocket mirror and

a triceratops with dreadlocks in mid-air smoking a joint.

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One the left below a violet modeling-clay mountain there is

a caveman holding a club imprinted with the words just say

no. As I slide my purse onto my shoulder, our principal

Betty Nakamura in a chignon and heels comes through the

public address system asking me to report to her office.

I follow her into the main office building to receive my

written warning for failing to discipline Clyde Hawkins

appropriately and for allowing a biohazard in the

classroom. I am telling her that I tried to do something

but there is nothing appropriate to do, I am not the

child’s mother. With a strawberry handkerchief, I blow

everything out of my nose with the capillaries. In the

bronze plaque honoring the principal for her service to the

United Way I see my mascara smearing and running to a point

of murky tears at the apex of my chin into stains on my

white ruffled bib stretched above my navy blue one piece.

I am walking through the parking lot to my Subaru Legacy

with sumptuous leather interior air conditioning eighty

watt am fm stereo cassette deck and Moonroof. I am lucky

to drive this car. It gets twenty one estimated miles per

gallon city and twenty seven estimated highway miles per

gallon advanced four-wheel drive system and anti-lock

brakes. This is what I am here for, to drive home to the

Imperial Valley on a clear night with the moon roof down.

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Driving home from a late-night stop at the all-night

grocery on the San Bernadino Freeway back to my apartment

in La Puente I listen to the radio. Today it is mostly

soft-rock and entertainment news tidbits punctuated by

sound effects such as Jew’s harp, pin whistle, and whoopee

cushion.

REC/PLAY. This is Daisy Newhart on the beat in Westwood

Village, a battlefield tonight after the overflow from the

ticket line was refused entry tonight to a premiere of the

new gangster movie New Jack City. What do you see there on

the ground, Daisy? I’m here in front of the Mann Westwood

Fourplex, Dave, and I see broken glass, the rioters are

heading for the breach at a Pottery Barn here and a Sam

Goody across the street here, breaking windows at the Gap,

setting fires in trash receptacles. Where the street turns

into Kinross, toward the campus of UCLA, one man is

stomping on an American flag, wait, now there is a man

lighting the flag on fire with a cigarette lighter, and the

flag is burning, they are waving the burning flag on

Kinross. They are burning a flag. I’ve been trying to get

answers here Dave, and also to stay out of the conflict,

but I’ve been told by the theater management that six-

hundred to eight-hundred demonstrators gathered here by

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nine forty-five to buy tickets, are you still with me,

Dave. Yes, Daisy. Would you say that this incident is

related to the videotape of the assault of the black

motorist in Lakeview Terrace last week? There are a lot of

angry people here. There are also some people who appear to

be happy, laughing here tonight.

STOP. I notice the stain on the new dress purchased at the

Casual Corner in the mall in West Covina and lift my hands

off the steering wheel of my Legacy to hold the lace bib

with my left hand and scratch the mascara away with my

right forefinger as the radio plays Amy Grant bouncy

devotional hymn cum pregnant matrimonial dirge with an

unaccustomed backbeat behind it. It must be the club

version. The car cascades into the back of a fire engine

and another car hits me from behind, a Lincoln town car

carrying a white haired old lady, and the caravan of three

vehicles careens into the yellow call box at the side of

the freeway. At the first collision, the phone at the call

station falls out of place, dangling there like a

tetherball after the punch of one of my students. My

thoughts whine and screech like tires in my skull as it

fractures against the window. The broad-coverage parser

produces conventional phrase structure analyses augmented

 85

with grammatical relations. On the radio, again from

Westwood there are interviews on the street. Someone says

the first thing I did was go out and buy a gun. My legs

are inside the car and my head is on a hubcap next to a

call box on the freeway exit. Syntactic analyses undergo

further processing in order to derive logical forms which

are graph structures that describe labeled dependencies

among context words in the original input and normalize

certain syntactic alternations and resolve both

intrasential naphora and long distance dependencies. In my

last moments I am returning as they said I would to the

years following my birth with the index to trace everything

that may have brought me here, and the freeway exits

approach slowly and drift at racing speed behind me until

they stop where they will remain forever.

15. If the sun hits at the right angle in the afternoon,

after the school day is over I ride my brother’s bicycle to

where the Long Beach freeway hits the river and he sits

above the fallen fronds in the reservoir stream to watch

the shadows of the speeding cars against the concrete

walls. Today is Easter Sunday. I am standing there with

my feet an evaporated stream of water competing for

equilibrium with clumps of weeds and trash blown by winds

 86

from the ocean to the south-west and the mountains from the

north in dueling gusts. When I close my eyes and

concentrate on the hiss I can feel the car driving me as it

passes. There is also a humming and vibration that I hear

at its highest levels, its high-pitched squeaks, as

discomfort in my eardrums over the chopping of distant

helicopters. I feel the rumbling lows, the clanking of the

chassis as the cars reach the one bump in the road as I

enter the sanctuary. I park my bike and enter Mount Zion

on 91st and Figueroa this morning. I read the plaque under

the portrait of the first bishop of the church, liquidated

mortgage of one hundred eight nine thousand on church, paid

in full December six nineteen eighty-two. To the right a

passage from Isaiah is engraved in a polished granite slab

in the mud wall, the word darkness worn down by the touches

of years of doubting Thomases. Behind my head on one of

the spruce twig vaulted arches is a surveillance monitor.

I look at myself but it doesn’t feel like looking into a

mirror. The camera is somewhere far above my head, as if

from a hovering helicopter or from the pipe organ built

into a niche above the head of the reverend, who preaches

today for peace in the city. Enough, he says, it is ground

zero time here no more hoses no more weapons, says Reverend

Hill. Look where he brought me from, he says. There is a

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bright side somewhere. Just rise. The audience grows

restless as the sound of shoes tapping against a rear pew

travel to the front of the church and into the reverend’s

ecclesiastical microphone pre-amplifies in an echo. He

singles out members of the congregation who have missed a

few sermons, and he reminds us of something that happened

four years ago. Brothers and sisters I want to tell you

about Operation Hammer, he says, about Thomas the Apostle.

Sometimes you do not have to bear witness to know something

in your heart. Does anyone live out by Dalton Avenue? Who

remembers? I hear some yeses and nos, because some of you

are too young to remember. Who can tell me how we made it

here? We came here on ships, but do we have a photograph?

The translator is there this morning to provide a bilingual

message. Si no viere en sus manos la señal de los clavos,

y metiere mi dedo en el lugar de los clavos, y metiere mi

mano en su costado, no creeré. Stand up if you are ready

to begin again. Just rise. The only difference now is

we’re going to do it right. We’re going to watch all the

channels as they come in, as they start coming in, the way

they marched into the lobby of Parker Center with Nancy

Reagan, and drove South to three nine zero three and three

nine zero seven Dalton Avenue. Everyone at heard the

approach, officers battering down front doors, ripping

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plaster from the walls of two four family apartments at

three nine zero three and three nine zero seven Dalton

Avenue, slashing furniture with knives, hammering toilets

and sinks and videocassette recorders and televisions

fenced from behind the Circuit City on lower Western,

poured bleach on the clothes our grandmothers here today

brought back from the laundromat. The police brought down

the walls with the sound of their steps on the concrete

steps and their knocking, the reverend says. The officers

forced the male residents to run a gauntlet in the front

yard, and just to make sure we got the message they fired

off a few shots on their way out above the door, crumbling

concrete slabs onto the screaming heads of the residents in

the courtyard below. All of this for one rock of street

drugs, the reverend says. Tonight, the Empire Liquor

Market and Deli in the ninety-one hundred block of South

Figueroa is crowded with protestors, bundled up in quilted

jackets in the seventy-five degree weather, with signs NO

JUSTICE NO PEACE and BURN IT DOWN and END DISRESPECT OF

BLACK PEOPLE. Danny Bakewell, the leader of the

Brotherhood Crusade has called for a boycott of all Korean

markets in the area as well as the incorporated purchase of

this market by an association of African-American business

and community leaders. It is not going to be business as

 89

usual. You are not going to be able to operate your store

and not take pennies, if you do not want to take pennies,

for example. Or not let me use the telephone. Or not have

your restrooms open to the public if they are public

restrooms, the reverend says. Those kinds of things are

intolerable and the community is saying no more and I ask

you to do all you can, join your brothers and sisters in

the street. Peace be with you. When the ceremony ends and

my mother and father stay for the reception, with Sanka and

oatmeal and circus animal cookies from pink and white

plastic bags. Peace is with us and we leave the church to

go home to watch Fantasy Island reruns. We ride our bikes

in a figure eight across the grim asphalt in Bell, the

slick oil drenched pebbles glimmering black after a pothole

repair, a fresh wad of pink gum wadded on the ground inches

between the rotating wheels. We veer toward the sidewalk

littered with discarded razor wire fence, hub caps, milk

cartons and neighborhood watch signs.

16. REC/PLAY. It sounds like Bush was unhappy that we

expressed our disappointment with the Patriots but they

were insignificant. If they talked to Bibi they would have

nothing but the grief of generations of Americans to carry

with them to Mcdonalds. Why is this happening. So this

will coincide with Yom Kippur, their announcement. Yes,

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September. If we do not obey the conditions of atonement.

They are trying to call this killer, this terrorist, a non-

combattant. This man who murders our women. We cannot have

Hamas on one hand praising these attacks against Israel,

and on the other, the US disapproving of our punishment of

the attackers. Calling it an obstacle to peace. The team

from America wants us to participate in the dual-track

negotiations, but we will not carry through with their

demands. We must not let them interfere. I already told

the President, that it is ludicrous to expect compliance

with all of their suggestions. We will tour the green line

areas with helicopters and he will see. They must

understand that the green line is something that they can

see on the ground from their helicopters and planes, but it

is only because they imagine it there. I cannot see it.

Any member of this party will not respect that line, we do

not believe. The cease fire means nothing. And that goes

beyond the green line, do we have to explain this again to

him. I will under no circumstance agree that there will be

no settlement beyond the green line. And I will not

entertain talk of payment to Egypt. This cannot be how

they think of the settlers, we cannot cooperate with that

kind of coercion. We cannot cooperate while we are on a

tightrope. They know what they need from us and there is

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some understanding that if we cooperate with the ceremonial

and give them the political support they need then we will

be satisfied with the outcome. Holding us hostage,

potentially, with this forced meeting in September. We

must not agree to allow Arabs living in Jerusalem. I have

made that clear to the President. He knows that further

pressure on the issue will result in our removal from the

talks. We must not have Arab activity in Jerusalem. Baker

has sided with the Egyptians with their claim of

reparations because they are aware that through the

necessary lens there are no damages to be repaid, when you

are looking at the horizon. My interests are the

completion of Operation Solomon, whatever is necessary we

must take those steps. This is worse than Carter,

challenging our right to exist. No cooperation at all from

this President on land. And this after you’ve taken him on

the tour d’horizon and you’ve explained the contract, that

it’s sub rosa. Yes, and when I first met with him I

thought he was listening to us, but all he could see were

the bulldozers and helicopters. It’s the terrorists who

have his ear, the caliphs. The caliphs, emirs, they should

have learned by now we will bring intransigence to the

table. The conference will have no afterlife. The

presence of the USSR, an entity which has endorsed the

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ethnic cleansing of Jews, will have no effect on our

compliance. Anything more is an insult. He must

understand that we have a right to Judea and Samaria, and

this is granted to us by God. He has seen Golan? He’s

seen it from the sky, from a helicopter.

STOP. I am alone in southern Jehrico this afternoon in my

estate designed according to the Viennese modernist

principle cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal

of ornament from articles in daily use. All you will see

are items essential to my life like this book resting on a

fireproof stand far enough away from the flames. I am

reading Samuel today for its fortitude, sound judgment and

a direct connection to God’s righteousness. And David said

unto Saul thy servant kept his father’s sheep and there

came a lion, and he smote him, and a bear, and took a lamb

out of the flock and I went after him and smote him and

delivered it out of his mouth and when he rose against me,

I caught him by his beard and smote him and slew him. They

servant slew both the lion and the bear and this

uncircumcised philistine shall be as one of them seeing a

he has defied the armies of the living. I set down the

book on the balsam wood table I made for my wife and family

from the tree grove east of the driveway. There is a clear

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plastic bookmark to hold my place in Samuel and I settle it

under the word philistine. The word means Palestinian, a

people from Crete who settled the southern coastal plain of

Canaan in the twelfth century before the common Christian

era. In another sense, the word philistine, in its

derivation from the French philistin is used by Europeans

to mean any person hostile to Western high culture and art,

a term of derision for those untutored in Leibniz,

Shakespeare, Darwin, the Old and New Testaments. Israel is

and is not a Western power. Shamir will know exactly what

I mean when I use this word to describe the face of any

representative from any nation’s embassy who tells us he

will not honor his commitments. The War of Independence,

the Six-Day War, they tell me today a Palestinian from

Gaza, Mohammed abu-Jallah, stabbed four Jewish women, to

quote send a message to the en-route James Addison Baker

III. On the radio I hear a reporter from the BBC

describing the daily events. I have spoken to the Prime

Minister again today about the appropriate level of

security threat we perceive after today’s events. Police

Minister Ron Milo has issued a statement today to the IDF

to shoot to kill all assailants and terrorists to protect

our democratic state. The murder occurred at a bus stop

near Yad Va-shem in mid-afternoon in a partly enclosed

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kiosk on a dusty street in the middle of a disparate

Jerusalem crowd, in the presence of only a few

eyewitnesses, but already, Israeli television stations have

picked up the story. We are alarmed but we will not

abandon our course of action. This is a pre-meditated act

of terror. There was nothing spontaneous about this

killing. I am reading this morning’s Ha’aretz for the

commentary of the assassin to direct my rage. It is as if

he imagined a place for himself in the nightmares of the

enemy, before he fired the gun. There is a photograph of

his gunshot blast scattering the people of Jerusalem into

door jams under cars desks and tables. On the phone to the

ambassador I quote the goal of settlement as articulated

originally by Herzl. I am quoting Ben Gurion and reminding

Zalman that he saw me as a great neutralizer of the enemy.

I add that the original soft coercion used to bar outsiders

must escalate into a more focused violence against a well-

defined set of perpetrators. We must preserve the opus

caementicium. I will explain to you our determination to

retaliate by any means necessary. It is the eve of the

Jerusalem visit of the American Secretary of State to Prime

Minister Yitzhak Yezernitzky-Shamir. He is aware there

will be no compromise on settlement or what the Americans

are calling land for peace. Our stated goals are clear.
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We need thirteen-thousand new units on the West Bank within

two years both as a strategic buffer and to provide living

space for thousands of new emigrants. I refuse to go to

Spain. Maranno is he Spanish word for pig, for Moslem. In

the hotel room I watch a production of Othello on public

broadcasting. I am looking into the face of the Von Trapp

faced Canadian actor playing the honest advisor and I see

all the faces of the assimilated and in the face of the

magot playing the North African the unassimilable. I will

not stand with the universalists who will say he could have

been anyone. The talks commencing on the arrival of Baker

tomorrow are merely a variety show. I know, along with

Arens and Moda’i, there will be no negotiation from Likud

regarding the territories. The territories are settled,

without question, there can be no more negotiation about

withdrawal. The phrase process of negotiations is

meaningless, like the words Egypt or Jordan or Syria, all

Eretz Israel. My granddaughter is on my knee telling me we

have to go, that we are late for the ceremony. My driver

is taking me to and my security force in the Range Rover to

dedicate a settlement near the new King David Reclamation

Facility in Golan. In the jeep, as the driver ferries me

across rolling hills, I listen to an audio recording sent

to me by Jack Kemp as a gesture of peace. It is a lecture

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from Billy Graham ministries explaining the role of Israel

in the coming salvation of the world. When their messiah

returns the unbelievers will be lifted up to heaven and the

heathens will go to the underworld to burn. We have burned

once and will never burn again. Ask six million American

Jews if they are willing to accept this perspective. They

will tell you they are asked to believe the official

viewpoint of the American government that assimilation is

the law. Continue to tell us you support us, but know that

God is not an as-if and please tell your housing minister

to stop sending us these tapes. Turn the thing off and let

us drive in silence.

17. My teacher for this class is Calvin, a painter and

performance artist who has exhibited in galleries mostly in

Arizona and New Mexico and has traveled all over the world,

showing us mostly his own works as examples. He says we

must always remain committed to our spatio-temporal

geographic, which I take to mean that he wants us to be

conscious that we are here and not there as a salutary

presence. He has exhibited a series of paintings telling

the story of the Haitian Revolution of seventeen eighty-

one. Sometimes he plays cassette tapes of performances of

his jug band and asks us to concentrate on the candle

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flame. Sometimes he takes a camera on stage and

appropriates his audience for his installations. He walks

like a sock puppet and constantly tugs at the inseam of his

white pants or pats his growing beer belly, as if to entice

us with the noble fantasy of intellectual disability as a

direct line to a more assured awareness. The teacher also

takes us through detours into his experiences reading

American literature and touring Latin America, where he was

a volunteer instructor in mixed-media at the Universidad de

San Pedro Sula in Honduras. This morning he is playing

something by Mamas and the Papas to stimulate us and to

fool himself into thinking it is the sixties. He

introduces it by telling us he prefers the past to the

present because people were not afraid of making mistakes,

that he values the sense of fallibility. He offers the

Checkers speech as an example. Richard Nixon wanted us to

hear the quavering in his voice as if he felt something

about the cocker spaniel and the cloth coat. He leaves it

up to us to decide if the sincerity we were looking for

even matters. Calvin calls it a rupture. He tells us that

on I saw her again last night there is a false start in the

middle and implores us to look out for Michelle Phillips

mixing up the words began and pray. He says these were

still the waning days of the Brill Building era, as people

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on both sides of the Atlantic lost their faith in Goffin

and King. He is reading to us from a volume of criticism

written in the twentieth century by a man murdered

attempting to cross a border from the Nazis. He says he

doesn’t remember the name of the country he left behind,

only the mental image of an escaping fugitive. Calvin

doesn’t remember when we bombed Hiroshima although he has

visited Japan three times. He tells us to think about

boundaries and borderlines in our own lives. Then there

are the terms and definitions to copy from the overhead

projection screen. Someone raises her hand to talk about

her parents’ migration north from Belize as stowaway cargo,

and how stepping into the gulf of Mexico is like crossing a

border into purgatory. Someone raises his hand to explain

how his Methodist church rejects purgatory as a repugnant

leftover from the oppressive Roman Catholic church. The

subject of today’s class is narrative and the extension of

quote symptoms throughout time. There is an example on the

slide of a painting that from the back row looks like a

three dimensional architectural model, the kind you see in

some of the buildings downtown since the revitalization.

It looks uninhabitable by humans, voided of urban context.

The teacher explains to us that the view is aerial and

oblique, as though viewed from a helicopter outside a glass

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bubble. He shows us an example of this perspective from

one of the Pre-Raphaelites. He shows us Ed Ruscha’s LACMA

on Fire. Then come the rhetorical questions about abstract

space and the formal elements of a realism. I have told

him about my videotape taken the last time I visited my

aunt and walked around New York without a map. I felt a

sense of freedom from any impulse to create. There is no

continuity but I thought Al Sharpton would appreciate it so

I am sending it to him courtesy of some one my dad knows

through the Nation of Islam bodyguards at his church. I

wanted it to be an example of a new unavoidable

discontinuous history of police abuse. I will enclose an

instruction pamphlet for how it should be viewed in

relation to his work as an activist and an invitation to

visit the city of Los Angeles to force the police chief to

resign. If they ask me if I support him I will tell them

like the Levert brothers for God’s sake bring more power to

the people. I am the only multi-media artist in this

class. Currently my projects include mall interventions in

the style of Tiffany, where I mimic the appearance of well-

known artists in popular music. So far it has not been

going so well. I am here to discuss my latest project, a

photographic map of my neighborhood in slides. We had to

squeeze the original panoramic shot down to this trapezoid

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so you have to imagine it sliding out from the middle and

upward and occupying more useless space, as though you were

inside of a car pressing your nose against the rear

windshield and the backdrop unfurled behind. Calvin says

if this is a representation of process I cannot see it, but

there is a sense of needing Dramamine. A girl wearing a

multicolored yarn bow in her curly red hair and a torn

apron over a black t-shirt and jeans returns to her seat as

the class reluctantly applauds. Another woman, an acid

wash revivalist with backcombed hair and white sunglasses

introduces herself as a feminist of color. My friend

Jessica says to the class I take every experience and

politicize everything, that the most important thing you

must learn while on this soil are strategies of resistance.

Another white girl stands up and announces she is from

Somalia. Another student in a polyester running suit

stands to announce his decision to switch media. He says

it is universal every human and animal deals with it in one

way or another. He says he is not inspired by any painter

only the chtonic experience of mud. Calvin says, Jefferson

would you say more about how you perceive those strategies

in your own expression. I tell him I am training myself to

see past simultaneity to sense prior temporal

configurations without giving in to the vaporous throb of

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the present. You don’t want to be premature? I am never

sure if when he is talking to us it is meant as a question

or a flat statement. I wonder if they talked like that in

Spahn ranch. He leaves us with a Mondrian and asks us to

imagine it is the aerial view of a mondern city in grid

pattern. The materials, technique and the flat primary

color field embody the metaphor as in any effective logo,

the birth of radical chic, the birth of a nation, essays

for epitaphs. I write these notes into a cartoon bubble

coming out of the mouth of the nude descending the

staircase in my textbook art for art’s sake. Fuck him, I

will forget everything and from this point on, everything

must become automatic and emptied of my presence.

18. This morning in my office, I look at this tape again

on the news and recalled my first encounter with the chief,

in nineteen eighty-one, at the beginning. These were the

days when freshman cops practiced lynchings at the Foothill

station with a ceramic black lawn jockey of the kind you

used to see in the segregated suburbs. The mayor told me

all about this tradition. The statue would fall through

the plank and crumble into mud and you would hear the

laughter of the policemen in the waiting room over the

popping of the percolator brewing coffee for Styrofoam

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cups. Now, in nineteen ninety-one, life for the people of

my district is exponentially worse, crime rates up,

unemployment up, quality of life down. Police performance

in my district is directed according to a siege mentality,

and Daryl Gates represents that violent principle. Through

my outreach I learn of new Rena Fryes almost every day, new

incidents of police brutality to replace the others in the

popular mind. There is a new example every day, but we do

not always have the videotape to remind us. Now is a

crucial moment for bringing these incidents to national

attention. All around Parker Center there are Latinos with

placards. GATES DEBER IRSE, they say, Gates must go. I

try not to stare into the blue eyes of the Chief of Police

across the royal blue tablecloth and the checkered marbled

ochre and dandelion linoleum gap between the tables beyond

the pots of blue gardenias spaced between the panelists.

Instead I look at the community activists, representatives

from the NAACP and the Brotherhood Crusade and one member

of the police commission. Most spectators sit erect in

their chairs, hands folded at their sides or in their laps,

while others stand at the sidelines of the courtroom, Chief

Gates, I say, none of us can continue to abide by the

reckless disregard so many arrogant and rogue officials in

your department display to the population of this city. I

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read the LAPD Use of Force Policy to the chief. While the

use of reasonable physical force may be necessary in

situations which cannot be otherwise controlled, force may

not be resorted to unless other reasonable alternatives

have been exhausted or would clearly be ineffective under

the particular circumstances. Chief Gates, is compliance

with this policy what we have all seen on this tape? I

want to hear the words from you and I want to hear them

said to the people here in this courtroom. He says to me

and if you read the following sentence it also says that

the officer is permitted to use reasonable and necessary

force. And I believe this is what this was, the use of

reasonable and necessary force. I want to implore all

members of the audience who have seen the tape to stand up

and turn their backs to the police. I demand to see

justice. I’m not feeling any magic in the air anymore in

Los Angeles, only lies and dissimulation. This will drag

into the summer months when everyone is ready to raise

barricades and attack each other with fire and megaphones,

like in the movies. Kwesi agrees with me. Last night I

thought about the day in nineteen sixty-five when as a

twenty five year old I first heard the news that California

had blocked the civil rights act with proposition fourteen.

I remember the shock on the face of my father who lived

 104

with me in Downey, his chin fallen, his sweat rolling into

the crevices where the flesh of his nose met the silicone

pads of his glasses, the expression on his face. He died

in sixty-eight and I cannot shake the feeling that he voted

against the proposition with his life. I still cast my

ballots in the precinct where I attended school, near

Exposition Park. I wonder what it would look like if the

citizens of this state called on itself to take a stand

against their very housing projects by dismantling them

brick by brick. We are going to see an end to this kind of

backyard justice meted out by thugs, Mr. Gates. We need to

see some reform here, a charter amendment, community

policing, this has gone on for too long. After the

hearing, the reporter from channel four is there at the

church when she steps out of her ford town car in a shirt

dress with a leopard print top and a zebra striped skirt

and I hear, Congresswoman Waters would you care to comment

on the use of the term thugs to characterize your

constituents? This is a police department that is out of

control and it knows it has to respond to the criticism,

let’s not lose sight of that. Home at last in Baldwin

Hills and I want my husband to see this video containing

most of a documentary some students at UCLA sent to me at

my office in DC. Look at this freeze frame. There’s even

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a button for it so everyone can stop to look at the

accident, or you can let it play and experience the

disjunction. On the television screen is a street scene

from the RKO lot from the Great Depression, the Hyundai,

officers, passengers, a single overexposed frame of this

image of Cagney’s gunfire from a thirty-five millimeter

technoscope film. I lean down to kiss my husband on the

neck as he struggles with his Montblanc and a stack of

paperwork faxed from the insurance representative. I

whisper in his ear above a drop of sweat forming on his

earlobe, am I going to testify all my life when do we move

to the Bahamas. You know how long do we have to wait for

the justice department to step in here. I met his wife

today and you know she’s telling me he was not reaching

into his left pocket, that’s only what they are saying.

Tomorrow the mayor and I will have a talk. I will tell him

about a meeting I had with one of the youngsters in my

district today about this problem, in a school off Grandee.

I asked the young man what he thinks of the flag. He told

me red is Bloods blue is Crips and the white is what has us

busting caps at each other. He will want to switch the

blame to the people of my district, so I will end the

conversation at eleven for an early lunch with a group of

high power donors including members of the Brotherhood

 106

Crusade. Their children represent a good sign that we have

black youth in the school district who do not want to get

shot over what kind of damn sneakers they are wearing, or

over their reputations as killers. I look in the mirror

and see something coming from behind my head like a comet

and floating there, something red a hair or a thread

drifting in from the closet off of one of my suit jackets.

It is time for some chamomile tea and then the gentlelady

will expire for the evening. Tomorrow when I awake after

the rare seven hours of uninterrupted sleep my attention

will return to the chief in the second hearing, where the

chief of police will tell the panel his view that Peruvian

drug dealers are uniquely corrupted by original sin.

19. A spider descends a green slope at the Wilshire

Country Club miracle mile and comes to a stop at the door

of the clubhouse. It changes course toward Rosemore where

it is squashed by the heel of a Top Sider boat shoe, its

carapace cracked open like the shell of a junior mint,

murky white liquid oozing from a quiescent shell. On the

underside of the shoe is a streak like a gash in the rubber

sole, and as the foot scrapes repeatedly against the curb

at Beverly turns into a thin smear of digestive fluids and

blood. The heat crackles in the freshly sprinkled grass

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and rises above the glittering chrome on the bumpers of

manicured cars with bulbous headlights made in Germany,

made in Japan. A dog sniffs at my hydrant and lifts its

wet nose into the air against the backdrop of speeding cars

in both directions, a Mercedes, a Bavarian Motor Works, a

Ferrari, as the breeze from the southwest offers a clue to

propel the animal in its direction, back up the hill toward

the final hole, the leash dangling loose between the hand

of the man and the tight red collar around the dog’s neck

and at last it is morning and I wake to the smell of

burning cinnamon. In Windsor Gardens it is sunless now for

five hours but I can still feel the heat of the day in the

capillaries of my face, heat rising in rosy diffuse patches

like a sunburn. I put down the binoculars and turn to face

the bed, where my wife is asleep, her eyes covered with a

pink cloth shade with the logo TWA. I check my image in

the mirror and pull the shade over the bathroom window. A

siren calls through the screen guarding the open window and

I squeeze some lotion from a tube into the palm of my left

hand and with my right forefinger circle the greasy fluid

around then smack my two hands together on my face. I walk

to the bed and prop myself up with a pillow against the

Biedermeyer headboard and think about the affect of police

sirens on dreams. When did this begin? Was it that

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Saturday night when that righteous son of a wiseass nine-

year rookie of the squad, Sergeant Stacy Koon, tased a

black man for refusing to lie in the prone position? I

can’t accept what they tell me about King, that he lunged

at the pursuers. I don’t believe Daryl Gates when he says

he recommends the City Attorney file felony charges against

the officers. This is a man who told those officers and

the rest of the city that casual drug users should be taken

out and shot. I keep a home system on my nightstand and I

record the systolic and diastolic readings each morning and

evening. They cannot argue color of authority here, this

is a plain and vulgar outcropping of the white imagination.

I must now confront the guilty white spectators, who want

to help the situation with their Walt Disney politics, Blu-

blockers and Ambervisions. I doubt myself. Even when

staring down Chief Parker in the nineteen-sixties, when he

told me such a nice honest face should go into Negro

politics, I doubted myself. The chief had said I could

really benefit from the Peter Principle. I always had the

feeling that when his back was turned, Parker would go to

one of his associates and you could hear the n-word

sprinkled like talcum and antipersperant through the locker

room. After these years I have mastered the art of the

death smile, the Nat King Cole Mona Lisa. That’s why they
 109

still call me the Sphinx or the Cheshire Cat. They can’t

see what is behind the smile. When I first met Stokely

Carmichael, who told me about this country’s revolutionary

past in terms of the Haitian revolution of seventeen

eighty-one. The panthers had cells all over Los Angeles

and Okie mayor Yorty and his chief were aware of

everything. They would go into an interrogation zone we

called the map room to discuss the attacks. Parker sought

only to exterminate them, a way of thinking which led to

the assault against counter-revolutionary forces within

California during the sixties. I thought I could be both

inside and outside of systems of power. I am not saying I

was naïve, that is just the way it was in the sixties and

that is the way it is in the nineties. I was a new kind of

officer, whose presence on the street would help to

alleviate the hostility I heard from my family, friends and

neighbors. The Panthers were friends of mine, but the love

faded. For years I watched all the radicals, Carmichael,

Seale, Cleaver, and Newton call me Uncle Tom. Two years

ago, I sent vermillion flowers of corruption to Huey’s

funeral in Berkeley. Years after my condemnation of

Carmichael to a corporate board of directors in a campaign

speech in a Century City hotel during my first attempt at

the mayoralty in nineteen sixty-eight, the opportunities of

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the Jerry Brown administration turned into another Reagan

administration. Parker was not the first man to call me

nigger. I expected to hear it from whites, hiding behind

copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman and Joseph

Wambaugh. Now I hear it from people of color, in the

mouths of the children of the communities south of

Downtown, in their music, sold by the record labels in

Hollywood and West Los Angeles to the suburban white kids

in the shopping malls of the San Fernando and San Gabriel

Valleys, throughout Riverside, the Inland Empire, and

Orange County. For a while there, when this city

transformed itself into the cultural capitol of the world,

harmonics and contrapuntal melodies carried the weight of

the meaning of life for a while, and words seemed

inconsequential unless they came from the throats of Billie

Holiday, Sarah Vaughan or Abbey Lincoln. Even then it

didn’t matter if George Gershwin or Irving Berlin wrote the

words, everyone could ride the A-train together. I never

feared the worst my daughter and granddaughter, always

acclaiming progress and looking the other way when

confronted by ghosts through their windshields from an era

when we would listen to Amos and Andy just to hear

ourselves on the airwaves. When I hear certain things in

the media from some young brothers in Los Angeles, I can no

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longer hide behind my optimism. Many of my supporters on

the west side wish for me to stand against these rappers,

but I will refrain from commentary. In turning the other

cheek I am expressing my wish that someone would remind

these youngsters calling for the murder representatives of

law and order. How about the showdown for non violence in

sixty eight? The stop the violence movement in eighty

seven? What happened to we’re all in the same gang? I

understand the self-fulfilling prophecy of the market, that

the more pejorative commentary about a product of popular

culture, the more book or TV movie deals, the more

brushfires and earthquakes. For this reason I ask all of

my associates to refrain from discussing internal

operations with anyone from the media. You have to put a

cap on the amount of needless chatter. I put some Monk on

the turntable, caravan, and rest for the evening in the red

curtained library on sari cloth covered pillows. I need

something to help me to extract some purpose, some meaning

behind the production so tonight I pull out my copy of

great Roman speeches and open it and read the following

passage. Look upon the city. In this emergency, you will

demonstrate the light of your energy, genius, and wisdom to

the people of el pueblo. I have underlined it blue ink,

possibly notes from the days when I would bring a book

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along to endless security details at Bullocks Wilshire,

where I first met the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who was

a doorman there at the time. I read on in Cicero about the

dream of Scipio Africanus as revealed to his son Publius

Cornelius Scipio in somnis. In the dream Africanus is led

into a room with a revolving structure of the heavens, with

belts and nine concentric orbs. He is told that he is in

Los Angeles, and that he will need to measure the section

of the district. Scipio didn’t believe his dreams were the

sign of the supernatural, even evidence of the devil, as

Luther believed and as I was taught in the Baptist church

as a child. I prefer the views of Aristotle, who believed

dreams were forms reflected in water, shimmering and

refracting light to the dreamer. The elder Scipio speaks

from the grave about fear of death, fear of treachery of

brothers. Only the sovereign returns to the city from the

empyrean. In the morning on the drive to City Hall we stop

to allow a hen to cross the road with some chickens. This

is the first time any bird imagery has appeared other than

the old recurring dream in Greystone in Beverly Hills

marked by the presence of a turkey with eyeballs of fire.

Later in the afternoon I will meet with a representative

from the police department to discuss the threats emerging

from gang figures who are out in the open proclaiming their
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desire for revenge on the police force of the city, blacks

at the core of the city calling it F-troop and whites on

the westside calling it the Gestapo. We are getting there

early to deal with any interruptions at the gates. I look

out the window at the truncated Hollywoodland sign and drum

my fingers on the arm rest to the Chuck Mangione on the FM

soft jazz station. I see the passing Church of Scientology

Chateau Élysée on my right and then scratch my rash, the

erythrogenesis now spreading to my forehead. It couldn’t

be more than seventy-five out but the smoke drifting in

from an oil fire in Long Beach gives the illusion of

inferno and I feel its light and heat through the air

conditioning and tinted windows of this Mercedes. On the

mobile connecton I am announcing the termination of all

connections between the mayor’s office and the chief of

police Daryl Gates. I say to him, it seems to me Daryl,

that these ideas as they are conveyed to me are not

conveyed openly to the people of Los Angeles. It was a

traffic violation. This individual was not a threat at

all. If these are the only images there was not a threat

at all. I scrawl a question mark in quotation marks, then

compulsively trace the punctuation a second and a third

time when all I want is to put this pen back into the

briefcase. Daryl Gates calls me to tell me has announced

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his retirement for sometime next year. I write surrounded

by quotes thou must save, and thou alone.

20. REC/PLAY. On the television Geraldo Rivera in an

episode featuring Alabama members of the Ku Klux Klan and

the booing of the audience and Geraldo’s voice fills the

clerk work station I stand behind a counter plastered with

statutory notices warning minors against purchase of

cigarettes, advertisements for the California lottery, the

heavyweight fights on paperview, Mike Tyson, Razor Ruddock,

Evander Holyfield, George Foreman, Kool cigarettes and St.

Ides. A minute later when Latasha Harlins enters the

store, I feel relieved it is yoja ai. I will not call

Billy this time. I am watching her nails as she shoves the

juice in her jacket pocket, long candy pink with appliques.

My hand is under the counter at all times, level with the

gun under the cash register. She goes to the cooler and

grabs a bottle of juice and reaches behind her head to

stash it in an open backpack. My hand is on the holster.

I tell her she can’t take the juice. She says I ain’t

takin it just chill. She reaches in her pocket for the

change and I jump the counter and slap the girl in the

face. I pick up a wooden stool and throw it across the

counter. She says I’m going bitch. I tell her if you

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steal I call police. Take it. You take it. My knee is at

the counter and I am slapping the girl again but this time

she fires four quick solid punches to my jaw. From the

pain of the four punches delivered across the counter I

grab the gun from the holster and point it at the girl in

the sweater with the backpack and the sixteen-ounce bottle

of Minute Maid orange juice, fire the pistol. The

convenience store is dark now after Billy turned the lights

off and the glow of the tube surrounds the discarded pistol

on the counter above me. When the officer arrives I am

crouching under the cash register. My husband, who first

called the police, hits me in the back of the head,

shouting at me, until the officer intervenes to separate

us. He takes a step back from the two and asks us to tell

him what happened, instant by instant. When my husband set

up the surveillance camera at our store he did not predict

that they would use the footage against me in court. We

thought the camera would point away from us at those who

would seek to do us harm. Now we find our own camera

turned against us. At the police station, the deputy is

looking at the videocassette confiscated by the officer.

You can see everything exactly as it happened from behind

and above the cash register. Latasha walks up to the

counter with the bottle of one dollar seventy nine orange

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juice in her backpack with two dollars in her hand. I

reach over to her, slapping the girl in the head. Over the

counter, Latasha returns the punches and sets the orange

juice on the counter to go. As she walks out the door,

the bullet hits the back of her head and emerges through

the front of her forehead, and she slumps down on the floor

mat next to the entrance of the store, blood forming a

puddle around her body. You can see it over and over if

you want to rewind and look at it again. The officers

freeze frame here and frame advance to pinpoint the exact

moment of death. One officer points out that it takes a

nanosecond before the facial muscles collapse and the eyes

fall. The night before, I had dreamed of a Pegasus on my

daughter’s pink and yellow portfolios, bursting with

homework and I told Billy of a flying winged white horse

the night before and he went to sleep that night thinking

the way of things here in this country are making me crazy.

We were an agricultural family, we sustained our lives on a

corn farm. It is Fantasyland in my imagination when I lose

consciousness. The white winged horse is swooping down on

a tobacco farm in Chungcheongbuk-do and my grandfather hid

his wings, stabbing some hay with a two pronged rake,

cursing the sun. I am on the other side of a mirror,

looking in at the dream without taking part in the scene

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unfolding on the fields, saying hold back, and hearing in

my own voice the echo of an empty milk carton across the

flat plain, and a strained fear, the descending elevator in

the office of my doctor in Alameda and the renal glands are

in my throat. Slumping toward the chair, I feel the pull

of gravity in my eyelids again and enter a state of

meditation, concentrating on the red orb in front of my

eyes above my head floating above the concrete entranceway

where the body is frozen, the arms blue, the head erupting

blood into the plastic flower on the welcome mat. They are

taking me into custody. In the correctional facility there

will be a discussion of my reasons for coming to this

country for Korea. They want to make me guilty. The

moderator will draw a table on the chalkboard, listing

reasons and chalking tally marks beside each point. I

believe God has his own justice. We do not know why he

says it is so it is just so, I say to the congregation.

The man at the chalkboard writes JUSTICE and marks one

tally to the right. This is something out of my control.

I never wanted her to die. I only wanted to protect our

property.

STOP. What is that, testimony? says Ronald Kerman of the

Brotherhood Crusade over lunch at Jimmy’s. It’s on me

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tonight. We are talking about the nightly news with Jim

Lampley and Kelly Lange the point-counterpoint with I and

Danny Bakewell. He said, this latest killing of a fifteen

year old sister by a Korean woman is just the latest call

to action. We are not going to let them refuse to take our

pennies, or call our young women black bitches, he said, as

if the whole fire next time comes down to pennies and

bitches. The first videotape was the spark, this second

videotape must be fires in Kuwait. This time advertisers

have approached us as if none of these agencies has an

attorney to explain evidentiary confidentiality. No one

understands the tape belongs to no one and everyone. It is

the ultimate witness, and if we ever decide to go to trial

it represents the interests of the people in a case against

Soon Ja Du. The tape is in custody like Richard Ramirez.

Still this morning one of his aides told him Minute Maid

had called, wanting to use the videotape of the murder of

Latasha Harlins in their new extreme ad campaign, something

about killing for orange juice. I am sorry I really do not

know what to say I am flabbergasted. He says to me, don’t

apologize Ira, how much worse does it have to get in this

town before it gets better. This is what I come up with

for Ronald, a cautious stance. We want to keep this away

from the media. If you had heard what Bakewell was

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suggesting to Jim Lampley. At some point you have to warn

people that if they threaten the civic leadership in my

office I may have to notify the LAPD and is that what you

want? I would like to keep my detail limited to private

security forces that we can hire and terminate at will.

Kerman says I’m under the impression we need to make the

tape public so people can see it. I want to explain to him

the tape is under the cover of the law. It is people

seeing it that I am afraid of. Do we need to keep you guys

away from the media? We can’t have this out in the media.

I mean, what do you want, sixty-five? Sixty-eight? Kerman

says no one is going to be assassinated here tonight. It

is as if he has an uzi to my head. I want to point to my

chest and tell him I am the people, I represent the people,

but something tells me this doesn’t go over in Brotherhood

land. I am attempting to compare this videotape of the

killing of Latasha to the videotape currently making the

rounds of the beating of a motorist in Lakeview Terrace.

The baton strikes, the vocabulary of the officers who beat

Rodney King, these elements will remain inaccessible to

anyone viewing the video. We want justice, he says. I

tell him you will have justice, Christ. I don’t want to

appear frustrated over a two hundred dollar meal in Beverly

Hills. I tell him don’t you like Jimmy’s? How are your
 120

truffles? Listen to the piano, he is playing Strange

Fruit. I requested it. Look, over there it’s Aaron and

Tori Spelling. Do you know who they are? And Robert

Loggia is over there with Susan St. James. He says he is

not Johnny Cochrane so don’t try any celebrity bullshit

because it isn’t going to work with him, and you also have

heard them outside the doors of this building, day and

night it never stops, so don’t ask me to explain it to you.

Them, who is this them, he says, so you want to suppress

this. What I want is for this not to add to what we

already have on our hands. And if we can do that, then

great, everything is accomplished, and if we can’t, if we

can’t we’ll have the whole world on our doorstep. We have

to keep this from getting out there. Video gets out to the

community that a black girl was shot over a dollar seventy-

nine orange juice we have a civil war on our hands. I’m

not exaggerating Kerman, I’ve lived in this city for my

whole life except for the winters in Tel Aviv. Kevin is

interrupting me, backing off, telling me he is not trying

to start anything. I know you’re not trying to do anything

Kevin, but I’m not going to be accused of breaking the

media silence on this case because some idiot at KTLA

thinks people want to see a video of some black girl

getting her brains blown out by a scared woman who probably

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didn’t know what was going on at the time. He interrupts

me again and says he’s not prepared to get behind any

excuses for what she did, and there are a lot of Koreans

out there who are scared when you say that you are taking

it to the streets. He says, because you are the soul of

the Korean community. I am sorry but the suggestion of my

failure to advocate Asian-American rights along with the

implication that I have no soul is too much for me today

and I throw down my fork and walk to the garden patio with

the orchids and the view of Century City and Beverly Hills

High School. When I return I am in a zen mode better to

convince him of my prosecutory color blindness. He says

the law doesn’t guarantee empathy. I feel that this is

something to seize upon. That’s just it. I don’t know what

to say. Yes it does, I agree with you, but I also tell you

that the mayor is working on these issues and there’s been

talk already about a dispute resolution center. We’re

talking anything could happen here the bottoms versus the

suburbs all the way down. Come on, Kevin we need to try to

solve problems not create them. And listen, Dick

Thornburgh is on this and they’re sending federal

investigators who want to know everything, what the

officers are doing at every moment when they’re on duty,

what kind of things they do in their spare time, what kind

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of talk goes on in the locker room when they’re suiting up.

And at a certain point the municipal authority is out of

our hands. It takes on a life of its own. My sarcasm is

out of control tonight in Beverly Hills and I cannot

control the media.

21. Under a cone of soft light I sit facing a seventeenth

century coromandel screen inlaid with imitation mother of

pearl and gilt. Behind my head is a Warhol car crash

silkscreen. I am seated on a leather ottoman in the office

of Bruce Eckert, esquire. We are discussing the imminent

sale of a variable life annuity, taken out against my life.

Past the marble pilasters there are stacks of annuity

statements on green and white reams spat out by a printer

on a Gustav Stickley oak dining table. I gaze through the

books on the gothic revival bookcase, including stock

market gurus, mojave desert self help, Daniel Bell, Susan

Faludi, Barbara Tuchman, Tacitus, Lee Iacoca. The broker,

a rotund man of middle age, demonstrates the concept of a

one zero three five exchange by conducting the air with his

forefinger. There are two graphs. One is human vitality.

The other is the rate of change in payoff after death

versus before death. He explains to me that there is a

limit to life, a curve forever approaching zero, a flat

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growth rate. I am looking at the vertical toes of my

electric blue pumps and shading my eyes from the vertical

blinds. He wants to know my life expectancy. They give me

at least three years. He wants to know if I am making this

up myself or if I have consulted an oncologist. Here, I

brought the charts. Eckert lifts the paper to his eyes

while at the same time tilting his head downward away from

the arc of his arm, moving so fast above his head to lift

the x-ray so that the item appears ready to land in the

large wire basket behind his swivel-chair, marked FOR

SHREDDING. What you are seeing is glaucoma and related

paraphimosis. He tells me we don’t want to put that down

here, we want to suggest that this isn’t going to go on for

so long so we’ll put an end date here of April. When were

you born? April twenty-seventh. I tell him I can trust a

Taurus and next year in April I’ll be in the Pyrenees. He

says, a year from this date, alright. I ask him what

happens if I’m not dead. The agent laughs and smiles a

clenched smile reminding me of the thirty-seventh

President, the man I stood down in the seventies on Park

Avenue as a member of a feminist peace group at the urgent

request of Grace Paley, when my eyes first felt the sting

of chloroacetophenone. There were streakers there, giant

puppets for social change, police carrying rifles like

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bayonets. At the time I thought that only a society

dedicated to the suppression of grief could create and use

a method of deterrence that mocked the emotional responses

of the lacrimal glands. The new distractions appeared and

I became a cultural Jew foregoing any rites of mourning.

When my husband died, the tears never came and when I saw

an ophthamologist he told me about the situation. I know

what you are feeling right now, says the broker. I show

him a photograph of my granddaughters. My daughter Patty

had these taken in front of a blue carpet wall at the

Sherman Oaks Galleria. Here is one of my husband, taken at

crossroads of the world before his death in nineteen

eighty-nine. To my knowledge it is the last photograph

taken of my husband. Eckert says, sometimes you can’t

control your reaction to things like this, Mrs. Rodano. I

refuse a tissue from the box on the table in a ceramic

holder lacquered black, next to the bonsai tree and the

issues of Scientific American and Popular Mechanics. Would

my grief look the same if I stood outside of the area,

close enough to my own image to catch a glimpse in the

gilded mirror of Eckert’s bald head and slouched body in

his Andre Arbus chair? My eyes are clear now, hypothetical

tears replaced with a fresh viscous surface of saline

fluid. I’m sorry I am distracted and English is not my

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first language. I reach for my purse and find the bottle

of eye drops, and turning to the side away from Mr. Eckert.

I tilt my head back and let one drop fall into the left

eye, then the right. I squint and open my eyes, then

replace the drops in the bag. I take out the pocket mirror

from my purse and look at my eye. The conjunctiva flips

open with the pink of the eyelid visible, and I steady it

back in place gently with my right forefinger. He notices

the pink tissue of the eyelid and coughs, concealing his

brief embarassment. He says, on this list of ailments, for

our purposes in determining the premium payments. If they

ask for it, the escrow company. I say who are we dealing

with on that. The agent’s name is Cooper, at Syndco.

Syndco, now is the office in Century City. You drive down

Robertson a few blocks. He hands me a business card on

gray stock with a burgundy logo and the name of the escrow

specialist. I’m not going to do that today, maybe

tomorrow. He says you don’t have to do anything I can deal

with the escrow. I want to know the name of the investor

on this policy before I sign it over. We are not

accustomed to authorizing the release of that information

unless there is some request by the other parties. You

deal with all three parties, correct. But there’s no

contact. Yes, just as we protect them from contact with

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you, Mrs. Rodano. Sometimes I think that I feel like I

want to know too much about what’s going on here. So now I

am going to read you some of the risk factors the rate of

return on your investment cannot be calculated before the

insured dies. No one can accurately predict the actual

life expectancy of an insured that is you. You may have to

pay in addition to your initial investment. Special risks,

he turns the page, disclosure, you will have time to look

over this. Eckert writes the names of my granddaughters

Jessica and Circe on the form with a Bulgari fountain pen.

On the offering circular, he writes viaticus policy number

one one two seven. He says as soon as I transfer this I

will close the account and burn the paper. We shake hands

over an ormolumounted chest after Stöcke. I have survived

my meeting with a man manufacturing and vending death for

profit. I exit the complex onto the Avenue of Stars in the

magic hour, violets and indigos seeping through the

extremities of a formaldehyde snow globe. Outside the

roystonea regia sway over Century City, and the banner

advertising a cultural festival on the Miracle Mile ropes

street lamps toward a downtown vanishing point. From the

other direction on Wilshire the message is in a language I

cannot recognize. I turn left on Santa Monica and drive

past Beverly Glen and Westwood and accelerate into the

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white and red lights, my Isadora Duncan scarf drifting in

the sea breeze. The police glide by riding their sirens.

22. All I need right now is some kind of guide to make me

feel like there is something I can do here besides meddle

into the business of people who may distrust me completely.

My room is number forty five at the Port-au-Prince Holiday

Inn. The sunlight illuminates the photo on the whitewashed

wall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide from nineteen-eighty eight,

before taking power, brandishing a machete at the pulpit.

It is five am and I am exhausted. Everything contributes,

from my late flight from Spring Break in Rome, to last

evening’s orientation meeting with the human rights envoy

from Princeton. On the nightstand there are bottles of

water, the first aid kits, the lists of emergency phone

numbers. We are here in Haiti to promote the well-being of

the citizens under their new ruler, to provide strategic

consultancy to provide strategies to defeat the Duvalierist

militia and secure democracy. My title is associate human

rights observer. With my background in finance, this

shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. I know little about

this country and should disclose that this excursion will

complete the necessary credits for my degree. When I

return to Princeton in June, I will organize all of my

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field notes from the trip, as well as those of the former

observer into a paper explaining the current situation of

political persecution in Haiti. If I have the resources I

may choose to videotape the thesis. When it is over I am

free and can return to Los Angeles for the summer. I have

not decided what to do next, but it is between graduate

school and accepting a position from Exxon in public

relations. It starts at only one hundred thousand dollars

a year but I may take it anyway due to my love of

communication and you have to start somewhere. I am

listening to the ambassador on Radio Soleil. Today is the

first day of the embargo lift. He explains that the state-

reconfigured C&H factories in Haiti will once again sell

its sugar related products to the US, as Venezuela and

elsewhere in Latin America. This can only be a good thing

for people who are returned home when located by the coast

guard and branded economic refugees by the INS. The

Haitian people will have more reasons to stay home and

there will be fewer boats capsizing on the open sea. If

there is one thing I learned from my seminar on Fichte and

Hegel it is that human buying and purchasing power are

essential for liberty, and that one must exist within

market structures or find oneself on a dinghy with a

telescope pointed toward Miami Beach. On the news I also

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hear that macoutes have bombed the home of the head of the

FNCD, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas party

financier Antoine Izmery. I believe this is the man we are

scheduled to meet this coming week as part of our week-long

introduction to Carribean politics. The traveling class

has already been instsructed to prepare questions about the

possibility and hope for constitutional democracy in Haiti.

We have been told to keep the questions straightforward and

historical rather than theoretical. We want to feign

ignorance of the party’s Marxist foundation, to avoid the

suspicion that we are traveling with central intelligence.

My lead advisor tells me never to admit any association

with any foreign power due to the impression that the

university system in the US acts independently of

government influence. It is late or early and I will have

to get some sleep eventually. I can wake up late tomorrow

for a day of lounging poolside with some piña coladas, then

on Monday we are up to our necks. I hear the rotary

telephone ring and I muffle the bell by placing a towel

under the phone. On the other end of the line there is a

whispering voice telling me in Creole that one of the

leaders of the ti-eglitz movement has been attacked. I am

telling the voice to speak to me in English because it is

too early in the morning to understand his dialect. He

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says, this is Jean-Jacques and I’m a representative from

the OAS. I cannot decide if this person is calling me from

the tarmac or a nursery from the jet prepulsion, scattered

squawks or what could be a parrot or a singing child. He

tells me about the attack this morning at the airport. I

ask him to please get to the point because I am about to go

to sleep. I tell Jean-Jacques I will be there at three

tomorrow. There must be some way I can verify the identity

of this Jean-Jacques through the consulate.

Representatives there have assured me there is total

security as long as I remain in accordance with

international regulations and do not interfere with local

politics. I notice Jean-Jacques’ name on my roster of

local contacts and draw an asterisk next to his name. I

hang up and try my friend in Florida, working during the

upcoming summer as a makeup consultant for Revlon. No

answer. I try to call my sister Jessica in Los Angeles for

some moral support but again no answer. I remember what

time it is and pull the sheets over my head. When I wake

up it is almost two pm and I need a hot shower but there is

no hot water so I walk to the harbor where I can buy some

mangos and oranges. There is a corpse in the street,

uncovered, throat slit, in fetal position. A man in black

uniform stands in a hallway down the quiet street of pastel

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colored concrete bunkers. I call to a man standing on his

porch with two girls playing a game of caroms to ask if he

knows her identity. He tells me her name was Marguerite,

that she is resting, and warns me to stay far away from the

body. I am testing the people around me, speaking in yes

and no questions.

23. There is this new comedy on ABC from Vin di Bona

productions called America Under Surveillance. It is one

of the most awesome things I have seen since Small Wonder

or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is a spinoff of the

home video program with Bob Saget and this one is hosted by

his Full House co-stars, the Janus-faced twins Mary Kate

and Ashley Olsen. They are dressed in matching violet

blanket sleepers with vinyl grip soles and drawstring

hoods. Everything they say is in unison. They add a

voice-over track to hidden camera footage of victims of

foul play, including but not limited to mercantile

settings. Here is one tape, they say, that looks like any

old convenience store robbery but if you listen closely you

will hear a scream. Then there is an attempt at an inside

joke and a break from their synchronization where each twin

asks the other a discordant question with the other’s name.

The audience track laughs.

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PLAY. Helen Kim arrives at work this morning on Ventura

with her daughter Hazel and she sees a man trying to get

into the door and she says to him it’s locked and he

stumbles a bit and falls down on his ass on the concrete,

his mouth opening in a yawn, his head tilting to the side.

The drool collects around his chin and drips into the

collar of his maroon quilted jacket with the mustard and

violet Lakers logo on the back. Helen waits for a second

and throws her hands up in the air, collecting her keys

from around her waist, where they are hooked to her belt

buckle by a fluorescent green key chain. She stares at the

body and feels a tugging at her dress and looks down to the

gravel, sprinkled with the broken glass of a forty-ounce

bottle of Old English from last week’s raid on the store by

ten neighborhood kids. The voice over intrudes, the Olsen

twins mimicking the voice of the assailant saying get your

hands above your head or I will inject you with this

syringe filled with AIDS. There is a raspberry sound

effect and the engineer activates the studio audience laugh

track. Her husband pours hot water on the head of the

syringe bandit and he writhes and drops the syringe. The

signal breaks. The audience groans, applauds. When Helen

awakes, the police officer gives her a glass of water and

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she drinks the whole thing in one sip. He announces via

the twins’ voiceover that the syringe will go back to the

lab for analysis. Another officer says the presence of the

virus is irrelevant now. On the ceiling is stapled the

image of a construction paper panda crucified on pipe

cleaners, a school project of one of the children. On the

television above the door on a platform suspended from the

ceiling there is an image of three bodies behind bars. The

picture tube flickers onto their uniforms in blue light,

glinting off their badges. Helen blocks her daughter from

the beam of sunlight streaming through the open door and

opens her encrusted eyes into double vision, theta, beta,

delta, gamma.

PAUSE. I lace my Nike sneakers with the lime greens swoosh

and walk out to the carport. Yes I drive a Datsun. Do you

have a problem with that? My car is not my soul. I am

packing some things for the planned getaway after the hit,

shaving cream, running shoes, hair color, a carrying bag

filled with blow wrapped in the rumba tights my wife left

me in the divorce. When the last of it hits my brain I

will have the confidence. I need to pull this off. I go

to the office on Burbank and after a businessman’s shower I

comb my hair in the mirror. The dry cleaner on Tampa does

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my suit. Everyone things I am a sales rep with this

company printed on my card, but there is no such company.

I walk into the elevator and press eight and ask for No-

Doze. See even the secretary is in on it. I walk in the

office and take in my client’s view of the new

developments, a hypothetical skyline called the Trillium,

and a Marriott hotel on Warner Brothers property. It looks

like the one in whatever place. I grab the shit and book

it to the parking garage and almost drive through the

rising barrier. I drive down Ventura almost to Topanga.

All I need is freedom of movement and some time to get to

Oregon to find her. I will continue to capitalize on the

growing fear of terminal illness, sex and death, like last

time in Rancho Vista. I will admit that what I had is

gone and I like that feeling as long as I can pay for a

space in the underground garage. I drive home on Corbin

and when I get in the door I hang up my Lakers’ jacket, sit

down on the couch and press pause, adjust the servos and go

at it again.

PAUSE. At the end of each segment the twins offer the

answer to the question where are they now, and warn the

audience in the style of Alan Funt something to the effect

of one never knows when the tape spools. The Olsen twins
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tell us now Helen and her daughter are fine and still

working at the same convenience store. Today, there are

two firearms behind the counter, an automatic pistol and an

Uzi subautomatic. They tell me Wesley Pledger has been

released from county jail and is currently on probation in

Reseda.

24. I am safely past the security detail at my home after

a day of negotiating between criminals, business advocates

members of congress and union interests. My labrador Bill

greets me at the door and I reach down to pat her head the

way she likes it against the direction of the hair. I put

my coat on the mahogany rack and sit in a floral

needlepoint covered Regence armchair next to one of the

Egyptian masks. I use the convenient remote control

discovered by my assistant Barbara to turn on the answering

machine device. Mayor, call from O’Melveny and Myers do

you want to take it. I press the blinking red light on the

console and Warren Christopher is telling me we should wait

another day to announce the commission. One request, Tom,

let’s not release the charge to the commission on April

Fools’ Day. What, you’re superstitious? We can’t wait one

more day, this happens now. At my house there is a master

bedroom with windows each with a pergola facing Hancock

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Park in three directions. On the balcony tonight there is

a gift waiting from me from the office. We are going to

make all of this work this time. Only six years since the

Olympics, I find the world turned against this city. It

is my job to support all of the city’s microeconomies and

while criticism is welcome, I must exercise my ultimate

authority over decisions made. Every city fractures but

there are some cracks in the earth you cannot step around.

There are always divisions, but we do not want the

metropolis to float into the ocean, as some seismologists

have predicted. We must establish connections with people

outside Los Angeles, all around the country, who may be

experiencing similar abuses. Let me say I am shocked and

saddened by the reaction of the world to this incident. We

have reporters from Spain, France, Sweden, Korea, Japan,

calling the mayor’s office for quotes and I have told my

secretary to refuse comment until there is time to issue a

public statement. I was a police officer for twenty-one

years, and I feel for the thousands of honorable men and

women of the LAPD. They have watched helplessly in recent

weeks as the LAPD’s fine reputation has been damaged. My

top priority is to restore the public’s confidence in the

cop on the street. Nonetheless, we all know, and the

Rodney King beating has been a shocking and tragic

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reminder, that we have problems in the department. I am

appointing a special Independent Commission, to be chaired

by Warren Christopher and charged with the responsibility

of conducting a full and fail examination of the structure

and operation of the LAPD. My daughter is with me, in the

bay window seat, drinking a cup of herbal tea. Today is the

anniversary of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre and my

daughter wants all the details. I tell her it’s when they

tied the Chinese up on lampposts all down broadway, after

some white cop intervened in a Tong gangster dispute. She

wants to know if White policeman were responsible for the

massacre so I turn on a tape Rosie Grier made for me of his

favorite songs to change the subject. The first track is

Paul Robeson singing there is a balm in Gilead to make the

wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin

s i c k s o u l .

Next is Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, If You Don’t Love

Me By Now. It is a pleasure to hear the original for a

change and not the white version I hear piped into the

office everyday. I play the messages on the answering

machine and there is a message from the district attorney

who has discussed the Latasha Harlins videotape with his

deputy Roxane Carvajal. Neither can see any provocation

for this, so we are in agreement again. The Korean grocer

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can be prosecuted and the jury will have to decide the

degree of manslaughter or murder involved. My

granddaughter is in the sitting room playing with her

barbies, and every few minutes she comes in and jerks it up

and down to simulate talking. She has been diagnosed with

attention deficit disorder but she tests well and is

demonstrates advanced skills in drawing. Barbie that is

way out of line is that one word or two, I say to her after

the Barbie cusses at me, covering my eyes for a second to

come up with the appropriate response, catching my breath

as the ceiling fan blows air on my loose filling. I

readjust my jaw as my granddaughter runs downstairs with a

barbie to the kitchen. I am not angry, but sometimes I

feel she needs some discipline from her mother. I think of

it mostly as helping out my daughter. When my daughter and

granddaughter leave the mansion, I am on the phone to my

friend Dick Gregory. I tell him thanks for the cassette.

He says he didn’t send me a cassette. Dick wants to talk

to me about his planned fast until the U.S. changes its

policy of forced return of Haitian immigrants. They’re

moving out of there so fast because they feel something is

changing in their country, he says, so they’re all out on

the seas in these makeshift boats and capsizing, starving

out there and then we pick them up and send them home
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because their reasons for coming here are economic and not

political, as if there was ever any difference. I tell him

he is going to destroy his health if he stops eating. You

don’t need to worry about what’s happening there, you can

change things here. He has been talking to Katherine

Dunham again and he wants to argue. He says imagine if the

INS sent everyone home from Los Angeles because they were

seeking a better life. I tell him I have to go to a

memorial downtown for the Chinese Massacre, and we’ll talk

about this later, see if there is something I can do. I

get in the city car and drive downtown myself to deliver my

speech. I can’t find my parking decal so I have to park on

the third floor of a concrete parking structure, but the

attendant waives my fee. It’s something not everyone wants

to remember but each year I see the same Chinese faces

showing up to pay respect to the fallen. Crying elderly

holding framed photographs of their ancestors killed in a

racially motivated riot over one hundred years ago. These

are people who are at once caught up by history and

excluded by it, whose memory extends for generations.

They continue to support me after almost twenty years in

office as their mayor and I owe it to them to be there this

year same as the last. When I get to the Dragon Tower at

Bubbling Pool road off Broadway, I cut the ribbon at the

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newly restored pagoda, and dedicate it to the

grandchildren. On the way home is the latest news report

about the videotape and the voices of Maxine Waters and

Danny Bakewell boom through the speaker panel, trashing me

and condemning our racist police chief and everything that

is wrong with Los Angeles. These problems must be

corrected. I’m trying to learn how to laugh again so when

I return to Hancock Park, I watch my advance VHS copy of

Ghost Dad while pedaling the stationary bike. We will work

on more of this tomorrow.

25. I am mending the tear in my gingham dress with my

sewing kit before meeting the OAS representative. Jean

Jacques told me to meet him at the church on rue Pierre

Dominique Toussaint this afternoon, and it is too late to

call him and cancel. He said I will notice the chapel from

the street when you turn from Rue Dessalines and there is a

sign in Creole, French and English advertising gasoline

then an abrupt turn into a driveway. I get to the meeting

place at quarter to three, fifteen minutes early. At the

church on Pierre Dominique Toussaint street, three girls

play a game of hide and seek around a chess board laden

with tokens of unfinished wood. There is a time-piece, a

plastic hour glass which appears stolen from a commercial

board game produced in Indonesia and packaged and marketed

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in the US. Two players turn over the sand filled plastic

and wait for the third to run somewhere out into the city

to hide. When the time is up, they both dart from their

seats, to look for the girl, running around a burning tire

spewing black smoke into the humid air. Into the church

comes a man dressed in a fedora, a pink blouse and white

baggy pants and a thick iron cross hanging from his neck.

The man fixes his eyes on me and sits across from me in a

crescent shaped wicker chair, common at the resorts in all

of the area. He says he recognized me because I am the

only blan here. He tells me his is not from the OAS, that

he only told me that to get me to come here. He asks me

how I arrived in Haiti and who sent me. I tell him Boston

Catholic Charities, Somervile, I have an academic sponsor

and a support network through Princeton University. Your

name is on my established safety contacts while I am in

Haiti. Jean-Jacques stares at me in silence, preparing to

change the subject, and I look into my demitasse of strong,

sweetened coffee. He says one volunteer was injured in the

blast. She was standing in the back with the laundry and a

shard from the roof came down on her head, but she is taken

care of now. He says in the wake of the attack there is

something Izmery would like to ask me to do for him. I

inform him that part of the agreement is that I would not

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become involved in any way with local politics. I am an

impartial observer and not a lobbyist or a journalist. He

says we do not need you to be anything but impartial. I

want to know exactly what he needs from me. I know you are

not forcing me into this but how would I identify these

people or how do you know who is after you. He says we are

not leading you into espionage. He takes out a leather

case and unzips it to reveal a Sony Betacam. It looks like

the one Mark and Patty bought in eighty-two before the

pressure to convert to VHS. He says he cannot tell me what

to look for only where to point the camera. Is this for

me? He says my name, Circe, is that your name. You can

call me Ceci if you want. He says there is a tradition of

revolutionary violence here, and in some ways this is what

we are trying to avoid in this situation, but a coup

attempt is imminent. The opposition is Raoul Cedras. They

appear to work for the President but they are independently

motivated and would prefer a return to the ancien regime.

Our constitution will not be torn apart by the elites. The

people will not allow that to happen if Aristide remains in

power. I tell him yes, absolutely, I will help. He says

Il ne faut pas imaginer, faut regarder. We want you to

document the changes, and the camera will not lie for you.

What? I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that. And say again for
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me just so we can be clear you have no ties to the US or

any other foreign government. Jean-Jacques turns his head

to the side, watching the children return from their game

of hide and seek, one girl chasing the other with a smoking

palm frond, laughing. A man with a rucksack of live

poultry pulls a US one dollar bill from the gutter under

the wheel of a parked bicycle. At the hotel I pick up the

phone and hear my mother Patty. My mother Patty is on the

phone from Sherman Oaks to remind me of my sister’s

birthday. She is turning eighteen and they are celebrating

at Benihana on Ventura. I tell her I am developing an

intimacy with live poultry. I tell her about the store Le

Mieux Poulet on the corner where the chickens fly free and

the attendant grabs the one you want to buy from out of the

air. I am revealing to her that the Graham Greene novel

she recommended is not teaching me a thing, but I am

descovering CLR James. Patty starts talking about a movie

she saw at La Reina that weekend about a cannibal and a

transvestite serial killer. I tell her that I am too

conscious of spies around every corner to talk right now.

The feeling that everyone is looking at me everywhere

escorted or not. Your sister told me the number here is

there a reason you haven’t called us, what time is it

there, she says. She is talking to me about zombies at the

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mall in Los Angeles and I tell her I do not believe in

transmigration of souls or morphogenesis and neither does

she. I think she is off her medication. Not that she

should be on it but that is not my concern. I should ask

her to send some of what she is taking to me if we could

bypass Guantanamo on the voyage to Cape Haitien. If she

asks me if I have seen any zombies I will execute her for

lack of cultural capacity and the county will have another

dead librarian to deal with. If she is suddenly so into

the gothic she should put on my costume black and white

leggings and go to the living room to listen to my Bauhaus

records and watch Day Of The Dead simultaneously on their

home entertainment system, if she vicariously wants to live

my life. She says good night Circe if there is anything

you need.

26. I am standing on my front lawn in Doflin hot pants and

a crystal studded tank top with a logo of the Anatomy

Asylum. I still live off Sawtelle and everyone knows it.

They must have me on some kind of map of the stars because

homophobic assholes come here and try to get trough the

gate. Since the new year I have been stopping at all the

map vendors on Sunset and so far no culprit. Sometimes the

trucks go by at night and you will see some jock from the
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Baptist high school pelting my porch with egg. I am

picking up the morning newspaper. I open the paper to read

about Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurdish population in

the US exclusion zone. The US was allegedly trying to set

up a safe haven for the Kurds through Operation Provide

Comfort, but their air cover could not protect the minority

population. Was the war a ruse? I do not know if they are

lying or incompetent. Just because I cannot stop dancing

to talk to you this time, do not think I am not paying

attention. The Metro section is again reporting this

beating and a new task force organized by the mayor. I

wish they could organize a task force to help me clean up

the dog shit smeared inside my mailbox this morning, but I

am sorry I do not believe in self pity I believe in moving

forward. If it is a brave new world or whatever the

President says then let us greet it with bravery. I open

the paper to the news. On the second calendar page, my

sweaty hairy torso and legs are spinning and gyrating to a

song by the Kingsmen. We intend to incorporate as many

dances from the late fifties and sixties as copyright law

permits. This is why you see me on late night television

dancing the locomotion, the twist, or the pony and shouting

out to my students and the extras to get them motivated. I

am proud because we are inventing a new fusion of

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advertisement and entertainment, the infomercial, and from

now on it is Ron Popeil who will imitate our great leaps

forward. In the Times photo I am holding the hand of an

obese woman from Fort Worth who is so happy to have come

this far. The black and white high contrast photography

makes a patch of cotton candy out of my hair, the backlight

filtering through the frizzy curls. But Mandy from Texas

looks good with her Judds concert t-shirt concealing her

double-D breasts and with the money we will pay her as a

real life success story she will get a reduction and for

the first time walk upright. I have been with her since

her first letter and photograph when she told me the body-

fascist slurs she received at a racist summer camp where

she is a counselor. Once she sent a photograph of herself

flashing a peace sign with her arms around the grand

wizard. Photographs can be altered for content and I do

not judge my fan base because without them where am I. We

are going to cut out the racist part for the overall effect

of avoiding litigation and losing audiences. In the

promotion for my playing card based weight loss regimen we

will introduce her as a childcare professional. For legal

reasons, the offending name of the camp on the t-shirts of

the children will be obscured by a digital paintbrush. You

would not believe the size of the computer that does this
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work. It will no longer matter that she represented

something hateful. My British assistant is on the phone to

her friend and roommate, new to Los Angeles. We’ll meet

tomorrow, she says, and I’ll drive you to Carmelita so he

can see the Spadena House or to the Heidemann House and

imagine what it would be like to live in a house built as a

set for something you reimagined from history transferred

into contemporary reality. Over Pero coffee substitute and

cottage cheese, she says to me what is the matter this

morning you look like you need to roger. I tell her I am

lonely and she laughs covering her face and says I am going

to the Beverly Center is there anything else you need. I

tell her to pick up some jodhpurs for the caravan.

27. I can see the neighbors across the street through

their windows, the television playing The Flintstones, the

kids eating bowls of cereal, the father straightening a

tie, the Latina maid scrubbing dishes. It is Sunday and US

secretary of defense Dick Cheney is upstairs talking to Bob

Schieffer on Face the Nation about congressional proposals

to cut defense spending. In coded language he refers to a

need to draw down after the end of the Cold War to free up

resources for developing domestic hot spots. Why not come

here with your weapons? I am wearing a Katharine Hamnet t-

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shirt that I stole from my Circe’s room after she left for

Haiti. It says FRANKIE SAYS WAR HIDE YOURSELF. My mother

comes down the stairs already dressed for work in a grey

pantsuit. Last night we were talking about my Grandmother.

She says if you want to understand your grandmother you

should look at her photographs from the nineteen-fifties.

There is a whole series of tableaux some of which are

programmatically associated, or they tell a story. My

mother refuses to answer any questions directly about my

grandmother Gretel except to reinforce everything I already

know. Mom leaves for work at the library and again I am

talking to Jefferson Davis, my partner for our detournement

assignment. Tomorrow morning we will present our notes as

transparencies on the overhead projector but all I have so

far are some notes on some idea of process art using a

motorized camera. Neither of us has decided where we will

find such a camera, but we are thinking some of the shops

in the Los Angeles downtown business improvement district.

He tells me he lives in Baldwin Hills and that I should

come out there to see where the reservoir cracked in

nineteen sixty-three. I tell him my grandmother

photographed it and claimed there were human sacrifices

there during the Aztec period and there would be human

sacrifices again. Jeff tells me it is another way for

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California to defame people of color. This is his sense of

humor and I like that about him. I misquote Pee Wee Herman

and say that is so funny I forgot to laugh. It is supposed

to be a joke and a way to determine his knowledge of his

shaped environment so close to Culver City, the

neighborhood MGM built. He knows the studios are inscribed

within us and it would take an exorcism to get them out. I

tell him I think she meant long before Hollywood, pre pre-

Columbian. If you read my grandfather’s books they tell me

her work will start to make sense. He asks me if she is a

documentarian, like the Works Progress Administration

photographers. I tell him she was a contemporary, but as

an immigrant she never received funding through the WPA for

her projects. She lives in Bel-Air. She photographed Los

Angeles, New York, New Orleans, and wherever else she would

travel, with my grandfather when he would be invited to

lecture at universities, St. Petersburg, and these Jurassic

places, Jerusalem, Baghdad. My grandfather Ted used the

photographs for illustrations in his book Positive

Antithesis. My grandfather was Italian and Jewish but we

are secular now. They moved around so often because he was

afraid of being apprehended and sent back to Italy. They

had this idea that there were foreign agents allied with

fascist interests working here under the auspices of

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corporate interests in the US government. Los Angeles was

the New Jerusalem to them at the time, but they were

mortified by the consumer mass culture they found here and

found it almost as oppressive as what they left behind. So

many of the people around them thought Mussolini was

awesome so they stayed, but long before the US became

involved in the war they had decided to stay permanently.

Then they moved out to California where the winters were

always warm like in Naples. I tell Jefferson I don’t want

to get off topic, we need to discuss our detournement

assignment so we agree to meet at Dupar’s for a late-night

snack. Jefferson arrives late from Baldwin Hills, stuck in

traffic on the Hollywood Freeway. I open my Mead

composition book, filled with panels of arms reaching above

basketball hoops, mushroom clouds and logos designed to

appear textual without reference to any known alphabet. I

am interested in the evasive or illusive appearance of

textuality, like Jasper Johns could achieve when he wasn’t

mourning the loss of his emotions. I tell Jefferson that I

never understood how the original ad was supposed to reach

people without the presence of Jordan. Now you are

supposed to feel the suspense of waiting for the logo, and

there is the vicarious thrill of the ball going through the

hoop, then you are under this hand with the atomic
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explosion then in the third frame is the logo. We want

them to experience a kind of catharsis even as they realize

this is mockery of the principles of the original version.

The tag is what is the color of your revolution and then it

stops, that is it. You see the image of Michael Jordan and

then the tight closeup on the product. I do not see how it

is different, we are not selling a product, it relies on a

different setting to be understood. Everyone wishes they

could jump so high, he says, it is like he is the first

person to openly defy gravity. What about Apollo eleven?

He thinks this is funny and I am not sure why. He says he

has been thinking about automatic art, transforming our

labor and devising a kind of Turing machine to take care of

all of the thinking for us but still keep us within the

process. He says this would really take the burden off of

us and we could start to do what we really want to do.

Originate the finite system and set the machine to work and

planned obsolescence tells us when to stop. All we have to

do is stand there. Mark picks me up from Dupar’s in the

BMW and it is an all Beatles Sunday on KRLA again We Can

Work It Out and All You Need Is Love. Mark says my

grandmother delivered the negatives about an hour ago, the

ones I wanted to see. Before I look at these photographs I

find myself discussing them with my sister on the phone

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from Port-au-Prince, but she reveals to me only

indifference. Circe has never cared much for visual art

and is more interested in corporate confrontation, the

bottom line disguised as peace activism. She calls herself

a globalist, but everything for her is always its opposite,

black and white. Binaries encode her. She tells me she

is unaware of any specific photographs of our grandmother

because she rarely turned the camera on herself. It turns

out she is simply unaware of the period between nineteen

fifty-two and fifty-six, right after she and my grandfather

moved from Santa Monica to the valley due to their dry

phantasy of vanished blue grass and orange groves. I found

the prints, each three by five, in a leather portfolio in

the basement, behind an old dictionary and some books in

Italian, Pirandello, Dante, translated Rabelais. Locked in

plastic bags some faded magazines called Tijuana bibles

with German words scrawled in blue ball-point over the

graphics. In all these shots she resembles one of the Gish

sisters both in costume and facial features. Here is

grandma bound to a post and shot with arrows in front of a

black-and-white photographic backdrop of Tenochtitlan.

Grandma, head bowed, hands tied behind her back, offering

herself to a knife-wielding Paul-Muni-faced Tezcatlipoca.

Grandma tied-up on a San Gabriel summit doubling for

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Reifenstahl’s Matterhorn. Grandma as Sacco and Venzetti

in the electric chair, her image double exposed in the

style of Man Ray photographs. Grandma in the arcosolia,

her hands raised in surrender, her upturned face under the

luminaria. Grandma, eyes closed, a talith over her

shoulders kneeling in front of a phylactery as a knife

moves in from the right. Grandma as safiyya in toreador

drag, confronting a brahma in front of a recreation of the

Paramount gate. Grandma half immolated in the pozzolano on

a marble slab staring into the arenaria and cubiculum.

Grandma chained to the floor of a castle with a mock weapon

and shield, flinching from an advancing armored jaguar

knight, water damaged and out of focus. Ergo she was

obsessed with sacrifice. There is a tendency for Circe to

overlook the obvious.

28. I come from Hayastani Hanrapetowt’yown. Ataturk

slaughtered my parents so I came to Jersey. I found work

in the city for twenty years and found work with some

agencies and met my wife Samantha, currently studying for

her real estate license. Now it is nineteen ninety one and

we are in Encino living only blocks from the Jackson family

compound with its giraffe and ferris wheel. It is my

belief that I am in a unique position to dominate the

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culture. I have been in marketing for ten years. Right

now we are working on a solution to the problem of apathy

in the consumer sector. What we need is a new hope,

something distinct and concrete and only slightly

disaffected, beyond zoning disputes. I admire this new

nike campaign, minimalist in its aesthetic and anti-

critical in its thought. It is not the first time I have

questioned how we know what we know, but it is the first

time a television spot has convinced me to stop. In its

directness, the finished ad is like showing a blind girl a

photo of a triangle with two right angles. Overall I like

the ideas to come fast to me as epiphanies. It is

preferable to my work at university in biology. Hours in

the lab and only the most minute hope of pleasing my

supervisor just this much more than he expected. Here I

can aim my insights to a short attention span and do not

have to waste my time justifying any of my ideas. We want

to go in this direction, to make the act of choice

instinctual and unreflective. The problem is not how to

make it new but to rid it of its advertisingness. The idea

of not buying the product can be ridiculed with an anti-

slogan, but the option of acting on it is off the table.

The Little Debbie campaign is still too celebrity oriented

as is the Budweiser. It operates according to a different

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equation he eats therefore I eat. It should be something

compulsory without referring to taste speaking in

imperatives and identification with the spokesperson. It

must be laced with great moments of non-conformity, the

existentialist belief that you are and it is impossible

that you are not. So with Gillette we are going with a

late display of the product where you start out knowing and

at the end you know, without direct confrontation with a

spokesman. Sally Kellerman will read the copy and then we

throw in the thing about the new technology involved. If

you see it enough you will not think when you are standing

in front of the display at the drug store. I remember when

we first got here and I saw a display for wheaties with

Bruce Jenner and all I could think about was Munich

nineteen seventy two. You have to be aware of the

consequences of anything you suggest to the table. My

daughters did well last winter as always at school. I

think it is the community that inspired us to move and

their ballet and soccer is the best that I can find to

support that fading notion. I tell them not to listen to

the other kids but they do not need my help. One is highly

gifted and wants to be an engineer and the other loves

writing poetry. I think it should be encouraged and I read

to her from my volumes of Gibran, Turgenev and Shakespeare.

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I want her to learn at least the basics of Armenian so we

try to speak it as much as we can in the home. She knows

we are going for a poetic in quotes campaign this march for

the public service announcement we are doing for the city.

This is new territory for me so it is going to be extreme.

They want to promote a strong anti-drug message without

relying on literal information. What they do not want to

do is to remind anyone of the Dalton Street incident or

police interference. They say the egg campaign was the

most influential example of the kind of thing they are

talking about. You may remember it is all done in one shot

first you have the frying pan and then the cracking of the

egg and the frying and the announcer says any questions.

We want to go without ambiguity on this and so conceptually

the last line is out. Another one they like is earlier I

think with a kid in a red and black plaid shirt lying on a

bed listening to music on headphones, then the moustached

father walking into the room holding paraphernelia saying

who taught you how to do this and the kid says you dad I

learned it by watching you. The mayor’s office also likes

the appearance of Nancy Reagan on Different Strokes and the

One to Grow On series, although all I can find is Nancy

McKeon. My perspective is we are not going anywhere close

to that because the western world does not go across the

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board for celebrity endorsement. I remember the time I was

in London to meet Mohammad Reza Shah and we talked about

the Sylvester Stallone Rocky ad campaign. Not only did it

not register with Persians they were offended by the Coca

Cola red white and blue imagery. I think celebrity is not

the way to go because you never know what they will do

next. Like all the Milli Vanillis. My one daughter is so

fussy she played that tape in the car all the time when we

would take trips as a family to Arrowhead or Zuma. My

other daughter hates it. Maybe she would make a better

lawyer than engineer. She will be married to a Japanese

businessman in Beverly Hills and the band will play Just

The Way You Are.

29. When Mussolini deployed poisoned gas against Ethiopia

through a secret order London described the attacks as

leprosy. No one knew and no one found out because the

methods of detection were dismantled, the press, the

libraries, all under state control. When the US sanctions

an attack, no one will know but the dedicated. I am

writing this only because of my interest so I am lucky in

that it does not affect me. Certain political events

arouse my political instinct and I am given the rare gift

of a political consciousness. My relationship with the

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department has been good so this phone call must be

respectful but forceful, resistant but obedient. None of

this passo romano business in front of chief commander. I

want to talk to someone at state to let them know someone

is still paying attention to what is happening within the

so-called exclusion zones. I want State to understand it

is possible to be an ally and still have something critical

to say. If I could allow myself to be desensitized it

would have happened when I learned the word phosgene. It

is not going to happen now. Hello Margaret this is Peter

Galbraith. The Assistant Secretary of State for Public

Affairs is in a cheeky mood today. She says, long time no

talk, what is this about the new UN resolution against

Israel or the looting of uranium from the Iraqi bunker. It

is as if she wants to enforce this idea of me as

troublemaker. The implied laughter is a brick fog. I

thank her for your support on that one, the world and the

IAEA thanks her. Margaret, you know I have no political

interest in what is going on at the moment but I want to

talk to you for a moment about what’s happening in Mosul

right now, cholera, meningitis, polio, new forms of

contagious diarrhea. Sounds like where I’m from in

Alabama, she drawls. The city of Qalaa Diza is demolished

and we cannot allow attacks on civilians to continue in the

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exclusion zones. She says I’ll have to get back to you

later today Richard, my arms are tired from all this weight

and I’m seated now but I’ll tell you that my shoulders are

tired right now, and since Jim is back from the Middle East

there is so much catch up to do. She calls me Richard and

she knows that is not my name. I tell her I’ll call back

to talk about this some more after I read the report from

the General Secretary. Five o’clock, she agrees and we

hang up. Five arrives and John Kelly answers the phone. I

tell him what we have here is an attack on the Kurdish

citizens by a leader willing to use any illegal means to

attack an inconvenient ethnic population. Kelly says we do

not support chemical warfare, you know our goal is a

multilateral agreement on non-proliferation and the end of

tyranny and the flowering of democracy, Peter, the US is in

full compliance with resolutions. Remember when you

doubted us before, he says. If you mean when Saddam

destroyed Qalaa Diza as ten thousand refugees returned I

do. I quote Truman establishing the UN charter, if we

should falter in the future in our will to use it, millions

now living will surely die. He reads from some prepared

statement about respecting the sovereignty of nations and

that is the end of the conversation. On my way home on the

radio there is a report about one of the UN officials

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monitoring the cease fire. He witnessed a truck driving

out of the uranium enrichment in mosul carrying canvas

covered objects. He believes they are calutrons. If they

are isotope separation devices then who is driving the

truck and where is it going is what I would like to know.

I write in my day planner a note to self to call Perez de

Cuellar and the President directly. I see the standing

mobile at the edge of his desk, a chromoform man riding a

man in a horse costume, gliding along a bronze pole, the

two halves of the costume chopped once per second by an

anvil aiming directly across the back of the ceramic suit

cracks, an egg, the sizzle in the pan as head separates

from body against the blade.

30. Someone within the throng of reporters dressed in

shades of gray in the Apollo lobby on one-hundred twenty-

fifth street is shouting black power. You can see the fist

above the crowd. I am walking through the corridor of

reporters and hangers-on at the entrance to the Apollo,

listening to a white reporter from Los Angeles. She is

acting as if there is a red carpet draped down one hundred

twenty-fifth street. These people will stop at nothing.

She says the leader of the rap group Public Enemy has a lot

to say on the subject of black power and tonight we bring

you an exclusive look into one of the most revolutionary

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groups of today, they call it black CNN but we call it a

house party and tonight everyone is invited. The camera

swerves in my direction and she waves to get my attention

but I am already climbing the stairs and don’t care to

comment. I am walking to my box in the balcony through a

secret passageway reserved for luminaries and those with

special protection. I am with my entourage, two security

guards and Jasmine Guy. There is no specific threat of

violence but the crowd can get passionate when they

recognize someone of their own of my stature. I have

chosen to abandon my customary brightly colored costume

tonight for a gray suit and when the lights go down I

remove my sunglasses because it is no longer Gucci time.

REC/PLAY. Yo what’s up y’all. Yo. Can I get more on the

monitor a little more high end or something. Yo, one thing

it always feels good to come up to the Apollo and do

something but it especially feel good to come up to the

Apollo and say yo all y’all got to do is just come in

through the door fuck it it’s on me and shit you know what

I’m saying. Fuck that. They trying to say where y’all

want to shoot it. I want to shoot it uptown, well what you

want to do I want to open the fuckin’ door, let everybody

in and shit, fuck that. I mean, if this was truly a city

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that gave a fuck about its people then it wouldn’t stop at

the Apollo. Apollo would always be taken care of. We go

down to the Garden and just let everybody in, twenty-

thousand. But they scared of that. They scared of that

shit right? Earthquake music, they don’t like us. You

know why? Because we don’t need the TV and the news. We

give it directly uncut as it fits our crowd and our

audience. Hey. Hey Terminator man we just found a beat

across the street we want you all to vibe to this we kick a

little freestyle continue on, y’all with it? Everybody put

your fists in the air. Put your fists in the air.

Somebody say soul. Soul! Soul! Soul power! Soul power!

Power to the people! Power to the people! At the count of

three, Terminator, I’m going to drop my fist and you let it

go you ready Del? One, two. Give uptown a record that

they liked a couple of years ago. Come on. One, two,

three, c’mon.

STOP. The first time I head Public Enemy it was nineteen

eighty six and I had never heard anything so

confrontational in both the lyrics and music since I was a

kid and records like Say It Loud were out kinky hair was

stacked and we had a Godfather and it wasn’t Marlon Brando.

We demanded a chance to do things by ourselves. We were

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tired of beating our heads against the wall and doing

things for someone else and it was the sixties and

seventies, the last time black music was for black people.

By the eighties the music had really crossed over and James

was performing the theme from a Rocky picture in front of

rear-projected fourth of July fireworks. The treble’s kids

come onto the stage for nine-one-one and the lights go out

on the sustained vowel in the word crowd. Applause. The

lights come up. Three security of the first world officers

restrain a Ku Klux Klan member in a corner, and the treble

walks over to kick the restrained klansman, Carlton is

visibly moved by the noose as it comes down, apprehensive

only for the fear he knows what will oscillate through the

audience. As the Apollo reacts to the lowering of the

noose amid swirling tornado lights with silent horror, the

security of the first world officer takes the noose and

applies it to the neck of the klansman. The body is raised

into the air, the hooded man now suspended by a hook over

the stage, and the lights go down again. Do the kids know

what this means? White hoods plus crosses plus fire equals

Ku Klux motherfucking Klan. They are stringing him up from

the scaffolding.

REC/PLAY. Oh, my goodness New York is built. Pleasure being

back home. You know we got Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx,

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Uptown. Get a better light effect on the man with the hood

--- Strong Island, upstate Jersey in the house check this

out Staten Island black people we ain’t had nothing for

four hundred and thirty-eight years in this motherfucker

now check this out we ain’t had shit for four hundred

thirty-eight years because I consider this motherfucker

guilty. I might ask y’all, is he guilty? I’m here in New

York, and I know that New York is the most vocal, is he

guilty? Do he owe you anything? Do he owe you anything?

Penalty for the black people damage in the US is one.

Penalty is death right? Motherfucker got to go, got to go,

got to go. Is he guilty? Yes. Is he guilty? Yes. Here

come the fuckin’ drums.

STOP. This is an exercise in crowd control and mass

psychology with beats by Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield

and Melvin Parker jammed and fragmented by my dogg Norman

Rogers, the Terminator. Carlton lifts up his hands and

Terminator lays down the beat under the effigy of a hanged

Klansman, blocking the spotlight as it dangles on a hook,

the hood casting a shadow on the turntables and the

monitor. When I get to Chuck backstage between sets he

tells me to expect something good tonight that this is the

band in the present the here and now. He means that the
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samples should not be interpreted as a nostalgic return to

the years when we had the ears of America back in sixty-

eight when they killed Malcolm and Martin. When the beat

kicks in it feels like I am in nineteen seventy again and

it does not matter if white people are listening. If we

had an Apollo in southern California we would maybe have

more than violence and the white culture to define us.

There is something you miss driving everywhere. Chuck

tells me he feels sick coming to Los Angeles that it

reminds him of South Africa but he loves the crowd in

Tijuana. When they play Baby Rock he says it is real

Mexican soul down there. I tell him there is soul in Los

Angeles that he should come to visit me in my Palisades

estate and we can put the needle on some classics and sip

on some of the best Hennessey. There are four extra

bedrooms each with a theme based on a prominent trope in

African-American history. Mine is the diaspora but he can

choose from any theme. Amistad. Attica. Southhampton

county. I try to keep it topical but humor is what I am

here to provide and it may work better to let the people

decide for themselves political matters without my direct

intervention. Chuck can be the agitator. When I speak it

is primarily to a black audience, but we are all tired of

disclaimers. I would like to think that with my syndicated

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show I am sowing the seeds of a New Jack renaissance, here

in Harlem and all across the world. Tomorrow I return to

Los Angeles to tape the shows for next week. Our guests

will be Danny Glover, Rodney O, Karyn White and C + C Music

Factory. I told them to bring Martha Wash with them and

leave Zelma at home. Also you’ve got the daily parade of

white actors. Sean Young will be in the house, to promote

her new film about the wife of Louis XIV. Possibly we will

repeat the appearance of Madonna from last year promoting

her appearance in the Warren Beatty movie and her video

about pretending to be Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Lauren

Bacall in To Have And Have Not, Katherine Hepburn in

Bringing Up Baby, and don’t forget my lady Marilyn. The

way her a-line skirt blows up from the subway grate and she

says isn’t it delicious is a permanent thing to make you go

hmm and that Hottentot ass will never change.

31. I am hungry for something besides the lunch of egg

salad I packed so I head out to Seocho-gu to see what I can

find on the street. The streets of Seoul are lined with

paper cows, tied to the metal street signs, their names in

white on green. Images of President Roh Tae Woo are pinned

to bulletin boards and spray painted with red and black

aerosol X-es. University riot police stand in linear

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formation, their batons raised. I watch the effigies burn

from across the street at a stand selling kalbi, sizzling

beef, squid and pork. This happens every year, the kalbi

vendor says to me, but at least the Patriotic Suicide Squad

stayed home this time. I look at my watch and the second

hand moves but its movement is an indeterminate creep

across the face. Across the street two students appear to

fight, entangled in each other’s arms, until one steps onto

the shoulders of the other and raises his fists in the air,

a victorious pugilist with a flaming torch. At the

university, the paper cattle are holy, sacred, therefore

they will destroy themselves by fire. The smell of burning

beef is familiar to me from my childhood in Riverside,

where I lived in a track home next to a meat processing

plant, one of the last remaining in the county. As a child

my father, following the suggestion of a colleague at his

bank, took me to see the cattle slaughter to enforce the

ideal of vegetarianism, ever since converting to Buddhism

after moving to the US from Korea in the nineteen-

seventies. I admire them for staying together after my

father’s conversion, not typical in Korean families.

Closer to my mother, I remained a Christian and a

carnivore, despite the offal and smoke creeping into our

noses through our apartment windows. This afternoon the

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gas burning fireplace smell of burning paper conjures up

images of the San Bernadino Cowschwitz and I have already

lost my appetite, but I will eat my egg salad sandwich

anyway. I can understand the Korean students when they say

we must open up the language. It must no longer restrict

us to the literal. It must speak to us like a mouth,

giving its tongue to us. It must expose the secrets of its

innermost tissues. These young people have all read Orwell

in Korean if not in the original. The opening synthesizer

fanfare and chime of We Are The World comes in over

loudspeakers above the university. Across the street, the

police move in from the streets in a single file line.

Their batons drawn, they move in across the line of

students from the front, each of the guardsmen with one

hand on a concealed weapon. A student picks up a Suntory

bottle stuffed with paint thinner and a cotton wick, lights

it, and throws it at the campus. Another throws an apple

bomb at the brown van carrying more riot police in olive

green uniforms, Kevlar helmets with gas masks. The vendor

turns over the barbecued meat with metal prongs, clipping

the strands of beef and turning them over on the stained

grill, flattening them with the curved end of the forked

scoop. A policeman walks up the steps to the burning man

and pummels the fallen body with a baton, left, right, as

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if plowing a field. Flames rise from the fallen man as the

students remain in line, staring ahead, swaying their signs

to the loudspeaker music. Another policeman steps out of

the bushes behind the burning man and holds a gun, pointed,

at the collapsing heap of burnt clothes and flesh. The

vendor hears my accent and wants to speak to me in English.

I explain the trajectory of my life. I spoke and wrote

Korean in the home exclusively until the age of three and I

continued to improve my ability alongside my schoolwork.

My best friend at North Hollywood High School was from

Nigeria. I taught him some basic characters and he ended

up studying Korean at UC Berkeley. You could say I am a

Korean ambassador although I didn’t visit until nineteen

ninety. I am still here, teaching logic classes in English

to Korean professors at Korea University. I tell the story

of the day in nineteen eighty-six when my mother and father

were attacked at their convenience store on Central. There

was a period of shock, then the call to the police, then

the wait for the police for about three hours. No charges

were ever filed because my father cleaned up the store

after the intruder knocked over bottles and because there

was no surveillance camera and because my father was so

angry speaking his broken English the police almost took

him in for disorderly conduct and verbal assault on an

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officer. My mother was in shock so she couldn’t describe

the attacker. These days I read the stories in the English

copies of Time in magazine shops in the French district in

Seoul about the Rodney King beating and the boycott of

convenience stores and I know little has changed except now

everyone has a camera. I give up and ask the vendor to

tell me what the students are yelling. Something about

Yankee go home. Is that tear gas? Cover your face and get

behind the cart, she says. As the chloroacetophenone hits

my eyes, I notice a blind priest crossing the street, his

cane crushing the sidewalk weeds into their concrete

valleys.

32. My name is Barbara Albey and I am the Vice President

of the California Public Assembly. I am here to tell you

this governor’s days are numbered. Last year with the help

of his chief advisor Otto Bos, the governor fatally

compromised between gay rights groups and Christian

fundamentalists. The log cabin republicans are now on

board to support Wilson and it is my duty to punish them

for their transgressions. I am dressed in a red traje de

chauta with pearls my husband shucked in Hong Kong pearl

river delta. He is an outdoorsman who windsurfs with a

love of Henry David Thoreau and do it yourself frontier-

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style living. He constructed our home in Santismo

Sacramento with his bare hands and the assistance of five

spics. We made his money the hard way, by going to the

source, mining borax in Kern County. He is on the board of

Procter and Gamble and we easily cross into the one million

bracket. It’s time to send faggots and immigrants home to

Greece or Mexico or wherever they are coming from. They

have no place above the Rio Grande and there is no place

for them in the economy of this state. I want to tell you

about something that has happened to the good people of our

state. I want to tell you about the bill by gay

Assemblyman Terry Wilson of Sacramento to add faggotry to

the list of factors including religious beliefs and

physical handicaps for which people cannot be denied a job.

Due to the support of Republicans within the homosexual

lobby, we can not trust Pete Wilson to lead California. I

am convinced Wilson is not a conservative, and in fact, has

gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those

who are. Look at the hardship we have experienced since

the nineteen sixties when they came out of their closets to

terrorize us on the streets with their flamboyant jewels,

clothing and hair. From now on, when I am driving and I

see you crossing the street it is one strike and you’re out

and I will sue your family for the damage to my tires and
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the body of my vehicle. If you leave it to me we will no

longer have this social disgrace around our children and

under the eyes of the lord. I remember one time I wanted

to go to shop at Giorgio with Pat Sajak and there was a

faggot behind the counter who would not sell perfume to us

because Wheel of Fortune gives away fur as a prize. He

said to us fur coats are worn by beautiful animals and ugly

people, and Pat was in shock, and we haven’t spoken about

the situation since. You could say the real reason I care

is because of my son. He came to my estate once in makeup

and an Esther Williams mermaid one piece and I vomited into

my saco de marinero. Tonight is the night to right wrongs.

I am taking the stage to announce my views on the nelly

governor, who for all we know may have more skeletons in

his closet. Don't let anyone fool you about me, my

friends, or about this crusade that we have begun. What a

disgusting decision this is for me and many other

conservatives who held our noses and voted for a sheep in

wolf’s clothing. The sentiment is very high for no new

taxes and our constituents understand the tax issue more

readily than the former watchdog of the treasury. We know

about his attempt to abolish welfare as we know it but

given these and many other concerns, a spoonful of sugar

does not make the medicine go down.  God made Adam and Eve,
 173

not Adam and Steve. These decisions reflect my deeply held

convictions about the institution of the family, about

moral and spiritual beliefs, and about the welfare of our

country. I cannot, and will not, vote for Pete Wilson for

another term as a matter of conscience. I certainly can't

vote for Tom Bradley or any other democrat based on their

virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the

nominees, I simply will not cast a gubernatorial ballot for

the first time in my life. These decisions are my personal

views and do not represent the organizations with which I

am affiliated, Dial, Pacific Coast, Procter and Gamble, the

list goes on. I proudly quote the Lord as received by

Moses in Canaan. Because California has become defiled, I

am punishing it for its wickedness, by making it vomit out

its inhabitants. You, however, whether natives or resident

aliens, must keep my statutes and decrees forbidding all

such abominations by which the previous inhabitants defiled

California, otherwise California will vomit you out also

for having defiled it, just as it vomited out the nations

before you.

33. In theory class, the teacher flashes a slide of two

still lifes one a bowl of fruit from the seventeenth

century one from the twentieth, Broyeuse de Chocolat by

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Duchamp. She wants us to tell her the difference between

the two works of art. I am still tripping from the half

hit I took this morning so I see raptors, a circus in

flames, the serpent. We hear the sounds of shuffling

bodies in chairs, the popping of gum against the roof of a

boy’s mouth, the asphalt rollers spreading the parking lot

with a new coat of tar and gravel. We are huddled together

in the back of the room finishing our homework, passing

notes. Later we agree that we don’t really need to listen

to anything the teacher says. We nonetheless pledge to

continue our work on the performance piece we will present

again at the mall this weekend. I pass her a note in class

explaining my thoughts about Duchamp. Tell Eckert, it

says, we’ve decided to build a Turing machine because I am

not going to participate in these performances any more.

It’s a matter of convincing him that we can do it with what

we have available. It’s half documentation and ninety-nine

percent appropriation. We can make it look like it is

really working or we can have it spout out nonsense. We

can actually make it function and cast a pallor over the

booth or the room or wherever it is exhibited. We want

people to forget it is you and only see an exaggerated

version of what they may have already seen on television,

Hammer or someone like him. Then I come in with the harp

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and you can either sing along with me or show us your

moves. I know you can running man, so keep that up and

we’ll talk to Eckert about the algorithm, to see if there’s

any way to approach this in a cross-disciplinary way, and

that is why we are talking to someone in the math

department about a collaboration, signed Jefferson Davis.

After class my mother picks me up and we drive to the

public library near my house off La Brea. I am waiting for

my mom to finish reading Redbook so I wander into the

architecture section, then the photography section, mostly

collections of Walker Evans, a few collections of early

daguerrotypes by Nadar and others, and there is this book

with Weegee photographs. I know if I check it out I will

not return it, but I take it anyway. There is a photograph

taken in front of the revival meeting in Harlem, the

children sleeping four to a bed in the bowery, the window

signs advertising horse meat, toupees and pin up girls for

sale. Looking at these old photographs, I wonder if the

reverend Al Sharpton got the videotape I sent to him. I

hope he takes the time to send me his response. In the

back of the classroom we gaze at Weegee photographs and

think of captions. I am beginning to think about ways to

record changing realities using any instrument available.

How is it possible to tell a story about something that has

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passed when nothing remains. This is what I have to write

in my first class this morning theoretical dynamics which

sounds like a physics class but is actually about the

market, with readings by Ricardo, Malthus and Schumpeter.

I am looking over what I have written and deciding not to

turn it in because it is a regressive fiction and not in

the required five-paragraph format. This was before my

father told me about the adoption. I wanted it to sound

flat and I gave up. I suppose it was a way for me to show

my solidarity with the protesters. One of the things that

bothers me right now is the feeling of not doing enough. I

turn over the sheet of looseleaf paper onto another blank

sheet and with a sharpie draw a question mark then

embellish it with some red pen contours to resemble the

titles of Schoolhouse Rock or a subway train in the late

seventies. I write my name on it and turn it in. Last

night’s Frontline was on South Africa and Angola.

Johannesburg looked like Los Angeles from the air, the same

smog and grit and high rises surrounded by sprawling

Sowetos, the same concentration of people in monoracial

clusters. My mom was watching it with me and she told me

the episode didn’t go far enough in explaining how much the

Angolan civil war became, and here she used air quotes

twice in one sentence, an issue for the anti-communists to

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exploit. She told me the UNITA forces in South Africa

operated with US support to stop the domino effect. In the

morning when I ride the city bus to school there is a man

looking down at his feet and scowling. The driver listens

to her headphones so loud that the two women sitting there

could hear every moment of the morning programming of

ninety-two point three fm above the roar of the diesel

engine. The women are singing along to Mary J. Blige Real

Love through the driver’s headphones and it looks like

there is going to be be a dance party on the RTD, but alas,

but nothing is happening. I am tired of this guy staring

so I slip into a seat and pull my shoe close to my stomach

and use it as a desk for the ride. I write on the tops of

my white converse with red permanent marker END on the left

foot and APARTHEID on the right and on the sole GIVE

CALIFORNIA BACK TO MEXICO. As far as the detournement

assignment, we are going to play it straight for now until

something from the outside contains it.

34. I am trying to read the legend identifying all the

footage on the videotape sent to me by one Jefferson Davis

in Baldwin Hills, California. He seems to have responded

to my request to go out into the community to record

incidents of police brutality. He has included a title LA

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REVOLUCION LA SOLUTION three days in new york in real time.

All of the images are in black and white and marked by a

digital display in the bottom left corner of the screen.

None of the leaves are on the trees, people are wearing

rats again, you can see the breath of the diamond merchants

all up and down Madison Avenue. Looks like Manhattan in

winter. I tell my minister of information to watch out

because next time it could be a bomb. Don’t open the

envelope, we could have a stalker on our hands. With a

name like that how do we know he is black? It’s some kind

of map, reverend, to carry us into summer. The camera as a

weapon. You know about the groups in LA raising money for

civilian patrol teams with videocameras. I stretch out

some butcher paper on the chestnut table and draw some

horizontal lines approximating the city. I add some dots

with a red pen and shade in each of the five boroughs with

a charcoal pencil labeling City Hall, Crown Heights, and

Gracie Mansion with a mechanical pencil. I draw a curve

through the East River from First Avenue to the Brooklyn

Queens Expressway. When we get to the rust colored

brutalist rectangle of one police plaza I step up to the

podium to lead the crowd in protest of the Periera case. I

call the police commissioner Lee P. Brown ‘Uncle Tom’ and

the crowd repeats back my words. I am painting TOM in red

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on a glass encased bulletin board in front of one police

plaza. They are arresting me for criminal mischief,

pulling my arms behind my back. I offer no resistance. He

cuffs me by the statue of a policeman holding a flag in his

left hand and sheltering a worried child under his left

arm. He leads me past the Bernard Rosenthal red cor-ten

steel sculpture five in one, representing the five boroughs

intertwined harmoniously. The crowd shouts PBA KKK as they

lead me to jail to book me for disturbing the peace and

vandalizing police headquarters. When I am released on

bail and return to my office there is another videotape

from Los Angeles this time from the Brotherhood Crusade. I

tell my entourage to begin working on the summons I will

present at Ben Gurion international airport to the man who

murdered Gavin Cato in Crown Heights. We cannot continue

to be railroaded out of the community we have shared since

before the emancipation proclamation. Within hours my

people have booked the flight and I am on the plane to Los

Angeles. I am standing in a fuchsia and lime-green running

suit on one of two belts conveying passengers and luggage

to terminal d and two women pass me on the horizontal

escalator to my left. I think one of them is Christina

Applegate from Married With Children, the one with the

titties as big as newborn babies popping out of her dress.

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Five hours later, when I arrive at LAX, and emerge from the

first class section of United flight four seven three into

the terminal four atrium filled with blinding sunlight, the

same two ladies are with me at the baggage carousel to pick

up two Louis Vuitton suitcases with lipstick red handles.

They look at me, hair first, then their gaze moves slowly

up and down my obese frame and I sense a look of terror on

their faces, like I am the holy ghost himself. I am not

sure if they recognize me or if I am paranoid. Someone

behind me mutters something about Don King, but she has me

confused with someone else. It happens all the time. Look

at this one with her sequined pantsuit like she is Diana

Ross, and the permed veronica with apricot pearls and a red

summer dress. I say so these are the people who voted for

Wilson and Bush and I laugh at them like I have not laughed

since Redd Foxx was still performing. My objective is to

bring the Atlantic side of the race dialogue to Los Angeles

and to represent the concerns of my community in the five

boroughs. If we are successful we can establish a

community of interest across the continent. We can isolate

the perpetrators from their victims and set the stage for a

purifying low-intensity conflict. The flight from La

Guardia seemed to take even longer this time than usual,

but it has been so long since I have visited that I do not

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remember how long the flight is supposed to last. My neck

is still sore from the turbulence from my flight last week

to South Africa and I hoped to remain in Brooklyn to get

some work done around this Gavin Cato case, where a Hassid

in a blue minivan plowed down an innocent brother, but

since hearing of the Rodney King incident, then watching it

repeatedly on the television monitors lined up in my office

under the framed photograph of Adam Clayton Powell

inscribed keep the faith, baby, then seeing another

incident in the Korean grocery, I knew that it was time for

a trip to Hollywood. When I heard governor Wilson calling

the anti-Gates movement a lynching I decided to bring the

outrage to Hollywood and make this house party bicoastal.

I talk to my assistants about the plan, wanting to get the

word out to the local black churches and businesses,

assuring them there is no Joe Klein or Jack Mathews to tear

us apart in this city. The worst we have to deal with are

Liz Smith and Mary Hart. We want to make sure to notify the

Brotherhood Crusade, the Federation of Labor, the Urban

League, the Civil Rights coalition and the campuses in the

area, USC, UCLA, wherever black people go to school, and

make sure Imam Aziz knows about this so we can get as many

men as we can. Our driver meets us at the airport, a Sikh

named Jahangir. I ask him how did you get your turbaned
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ass so far out west. He laughs and says his family has

been here for generations. I want to know what it means in

English and he tells us king of the universe, and my

minister of information laughs and says if you are king of

the universe you can drive through the barricades to

Century Plaza. Our suite is on the fourteenth floor, a

room decorated in shades of burgundy with an adjoining

office, with a view of the shopping district of Beverly

Hills. So this is how LA looks from up here. The night is

clear and the moon is yellow through the smog. Cars

deliver Hollywood executives and attorneys to power

brunches. Where is Gates’ office? My lead advisor tells

me you can’t really see Parker Center from here but it is

straight ahead. He says we’re on the Westside and it’s

downtown. What are we doing up here when his office is

down there. How are we going to get downtown on foot from

here? I told Danny to help with the parade route here none

of us knows shit about this city. My people are noticing

some resistance to my efforts from the local activists,

like I am an interloper into private affairs. On Good

Friday, we have instructed protesters to bring wood

crucifixes to the march, to coincide with my metaphor the

crucifixion of people of color. Is anyone hungry? At

Phil’s Coffee Shop, two blocks from the courthouse, we hear

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a Stylistics song on the AM radio as the fry cook flips the

ham, bacon, eggs. I am talking to a reporter from the Los

Angeles Times who waves a micro cassette recorder in my

face as I tell her about my role as an agent of change,

about the catch twenty-two of my appearance here. They are

waving a videocamera in my face. Through the fourth wall I

ask it to help me find an eight-foot crucifix. My

assistant says there is lumber in the valley and I say can

we get there tomorrow just use some hammer and nails and

get it down here or you can ask one of our contacts in the

community, go down to Mount Zion and make a deal with the

reverend. The march is on Tuesday and we would only want

to borrow it for one day. My assistant says you want an

effigy and I tell him I only want the cross. Black people

can use their imagination. I can see them now parading me

then their corrupt asses bringing in the hoses to cool us

off. They will only create another martyr and my wife

agrees we do not need another one it is a marvel so many of

us are still alive. Bring Bradley down here, I want to

know what these points are so I can construct this

situation. It is impossible to work on five things at

once. They should have known Sharpton would be here.

Through the barricade I see southern looking crackers with

Rolexes and brooks brothers suits flashing bleached smiles

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and Nancy Reagan hoes with brooches and so much makeup

pancaked on they could be Tammy Faye Bakker in a Noh play.

I am carrying a cross on my back from the Century Plaza

Hotel on two zero two five Avenue of the Stars to City Hall

on two hundred north spring street to Parker Center on

fifty North Los Angeles Street. We walk through Beverly

Hills, South Carthay, the Miracle Mile, Country Club Park,

Koreatown.

35. At the center atrium of the mall, I assist Jefferson

Davis with a performance involving the art and image of MC

Hammer, nee Stanley Burrell. He claims his inspiration is

not the ubiquitous video and song that samples Rick James,

but the rapper’s television sponsorship deals and his

Hammerman Saturday morning animated series, aimed at ten

and eleven year olds. Jefferson carries his paintings and

drawings on parchment in a cardboard envelope the size of

an LP. He has painted the likeness of the rapper on small

postage stamp-sized cards, with twenty-five cents painted

in the corner. I am still unimpressed by the idea but I

like the execution. The image of Hammer, looking out of

the stamp with an enigmatic expression of either delusion

or vanity, provokes a feeling of horror that I could not

have predicted in myself. We have already discussed our

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mutual interest in sampling and how it has replaced this

whole back catalog of music while at the same time

elevating it in awareness. We both fear that when people

hear Super Freak, they will think of U Can’t Touch This, or

when they hear Under Pressure, they will think of Ice Ice

Baby. It is asynchronous and anti-chronological, but we

both think that as long as new ideas flourish sampling

should continue. The culmination of Jefferson’s work is a

series of performance pieces to be presented at local malls

and shopping centers. My goal today is to show up in a

style reminiscent of Wendy or Lisa or Vanity or Apollonia.

Today, for our visit to the mall for a guerilla, Tiffany-

style performance, Jefferson is dressed as the subject of

his postage stamp portrait. I watch his face as it

transforms into from object to subject and back again, like

that transvestite on the Gong Show who performs Endless

Love as Diana on the left side of his body and Lionel on

the right side. He stands on a dais lip-synching to the

Hammer part of the West Coast All Stars’ We’re All in the

Same Gang. I wonder if the anti-gang violence content is

lost on the valley audience. Jefferson’s costume consists

of parachute pants and an orange lamé jacket over an

Edwardian ruffled shirt and some gold chains, which to me

looks a little new tribalism to me, like Adam Ant or

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something. I can see that he has been practicing his

running man in the mirror at home as the movements of his

legs and arms are synchronized as though he is fighting a

treadmill on the stage pulling his body forward through a

tornado. The crowd of shoppers approaches him and points

and laughs at his close approximation. A little girl in

red and yellow barrette cornrows pops and locks in front of

the stage. He finishes the performance and an infant claps

from the third floor May Company restaurant balcony and his

mother pulls him back into the highchair. Jim’s face is

glistening and some of the foundation and white mascara

smears into a muddy line on his face. The ineptitude of

the makeup adds another layer of depth to the impersonation

that would have been missing if Jefferson had attempted

this in his natural appearance. I want to ask him if it is

necessary to make his face white but I understand that he

is imitating a black man imitating a white man imitating a

black man, or something to that effect. While he’s packing

up his equipment, I buy a fleece nightgown with pink gecko

design from Claire’s that I can only wear when Mark and

Patty take me to the mountains, and some cosmetics from Pro

Beauty. On the ride home from the mall with Mark, the

latest jam from Bell Biv Devoe rattles the speakers below

my feet as fake smiles and eyes behind sunglasses greet me

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through tinted windows reflecting red lights. I call

Jefferson in Baldwin Hills as soon as I am home. In the

next performance he wants me to make myself look like Eazy-

E, but I tell him I do not know with my Jewish features if

I can pretend to be someone like that. He tells me Eazy’s

jherikurl reminds him of Hasidic peyoth, and I tell him I

am not orthodox. I congratulate him on his performance and

the reaction of the shoppers. I am full of non-sequiturs

today and ask him if he has seen Song of the South. I

can’t believe he has never heard of it, because I grew up

with it. I thought since he had a record collection that

you might have some soundtracks. That and they re-released

it in theaters a few years ago. I tell him he totally has

to see it because it’s where Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah comes from

and there are Disney-realist thrushes testifying. He asks

me how I know about this shit and I tell him I saw it with

my grandmother at the mall when it was re-released several

years ago. If I let him borrow my German copy Onkel Remus’

Wonderland I do not want him to lose it because Disney has

retracted it and it would be impossible to find another

copy. Tomorrow Jefferson will leave me this weird message

today about going to see this movie about cyborgs and how

he ran out crying. He said he didn’t know whether the

Dolby surround sound or the encouraging shouting and

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barking of the audience was louder. He says he is so

confronted with apocalypse on a daily basis he wonders if

it happened how would anyone know, because it would be a

silent implosion not a noisy explosion. Do you believe in

that shit? Before I fall asleep I write a note for myself

on a post-it reminding me to ask Circe about the Song of

the South and what it meant to her.

36. We are checking out the new vanity licence plates on

our Mercedes SL four fifty. She says what do you think it

means. I think it is pretty fucking clear what it means.

Without giving it away let us say it is a work of her

genius. We came here exactly in nineteen seventy-eight

with old photographs and my experience as an engineer, and

we have lived on Bajio Court now for seven years. Both of

us were left standing in the valley without a choice. At

that time we were certain of what would happen and our

minority population found something better here while our

country burned effigies of Carter in the street. It was a

choice between oblivion and prosperity. So as the Shah

found his asylum so did we. Enough hiding. The past is

not my concern. My work there was architectural

engineering and if new buildings in Teheran are safe from

earthquakes in the year two thousand they can thank me for

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my engineering prowess. I prefer consulting because you

can let the ideas just come to you at once. As an engineer

I grew tired of having to providing documentation for all

of my patents. My new profession is all throw away

inspirationalism. An advertising agency is working with me

now on my demographic models of consumption that have been

modeled topographically using software I helped to design.

I spend most of my time answering their questions how to

read the graph. In my presentations I spend almost no time

explaning how the graph is produced. My wife is a

homemaker and is active politically. I admire her attempts

to forge an identity with her pastel and paperboard and her

work in the local schools. She speaks Spanish with the

maid and teaches her some words in Farsi and all I can say

is como estas. We are enjoying a dinner of roast chicken

with spinach and kidney beans. My daughter says something

to me at the dinner table that bothers my wife and she

stares at her and holds her fork like she is ready to stab

someone. My wife says how can you say that when you know

where we come from and then you threaten me like that. I

say no one is threatening anyone. I missed it. She says

she is using anti-semitism at the table. My daughter says

I was only talking about her not us. I say remember why we

are here. It is only a cry for help. My wife concurs but

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adds that our daughter is unfamiliar with our family’s

history and she doesn’t understand our reasons for leaving

an Islamic republic so maybe it is true that we should not

expect more from her although we do. I ask her is her

history the same one as ours and she says yes and I say

then you should talk to her about all the things you

remember. She says do not make demands of me Alfred, if

that is really your name. She shrugs her shoulders and

says what me worry. Whatever I say and roll over have you

not ever made an off color comment she did not mean

anything. My daughter will rule the world if I have

anything to do with it and you will find me in my Mercedes

driving into the platinum triangle looking at the Persian

palaces on the market. I will drive down Hayvenhurst until

it turns into Calneva. I will find my mistress in a tent

on Mission Dump Road in Bel-Air state lands. Her birth

control methods and my low sperm count will add up to an

affair to remember. Tomorrow out of respect for the young

I will sit down with my daughter and tell her all of the

reasons for everything.

37. In private life I am what I say I am. In public life

I am what they tell me I am, someone gifted with a

preternatural political authority. If they call me the

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velvet hammer it is because I can stop you in your tracks

without raising my voice, just by a slight inclination of

my head and a narrowing of my eyes. In private I remain a

pragmatist even in the chief of staff days. There have

been no hidden solutions and no private words offered

regarding our future presence in Iraq. And while I will

always accept calls from Kissinger I no longer want to talk

about Kurdistan. The caller ID says Rand corporation and

the area code is two one three. Jim Baker, he says.

Without introduction, Henry immediately advises me on a

course of action. He says what I need to remember is that

we were there for the Kurdish since nineteen seventy-three

we needed to establish these connections and could not so

it was abandoned as a no-win policy. Read the Otis Pike

Commission report, he says, it’s all there for you,

remember how crucial is to remain aware of what is going on

there if you want to destabilize Baghdad, and these

contacts. You don’t leave history to finish itself, Jim.

You may need to finish the job, Jim, this is a perception

issue requiring a clear statement or else watch the

dividends as they recede from view if you think of this as

a compromise. Continued constabulatory involvement in the

gulf must remain consistent in its motivation you do not

want them to see backward motion. Now Henry wants to talk

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about Madrid. He says, regarding Syria, do not bother with

Damascus, their objection is not the borders it is the

existence of Israel. How do you speak to someone who

doesn’t believe you exist. What resolution will you cite?

I am not identified with the viewpoint but I urge you to

consider it. At some point you cannot consider events as

a divine chariot to ride across the celestial battlefield

or as a ferry across the styx. You cannot consider it at

all beyond what is at hand. When we sit down to pound this

out I would be surprised if someone spoke up to demand an

end to world peace. I or Henry. I am a pragmatist. He is

a realist. Who leaked the lie that we want to destabilize

Baghdad? I refuse to hold a deterministic view of the

world. People possess enough élan enough free will to

comply with US diplomacy when they know what is best for

them. We must always seek to preserve the exception at all

costs. Henry, go back to your Leviathan, Hobbes doesn’t

belong in the White House. We need a litmus test but he

would not see the red on the filter paper.

38. Finals are this morning and we are debuting our

commercial to the class. I am wearing a suit and tie and

some patent leather moccasins I stole from the Salvation

Army on Fairfax. Jessica is wearing a Sisters of Mercy t-

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shirt and a white belted black leather miniskirt I bought

at store on Melrose called Gothic Fetish. Instead of

simply showing the advertisement, we have edited in the

camcorder footage of my conversation with the police to

illustrate the shoe commercial. At the end a title says

this is the greatest picture of an elephant in the world,

except himself. We begin by showing the footage of the

intervention, where Jessica videotaped from a distance and

zoomed in, despite my harassment, fearing her own arrest.

At first I was angry that she would not intervene and I

told her that to me that proved her total passivity when it

comes to resisting law enforcement. The class discusses

the work of a student named Steven, a kid from the valley

who dresses in a mod athletic style in a Ben Sherman shirt

and khakis with Doc Martens and a red headband. He is

discussing his art dealing with the growing problem of

urban gang warfare. He employs analogies from the study of

bees, ants and other insects and animals with a tendency to

crowding behavior. A majority of his pixelvision studies

in apian assembly remind me of the sketches of naturalists

but never without colors that couldn’t have been invented

before the nineteen fifties, radioactive yellow, flashlight

pink, IBM green. He says he is also engaged in the process

of what he calls tagging certain neighbors whom he believes

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are involved in emerging Mission Hill street gangs. The

teacher today is Cheryl, a sculptor and transplant from

Hartford, Connecticut, where she turned to the spinning

wheel at age forty after two decades in the insurance

industry. Her voice comes in lilting waves as if her

diction coach is Snagglepuss or Paul Lynde. She wants us

all to know that she appreciates when we take her

assignments and turn them into something with social

relevance. Her example of social relevance is at this

moment Steven’s piece analyzing the data collected on gang

shootings within a five-block radius centered arbitrarily

downtown. In the class are a few approving looks, but

mostly dead glances, and one drooling boy falling asleep

behind Ray Bans. A woman wearing leather pants under a

gingham skirt tells the class about her decision to take

the critique of phallogocentrism one step further by

applying the paint directly with what she calls her chasm.

She calls her orgasm a crisis. She claims her work is

explicitly gendered action painting and a reclamation of

the painter as athlete. She is showing a silkscreen of a

nude, volleying Martina Navratilova in the printmaking

biennial. I stand with Jessica to present our video on the

monitor brought in from the visual aid service division.

Jessica and I stand to answer questions. Cheryl says so

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you have taken this advertisement and with the contact of

the basketball and hoop you cut to an image of Chernobyl.

You have kept the form of the commercial here except for

this and the slogan at the end of the commercial. We were

thinking about places where westerners couldn’t just decide

to go out and buy the product, because it would not be

available for whatever reason, because it is too expensive,

or it doesn’t suit our lifestyles. There is a Korean

version and a US versions of the same ad. This is the

Soviet version of this ad. She continues describing our

work to the class. She says so at the end you have the

phrase the USSR collapses and the statement about the

elephant with Ronald Reagan’s face superimposed. She asks

us why we felt the need to make variations on the US

version. Jessica says we felt the original was almost

enough. The sense that the product was unattainable was

already there, even with the use of the amazing Michael

Jordan who appears to defy gravity in the advertisement.

It is another case of the consumer being asked to identify

with a person whose salary is in the tens of millions, who

may or may not be from the same ethnic or religious

identity as the viewer. We are concerned with the question

of how messages are assimilable by certain audiences. And

in this case we used the idea that even utopian messages

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that anyone would agree with can conform to the language of

any thirty-second advertisement. She asks us if we think

the same strategies are still appropriate some twenty-five

years later. Jessica says to her, it was your assignment,

Cheryl.

39. We are both familiar with the stories of Uncle Remus

due to English class in high school, where Joel Chandler

Harris is on the reading list, along with Zora Neale

Hurston and Langston Hughes. But neither of us was

prepared for how uncomfortable this film would make us. To

read the conversation back to us, we rigged two Teddy

Ruxpins, their eyes and jaws blinking, unblinking,

clamping, unclamping.

REC/PLAY. As long as you got a laughing place. I know, it

is like a sentimentalization of the south during

reconstruction after everything burned. Oh my god the

rabbit is burning at the stake. Is Disney telling us that

in their world of anthropomorphic animals racial

discrimination doesn’t exist or is denied according to some

missing Leibnizian principle. Yes. The idea that this is

the best of all possible worlds could only have been

invented by Hollywood. The NAACP said it presented an

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idyllic master-slave relationship and that’s why it is out

of circulation. But Harriett Beecher Stowe, Showboat,

Michael Bolton, every generation can come up with something

cheese that is what kitsch is. You don’t have to defend

it. Okay here is a quote from Bobby Driscoll, who plays

the kid in the movie. I really feared people. The other

kids didn't accept me. They treated me as one apart. I

tried desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected

me, I fought back, became belligerent and cocky and was

afraid all the time. And he died young after Disney.

After they fired him. It is like he is guilty for what he

did at eight. Look at these white people making slaves

raise their children. And the myth of the benevolent

slave, there only to entertain these children, would be a

disgrace if it wasn’t so beautiful. Are you serious that

is racist. Fuck you, Jefferson. Have you talked to your

sister since she left? Circe? She calls every now and

then, but I’m usually out of the house or something. Dad

says she seems kind of overextended with all the

responsibilities of being an observer, taking her video

camera all around Haiti and stuff. It sounds like they

want her to document any unexpected changes with a Betacam,

but she makes it sound like she knows what is going to

happen, that it’s all scripted. Some kind of voodoo shit.

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Maybe later she will add songs and animation and release it

to an audience of children and nostalgic southern whites.

It’s not that kind of movie. Song of the South is so wrong

that it makes me think about aproaching history as a math

problem solvable by a computer, the way Leibniz and Disney

would have wanted, so you could stop any more

interpretations, put a cap on the amount of source

material. But as time passes you would have to incorporate

the new into the program, new headlines and narratives.

Talk to Eckert and get back to me. I have a hard time

believing in the discrete and discontinuous.

40. We are escaping Los Angeles for a few days. I arrive

in New York on monday unaccustomed to the smell of a

garbage strike. In the car to the Lincoln Center I read in

the Post about the latest arrest of Al Sharpton for

protesting the choking death of a car thief. We are

esorted by a security officer past the circular fountain

through the plaza into a travertine international modernist

structure. We are here tonight as classical music fans and

not as the chief of police and his wife. We are seated in

an enclosed box off the balcony at Lincoln Center. We are

listening to each of the seven parts of Eines Deutsches

Requiem , Brahms’ opus forty-five. We hear the words of

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Martin Luther as we follow the English translation in the

program. My wife and I have been admirers of Brahms since

we heard his music for the first time at a concert at the

Hollywood Bowl after the riots in Watts, before the Sylmar

earthquake. The city paid for a free concert featuring

Nelson Riddle conducting the second symphony. Mr. Riddle

composed a vocal part to be performed at the ceremony by

four female singers, two altos and two vestal sopranos

borrowed from the cast of the Lawrence Welk show. This was

in nineteen sixty-six, as the city congratulated itself

with the encouragement of Mayor Yorty on a job well done.

We have survived the turmoil of the last year and we are

stronger than we have ever been, the mayor announced to a

crowd of thousands, mostly white except for the notable

inclusion of three black officers in the front row

including the current mayor. Yorty dedicated the

performance of the second to the men of the Los Angeles

Police Department, who have responded to the call to serve

and protect in some of the city’s darkest hours. The two

of us smiled proudly in the crowd of three-thousand in the

Cahuenga Pass, as the Hollywood Freeway hissed from the

East over Whitley Heights and Riddle conducted the

orchestra, complete with apocryphal tubas and bongos. The

performance tonight, more in keeping with the exclusive

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Manhattan crowd arriving in black and white, will be a

performance of a different piece, Eines Dutsches Requiem,

one I have not heard before to my knowledge, although my

wife has been listening to a recording on that new sound-

reproduction technology the compact disc player, thank God

for its fidelity. She listens to this requiem in our new

Volvo station wagon, whenever she drives long distances on

the freeway to meet me at the office, or to pick up our son

from outpatient care in the valley, far away from our house

in Brentwood three miles from the mayor in Windsor Gardens.

No one recognizes me here, and after the reserved applause,

we are ushered crosstown to first avenue. I arrive at Carl

Schurz park where the guards are expecting me, one of them

telling me how proud he is to meet me. Dinkins finds me at

the door and I am shocked that he is black. Who among us

knew? He gives me a tour of the first floor, with its

polished surfaces, chrome vertical louvers, and mirrored

polished stainless steel, installed by Ed Koch. The record

player plays Don Giovanni, act one, vendetta ti chieggio,

la chiede il tuo cor. We talk about trust in authority. I

tell him it is my belief that trust comes with obeying the

law and people know freedom is about the willingness of

every single human being to cede to lawful authority a

great deal of discretion about what you do. He says it is

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always the responsibility of my officers to create that

trust by themselves upholding that law through their own

obedience, making that adherence to the law visible to the

public through outreach to communities that are the hardest

hit by crime and violence. He says Chief Gates, I believe

in a New York where people can go about their business

without fear. I don’t want people to be afraid of coming

here anymore this city needs to pay its way again in the

world, with all due respect to Los Angeles, this is the

greatest city in the world, and I do not know why anyone

would not want to live here. When I get to the car from

the mansion on the back seat there is an effigy molded from

gravel and coated with a transparent waxy substance. I

grab the hand of my wife and we dart out of the town car

pronto. I tell my NYPD detail to immediately rid this from

my view and please do so with care because it may explode.

Tomorrow I will return to my office via Delta business

class and look again at my framed newspaper clipping from

when we caught Bianchi and Buono. People don’t remember

how tense it was in seventy-seven. We had bodies in the

hills. They never ask me about Yolanda Washington only the

incident at thirty-ninth and Dalton. I want to say to them

you people should consider yourselves damn lucky to have

made it this far. Take me to La Guardia it is time to go

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home. The cab driver has the radio on and it’s playing

Stevie Wonder’s Living In The City. Would you please turn

it off, sehr völkisch.

41. Lassen sie noch Dallas kommen. I am touching the Cape

Cod stones surrounding the tax-payer subsidized natural gas

pipe in Arlington feeding the eternal flame of memory. I

read a statement from Kennedy’s inaugural address let all

our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose

aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas and let

every other power know that this hemisphere intends to

remain the master of its own house. There is something to

what this guy was saying that resonates with what we are

trying to do thirty years later, suggesting he may still be

alive under there. My respect is bipartisan and I do not

mind paying for this instead of the Rodney King boondoggle.

The cultural elite is here to watch me pay tribute to

someone who by all rights is a hero of democracy promotion

and the Roosevelt corrolary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Although I speak for the elephant, I recall his sabre

rattle reached me in my early days in Ohio. This event

today is ritual at its most orchestrated and in my lofty

position I do what I am told not because it is my custom,

but because I am so afraid. Everything I touch turns to

shreedded paper. The idea is to incorporate and evaporate

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everything I read from his inaugural such as these repeated

pledges condemning poverty, and alternately praising and

doubting our military prowess. In the interest of respect

we will ignore politics for the day, although we disagree

with some of the qualifications. Someone is carrying a

candle and walking like he is at the basilica of Saint

Peter in solitude with head tucked in robe. He or she

places the candle on the edge of the iron rail where the

kneelers would be, if we had not already blockaded them.

The cameras come into view and I emerge from the motorcade

with a sincere wave, something to prove I am just a person

like you wherever you are in your Napa Valley winery or

your Beverly Hills Esplanade or your New Orleans veranda or

on your golf course in Palo Alto. There is a hidden link

between now and then and I will portray it for the cameras

and the people of this beautiful country. One example I

always carry with me is the recent victory in the Persian

Gulf where we demonstrated for eternity our thunder is

behind our purpose or the other way around. There is a

group of reporters calling out to me mister Vice President

how do you feel about Murphy Brown’s response to your

statements. I tell them politely that this is a photo op

strictly visual and there will be no questions answered

today, besides it is clear to me that this woman is only a

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television character and therefore has no more political

resonance. This one photographer shouts how does it feel

to have a tomato lobbed at your head in Brookline,

Massachussetts, Mister Quayle. My hairdresser tells me do

not turn to the left to greet them there is too much

humidity today. I stand staring straight ahead at the

eternal flame. Someone throws a yam at my head and it

misses, but I see it floating in the air like an ambivalent

turd in a septic tank until it splatters on a chestnut tree

to the east of the gravesite. The air is like hot baby oil

around my head and floating around it are terry cloth

sculptures of the letter e. To me this is the one thing I

want to remove because of all the trouble I have found. If

you remove it they will respect you. Marilyn stands next

to me in a salmon dress and jacket and a black handkerchief

spotted with palinurus barbarae. My wife says the e will

never delete politically and we should forget about it. In

Korea there is a brand of suppositories called white

doctor. You can think of me as the white doctor, because I

am always sterilized and prepared to tackle your concerns

health wise or business or if something is bothering you.

My teachers in law school always gave me high marks for

leadership capability. I do not care about network

television or the Washington Post and anyone from the

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liberal establishment to turn me into another Spiro Agnew.

If you show me something I will point at it and say this is

it this is what it is. I only care about my family at this

moment surrounded by a memorial to an assassination victim.

Tomorrow I will go to Dallas where the air is dry and warm

and I can make a left turn if that is what I want to do.

42. I am propped up in the south west bedroom of my dacha

in Foros. Thirty two of my guards stand at the door with

machine guns announcing times of trouble. Yuri Plekhanov

is here, the head of the state security guard. In comes

Valery Boldin, my chief of staff, to tell me to transfer

power to Gennady Yanayev. You and those who sent you are

adventurists tell it to those who sent you you will get

nothing from me. I refuse to declare a state of emergency

for Yeltsin and the Russian Federation to exploit for

political gain. They will use the declaration to excuse

themselves in the eye of the republic for what they

euphemistically call restoring order. Valery wants the

code to open the nuclear briefcase. They tie me up against

the bed and strap a towel around my mouth until I signal

with my eyes that I am ready to provide the ten digits.

There are only a handful of scientists who may be able to

crack the code. What Valery does not know is that his is
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not the same as mine, and even if he can open the briefcase

he does not have the deployment code. It is the notion of

stealing the ultimate authority that motivates these goons,

not the good of the people. There is no way they will

assist in a coup attempt because they are all loyal to me

and want to see me returned to Moscow safely. If you want

to take the valise then take it. See what I can do as the

leader of my country while tied up against Crimean

bedposts. Now I fear for the life of my family. We are

nearing seventy two hours. My daugher found a secret room

where she can see their satellite connection throught the

keyhole. My ouster on BBC radio liberty and voice of

America telling the crowds he stands for a new era. There

are news reports my family brings, such as the one a new

matryoshka doll with my replacement, a man with a question

mark for a face holding my head in his hands. There is

access to the kitchen. I have asked my daughter to bring

the camcorder we keep in case of emergency. We will set

the camera on a tripod and record my speech to the Soviet

people asking them to reject this illegitimate coup. I

tell them the state of emergency declared is an excuse to

create a legal civil war and they must only look to this

videotape to see that I am not ill and tired. This is the

worst holiday since the second five year plan, when we ate
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rats and insects to survive when Stalin dumped the grain to

balance the books. The baths are closed prematurely for

the autumn. I cannot swim in the Black Sea because I am

coughing and my doctor tells me I may be allergic to the

microalgae. The idea of swimming in the sea is a farce.

We cannot broadcast this or Gennady and his gang will

immediately retaliate. We only have a radio, papa, my

daughter says. See if it can transmit someone must be able

to hear me. You shall not bury us and we shall not bury

you. We tell you in the friendliest terms possible we are

planning no funerals, yours or ours. Please dismiss the

cossacks and let them take what they need and go.

43. Today I am pleased with myself for another successful

attempt to accommodate my harp to contemporary music, a

move my instructor deems false-classicist. It would be

nice for people to leave their connotations of seraphim and

succubim aside for a moment and move with me into the

latter days of the twentieth century, but I know that in

competition there are only certain pieces the judges would

ever accept. It is well known that unlike Star Search, if

you choose a contemporary selection you will never win. We

just have to vary it so that people think it is Schubert,

but we’ve been listening to the Ciccone Youth album and Pat
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Magee doing Krapp’s Last Tape and Harry Partch a lot these

days. Jefferson has this thing for Boulez but I can’t get

into him. We’ve been watching Secret Honor and Song of the

South on VHS. We are going to set up a booth and play it

as the sample over our own conversations, possibly with the

Teddy Ruxpin. Our working title is Checking A New Routine:

The Manner of Sinking Inscribed To Dealers In Dark

Paintings.

REC/PLAY: Listen, I transcribed the melody from the

keyboard solo in Ohio Players Funky Worm into harp. Do you

want to hear it? Sounds regal. You could have ceremonial

violins like in those old Nat King Cole Johnny Mathis Sam

Cooke records. They never needed that, he was better off

at Specialty, and you know I can’t do the whole arrangement

with this equipment only one track. Peter Uberoff gave

this to me after the Olympic games, it’s a multi-track

recording device you put the cassette here. You can almost

see the queen marching in and waving when I play Funky Worm

on the harp. You know I am trying to get away from that

with this instrument. You have to pick up on it as a

precise melody off the slide because you cannot control the

sustain of the harp making legato impossible. But you want

to make it as much like Purcell and Elgar as you can. Have

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you heard that new song on the radio that samples it. What

doesn’t rip off the Ohio Players? You want it to sound

like something John Dolphin would play on KGJF 1230 AM. My

father has all these reel-to-reels of it, all this stuff

from labels no one remembers, like Dooto, Swingtime, Class,

Louisiana, Recorded in Hollywood, Modern, Derby, Imperial,

Cash, Ebb, RPM. What happened to your hair today?

Distressed it with the iron to give it a half-crimped look.

Why are you asking me look at yourself. Don’t you want me

to look like one of Vanity 6? Sure you can’t buy that at

Gelson’s. You just don’t know where to look. Whatever,

you are so glib about the destruction of my follicles. It

is like wearing those parachute pants you made for the

Hammer performance in public like you do. I am anti-

fashion.

STOP. This inspiration from Disney is out of control and I

find myself thinking about the Hall of Presidents for

inspiration. It is early in the morning and after reading

something about Emil Post I am thinking of myself inside

the Turing machine. I am within a two-way infinite

sequence of boxes. I move and work in this symbol space

but can only work in one box at a time. The parameters

within each box are yes and no, one and zero, time and
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space. Somehow I have to decide and continue to move

forward into new boxes. We meet at the edge of the

reservoir, with picnic lunches of egg and tuna salad, a few

small rounds of gouda cheese in red wax, and two apples. I

have driven him for almost thirty minutes on the freeway

after objecting to his plan to drive away from the center

of town toward the ocean and away from the sunset. I merge

into traffic and remove my right hand from the wheel to

inch up the pink shoulder-strap over my white tank top

because it’s hot and look at him and say take me somewhere

around where you live. We drive through the streets of

Baldwin Hills, with their mission and spanish colonial

revival architecture, and the newer pieces where buildings

strain against their potential interpreters, guarding their

spires in parentheses. There are some people flying kites

at Ladero Park and I wave to one of the children as we rest

at the La Brea stop and continue into the flatlands under

the Harbor Freeway. Jefferson turns right on broadway and

points to an abandoned structure with a steeple crowned by

an unfinished wood crucifix and a steeple with a rooster

weathervane.

REC/PLAY. That’s where the Temple of Islam was. My dad

still knows Thomas X. Before he became a contractor he

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read more, like Sex and Race and The Miseducation of the

Negro. He used to pray with him and the in the room in the

basement but he realized he was more interested in sufist

cosmology. It doesn’t look like a mosque anymore. That’s

because it was secret then and it is a church now. How do

you have a secret place of worship. When you are under

siege. Like in Chinatown, they have those um. Opium dens.

No, not that where people go to gamble. Look there’s a

byzantine spider. No, there, on the side of the building.

Where. See, in the concrete. It’s all two-dimensional

here. Have you heard of this book the end of history? No.

He argues that history ended after the US victory in the

Cold War, with Reagan, that societies will only change to

become, behave more like the US in the future. I did not

ask. This is the professor I told you about who calls

Mexico a vast suburb of El Paso. I think that was ironic.

He says a truly cyclical history is possible only when a

given period doesn’t leave an imprint on those that follow.

Fucking reactionary bullshit. A way to trap us all in the

present. So much for abstract negative concrete. So you

actually read Calvin’s handouts. How did we got to Marx to

Hegel to begin with. Before the end. I don’t know wasn’t

it a rejection of romanticism, the collective against the

bourgeois individualist, a belief in collective

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consciousness. But the idealists never believed in that.

Belief in consciousness of any kind, the difference between

American and soviet civil engineers, I do not know. What

does your grandfather say? I can understand the whole

collapse of metanarratives thing but I can’t read anything

my grandfather wrote. They will continue to claim

everything is over then when they try to look at the

present they will claim a lack of historical perspective.

What about this Turing machine we’re building? If we give

it the appropriate parameters it should be forced to answer

historical questions. With what it has in storage it can

appropriate and reconfigure to present an answer to that

question. The answers will always satisfy because the

device will possess mechanomorphic authority, like Great

Moments With Mister Lincoln. We can dress it up any way we

want.

STOP. Last night my grandmother called me to tell me she

dreamed of a bird the green translucent color of a

caterpillar, with large black orbs as eyes. As in the

animated programs she watched on television as a child, the

bird spoke to her in Prussian accented German, bearing no

small resemblance to the language of her grandmother. In a

way similar to the viewer of a film recalling his or her

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experience, nothing more than a pentangle emerged on the

ivory carpet. That’s her, with the karaoke machine,

chevlon eyespot lining her purse in tubes. She says to me,

will you play the brahms piece for your grandmother when

she comes, the one you’ve been working on for your

audition. So I bring out the harp and I put on my blonde

wig to look like the blue angel. Selig sind, die da Leid

tragen, Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras; Herr, lehre

doch mich Wie lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen. Ihr habt nun

Traurigkeit. Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt

Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben. I reprise

in English, this time more like Madeline Kahn borscht belt

and burlesque this time. Blessed are the dead which die in

the Lord, Blessed are they that mourn, For all flesh is as

grass, Lord, make me to know mine end. How lovely is thy

dwelling place. And ye now therefore have sorrow for here

have we no continuing city. Schoen , Jessica, she says.

She is laughing, because she knew Dietrich through Brecht

who knew Goldwyn and Selznick. I wonder how my grandmother

can bear to listen to lieder, Denn wir haben hie keine

bleibende Statt, Destry rides again.

44. I am sitting next to a Toussaint L’Ouverture mural in

an outdoor cafe with Jean-Jacques. I have attempted, most

notably in my interview with Princeton before my selection

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by the committee, to harbor an enthusiastic curiosity and

acceptance of Haitian customs and beliefs, but until now,

my interest in local religion has not matched my interest

in local politics. This morning I saw a faded mural of

Abbe Gregoire in primary colors. I will need to work on

exhibiting some of that in my interactions with the Lavalas

party representatives by asking more questions about what I

see. He tells me not to look too closely at corpses. Even

as I reassert my fidelity to his cause, I have to doubt a

person who believes that his President has the power to

turn at will into a fang-baring canine although if you

believe the bible literally that cannot be out of the

question. I thought his emblem was a rooster, as painted

in murals across the city so why would you believe he would

turn into a dog. If you go with the logic of superstition

then he would have to turn into a rooster. if it is

possible that he is only employing a metaphor whose meaning

is lost across cultures. Certainly there must be somewhere

in the world where people believe transmogrification is

possible. Some old belief system where the tranfer of

information is equivalent to mutation. I know nothing.

All I can do is listen to what he says to me and try to

write as much of it down as I can and continue to roll the

Betacam and hope its planned obsolescence has already

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occurred. I am waiting for the subject of the President as

chimera to come up again to convince myself I heard it

correctly the first time. I use the Betacam for something

that I can use later as the introduction of whatever

happens next in the plan of events. Jean-Jacques says when

the time comes for the macoutes, Aristide will not

surrender his faith in the liberation and redemption of the

people, and we will not allow them to bloody the palace.

We will be there and you will videotape these occurrences

as they happen and there will never be any doubt for the

world again, they will know the events occurred as they

occurred, there will be no question of guilt or evidence.

Some say Aristide has turned into a dog, some say a

rooster. We are assured that a transformation will occur.

You have seen Caravaggio or Durer you are well educated at

Princeton, you know the New Testament. I tell him I know

little about the new testament, but my grandmother once

staged a photograph of herself as a doubting Thomas as

Pancho Villa at Fort Bliss. He says good so you are likely

to know what I am talking about. Si je ne vois dans ses

mains la marque des clous, et si je ne mets mon doigt dans

la marque des clous, et si je ne mets ma main dans son

côté, je ne croirai point. I’ve seen the Dürer it is in

Los Angeles, but I do not understand. He says you want to

 216

be careful about what you say about any of this, you don’t

want anyone to know your opinions, you don’t want anyone to

see your lack of belief in what they are promising you, if

indeed you think it is all a joke. We both laugh as if the

knowledge of the Raoul Cedras coup somehow will prevent its

occurence. He makes some joke in French about fortune

tellers but I could not understand the punchline. We are

walking together across the unpaved road past an outhouse

decorated with a pink crustacean exoskeleton. There is a

two-story mud and brick church up ahead. As Jean-Jacques

talks to me about the coming coup attempt, the duvalierists

point uzi submachine guns and Galil assault rifles at

demonstrators in the Gonaives and Port-au-Prince slums.

This is the area of the city that we see most on the news

because of the massive murder rates. The police march

through the streets in their sleek blue uniforms with white

equestrian hats, firing at unarmed inhabitants, most

supporters of Aristide. I wouldn’t walk here alone. In

panic, I call my mother and younger sister telling them

there is no way for me to understand what it is they want

me to do here. If they are afraid of changes in the

footage, and they are so distrustful of Americans, then why

are they asking me to be the custodian of this future

event. I do not know why they don’t want someone on the

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inside of their organizational structure. I tell my mother

how much like Miami Beach it is here and wonder if she can

sense the sarcasm in my voice, hoarse from too many bootleg

Philip Morrises. I am going to start shopping this Beta

videotape around to see if anyone is convinced. I tell my

mother I cannot look at the videotape right now.

45. On the way into the building directly from the

helicopter to the roof to the staircase I notice a stain on

my right collar under the cufflink. At this point there is

nothing that I can do except make sure not to raise my hand

so they can see my veins under the sleeve of my jacket. On

my way down the stairs to the elevator a reporter joins us

and waves his boom microphone over my head as we enter the

elevator. I think he will stay behind because the mike

doesn’t fit inside, but an assistant takes the sound and he

mixes us in. The secret service officer tells him there

are no reporters allowed inside this wing of the building

and he should wait and talk to Marlin waiting for us behind

the curtain when the door opens. I tell him we were

shooting for a Santa Claus entrance here straight down the

chimney and if he wouldn’t mind please no tape recorders

during our descent. If Marlin wants to go over this later

short hand should be appropriate but if he has a problem

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with the syntax or semantics then he can write it for me

next time. Or we can get the transcript from the secretary

if he wants to do it that way. The reporter says to me Mr.

Bush would you want the deferment if Israel was no longer

constructing housing in the illegal settlements. I tell

him he should wait until the end of my speech but that off

the record. Our settlement policy is well known and it is

not going to change, but my presence here is about more

than my negotiations with Shamir. It is about the people

of America, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And I must do a

better job of convincing people here and in Israel that we

are correct on our stance against the settlements, but that

we are ultimately supportive of Israel and its goals in the

future. We are inextricably linked. Give peace a chance

for one hundred and twenty days, we’ll repeal this

resolution, and we will see them in Madrid. The chime

rings and the elevator doors open to reveal the

bespectacled bulldog face of Marlin Fitzwater. I walk into

the General Assembly behind my four men business suits and

Perez de Cuellar. No one here can promise that today’s

borders will remain fixed for all time. But we must strive

to ensure the peaceful, negotiated settlement of border

disputes. We also must promote the cause of international

harmony by addressing. Here is where I have to sneeze and

 219

cannot hold it back, so I take out a handkerchief to muffle

the sound, and say excuse me. By addressing old feuds. We

should take seriously the charter’s pledge to practice

tolerance and live together in peace with one another as

good neighbors. UN General Assembly resolution three-

thousand seventy-nine mocks this pledge and the principles

upon which the UN was founded. And I call now for its

repeal. Zionism is not a policy. It is the idea that led

to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the

State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the

intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget

the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed,

throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to

reject Israel itself. The body cannot claim to seek peace

and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist. By

repealing this resolution unconditionally, the UN will

enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.

The General Assembly, recalling its resolution X

proclaiming the UN declaration on the elimination of all

forms of racial discrimination, and in particular its

affirmation that any doctrine of racial differentiation or

superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable,

socially unjust and dangerous and its expression of alarm

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at the manifestations of racial discrimination still in

evidence in some areas of the world, some of which are

imposed by certain governments by means of legislative,

administrative, or other measures, recalling also that, in

its resolution X, the General Assembly condemned, inter

alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and

Zionism, taking note of the Declaration of Mexico on the

Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and

Peace, which promulgated the principle that “international

co-operation and peace require the achievement of national

liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism

and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid

and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the

recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to

self-determination, taking note also of resolution X, which

considered that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and

the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a

common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the

same racist structure and being organically linked in their

policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of

the human being, determines that Zionism is a form of

racism and racial discrimination.

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46. I am drinking a stiff Cuba libre on a plane chartered

by Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly from Johannesburg to

Luanda. I am reading in the International Herald Tribune

qualifications about what they are calling my limited

success. There is a photo of de Klerk from el pais

visiting the Church of the Precious Blood and breaking

bread and breaking because he knows it is the end of an era

and he will resign soon. The Americans believe that any

withdrawal is a failure without total victory. In fact, we

are turning the page and in another twenty years when all

of this is over you will look back to this page as the

first in a new volume. We have been moving away from a

Civil War that has continued for more than twenty years in

the African subcontinent and claimed countless lives. They

tell me today it is over, it is the end and I am not one to

disagree. I am thinking of the other night when I spoke to

the African National Congress and Mandela was there and he

congratulated him on the end of the war. If it is the end

of the communist party, there is no longer an enemy to

fight, only the opportunity to consolidate political power,

negotiate treaties, and eliminate protections. Perhaps we

never achieved a victory to unite the world but now we no

longer have to listen to a discussion from Pretoria about

the white body count. I listen to the news report on the

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headphones plugged into the simulated suede plastic

console. I still control half of the hinterland, diamond

and gold fields, Benguela railway, all still under my

control. I find myself in a position between fences with

an illusion of total mobility and clemency from the western

powers. When we began the National Union for the Total

Independence of Angola, Reagan and Bush wanted to provide a

constructive engagement against international socialism.

We have defeated the armed struggle only to institute a

state-planned economy. I fly above a landscape united by a

bittersweet victory. I am squirting Kraft Cheese Whiz onto

a Ritz cracker through an aeresol can with a tip autoclaved

in Portugal. One of my security announces a phone call but

my mouth is full of cheese and so I push the phone away

with a napkin in my fist. Now I am calling home speaking

in Kongo. Through the window with ten minutes counting

before we land, you can see the aerial view of my new suite

in the growing UNITA compound. I put on my sunglasses and

lift the shade to see the city below, its huts and shanties

surrounded by dumps and exploded refineries, their spray

painted exterior aluminum ringed by rust. And then guess

who calls me from Johannesburg as if there is enough

unfinished business to retain my phone number. Without

absurdity let it be seen as voluntary. I will be murdered

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ten years from now in a skirmish with Angolan Armed Forces,

South African mercenaries and Israeli special forces along

Moxico riverbanks.

47. I rest my hand on her shoulder and ask her to look

after him he’s with the delivery. I am talking to

Deukmeijian about accomodating civil religious and sexually

orientated difference in my gubernatorial duties. He says

you cannot please everyone you can only do the best you can

do, keep your friends close and your friends closer, and

other clichés. I am starting to wonder how he was elected

twice to the Governorship, and what is more, why anyone

would ever accuse me of an inability to fill the shoes of

the predecessor. The idea echoed by the Duke that I am not

enough of a conservative is a lie. The work I do is as

much a fulfillment of obligation as anything our good boys

and girls at Camp David have done preserving our interests

in the Middle East. My reaction to the former governor is

to keep my opinions to myself for the moment. He says

something about branding and proposition eighty-one and the

call of the many silenced but this does not help me and

only reminds me of Richard Nixon who I met a few times at

Bohemian Grove and still think is a real nice fellow. I am

staring at a package addressed to me but without the

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customary address of the honorable. In crayon it says Mr.

Wilson like I am the neighbor from Dennis the Menace. What

the children can tell me I am at least willing to consider

so I keep the package on my desk despite a strange odor

emerging through the envelope. I want to at least appear

to listen to the children and that is why we have taken so

many chances with scheduling appearances at underperforming

schools. Children can see the future whereas we are stuck

predicting it. I am opposed to discrimination of any kind.

The question isn’t simple though. The question is not

whether or not there should or should not be

discrimination. The question is, if you acknowledge that

fact as I do how do you go about affording a remedy that

doesn’t impose an undue burden on those on whom I rely for

my base of support. They have been trying to get at me

through Otto for years may he rest in peace the greatest

assistant and colleague any politician could hope for.

There are those like Barbara Albey who want to relive old

vendettas from my days at the California Public Assembly.

They accuse me of being somehow less than a red blooded

American male. Let me put it this way, when you begin to

attack a dead man you lose all credibility. Or when you

use a dead man to attack anyone by proxy when that man is a

sexual minority, then you do not deserve a political future

 225

end of story. As far as my office come on people I do not

know if there is anybody to out and if there is I would say

that the threat is contemptible. I really regard that as

an outrageous invasion of privacy. But even if that were

not the case it would violate my own feelings about it.

One of the interns in the Capitol has photocopied an

article from todays Bee and marked it FYI, prescient. It

is an article about a British scientist at a European

organization for nuclear research. He has invented a new

way for computers to communicate. The utopian exuberance

makes it sound almost as if computers will act autonomously

free of human agency and that governments will fall and

people will cease to exist as discrete entities. I mark

some sentences with a highlighter and put in an envelope

addressed to my broker. There will be an age with free

access followed by diminionization of bytes. The

government and technology firms will encourage new forms of

loss insurance to cover the virtual space. Personal and

surveillance cameras will be as commonplace as used car

dealerships in the City of Industry. Fiber optic

communication will transform identity into a null value.

Reincarnation will be as obvious as changing a diaper.

 226

48. I am going through the mail, the Price Waterhouse Ed

MacMahon letters, the student loan debt receipts when I get

this I got a letter from the Supreme Court the other day

asking me to come in for jury duty over the hill. It tells

me that if I chuck it into the fire they will come after me

asking for fifteen hundred dollars. At first I was like

there is no way I am driving to Crenshaw and one-hundred

eighty-fifth to be on this jury at the Compton Courthouse.

It is a reconstruction of the Pottawattamie Courthouse,

Council Bluffs, Iowa but plunked down on Compton Boulevard.

How is that for inspiration? I asked my coworkers at

crocker and they told me that they have underground parking

with attendants so it should be okay. I said to them what

about drive-bys. They told me to always take the freeways.

My rejoinder is what if I have to get off the freeway. See

you can’t answer that and I would like to see you try.

They sit me in a box between a man eating a pomegranate and

a woman in a flannel suit with a mullet. Deputy District

Attorney Roxanne Carvajal interrogates Ismail Ali and

Lakesha Combs in front of the jury, asking for the

indictment of the Korean grocer. She is a fixture on the

nightly news on the surveillance tape loop. When they

asked me if I had heard of whatshername, I told them I

think I ate that last night at Ya Zhou Golden City

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restaurant incorporated last night after Night Tracks and

they were like, fine, and checked their checkmarks and

initialed their initials. I wanted to tell them I know

Michael Milken and I understand the term miscarriage of

justice, boo-yah. Carvajal waves her hands like Clarence

Darrow and emotes to the courtroom. She says a seven-year

old child witnessed what you are about to see. Tonight he

will relive this experience, over and over again. The man

next to me says, are you serious, and then you are going to

call her as a whiteness? He offers me a Wheat Thin and I

tell him no, thanks, I do not care for crackers. I try not

to look at the other jurors. There is this one guy who is

a sanitation engineer they brought in from Arleta who looks

at all of us to kind of validate his own opinion.

Everytime there is significant testimony or the prosecution

rests on a crucial moment, like Soon Ja Du admitting to not

seeing a weapon, he’ll look over at me like Archie Bunker

and nod and raise his eyebrows. At first I was concerned

that he was flirting with me, but then I talked to the

provost after the trial and he said he was off the record

but it is about justice not phone numbers and everyone

should understand this. Ali says this is not television.

This is not the movies. You have to brace yourself because

you will see Latasha killed. In the closing arguments of

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the case a week later Carvajal reminds the jurors the

killing was an act of gross negligence. She knows

according to her testimony that all she has to do is pick

the gun up, shake it and it goes off. She doesn’t know how

to use a gun, yet she takes it out of the holster and

points it at Latasha. She knows that is how it goes off.

If you shoot someone without provocation you get sixteen

years. Judge Karlin will have to work it out according the

guidelines but I think we can all agree.

49. I explained to her I am not an expatriate I was born

in Brooklyn, went to Columbia and I am on the payroll of

the Herald but I also freelance. The latest appraisal of

my role in the department comes from the chief, who faxes

me a recommendation referring to me as a great fabricator.

After years of cutting newsreel footage into fake

documentaries for MTV I am now looking for some way to

present the primary sources with a minimum of intervention.

No more of this leaving some things out to incude others.

It should all be there in plain sight like the flamingo

that flew into my windshield last week. I have asked my

attorney to file the claim about the beak damage. I am

calling this young woman who is visiting the country of my

grandfather from some Ivy League university, where she pays

 229

thousands of dollars to learn about multiculturalism,

pluralism, corporate finance and democracy. My contact at

Lavalas party headquarters tells me she is out of her

element, and in response to my last mailing of story ideas

he enclosed some close range shots of her walking the

streets of Port-au-Prince with a basket like little red

riding hood. And her name is Circe, how is that for hippie

travesty. Poor girl should change her name to Squeaky

Fromme. Last night she called me as I was getting into the

shower with the news about the coup. I was totally blitzed

and ended up talking to him for an hour in briefs with the

water running, staring at my perfect body in the frosted

bathroom window from my office tower rising above the

Biscayne Bay aquatic preserve. She starts telling me about

the coup, and about some assignment through the Lavalas

party that she couldn’t resist. She says she has recorded

his morphogenesis. My first response was one of great

sorrow, that the hope of democracy has been vanquished

again in Haiti. My second response was to express my

concern for Aristide’s well-being, and ask whether he

needed some contacts to secure another Miami sabbatical.

As long as I haven’t heard anything I feel relatively

assured things are progressing and the coup will reverse

itself. I said goodbye after offering platitudes about

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history repeating itself, and the coup in the USSR this

august, how that seems to be working out. And then I told

her come to Miami it is close and we’ve got the best babes

with dream tits. I pick up the phone and say hello Circe

it’s Ben Dupuy from BCFO calling about the videotape. We

received word, can’t tell you how, that this is something

unprecedented. She is on to my game and already has a

price in her head so I try to tease it out of her. She

tells me she won’t settle for any thing under one hundred

thousand. I ask her to explain some of her reasons for

making this video, hoping she will reveal some of its

content. As she intones about its intrinsic value and

monetary worth I realize she must have studied marketing as

well as political science, particularly when she refers to

our conversation as this negotiation. We share an inside

laugh approximating the distance between capitalism and

democratic governance. At this point I am going on and on

about my credentials so she understands this tape will be

in private hands and will never be used by any government

authorities or international operations to force her return

to the US under official scrutiny. I want to make clear

the potential result of such a sale. The most extreme

thing that could happen would be to see portions of it on

television within certain regions, probably not here unless

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the US were to invade immediately and reverse the coup. I

tell her I am sorry Circe all I could guarantee to you is

that the video will not pass into the hands of any entity

that you have not already contractually approved. We do

not concern ourselves with politics so you need not worry

that we would approve any use of the tape for the purposes

of one army or political party. Then she interrupts me to

suggest its use as grey propaganda. She wants to know if I

have any connections to the State department. Who does

this shapeshifting white bitch think she is? She is

fortunate that no one in Haiti can afford phone

surveillance equipment. I say sweet thing sit tight if you

have there what you say you have then you have nothing to

worry about.

50. They drive me to from San Francisco airport to the

Stanford University Centennial. I am wearing a black

academic robe and purple sash and behind me is the seal of

the university. Already the protesters amass in the front

rows, carrying with them their tomatoes, bananas, cream

pies, as I am clearing my throat and climbing the stairs to

the platform. A pie flies over the audience into an

elephant tree in an emerald field of immaculate grass

interrupted by sprinklers. I am telling the usher at the

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back entrance that he has to do something about the crowd,

some kind of barricade. I ask him if anyone has any

information about this man from Oxnard who they found

scouting the Simi Valley hillsides planning to kill Bush at

the dedication of the Reagan library and scouting for

jurors at the Rodney King trial. The man was found with a

cache of twelve fully automatic weapons incliding an uzi

submachine gun and AK forty-seven assault rifles handguns

and twenty seven thousand rounds of ammunition. I need to

know if this is risky and if we need to bring more people

in here. He tells me he doesn’t know he just works here

and that the majority of the crowd are Stanford students.

I eye the crowd from behind a tarpaulin draped across a

bowed iron frame. They followed me from the tarmac at Fort

Bragg they were there behind the barbed wire fences and the

gate waiting to get past the guards, they were there in LA

in Westwood Village, good, upscale neighborhood, and now

they’re in Palo Alto for a siege on my alma mater. They

tell me they have riot police around if it gets out of

hand. They have a rear-guard of Santa Clara sherriff’s

deputies, Palo Alto police. I need to be flanked on all

sides here, and did they put in the detectors, we have

clowns following me around just go easy on them would you

please we don’t want this to look like Oakland but watch

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that guy over there with the EPIC sign who does he think he

is trying to scare me like Giteau’s ghost. Anarchists, can

you believe it, Steve get a load of these guys. Or there’s

Berkeley, Santa Cruz, you know a lot of my encounters with

these folks. Alright I’m on then, thank you fellas. A

member of the audience screams GO HOME WILSON and hurls a

handful of mashed potatoes and spaghetti bolognese at me.

Above hisses I regale the audience with talk of family

values and individual responsibility even quoting Reagan on

free-enterprise, and the debris arcs toward the podium

once, first a banana, second, an egg, barely missing my

head, and third an orange, caught with gravitas in my right

hand. This is not the place for fascist tactics. They

won’t win converts at Stanford. I resist the urge to lob

the orange back at the crowd and place it under the podium.

When I am looking down someone wearing a t-shirt with a

pink triangle walks right up to me and smacks a cream pie

on my right cheek and all I can think of to say to the

crowd is thank you. It is one of those days in the life of

a politician. After I make it out in one piece to the

tarmac, I call Otto’s widow and we share a laugh when I say

to her it’s not often a politician gets to mean literally

the saying egg on your face. She says it sounds like you
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had a seven course meal by the end of the speech. All this

declinism.

51. I am reading a copy of Le Monde I secured through the

consulate with Ken’s article about the coup. I am reading

the coverage of the visit last weekend to New York by the

deposed Haitian leader. The President received the key to

the city from mayor David Dinkins and a warm reception at

the UN where he introduced a new language to the UN,

switching from French to Creole. The photograph reveals he

has reverted back to his original form, the Brooks Brothers

suited radical priest, for the escape through Venezuela to

the US. I rewind the videotape for the thousandth time to

discover nothing new, the event has played itself out so

many times for me already. The quality is so poor, the

ages faded in a creeping dark stain, that it could have

been filmed through an eglise filled with the smell of

euphorbius and charcoal black smoke billowing. On the

video is visible only what could be an opening of a tent

from the hanging polymer tarpaulin but there is a window

sill and a frame of broken glass and a seraphim with canine

features and then a white flashing line and jump rope. If

you are not looking closely at the footage you will miss

the metamorphosis. I should have asked them to give me a

blank tape for the coup, or at least recorded a few seconds

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of blackness after the President jumped out the window so

we wouldn’t have a double dutch tournament at the end. I

would assume it would undermine the credibility of the

video but then this is not my area of expertise and I am

not in Haiti to learn about admissability of evidence. I

eject the cassette. I peel off some masking tape and to

throw off the curious write FRANKIE SAY RELAX, which was

also my senior quote at Uni although no one knew what it

meant. It is actually, never mind, it is nonsense, I am

not going to tell you.

52. At the county museum of art we discuss the limitations

of my grandfather Ted, his unwillingness to concede the

present, his speaking in quoted stanzas he illuminated with

eidetic analepsis and aphorism. We are looking at the

Dürer and the memories attack but my grandmother is not

crying. Grandma is summoning Ted at the podium at the

Exile University, eyes fluttering closed, reading from his

translation of Blake’s Daughters of Albion to a room full

of undergraduates. She tells me his work was a sustained

rebellion against the effects of the positivists in the

social sciences, a rebellion against the idea of

limitations on speech due to an imposed silence of

automated deduction and symbolic computation. He refused

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Wittgenstein’s prohibition on speech as much as he refused

the fascists. It is as if he is still there intoning a

future of political action through the reading of texts,

paragraphs against lemmas, his head held high in the air,

lowering it only to suffocate its nostrils with a stained

silk handkerchief, his eyes strained and popping along with

his sinuses. Listening to my grandmother on Sundays is the

only way for me to recapture my Italian heritage. It is

the only way I can begin to know a man who died when I was

six years old. She points at the visiting Melancholia

engraving with its compass, scale and hourglass. She says

my grandfather loved this Dürer for what he saw in it of

the futility of human thought and the bind of positivism.

Even the imagery borrowed from the New Testament, he had

this way of taking something that had been used to oppress,

transform it so it can be seen with new eyes. I want to

see this image in context. I ask her what she would think

now after the war, the new world order as Wilsonian

humanism disguised by Nazi metaphors. I read it in Foreign

Policy. She says he would see the barbarie della

riflessione all around us. She is not sure he would read

the newspaper at this point, but it wouldn’t mean that he

had given up, only that the consolidation of mass culture

in capitalism had reached a point of no return. In the

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years during and after the war they thought they could

change the progression and that spirit lasted until the

sixties when students would heckle his lectures in Paris by

baring their breasts or shouting pseudo-revolutionary

slogans. By the nineteen sixties, mass culture was

accepted as liberation itself, and they thought of his

ideas as reactionary. After the sixties, all you had was

vulgar Marxist nostalgia. In the car back to the valley

there is bumper to bumper traffic due to a spun out

mercedes on the Ventura Freeway and the classical radio

station plays Chopin’s Funeral March. She tells me my

grandfather only responded to women he could not hear and

that is why he lost his hearing at the end. I think she

was telling me his inability to hear was never diagnosed.

I do not know what she means but I am grateful for anything

she tells me. I also learn that he could not stomach those

who had given up on Kant but my grandmother’s explanation

doesn’t make any sense to me. I ask her what he thought of

democracy in practice. Sometimes, she says, we are forged

by events outside of our control, but at the time

everything seemed voluntary. As she turns off Wilshire

onto Doheny I ask her if that means she believes in fate

but she acts like she doesn’t hear me.

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53. We recline on down pillows on our king size waterbed

in Sherman Oaks. We have been wanting to get rid of it

since around nineteen eighty-two when we realized that

minor leaking had created moldy patches in the bed base.

Now we are accustomed as much to the smell as to the effect

of slowly rolling waves under rubber on our dreams,

generally maritime in theme. Last night I was Tallulah

Bankhead in Lifeboat surrounded by a people I can throw in

the ocean depending on my own needs. I can speak German

and I do not speak German except for the words my godfather

Brecht taught me when I was a child. I am wearing a

bathrobe and Mark only boxer shorts covered in a hammer and

sickle pattern. It is unclear if this is one style among

others available at Saks, or if this is a calculated

statement in favor of or against USSR policy. Who knows?

Mark has voiced his sympathy to liberationist movements in

the past, but the sixties have faded and now allegiance to

Marxist politics seems to him a poor fit to the times.

Ever since he voted for Wilson against Bradley, he claimed

it was a protest vote over mismanagement of public

contracts, I have been ribbing him on his credentials.

REC/PLAY. I was bored the other day so I was watching this

musical with Olivia Newton-John, Travolta and it made me

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think about how so much of what I remember about here

during the fifties was mediated by the seventies. Even the

forties, Bunker Hill, the trolley. You weren’t born, you

were three. And when I hear her talk about Haiti all I can

think about are those photos of zombies not the night of

the living dead kind the photos you see in National

Geographic. What do you think of the future, Patty, living

here in perpetuity. I don’t like it. Researchers went

down once and found that the zombies who claimed possession

by the spirits of their ancestors were really suffering

from common psychiatric disorders such as bipolar

depression and narcissistic personality disorder. But this

was in time so I do not know if I can believe it. Neither

do I, all the driving and the violence on the streets, and

that same frontier Okie mentality you get from the cops,

and the few interactions I have with people when I step out

of the car when I walk from the parking lot to work are

always so violent. But it’s not the sixties Mark. Look at

Shakespeare again you realize no one lives their lives that

way no one ever did that pattern of scenes the illusion of

had been taken for granted for so long, the system of bad

decisions and redemptions. All lost and it is too early to

comment, but the same mode of representation continues. It

is as if if you don’t have it you don’t have any purpose

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you are only moving forward without a future goal. Don’t

you feel like you can just relax? That is so typical of

you to say that when you can hear my fear of losing

everything again like after Black Monday, pulling Jessica

out of Harvard-Westlake, and now she’s at this public art

school, selling the Mercedes. Circe finished Uni in three

years and what is Jessica doing? I don’t know. I’m so

tired of your your hippie pantheism, your freshman year

reading Thoreau and Proudhon in the omega sigma tau dorm.

There was a coup, MarK, and your other daughter can hear

the explosions behind her when she talks yet she claims she

is out there as an attached sorry detached, she has seen

corpses. I do not want to talk about the coup because what

do you say. I want to hear it from her first. That is how

it makes sense to me, to hear it directly from her, but she

doesn’t call me, she calls you. If she doesn’t talk to me

none of it has meaning. Do you want to take a vacation

somewhere? We could go up to the mountains, Big Bear or

Lake Arrowhead just for the weekend, leave Jessica at home,

she can take care of herself. I feel more than a need for

escape. So we take her? No, she will be fine, take the

bus, watch the hearings on C-SPAN. She can learn something

from Anita Hill. This man cannot be confirmed, Marc, or I

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will lose my control over my own body. This cannot happen

in nineteen ninety-one after Bella and Gloria and Betty.

STOP. We turn on the television and see some kind of

eating contest in Osaka, an imitation of the Nathan’s

famous hot dog event at coney island. It is a low-angle

shot of the contestant jamming hot dogs in her mouth. Her

throat is engorged and her hands are tied behind her back.

Behind her there is a man dressed all in white like a chef

with a timepiece around his neck.

REC/PLAY. You have been talking to Circe about this, so

where does this guy come from. You say he is a priest?

Now you want to talk about it. All I can give you is

second-hand information and what I know from the news.

They follow liberation theology, the idea that the bible,

the New Testament, can be interpreted as a call to arms for

the world’s poor. It is an ideology that the US military

has been trying to stamp out throughout the southern

hemisphere for years. Who does he see himself as some kind

of Haitian Jesse Jackson? Their calling cards are mostly

French. What does that mean, Lavalas? It means the flood,

the flood washes us clean. So the party members she has

met talk about Abbe Henri Gregoire, who was this

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abolitionist. He voted in the convention of seventeen

ninety two to abolish slavery and then went on to found a

fine arts university, so they think of him as someone at

the intersection of church and the freedoms encouraged by a

benign state. The anti-imperialist Napoleon. Yes he was

always in opposition to the empire, he opposed every

invasion. No entangling alliances, respect sovereignty.

And Aristide, does he think his people are still in

slavery. They are, but their oppression is economic, not

political. No one would say it out loud. People in the

states could not accept that kind of rhetoric, wait a

minute, there’s someone out there.

STOP. I open the door and catch Jessica listening to us

through the door with a microphone and a cassette recorder.

I do not know what we have ever done to deserve

surveillance in the home. It is time for the little bitch

to move out. We will continue to support her education to

prevent the visible slide in status, lifestyle and material

wealth that coincides with her decision to pursue a career

in the arts. I will consider giving the Audi to her when

we replace it with a mid-priced BMW after liquidation, and

she can cover it with bumper stickers and never take it to

the car wash. See if I care what she does. In addition,

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Marc knows I am in touch with a child psychologist in

Century City who specializes in troubled teens, but I do

not want to further jeopardize our relationship. I want

him to confront her directly and with no apology about her

eating habits and infrequent bathing and the misogynist

minstrel music she internalizes.

54. I am waiting for Andrea Feldman. I know her from

junior high where we both prepared to go on to higher

things like acting and mixed media. She has done a few

commercials for products like Johnson and Johnson baby

powder, as a newborn, and McDonalds, last year when she was

sixteen. She is the one at the end holding hands with the

Hamburglar saying food folks and fun. Casting directors

like her because she has range and projects a sense of

youth and joy. Now she has a part as a dead fashion model

on a television movie. In the movie she is alive, but she

has since died, and is most famous for being dead, or

became famous after death. I fear that she is becoming one

of those people who decide that their roles are their

lives. I am afraid that the next time I will see her she

will be ten pounds lighter and will boast of her

achievements on the runway, so I have decided that there

will be three strikes allowed for severe delusionary

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behavior. This does not include remarks about appearances,

but only situations where she attempts to frame shared

moments incorrectly, according to my memory of those

events. In other words no lying about important things,

but casual dissimulation I can tolerate. We’ve decided to

see the Helter Skelter show downtown at the Temporary

Contemporary. We meet at Dupars, where I watch her eat. A

waiter in a rhinestone-encrusted salamander coat over a

vest of solid plastic the color and translucency of an

opaque milk container delivers two salads to our table.

Andrea takes a bite of the salad from her fork, tugging at

the romaine with her lip, snagging it with her front teeth

as it falls to her plate into a pool of congealed vegetable

oil and white wine vinegar. We take the bus from the

valley, the smell of combination of halitosis and a stale

perfume counter settles around me as we slide onto

naugahyde seats amid the drifting specks of sunlit dust. I

am shocked that she agrees to take the bus with me after my

insistence. There is a transfer in Westwood and the whole

trip takes about an hour and a half. When we get downtown,

we wander the tarpaulined temporary addition to the modern

art museum where the freeways viewed from above form a

square knot of muddied grey ribbons, at Temple and 3rd.

As we walk to the temporary collection a man twirls a

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toilet snake like a lariot while his daughter plays the

violin. Gallery visitors drop coins in their Folger’s can.

In the first room, a solitary art buyer stands with here

arms crossed admiring a piece by Charles Ray called

Black Box, ink within an unnoticable synthetic glass cube

so that it appears to float congealed enclosed three feet

above the floor. In another room, behind a green laser is

Paul Mccarthy’s Garden, a lifelike latex-covered robot

fucking a tree on some astroturf. Andrea says it reminds

her of rape and Magic Mountain. In another room we visit a

framed areproduction of an oil painting on linen of a red

tinted mirror on a white wall reflecting a quotidian office

scene. It is a copy of an original hanging in Zurich. I

ask Andrea about her trip there last year. She says the

center is medieval and there are these narrow cobblestone

streets with office buildings and department stores,

Bauhaus banks with anachronistic copper, some examples of

late le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to inspire bathtub

drowning and defenestration in weak souls. I tell her it

sounds great. At least it must have been a change from Los

Angeles. What was the weather like there? We stand at an

an oversized store mannequin. A tour guide walks by with a

group of seven and says when someone says a work of art is

something, the ugly specter of a positivist ontology

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returns to being. It is a mannequin. If one says this, he

has adhered to the literalist tradition, announcing that

the mannequin, the work of art is not mannequin, that is to

say if it announces itself as not-being by occupying the

same shape, and the pedant drones on. I ask Andrea if it

reminds her of anything and she says, the flood. I tell

her I don’t remember the flood, only the coyote brush

fires. She says she doesn’t know what I am doing to

myself, and that I look like Jennie Garth in this halter.

From her, I think this is an insult, but I pretend it is a

compliment. I suck in my cheeks. Look, I am doing Kate

Moss. She is not laughing. She flips her hair like

Shannen Doherty.

55. I change the channel from something called the heroes

of desert storm to catch day one of the testimony on C-SPAN

after getting my hair done in Bethesda, where I am staying

with my sister to avoid the public eye until the world

forgets what I look like. In my estimate this will take

exactly twenty-seven years. They told me not to look at

him directly so as not to become hysterical. I hold the

opposite theory that the more I am exposed to him the more

immune I will become. Clarence says it is important for us

to eliminate agendas to eliminate ideologies and when one

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becomes a judge that is precisely what you start doing. He

says he became ideologically stripped down like a runner to

become a justice of the highest court in the nation and

uphold the communio sanctorum. I remember the day he told

me how Malcolm X and Richard Wright taught him not to

sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people.

These two brothers would somersault if they heard the spin.

I do not remember if I predicted any of these events at the

time because the truth is I did not think about Clarence

much at all outside of the office. It was not the way he

expanded his view of Malcolm into a dissent of Brown v.

Board of Education, or the pickaninny doll collection in

his office or his spam sandwiches. It was something else

that repulsed me. I felt it in my lower intestines and in

my uterus. I felt is as a lack and a churning and could

not bring myself to speak of it until now. The moment I

knew I did not want to see him again was when he told me he

wanted to show me the hottest sexiest pounds per square

inch women I will ever meet. It was a videotape in the

electric blue series and we were standing in the offices of

the EEOC with the door open. I declined and told him I did

not talk about these subjects and the VCR is used strictly

for business presentations but he didn’t listen. The blue

of the screen skidded and went to the Adventures of Bad

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Mama Jama and he told me he had wanted to the exact words

he used were bang the elephant. I said please mister

Thomas turn this off immediately. On another instance he

came to me with a beverage and said to me who has put

public hair on my coke. Tonight I take an over the counter

sleep aid and fall asleep to an episode of Family Ties to

get my mind off the hearing tomorrow. In the morning I am

out the door at six, and after a quick jog on the treadmill

they bring me out in front of the Senate Judiciary

Committee, behind their microphones writing notes,

fidgeting with glasses, scratching foreheads. I am looking

at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kennedy, Biden, and some

faces from the Western states that no one remembers. I

take a sip of water and tell thim his conversations were

very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in

pornographic films involving such matters as women having

sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape

scenes. He talked about pornographic materials such as one

entitled the green-eyed monster starring Long Dong Silver

depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts

involved in sex acts. On several occasions he told me

graphically of his own sexual prowess. Because I was

extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all,

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and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I

did not want to talk about his penis.

56. Everyone here this afternoon would agree that we need

to speed up this process and get out of here before five so

I can go back to Jackson Hole for the weekend. The trouble

is that so many of us have words to say about this

testimony even though we would rather spend our time

signing our names to bills we haven’t read. We are

prepared to listen to the testimony of a former staffer in

the equal opportunity commission but she is late or

something is going on behind the scenes with her attorneys.

From what I have heard from Orrin Hatch it might be in her

best interest not to show unless she is prepared to defend

her character. She fears taking the stand because she

would be destroyed. She will, just as you has been

destroyed. I hope you can all be rehabilitated. I have a

couple of questions, if I may, Mr. Chairman. I have not

taken time and I will get to that. Angela Wright will soon

be with us, we think, but now we are told that Angela

Wright has what we used to call in the legal trade cold

feet. Now if Angela Wright doesn’t show up to tell her

tale of your horrors what are we to determine about Angela

Wright, did you fire her and what for. The witness says, I
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indicated senator, I summarily discharged her and this is

my recollection, she was hired to reinvigorate the public

affairs operation at EEOC, I felt her performance was

ineffective and the office was ineffective. And the straw

that broke the camel’s back was a report to me from one of

the members of my staff that she referred to another male

member of my staff as a faggot. As a faggot, I repeat. He

nods and says and that is inappropriate conduct and that is

a slur and I was not going to have it. I say and so you

summarily discharged her. He says that is right. That was

enough for you, I say. He says that more than enough for

me that is my recollection. I say that is kind of the way

you are isn’t it. He says that is the way I am with

conduct like that, whether it is sex harassment or slurs or

anything else. I don’t play games. And so that was the

end of Miss Wright who is now going to come and tell us

perhaps about more parts of the anatomy I am sure of that

and a totally discredited and we had just as well get to

the nub of things here a totally discredited witness who

does have cold feet well Mr. Chairman you know all of us

have been through this stuff in life, but never to this

degree. I have done my old stuff about my past and shared

those old saws but I will tell you I do love Shakespeare

and Shakespeare would love this. This is all Shakespeare.

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This is about love and hate and cheating and distrust and

kindness and disgust and avarice and jealousy and envy all

those things that make that remarkable bard read today but

boy I will tell you one came to my head and I just went and

got it out of the back of the book. Othello, read Othello

and don’t ever forget this line. Good name in man and

woman, dear my lord, do you remember this scene? Is the

immediate Jewel of their souls, who steals my purse steals

trash, it is something, nothing, it was mine, it is his,

and has been slave to thousands, But he that filches from

me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and

makes me poor indeed. What a tragedy, what a disgusting

goat song.

57. I am looking through a newspaper in my first language

to rest my eyes from the roman alphabet for a few moments.

The news of the entire Asian world and marketplace is

presented to me in my native language, but I do not feel

like reading on a day when it is so important to write in

English to save my life. I stare at the photographs, an

international conference in Bombay, leaders in traditional

robes, a man holding a trophy, burning buildings, residents

holding their jackets to their noses from the smoke,

building with top floors bombed, smoke rising over a

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metropolis, a man with a broken windshield outside a car,

holding his nose, a crowd at the airport, the barge in the

harbor, the woman in front of the STOP BUSH NOW placard, an

indian girl with a photo of a crying youth. I am not

reading the captions, but in a way you already know what

the story is going to be. My husband is looking at a

magazine exclusive to our store. Most of the words are in

Korean but the back page has a puppet and the English words

it is not his nose that grows. More green ooze from the

toilet and we will have to call the Vietnamese plumber on

Western. For a moment before beginning I light a candle

and stare at its reflection in the window facing Irolo. If

I concentrate on the darkness I can see animals mocking me,

images of statuary in the shape of rats or dogs. But I

choose to ignore them and look across the courtyard at the

new building until I tell myself to write this letter. I

take out a sheet of yellow legal paper to write a letter to

the judge in Compton. Across from my apartment is a new

structure, either an office or condiminium building. The

entire floor is lit from above by flourescent light, but

only one man sits praying on the false grey marble. On the

floor below him there is a work lamp and someone who may be

a lawyer although from this distance I cannot see what he

is writing. I gaze across giving myself horizontally and

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vertically to test whether or not I can identify the

contents of the other floors without scanning my eyes as if

I am the center of a perpendicular axis but I can only see

these two people and no walls on any floor only one man now

kneeling. In my hallucination I am home in Mission Hills

hearing the crickets and not in the Sybil Brand Institute

for Women.

58. I am telephone pitching my idea for a sequel to Terms

Of Endearment to a television producer for whom I wrote

classic episodes of Benson and Small Wonder. We had this

discussion at Musso and Frank, for old time’s sake, oldies

but goodies, to feel out the vibes on whoa who would be the

next extra terrestrial so I want to go with this and see

where it takes me. I already have three floppy disks of

notes on this project. I didn’t seek to discover El

Dorado, you see, it discovered me. Why don’t you come to

the Beverly Wilshire and we can talk about it here? When

he arrives we are seated in front of the fireplace and

speak to each other over a blue torso by Issey Miyake and

an arrangement of pussywillow. There is an oversized

goatskin tabletop to give a sense of enclosure. Exactly,

and that’s why I have to tell the story, to compensate for

a lost memory. It’s located in La Guatavita is the lagoon,

it is the place where you go to make offerings and

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sacrifices to the demon you worship as God and Lord. Do

you worship this demon, he says. No, but they did, and

what we’re doing out there is exploring the idea of

sacrifice, in our world today people don’t want to think

about sacrifice, the President’s got his thousand points of

light, people know there is a service, profiles of courage.

We’re not talking about sacrifice as in the spirit of

volunteerism are we, here, because when I see sacrifice I’m

thinking more the horror genre, the sacrificial beast,

voodoo. No, I say, but this is not about that, this is a

tribal ceremony. I want to talk about the budget for this,

he says, let me worry about the specifics I just want to

let you know that it’s going to be tough to get this idea

through the sphinx. They want it to be a profitable Queen

Kelly, but they don’t know what they are talking about.

Let me tell you about your cousin. He says, Joe Kennedy

was a friend of mine and Louella Parsons called him the

coming Napoleon of the movies. My father helped him buy

the film booking offices US affiliate. He says, we might

want to run, I’m sorry, we might run into trouble somehere

in the hierarchy. We’re on the other side of that

entablature. He says that’s your side and that’s where I

would like to keep you but one question for you, Kennedy,

why Amoa? Another name for it. The original people who
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lived there. And why are we calling him Swollenfoot, he

says. Because he is an indigenous person, Chuck, what do

you want me to call him. They had self-descriptive names.

He says calm down, let me just put something on the table

about how we’re going to approach this here. Wasserman is

sensitive these days after all the protests last year over

the Christ picture so we want to be clear on all of our

initial boundaries going into the project which means we

don’t want to offend anyone here or cue anyone as to what

this is all about. I understand and it’s nothing to worry

about. He says Wasserman thought you might have been

referring to cocaine, Amoa, and this is Bogota we’re

talking about. I tell him not to worry, I’ve been sober

now for two years, you can ask my sponsor and my

girlfriend. He says because there will be a clause on the

contract, he says, a projection of your insurability, I’m

not worried about that we can have our attorneys go over

the paperwork, my only concern is putting together a budget

that works that will keep us in the clear for what really

is an ambitious script, some numbers on a balance sheet

that can please these people, some revenue built into the

production schedule, listen film can shift things around

and make time malleable, what it cannot do is temporal

succession and continuity so I am into this real time idea,

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we can make them a very favorable deal, I am not in this

for the money, I just want what is best for the movie, but

the catch is we’re doing it all on video. I tell him I

believe him one hundred percent and hang up the phone.

From the concierge I retrieve my key and go back to my room

to change into my Speedo. From the terrace I call one of

the prospective actors and I drive to meet her at the

Chateau after she finishes her salad lunch. She is

reclining in a trumpet vine gazebo, glittering in a

metallic Ungaro two-piece and suntan lotion and I in my

Speedo. We order two bottles of Vittel and I tell her what

we are looking at for next year, Emperor Valerian discovers

a painting of Lake Guatavita in the Roman Catacombs while

he hides from the Persians. It will be like that and you

won’t even notice the difference, human sacrifices and

everything. In flashback sequences which you wouldn’t be a

part of, we have a great ten year-old to play your

daughter, authentic Mayan face, but I’m not going to keep

it from you it won’t be an easy shoot. We’re going to do

it right here, the parts with actors. You will not have to

travel to Colombia, we can do this all in-studio. We

wanted you because you are one of the few actors who can do

this from the inside out. Debra dries herself off, says

follow me and walks into the lobby from the garden through
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the vaulted gothic portico painted with reproduction

napoleon trios murals. She punches her floor and sits at

the Hans Wegner desk chair under the George Nelson hanging

lamp. She pours some ice water from a Russell Wright

pitcher and sets the terms two script down on a Drexel

round low table. She asks me if she is playing the same

character. She says to me Shirley may be willing to go out

on a limb for this but we haven’t spoken in years. So why

is Emma living in Colombia, she says, I thought I died in

the first picture. I tell her she has been reincarnated

into the script. Emma has been living in outer space and

her spaceship lands in Colombia. She is a shapeshifter who

has the ability to appear as a manatee, goes through some

serious changes over the course of the film if you are with

me, like Daryl Hannah in Splash. I move from the Louis XV

chair to the black on black embossed silk lit de repose so

I can listen to Debra’s answer without the distraction of

the alpulian volute Krater modern herm with erect penis.

Will it be yes or no? Come on, Debra, do this for me, do

this for me.

59. Bienvenidos a Madrid. The invitations sent by the US

and the USSR are printed on gilded card stock and call for

a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement through

direct negotiations along two tracks. I will attend along

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with the Jordanian delegation and Palestinian

representatives on one side of the table. On the other

side, Shamir and the Israeli delegation. According to

assad this event gives a cordial appearance to the world

and makes it look like we are willing to negotiate across

boundaries. Our Spanish driver takes us to Bailén street,

in the western part of downtown Madrid, east of the

Manzanares river. In front of me stands the Palacio Real

de Madrid, Palacio de Oriente. This was a structure built

during a time in the west where if you alluded to il Milone

you guaranteed succor even when you called your style

Moorish. I am prepared for and expecting chinoiserie and

Byzantine rinascimento squalor. The driver is telling me

the architect was a Sicilian priest. The structure was

commissioned by King Philip V, and Filippo Juvarra’s plan

resembles Bernini’s design for the east front of the Louvre

with corresponding windows and entablature. There are some

bourbon elements complementing the Franco-Italian interior

decoration. There is a garden front reminiscent of

Mansart. There is a vast rectangular building with a

central court and wings forming a place d’armes, above the

ravine of the Zamzanares. The palace façade is a heavily

rusticated pedestal in the Ionic order with fluted columns

and pilasters occupying three stories. I hope President

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Bush is impressed after sending his secretary of state to

visit Damascus. The delegations gather at t-shaped tables

in the salon de las columnas with no visible national

flags, placards indicating names. The Israeli delegation

includes Eli Rubenstein, Yossi Ben-Sharon, Eliahu Ben

Elissar, Uzi Landau, Sarah Doron, Assad Assad, Shlomo Ben

Ami. On the first day speeches are delivered by Prime

Minister Gonzalez, Bush, Gorbachev, and the leaders of the

European community and Egyptian delegations. When I walk

to the podium I look at Baker, who is pouring a glass of

water from a vessel swarming with flies. I tell the

audience that international public opinion is aware more

than ever before and especially following the Gulf crisis

that double standards are no longer acceptable in this age,

that the principles of international law, not the law of

the jungle, must be respected, and that UN resolutions, not

brute force, must be applied. In order for a just peace to

be established no Arab land must remain under Israeli

occupation, nor can the right of the Palestinian people to

self-determination remain denied.

60. I am wearing a beaded organza jacket with a black lace

dress over white cloque. I throw the keys in the Chinese

crackle-glass bowl on the marble top table. When it rings

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I carry it with me, console, receiver, everything, to the

living room alcove over the turkish silk carpet. They are

on the phone telling me about an adaptation of the work of

my photographic work and the texts of my late husband. It

is the story of Columbus in the Dominican Republic, how the

impetus for the film based on the work of my husband is the

true story of the black legend of the Conquistadores. This

is the version which features the Spanish forcibly ejecting

the tainos from their land, massive amounts of people

comitting suicide by drowning or drinking a poison made

from yucca. It is also somehow the sequel to Terms Of

Endearment. I do not know what this has to do with my

husband’s work aside from anthropological treatises written

after his death possibly inspired by him, but I repeat to

them that once the rights are in their hands there is

nothing I could say about it. I am willing to sign a

release but I do not want to get my hands dirty. I am

talking to my granddaughter Jessica on a Sunday morning

about Circe, somewhere in Haiti, about this deal, and my

own future. My settlement will expire in April according

to the terms and she and her sister will have everything

now. She will not have to wait until my death. Jessica

carries a tape recorder and tells me anything I say could

be used in a further artwork involving a stored program

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machine, where the mechanisms used in reading the program

are of the same kind as those used in executing it. She

places the Teddy Ruxpin before me and pushes record.

REC/PLAY. Your grandfather always said that before Rousseau

you had all these marble busts, heroes in togas, and that

after the Revolution all of this was replaced a by an, I

don’t want to say natural he would say a sylvan scene, you

know, James Fenimore Cooper, Chateaubriand, the poem by

Edgar Allen Poe, do you know it, El Dorado? The heroic

replaced by the primal scene. Enacted as a struggle with

nature and not so much with culture, you could say, the

authority has been turned on its head. The primal scene is

acted out on that landscape definitely, if you want to look

at it that way. You don’t have to see it that way. But

your grandfather did, and I’m getting off track, in that

land, that El Dorado, the dream of an escape from culture

as an eternal renewal. Something happening in the present.

Nothing changes there. This took the place of the old

longing. Yes, it supplanted the old regime, which was

heroic even in the sense that the king with his divine

right was also a hero, and this was a change that came

about with Revolution and the expansion of the colonies.

And Ted thought that the way the colonies conceived of El

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Dorado was without heroes. An egalitarian utopia, so of

course they banned all the heroes. And you will see this

in my photographs, Jocasta is either left behind in Thebes,

or else they’ve kidnapped her locked her in the fronteir

house with a colt and some bullets, for the fronteirsman in

these myths has escaped the family drama. And this is what

they want to adapt into a film. They revise the myth, they

kill her so she doesn’t have to kill herself. It need not

follow him around. Do you think it will ever stop, I mean

do you feel like the program will finish running, or will

it run forever? Do you think it is up to you to decide?

STOP.

61. Bienvenidos a Madrid. Distinguished co-chairmen,

ladies and gentlemen, let me first apologize, as I have to

leave this hall immediately after my statement, together

with some of my colleagues, in order to return to Israel

before sunset, in time for the advent of our holy day of

rest. I trust no one will see in this a sign of

disrespect. We came here out of goodwill, hoping there

might be a change, a turn for the better in tone and

content, that would lead us to a new and more promising

chapter. And we have not given up this hope. Let me

therefore make just a few remarks, not for the sake of

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polemics, but to shed light on a few facts. Syria’s

representative wants us and the world to believe that his

country is a model of freedom and protection of human

rights, including those of the Jews. Such a statement

stretches incredulity to infinite proportions. Let me say

that twisting history and perversion of fact will not earn

them the sympathy which they strive to acquire. Was it not

Palestinians who slaughtered a major part of the Jewish

community of Hebron, without any provocation? Was it not

Palestinians who rejected every peace proposal since the

beginning of the century and responded by violence? Was it

not Palestinians who produced a leader who collaborated

with the Nazis in the extermination of Jews in the

holocaust? Was it not the Palestinians who called their

Arab brethren in nineteen forty eight to come and help them

destroy the Jewish state? Was it not the Palestinians who

rejoiced and danced on the roofs when iraqi scud missles

were falling on Tel Aviv? Have they forgotten that more

Palestinians were killed by their own brethren in a few

recent years, than in clashes with Israeli security forces?

Even to this very day, under conditions which you describe

as occupation, is it not a fact that any Jew who strays

into an Arab village risks his life, but tens of thousands

of Palestinian Arabs walk freely in every town and village

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in Israel and no one molests them? We have presented to

the Palestinians a fair proposal, one that offers them a

chance to improve their lot immensely.

62. I rise to speak about Shamir after he leaves the

podium to return to the Holy Land for a dedication

ceremony. To address the assembly, I walk around a desk

supported by sirius shaped legs stolen by the Spanish from

Damascus. I walk past Baker, tapping his hands together at

the fingertips around his water glass. I wonder how the

head of the Israeli government says it is the right of

every Jew to return to Palestine after an absence of about

two-thousand years. Then how is it that a Palestinian

whose absence is only forty years has no right to return.

Which is more realistic, a Palestinian who still remembers

his house, who may even have the key to his house, or talk

about the return of Jews who were there two thousand years

before. This is a difference between forty and four-

thousand years, which was discussed by the head of the

Israeli government. I wanted to concentrate on peace. But

before this let me show you an old picture of Shamir, when

he was thirty-two years old. The caption says wanted by

the Palestine police force. At the time he was thirty-two

years old. Height one hundred sixty five centimeters, then

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the other details which you all know. I am holding up a

picture of the Israeli prime minister from the nineteen

forties, when Shamir was the leader of the Stern Gang.

During the British mandate on Palestine, but before the

unification of the Israeli defense forces eventually

achieved by Ben-Gurion, Stern, also called Lehi, existed as

one of two primary Israeli terrorist organizations, the

other being Irgun. Bernadotte, the Swedish UN mediator in

Jerusalem, worked for a compromise solution to a divided

Jerusalem in September seventeenth nineteen forty eight.

Bernadotte had led the rescue of five thousand Jews from

concentration camps during world war two. He slept in

Jerusalem at the King David Hotel as the assassin entered

the room with a muzzled Colt. Shamir is responsible for

the death of Count Folke Bernadotte. He himself confessed

he was a terrorist. He kills peace mediators and talks

about Syria, Lebanon, terrorism. The problem is that I

don’t have enough time to talk about Israel’s terrorist

practices which needs volumes, not only a quarter of an

hour. Yesterday, I gave our perception of terrorism and we

believe he could not respond to any word in it. I don’t

want to disturb you with more details. If anyone wants

more, they can refer to it. He says the nineteen sixty-

seven war was defensive. In their media they say the Arabs
 266

attacked Israel in nineteen sixty seven. They insult

historians. I would like to say one final word.

Regardless of who occupied, or who started the war in

nineteen sixty-seven, the text ot the resolution is clear,

Mister Bush, that it prohibits the acquisition of other

people’s land by war. This land must be returned.

63. I am looking at two sketches. One represents vacuum

tubes and the other motorized optic discs, both spelling

out the words USSR collapses. My friend in the math

department has thought of a way to propose using the

algorithm to decide exactly how the neon or the spinning

discs will take shape, as though predicting the future by

automatic headline generator. We are both obsessed with

the halting problem as something to work through, so we

want to design a work that will come to an end at an

arbitrary and unpredictable point. We are considering our

designs for the audioanimatronic Jefferson Davis in the

style of One Nation Under God at the Hall of Presidents at

Disneyland. She says if we want to do this, we need to

determine what exactly it is we want to stop and why. I

tell her we don’t, that it’s a logo, a sign whose form

reflects what it signifies. If we decide to use the

spinning discs, we can incorporate our idea into a larger

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project where hypnotism becomes the pretext for answering

historical questions? I am looking at the front page of

the times with the headline confirming the end of the USSR.

It only arrived yesterday but the pulp has already yellowed

from exposure to the sun. No one picked it up the other

morning and it sat on the porch all day. That or the dog

got to it and wanted to make a nest. I point at the

headline and Jessica takes the paper into her hands and

laughs and tells me I would be better off covering the

paper in gesso and a protective lacquer and making it into

a sculpture. Today we are going on a photographic

expedition to the Arroyo Seco. She calls me and tells me

to remember to bring the tripod because she can never make

the shots level on her own and may want to try some

panoramas. Today we will try to forget where we are and

restrict ourselves to seeing the freeways, bridges,

mountains as they slide by the river. We are assuming the

river exists. The dry concrete streams stretch from Bell

Creek and the Calabasas wash in the Santa Susana mountains

and Devils Gate reservoir in the San Gabriel mountains

through the city to the Long Beach harbor. I pick her up

at four after school and we get in the Toyota hatchback my

dad James loans to me on the condition that I make straight

as on my report card. It is worth it to live at home

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because there is no way I could afford everything they give

to me. Today he gives me twenty bucks for the gas and

tells me to check the oil before I bring it back to Baldwin

Hills. I show up at her house in Sherman Oaks. She gives

me the directions from the Hollywood freeway exit at Laurel

Canyon, cross the river and drive past Ventura Boulevard

into the hills. She draws a map showing Laurel Canyon with

an arrow toward Wilacre Park where she lives on the corner

of Iredell and Fryman. We drive down Laurel Canyon and eat

at Art’s Deli, where we discuss whether to order the

pastrami and rye sandwich or the chopped liver. On the

menu there is an irreverent dictionary of basic Yiddish.

Jessica tells me she does not want to eat because her

breakfast was giant, eggs and bacon, but something tells me

she is lying. I ask her if she made it herself and she

said no her mother made it for her. She sits there eating

a plate of cottage cheese with a garnish of raw red onions

and sliced tomato. While eating I notice a family of four

sitting in the adjacent booth. The two children stare in

our direction, and I remember not to assume anything about

what they might be thinking. We talk about our opinions,

tastes, families, what we think of Anita Hill. I tell her

there is no way I would believe Thomas and she agrees with

me but says there is no way she is a feminist. I am

 269

surprised and tell her that I probably am. She says she

got sick of her mother who is actually friends with that

lawyer Gloria Allred and how their feminism is poisoned by

capitalist fantasies of will-to-power. She tells me it is

up to the next generation of women to reject this as the

world falls apart around them. I ask her why she is not

more politically active. She says do not try to turn me

into a Scandinavian play I am not some neurasthenic pin-

cushion alone on the stage. She is joking. She says do

not attempt to mollify me into the kitchen. I want to

change the subject so I tell her about my conversation with

Eckert in the math department regarding our life-sized

Jefferson Davis automaton. Eckert says the steps must have

specifications of a fixed length. Eckert says the read and

execution must involve the same mechanisms. Eckert says

the conditional and unconditional must be approached with

the same grammar. Eckert says the operation must be easily

adapted to binary storage. Eckert says he can design

something for us, but he says we would be better off

keeping it unrealized, as a series of sketches. We need to

be careful about bringing the dead back to life.

64. This is a major deal. I am waiting by the portable

fax machine in my study overlooking the backyard. My case

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relies on incoming documents from my psychologist

indicating the vespers and all other catholic timekeeping

triggers severe emotional trauma in conjoined residences.

We are he is working on the plural but my attorney

translates e pluribus unum everything flows from the top

one percent, the convergence of the sides of the pyramid

into a point. He will be paid to consult the neighbors

tomorrow. If the sisters can meet us half way we may be

able to settle out of court. Aside from the memory

triggers it is too loud and I cannot concentrate. He says

that is not enough for the case we have to demonstrate

disturbance. I tell him how about the repeated trauma of

hearing this ringing seven eight times a day. He says so

the ringing is not the cause of a later effect, such as

these sense-memories, the ringing is the trauma. I tell

him exactly. I have chosen to photograph my psychosomatic

symptoms of loss of vibrancy to prove they are not

idiopathic, that they are the means and the ends of this

suffering. To demonstrate a temporal progression I will

borrow a convention of late night long-form advertisements

and television talk shows through my employment of before

and after photographs of the scene in dispute, in this case

my face. Then there are the necessary segments focusing on

vascular symptoms such as varicose veins, bitten nails,

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ground teeth, hair loss. I also videotape the x-rays from

the dentist and the seven hairs I have torn from my head

just in the last few minutes. Exhibit what the fuck is it

now will feature my signed testimony of emotional

disturbance because videotape is useless to document a

crime against the nervous system. It is six o’clock time

for their dinner bells and my emotional breakdown. These

unwanted sense memories flood with every corrosive sound

wave from those metal cuspidors, forcefields of memory

sonically penetrating my cerebral cortex. I am inside the

bell as it rings. It is my head that is the clapper. I

see humiliation in Vistavision panoramic views of scorched

hillsides. I do not want to talk about it without my

counsel. I bought this home off Los Feliz on Hillhurst

only a few months ago. Escrow closed and I never wanted

anything in the flats that my market research tells me the

property should continue to appreciate once we are out of

the oil price recession. If it was not to jump start the

markets then will someone explain the war to me. I do not

think I will vote for Bush for a second term. I am looking

at the wind dappled surface of the swimming pool, at the

expanding circles colliding into the eucalyptus and oak

leaves rotting on the water. There is an automatic sweeper

rolling over the blue concrete floor. I am wondering when

 272

a good time to call the pool man and when I can ask for his

testimony. On the other day on the phone with him I was

livid. I had to keep apologizing that whatever effects the

nuns have on the pool it is not entirely within the control

of maintenance. I told the guy, Eckert, It would seem

physically impossible but you can even see the force of the

noise in the water, the arcs rippling from one side of the

pool to the other, undulating the inflatable Pee Wee Herman

raft. At least when you are underwater there is an

illusion of cleanliness. It is time to bring the pool man

out again. There could be something dead in the filter but

you are not getting me to open it. Last time it was a

tampon and I was like is this coming from the sewer because

this would not just blow over the fence. It is possible

there is another hole in the fence and one of their cats

brought it in. I really do hope the immaculate conception

has a great excuse for what it has done to my body. I do

not swim if I am menstruating and if I do it is not like I

would not notice or pretend nothing had happened. My

sister found it when she was over one night for drinks with

her boyfriend and he said someone call in the national

guard. All this after I warned him not to look inside the

filter. I am sorry but he is no longer welcome in my home.

They can have whatever kind of floating waste wash up in

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their own pool once they are trapped together for too long

and Justine gets off her ass for something other than

potato chips. I still talk to her on the phone so it is an

unstated boycott but I am serious about Edgar. It is not

like I would say it to her face. I went to the wedding and

they got their Hammacher Schlemmacher recliner so that is

more than enough than I can do for them. Whoever sits in

it do not know do not care ever to derive. I walk through

the hallway decorated with career memorabilia my plaques

from each successive year of achievement in excellence.

With the name change from Canoga Park to West Hills you can

count on at least another fifteen percent this side of

Shoup. It may be the best thing to happen to north of the

boulevard since the porn industry or orange trees or

Marilyn Monroe. I am listening to motivational tapes this

fiscal year more than any time since I got my license

mostly Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, but I go in for the old

fashioned stuff, Dale Carnegie. My sales were low for the

time being but the real reason is I could not be in an

office without my own space. You can be assured that

everyone in the vicinity will hear you when desks are

connected like that. And regional managers in and out

without warning I mean seriously fuck that. My personal

calls never veered from reality, something new on the

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market, a for sale by owner, or just calling to check on

clients. You need friends because friends are a base for

productivity. It is much harder to walk in or call cold,

even with a silver and red business card and the right car

and suit like you know what you are doing. Mike Glickman

is serious about reality and his name lends prestige to

mine. The thing we are doing now is is showing property

outward, instead of dragging people into a net with

arbitrary boundaries. This means I can get out of the West

Valley and represent property in Ventura County and

represent more prestigious properties closer to where I

live. If I play the cards right we are looking at a new

embossed business card. The potential is endless even with

the market the way it is. The one problem I have is with

the listing in Lakeview Terrace. I see the tape on the

news every morning when I am brushing my teeth and the

whole thing is so ugly that you understand why someone

would not want to come here. The market has been

unpredictable for years now since the crash and when things

are down you have to reassure yourself. I have always done

that by pushing myself harder. You can sleep when you are

dead. There is only one chance to close the deal. In the

kitchen I open the refrigerator which needs this Sunday’s

Cathy and grab the tonic water and the gin. I move to the
 275

door to see what they are doing over the fence. I push

aside the sun damaged lace curtains on the kitchen door

window to see what they are doing. The sisters are playing

a game of ultimate frisbee in their habits. They are

lounging in a plastic wading pool with the legs and face of

a turtle the kind you can buy at Toys ‘R’ Us. I will have

to stretch out the fence vertically. It is unreasonable to

expect me to look at the defendants while I am enjoying my

own kitchen. It is like the time I had to watch the

Mexican atmosphere devalue the area around my house in

South Carthay I was forced to sell. The memory of their

children and hanging laundry still haunts me. I am still

hearing their languages. I am thinking of my favorite line

in my favorite book the greatest salesman in the world by

Og Mandingo but right now I cannot remember it. It goes

something like which word witch worm.

65. This is only a minor setback. Vielen dank. When we

started the executives said we were a joke but we did not

listen to them. Then girl you know it is true hit in

europe and we came here to promote it. I told der Spiegel

that our arrival was like when the Beatles came to America

except there was no one there to meet us, but the same

enthusiasm from the radio stations. They liked the melody

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and New Jack intensity of Girl You Know It’s True. They

picked up on it so fast and they all told us they liked our

moves, especially this one where I slide from side to side

on my heels and point my right forefinger toward the

civitate dei and my right hand toward my shoes and the

disco inferno down below. We never listened to the critics

but we knew what they were saying about us. Then the album

came out and went quadruple platinum in this country so boo

yah, motherfuckers. All you have to do is look at our

American Music and People’s Choice awards and then you can

fuck off. The television plays my copy of the Hammerman

premiere as forwarded to me by my agent. It features Stan

as a Zeichentrickfilm version of himself in possession of

magic dancing shoes, working at a recreational center in a

fictionalized Oakland. I am snorting another line of the

best shit from Long Beach harbor off a framed photograph of

us with Helmut Schroeder by Helmut Newton so I do not have

to look in the mirror while shoveling coke into my nose by

the teaspoon. I am not my image. This is a

misunderstanding because I do not look like that in real

life. When I look in a mirror I see Fab with the cornrows

next to me and yes I can dance for myself but there is more

to me than that. I do not want to be reminded of the

partnership imprinted on the memory of the people. It is

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like Hammer. He has been supportive of us throughout our

career. He says we are more than another Starland Vocal

Band because we have the repertoire and we can dance. We

tell the press that Stan taught us how to dance out of

respect for his work because he wanted to do something for

the world of choreography. In other words it wasn’t to

help us or even himself. This is what I have come to learn

about Stan is that he will reach out to you if you are in

trouble and this is why it pains me to say I do not know

his whereabouts. I have been forced to research

entertainment news. Television was live in the days of my

mother, who still lives in Dusseldorf on the money I send.

When the reporters from entertainment tonight chartered a

jet to find me I looked it up in the dictionary. I asked

Mary Hart if she thinks Connie Francis sang when she was on

the Ed Sullivan show. When the Singing Nun sang do you

think she was really singing. I asked her what she thought

Dominique was about. She told me I am the interviewee and

she is der Moderator and I should stop asking questions.

We are all puppets. I find myself looking at old videos

and finding watching the threads come apart across the

seams. The consensus is that I am nothing but an empty

mouth a mere representation of a person but then I look at

this and think Blame It On The Rain will stand the test of
 278

time. We have been working on something with Mike Bolton a

duet or trio. He will not return my phone calls. I refuse

to consider that I am relying on paparazzi for business

information. I know Stan is in oakland laying down a track

for the new Addams Family movie but I cannot find him. We

will be remembered the way I remember Heintje. I am

looking at my VHS copy of Ich sing' ein Lied für dich

thinking what I am hearing is French spoken by a Belgian.

I do another line off the frame and on the VCR I turn on

one of his movies the one where he is in Mexiko but it is

actually Bavaria. My copy is dubbed into American English.

I will turn this off and watch Onkel Remus Wunderland until

I fall asleep from the whiskey. While I am looking for the

videocassette the nightly news shows protestors marching

with butcher paper banners and signs spraypainted on

corrugated cardboard, LAPD ES CULPABLE, NO JUSTICE, NO

PEACE. I take my copy of Livin’ For You out of its sleeve

and place it on the turntable on the second side and drop

the needle on the last track.

66. One-hundred eighty Valley Bureau police officers in

riot-gear, some on horseback, invade Warner Center to

protect the former chief from hecklers. I am talking to a

reporter from KCOP covering a luncheon honoring Ed Davis, a

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politician calling for the criminalization of HIV. I am

wearing an ACT-UP t-shirt and a yellow paisley headband

around my shaved head. My eyes behind aviator sunglasses

are bloodshot and my nose is red from the rail of coke I

inhaled to give me the right level of brightness and

contrast necessary for me to compete with the valley’s

brutal sunlight. We’re out here because the people who

live in these condos and high rises and shop at that mall

over there with its Bullocks Wilshire and Saks Fifth

Avenue. These people here don’t give a fuck about people

dying all around them wherever they look and, and they let

these politicians like Ed Davis the former chief of the

most violent police department in the nation, they let Ed

Davis convince them that people with AIDS deserve a life

sentence. He calls it a quarantine but if you listen to

him he wants us in jail for life. And we’re here to tell

them that they need to open their eyes to what is really

going on. The reporter says alright we got it, thanks.

The more experienced officers in the crowd are familiar

with using firm grips, compliance holds on gays when they

get out of line. It’s easier to thump a faggot than an

average Joe, he says, who cares, they love it, they want to

get hit. I notice the officer who arrested me for lewd

conduct when I was fifteen in a bathroom on the westside,

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still in the force, looking more like a bulldog than ever.

Today they are prepared to use the tools of intermediate

force, batons, chemical gas, even tasers. Once the

reporter is out of earshot, they talk amongst themselves in

formation. I am not approaching to them, only listening,

and they can’t touch me if I am not in their face. We’re

going to kick the asses of some faggots today, says one.

Another officer says they’ll get it where they want it, and

he mimes penetration of the buttocks of a female cop with

his baton and all around the nervous laughter begins. The

cop says we brought the latex so nobody gets AIDS if these

faggots try to bite us. An LAPD foothill officer says,

man, that shit would rock, if fags bite us in these suits,

dude. He points to the police issue kevlar stretched over

a blue uniform, an a-shirt and a necklace with brass

crucifix. All around the Marriott hotel, where the

representative from Santa Clarita celebrates his seventy-

fifth birthday, protesters, blacks, Latinos, whites, men,

women, hold signs with messages like SILENCE=DEATH and STOP

HIV HYSTERIA and ED DAVIS IS A SLIME HIV IS NOT A CRIME and

STOP GOP DEATH SQUADS. Thirty-six people are arrested at

the Intersection of Oxnard and Owensmouth in the west end

of the San Fernando Valley without resistance, some in Park

Avenue Republican drag, Brooks Brothers’ suits, Ralph

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Lauren ties, some splattered with red paint and vegetable

material. One of my friends from USC wears a placenta tied

to his neck with an umbiliical cord stolen from a trash

site in Canoga Park. Another protester wears a plush

McGuff the crime fighting dog head and a leotard decorated

with feathers plucked from chickens purchased at a live

poultry shop on corbin. A PBS reporter asks him to

explain his costume. He says sometimes I wake up in the

morning and the first thing I can see is the McGruff six-

foot plush toy that represents the police department and I

can’t go to sleep from the laughing. I mean seriously why

not just have a fire hose with a smiling face drawn on the

end. It is possible to laugh at absurdity however violent

the image of this hound may be. And especially when the

idea falls so off the mark, you think these people believe

in this dog, that it works to defuse what they say and how

we hear it. It is this Mister Ed mentality, trot him out

and let him speak for you, no need to sign a release. We

will see if they use that on the six o’clock news. At the

end of the afternoon, three of my friends are taken in for

protesting without a permit, and seven more for obstruction

of justice for standing with their signs on a restricted

trillium site, home of a future Cheesecake Factory. I find

my green Audi in the mall parking lot, remove the club, and
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drive back over the Ventura and San Diego freeways to my

studio apartment, where I am grading more papers on

Spectres of Marx for my political theory class. My friend

calls me and says he watched it all on the news including

himself in his abortion suit, all blood and placenta. He

tells me the cops used the phrase in an interview

compulsive force was utilized. I call one of my best

students who I just found out is sixteen. I don’t usually

socialize with my students but this one is new to town

after transferring from the University of Michigan. He

seems like he needs some friends in the city. He is

reading something new by Derrida that I am unfamiliar with,

but he wants to talk about it nonetheless. His paper

bears the title is looting counter-revolutionary? He says

we are the Geschlecter, the dead generations. Do you want

to talk about this over coffee. I think i’m going to the

film series at the Nuart, Great Depression. Tonight they

are showing newsreels by the film and photo league. We

could meet early and then see the reels if you are

interested and have time, if you’re finished with all of

your work. From this side of the street the field of

pigeons in Exposition Park looks like settled ash, and the

solitary rising seagull like a dollar bill in the wind. I

am driving across campus onto childs when I recognize the

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same officer who has been giving me shit for years despite

my tenure and fucking obvious parking lot tags. My anxiety

and regimen are affecting my ability to drive by forcing me

to constantly ride my mirror expecting a code blue. This

afternoon I nearly crash into the parked Audi to my right

possibly an undercover officer. I pick the student up from

his apartment near Exposition Park and we drive to the

nuart where there are posters for a re-release of La Dolce

Vita and the new Derek Jarman Shakespeare adaptation. When

we take our seats in the back row he wants to talk to me

about the President’s press conference. I tell him I avoid

the news and get most of my information about what is going

on from my friends. My stomach is too weak to receive it

unfiltered. Too many friends have died and too many

enemies seek our ideological imprisonment. He wants to

talk about mainstream politics. He says did you hear what

the President said about AIDS. He says he believes in

behavioral change and this is a full-on plague. I tell him

the Republicans have a long way to go before they can

distance themselves from some of the religious fanatics in

their party. But be careful about the word plague because

your falling into their trap of asking you to see things

their way in the terms of Revelation. Use the word

pandemic, its epidemiologically precise. I am wondering if

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this is a rhetorical question or if he wants me to answer

but all I say is popcorn . I tell him I am really big on

binaries and it has become my business as low-paying as it

continues to be, but let me ask you this, does theory lead

to practice? He says I don’t want to look at this like

what legitimates power or what is the state. I want to see

it emerging as a question of the individual body within

such a state however its sovereignty is defined. You

haven’t answered the question Is looting

counterrevolutionary and all the Proudhon only

overdetermines your armchair status. What do you mean by

sovereignty? He says he thinks Stokely said it best, we

are no longer going to kill people just because a honky

says kill, you know like the war in Iraq, the national

guard, but I think we can recapture our sovereignty, when

we decide to kill, we will decide who we are going to kill.

He says so many people stayed at home for sixty five then

later said they wanted to go down there and shoot people,

that may have been exactly what we should have done, go out

there and blow a few heads off, so you know what I’m

saying? Have you seen the Rodney King tape? I nod my

head. I want to recommend other tapes of note but none

really compare. This five foot six white boy from

Minnesota reminds me of my friend Jerry Rubin before Apple

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Computer’s IPO. He says it comes down to the question why

bomb the rest of the world and preach non-violence abroad.

you want salt and butter? Have you ever witnessed death?

Pick your battles, my friend. Junior Mints?

67. It is a nice day. I give the City Hall valet my

ticket and he brings my Mercedes up to the ground floor by

freight elevator. I drive downtown but have to wait in

traffic on the Hollywood Freeway as a carrier unknowingly

releases from its uppermost compartment four BMWs sending

commuters into a whirring whine of tires and horns. As I

slam the brakes and watch the ambulances and police cars

arrive I inhale a much-needed cigarette. I am singing

along without irony to Randy Newman’s I Love LA on the CD

player. I drive off the Hollywood Freeway at Lankershim

just where the valley begins and there is this cop

following me as if he wants to stop me even with my license

plate. What are they doing there, the army, do they have

to carry migs and sidearms or are they, is this brit milah,

what’s being wasted here? If he types it into the computer

he can immediately see who it is so I see this as an act of

excessive vigilance. What is the point of being district

attorney unless I am granted the freedom of movement? You

can see there is a fire in the distance, off Magnolia, the

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other side of the Ventura Freeway. It is time to leave

this threatening atmosphere and retreat somehow, go north,

get away from Old Bailey, but first I am going to the

valley to get my hair done. I open the door with the key

under the welcome mat with its image of Mickey Mouse

extending his arm bent at the elbow in a gesture of

servility his hand wrapped in a black patent leather glove,

his ears of the same glossy material, the impression of his

the foot of the cartoon character in cement inverted and

reshaped in latex. I consider myself fortunate to have

someone to talk to who is also a professional at doing

hair. I am sitting on a sienna cough next to the light

reflected on the wall between the bars on the cage and the

muddy footprints on the canary-yellow throw pillows in the

most comfortable parachute pants. Even if they do not look

good in their eyes they are here to stay, they are

comfortable, and after all of the debate over these

videotapes there is no way anyone can convince me to run

for office again. I always keep a pair in my office drawer

for any moments away from my office, to feel a sense of

freedom mostly in the crotch region. It really is amazing

that we live in a place where you can wear these in

February and get away with it. This could be therapeutic

for either of us but everything I give he can take. I am

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exiting the elevator on the third floor of the Toluca Lake

business park above the Laundromat, and entering Ken’s

salon. When I hear some of his fantasies I feel there is

nowhere I could go with him that would not be honest in

some part unless it turns to Erhard Seminars Training or

Jung. It is probably the proximity of the hair with the

brain that makes all of this possible for me. Ken has

solved the mind/body problem with his practice. Together we

move beyond analysis and into new coiffures. There should

be infomercials. Ken remains involved in the community

since coming here from Georgia in the seventies, when

barefoot flower children with ice cream cones rode ponies

down Ventura Boulevard. The barber shop is lined with

porcelain statuary of major figures in African history in

the poses of kings and queens, some holding domesticated

animals. On the wall is a mock up of a hundred-dollar bill

with the barber’s face in the center. There are framed

photographs of former and current customers with fresh

kurls and weaves, oldest sister Rebbie Jackson, star of

Cheers Rhea Perlman, the television star Ann-Marie

Horsford. There is a certificate of participation in the

Van Nuys hair-a-thon to raise money for police victims.

For each pound of hair, Edward James Olmos pledged five

dollars. On the ride back to my office, I hear a Muslim

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cleric on the radio. We are in between FM signals and I

listen to the accent in the voice, an unidentifiable Arabic

inflection with guttural stops between flows of vowels that

sound like Italian to me, reading off the directions to a

mosque on one hundred eighth after delivering a lecture on

al-Ankabut the spider, comparing false beliefs to a spider

web. He says and for every ummah there is a messenger when

their messenger comes the matter will be judged between

them with justice and they will not be wronged. The world

is changing, and I turn off the radio for now to hear the

sound of myself thinking. I meet Kevin Mankes at the

Jerry’s Deli in Studio City for a pastrami on rye and there

is an address from the green room on the monitor. There is

a copy of the Final Call under some napkins and a USA today

showing Saddam Hussein eyes flared and red, raising his

fist in protest in front of a ziggurat in Baghdad. How

would it be possible to have a catastrophe on our hands in

anyway comparable to the holocaust. It is intellectually

lazy to encourage the complacency of those who regard

events only as the latest version of the same old. Events

are discrete units, they cannot be stacked to represent a

totality. This could go on forever. Not a day goes by

without having to listen to one of these insipid speeches.

But I cannot ignore the fact that we are right now looking
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for witnesses in this case and there is nothing related to

this case of which I am not permitted to speak. This is

not the Babylonian captivity we are talking about here, or

two extraterrestrial Londons, there is due process. We

continue to discuss this on the way back to City Hall.

Kevin continues to try to convince me that I am at the

center of a coming storm of backlash against active support

of the police department. He wants me to approach every

case politically. That is something I am not willing to

do. I want him to understand that I do not let race

influence how my office prosecutes a case and that it is a

short drive from Watts to Brentwood. He tells me he will

not compromise with Robocop but I do not understand the

reference. He says to me I think you and I can agree this

must be done right and with minimal loss. He tells me if I

still want the number of the bookie he works with he will

page the message to me later, after I announce my removal

of Judge Karlin from future criminal cases by blanket

affidavit. When a jury delivers a verdict, unless there

are extraordinary circumstances, the judge must sentence

according to the guidelines. If the judge shows racist

sympathies, punishment is imperative. I am comparing

myself to John Kennedy when he criticized the incarceration

of Martin Luther King. My reasoning has always been that

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there was no fight in this case. It was an accusation

followed by a violent attack by the defendant on the

victim. There was no great provocation from this fifteen

year old girl. We need someone impartial in Compton

someone whose decision making ability is not determined by

racial animosity. There is a state law requiring a prison

sentence for anyone who uses a gun to commit a crime, and

when you ignore that you are in flagrante delicto. Because

Danny Bakewell and the Brotherhood Crusade have been

calling my office all day since I came into the office at

eight o’clock. Now I am reclining on the ottoman in my

home off Mandeville Canyon where Topanga Canyon subsides

checking out the view of the Santa Monica flats when the

wife of my best friend calls to tell me she is sorry about

the way this Korean grocer case is going. She is going on

about scapegoating and the war between Asians and Blacks

and I am listening to all of it and wriiting in my notepad

whatever comes of this remember it like it was your first

day and all you could think about was finishing the list.

In those days I felt I could continue going on forever

litigating but now I know I have realized my limits. I am

getting mail now accusing me of inciting anti-semitism and

interfering with judicial process. Generally and we get

hundreds from throughout the city they start out by

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criticizing me for the McMartin case as if there is

anything I can do to guarantee a verdict. Then they go on

to explain the fragile relationship between Blacks and Jews

based on mutual almost tribal identification, the link

between Alabama and the Jordan, you know, Sam Cooke, I was

born by the river in a little tent. I can relate to that

because I was born five miles from the Porciuncúla in a

carpenter gothic mansion next to an auto parts shop. This

was in the days before we had zoning laws to protect

residents from proximity to commercial enterprises. They

tell me I have disturbed the independence of the judiciary.

They say they have a video of me smoking crack. It goes

without saying that I have never touched the stuff. But

tell me if I have not contributed to understanding among

peoples here during my eight years. I misjudged the

traffic today and I am stuck somewhere around the WPA gate

to the Hollywood Bowl depicting dance, music and art. In

the driveway my son rides his tricycle and extends his

middle finger in greeting. I unlock the door and General

Barnard and his family greet me in needlework and eglomise.

In the bedroom, I put down my Valentino blazer next to the

Aunt Jemima patterned Staffordshire garniture on the

nineteenth century Noah’s Ark blanket chest. I eat a bowl

of frosted flakes and stare at myself and the terra cotta

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horseman from Nigeria in the seventeenth century Flemish

mirror. I walk to the dining room and sit at the English

mahogany breakfront holding an eighteenth century armorial

service and write a letter to the California Democratic

Leadership Council announcing my decision to retire at the

end of next year.

68. The office is the sixteenth floor of a building on

Century Park and Santa Monica across from the country club.

When I pull the Jaguar into the parking lot the valet is

there to relieve me and I count the cash in my wallet so I

know I have enough to pay him when I leave. The elevator

takes me up several flights of stairs and we stop on the

seventh for an ancient man in a fedora holding a walker to

get on. He wants down but I tell him we are going up and

he gets on anyway. He gets off on the tenth floor and when

the door opens on the sixteenth I am alone in the car with

no one to corroborate my shock at the ornamentation. I

wonder if this is the kind of place where you send your

kids only to tell other influential people that you send

your kids there. There is a vestibule with walls painted

to resemble burlwood and tortoiseshell, stenciled with gold

and a door with a plaque. She comes out to meet me and

leads me into the lobby and inside there are french bronzes
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from the seventeenth century on the eighteenth century

Russian console. For my morning at this therapist I have

worn a white blouse with ruffles and rhinestones and some

leather jodhpurs, like something from the urban cowboy

movement in eighty. With this I have paired a black skirt

going down below my knees and some nineteen fifties Nancy

Drew shoes. It would be satisfying to persuade her to

discuss my choice of dress today as a cover for other

problems. Then we could discuss my outfit and never move

into Mark and Patty’s concerns. This is plan A. I walk

over inlaid parquetry floors into a room she tells me is

made to resemble Leningrad’s summer and winter palaces.

Capodimonte and Niderviller porcelain covers a Louis XV

console. To my left are Meissen roosters and boar’s head

tureen. The therapist says she will skip the long

introductions so we can get right into the discussion. She

says your parents tell me you are not eating. I am

slightly surprised to hear this and my first thought is to

wonder if the weight loss is visible. I tell her without

reserve that my initial impulse coming today was to try

some mode of distraction so we can veer off topic. I ask

her if she wants me to admit anything and she tells me she

knows everything. At this point I am thinking of leaving

immediately and forfeiting the session, making Mark and

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Patty pay for it, but then I think of what will happen at

home for refusing to follow through on what Mark calls

quote the one thing you can do for us right now. Instead

of going along with the questions I have decided to go

along with plan B. This is to come up with a strategem in

the session through my line of questions or answers that

would throw this person into discussion of an issue more

important than Circe and how she is doing in Haiti.

Although I am sure of her whereabouts and safety I will

present the issue of my sister. I start to fidget with my

hands in my lap until she notices then I start to cry and

say my friend is getting breast implants and the reason I

am in here is because I do not think it is fair that some

people can have everything they want and others can. And

she is in jail! I am hoping the histrionics can be

contained within my narrative of noble suffering. She says

how long has this been bothering you. I tell her since the

morning of the twenty fourth when my friend came into the

main building of school and told me her father had spent

several thousand dollars on the best surgeon money can buy

in Beverly hills. She says how did this make you feel. I

say to her it was yet another example of something I cannot

control. She says plenty of people live full and happy

lives with the presence of ideation. Now she is launching

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into the anorexia nervosa discussion which lasts all of

five minutes without interruption. She hands me a copy of

a book by Alice Miller. She says there are treatments now

which get to the bottom of the desire to have control over

our environments. She wants to prescribe benzodiazepines

and send me to another specialist for outpatient treatment.

She suggests keeping track of all of my meals in a journal,

everything including foods without any calories such as ice

tea and diet coke or sugarless chewing gum. I am

attempting a kind of histrionic performance I see

occasionally when I stay home from school and watch all my

children. But after a few moments I stop myself, because

even if she recognizes this is something with a different

motivation. Do you like dogs, she asks. I notice a

reproduction of an oil painting on the wall representing

what looks like a dog hovering over a sewer grill in the

gutter. The dog’s face is obscured and a shadow covers the

pavement behind only his head as if the rest of the body is

spectral. I say is that Lucien Freud. She says you are

good but no it is his friend Francis Bacon. I say oh. She

says do you like dogs this is called man with dog painted

in nineteen fifty-five. I am thinking whether or not I am

a dog lover is missing the point of this disturbing

painting. I am beginning to wonder what she is thinking

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hanging a painting like this in her office. I tell her how

much I like dog, and when they jump into my lap and lick my

face sometimes I make out with them. I want to discuss the

automaton but instead I am telling her about a project I am

working on for school mocking notion of afterlife with urns

marked with dead Presidents from coin reliefs. I tell her

it will be like the Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square

in Anaheim. She asks me if there will be anything inside

the urns. I tell her I haven’t decided yet but possibly

there will be an olfactory element somewhere. I was

thinking of just stuffing it with old newspaper instead of

the ashes and then anyone can go ahead and start a fire

within the sepulchre. I ask her if she has heard of Jacob

Weintraub. She says no. I tell her he invented this thing

called the PC therapist. You can tell the machine anything

and it will respond to you. Like you could say to it I

hate my father and it will say why do you hate your father.

It can do more than that, because it has modules for short-

term memory, topic-tracking and grammar, and it stores

every conversation in a text file so its memory and

relevance continues to grow the more you talk to it. What

do you think? She says it sounds like a great idea and it

could help someone. I thank this woman and say goodbye but

she still wants to talk and write all of my responses on

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her legal pad. At home I will open the Los Angeles Weekly

and see the full-page bilingual ads offering legal and

health services to people with AIDS. There is a photograph

of Desmond Tutu and Boutrous Boutrous Ghali, the new Ghanan

head of the UN. I wonder if my sister knows him. There is

an advertisement for a mutual fund investment firm. I

could stare at the statistics in this article about housing

prices for ten minutes for ten minutes without

comprehending so I am going to make myself a bowl of

alphabet soup.

69. I come in peace. It is not that I am angry but

protection is institutional, instinctual, so tonight I am

wearing a bulletproof vest borrowed from an off-duty

security officer from my office. I am here as a humanist,

first, American second. In my pocket there is a handgun.

When the bull gores he is not thinking about his horns, he

is not angry like I am not angry. Words have consequences

when I say them in front of a crowd of several thousand at

the prince hall memorial auditorium on 90th and Figueroa.

I will be greeted by protesters with signs: RECALL JUDGE

JOYCE KARLIN, STOP THE WAR AGAINST BLACK AMERICA, NO NAZIS

IN OUR COMMUNITY, NO FREE SPEECH FOR FASCISM. Tonight five

days after the verdict in the Korean grocer trial I am the

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guest of robert brock the national President of the

cosmopolitan brotherhood association. Danny Bakewell is

here tonight, and congresswoman Maxine Waters. I am

motivated by thrill of communicating my ideas about

historical approaches to the holocaust to the mostly black

community of south Los Angeles. I plan to discuss the

possibility of a messianic stage, the criteria for

emergence of the moschiach. I will betray no religious

conviction in the discussion of any of these ideas and you

can review the transcript of the remarks if you have any

questions. The topic of my discussion leads in from a

discussion of multiethnic democracies such as our own into

a list of what would occur after the coming of the

moshiach. All of the people of Israel will come home to

the torah. The people of Israel will be gathered back to

the land of Israel. The first temple in jerusalem will be

rebuilt, and by that I mean the Temple of the Mount.

Israel will live free among the nations with no need to

defend itself, and war and famine will end and an era of

peace and prosperity will come to the earth. Tonight the

subject is Beginnings: Attitudes to the Holocaust Then and

Now. I will be discussing the word in its many uses as

metaphor, how attitudes to certain monikers can be

conditional. I will ask the question if it is possible to

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continue to use certain words after they can no longer be

used as general descriptive terms and become historical

fixed ideas. I do not support the use of the word in the

present context to indicate disaster or fire or devastation

or auto da fe. We need to use words with care. Until it

happens we should not overstate given historical fact. In

large part people listen to representative Waters because

she oversatates. I have supported her and others but when

I look at this community I see one united against police

abuse and not a determined effort to destroy a people. Can

genocide happen in Los Angeles. Certainly it can. Will it

happen. Absolutely not. We are seeing elements in the

community which have never comisserated, coming together

tonight to discuss a metaphor that will never happen again.

I conclude by expressing my outrage over some of the tracks

on this new CD death certificate and the need for hate

crime regulation. I support Tsongas or Paul Simon and

Mayor Bradley and I send money to survivors and vote and

donate my money and organs and speak that is all I can do.

My message tonight was simply to promote my real opinions

and worldview and also to persuade folks to work with me to

get this thing off the market. There are students here

from Santa Cruz to protest but they left me with the

feeling they are not sure of their reasons, almost as if

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they had been paid by some other organization. A small

group from the audience raises their hands after the

lecture. A student asks do you believe in what Rabbi

Moshe Ben Maimon suggested regarding disembodied intellects

or monads turning simultaneously to monotheism and second

do you think Israel in this case refers to that

geopolitical entity as it is now described or to the entire

world. He goes on to describe some Goya painting he

believes relates to our discussion. I am sorry I do not

think I can answer the first question because it is a

question of faith and not hermeneutics and also I am not an

expert on Maimonides. I respond to the latter part by

suggesting that certain words should not be assumed to

mirror something that was or is out there. Someone asks

sarcastically when you go to the Garden of Eden do you mean

something in Judea for which the potentiality for existence

is thousands of years old, or the convenience store that

bears the same name. This does not require an across the

board loss of meaning, I told them, rather a rejuvenation

of possibilities of meaning, then I use an organic metaphor

the kind of which the naturalists would employ to reassure

the audience that they are as real and precious as cactuses

or rhododendrons. Someone else stands to ask when you

visit Israel do you expect to find things as they were two

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thousand years ago or do you expect to see something

adapted for the Twentieth Century which bears almost no

physical resemblence to those images you conjured while

reading the Bible. I would argue it would be unlikely you

would see partings of seas and such, but this is my own

historical pessimism. The landscape at least its hills and

valleys would have largely remained the same, away from

settlement activities, where you would still see balms of

gilead and roystonea elata. If you turned on CNN I am sure

it is what you would see. A young woman asks does justice

exist independently of the law. I believe they are trying

to suggest that the invisible hand is not invisible

anymore, that they can see it moving and it fills them with

dread. If something is out there your choice is simply not

to buy it. Perhaps they are confused about imagining a

return to Israel as though a resplendent hovercraft would

levitate them from the US to the holy land. On my ride on

Figueroa south to Prince Hall I listen to the CD on my car

CD player. Don’t follow me around your marker or your

little chop suey ass will be a target, this philistine is

saying now. Gone are the days when high ideals seeped

through into popular culture. They are telling me the

director of The Sting has cast him in a film now called

Looters. Destruction of property seems to be the last

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thing to want to encourage but then what do I know about

this community. They have roped off a section of Figueroa

for a self fulfilling prophecy. I can see the signs, SO

FREE SPEECH FOR FASCISM, STOP BLACK KOREA, but I do not

want to look at them only because I know what I am here to

accomplish. One protester shouts at me to go back to

Israel. I wonder if he understands the irony. In my life

there can be no stunned anymore. I want to say because

this is the new Jerusalem, my parents saw no reason to go

to the old Jerusalem. What am I going to say that I came

here almost without my knowledge. This was where the ship

landed, in Long Beach, our Ellis Island. As I pull away I

notice the police intervening in the crowd with the anti-

Nazi signs so I turn down Death Certificate to listen and

hear someone say no more Rodney King shit here. Most of

the cops and the protestors are white even though there are

no white people once I turn on Figueroa from ninetienth. I

turn right on Manchester and enter the Harbor Freeway north

back to my home in Sherman Oaks. I want to listen to the

news and the governor is talking about the failure of the

aid to families with dependent children program and

announcing a ten percent cut in welfare benefits from six

hundred and sixty three a month to five hundred ninety

seven for a family of three.

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70. We are driving to Pasadena to talk about the halting

problem. How will we know when it is over? She says it’s

cold tonight but it’s not cold, it’s sixty five degrees

already and it is only eight. She says we should go in the

evening because in the morning the marine layer comes in

and then she asks where are you taking us? I thought we

could go out to the bridge at Marcy and Fourth Street, look

at the beaux arts towers there, photograph them when the

streetlights and the sunset are at their reddest. She says

how will we see it in the dark? We will see something if

we start early, but there is no marine layer in Pasadena.

We drive to Arroyo Seco, the dry waterbed from Studio City

down the Ventura freeway through Glendale until we see the

Annandale golf course on our left. We pull over onto

Arroyo Boulevard, under the stacked Long Beach, Foothill

and Ventura. We reach the Colorado Street Bridge at around

nine in the evening only to discover it has been closed due

to the Loma Prieta earthquake. I try to make a joke about

rolling hills, as in the heaving circular motions of

seismic activity, but she just stares at me like that bald

Irish singer when she tears up the Pope. I am narrating

now, because she doesn’t want to listen to the radio. This

construction was major. It used to take people about four

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hours just to cross the arroyo. When they first built this

bridge a construction worker drowned in the pouring

concrete and allegedly his soul cries out for others to

join him. This may be why this was the leading site for

suicides during the Great Depression. When the linear

graph plummeted, the people, rendered desperate by market

forces, jumped into a river evading the city by the

gravitational pull of water into the center of the basin.

It isn’t always dry, there has been flooding, like the one

in nineteen thirty seven. It’s never been the best place

for a corpse because after a few days you can’t ignore the

odor in this canyon, and the police bring out a search

squadron. The river starts in the San Gabriel Mountains

near mount Wilson and flows down Hahamongna Watershed Park

the city until it reaches Elysian park downtown and joins

the Los Angeles River. We are standing in the Rancho San

Pascual staring out into the Rancho San Rafael, I want to

ask someone who lives here where the boundary line is and

the faces look confused. She asks me if we will see any

ghosts and I tell her I do not believe in ghosts. We walk

down the road and into an oak grove where we have a clearer

view of the bridge above and the dry riverbed below.

There is a clearing next to an oak grove where all you can

here is the faint buzz of traffic, and we spread the

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blanket on a large rock. We brought a thermos filled with

some cheap red wine my father is unlikely to notice

missing, and two wine glasses. I have some trouble getting

the cork out with the bottle opener. It comes out in two

pieces. We each lift a glass to the end of the war, it was

a quick one, and to another school year, the two of us

working together. We look at a photocopy of a November

newspaper and laugh at the President posing with a hand-

picked inbred turkey they will eat at the White House for

Thanksgiving. We talk about the halting problem. The

river courses through the entire city but as it is under

the street level, it appears septic, toxic, circulating

through the highway system. It bisects the city into a left

bank, Solano Canyon, Chinatown, Silverlake, Downtown, and

the West San Fernando Valley, and Right Bank, Lincoln

Heights, Boyle Heights, the Arroyo Seco area, Glendale and

the San Gabriel valley. Apropos of nothing she says in the

popular imagination it represents the unconscious, but I

think she means all rivers. I begin to photograph some of

the descending rock formations, and take one of Jessica

herself through the white lavender silverleaf lupine and

duckbrush, holding a glass, her black hair obscuring her

face. We admire the bridge and its Beaux Arts style, a

mixture of late-19th-century Parisian neobaroque, Italian

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Renaissance and Roman Imperial imitations. Jessica says

she expected more Mayan influence, and I say because the

bridge is in this location you can sense that even if it

was not intentional. We both discuss the fact that we are

standing in Mexico, but neither of us can remember when

this became California. We are certain it was not during

the lifetime of anyone we have ever known outside of books.

She thinks it was James K. Polk and I tell her I think it

may have been later, like McKinley. Coming here reminds me

of why you cannot go to a place expecting to visit its

history. I am thinking about the willows Mulholland saw

all along the banks of this river when he rode into Los

Angeles on horseback. She says that if you cover your ears

to filter out the sound of the freeway it can have a

powerful time machine effect. I tell her she should dress

up Gloria Swanson and shoot this at Devil’s Gate, but she

says she doesn’t want to imitate her grandmother. A family

walks by, the mother wheeling a child wearing a bootleg t-

shirt showing Bart Simpson in dreadlocks a Rastafarian

speech bubble emerging from his spiked yellow head.

Blotches from exposure to the toxicodendron diversilobum

growing in the hills cover the child’s face, but he is

still smiling. The father is wearing an Oakland A’s hat

and sandals over socks. They tell us they live near lower
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Arroyo on del Mar and ask us where we are from. We tell

them I am from Baldwin Hills and she is from the valley.

They tell us to be careful of poison oak and to always

bring calamine lotion just in case. I ask them if they

know how to get to rancho San Rafael and everyone shrugs

their shoulders, even the kid in the stroller. We offer

them some raisins but they continue on their hike away from

the rose bowl to the streets of Pasadena with its magnolias

and oaks spewing acorns on the sidewalks. We pack up and

walk back to where the car is parked, in viewing distance

of one of the Colorado street towers. In the car I put

in an Art Tatum tape recorded off of my grandfather’s

record collection. We hear the sound of a piano riff two

fifths transposed triangulated in a syncopated rhythm, the

echo of the strings as they hit the keyboard through the

scratch and crackle of the vinyl. All we have to do to

get to Devil’s Gate is to drive north on Arroyo past the

Rose Bowl and the Brookside golf course, but the traffic is

a little slow today due to an event at the Bowl. By the

time we get to Devil’s Gate it is already ten thirty and

all we can hear is traffic as we pull off the road and step

out of the car and walk through cobwebs, discarded

lightbulbs, dead beetles and spiders and a rusted stop sign

stenciled WAR.
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71. We never meant to kill Tiny, they surrounded us, we

were held hostage and We crawl in through the drivers’ side

window of the police car because my partner left the keys

inside. We drive down east one hundred fourteenth street

into Imperial Courts over the curb and park in the entrance

to the carless parking lot. Sergio puts the car in neutral

then we roll up on to the sidewalk, past the mural of

Martin Luther King, the door to the front office, bolted.

The wind tonight is out of control, whipping against the

buildings with the same force as it hits the dusty peaks of

the San Bernadino mountains. The tenants of the project

are out waiting for the return of one of Tiny Peco, cupping

hands around the flames of votive candles. A television

antenna falls into a power feeder line across the Imperial

Highway in a power facility in Willowbrook and a puddle of

darkness oozes toward downtown, Long Beach, and across the

river and the freeway to Downey and Bell Gardens. We see

the Pep Boys sign on Slauson sputter, splash neon and fade

and only the headlights lead us out of darkness. Sergio

hands over a cassette tape labelled with some masking tape,

Apocalypse Now. We drive through the complex, narrowly

missing the two magnolia bushes planted near the structure,

scraping against the wall. As Walkürenritt begins on our

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car cassette radio, we park on the other side of east one

fourteenth, away from the majority of the residents in the

main two buildings, where a set of tracks begins in thorny

underbrush littered with aluminum refuse. We stare at the

project built of cinder blocks, most repainted in aerosol

in metallic red over the original institutional periwinkle

including the tag TINY 1984-1991. I tell Sergio to turn

the music off because it sounds like something Hitler would

listen to in his bunker when he knew at last it was over.

He says it is not Nazi shit man it’s from that movie you

know the part with the napalm bombing and the helicopters

man it gets me every time I tell you it takes me back to

the Amazon. We are talking about Sergio’s work in the

nineteen eighties as part of the Caltentli battalion in el

Salvador, battling campesinos cocaleros. The idea that we

fight the war over there to keep from fighting it here is

one that has lost its appeal to Sergio. He is comparing

the Andean initiative to the work we are doing here in

Imperial Courts and there is an underlying dissatisfaction,

as though Sergio refuses to recognize the good work he is

doing for the city on both sides of the equator. Sergio is

breaking down as Wagner blasts out of the dashboard

speakers. I have never seen a man cry like this. Last

week he was involved in a stakeout in a warehouse in

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Hayward where twelve hundred pounds of China white,

somewhere between two and three billion worth. I feel like

I should take him somewhere for a beer after this mission

ends so I can defend him. I will say to him there is no

reason not to be proud about what you did over there and

not think of this as a demotion on any scale, raise the

prices and reduce consumption here at home and that what

you were doing in the Andes, you battle the insurgents

there first before they can attack us here. Cheer up, man.

You were doing what you could in the war on drugs, so stop

crying. Stop fucking crying. We feel a bump under the

tires like we ran over some cat and I halt the car. Looks

like we really fucked up somebody’s science fair project.

We step out of the vehicle, and officer B slams it, locks

the doors. There are Christmas tree garlands and votive

candles in shattered glass jars and a photograph of a boy,

maybe eleven. The word Tiny is scrawled onto a canary

yellow banner surrounded by marigolds. There are two

glasses of beer with pennies collecting at the bottom. We

drive over the remaning gladeolas in the memorial display

to Henry Tiny Peco. Sergio cranes his neck above the

steering wheel at the detritus about to roll under for the

second time, the third. He says none of us meant to do it,

we had no choice, we never wanted to kill him. You

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couldn’t see him, he was so small. I tell him to get

ready, it’s going to be a horde out here once they see

this. We should get back to the other side of Vermont as

soon as possible where the bloods will greet us as heroes.

He says we don’t want to incite PJ Watts do you know what

the fuck you are messing with. We drive around the

warehouse on the other side of the mural, behind the

residential area, where there appears to be some kind of

vigil going on tonight judging by the glow of candles

through the windows of the units. Sergio points to the

right, where down one hundred fourteenth, the weed covered

lot turns into a convenience store parking lot, its three

parking slots jammed with a van and two pick-up trucks, one

with a rottweiler on the flatbed. With the Wagner turned

down you can hear the Sony mini television on the

dashboard. I speak into the MDT. Imperial Courts, we got

some kind of ceremony going on down here. From out of the

darkness come the candles, one by one carried by residents

of the courts carrying banners and signs, everything from

JUSTICE FOR ALL PEOPLE to GATES MUST GO. Eyeballing it it

looks like more than a hundred people. There is a man

armed with an Uzi behind the elephant tree in the

courtyard, one of the new models from Israel with a near

perfect target. A baseball hits the window and the crowd

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approaches the car yelling at us to turn down the music

when a gun is fired at seven thirty two in the evening and

we are both running away from the elephant tree toward our

parked police car. Sergio reaches up from below the seat

and turns on the silent siren and the court is lit up in

red. He draws his piece and he tells me to crank the

Wagner. As the shots rebound, Sergio stands and fires into

the crowd and I know that there will be at least one

victory tonight in the gunfire reduction program. We were

looking for those with proclivity to fire arms and that is

what we got handed to us in the middle of a big a shit

sandwich. Sergio is down and I am hiding behind the

dashboard as the music blasts. The paramedics arrive and

people are preventing them from reaching the center

courtyard, as though they cannot tell the difference

between an EMT and us. I want to tell them just to leave

and look out for what is best for their safety but right

now my face is mashed against one of the strands of carpet

protecting the floorboard and I hear the gunshots. In

rolls the six ton armored personnel carrier, f-troop

standing on guard, their regulation automatics pointed at

the crowd. You see a few people stooping down, hands in

the air in surrender and everyone else pounding their fists

chanting GATES DEBER IRSE. There is blood on the driver’s

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seat and my partner is sprawled on the reclined driver’s

seat. Stop crying, Sergio, be a man, fucking stop it, stop

crying, stop crying, Sergio.

72. I the sovereign who am outside the law declare that

there is nothing outside the law. We have eluded disaster.

My stationery still bears my name but I am filled with

apodosis and protasis, but if there is nothing new under

the sun, at least consider the attempt. At the donor

banquet Kenny G plays his hit Songbird and Barbara spins

around in circles like Josephine Baker. In the morning I

will blame this on the ambrosia salad. At the time I found

not only too reminiscent of picnic food but too sweet with

its chunks of honeydew melon in whipped cream. Now I can

feel it in my large intestine as a hairy throbbing, like I

swallowed a mongoose whole. For Kennebunkport we brought

up a cook from Guatemala, Virginia, and she can’t seem to

get it right just yet. She is no match for the White House

chef. Two of my sons are in town for some golf at Cape

Aurundel. Neil and his wife are asleep in an adjoining

bedroom after having been in Connecticut for the last three

days, and my youngest is asleep on the couch in front of

the Andy Griffith Show on the Nashville network with a

Miller Genuine Draft in hand. It spills and Pickles’s

Scottish terrier licks the spilled beer from off the arms
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of the chenille couch and the crotch of my sleeping son,

the television now showing white and red fluvium escaping

metal pipeline under the titles of a soft-core pornographic

film starring Kim Basinger and Eric Roberts, Scorpion Whip.

On the wall behind the couch is a portrait of Ali Feisal by

Augustus John. The last thing I remember is telling

Barbara I am going to turn out the light but that someone

needs to tell this cook how to make food for his dietary

needs or they are going to have to look for another

involving secret service background checks and how do you

check the background of an illegal immigrant? We need to

look into the legality of that before the general election

campaign. I say to her and switch off the light. I find

myself in a desert world, all desert and hot sun with a

cactus garden and a fountain running down rocks in

ultramarine. My image is not me. I do not know how we

made it this far if this is what they are seeing when they

look at me. When I am at the office I think about the time

it took for the news of Polk’s war to get out to the

reading public. I am not ready for simultaneity or

necromancy. As rapid eye movement begins so does the

speech, a paen to the pre-emptive war I would have

disavowed in my waking hours as the grotesque fantasies of

the Nuremberg defendants. Again, full-sleeved cotton

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blouse and a denim skirts worn over petticoats. I have my

wallet out to pay for something but I am not sure what.

The wallet itself I do not recognize, with its CIA

insignia, but the leather is worn out as if it has been in

his pocket all of his life. I am at once outdoors and

indoors as though at a picnic in a roofless room with low

walls fashioned from horse diving platforms, through which

the desert sunlight streams in unfiltered. I am delivering

a speech to an invisible audience but I have the sensation

of having eyes on the tips of my fingers. I am lecturing

about Ephraim, a book I do not remember. I am not crying.

But the iron children of these tears shall never perish. I

straighten my tie and cough into the dusty wind and it is

suddenly hot, over one-hundred degrees, and I notice the

sun is going down over a distant palm tree. I can hear the

traffic of the interstate but the room here in Tikrit is

the press room in the east wing of the White House, the

main chamber about sixty by twenty by thirty cubits, and

the questions are asked by members of the Washington Press

Corps. I’d like to ask you Mr. President, your decision to

invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqis,

yet every reason you have given publicly at least, has

turned out not to be true. We have been through Operation

Cobra, Operation Desert Sabre, Operation Desert Shield,

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Operation Desert Storm, Granby, Hail Mary, Imminent

Thunder, Night Camel, Provide Comfort. I tell her that’s

history. I have never consorted with assassins or

reactionaries. I was always there for Nixon even when they

called me a liberal. Now I am Neville Chamberlain with the

familiar combover of my last grey locks over the shoe-

polish black hair piece. Marlin and Nunu wake me up and

they steer me down the ramp directly into another press

conference. And on the question on the national

convention, what was that one? If they have delegates,

either one of them have delegates would you work to deny

them a role, including, say, national television time? No,

I think you’ve got to be fair. I believe in fair play, and

that’s too hypothetical because I don’t want that to

happen. I’d like to have all the delegates. You could

envision David Duke appearing at the Republican National

Convention? Foghorn, I don’t know what the ground rules

are. You’re going to have all kinds of weird groups down

there at the Republican convention and they’ll adjust then

to the Democratic convention. They travel. They’re

convention-goers. I can’t speak for all these crazy people

that show up. They’ll be swarming all around the outside

I’ll guarantee you but you’ve got certain ground rules you

play by the ground rules and we’re not going to deny a

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person a fundamental right. I don’t know what that right

is, but there are rules that apply to delegates and I can’t

frankly conceive of any Republican state any state

Republican delegation at a convention wanting David Duke to

have anything to do with the process. I just can’t see it.

So, I hope that’s the way it will work out and having said

that, a person is entitled, no matter how obnoxious, to

certain standing and we’ll just see how it goes. But I

will now rush out and talk to Hogan & Hartson to see what

the rules are on this, thank you.

73. My agent says I wish I could ask Jesus for hair for

Christmas, but I know that is not what I am getting, and

before we go is there anything I can get for you, horses,

your daughter old enough to ride horses? Hookers, I know

some great escort services on the westside? Cocaine?

Gerbils? There may be possibilities for crashes but we

minimize them with the proper mechanisms. In this way I

never concede to loss and can maintain a rise even as I am

filling my tank. I am driving directly from the home

office of my agent somewhere in a broadacre city off

Vanalden. I park on Robertson and as I am filling the

meter a former associate hands me cash to find someone to

sort out my issues. When there is money and I can see it

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in cash form in all denominations it now represents

something new to my blood a pure rush gone are the days

when the sight brought on a moment of reflection on its

purchasing power all replaced by the promise of Benjamin

Franklin traveling in my nose and through my arteries and

then out on the street all I can see is what I want to see.

How disappointing to hear others tell me this longing

obscures my dreams and long term goals when they are

thinking of previous versions of me. At first I want to

say are you serious but then I take it and tell him thank

you for your offer, because I want to experience today

arterially. I am looking at the guests of the Beverly

Hills hotel through tinted windows. It is unusual to wait

especially following awareness of my status but it is

sunday afterenoon and the affter tennis and golf rush is at

its peak. There is a hippie with a dreamsicle bandana and

birkenstocks, a Jonathan Livingston Seagull t-shirt and a

pair of bifocals. He begins to draw on a clipboard with

charcoal. He clances down and up in my direction. I am

sure he is sketching the star of television’s Night Court

standing behind me next to the potted paparavacae or wait

it is Shelley Long. You could harvest the alkoloids out of

that and make yourself a killing. It is my job it is

critical to identify at once with market fluctuations and

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my consciousness is now an unbroken straight line. I am

loving it. You can read me like a graph from left to right

but I am only one point and not even that because when you

look at a point it is only an icon representing something

abstract and invisible. The point on the page no matter

how small gives the illusion of two dimensions. The artist

shows me the portrait and I feel an invasion of privacy. I

tell him to I am going to kick his Topanga Canyon ass. He

says hey rock out man just drawing it is not you it is a

picture you can have it. I do not know how this flower

child got into Beverly Hills or can even afford a car. The

truth is that his drawing of me is ugly and I do not want a

reminder of how I appear to others. I can see it every

week on the worst dressed list. My table is ready and

there is no sleight of hand in place for at least the next

few moments waiting in line here where for just a moment I

can matter to others as much as I care for myself. I am

watching the flag of the USSR come down for the last time.

The flagkeepers fold it and toss it in a box. They pulley

the new tri-color flag of the russian government up the

pole and I feel the slide into the ridiculous familiar to

me from years of self-medication. All of this could have

been predicted from the get go. I am banging my head

against a glass door in South Carthay.

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74. My face is reflected in the glass and I cannot see the

pupils or the irises from the green light. My computer is

freezing at school and I scream at it and curse and hammer

away at the space bar and hold down the escape button and

the button representing the logo of the corporation

manufacturing the computer. Before we go ahead and do

this, we agree the subtext will be awareness of the other,

with the assumption that there is the preliminary awareness

of a first contact and a second more intimate awareness.

We will break some of the rules in order to help people

confront certain representations that disturb them. In

these photographs we will be mocking quote sensitive

portrayals of minorities by Hollywood in the eighties and

beyond. It should go over well in the sense that it should

at least produce a reaction, since everyone has been at

some point disturbed to look at someone else’s

representation of themselves. In the first shot Jessica is

dressed as a Mexican whore on Hollywood boulevard, in a

miniskirt and a rosary. Behind her the boulevard can be

seen retreating toward the vanishing point, the Grauman’s

Chinese. In the shot she is eating a torta and the mole

sauce drips down her chin onto her exposed collar bone.

This one is black and white and we tinted the sauce in a

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special treatment of the print to make the whole thing look

even tackier as if it was done before color film and

someone just used a color pencil to bring to life the

details the camera missed. In the second, we applied boot

polish to her face and she is posing as the popular little

rascals character buckwheat, seated in a wheelchair we

borrowed from the prop division of the film department.

She is aged buckwheat, and the kinky hair is now gray, and

Jessica insisted on placing a watermelon slice over her

lips rind on top to suggest a frown. The third is my

favorite. She is wearing as black Cyd Charisse wig and a

leotard. Jessica’s eyes are visibly scotch taped back from

the cheeks to the ears to suggest someone of asian descent.

In this shot she wears wax lips chewing gum with buck teeth

that we found at the dollar store, five per pack. To the

camera she extends an arm to present us with a take out

pail folded from red paper. On the box there is a

character neither of us recognizes, and since the

foreground is out of focus no one else can decipher it

either. Mah jong tiles are scattered around a folding card

table. In the fourth, her breasts are pinned back and she

is wearing hot pants and a pink Gold’s Gym t-shirt and a

wig not unlike Richard Simmons. She is caught mid jumping

jack with the street corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega

 322

appearing behind her, the Pacific Design Center. There is

a sense of false exuberance suggested by her facial

expression and open-mouthed smile. The last is also a good

one, Jessica in a suit carrying a suitcase and talking on a

cellular phone the size of her head standing in front of

one of the new developments downtown where Bunker Hill and

the Angel’s Flight used to be. Her hair is slicked back in

a gelled and hairsprayed pompadour reminiscent of Donald

Trump. I wake up at twelve-thirty after rolling around in

her bed for hours, checking the digital display of her

alarm clock periodically between morning naps. She pulls

the sheets over her head again, staring through the dyed

cotton weave at the light overhead through the rotating fan

blades. Last night they fired her from her job at the

mall, at one of the kiosks. I am prepared for spandex

capri pants and crimson seventeenth century gendarmes

uniforms with shoulder pads and braided ornamental

sidestrings. I walk through the doorway into the padded

cell of her room, the stretched nylon threads from the

factory quilting dangling from the mattresses on the walls,

catching the toe of her left foot. She shrugs her leg and

the sock and the shoe slide off revealing the leg of a

skeleton, the femur bone. Tonight we are breaking curfew.

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She wanted me to stay here tonight but nothing is

happening.

75. You with the gout to the left please. When you know

the symptoms and not the people you start to think about

Hawaii. I work in urgent care at Drew King. It is only an

internship but I am counting the days. In the Peace Corps

in Nicaragua I learned Spanish and coping with limited

resources. There we maunfactured our clinic from trees and

mud. Sometimes I think we had more to work with. Just

thinking about the amount of times this place has been

condemned by overseers makes me worry about the future of

this neighborhood and count my personal blessings. I am

looking at the inpatient services room. There is a woman

with acute dysmenorrhea on a stretcher in the corner near

the fire extinguisher. There is a yellow-eyed man hunched

over in the corner clutching her liver. There is a man

with myoclonus twitching in the other corner. Then there

are the kids with unexplained discharges from eyes noses

and genitalia, forcing me to report sexual abuse. And

coming at me now is another corpse, a woman of around fifty

wearing a rosary and a platinum wig. My girlfriend said

when she met me said you seem like a guy with a lot of

stories. I say can you imagine a storyteller around a

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campfire in drew king. We can set it up in the intake room

and lead the patients in Kumbaya with my harmonica. She

tells me that my gallows humor masks something underneath

that is just a giant baby. She says you are right have you

thought about testifying. I tell her I have no time to

play activist. Are you kidding here comes alberto with a

clipboard and she says I need a signature. Now we are to

decide to take the coronary thrombosis or the missing ear.

I decide severe blood loss is more urgent and forget about

the heart attack. If it is happening we can do little to

prevent it. This one has a goiter. Again what can I do I

cannot treat that here so I tell him to call ripley or

barnum out at the forum they are doing the ring of fire

with elephants. A woman says doctor and I know it is

another case of the dengue from Micronesia. It is as if

everyone comes to Los Angeles. This white man says he has

swollen veins around the anus I tell him preparation h is a

good start and wonder if he is a reporter or someone with a

genuine sense of fear. Every day I am trapped in a box

then I get the drift and sell my shares and get out of the

box but the experience has overshadowed me. I say to her

do you have trouble sleeping. Look at my finger can you

follow it with your eyes for me. I move my head to the

left and the right then back and to the left and right
 325

again. I notice no movement. Have you noticed any lack of

sensation. Is it confined to one side of your body. She

says I no longer feel it all over. I wonder if we will

diagnose. I call in the nurse and she is wearing civilian

clothes and I say are you on duty because she is my staff

now. The last thing I am saying is to bring the pressure

down with a sedative and I collapse on the tile in a puddle

of coca cola encrusted with carapaces and the live ants

crawl onto my face and into my mouth. Tonight I meet my

wife in the hallway of our rented house in Silver Lake. It

remains an oasis at the center of a city in crisis. I will

say they will kill me and then we tumble into each other.

She works for some asshole in a private office on la

cienega the other side of the Miracle Mile and she is tired

but not too tired to fuck even though I am only a country

doctor in this bear market. Why is she with a Herve

Villechaise who cannot even swim when there are Tom

Sellecks with life saving devices out there on the Pacific

in their yachts sailing into fiber optic tunnels toward a

highly evolved atavism.

76. I am looking in my art history book at Fanatics of

Tangier by Delacroix. The caption says it hangs somewhere

in Minnesota. I am thinking about how this painting in my

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art history textbook may be racist then I think Calvin may

be influencing me when I do not want his advice. I turn

the television on to a new situation comedy about the in-

flight employees of an airline. This episode stars Robert

Blake as a Libyan terrorist waving an automatic weapon in

the face of the cast, who must comply wiith every request.

The list of demands starts out with a Pepsi, which provokes

resounding laughter from the track. By the end of the

episode, the airplane is coming down, and the laugh track

disappears until Tim Conway emerges from the bathroom,

toilet paper stuck to the razor slices on his face, and

stumbles into the cockpit screaming the catch phrase of

Herve Villechaise, and again the laugh track erupts until

cfonway steps behind the terrorist and rips off his beard

to reveal Robert Blake, star of television’s Baretta. Over

the soundtrack is a prolonged audience gasp. Over the

screen flashes the phrase TO BE CONTINUED over a plaster of

paris sculpture of the lead actor of the series, who is

still, by the audience, thought to be lost in the skies

over bermuda by the principals of the series, after the

last season’s cliffhanger guest-starring Susannes Somers

and Pleshette. People get ready, the Love Boat is about to

dock. I say out loud to the television screen blow me

Robert Blake and call up Jefferson who is at home reviewing

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the plan, which we have enclosed in a three by four foot

portfolio. When he picks up he tells me he has it, he

stole the mannequin from behind Saks Fifth Avenue at the

Culver City Mall. We will alter a mask from my Halloween

costume collection and ask it questions of historical

importance, but the answer will come out at once as an

arbitrary relation and something expected. It will ask the

spectator to tell us what the outcome will be. I am only

constrained by my inability to function as a musician while

a metronome is counting the time signature. I have never

used one to practice but this time Jefferson tells me it is

essential to follow along with all of the clicks. My

performance is only ancillary to the project as a whole.

When we finally show this thing at the spring fair, the

video will play of the Jefferson Davis automaton reading

from a script and what she reads will appear to lip synch

to a recording of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate

Government placed in the center of an enclosed space. The

script followed by automaton will have no relation to what

is heard, but her mouth will appear to form the same

consonants and vowels produced by the phonograph. He says

most likely it would end up a series of sound images which

could then be accessed by a central database. What are

sound images? Eckert says we would control all the

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responses through the algorithm. It could be something as

simple as the first letter in the name, or the use of

certain words like sun could trigger a response of rain and

we would see a thunderstorm, or it could show you exactly

what you type and you could then see a sunny day. We would

work with the programmer to come up with the structure.

We’re trying to find the solution to a problem in a

sequence of yeses and nos. I suggest performing it live

with one or both of us behind the curtain, but he reminds

me that we’re trying to let the machine tell us when to

stop.

77. My assistants tell me old Hollywood is like saying old

Disneyland, as though the preservation of either requires a

devotion to something jejune. But I want to preserve these

memories and do not want to believe that the space I occupy

renders my existence trivial. I believe we have been

successful in cleaning up a weed-infested mausoleum and

turning it into a movie palace fit for Louis B. Mayer and

David O. Selznick. I am going for a constituency walk on

Hollywood boulevard mostly to prove to myself that it can

be done. Maxine chears her throat and says excuse me. Her

smile now indicates her enthusiasm is entirely political.

I appreciate the coded restraint. The people of my

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district know that it is not in my interest to deny them

representation within our city government. I enjoy support

from a broad racially diverse coalition of persons who

expect more from Hollywood than a dumping ground for lost

souls and decaying fantasies. Without their support the

renovation of these historic sites would have been

impossible. I walk with the mayor and a representative out

of the gates of the Egyptian theater. Ben Hur premiered

twice here and Ben Hur is something you can only see on the

big screen. I say I would like old photographs in the

hallway here to reinforce the idea of restoration and

reformation. When it is complete the city will see that we

have taken few liberties with the plan it is possible to

resurrect dead glories. As we round Highland onto

Hollywood I say to Maxine and Tom who remembers when it was

Grauman’s and only Maxine raises her hand. She says saw

Carmen Jones there and the mayor says how could you not

fall in love with Dorothy even if you agreed with the NAACP

and then Maxine tells us how lovely Harry Belafonte is in

person. She says she agrees it is even now a living

theater where she would be proud to take her children.

Tom points toward Vine and tells us about the Watkins hotel

where Duke Ellington wrote Satin Doll for Madi Comfort. He

says the motto then was together we stand divided we fall

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cooperation or none at all. They demolished the hotel in

nineteen sixty-three. He points to the spot where Billie

Holiday stabbed a heckler at Billy Berg’s club and the

judge dropped the charges because Walt Gordon was such a

fine lawyer. Tom says he met Billie once through Walt at

the Mayan Theater on Hill and Olympic. Maxine tells me

that her district was once the place for black musicians to

play, with clubs down Central all the way into the

hundreds. I want them to hear some of my memories. Not

far from here is the site of the Chinese massacre one

hundred twenty years ago. They called Los Angeles a blood-

stained Eden because of the death of hundreds of Chinese.

The neighborhood of that period was of course demolished,

someone from each family, and the memory no longer exists.

Grauman built his theater in encomium. But I am too close

to the city so much that I can tell you what was once there

on most blocks in my district. For instance, see that

Pioneer Chicken with its insipid Andrew Jackson motif.

There was once a society for Chinese-Americans on the

second floor, no relation to organized crime, just a group

with political interests. I visited with my mother as a

child. She told me what we needed protection from then and

it was the police departments and raids on supposed

organized crime. I liked it because the red velveteen

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curtain blocked the sunlight and the room seemed encased in

vein and tissue like being inside a heart or a lung. There

was the smell of tobacco smoke and citrus fruit and bai

jyo. Hickory nut shells and mah jong tiles clacked on the

card table. Sometime almost before I can remember we

stopped going. My mother told me the police raided and

found evidence of communist activity. This is where the

memory fades out at the Popeye’s and the window above, the

one with the prostitute leaning out shouting a racial slur

at the mayor. We are walking down Hollywood Boulevard. It

is too late to see where we are going so we look down at

the sidewalk and the mayor asks what does this represent to

you Mike. A graveyard, in the best possible sense. I tell

him a monument is sepulchral and we are looking toward the

future here, so why rebuild it? He says look Keye Luke has

a star number one son. I publicly appeal the pantheon

includes me. We pass the Masonic temple on their right

with its frieze reading FREEMASONRY BUILDS ITS TEMPLES

AMONG THE NATIONS AND IN THE HEARTS OF MEN below a cyma

recta of fleurs de lys. Tom says that was where his first

daughter was baptized but he refuses to say more. A man

driving down the street rolls down the window and shouts

something at the mayor. The mayor asks me if I heard it

and I lie to him and confess at the same moment. I say I

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didn’t hear the man call him a racist. The mayor starts

telling us about he began to fight after leaving Texas

before joining the LAPD and I am sleepwalking past

McCadden, Las Palmas, Schrader, Wilcox, Cahuenga.

78. After this memo, the United States will possess a

civil defense capability as an element of our overall

national security posture. The objective of the civil

defense program is to develop the required capabilities

common to all catastrophic emergencies and those unique to

attack emergencies in order to protect the population and

vital infrastructure. I am in no position to offer my

opinion on what possessed the framers of the constitution

or to parse their idea of egalitarianism out of a finite

series of words. Every legal document has relevance only

to its own time and we can only let each run its course.

While we are all aware of the threat of terrorism, it is

not easy to imagine such things occuring so close to home,

on our own soil, but a state is merely all bodies within a

set of geographical boundaries. Attempts to illegitimize

government, to undermine the integrity of nations can occur

anywhere from Quebec to South Africa to Yugoslavia. We are

beginning to see nomadic tribes within nations without

territorial or legal claim to the economy of nations. We

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must not surrender to an anarchic clash of ethnic tribal or

religious factions. Hannah Arendt said that minorities

within nation-states must sooner or later be either

assimilated or liquidated. If you ask her she would tell

you they live in their own state of internal minority exile

inscribed by ours. I argue that those who are defiant, who

seek to do harm to their government still exist within a

legal framework as it is defined by those they oppose.

They wish occupy the legal status denied to them by their

acts of violence. They believe their rebellion will usher

in a new period of lawlessness followed by a redrafting of

the law in their own interests. Our pre-emptive

retaliation then must remain the guiding force of law. Our

law becomes apparent when it is executed, not in its verbal

form. Our new civil defense posture will contribute to

deterrence by denying an enemy any confidence that he could

prevent a concerted national response to attack. The new

civil defense program will support all-hazard integrated

emergency management at state and local levels. These

people are the strangers who live among us as shadows

plotting to destroy our country and it is from them that we

receive the bulk of threats to law and order. Our focus

has shifted to the cities. If you recall MOVE or the

Symbianese Liberation Army, both of california, or Kent

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State you will see how government has responded piecemeal

to destabilizing efforts, often without success. I have

discussed this with both civilian and military personnel

including many of my predecessors. How is it possible to

offer a civil defense capability on the federal level with

a secure opaque line of command from the top to the bottom.

I prefer to tackle problems before they appear. Low

intensity conflict in both Los Angeles and New York has

reached an irrepressible stage. We are now looking at a

resurgence in violent dissent not seen here since the

nineteen sixties. We can attack it piecemeal or we can

establish an overall posture. We have also been working on

Posse Comitatus with Thomas Scalia and Rehnquist for civil

disturbance of the kind I have described. This is not

passive deterrence. I am looking at a photograph of Jane

Russell. I share the opinion of Antonin and Howard Hughes

concerning her mounds and that the legal must preserve the

military. I seal the envelope and take it with me into my

Bavarian Motor Works. Margaret Tutwiler is on the phone

again. She says, Paul we need to know how to answer these

questions from the press. Margaret, please direct these

questions to the secretary of defense, he is right here,

would you like me to hand over the phone? State wants to

know how we can think of threats as coming from the inside.

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I tell her to direct those questions directly to the

secretary of defense. Cheney stands over my bathtub with a

model Unterseeboot, imitating b-movie radar sound effects.

He says it is magnetohydrodynamic drive and that is why you

cannot hear it when it moves through the water. We are

proud of our assembly of what we have purchased. The plan

is in place to defend our cities from attack and tomorrow

morning the President will sign national security directive

sixty six George Bush.

79. I am in my office at Parker Center applauding Sam

Yorty for acquiring grenade launchers from the department

of defense for this kind of thing. I am remembering

Bradley funneling sensitive information to dissident groups

in Los Angeles during our years working for Parker. Now

when he tells me what is going down I ask myself where he

is getting his information. And if he has sources who are

willing to testify to a conspiracy among these left wing

groups and withholding that from us, I can only point to

his supporters. Lipstick liberals like Ramona Ripston who

are champions of the poor urban guerillas until the valet

steals the keys to a Mercedes and a three-car garage up in

the hills. Or in this case the worst case scenario about

to happen, they pull her off the road and fire a thirty
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eight cailber rifle into her head. I have it right here in

front of me on this fax if the verdict in the people versus

powell trial is innocent they will fuck shit up. That is a

direct quote from gang paperwork faxed to my office. Do

not forget the numerous undercover operatives dedicated to

intercepting plans for radical activity. People are

organized. I am wondering how my son is doing and hoping

the tough love is working long distance. My son wrote me

from rehab and asked me to come back and even to use the

car again. He believes I can magically reinstitute his

license with my connections at the Department of Motor

Vehicles. I returned the correspondence the other night

from my hotel in Washington, where I spoke at an event to

promote the President’s small business owner’s initiative.

Driving back to my office in Parker Center after a visit to

the deputy district attorney today I noticed the strangest

thing. After my lifetime in this city it amazes me that it

never came to my attention. It is a mural of a man at

golgotha standing in evening wear in front of a logo for

victor clothing company. What interests me is that the man

appears to be falling forward from a gunshot wound or

softshoeing his through the panorama out onto the street.

Also he looks like Anthony Quinn and was probably once the

strongest pugilist in the world. Right now looking at our

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plan of response in the case of an incident according to

the timetable I have in my mind all they are going to want

to do is draw this out and this is why I tell them they can

go out there to fight them in the streets but they better

remember everything comes back to bite you in the ass.

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80. My intention is not to repeat the past. I joined the

commission to examine the present primarily because I was

asked to do so. This is a case with effects on law

enforcement comparable to the Scottsboro case in nineteen

thirty-one and the Serpico case in nineteen sixty-seven.

We are likely to continue to witness its effects long after

the verdict is unsealed. The mayor understands that even

during a period of private enterprise I cannot but continue

my feelings of concern for those who could not possible

afford my legal services. With this commission their

concerns become my own again and then we are back in the

vicious circle. I recall my experience as a negotiator

serving under our thirty ninth President. Everyone in my

position understands the nature of their own indifference.

In this exchange my impartiality shifted at the moment of

least resistance, I knew there was a possibility for my

diplomatic involvement, much like what you see here right

now in this city. It is fashionable and will remain so to

criticize what we accomplished. Having been a part of the

negotiations I believe it is possible to be quite proud of

what we accepted in the termination of the hostage

conflict, although I could not have foreseen how it would

be used against us in the election. At that time you would

have told us October surprise and we would have thought you

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meant a razor blade in an apple in your trick or treat bag,

we did everything we could to ensure the safe passage of

the Shah and his wife so please do not attempt to assert

something that you cannot substantiate. We agreed not to

intervene in any Iranian affairs. We agreed to the claims

settlement agreement and to freeze all confiscated assets

because it was what we had to do to get these men and women

to return to their home soil. And it has always been our

belief despite Kissinger that we should be open to

international arbitration and so we allowed the Iran US

claims tribunal. I cannot pretect those who may have

operated in my position before. I am free of guilt and it

is up to misters Kissinger, Schultz and Baker to defend

themselves as I will not accept their case. I do not

expect love from them although I have always been willing

to listen because listening is my business. From Hope

Street I can see the twenty six story six sided tower as I

drive through the sixty eight Italian Cypress trees into a

Prateresque underground parking structure. In the elevator

I notice a delivery man with a Walkman pressing the

headphones into his ears further with some urgency as if

struggling to hear an am transmission from the Rodney King

beating trial in Simi Valley. I smile at him and he nods,

frowning with an open face, and the doors open onto the
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lobby of the O’Melveny and Meyers office building on the

south side of Fourth Street between South Hope Street and

South Grand Avenue. My building represents the tomb of the

pharoah as recently excavated. I walk into the sarcophagus

under a mosaic of king kong on a chartri and some v-form

dancettes. The building’s thirty floors are constructed in

a pentagon around an atrium centered by a column wrapped by

vines. I ride the elevator with Tony Danza, who is

carrying a dozen roses and a briefcase. Inside you can see

rolls of tropical fruit Tums and mint lifesavers and a

photograph of a young Italian woman who reminds me of

Sophia Loren. I say hello to Tony and tell him I like his

work, but he is in character so he doesn’t respond. I take

a seat in the lobby and take out my own personal electronic

device my daughter bought for me last Christmas when I

dedicated the new building to her. I tune to National

Public Radio because the last thing I want to do is to hear

conservative commentators gloating about potential bad news

about the case. It is Nina Totenberg and she is talking

about the response at Simi Valley, talking to a

correspondent there reporting from a phone booth. I do not

believe what I am hearing about the verdict and the

assembling crowds and yes this is an atrium but it is the

best of its kind and I can think of myself back in

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Beachwood Canyon looking down on all of it thinking the

best years of our lives are yet to come as helter skelter

comes down again. I want to set it straight to people that

protests are often a good thing and that you have to see

everything in its historical context. A black dot darts

from one of the roystonea regia and I nervously grab my tie

realizing there is a bat inside the atrium. It is either

that or a small object passing by the floodlights buried in

the fern underbrush underneath the escalator. It projected

itself across the indoor landscape. This verdict has us

all on edge.

81. It is not every day all three of us get to go off duty

to look for another syringe bandit. I am going for the

Robert Urich on SWAT style of off duty. My hair well

Brylcreemed and blow-dried. My black silk shirt is

buttoned to the nipple. My Levis are tight around my

crotch to accentuate my penis, augmented by sock, and also

my bulging thighs. There is a Joseph Smith around my neck

but I am a scientologist. There was an incident in the

valley last year where a man walked into a grocery store

and threatened the Koreans there with a syringe he said was

filled with AIDS. It could be the same one as before

because we aren’t confident at all that the judge sent the

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right person to jail. Your honor has since been removed to

juvenile cases. This one walked into a convenience store

on western at sunset, pointed a gun at the Koreans there,

stole fifty bucks and took his datsun to the hills. The

same threat with the loaded syringe he claimed was filled

with his own tainted blood. We have a be on the lookout

from west bureau. When he passes by us his days are

numbered big time. I am driving in circles around

imperial courts with its elderberry gulches and Mercedes

and multiethnic lawn jockeys. I tell my partner we are

coming in for a stop where Wiletta ends at Primrose. We

step out of the car where a pigeon nests in a hedge shaped

like a fuel silo. The anchorman describes the makeup of

the jurors in the trial in Simi this morning, the panel

members are between thirty eight and sixty five and most

are regarded as conservatives. Among them are men with

military backgrounds and memberships in the national rifle

association a housekeeper a woman who works in a print shop

and a utility company cable splicer. I want to ask my

colleagues the appropriate way to eat lunch in these

situations when we are simultaneously on call waiting for

the mayor’s advice about the trial in simi. My wife and I

were talking about a vacation this weekend to see my sister

in palmdale just to get some high desert air but will have
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to breathe in the smog for another night. It comes

directly off the Harbor Freeway into our apartment window.

Do I eat this in the car or should I always be sure first

to pull over and find a slightly obscured location. It is

the same thing when I was fifteen in Nebraska and in the

dry county you would chug the whole bottle when you see one

of us in blue coming up behind you. I consider the fact of

my eating in full view of anyone on the street may force

criminals to support me in my work, the guilty and the

innocent, excluding the latent criminals who have yet to

encounter our system of justice. I bite into a McDonalds

Filet o’ Fish and finish it off with a slug of Coca Cola

Classic. Dave says what are we doing looking for this guy

in the hills when the verdicts come down. It happened by

now, what time is it? It’s five o’clock. Bob tells me to

turn on the radio. It takes me only seconds to down the

whole sandwich so I pull myself into the vehicle again and

everyone follows behind me. We are now listening to two

radios at once telling us the city is on fire like sixty-

six. I am turning around to take Primrose to Vine and get

back on the freeway at Franklin when we learn the command

post is at Fifty-fourth and Arlington. There is no way we

are going anywhere near that neighborhood until the mayor

calls us out there and in particular not for any looting

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calls. I change my mind and drive out to Beachwood where

if I turn left there is more open space near the rock

quarry and the azalea gardens so we can see the burning

buildings. A squirrel springs onto the hood of our vehicle

and juggles and acorn. He stares at me At the stop sign I

change my mind and u turn back on to the 101 going south.

After this is over I will take them to Disneyland and at

the It’s A Small World attraction I will dedicate copies of

Dianetics to each of them telling them how far I have come

without revealing any specific information about my

affiliation. On the nameplate is only the suggestion that

the reader give us a call for a free evaluation possibly

commencing with a dry run on the e-meter just to get an

initial reading of personality traits and tendencies to

failure. I drive past sunset and Melrose between Angelino

heights and Echo Park through downtown and across the river

where we will exit into the command post area. Bob says I

always liked Autopia. I tell him they closed it down, my

friend, but they still have the cars. That settles it

then, we are turning off the radio and driving to

Disneyland. We are going to Anaheim to visit my friend

from the Phoenix department, who moved here with me in

seventy-nine and suddenly veered off, became a delivery man

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for Disney, then Peter Pan or one of the mice depending on

the day. He is a stand up fellow.

82. I am answering questions with reporters following my

acquittal on charges of excessive force. Not guilty the

way I have always thought it would be. I know how justice

is delivered and if it has given itself to me. I am

talking to reporters with boom mikes surrounding my body.

The reporter Kelly Meyers from KTTV says what do you think

of the verdict. I collect myself and prepare to answer the

question I have prepared myself to answer for one year and

almost two months. A lot of people in this society they’ve

evolved through the century, but somehow they manage to

skip the vertebrate stage if you will. The don’t have any

backbone. They don’t have any convictions. They don’t

have any sense of what they’re about. And I’m not that

kind of person. I have a spine and I have a backbone. And

if they want to do this to themselves I’m not going to be

the man who is there to try to stop it.

83. The radio tells me they are burning Frederick’s of

Hollywood down to the ground, burn baby burn. I turn the

camera on either automatically or manually. It has a wide-

angle lens and can be rotated three-hundred sixty degrees

 347

in a total circle. I have a wireless remote microphone

capable of picking up sound within one-thousand feet, but

it’d only there in case I need it. I never use it. I am

laughing nervously and fiddling with the silver chain

wrapped five times around my neck above my fake-rabbit

coat. I have overdone the accessories today. Around my

neck is also a string of glass beads covered in the same

pulverized fish scale mixture I use to gloss my watercolor

seascapes. Television plays a video of a conversation on a

porch in with Venice Shoreline. The crip says so we were

watching it on the news, and all the homies we start

meeting up and riding around going down Crenshaw and stuff

you know just riding around. I don’t want to answer the

phone because I am watching the city burn. I trip on the

cord and almost brain myself on the coffee table. I tell

him the border agents have all these command posts with

police everywhere they are deporting anyone who can’t show

papers.

84. The means employed by nature to bring about the

development of all the capacities of men is their

antagonism in society so far as this is in the end the

cause of a lawful order among men. Some day it will all

come out of the algorithm if we give it the answers it

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wants if we get this thing set up properly. I am looking

at the diagram with all the little boxes laid out with ys

and ns and if it works and we have the Jefferson Davis

automaton to provide the face then that proves everything.

Some sound images go along with the words I have written

for the project, which the audience will hear according to

the algorithm coming from a speaker in the position of the

stolen mannequin heart. I think if we look at it from

above without trying to inhabit each of the rooms, we may

find something with everything like it was last night, as

we stared out into the basin and saw the burning with

everything coming together in a consensus of red glowing

boxes. I wonder if it will vary much from what we have

already discussed, considering the argument. Jessica will

paint in watercolor some kind of landscape combining

Baldwin Hills with the river as it was first conceived, all

a wash with some vertical viaducts protruding and a

Mayan/Egyptian revival on the bank grown over with

california laurel and sugar brush. We will place the

device in front of the backdrop. Someone threw a molotov

cocktail into a Jaguar on temple now burned into a black

steel husk. On central in the hundred teens convenience

stores smolder in the same neighborhood where KKK burned

crosses in the nineteen twenties. A yuppie in a mercedes

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drives by blasting the number one single in the country

with its Jackson Five sample and twelve year old boy in

backwards pants shouting you should know you should know

better . I am not prepared for any of this. I am looking

at a photo of Broadway Boogie Woogie through a pigeon

feather. Do you want to go out to the hills and look? We

drive out to Beverly Hills. We drive up to Greystone and

think this is it, everything is there for you to see, but

the signs prohibit photography and we are afraid of arrest.

We are talking about ceratitis capitata containment as we

leave the med fly quarantine area. We are driving west on

Sunset into the hills off Doheny turning into Greystone

where we can watch the goings on. There are orange spots

throughout the city, tiny flames like on the tarmac at LAX.

We decide there isn’t much here and go out to Griffith Park

so we want to drive on Sunset and drive east through West

Hollywood and turn left on Western into the hills off Los

Feliz where looking for the Griffith Park observatory.

This should be a good place to watch all of this, so we

settle into the hillside on a blanket and uncork a bottle

and put in my mix-tape with Rick James, Mary Jane Girls and

Geto Boys. I read Eckert’s caveat to her, no engineer or

chemist claims to be able to produce a material which is

indistinguishable from human skin. It is possible that at

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some time this might be done, but even supposing this

invention available we should feel there was little point

in trying to make a thinking machine more human by drawing

it up in such artificial flesh. I show her my diagram for

the machine, with a circumscribed right triangle. Go

ahead, ask it a question, and one of several samples are

activated as it records and responds to any question you

propose. Each switch must be definitively on or

definitively off. There must be intermediate positions but

for our purposes we can forget about them. Jessica stares

at the page and shakes it and asks it what brought us to

this conclusion? She says to it what do you want me to do

about it. On the page there are three participants

situated at each vertex, an analog tape recorder, a digital

sampling device and a human. Each triangle side represents

a pathway of communication and the square of the hypotenuse

is equal to the sum of the square of each of the sides.

Each of these participants can play the role of the

interrogator or contestant one or contestant three,

depending on the intermittent revolution of the circle.

She traces lines on the map in the shape of a pentagle and

says it looks like it was designed by Anton Lavey. She

says we will never build this, can we? We look away from

the page and encounter an unavoidable unobstructed view of

 351

the Los Angeles basin the smoke billowing out of the

indeterminate center of the city and drifting south toward

the sky over Long Beach. The taberah spreads out before us

over Imperial Courts, suburbs of the world, stop, hold up,

tag team, this is never going to stop, we will be lucky to

get the thing to talk at all, maybe we need to head to the

Hall of Presidents to see how it was done and dismantle

Honest Abe and steal his audio device and stick it inside

of our Jefferson Davis.

85. The night before the verdict I watched Carmen Jones in

my office with the door ajar and sang along with the voice

dubbed into the body of Joe Adams when you fight out in the

open air in a patch of light the ring looks small and white

out in the blackness you can feel a hundred thousand eyes

filling the night. I was thinking of seeing a production

of this once and the character playing Don José fell into

the first section of the crowd at the Hollywood bowl and

injured his knee. Today I am watching the city burn on

KTLA. The image of fire on television reminds me of the

day in nineteen sixty-three when I saw the KKK bomb the

Sixteenth Street baptist church in Birmingham. I am

reminded of the death of Ronald T. X. Stokes when I ran for

mayor the first time. I think of the Reagans safe in their

 352

Bel Air estate. I recall my frustration and inability to

act or react. From my room I watch the fata morgana. I

can see the indigo murk of billowing smoke from the

stationary bike. Even George Will called these officers a

band of criminals in police uniforms. I cannot believe

this jury missed the obvious and now there is war on the

streets. I do not believe in revenge but I believe in a

vengeful god. The orange light blinks on my telephone

console indicating I have a message. I do not want to

answer any questions at this time, when the conflict on the

street could go either way but this time it is the

President. Let’s get the INS down there. After tonight

it’s a clean up I’ll tell you, it’s going all the way to

central America. Tell them those who seek to undermine

justice will be disappeared and send in the marshals who

defeated Noriega, velox, mortifer. We will make this

another operation just cause. The Los Angeles disorders

flow from a violent breach of rooted American principles.

Those who strike at the fabric of ordered liberty also

erode the foundation on which the house of justice stands.

The President speaks in the voice of Lyndon Johnson. I

will not sign any paperwork sent to me by Attorney General

Barr authorizing the federal government to set up

immigration and nationalization services command posts in

 353

the city. I do not want to bring the National Guard in

here unless Wilson absolutely demands it. We cannot use a

state of emergency to have deportation without due process

following the whim of the White House. I have informed

them I will consult Ira about the possibility of violation

of special order forty limiting local police intervention

in federal immigration cases. Lastly, I will not allow

this city to be used as a platform for xenophobic

ideologues with influence in Sacramento or Washington. We

have already covered our bases. I have met with the

brotherhood crusade to found a dispute resolution center

and with the Korean grocer association to create a

merchants code of ethics emphasizing customer sensitivity

and sincerity. If no one else will I congratulate myself

for mediating public forums pitting Korean against black in

polarizing argument. The Sentinel and La Opinion have

dismissed me, but this is international now. Already the

French press is declaring this a revolutionary period on

the scale of seventeen eighty-nine, despite the tyranny of

their own police toward citizens of North African descent.

They say it is like the storming of the Royal Palace and

the Hotel de Ville staged as another American revolution

against consumer items. The BBC has claimed the disturbance

is black anger directed at the Reagan and Bush dismantling

 354

of the war on poverty, as though Tory rule and Margaret

Thatcher never happened. On CNN a man from Inglewood says

we are spraying the rooftops tonight so the ashes don’t

fall and start new fires in the neighborhood. A man in a

shirt with the bill of rights in flames and the slogan

CAN’T TRUSS THIS sticks out his tongue at the seven-eleven

surveillance camera and points to his new Goldstar

appliance. I find it disappointing but hardly surprising

that people all over the globe are manufacturing hasty

historical comparisons. We have word from Amer-I-can that

a truce has been signed by representatives on both sides of

Vermont, Bloods and Crips, modeled on the UN ceasefire

between Israel and Egypt. I am thinking of my days in the

force, wondering if it perhaps silence is the best policy.

The problem here is that there has been no way to retreat.

Every night there is a story. Even when there is nothing

new to report on the case, they will flash the video. The

conferences for small merchants, the dispute resolution,

the truce, all failures. I dreamed about it again last

night, the abominable shining city speech, this idea of a

city of the righteous within a city of the damned. You

know who will be administering that kind of justice. I

stand on the balcony in Windsor Terrace and see the smoke

in the distance. I wish I could stop this from the

 355

balcony, like Marcus Garvey, shouting go back over the

heads of the people of Harlem. Falling asleep has never

been this difficult. I swat the air, thinking there is a

gnat, but it’s something else, a spider, and I crush it in

my right fist and my head falls onto the pillow. I am

watching myself measuring the length of Wilshire Boulevard.

Then I freeze there mid-calculations, trapped above the

ceiling, below a long fall down the ladder to the earth. I

look out the window and see that this is the same building

built in nineteen twenty eight but transplanted to

nebraska, all flat prairie. The same modified classical

style. When I awake I am haunted by the precipitious

feeling of falling while standing motionless. It is five

in the morning and I am standing on a diving board staring

at the Santa Susanas along the horizon. I am looking

through my son’s telescope to see if the world is ending.

My hypothesis is no, but the smoke obstructs my view.

Seventeen stars in the sky come together in the shape of a

dog, Canis Major. A loudspeaker voice announces at six

o’clock Chief Parker will do the morning roll call one last

time. People stroll in and out of supermarkets with

shopping bags and armloads of shoes and liquor, radios and

wigs, auto parts and gumball machines, toilet paper and

guns. They are only replaying a tape that has already been
 356

played numerous times, like an episode of Dragnet,

myrmidons pushing ministries of propaganda. They are

spelling out TUMULTUS VIATICUS in the sky with fireworks.

With the feeling that it would happen exactly like this,

sleep comes for the third time and I am out again as pelion

piles up on ossa. Let us sleep tonight and see if this

holds.

86. Under my face the time display reads May second,

nineteen ninety-two. The feed is live so I am here again

as the new George Zapruder. They have to have me because

they accuse me of starting it all. I do not blame myself

because I am a victim of circumstance. It in this case

would be the ongoing investigation into brutality, the

critique of violence ignited by my handiwork. Today I am

discovering that the answer is brutality creates more

brutality, at least if we go by this example. My only

shock in the wake of the violence is to discover that only

now is there a videotape to rival mine. I am watching a

helicopter surveillance of a truck driver as he is pulled

from behind the wheel into Florence head first by Eight

Trey Gangster Grips. If you freeze frame and advance you

can see the moment his head ruptures under the boot and

against the asphalt. I cannot shake the feeling that I am

 357

directly responsible for what is happening to this man.

This morning I am addressing the greater Los Angeles press

club about the genesis of the tape and its aftermath. I

tell the reporters that there were times when I could not

escape the tape, that everytime I turned on the news, there

was the beating again, and everytime I listened to the

radio in the car, people were talking about it. I reveal

that I have been a recluse since the identity of the

cameraman was revealed to be me. To make them understand

that I am not an agitator I tell them about the beginning

minutes of the tape, the footage I shot of last summer’s

terminator movie from the second floor balcony. I tell

them Arnold Schwarzenegger wished the best for me and my

family, even though I never spoke to him, only to an

assistant who told me to lock up my daughter. The reporter

asks me if I am shocked to see of what came of my initial

idea. I tell them again there was no initial idea just the

impulse to begin recording. It was unusual for Lakeview

Terrace and I had the thing out. Where is the lake and

where is the view? It was too much of the moment to be a

real idea. I tell her I do not want to think about it too

much I have kids and this violence is like a disease where

you keep hoping for the breakthrough but you know nothing

is being released from the lab except commentary. The

 358

reporters have done their homework and are comparing this

case to the Don Jackson case in Hawthorne and Kevin Dunbar

case in South Laguna, the beating at the bridal shower in

Cerritos. All caught on tape to ease apprehension. You

can say that along with other video enthusiasts I am part

of the rear guard of community policing. That is if you

want to look at this as a war. I am watching the head

fracture on the pavement as the reporters tell me these are

the Los Angeles four and these are acts of war not crime.

Someone asks me if the beginning minutes of the videotape,

when I was still focusing, may have made a difference in

the trial. I said if it did then it was because of what

you could not see. I say the defense may have used

testimony regarding those seconds to suggest Rodney King

may have lunged at the officers. But I was not in the

courtroom and I do not have an opinion about that. In fact

everything I say should tell you that I am someone who

refuses to take sides in the war on the street. And I just

want to thank you for picking it up, or that is for letting

everyone put it down as is was. And I want thing to

continue on as they once were before this incident, back to

what paradise looked like. On my way home on the Pasadena

freeway all that was in my head was how it is all something

I had invented. All I want to do is listen to Cher so I

 359

fast forward to If I Can Turn Back Time and it is heaven to

think of her in fishnets on the USS Missouri. Thank you

Diane Warren for your timeless songs.

87. I cannot tell you the number of times I have laughed

in response to visiting dignitaries of state in my former

post at Princeton as the chairperson of the student

welcoming committee. The most frequent occurence of this

laughter surrounds bodily functions such as eating,

digesting, removing snot, anything related to hygeine. The

time I laughed at the german businessman for belching in my

ear during a greeting I could not forgive myself. I told

him entschuldigen Sie bitte. I am still paying the price

for the tape. I may be overcalculating but at this point

in my career I want to keep it as much in my hands as I

can. The only time I have lost it here was during an

invocation to the god Legba. It was not the cracking of

the egg the cracking of the egg or the presence of the live

chicken. What it was was an expression on the faces of one

of the officials of the former government. I cannot

describe it or say why it was funny at the time. It was

such an extreme honor to have been present at this moment

that I played it off as a sneeze and with the claves and

tomtoms and the ceremonial dance and Antoine was there not
 360

even Antoine noticed. The last thing I would have wanted

is for people to think I was laughing at their ritual and I

am not in any position to challenge the beliefs of anyone.

The television plays an image of the presidential candidate

Bill Clinton speaking to an audience in Los Angeles, his

words in yellow subtitles, America debe esta noche, hablar

en contra del odio, la violencia y la crueldad. Now there

is Pat Buchanan and George Bush standing on the same

outdoor stage in Koreatown within only hours of each other.

If I have children I do not know how I would explain to

them the fearsome feeling I get listening to the voice of

the President, the calcitonin cystotic whine. I am unable

to sleep at half past midnight in my Port au Prince hotel

room. I am sober all the time so tonight I am excusing

myself to enjoy an individual serving bottle of côtes du

rhone from the self service stash. I pour the glass,

insert the videotape, return to bed, and throw the

comforter on the carpet. The channel from Miami is playing

some concert in colorado by Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells,

but I do not want to relive that gothic impulse. I push

TV/VCR and PLAY. We were lucky to have had color and for a

camcorder the image is sharp enough. I am shooting from a

platform rigged under a bay window in the presidential

palace but it is red glass and in the light you can make
 361

out three people, Aristide, his interior minister and the

minister of education. A gunshot breaks a window but you

cannot see the macoute fire the shot only the shattering of

bodies against glass. Two heads come up slowly and a

caniche in a continental clip, pompoms, rosettes and

everything, leaps through the shattered glass. He has

really changed, but he looks good. Two macoutes move

forward with sides raised and that is when Antoine ushered

me into the town car and that is it, the end of the tape.

As far as home sure with the coup now they will suspend

their economic aid just what people down here need. The

affectionate appropriation works out so well in their our

favor. When I look at it now I feel like accepting the job

was just a moral imperative, like cardiopulmonary

resuscitation. Nothing happened to me. I needed to stay

far enough away from the situation to capture it on tape.

On the Miami station the Oldfield concert ends with a

slogan from Eberhardt and there is footage of a march down

Temple, Koreans in white headbands with signs JUSTICE FOR

ALL PEOPLE, BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES.

Slavery/mastery love/ownership played out again in these

Korean groceries and convenience stores. I am reading back

my proposal for employment at Exxon, covered with felt-

tipped red ink arrows and capital letters. I admit the

 362

last few weeks have changed my mind and I regret that I

cannot be there right now for the clean up. Does counter-

violence follow violence? Is there a telos to the arcana

imperii events of the fourteen months of the revolutionary

calendar prior to the Los Angeles uprising of Nineteen

Ninety-Two? Is there a historical difference between an

insult of fleshtone or an insult of character, identity, or

other permanent unavoidable empirical trait? When does

dialectic cease its perpetual oscillation? I am trying not

to think about going home. Patty called me yesterday to

tell me my grandmother died and I will be heading back to

the valley for the reception and my sister stopped her

fast. She complained that constant contact with me cannot

be maintained without some kind of military tracking

device. At that point in the conversation I had already

microwaved a fried plantain so I let it go at that. I

cannot imagine returning to an environment where time is

entirely managed by automobiles but I will have to for a

few days before returning to Haiti. Patty is telling me

all about how my mother made this deal to send the money to

me and also to the production of a new film about the El

Dorado discovery told in Quichean-Mamean even though to my

knowledge that language was never spoken here. It is based

on source material by Carlos Fonseca and my grandfather.

 363

They are marketing it as a sequel to Terms of Endearment.

Debra Winger, Lew Wasserman and Shirley MacLaine are on

board. They want to shoot it at lake Guatavita and pretend

it is Beverly Hills. I guess what they have going for the

project is that no one knows any better. I hear they are

activating the National Guard, so maybe that will give them

something to work with. Someone told me if Aristide does

not come back the country will be dead but if he comes back

he will be dead. Inclusive injunction you have your choice

between the destruction of a person and the destruction of

a country. From the outside I say bring him back with

military support and risk assissination for the good of an

emerging country. How long would I have to make this my

permanent address before I could say so emphatically

without the dispassionate apologies for my presence here.

If I do not come back the country will survive but if I

come back I will be dead. If I stay here I will also be

dead so the whole thing is up in the air. Patty sent a

letter to me yesterday with a polaroid of Jessica with a

mannequin of the confederate president. Patty told me she

learned how to make it talk and she is out touring with it

at shopping malls. She told me they have scheduled a

memorial service for my grandmother next week and she would

like me to get a flight out of Port-au-Prince as soon as

 364

possible. Have you seen the tape? Aristide is fine he

landed on the ground and capered directly to the flight to

Venezuela you know what do you want me to say rache manyok

ou bay te a blanch. I do not feel guilt from laughing

because I know now it is too late for me to begin

understanding Creole. So be it, try to forget it, it never

came back to me anyway, the tape is out of my hands, pop

the cap, Cassius, go in peace, have a good ball, GATES

DEBER IRSE.
 365

LA CLEF DE L'HISTOIRE

02261991 US blitzkrieg: al-Mutlaa ridge, Jahra-Umm Qasar

highway
02271991 US announces end of Operation Desert Storm
03031991 LAPD beating of Glen Rodney King, videotaped by
George Holliday
03061991 Uprisings in the Shiite south and Kurdish north of
Iraq
03081991 New Jack City disturbance in Westwood Village
03101991 Mohammed abu-Jallah of Gaza stabs four women in
East Jerusalem
03111991 Secretary of State Baker arrives in Israel to meet
Prime Minister Shamir
03121991 Baker writes letters to families, visits graves of
slain women
03121991 Black caucus in Los Angeles urges broad inquiry
into King case
03151991 Attorney General Dick Thornburgh orders Federal
review of police brutality
03151991 Officers Powell, Koon, Wind, Briseno arraigned by
DA Ira Reiner
03161991 Korean merchant Soon Ja Du kills Latasha Harlins
at Empire Liquor Market Deli (Figueroa/91st)
03211991 Kurdish take cities in Kurdistan from Republican
Army
03211991 Brotherhood Crusade demonstration calls for
closing of Du store
03221991 US resumes trade with Haiti after four-year
embargo
03251991 FBI questions LAPD officers, Foothill Division
03261991 Bush denies aid to rebels in Iraq
03281991 Syringe Bandit pleads not guilty
04011991 Mayor Tom Bradley announces Christopher Commission
on LAPD
04021991 Bradley asks Chief of Police Daryl Gates to resign
04061991 Shining Path blacks out electricity in Peru
04081991 Rev. Jesse Jackson calls for boycott of Super Bowl
in Los Angeles
04091991 Gates blocks police commission-enforced leave with
restraining order
04091991 Bradley and Gates declare truce, enter period of
simulated détente
04111991 Saddam attacks Kurdish refugees within US
exclusion zone
04151991 Gov. Pete Wilson targets undocumented workers in
speech on welfare
 366

04181991 Secretary of State Baker calls for temporary halt

to construction in occupied territories
04201991 Danny Bakewell purchases boarded-up Empire Liquor
Market Deli
04261991 Student Kyang Kyong Dae beaten to death by Seoul
riot police
04261991 Cuba pulls troops out of Congo
05051991 Riot in Mt. Pleasant follows incidents of police
brutality in DC
05111991 Reiner announces others present at beating will
not be indicted
05181991 Prison riot in Matamoros, Mexico
05191991 Post-Mardi Gras vandalism in Westwood Village
05211991 Rajiv Gandhi assassinated
05281991 Prison riot in Hagerstown, MD
05281991 Rev. Al Sharpton arrives in Los Angeles to protest
LAPD brutality
06021991 Demonstration against police in Seoul, Korea
06041991 Korean merchant Tae Sam Park kills Lee Arthur
Mitchell at Chung’s Liquor in LA
06051991 Bakewell leads boycott of Korean-owned merchants
in black neighborhoods
06061991 Dominican Republic begins expelling Haitians
06171991 Day one of one-hundred day boycott of Chung’s
Liquor Market
06301991 Sharpton arrested outside Periera hearing at New
York City Hall
06301991 South Africa repeals Land and Group Areas acts
07091991 Christopher Commission released
07231991 Gates sets date for retirement in April of
following year
07311991 Gates hears Eines Deutsches Requiem at NY
Philharmonic
08011991 Forced return of Haitian refugees from US begins
under economic refugee policy
08191991 Gorbachev held hostage in Crimea during attempted
coup
08221991 Soviet coup collapses
08241991 Demonstration in Crown Heights, Brooklyn follows
murder of Gavin Cato
08261991 Exhuming of peasants killed by death squads in
Guatemala
08301991 Bradley organizes meeting between detectives and
boycott organizers, fails to end boycott
09051991 Public Enemy premieres ‘Can’t Truss It” on David
Letterman
09061991 President Bush asks congress to defer loan
requests from Israel until January
 367

09171991 Sharpton tries to serve summons at Ben-Gurion

International
09201991 Kenneth Phillippe suspended for hovering
helicopter over beating of King
09231991 President Bush asks UN General Assembly to repeal
GA Res. 3379
09281991 Jonas Savimbi departs Johannesburg for Luanda,
Angola
09291991 Gov. Wilson vetoes gay rights legislation AB 101
09301991 Tonton-macoute military coup in Haiti ousts Jean-
Bertrand Aristide
09301991 Mayor Bradley announces truce between Korean
merchants and black activists
09301991 People v. Soon Ja Du trial begins
1011991 Protest of Wilson’s appearance at Stanford
University Centennial: “all this declinism” speech
10021991 Talabani and Barzani arrive in Washington
10111991 Verdict in Soon Ja Du trial
10201991 Juri Kang shot at Broadway and Century convenience
store
10201991 Baker, Pankin, Shamir hold symbolic press
conference before Madrid
10251991 Soon Ja Du writes letter in Korean to Supreme
Court Judge Karlin
10301991 Madrid Peace Conference commences
11011991 Simon Wiesenthal Center calls for boycott of Ice
Cube’s Death Certificate
11031991 Prison riot in Helena, MT
11041991 Madrid Peace Conference concludes
11051991 Drilling begins in Bahrain pursuant to Harken
Energy deal
11101991 Explosion in Managua, Nicaragua damages Carlos
Fonseca mausoleum
11141991 Massacre in East Timor
11151991 Sentence in People v. Soon Ja Du: five years
probation, four-hundred hours community service
11241991 Haitian refugees held indeterminately at
Guantanamo Bay detainment area
11291991 Henry Peco shot over twenty times by LAPD during
power outage at Imperial Courts housing project
11291991 DA Ira Reiner accused of attacking independence of
the judiciary
12061991 President Bush delegates son George to fire Chief
of Staff John Sununu
12121991 Protests of Judge Joyce Karlin at Compton
Courthouse
12121991 Shooting of film Looters starring Ice Cube begins
in Los Angeles
 368

12181991 Maxine Waters calls for probe in Peco shooting

12241991 LAPD car destroys memorial to Peco during raid at
Imperial Courts
12251991 Gorbachev resigns
12311991 Police raid Imperial Courts to combat shooting of
firearms into the air
12311991 Pete Wilson receives mail bomb at capitol
01031992 First arena hip-hop concert at MSG, 16,000 in
attendance
01101992 MTV premieres Public Enemy’s ‘payback’ video By
The Time I Get To Arizona
01171992 Jesse Jackson leads protest at Imperial Courts
02031992 Wilson announces cut in welfare benefits.
02111992 Attempted discussion of ‘holocausts’ at Prince
Hall Memorial Auditorium attracts 150 protestors
03111992 Gates admits ‘underestimating’ beating at one-year
anniversary
03261992 Pentagon announces major cuts in defense spending;
California hit squarely
04091992 Rev. E. V. Hill urges cease-fire in Los Angeles
for Easter Sunday
04231992 People v. Powell trial begins in Simi Valley
04241992 Gates predicts unrest at morning roll call if
officers not convicted
04281992 250 Crips and Bloods march to City Hall to
announce truce
04291992 Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Boston and New York on
tour of US including UN
04291992 Declaran inocentes las policias!
04301992 Days of riots in Los Angeles, thousands of
deportations and arrests, fifty-four deaths, two
thousand three hundred twenty eight injuries,
eight-hundred sixty-two structures consumed by
fire