Words: Disheveled Daily Prose:

People have been asking for another teaser from the novel since that Rolling Stone article. There's 37 chapters in my book--how much could I be giving away? To hell with my lawyer. Let's see what he has to say to this... I'm posting:

2. “Hey boy, want some sauce?” came the voice from the caddie that had just pulled up. Minstrel stood in the burger parking lot, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and with the lost look on his face that Karvac told him to always have. “Be goddam James Dean,” Karvac had told him while grimacing into the concerned face of a now dead star.

“Who?”

“I dunno. Some dead star on the Boulevard some fucker who got me mixed up in this shit told me about. He had the look about him.”

“What kind you got?” Minstrel said sheepishly to the driver.

“I got the hard stuff. I got liquor—hard and sweet. Whatever. You look like a nice kid, kinda lost though.”

“Oh I ain’t lost. I know right where I am.”

“Maybe you’re lost for a reason.”

Minstrel stared into a face much older than his own. It looked ancient, wrinkled, pulled and dripping with skin that gravity had tugged harshly toward the earth. A big pair of thick black-rimmed glasses seemed to blink like a Bugs Bunny cartoon head and yet gave Minstrel a pseudo-intellectual stare that hung in frames nearly as wide as the man’s brow. Minstrel could see that the man hadn’t slept in a while, or had been in a recent scuffle because he had a head of messy gray hair.

“It’s the middle of the night, kid. Don’t look at me too close,” the man said as Minstrel hopped in. He spoke softly; it was a kind voice, one that Minstrel thought he could get used to.

“It’s not that late yet. You been fighting with yourself mister?” Minstrel noticed a bit of blood on the man’s left cheek. “Looks like you lost.”

“Someone tried to purify me. Hey, I haven’t seen you around before, kid, but I know you know Karvac. Where is he? Maybe he’d want to come too.”

Minstrel looked out the window into the clear Hollywood night. Not a cloud in sight. Neon lights brushed against palm fronts and old rust-colored tiled hotels lighting the punk streets in a rainbow of colors. A police cruiser passed just before they left the parking lot and the officer inside shot a glance toward them. But he quickly disappeared into the majestic Hollywood darkness that swung around them like a crazy Orson Welles picture of the Mexican-American border. Everywhere there was a Charlton Heston Mexican look-a-like cop looking for someone to throw in the slammer. Minstrel could spot them. But he felt safe in this big car. “Karvac’s in Koreatown. He’s gonna learn a few words and get a punk mohawk haircut like those British who set up instruments in the Hollywood dives with their fucked up hair that looks like yours right now.”

“Now you’re starting to talk, kid. Tell me a little more,” he said, handing Minstrel a long red pill.

Minstrel felt strangely comfortable as he popped the capsule. His tongue loosened. He felt like this man wanted to listen: “His older brother brings back photos all the time of these Brits, punks, losers, anarchists, whatever he calls them. He’s got the spikes and leather and spiked hair too and says, ‘Every mother fucker in Hollywood and LA needs to show them cops what it’s like to throw faggots and streetbums in jail.’ ‘The kids are gonna fight back’, he says. Those British will sing about it right in your face, anyone’s face. You know that? I stood outside one shithole and saw Karvac’s brother go in to listen to music and get thrown right out along with the band and all their equipment. There was a big fight right there; blood and shit, and then everybody took off running every which way; a lot of them with cuts and some with glass sticking out of their faces. The Brits lost all their equipment except one guitar in a shitty guitar case cause they had to take off in their van right after the fight. Karvac’s brother and everyone else met up a while later and they all smoked, and even let us too, because we had been there and Karvac had busted a bottle upside someone’s head with a nice shot. Layed him out fuckin’ flat.” Minstrel looked at a long line of palms all bent over the Hollywood streets as far as he could see. He couldn’t imagine how they could grow and bend and never fall down. He wanted them all to fall just then. “Those Brits fucking talk funny. You ever hear them? They’re way fucked up in the head. I can’t understand a word. But they took care of me that night. We all slept outside—didn’t even have a lookout. We were in the dark places—you know, on the industrial streets where nobody goes but us fucked-up kids, cause you have to hop about ten fences just to get there. But what do I know? Koreatown ain’t got shit but noodles. Karvac’s probably gonna go to the Melrose stores and take shit. He always does that. Then he gives his brother cool patches from all those music stores, surplus and T-shirt shops. He says he was going to Koreatown to eat sea cucumbers. But I don’t even know what those are. I don’t think he does either. I don’t fucking believe him. I told him it was shark dick.” Just then Minstrel noticed the car push its way onto the Hollywood freeway. He’d been talking a while. In just a few moments, the last of the Hollywood hills streamed past the window. “So where we going? I saw the car tags—you’re taking me over the hill. You’re from Bakersfield.”

“Is that all right? You have time don’t you? Kids like you have nothing but time. You’re a runaway, right? Not even from Hollywood or Bakersfield. You’re from someplace only shit knows, because it’s someplace that stinks of rotten living.”

“Maybe I am from Bakersfield. Well Karvac, he’s from Modesto. I met him on the bus going from Fresno to Bakersfield. I was coming down from Frisco not long ago, actually. He was doing something on the bus I didn’t think was possible then. But that was a long time ago.”

“A long time ago? Really? Why you can’t be much more than 15.”

“A couple years younger than that.”

“Well how old exactly? Come out with it now.”

“You just watch the road, Gramps. We’re climbing some steep hills.”

Flung from Hollywood they had entered the transverse range: those mountains curled strangely at the Southern bowl of the San Joaquin Valley that hides Joshua trees and little mountain towns, lakes, and the little Frazier Park mountain folk community where condors once flew into the LA Basin and San Joaquin Valley, only to hurl themselves like gods; the towering phoenix over the Tules and Indian lands that once ran hundreds of miles in a lost age through countless Yokut tribelets northward, past lakes and the San Joaquin river drainage, and further north, into the Sacramento run-off that along with other rivers, wet the valley floor with an intoxicating god-breath. They were still far from the valley yet, and though Hollywood had cast a neon shadow like a veil over the stars of the universe, Minstrel could now see and count stars in a brief moment of longing for them; he saw their milky wet path that seemed to strangely pull the car up and over the mountains toward a bank of fog that would penetrate Minstrel down into the very ticking of his heart the nearer they got to it.

It wasn’t long and they made their descent down the steep Grapevine Freeway that took them like those condors above that fog where they could see an endless sea, so different from the clear Hollywood days and nights, but here, just like they were flying, just above a bank of endless grey, and yet here they both were, hurtling and ready to sink into the very cloud banks that filled and muddled and confused all the weary inhabitants far in the valley below.

“That’s a fucking lot of clouds,” Minstrel said.

“That’s fog. It’s up in the sky and spreads all the way over the valley and sinks onto and into the ground. And that means slow going once we get ourselves in it. Entire towns are clogged with the stuff down below. It goes for hundreds of miles. Those people, they don’t know what they’re doin’ in it.”

“I took a bus through the valley a few times, but it was always a hundred degrees. I feel like this is somewhere I haven’t been. Just never really seen it from up here.”

“Oh this is somewhere else. But then, it’s just what it is. A city close to everything, but with small-mindedness that keeps people and kids like you in each other’s business. As long as you can hide it a little, I don’t mind. Know what I mean, kid?”

Minstrel didn’t talk but stared at the last bit of clear sky that washed milk and stars above the mountains. It was so clear that he remembered the mothership in the movie, and half expected her to come tearing out of the sky, or get ripped from the fog of the valley below and come straight up onto this path that he felt he alone were cutting into the mountainsides. To Hollywood that spaceship would go and zoom right over his head. It would suck palm trees up like Koreatown noodles, and drop off alien children to work the streets. Hollywood would make a fortune off alien-whores and spaceship rides, and real documentaries on aliens who wouldn’t talk at all, but point to their wallets all sewn into their skin; their money would go straight into their veins.

It made Minstrel a bit nervous and cold to think of such a sight. He shivered and stared, and soon, with the fog surrounding the windows where he could only see the cold grey underbelly of the Central Valley leviathan, he fell asleep.