Hollywood Bablyon

For NK

It was Hollywood and she was the real thing, except for the parts that were made from cartilage and fat sucked from other bodies. That part was a dream, like the sun setting between two hills that were like firm nipply breasts that were on fire and all the kids danced the sock-hop, they did the fug and walked through mirrors with slicked hair and the smell of Fresca. She had a convertible; I had a motorized surfboard with wheels. I had a switchblade, she had pregnant nunchucks. Pregnant with what? Pregnant with “WaaaaaaaaH! Blam!” : parking meter decapitated.

We went to club and danced aggressively, like a bear and a shark that spot each other across a crowded gym and the air is filled with bad techno and they keep working out until the machinery breaks down and everyone is dead and they have no choice but to fight it out with weights snapped in half and dead fit people. Yeah we danced like that. Other people’s faces melted off. People shook like planes coming apart in our turbulence. I bought her shots of whisky. She said she had never drank no whisky before. She said it tasted like her mother’s blood.

We danced hard. I made that move I make where it’s like I shoot beams out my eyes and she danced like she was like blinded. She danced like she had one roller skate on and was being chased by a terrier. I danced like I was a ship and the shipbreakers. She dived in the lap of the guy in the wheelchair and rode him across the bar. I punched the saxophone and dented it. It was a crazy scene. Eventually we had two fire extinguishers and were just whaling on each other.

After the club closed we walked down the street. She was glimmering with sweat. The stores were closed so I broke into the Natural History Museum to get her a soda. I took the mammoth coat off the caveman and put it over her shoulders. She knocked me into a dinosaur and a space probe. I told her that I wanted her to be the empress of the empire development project deal thing that I had been working on that some really important people had expressed some interest in. She didn’t reply, and instead cuddled with the stuffed penguin and Eskimo she was holding. We didn’t go to the Egyptian wing. It was time to go.

I slid into the seat next to her. It was still a fine early morning. As we drove along the grey ribbon of highway we listened to oldies, broadcast to us from distant galaxies, millions of light-years distant, singing songs of love and loss in vanished civilizations and extinct species with too many arms and eyes. And I wanted her then. I wanted to make love to her so I could show her the happy trusting face I make after making love as well as a little house I had made out of peanuts. I wanted her, in the sheets next to me, looking at my peanut house.

I held her hand. I tried to pull her close, but she pulled away. I felt it then, the curse. The mummy’s curse. She was his girl. Toungless, eyeless, dry as dust. Old money, the oldest. But what was all that now? Could she really be into him just for a few gold trinkets and a social set and cache that was millennia out of date?

Oh, he was elegant in his shuffling, tongueless way. The way he wrote her little notes on papyrus that were all just squiggly little pictures. The way he moaned when she came back to him. The whole I-came-back-from-the-dead-to-love-you routine. Even now, he’d be back at the condo, lounging about in a track suit he filled out like a bag of bones, watching the History Channel. It made me mad, just thinking of his old man stinky hands all over her, smelling of frankincense, myrrh and dead, dead man.

And so we drove on, into the valley of kings that came and went like the waves of box office returns.