Kingdom of Fear (44 page)

There
are
no jobs in America, Simon; the job market collapsed in 2001
A.D
., along with the stock market and all ENRON pension funds.
All
markets collapsed about 3 days after George W. Bush moved into the White House. . . . Yeah, it was
that
fast. BOOM, presto, welcome to bombs and poverty. You are about to start paying for the sins of your fathers and forefathers, even if they were innocent.

We are in bad trouble over here, Simon. The deal is going down all over the once-proud U.S.A. We are down to our last cannonball(s). Stand back! Those Pentagon swine are frantic to kick some ass, and many job opportunities are opening up in the Armaments, Surveillance, and New Age Security industries.

Hell, did I forget to mention
those
jobs? How silly of me. There is always a bull market for vengeance and violence in America, and on some days I have been part of it. You bet. In my wild and dangerous youth I wanted to be a dashing jet pilot, a smiling beast who zooms across the sky doing victory rolls and
monster sonic booms just over the beach in Laguna. Hot damn, Simon, I could walk on water in those days. I had a license to kill.

I have been a news addict all my life, and I feel pretty comfortable with my addiction. It has been good to me, although not necessarily
for
me, or my overall comfort level. Being a news junkie has taken me down some very queer roads, and into the valley of death a few times—not always for strictly professional reasons, alas—but those things
do
come with the territory, and you want to understand this: It is the key to survival in my business, as it is in many others.

And you definitely want to have a shockproof sense of humor, which is hard to learn in school and even harder to teach. (It is also an irritating phrase to keep putting on paper over and over—so from now on we will use the ancient and honorable word “WA,” instead of “Sense of humor.” It will smooth out our word-rhythms, and we can move along more briskly.)

Okay. We were talking about the
news
—information or intelligence gleaned from afar, etc., etc.

The news is
bad
today, in America and
for
America. There is
nothing
good or hopeful about it—except for Nazis, warmongers, and rich greedheads—and it is getting worse and worse in logarithmic progressions since the fateful bombing of the World Trade Towers in New York. That will always be a festering low-watermark in this nation’s violent history, but it was not the official birthday of the end of the American Century.

No. That occurred on the night of the presidential election in the year 2000, when the nexus of power in this country shifted from Washington, D.C., to “the ranch” in Crawford, Texas. The most disastrous day in American history was November 7, 2000. That was when the
takeover
happened, when the generals and cops and right-wing Jesus freaks seized control of the White House, the U.S. Treasury, and our Law Enforcement machinery.

So long to all that, eh? “Nothing will ever be the same again,” the whorish new President said at the time. “As of now we are in the grip of a National Security Emergency that will last for the rest of our lives.”

Fuck you, I quit. Mahalo.

I would never claim to speak for my whole nation, Simon; I am not the Voice of America—but neither am I a vicious machine-gun Nazi warmonger with blood on my hands and hate in my heart for every human being in the world who is not entirely
white
—and, if you wonder why I mention this thuggish characterization, understand that I am only responding to it in this way because my old friend, the weird artist Ralph Steadman, is saying these horrible things about me in England, Wales, and Kent—and directly
to
me, in fact, when we speak on the trans-Atlantic telephone.

“That is bullshit, Ralph,” I tell him. “Are you getting senile? Do you know who you are talking to?”

“Of course I do,” he replies. “You are the same brutal redneck I’ve known all my life—except that now you are turning into what you always were from the start—just another murderous American. . . .”

So that is how this thing got jump-started, Simon. And ever since (I think) I talked to you on yr. birthday I have been feverishly writing down my various fears and worries and profoundly angst-ridden visions about our immediate future.

So good luck, Simon. Pls advise me at once in re: yr. space & rates. How about $20,000, eh? I can ramble on for many hours about my recent experience as an American in these days at the end of
our
Century. Or maybe just 1,000 words, or 2,000. Think about it, and R.S.V.P. soonest. Thanx,

HUNTER
May 10, 2002

He not busy being born is busy dying.

—Bob Dylan

She flew low over central Paris—the Dream of the Princess in the White Helicopter.

Took lessons for months—
very
difficult; you can’t
hire
many people who could fly a chopper in low over downtown Paris and park it in midair above a prison long enough to send a man down a line with an Uzi and come back up . . .

Then put it down on the roof of the prison and carry her lover off on the skid—and then to put the thing down in a nearby parking lot and have everything organized so finely that they disappeared instantly in the waiting car.

Perfect. Nadine, you can have a job with me anytime. This may be a love story. . . .

. . .

There were other things happening in the news last week—mainly politics, but we need a break from that now.

There was, in fact, this truly elegant little tale that came out of Paris, and it was about The Girl in the White Helicopter who rescued
her lover from prison. It was one of those fine little love stories that can make you smile in your sleep at night.

The real action last week was in Romance & full-on madness . . .

The wife of French bank robber Michel Vaujour flew low over central Paris in a white helicopter and hovered over the roof of La Santé prison. A man armed with a submachine gun slid down a line to the roof . . . Vaujour, wearing a blue and red warm-up suit, was hidden from guards behind a chimney. He grabbed one of the chopper’s landing skids and climbed aboard. The gunman leaped in after him, and the copter whisked them to a nearby soccer field, where all three disappeared . . . Nadine Vaujour, the robber’s wife, had been taking copter-flying lessons for many months, French authorities learned later.

Even a dumb brute could fall in love with a story like that. It has the purity of a myth and the power of being simple flat-out true, and it spoke to our highest instincts. It was a perfect crime, done for love, and it was carried out with awesome precision and a truly crazy kind of fearlessness by a beautiful girl in a white helicopter.

There is more to the story, of course. That perfect escape was last May, and the honeymoon lasted all summer. But in the autumn Michel went back to work, and a
New York Times
dispatch out of Paris in late September said he’d been “seriously wounded and captured in a shootout while trying to rob a bank.” He had been shot in the head and was lying in a coma at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital.

“Officials said Mr. Vaujour’s wife, who masterminded the May escape, was arrested Saturday morning at a hideout in southwestern France.”

When I read it I felt a chill. All the real love stories end wrong, and I was just about to close the file on this one . . .

“Mrs. Vaujour was already well known to police,” said an earlier
Times
item. “She and Mr. Vaujour were married in 1979 while he was in a different jail serving a previous sentence. (He was moved frequently to prevent an escape.) They had a daughter, who was born in jail in September 1981, while Mrs. Vaujour was being held in preventive detention.”

I was struck by the almost unholy power and purity of the Vaujours’ love for each other, which ran through their lives like a red thread. Above all else, they were lovers, and they honored the word by the terrible intensity they brought to it.

With Juan at Owl Farm, 1997
(Deborah Fuller)

It is Sunday morning now and I am writing a love letter. Outside my kitchen window the sky is bright and planets are colliding. My head is hot and I feel a little edgy. My brain is beginning to act like a V-8 engine with the sparkplug wires crossed. Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.

Last night a huge black cat tried to jump me in the swimming pool, then it suddenly disappeared. I did another lap and noticed three men in green trench coats watching me from behind a faraway door. Whoops, I thought, something weird is happening in this room. Lay low in the water and creep toward the middle of the pool. Stay away from the edges. Don’t be strangled from behind. Keep alert. The work of the Devil is never fully revealed until after midnight.

It was right about then that I started thinking about my love letter. The skylights above the pool were steamed up, strange plants were moving in the thick and utter darkness. It was impossible to see from one end of the pool to the other.

I tried to stay quiet and let the water calm down. For a moment I thought I heard another person coming into the pool, but I couldn’t be sure. A ripple of terror caused me to drop deeper in the water and assume a karate position. There are only two or three things in the world more terrifying than the sudden realization that you are naked and alone and something large and aggressive is coming close to you in dark water.

It is moments like this that make you want to believe in hallucinations—because if three large men in trench coats actually
were
waiting for me in the shadows behind that door and something else was slithering toward me in the darkness, I was doomed.

Alone? No, I was
not
alone. I understood that. I had already seen three men and a huge black cat, and now I thought I could make out the shape of another person approaching me. She was lower in the water than I was, but I could definitely see it was a woman.

Of course, I thought. It must be my sweetheart, sneaking up to give me a nice surprise in the pool. Yessir, this is just like that twisted little bitch. She is a hopeless romantic and she knows this pool well. We once swam here every night and played in the water like otters.

. . .

Jesus Christ! I thought, what a paranoid fool I’ve been. I must have been going crazy. A surge of love went through me as I stood up and moved quickly to embrace her. I could already feel her naked body in my arms. . . . Yes, I thought, love does conquer all.

. . .

But not for long. No, it took me a minute or two of thrashing around in the water before I understood that I was, in fact, completely alone in the pool.
She
was not here and neither were those freaks in the corner. And there
was
no cat. I was a fool and a dupe. My brain was seizing up and I felt so weak that I could barely climb out of the pool.

Fuck this, I thought. I can’t handle this place anymore. It’s destroying my life with its weirdness. Get away and never come back. It had mocked my love and shattered my sense of romance. This horrible experience would get me nominated for
Rube of the Year
in any high school class.

Dawn was coming up as I drove back down the road. There were no comets colliding, no tracks in the snow except mine, and no sounds for 10 miles in any direction except Lyle Lovett on my radio and the howl of a few coyotes. I drove with my knees while I lit up a glass pipe full of hashish.

When I got home I loaded my Smith & Wesson .45 and fired a few bursts at a beer keg in the yard, then I went back inside and started scrawling feverishly in a notebook. . . . What the hell? I thought. Everybody writes love letters on Sunday morning. It is a natural form of worship, a very high art. And on some days I am very good at it.

Today, I felt, was definitely one of those days. You bet. Do it
now.
Just then my phone rang and I jerked it off the hook, but there was nobody on the line. I sagged against the fireplace and moaned, and then it rang again. I grabbed it, but again there was no voice. O God! I thought. Somebody is fucking with me. . . . I needed music, I needed rhythm. I was determined to be calm, so I cranked up the speakers and played “Spirit in the Sky,” by Norman Greenbaum.

I played it over and over for the next three or four hours while I hammered out my letter. My heart was Racing and the music was making the peacocks scream. It was Sunday, and I was worshiping in my own way. Nobody needs to be crazy on the Lord’s Day.

. . .

My grandmother was never crazy when we went to visit her on Sundays. She always had cookies and tea, and her face was always smiling. That was down in the West End of Louisville, near the Ohio River locks. I remember a narrow concrete driveway and a big gray car in a garage behind the house. The driveway was two concrete strips with clumps of grass growing between them. It led back through the vicious wild rosebushes to what looked like an abandoned shed. Which was true. It
was
abandoned. Nobody walked in that yard, and nobody drove that big gray car. It never moved. There were no tracks in the grass.