Oh, God! You should have been with me yesterday when I finished my ham and eggs and knocked back some whiskey and picked up my Weatherby Mark V .300 Magnum and a ball of black opium for dessert and went outside with a fierce kind of joy in my heart because I was Proud to be an American on a day like this. It felt like a goddamn Football Game, Jann—it was like Paradise ... You remember that bliss you felt when we powered down to the Farm and whipped Stanford? Well, it felt like That.
I digress. My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and ghosts too foul to name ... Oh, no, don’t ask Why. You could have been president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in the dusk and mournfully call our names . . .
O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.
Right, and so much for autumn, the trees are diseased and the Animals get in your way and the President is usually guilty and most days are too long anyway ... So never mind my poem. It was wrong from the start. I plagiarized it from an early work of Coleridge and then tried to put my own crude stamp on it, but I failed.
So what? I didn’t want to talk about fucking autumn, anyway. I was just sitting here at dawn on a crisp Sunday morning, waiting for the football games to start and taking a goddamn very brief break from this blizzard of Character Actors and Personal Biographers and sickly Paparazzi that hovers around me these days (they are sleeping now, thank Christ—some even in my own bed). I was sitting here all alone, thinking, for good or ill, about the Good Old Days.
We were Poor, Jann. But we were Happy. Because we knew Tricks. We were Smart. Not Crazy, like they said. (No. They never called us late for dinner, eh?)
Ho, ho. Laughs don’t come cheap these days, do they? The only guy who seems to have any fun in public is Prince Cromwell, my shrewd and humorless neighbor—the one who steals sheep and beats up women, like Mike Tyson.
Who knows why, Jann. Some people are too weird to figure.
You have come a long way from the Bloodthirsty, Beady-eyed news Hawk that you were in days of yore. Maybe you should try reading something besides those goddamn motorcycle magazines—or one of these days you’ll find hair growing in your palms.
Take my word for it. You can only spend so much time “on the throttle,” as it were ... Then the Forces of Evil will take over. Beware . . .
Ah, but that is a different question, for now. Who gives a fuck? We are, after all, Professionals ... But our Problem is not. No. It is the Problem of Everyman. It is Everywhere. The Question is our Wa; the Answer is our Fate ... and the story I am about to tell you is horrible, Jann.
I came suddenly awake, weeping and jabbering and laughing like a loon at the ghost on my TV set ... Judge Clarence Thomas ... Yes, I knew him. But that was a long time ago. Many years, in fact, but I still remember it vividly ... indeed, it has haunted me like a golem, day and night, for many years.
It seemed normal enough, at the time, just another weird rainy night out there on the high desert ... What the hell? We were younger then. Me and the Judge. And all the others, for that matter ... It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days—without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko when you were lost in a midnight rainstorm—and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California.
There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were Rules, but they were not worshipped ... like Laws and Rules and Cops and Informants are feared and worshipped today.
Like I said: it was a different time. And I know the Judge would tell you the same thing, tonight, if he wanted to tell you the Truth, like I do.
The first time I actually met the Judge was a long time ago, for strange reasons, on a dark and rainy night in Elko, Nevada, when we both ended up in the same sleazy roadside Motel, for no good reason at all ... Good God! What a night!
I almost forgot about it, until I saw him last week on TV ... and then I saw it all over again. The horror! The horror! That night when the road washed out and we all got stuck out there—somewhere near Elko in a place just off the highway, called Endicott’s Motel—and we almost went really Crazy.