Kingdom of Fear (7 page)

. . .

Many wild and desperate years have whirled through my life since my one and only experience as a certified Victim of the law enforcement process. The lesson I learned from those thirty days in jail was never to go back there again. Period. It was not Necessary. My jail mates had called me “The President” and beautiful girls came to visit me on Thursday afternoons, but I had better sense than to feel any pride about it.

The late Pablo Escobar, former kingpin of the powerful Medellín cocaine cartel in Colombia, once observed that “the difference between being a criminal and being an outlaw is that an outlaw has a following”—which he did, for a while, for his willingness to share his huge profits with the working-class Poor of his city. He was a Home-boy, a generous friend of the people. His only real crime, they said, was that the product his business produced was seen as a dangerous menace by the ruling Police & Military establishments of the U.S. and a few other countries that were known to be slaves and toadies of U.S. economic interests.

When I got out of jail, in fact, I went immediately to work for the rest of the summer for Almond Cook, the Chevrolet dealer in town. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do that fall—maybe go to the U.K. I didn’t know, but I was in no mood really to take up anything conventional. Mr. Cook was the father of one of my longtime girlfriends, and I was given a job driving a brand-new Chevrolet truck, delivering parts around town. It was a wonderful job—I’d just take things all over town, driving constantly, sort of a very large version of
those bicycle messengers in New York, but in a brand-new fucking V-8 truck.

I got very good with the truck. I was driving all the time, and it was wonderful, like being given a rocket. And I had no trouble and got to be such a good driver that something was bound to happen . . . the numbers were getting bad. Then one Saturday morning—a very bright, very sunny day—I was speeding down an alley behind some kind of a car repair emporium on Second Street. I’d gone down this particular alley many times, and had gotten to the point where I could put this huge V-8 Chevy pickup through a burning hoop without it being touched—at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

I remember coming down that alley. It was bright. I could see it was all bricks on either side, and here was this big truck, say a ton and a half, like a big Ryder delivery truck, only blue or green, and it had one of those tailgates that hangs down on chains, made of pointed lead or hard steel. The tailgate was pointing out by a few degrees; had it been parked parallel I would have had room to go through with about three inches to spare. But instead of being parallel to the wall, it was parked at a slight angle, and I remember thinking,
Shit. I can make that.
But I knew it was bad.

I hit the accelerator so hard that I went through the alley at about sixty—so fast that I barely felt the impact. Sort of a click, more than a crash. . . .

I knew immediately that I hadn’t made it clean, and I stopped. Another inch and I would have made it . . . two inches, maybe. But I missed it by those two inches: The tailgate had kicked in, just to the right of the front headlight. The truck had a big chrome stripe all along it, and right on top of it, about three inches above, was another stripe, this one dark in color. I looked at it and thought, What the fuck? What’s that? There was no other damage. I hadn’t crashed anything. Nothing bent. So I stared at the dark stripe again, and as I looked at it I realized that the tailgate had caught the front headlight right there and opened up the truck like a can opener—the whole length, front to back, about two inches wide—but clean, like a sardine can. You put one on both sides and people would think that’s the way new Chevy trucks were.

I thought, Oh, fuck. But nobody had seen it. It didn’t make any noise; there was no crash. Just a hairline miss. Hubris! I knew I should learn from the thing. I knew the damned track was not what it looked
like, literally: a two-inch racing stripe. But it was so clean that I thought for a minute that I might get away with it.

I went into the diner across the street and sat drinking coffee and beer, thinking, What the Hell do I do?. . . Do I tell anybody? I parked the truck out in the lot with the bad side right next to a fence so nobody could see it, then finally decided what to do.

I went in and told the parts manager, “Come out here, Hank. I’ve got something to show you.” He was in charge of such things, and he was a good friend. I took him out to the lot in the hot noonday sun and said, “Now, I want you to be calm here, but I just want to show you this. I don’t know what to do about it, and I need some advice.” I took him around to the other side, between the fence and the truck, and he almost passed out.

I said, “What should I do about this?”

And he said, “We’ll have to tell Mr. Cook.”

That’s fair, I thought. It was right before lunch. Hank then called and said he needed to talk to Mr. Cook, but he wasn’t there, Thank God, which gave me another hour or so. I was going nuts with this. Something was coming down.

We just happened to be right across the street from the main Louisville Post Office, and I thought, Ah, hah! I bet the draft office is still open there. So I went right across the street at lunch and volunteered for the draft, which a lot of my friends had done. It was kind of a nice resting place between stops—and there was a six-month waiting list. I thought, Oh, fuck, time’s way down and I have to go back and see Almond Cook at one-ten.

I had an appointment.

So I just went next door to the Air Force. It happened to be next door. And I took the pilot training test and scored like 97 percent. I didn’t really mean to go in there, but I told them I wanted to drive jet planes, and they said I could with that test. So I said, “When can I . . . when can I leave?”

And the recruiting officer said, “
Well.
Normally it takes a few days to check out, but you go Monday morning”—allegedly to flight school at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

I thought, Ah, hah! I’m out of here.

I went back and apologized to Almond Cook and told him that I had to admit I had failed at driving the truck.

(HST)

. . .

And where is my old friend Paul Hornung, now that we need him? Paul was the finest running back of his time: All-State at Flaget High in Louisville, All-American at Notre Dame, and All-Pro for the Green Bay Packers. He was a big handsome boy from Louisville’s gamey West End, a longtime breeding ground for sporting talent, which also produced a flashy young fighter with extremely quick hands named Cassius Clay, who would become even more famous than Hornung.

That would be my old friend Muhammad Ali, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. He beat the shit out of me once, for no good reason at all, and Paul Hornung ran over me in a car, just because I couldn’t get out of his way. . . . Yes sir, those boys stomped on the terra.

They were also serious flesh-tasters, as working Libertines were sometimes called in those days. They were . . .

Fuck this, I feel weak.

Get your hands off me, Harold! What the fuck is wrong with you?

Okay. You’re the boss. Do anything you want, but please don’t hurt my animals! That is all I ask.

Oh Yes Oh Yes! Praise Jesus, don’t
hurt
them. They are creatures of God, and so am I. Oh god, pain is everywhere I feel. . . . “Bend over, honey,” he said. “I’m going to put this Eel up your ass, so try to relax.”

Ho ho, eh? Balls! There
are
no jokes when we start talking about introducing saltwater Eels into people’s body cavities. Some of them are nine feet long. That is over the line, if it’s done against their will. That would be rape of some kind.

Whoops! How about a break, people? How about some Music? Yes. Music is where it’s at, so consider this:

I am a confused Musician who got sidetracked into this goddamn Word business for so long that I never got back to music—except maybe when I find myself oddly alone in a quiet room with only a typewriter to strum on and a yen to write a song. Who knows why? Maybe I just feel like singing—so I type.

These quick electric keys are my Instrument, my harp, my RCA glass-tube microphone, and my fine soprano saxophone all at once. That is my music, for good or ill, and on some nights it will make me feel like a god. Veni, Vidi, Vici. . . . That is when the fun starts. . . . Yes, Kenneth, this
is
the frequency. This is where the snow leopards live;
“Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. . . .”

Herman Melville said that, and I have found it to be true, but I didn’t really know what it
felt
like until I started feeling those shocks myself, which always gave me a rush. . . .

So perhaps we can look at some of my work (or
all
of it, on some days) as genetically
governed
by my frustrated musical failures, which led to an overweening
sublimation
of my essentially musical instincts that surely haunt me just as clearly as they dominate my lyrics.

Something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?

—Bob Dylan

No sir, not a chance. Mr. Jones does not even pretend to know what’s happening in America right now, and neither does anyone else.

We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look
super
weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. . . . We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

. . .

The Autumn months are never calm in America. Back to Work, Back to School, Back to Football Practice, etc. . . . Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the
known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnappings and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized Perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other as personal Sex Slaves and playthings.

Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly—but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway
will
ice up, your furnace
will
explode, and you
will
be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.

But what the hell. That is why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. The structure might be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still Strong and Unshakable.

Ho, ho. Think again, buster. Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. . . . There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no Congress at all—not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the “New President.”

If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends . . . or four L.A. Lakers stars being murdered in different places on the same day. Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism.

Good luck, Doc.

November 19, 2000

Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. I don’t mean to say that I’m about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able—or even have the courage—to achieve

—from a letter to Joe Bell
October 24, 1957
Eglin Air Force Base
Fort Walton Beach, Florida