You can walk her streets and you can suck in the history from the glaze and aura that gets repainted every year, sustained by those that strive to maintain her golden beacon of light; the starlight that draws new moths to the flame. It isnt evil per se, it is just that too much sugar inevitably drives people crazy. You can follow star maps and feel your own heart sparkle for a moment, thinking maybe at any moment you might see one, could be eating at a restaurant, shopping, or they might just pass you in the street like a regular person. This is their town after all, this is what you came here for. A little fix. A little rush. A little taste of the drug that feeds us all, it has it's spring here, in Hollywood.
There is something in the earth here, maybe Los Angeles is an angel after all, an angel feeding all the suckling mouths of her children with her own kind of divine blood. Every soul here inevitably becomes a vampire, but then who is to say that is such a bad thing, and show me somewhere on this earth where people are free of need. It is just that here it gets amped. Could be the fault line, or the blood of past atrocities that dripped from dying souls into the earth beneath my feet even as I write this, the earth does not forget even if we do.
I dont know, I felt myself glide in my own kind of carriage along her streets, down to her ocean, out to her wilderness reaches and back again. Looking, looking for something, the echo of a good detective movie or maybe the realisation of some Gothic romance that carried in my soul, I wasnt even sure. I felt something in every step I took, something new, something enlightening and sometimes even a little dangerous, I realised that even though it was a dream, it was real enough to kill me if I took the wrong corner at the wrong time.
Remember this is real.
I kept trying to tell myself, but it was impossible. I just couldnt get it into perspective, out here, I no longer had any idea what real was.
I knew then I was falling and there was nothing to cling to, but I wasnt such a novice anymore, I wasnt so afraid of life, so I let go.
Death didnt really matter all that much, whatever you did, ultimately you were reminded that you were still nothing. That was the whole point, being nothing meant you could be anything you wished to be. Even the greatest; the Babylonian gods and goddesses, they were just soft bags of shit, piss, blood and confused emotion if you looked close enough. Every single one. Jesus! What the fuck was I doing in Hollywood? I wasnt sure if I should be concerned. I was on my way to Oz and the irony was not lost on me.
I wondered where it had all began. I figured it was like a disease, if you could just work out how it had gotten into you and where it had started, you could maybe work on finding the cure. I came across a book one morning as I sipped coffee in the house of a lover that she had brought to me, I felt possibly by fate but wasnt sure, the book was called Hollywood Babylon. I opened it and read the first few chapters.
hmmm, I thought, just as I had surmised
It seemed it all began with a Babylonian set design of devilish proportions. circa 1920. The first true Hollywood death was a starlet by the name of Olive Thomas. She had, of course, been thought to be the perfect American girl child. Little surprise she was found dead of an overdose after spending a night in Parisian clubs with the mafia earnestly trying to score heroin for her lover, or was he husband, I cannot remember and am no longer interested. I turned the book around in my hands. Reading it somehow felt like looking for suicide. I noticed the publishers address was 666 Fifth Avenue, New York.
Does no one ever realise that Revelations was a self fulfilling prophecy? I sighed a little exasperated. Sometimes I felt I was the only person on the planet that understood it was in constant revolution and all the mad fools aboard her were just laughing uncontrollably desperate. I wondered if we didnt all deserve to die for our sins, not against each other or some invented god, but against the truth. We shied from it because it burnt us. The lie was our protector until Death would come to set us free. We liked death, liked to watch it in the amphitheatre or upon a movie screen it didnt matter. It fed us, like it or not, that was true. Every single one of us was ultimately a vampire, the thing was that only some of us understood this while still alive.
I sipped again on my coffee and stared a little soft eyed out the mesh window into the dusty yard and the sunshine of a hot California day in June. Two cats played with each other, all claws and teeth, nature playing, training her own for the kill. I wondered what would get me ultimately. I tried not to think about it, my heart was racing with the coffee and I didnt need the stress. I didnt have long left. I wasnt sure if I was glad to be leaving Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, her streets, her romance, her poor, her rich, her crazy, her prophetic, her divine, the angel, the city of lost angels. I wondered if she would let me go.
I sipped again.
The cats played.
I felt inspired to write,
but time was never going to be on my side.
I tried to imagine what came after all this,
but like always, I just drew a blank.
I felt in control, but I knew something else was throwing the dice.
It was always going to be this way so long as I was here.
I sighed, then stepped out into the sunshine to let her warm me once again.
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