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ZANE WEST
Zane West is driving 100 miles an hour up the 101 freeway. He's taking big crazy drags on his Spirit, smoke is everywhere, and we're both on 20 milligrams of Aderol. I'm supposed to be interviewing him about his unpublished book Xx. We're math wizards right now because of the Aderol and I'm yelling out numbers to add and Zane's yelling out the answers really fast. We're listening to Converge, which is high quality Aderol music. Long live Converge! Long live these throat stabbing motherfuckers! "226, 342, 761!" I shout,
and Zane seems to answer beforeI've even said the last number. "Thirteen twenty-nine! Gimme something
harder!" He's got both hands on the wheel and the wind makes my
hair swirl. Ashes and sparks whip around the car. "How do you do that?" I shout.
"Add left to right," he says,
"like an Abacus. It's way faster than how they teach you in school."
"ja ba ba ba ja ba ba ba We're racing to meet with a publisher.
Zane spits his filter out the window and immediately begins biting his
fingernails. He's low on cash and this is the third publisher he's seen
this month. In our society, he's got no qualifications, no skills, he's
24 years old and staring into the abyss. He's living with me at the
co-op, we're both gonna be on the street if we don't make some money
this month, and I'm just trying to keep all his papers from flying out
the window because there's no AC. The Aderol-interview was Red's idea,
my long lost love. He's my Transylvanian gentleman and I'm his darker
self. He swore if I could get Zane to take Aderol it would lead to something
cool, so I hooked up some pills from my friend Oni who is well-respected
around Silverlake for having lied to a psychiatrist for a prescription. His agent hooked him up last week with
this publisher and now somebody wants to see the first 50 pages. "Zane, nobody reads anymore, and
even if they did, they wouldn't read this article. The ones who try
won't get halfway through it. They'll get scared by CNN and run out
to buy Campbell's soup or whatever they're told. So this is gonna be
our little secret--tell me some of your actual, recent, inner thoughts." Some idiot in front of us can't drive and Zane slams on the brakes. I brace myself but we don't die, we don't hit anything, we just keep racing through the Burbank wastelands. "Like personal thoughts?" he says. "Tell the people!" "The bank owns the biggest buildings
in the city because it's the business that came up with the best trick
to get people to part with their money. They call it a 'trust' and everybody
hands over what they worked for. Money is trust. It's a promise that
the whole society forces you to keep. It's imaginary, they print endless
quantities of it, but the material it buys is limited. So the true mastermind
controls this imaginary energy and in doing so he wins control of the
actual material goods! Food and shelter and everything. "You get money when you trust yourself.
I trust myself and that's why I can afford to be this broke. I don't
know anyone with less money than me. But it will never be a problem.
I get it when I need it. "I don't know how to do web design,
I don't know how to draw blueprints, I don't know which stocks are gonna
rise, and I can't do anything that people call 'skilled labor' because
those are monkey skills and I'm not a monkey. What I do is beyond manual
work, and no matter how sophisticated the biological engineer or the
chemist will tell you their work is, it would feel mundane and awful
after a night of this. I write in spite of the whole society telling
me it will not work, my body gets hungry and I don't know if I'll get
sick, the whole culture tells me to become secure, to do something stable,
and then I write all night just to spite them. People who think that
way are monkeys, they've always built fortresses and weapons and they've
always seen sex and reproduction as the END. Most people can tell you
what country they're from. That's sick! That's what destroys the world.
But I don't know what country I'm from and I'm a warrior for peace,
and that's what I was thinking last night." "How are you a warrior for peace?" I shout over Thaw, which is Converge's Metallica song.
"I practice non-violence at all
costs, even my own life." "Everyone practices non-violence.
I practice non-violence. Your driving is violent." "I'm the only one in danger." "I'm in danger, too." "You're me, Sonia." "It's not a novel, that's how it's different. It's just a 300-page journal entry of me retelling one night in my life as seen by every other human soul I interacted with from sunset to sunrise. "The two guys who robbed me are represented with exactly as much energy as the girl I fell asleep with. Drunken rambling in my ear gets woven into my parents' voices advising me to get a job. The movie I snuck into and the movie music are as real as the gravel I woke up on. I wander from movie set to actual city interchangeably. It blends together in what humans would see as a distorted, unnatural narrative, but I've found it to be the way one thinks in moments very close to death, which seem to be more clear." "More clear? How? If I was hanging out of a window, I wouldn't be thinking clearly." "The times I've felt sure I was
about to die--on a highway in Arizona, out of my mind on bottles of
cough syrup--I felt a great resignation of all my hopes and desires,
and was able in those moments to see clearly, like the way a tree probably
experiences life. At least that's how I hope a tree feels, because that's
what I'm shootin' for to come back as..." We reach our exit and have to slow down
so I can navigate. Zane gets serious, has to find a place to park, and
my battery dies. Then he goes inside and says he'll meet me in an hour.
His meeting runs so late that I give up on him. That's life with these
artist people. I'll leave you with an excerpt from
Chapter 3 of Zane's novel Xx. Let the record show we were the
first ones to spot his genius. Zane doesn't have email but you can send
me a letter and I'll get it to him. sonia@whiskeyandapples.com
(See the "about us" page.) We'll keep you posted when his
work becomes available. Excerpt from Xx, a novel by Zane West "What's in that fridge?" She opens
the door. Light, draft, and door align; 15 years ago at the same set
of visual coordinates, a mailbox opened to reveal three letters, my
own orange hand reached up for them---back before I had become conscious
of its skin, a smooth alien warrior painted in mud with nothing but
crossbows and daggers on its mind, thousands and thousands of explosions
flashing behind its closed eyes, camoflauge and cannon thunder, camping
with bear fishermen, running without feeling anything. Somebody
shouts,"Ghost in the graveyard!" Someone watched them all
scatter. Someone recalls its Nintendo enlightenment, its fight on dead
grass before its muscles could shatter teeth and bones. Now it glides
to the bed counting by sevens to infinity, whispering "steal me
from my husband," it is terrifying, otherworldly, with glossy black
eyes and sand skin counting by sevens to infinity. The sound
of whistling in the tunnel, she leans and falls and it holds her up
but it is not where I now reside. Our long shadows stumble down graffiti
walkways and she climbs up on a table to best unleash her life's frustrations
in the form of a desperate jolting dance. She wants to photograph me,
calling me her Navajo prince. She calls me her prince and I become a
prince, the unstoppable son of gods, dancing and scat singing to Mars.
Distant echo
of whistled atonal melody: her lurching body escapes its mind for three
seconds. One one thousand, two one thousand, three--I steal her from
the awful bar and take her to the caves where I painted another one
of her in mud and raced its blood up the glass steps singing, "sweet
rain, hail sweet fire." Left in the field to dig for arrowheads, this one life, to play the role of idiot who challenges with wit or smarts the born wise, the born leader. Lucky for them I was born dumb. I would enslave them all. Left in the field I created greater perfect friends and waited for them on wooden bridges. Drunk girl wakes the neighbors. I slept with punks and brought them home when my parents worked. Felt love but this new rebuilt body has no recollection of it. "Never be ashamed of your
talent, Mario," said the German bum I played chess with. He always
thought my name was Mario. "I see the way you hide it when you
go around with the... how you say... slackers." She wears our blanket, leaves
me to the cold air. It had been the steamy dark night of New Orleans
for an hour and we'd wasted our minds' glorious energies wrapping curses
into each other's hair. I chose her because she had the same face, now
it forces me to remember white rags and gasoline in empty summer parking
lots, framed by the fields that San Diego City stole. My Saint Teresa. Stained glass explodes into a billion dazzling sparks out of her lungs, we inhale each other's atoms. The ballroom light, the black door, the haunting melody Annabelle Lee in the caves of La Jolla. I lose my focus, no longer able to pretend I am there with her, and reappear completely intact, with no question of any reality other than this one, sitting in a Volkswagen Beetle exhaling steam. I'm at an "angle," a word I learned only moments ago, because the car is on a jack, we have a flat tire, it's winter in Salem. Dad was as old as I…am…now...
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