Amputation, page 2
Then—
Good On You everybody knows los zionistas collaborated with the nazis during the hollowcaust (that’s what the leonard cohen song ‘everybody knows’ is about—kike kollabs)
And at last, which made her heart jump:
did u know yr loser husbnd is fucking the Grey’s Anatomy grifter Elisabeth Finch?
Humph.
She would need to look into that.
She kombucha’d down a 50 mg trazadone and fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
Karen
On the military plane back to LA, she talked to a dozen staffers who were reticent to say outright what she already knew: the plundering of her legacy had begun. She couldn’t mount much of a defense until she was home. The best she could do was gather the troops and brace herself for a literal trial by fire—a blaze of defamatory disinformation and racist innuendo.
During a queasy break, a sympathetic aide passed her an iPad.
The charismatic Yvette Nicole Brown, a self-proclaimed ‘ride-or-die Bassinette,’ was testifying to a reporter. ‘Our mayor,’ she said, ‘has a spine 14of steel. She’s also been a Black woman in America for a long, long time, so none of this is new to her. We’re mad as hell, ‘cause we’re just tired of it!’ They rarely spoke but the well-known TV actress was among a handful of Karen’s off-and-on text buddies.
Surprising herself, the embattled leader decided to call Yvette right then and there. When she picked up, the mayor said, ‘It’s Karen Bass and right now I’m on a US Air Force Gulfstream, California-bound.’ Yvette shrieked and they both started giggling, which was a wonderful release. Then Karen spoke in medias res. ‘These nincompoops are saying why didn’t I cancel my trip after being told there was going to be moderate to strong Santa Anas and extreme fire conditions. Santa Anas and fire conditions! Yvette, that’s what I’ve had for breakfast in our beautiful city for more than sixty years!’ The actress hooted. ‘Lord, I’ve been hearing about Santa Anas and fire conditions since I was a little girl raised up in Venice. Daddy was a postman and oh he loved the weather. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor Santa Anas can stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds! But you know what? Try as we may, we cannot avoid fires, earthquakes, and mudslides—or wrecks on the 405.’
‘Can’t avoid the Orange Hitler Man either,’ said Yvette.
‘That too,’ laughed the mayor. ‘And how is anyone going to stay out of the way of a hundred-mile-an-hour wind?’
It was strange how randomly her daughter Emilia’s death still reared its head to pair itself with anything at all. The car crash tragedy happened twenty-odd years ago but seemed to have a deathlife of its own. Point still taken: Freeway accidents and fire seasons in LA—does that mean you stop driving? Does that mean you don’t travel for a joyous, historic occasion at the behest of your president?
It was almost 90° in Accra.
Their arrival had been delayed so they had to bypass the hotel; she would have to change into her dress at the palace. The route from the airport to Black Star Square was carefully choreographed to highlight the beauty and modernism of the capital. When they couldn’t escape driving 15past a shantytown, a delegate tried to distract the mayor with small talk because a whole section of it was inconveniently on fire. The stink of burning metal and sewage was knockdown pungent but Karen maintained her bland trademark smile, never breaking the delegate’s gaze in the shared pretense of not really noticing the peripheral carnage.
On palace grounds, they were misted by the aerosol of a sweet, musky bouquet. Ambassador Palmer said that it was a fragrance from Maison Yusif, a young Ghanaian company that just won the prestigious Perfumista Award in France.
Karen stood beside the presidents of Nigeria and Kenya for an official photo before having a private audience with the newly inaugurated Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Ghana’s first female vice president. Both wore red—something providential that made them smile—Jane in a kente gown, the mayor in a dress from Sergio Hudson. They were about the same age and the honored guest immediately felt a sisterhood. She couldn’t wait to tell Kamala. What a lovely antidote and bookend it was for her heartbreaking loss …
A glorious tribal circle of lady warrior drums.
Jane was a maverick whose focus was inclusivity, gender equity, and the empowerment of girls. She was also a PhD in English literature and when Karen learned that, she said out loud, ‘Oh my!’ The mayor had always felt insecure at not being book smart. (It didn’t do a thing for her when her stepdaughter Scythia said, ‘Mom, you’re the smartest woman I know.’) By the time of their chat, she had already been discreetly informed of the conflagration at home but was doing her best to stay present; compartmentalization came with the political territory. She warmly told Jane that ‘the other vice president’ sent her personal regards—and with that PhD in mind, added that Kamala’s favorite book was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Jane said Song of Solomon was her favorite too, then asked Karen if she’d ever read The Fire Next Time. The ladies winced almost imperceptibly at the faux pas.
16 Jane quickly covered it over by backtracking, mentioning that she loved Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
‘My shameful secret,’ Karen confessed, wanting to be transparent, and backtracking as well, ‘is that I’ve always meant to read Mr. Baldwin but never seem to have the time. I have read him,’ she lied, ‘but not in depth.’ She did share that she loved the actor who portrayed Baldwin in The Swans, a miniseries that ‘became one of my guilty pleasures.’ Veepee Jane hadn’t heard of The Swans. Karen said it was ‘about another marvelous writer, Truman Capote. I haven’t read him either!’ laughed the mayor. Jane was charmed.
While the logistics of returning to LA were being plotted, everyone in the delegation now knew what was happening in California. The King himself sympathetically took Karen aside and spoke of ‘our own trouble’ with fires in Ghana. They too had strong winds but things were always made worse by congested access, poor water distribution, and ‘delays in raising the alarm’—problems his government was trying mightily to remedy. The Commonwealth Secretary-General chimed in about flames that gutted close to two hundred shops in the Kumasi Market. ‘Such terrible things are quite expensive,’ he said. ‘One of these incidents cost well over seven million cedi.’
On the way to the plane, Karen thought of her father, the letter carrier. The shantytown was still burning.
She told an aide to order Song of Solomon, and some Baldwin too, but not The Fire Next Time.
* * *
Roderick
The stuntman was staying with his girlfriend Sonata at her mobile home in Tahitian Terrace and they wound up evacuating later that night. But it was only 3 p.m., so when Steve Guttenberg urgently texted, Rod heeded 17the call. He was already close by, up on the fire road clearing brush. He jumped on the Harley and sped down from the Summit to help the actor move residents from Cielo, a superluxe assisted living home in the Highlands that someone told him cost tenants at least $20,000 a month.
On the way, he passed three men on scooters, hooded, hunched down and determined. Each had a slew of empty messenger bags slung over their shoulders. Rod called 911 and somewhat guiltily said, ‘I think they may be opportunists—you know, marauders, whatever. They don’t look like they’re local and they definitely don’t look like they’re here to help.’ The dispatcher asked if they had weapons. ‘None I could see.’
He got cut off when she patched him through to the police. By then, he’d arrived at Cielo and let it go.
Due to his native decency and sense of community during the fires—anachronistic qualities that evoked nostalgia for an extinct time—the media crowned Guttenberg, a borderline pudgy, faded star, as the Everyman and ‘folk hero’ of the hour. (When his wife teased him about that, he dad-danced while hammily belting out, ‘We could be folk heroes, just for one day!’) A fair segment of the bygone world was still besotted by the clownish lead of Police Academy, who didn’t seem to have a nasty Hollywood bone in his body. Before asking the stuntman to pitch in at Cielo, Guttenberg had been helping to move the IONIQs, Rivians, and Teslas that were abandoned on Sunset Boulevard by panicked road hogs, blocking the only route of evacuation and firetruck access. The pileup looked like the set of a Universal Studio tour that suddenly morphed from disaster film to comically surreal Blues Brothers demolition derby. When, in front of the actor’s eyes, three Waymo taxis inexplicably rounded Lake Shrine and smashed into the gridlock of their driverless brethren, a gum-chewing cop cracked a smile and slowly shook his head. He told the actor that the fires were probably disrupting guidanceware, likely the cause of the oddball-looking machines going rogue. In the current situation, it helped that Guttenberg had an affinity for first responders; his dad had been an Airborne Army Ranger and New York City cop.
18 Rod used to bump into Guttenberg in the Village, at Hank’s or Starbucks, but actually knew the actor back when he was an assistant stunt coordinator on a reality sports show called Holey Moley. (Guttenberg was one of the judges.) But the reason he had Rod’s cell number was because only a few days ago, by strange coincidence, they both happened to be at the horse ranch of a producer in Point Dume. Clearly, thought Rod, there’s some kinda karma goin’ on.
Rod, on the other hand, never had much luck as a thespian. When success finally arrived, it came sideways. A casting agent sent his reel to Denis Villeneuve but the director was more impressed by his fearless, elegant athleticism than his wooden recital of ‘We are House Atreides. There is no call we do not answer.’ When he was hired to be Timothée Chalamet’s stunt double on the Dune movies, word quickly spread through the below-the-line grapevine. He was an exceptional horseman and after Dune 2, landed in Morocco for Gladiator 2—the most fun ever. Fawning, horned-up Roderick Paisley IG fan clubs mushroomed overnight. One site, A Complete Unknown, proclaimed him to be ‘superior in beauty’ to the young star he famously shadowed. ‘He is nothing less,’ it pronounced, ‘than the Ryan Gosling of Timothée Chalamets. He is Timothée Squared, the ayahuasca to Chalamet’s MDMA.’
Gung-ho Guttenberg was already at the rest home when Rod arrived.
Six ambulances had somehow been mustered while disoriented lodgers were brought out in bathrobes one by one for transfer to a hotel in Chino Hills. Some were compos mentis, some were not; some were ambulatory, some were not; some were crying; some laughed too loud and too long for no apparent reason. The caregivers were near breaking point.
Rod helped one of the residents pack. The old man clutched a rectangle of battered metal that on further questioning was revealed to be an ancient fire engine and childhood keepsake. He kept talking about his mother.
19 ‘She owns fucking Pepperdine!’ he shouted. ‘Old bitch probably started this fire to smoke me out! Her name’s Rindge,’ he spat. ‘Sound familiar?’ Weirdly, Rod knew all about the Rindges because of research he’d been doing on a movie idea he was shopping. ‘She still owns the whole coast and don’t you believe otherwise! I am her son. Her son, her son, her son!’ Then his features went blank and the sides of his mouth began to twitch. No longer a scourge, he was a scared little boy. Tearfully, he said, ‘Why won’t Mommy talk to me? I call her but she won’t talk! She won’t talk, she won’t talk—’
As Guttenberg caromed to Lake Shrine to help volunteers water down the roofs, he shook the stuntman’s hand. ‘Thanks for helping out,’ he said. ‘And hey—that ranch was crazy beautiful, right?’ He was referring to their recent chance meet in Point Dume but Rod thought it best not to ask any questions about whether or not the project he’d overheard Steve talking about with the producer who owned the ranch was moving any further along. Wasn’t the time or the place.
‘The thoroughbreds!’ Rod exclaimed. ‘You have no idea what those things cost. And the maintenance? It’s like owning a yacht.’
‘Hope the place doesn’t burn,’ said Guttenberg, almost wistfully. ‘Well, thanks again, buddy. Let’s have a bite at Hank’s when all this nonsense is over.’
Walking to his motorcycle, the stuntman encountered a distraught DWP worker in the half-dark, leaning against a wall. The pale, overweight man wore a gleaming hard hat and held a clipboard like a useless prop. He glanced up at Rod and began talking as if they were already in the middle of a long conversation.
‘I didn’t always have this godforsaken job!’ His cheeks were wet. ‘Like others, I don’t wear the epaulets of my bonafides—that’s not my style. But I don’t mind telling you that I have three magna cum laude degrees from Harvard, that’s right. Chemistry, economics, and law. Did you know that when the St. Francis dam collapsed, William Mulholland immediately 20resigned? That’s right. Immediately. And that was William Mulholland. Know what he said? ‘A true leader takes responsibility for their actions, be they successes or be they failures.’ That’s what William Mulholland said.’ Rod experienced a curious déjà vu—as if he had heard it all before. ‘I just wrote an email to Ms. Quiñones, the CEO and Chief Engineer of LADWP, which will very likely cost me my job. I asked her to resign for not delivering sufficient amounts of water to this area. Yes, I did. I wrote that sans hubris and sans regrets.’ Rod suddenly realized that he’d heard the soliloquy on a YouTube video that some pissed off AA amateur politico forwarded in a group text—it was actually the studied harangue of a resident speaking out at a Pacific Palisades Community Council meeting. Could this have been the same man? ‘The Santa Ynez Reservoir,’ the DWP worker went on, ‘holds 111 million gallons but was drained about a year ago. You can see it from here, friend! There,’ he pointed. ‘Right over your shoulder … it’s a crater. By the way, here’s some trivia: know who was the youngest commissioner ever of the DWP? And went on to become its president? Rick Caruso!’ Rod was certain now that the speech had been plagiarized but felt stoned—it was all so bizarre. ‘Let’s get back to why, why might you ask, was ol St. Ynez drained? That’s the 111-million-gallon question, isn’t it? Well, I’ll tell you why—it was drained cause it had a cover. Just like the ones overprotective parents put on their pools so Fido or little Jimmy won’t fall in and drown … and lo and behold, one day some sweet imbecile found a teensy rip in said cover. Oh dear! Oh goodness! So the woke, broke, paranoid pencil-head geeks—that’s Freddie Blassie, you’re too young—rolled back on their mutant heels and proclaimed ol’ St. Ynez must be drained. Because the water was no longer safe! Oh, they are all about safety! Safety for people! Safety for plants and endangered insects! The eco-warriors banned Super Scoopers from using ocean water to put out fires because the salt stressed the plants out … oh, they are looking after us, I tell you! All creatures great and small! Who knows what perilous microbes snuck in through that torn piece of fabric! Bird flu? Measles? 21Hanta? Long Covid? Fucking cholera, fucking plague! Just a few months ago, Ms. Quinono said she was more interested in filling racial quotas than reservoirs! I shit you not, sir. The Board thought it prudent to pay Ms. Quinono $750,000 a year to fill aforesaid quotas. $750,000 a year! Want to hear something else? They never did a background check on her. Background checks were a no-no for Quinono! Oh! You wanna know who recommended her for the job? Her bestie, the right Reverend Karen Bass! Or should I say the left Reverend Bass. If they sniffed around just a weense, they might’ve learned a particularly sordid detail: Quinono was in charge of the re-electrification of Puerrrrrto Rico after Hurricane Maria. And guess what? One year later, 80 percent of Puerrrrrto Rico was still without electricity! Know who Ms. Quinonononononono worked for next? PG&E! No no no! The bankrupt syndicate that burned down half the state! It’s a revolving door of bureau-rats … but the left right left Reverend Bass said, Oh, she’s perfect! Let’s make her CEO of a six-billion-dollar concern! And we must double that parsimonious PG&E salary! Come, let us double her housing allowance! Quinono’s probably living up at the fucking Getty!’
Just then, a squad car screeched to a stop just a few feet away and cops rushed over, pointing guns at the DWP whistleblower. He dropped the clipboard and sunk to his knees, whimpering.
A heavyset nurse came over to identify him.
A policeman asked, ‘Is that the man?’
‘Yes,’ she said, trembling with rage. ‘Yes, it is. He said he was here to check the meters but we caught him boostin valuables from the rooms. I called the DWP and they said, ‘We didn’t send no one to the address where y’all are. We don’t send folks out during fires unless they’re emergency workers.’’
She stood above the sad sack detainee, hands on hips.
‘You don’t work for the city,’ she remonstrated. ‘You work against it—and its most vulnerable people. Shame on you stealing from these helpless old folk!
22
* * *
Lil J
‘We gonna do a lick up there oh mama. A serious lick, you feel me?’
‘Gonna lick some fire.’
‘Gonna slurp. Oh mama my sister googled that shit in the Palisades? All the celebrities?’
‘Sweet—who up there?’
‘Oh mama Spielberg and Tom Hanks.’
‘Who Tom Hanks? Doechii up there?’
‘Doechii doin good, she makin money, but the nigger’s too new to the game!’ he laughed. ‘Oh mama we gonna do an OG lick. Those moguls been collectin from Jump Street, pilin up those gold bricks. Spielberg’s superyacht superer than Bezos.’
‘Jaw’s wife ain’t got titties like Bezos’ shortie.’
‘If they’re home when we lick, you can suckle em.’
‘Gonna lick the lick for real.’
‘Use those Jaws on that Spielberg pussy.’
‘Jaws o’ life! Hawhawhaw.’
‘My sissie google-earth’d that shit, there’s like oh mama a celeb every house. But the OGs got security drones, oh mama, they got night vision, like, that’s Sicario shit. Motherfuckers got Mossad. So we gon do Reese Witherspoon.’
