With no blood in him any more, just wax and formaldehyde, Royce sways. The front teeth, perhaps, are bared: the teeth of a sunbelt golf pro. Royce sways, but not drunkenly. He rests, catching his breath, unappeasably preparing himself for fresh assault.
PART III
CHAPTER NINE
1. The syrups of the sky
Xan Meo hit Fucktown at four p.m. on February 2, when the Fucktown Shuttle landed at Fucktown’s Felixio International Skyport … All the signs, of course, said Lovetown, as in Welcome to Lovetown. But people very often accidentally called Lovetown Fucktown. It was clearly something Lovetown had had to get used to.
First, at LAX, he was required to pick up his suitcase and clear it through Immigration. This wait at the luggage carousel, he realised, was an interlude of enforced, of mandated ennui. It wasn’t like standing at a bus-stop with nothing to read: the bus, when it came, would announce itself; and there were other things to look at. No, you had to go on watching, staring; you had to go on performing humble mental tasks involving the differentiation of shape; you had to go on dully imagining dull complication, dull delay. A lanky Englishman was talking fearfully to his mobile phone: ‘It’s going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s stopped going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it …’ And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been bored, and this was what it was like. It was like civilisation. Because you’re never bored, are you, when you’re always raring to fuck or fight.
A courtesy car transferred him to the second airfield. Here the little toytown terminal contained a busy, frisky, jittery throng: multicoloured lovebirds massing ecstatically for the long flight south. Xan felt further depersonalised by the open and unsmiling use, hereabouts, of the byname Fucktown — as in ‘LA — San Diego with a stopover in Fucktown’, ‘What takes you to Fucktown?’ and (from a man in uniform) ‘And is Fucktown your final destination?’ For an instant, as he stood beneath the blatting, clacking information-board, he saw, or thought he saw, the directive ‘14:05: FUCKTOWN 5D LAST CALL.’ The twirling cubes quickly corrected themselves, with a paparazzo flutter. Lovetown’s other cognomen seemed to be used only in reference to the Sextown Sniper …
In the plane his consciousness of anomaly, of regrettable innovation, persisted and ramified. It took him several minutes to identify an important absence — that of children. All planes have children on them. But not the shuttle to Lovetown: no babies, bassinets, no hefted bundles. Well Lovetown was a babyless place, he supposed. It was Adult. There were teenage passengers on board, male and female, who couldn’t possibly be destined for erotic employment; but Lovetown needed its hatcheck girls, its busboys and carboys, just like anywhere else. And some of the older people maintained a patina of childishness — the cartoon, the picture book. As he returned from the toilet he noticed that some men and women got younger, or older, fast, as you walked towards them: about five years for every row of seats.
Surrounded by tans of butterscotch and eggyolk, by sculpted puppyfat in tanktop T-shirts, with noses too small or hair too big or mouths too wide, too full, and engaged in ceaseless laughter, as if the passengers were the unified audience of a coruscating comedy … The stewardesses in their blue suits looked more normal, less stylised in mien and gesture, than the intransigent titterers they tended. The Captain put them down in Lovetown, and the tube of canned sex emptied itself in relays of tits and pits and zits.
Again by courtesy car he was driven to the U Hotel, past suburban gardens of brown grass and haggard cacti. Xan read about it in the complimentary Lovetown Journal, fished from the pouch of the seat in front: the U Hotel belonged to a chain whose owner had earned 78 billion dollars for realising that w was the only non-monosyllable in the English alphabet. Scrapping the supposed abbreviation, which had human beings gabbling out nine syllables, and replacing it with three other syllables chosen at random (or, indeed, with the unabbreviated phrase ‘world wide web’) would save global businesstime half a decade per day …
As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire and mudslide, of stripmall, freeway and gridlock, of hatefuck, cockout and boxback, of blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue.
‘Hatefuck evolved very naturally in a way,’ said the voice of Karla White, ‘because there had never been … any love lost between the actors and the actresses. The girls earn five or six times more than the men, and the gap goes on widening. As you can imagine, the scenarios for Hatefuck are extremely monotonous. “So this is the big guy, huh?” “You’d better believe it, bitch.” “Have you taken your pill like a good little boy?” And so on. And she’ll ask him about the car he drives, if any, and the square-footage of his shitbox in Fulgencio Falls. Then came Cockout.’
‘Cockout,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Cockout,’ said Karla White.
Xan went on to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Down at the desk they had told him about the English journalist who was recently arrested and jailed for smoking a cigarette in his room. They had also given him Karla’s package: the script of Crown Sugar, the audiotape (‘Background’), and his docket for the courtesy car which, the following morning, would take him to Dolorosa Drive …
‘Cockout is a sub-genre, or an anti-genre, within Hatefuck. Much prized for its rarity, Cockout occurs when the man actually succeeds in arousing the woman — to such a point where she stops calling him a piece of shit and starts offering encouragement or even praise. The father of Cockout, Lover, Trash My Ass, was an uncontrollable hit. Nothing like Princess Lolita, but very considerable business.
‘Very soon, “I cocked her out” became the pet boast of the porno male, “He cocked me out” the pet peeve of the porno female. But its rarity created pressure, giving rise to a further sub-genre, Bullshit Cockout. Bullshit Cockout is when the — usually very minor — porno female pretends, after grim resistance, to get herself cocked out. And a lot of ten-year-old porno started being recycled as, in effect, Bullshit Cockout, suggesting that that was what porno was, all along: Bullshit Cockout.’
Below, Xan abruptly noticed, in about half of the thirty or forty plotlike gardens he could see, pornography was being made: little brown bodies around little blue pools.
‘True Cockout seemed to throw a lifeline to the porno male — to begin with, anyway. Every morning, as he thumbed his way to work, there was always the sustaining dream of getting hold of a headlining actress and cocking her out. The grunts, the poor stiffs, started rating each other by their cockouts. You know, stats and averages — like baseball. There was even an actor called Cockout. Kirk Cockout. He sure didn’t last long … Because Cockout was another poisoned chalice for the porno male. After a while no girl would even consider working with a guy who had cocked her out — or cocked out any of her friends. Porno men with any kind of rep for cockout stopped getting phonecalls. Then they started fearing cockout. A further humiliation was on its way in the form of Boxback.’