"Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit."
"Adventure without risk is Disneyland."
"Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland."
"At Disneyland, [in Adventureland, chief landscape architect Bill] Evans decided to create a Hollywood jungle, the type the armchair traveler who has never been to the tropics visualizes — man-eating plants, bananas, sixty-foot high bamboos, and giant palms. Ironically, perhaps the greatest source of plant material for Evans's 'far off exotic jungle' turned out to be the nearest and most unlikely of locations, the pathways of Southern California's rapidly growing freeways. ... Evans's crews snatched palm after giant palm from the jaws of advancing bulldozers."
"[In this city] people are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. And that goes on twenty-four hours a day, every day in the year. And that's not exceptional, that's usual. It's the same in every city in the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad. Suppose we had [he flips off all four radios] - just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished. The jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over. Think about it."
"Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome . . ."
"Glenn Clark, searching for a versatile genius who knew and used universal law, and would be an inspiration to others, found Walter Russell, musician, illustrator, portrait painter, architectural designer, sculptor, business practices advisor to employees of International Business Machines, champion figure skater, natural scientist, philosopher and author.
'Can you give me the secret of your life?' asked Glenn Clark. 'I believe sincerely that every man has consummate genius within him. Some appear to have it more than others only because they are aware of it more than others are, and the awareness or unawareness of it is what makes each one of them into masters or holds them down to mediocrity. I believe that mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed. Every successful person I ever have known, and I have know a great many, carries within him the key which unlocks that awareness and lets in the universal power that has made him into a master.'
'What is that key?' queried Glenn Clark. 'That key is desire when it is released into the great eternal Energy of the Universe.'"
Revenge being best served cold, at least in Giblet's methodical world, it took him ten days, going on eleven, to respond to a reviewer's screed about how all of his novels were starting to seem alike, by finding a house and cat sitter and temporarily moving from Vancouver to a hotel room in the __ Longhouse of the Polynesian Resort at Walt Disney World. According to a well-bribed concierge, this was the very room where Corky Chieftan {Corey Doctorow} wrote most of his award-winning novel, "Hitting Bottom At the Top of the World," the post-modern (and post-Chrome) sci-fi novel that took the critics by storm. He'd been the first to have the huevos to set an immortalist utopian novel in a Disney rsort in the far future, transmuting fan fiction into literature, and leaving Giblet and the creaky old Chrome School in the pixie dust.
The week on the lanai was all a blur. All he remembered was the monorail vrooming by beyond a bunch of philodendra and a lawn where wild rabbits sometimes grazed. He never saw the ibis Chieftan emoted about on OingoBoingo.com. He had a better recollection of the last few hours in his vancouver apartment, agonizing about how much electronics to bring. His thoughts ran: "Laptop, yes, but which cables? Certainly the iPhone but its video cable? Car charger or wall, or both? What will I show video on? A projector? Will I need a small printer?" And so on.
His house-sitter, an androgynous helmet-desinger named Justin Cayce, finally excused him/her self and went out for blended iced chai. "I've got my key, just lock up when you leave."
He ended up with a stack of DVDs to play on his laptop, which he mostly didn't watch after a dissappointing sampling of season one of "Route 66" (19__). Whatever it was that made the real Route 66 a cultural touchstone didn't seem to have made it into the show. Complaining to a breakfast waitress at the Kona __, he'd been suprised to be informed that he should watch Pixar's "Cars" -- it was "not just a kids movie" she assured him. But she was wearing "Little Mermaid" earrings, which made her a suspected infantile Disneyphile.'When the muse finds you
When he complained to a barrister at the __ coffee kiosk that he was paying almost $300 a night for a place to write where he couldn't seem to write, the young man, a self-described poet, said, "When the muse finds you it will be impossible to stop writing, no matter where you are." It pissed him off, because he already knew it was true.
But now, watching Dusty's butterfly tattoo undulate as she stroked her boyfriend's considerable unit into her mouth, the sunscreen refelcting the glare of the hot sun with a flare with every stroke, he wondered if the totally horned-out feeling he was having was a muse in waiting.
He felt like a peeping Tom as he peered through the picture window's blinds, over the stamped aluminum railing, down to the firast floor courtyard pool, suprisingly like the set-piece in "Melrose Place" but a lot less clean. "Damn," he said, and crept off to jerk off in the shower.
It was a woman who'd gotten him out of the Polynesian. Wandering into the Great Hall lobby he'd joined a group of pre-tweens at the bamboo-enclosed TV that always showed cartoons, and ended up watching the last half of "The Wind In the Willows" followed by all of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Mildly curious, he found a library fairly nearby and read both American classics in one sitting. A friendly librarian named Wendy, grey-haired but still sexy to him at 60, told him that both stories had inspired attractions at {Walt Disney World}; alas "The Wind in the Willows"-inspired "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" had been torn out to make way for a Winnie-the-Pooh ride. "But Liberty Square is still there, inspired by "Sleepy Hollow" as well as "Johnny Tremain," of course.
"Of course," he mumbled, having no idea what that was. "You sure know a lot about the books behind the cartoons," he added, wanting to seem grateful.
"That's how we try to motivate kids to read in {Orlando}," she said with a wink.
Back in his room, his ridiculous red Cadillac parked in the __ lot, he hopped the "red" monorail to the Magic Kingdom with a xerox of the afterword of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" folded in his pocket, not sure why. "Follow the muse," he muttered to himself; a Hispanic wmaon sitting across from him in the monorail compartment picked up her young son and looked suspiciously at him.
The immortal voice of Jack __, "the voice of {Disney World}," announced the Magic Kingdom station. The doors whispered open. He fumbled with the 7-day pass __ that the concierge had up-sold him. (All tax-deductible, he assured himself.)
He hadn't been to the Magic Kingdom since 1976, when he spent five months of his 26th year working as a dishwasher at the Contemporary Resort Hotel, the giant U.S. Steel A-frame with a monorail track running throught the __th floor of the lobby. That summer was a blur to him. He'd lived in dorm-like conditions in a trailer park up an orange grove road, called the Hidden Village. He remembered hedges in the shape of letters H & V, and a double-decker bus that took him to work, and navigating a maze of steam tunnels under the castle, color-coded by the "land" they terminated in. There were white bicycles he wasn't supposed to use, and pipes carrying trash from the park "wooshing" by in pnumatic tubes. The job was mindless -- mostly smiling whenever he intersected the paths of the public, "guests" in Disney Newspeak. After hours was the fun, which always seemed to start at a hotel bar, called the Giraffe Lounge, and ended... he wasn't sure... He recalled quite a few durnken blackouts and "lost" nights. The folly of youth.
Now his wanderings took him up the Main Street horse-drawn streetcar tracks towards the hub. Disney World's entrance street seemed less like Walt's home town of Marceline, Missouri, 1910, and more like a 1910 Coney Island commercial strip of candy stores and bathhouses that operated as covers for drugs and prostitution. Or maybe Pinnocio's "Pleasure Island" where bad boys would smoke, gamble and vandalize until they turned into donkeys for the salt mines. Funny, he'd never had these thoughts in '76.
Mostly he'd grumble back then about how easy it was to find multicolored rock candy and white chocolate but how hard it was to find a can of stringbeans or fresh tomato.
At the hub, noticing the statues of Walt and Mickey that hadn't beem there before, he swung a left into Liberty Square, past the Hall of Presidents to the central "big weenie" of this land, the Liberty Tree hung with 18th century lanterns. Walt always wanted a "weenie" to attract people into each of his "lands" -- Fantasyland had the castle with its drawbridge over a moat, and Tomorrowland had its overhead Peoplemover tracks with the centrally mounted Astro Orbiter ride spinning merrily. Dusk was beginning to gather, and the Lily Belle stern-wheeler river boat rounded the bend, its steam whistlem tooting.
"What was it Ray Bradbury said about sunset on a river boar?" he found himself thinking. "Means it's dinnertime," he answered himself, and turned right into the Harbor House for some New England fare.
"Never eat Pilgrim food," a buddy of his who had traveled to Massachusetts on business often had once told him. "If in Boston, have seafood, or go to the North End for Italian, or if it's late go to Chinatown, or find the little diner in Watertown right off theb rotary that opens at midnight for some steak and eggs, but do not eat anything billed as authentic colonial food. It'll be made with flour, lard and dried beef, stuff that keeps all winter, and baked into a heart attack in a casserole dish."
Now he was staring art a menu board. "Is the fish and chips breaded?" he asked a young brunette in frilly apron and gathered Plymouth cap.
"Yes they ah," she said in a Boston accent. Authentic, he guessed, and the result of obsessive type-casting in Disney's hiring process. "The fish ah. The chips ah fries, but biggah, and wicked good with vinegah on them."
"Is there salt in the breading?" he asked.
"I have no idear." She brushed a black shock hair back into the cap. "Would you like a sample?"
"If you don't mind."
She bent down to slice off a piece of icelandic cod and spear it on a fork for him to try, exposing a view down the neck of her apron of freckled cleavage in a white lacey bra.
He sighed, and quietly said, "If I was thirty hears younger," to himself.
He realized she'd heard him when she began waving rthe code skewered on a large serving fork in fron of his face in a vaguely threatening way.
"You'd do what," she demanded.
"Uh, ask you out," he stammered, snatching the sample from the fork and popping it in his mnouth, burning his tongue.
Hey, if you were thirty years younger, and they didn't have a rule against us dating guests, and I didn't work nights, and let you take me out and then I'd do you."
He looked around nervously. They seemed to be alone in the restaurant. "But not in this ubniforrm," she added. "They make me turn it in at the end of my shift."
He got the second wink of the day. "So, you want the fish?"
Nothing came out of his mouth when he opened it, so he nodded.
He sat chewing on the fish, which was salty, glancing over at the server now and then. She either ignored him or waved the fork as if scolding him. In front of him was a plaque on the wall that said __. Something was coming back to him. Melinda? Melissa? His neighbor at Hidden Village had been a brunette from Massachusetts who worked at a food service in Liberty Square. Was it this one? HJe thought maybe it was. He'd only seen her at work one or two times, but he used to run into her a lot at the Giraffe Lounge, always in jeans and some sort of dicso blouse, flirting heavily with the bartender, along with her room mate Rebecca, a local from Saint Cloud.
Rebecca had apparently decided to blow his mind once. She told him a joke: "What does Snow White do for fun?"
"What?"
"She sits in Pinoccio's nose and makes him tell lies."
"Jeez, Rebecca, you're only seventeen!" he'd blurted, confirming her opinion of him as a Boy Scout.
"Sh!" she replied, looking around, and then leaned close to whisper, "That's not what my ID says."
She went on to tell him how working at {WDW} over spring break was the first time her parents let her go out on her own, and since she had a good fake ID she spent all night flirting -- mostly with bartenders -- and then fucking, and becasue there was no time to sleep she was doing speed the whole time.
Speed.
>>>
Someone said "Virtual Sex" was a rip-off of "Blue Screen," which he'd never read, by Nelson Jingleheimer {Neil Stephenson}. So he went looking for {Haasen} novels back at the __ library. Wendy was there again. When he asked about a copy of "Stormy Weather" she wrinkled her nose at him in disapproval. "Also 'Simulcra and Simulation' by Baudrillard," he added; he's always meant to get artound to reading it, after it appeared in the movie "The Matrix." She sent him, over to the fiction stacks, alphabetical by author. He found both books and sat down by a window to read. Wendy strolled by and said, "Do you want to check those out?"
"No, I'm a tourist. Staying at the Polynesian."
"You came to Orlando to read?"
"No, actually, I came here to write."
"How's that?"
"I'm a novelist, trying to recapturew my muse."
"Aha!" she said, snapping her fingers, and scanned some nearby shelves for a few minutes. Pulling a copy of "Party Like It's 2002" from the shelf, she flipped it over to show his monochrome portrait on the back. "I knew it! You looked so familiar yesterday."
>>>
After the Luau, in which Bill nearly dozed off until Wendy squeezed his leg under thre table, bringing a surge of adrenaline that brough him immediately awake, he suggested they take a walk along the edge of the Seven Seas lagoon, to the Grand Floridian Resort's Victorian spires, and a postcard-perfect view of the Magic Kingdom's castle refelected in the water.
She took his hand as they walked, and he felt compelled to say, "I'm not meaning to romance you."
"I know," she said.
"The why are you romancing me?"
"It's better to have loved and lost," she said.
"Could you elaborate?"
I'm a grey-haired old lady, twice divorced, no kids, and I've wasted many, many hours of my life crying over men who weren't worth it. You seem worth it," she said.
"I'm not so sure I --"
"Hush!" she said. "You take me back to your room and I'll gladly fuck your brains out. Maybe you'll find your muse. Maybe not. Either way soon you'll go back to Vancouver. I'll cry. But it will be worth it."
Fireworks began to explode over the Magic Kingdom. "I don't know if I can compete with that," he said, waving his arm skyward.
"Let's find out," she said, stopping.
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He remembered what the old prospector had told him about how the lap dance had been invented at Thee Dollhouse, as he drove past the dingy sign on the Trail. Maybe it was time he checked out the "lame ass" strip clubs of Orlando.
There was no cover charge at 2:30 in the afternoon. "Tooth hurty," he thought, remembering a childhood joke. It was time to see a dentists about the tooth. Maybe it was time to go back to BC where his health infrastructure was.
He tripped over something as his eyes adjusted. By the light of beer logos, electric table candles, and the neon "Champaign Room" sign, he found his way to a table near, not at, the rail. A brassy dancer in a day-glo bikini was writhing in slo-mo on the stage. He was bored already.
He pulled a piece of quadrille paper out of his pocket ("Same kind {Pynchon} used for Gravity's Rainbow!" he thought), grabbed his purple gel pen from where he'd clippped it on his shirt, and began to write a novel.
The first time I saw Dusty she was sucking off her boyfriend by the pool at the Winter Garden Apartments. What looked like a Harley belt buckle held her bleached hair in a ponytail while her head bobbed up and down, and her tube top showed off the butterly tattoo on her shoulder blade, which undulated, glistening with Tropicana in the sun as she knelt beside a patio lounge chair where Sonny reclined with his Wranglers unzipped. I'll admit I was shocked and offended -- they have some gall, aren't they afraid of getting busted? I wondered even though the cops never seemed to bother the crack dealers on the street out front -- but it really was love at first sight.
A year later he was sitting at his laptop in his new Tiki Room, Googling himself, when the doorbell rang, scaring his old, orange cat. It was his agent, Rachel, with a magazine: the latest Harper's with a review of "S.O.B. Trail" written by {Corey Doctorow}.
"Sucking the Chrome Off a Trailer Hitch" was the review's title. And the subtitle: "Giblets's latest novel dives into {Carl Haasen} territory and retrieves delights for all," and lead into a glowing analysis ofn the author's rediscovery of his "lust muse."
"It's for your newsstand," said Rachel, placing the the magazine under the "NEWS FROM CIVILIZATION" sign he's commisioned from the artists at Ocean Arts to reproduce in original Polynesian Village Resort style.
[9/13/10]
| chapter | locales | characters | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| PROLOGUE: ZENITH TO NADIR | flashbacks to meeting Dusty & pit | ||
|
$420,000 A YEAR AND DROPPING |
Seattle/BC |
Rachel accountant |
Chrome Aviators |
|
TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS A WEEK |
Polynesian Contempo MK: Liberty Sq Giraffe Lounge
Kukabura: 70s swingers |
Superfan: Master Gracey gravestone in Griffith Park, riverboats on St. John's, Gasoline Alley, Elias oranges Hotel Photog. Wendy |
|
|
SOMEBODY ELSE'S MONEY |
Chaos Conference IAAPA bar list story: heroin at McD Adv Club
Rail Trail Tara-like mansions in S/W of O'town hippie food spots / Back Street (boys) Mkt cop / heroin addict t-bone spot |
{Doctorow} | at Star Wars V somebody puts "quotidian" on his back; {Doctorow} gives him Shelli notes, tells him she's "prep" |
|
ORCHARD COUNTY'S DIME |
jail, hooker zone | Orlandon jail preacher, alchoholic hooker lawyer | story: held at gunpoint by cops |
|
NINETY-NINE DOLLARS A WEEK |
Big Bamboo Lounge, getting drunk & climbing the tower BBQ place in Kissimmee Rachel's Steakhouse -- legal probs |
>>> | moldy & mossy towels, no-see-ums, infected mosquito bite |
|
FIFTEEN DOLLARS AN HOUR |
Residence Inn / skull billboard Arrow Motel HoJo's on SOBT Army/Navy Melody: porn ivy-covered house (divorce side-effect) Shep's |
>>> |
McGuffin: sweat analyzing hi-5 dummy +
iPhone app = pheramone |
| THE PIT | >>> | >>> |
"Come sweet slumber, enshroud me in thy purple cloak. Hm. Doesn't even rhyme!" Art of Noise Paranoimia the sheep stood on the burning deck |
|
RANSOM SITUATION |
>>> | ||
| SALVATION: PRICELESS | >>> | ||
| RECOVERY | >>> | ||
| EPILOG: NEWS FROM CIVILIZATION | >>> | >>> | >>> |
[9/14/10]
headline: Steve Jobs Stopped at Japan Airport Over Ninja Stars
[9/15/10]
[9/15/10]
Giblets's novels
objects
/ ^
v \
rendering ai
\ ^
v /
pixels
[9/22/10]
hotel biz
[9/30/10]
Swan bed
[12/13/10]
2 in the pink & 1 in the stink
firecrackers and geishas
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[7/26/98]
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Notes: Thee Doll House tourist tv on motel closed circuits (no local news), Eb rips off newspapers with rapist story, Flo hides guns everywhere suicide highway (old back way to Disney World), Heroin & cop crash the three Disney families: Applegates, Grammy & Pops, single dad Den Mother to Disney girls tries to keep them from her wicked ways (flashbacks) Origami Man at Beach Volleyball Bar Dreamfinder
[8/16/98]
exhibs & Church St. I-95 truckers busted at Florida mall closet view of hooking alcholholic lawyer Red/Fed Liner Cher Guevara Cindy Stoner Randy of the Redwoods, misses friends he pissed off, trips alone, Fry cook at HoJos evangelist Crossman 4 days:House of Blues
- _/__/72
- 4/12/81
- _/__/90
- _/__/99
Last update 16-Dec-02010 by ABS.