Damn The Darkness

Last month I was in Las Vegas and visited the much heralded Kiss miniature golf course. Prior to going there I fantasized of being in a cool, fun miniature golf course filled with crazy rock & roll props and stuff. It was a little bit like that, but then again…

The KISS miniature golf course can be found at the end of a completely empty strip mall, and unlike many mini golf courses, is indoors. Inside the walls are all painted black with paintings of the band and other images (‘70s hookers) in either blacklight or fluorescent paint. The images are painted with a heavy hand by a man who was probably blind in both eyes.

There are some interesting statues, like a big Gene Simmons head (no pun intended) with an enormous protruding tongue you need to tee your golf ball into. There are lots of fake amplifiers and giant phallic guitars to putt your way through.

The music piped through the PA is largely composed of material spanning the band’s entire career, solo albums and non-makeup period, as well. When a Paul McCartney & Wings track played over the PA it was met like an unwelcome intruder, so yes, there’s some scattered vintage rock tunes programmed in addition to the KISS songbook. By the way, it’s very hard to play below par to “Beth”.

The golf course also had a rock & roll party lounge roped off from us slobs, a fully stocked bar, as well as a KISS souvenir shop. The people who worked there were pretty nice so I don’t want them to feel like I’m fucking with them, but nevertheless, it had a low budget ghetto vibe about it.

I suppose it could’ve been worse: imagine an Oasis or a Smiths golf course. Yeah, a KISS golf course suddenly sounds pretty good.

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While I was standing in line at Amoeba Records yesterday the store played a video of Donny Darko, the Magna Carta to all Emo kids the world over, on the monitors. The film raised a multiple series of questions about mortality and other major life issues, but the grim attitude it shipped is what struck me the most.

Every cool person in the movie is pale skinned and glum and all the smiling, happy people came off looking like idiots. Well, fuck us happy people! I was also amused at the myopic view given towards Graham Greene’s story “The Destructors”. Donny interpreted the story of a bunch of street kids mindlessly destroying an old man’s carefully constructed house as “creativity through destruction”. There’s no reference made whatsoever to the story being written shortly after World War II, and that it’s more likely about the brutal bombing of London.

I remembered how ten years ago I threw all my black clothes away and began wearing more bright colored clothes. As ridiculous as it may sound, doing that was more subversive than wearing flat, empty black.

I also discarded that fey hipster negativity, my new mantra being “Damn The Darkness”. It’s too easy to embrace the dark and the grim. It’s not fatalistic; it’s passive acceptance of a grotesque, ugly, horrible world without creating an alternative. You don’t have to wear a stupid pink sweatshirt screaming “CHOOSE LIFE”, but you’re going to have to do more than just frown and say “Everything sucks”. Putting shit down all the time doesn’t make you cool.

Illustration by Yuki Ramaro

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Several plateaus are reached when you work on a novel. The first one is obviously getting all that insanity down on paper and the third plateau is putting the final touches to your work. Right now I’m reaching the middle plateau, doing rewrites of all the things banged out for the first draft. Wow!

If you’re a serious writer you’ll know how great rewrites are. You get to read the whole novel back to yourself and keep all the good parts and fix all the shitty, jacked-up sentences and paragraphs, etc. etc. You also get to beef up all the parts that you kicked out so quickly you neglected to fill in with enough details.

The joy of rewrites is being able to step back and fix an already exciting project you’re working on. It’s not unlike Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film “The Mystery of Picasso” where the great master steps back, looks at a brilliant section of his painting, you’re thinking “That’s so brilliant”, and then he literally paints something else right over that section! Picasso’s approach can be applied to all artists. That’s rewriting for you: your novel might read really cool, but you can always make it even better.

Hemorrhage

Friday night. 11:45 PM. Las Vegas. I walked down the strip; it was lit up like a crazy jewelry box. The streets were jammed with vans, jeeps, and pickup trucks. There were mean-faced girls with tight lips riding shotgun in the cars. There was a stench of pizza, beer, urine, and vomit that filled the air. Drivers and riders were all yelling and laughing form their cars. Some were even yelling at me.
“Get a car, asshole!”
“Hey faggot!”
“YOU are one UGLY son-of-a-bitch!”
The yells were accompanied by the nauseating dull thud of the bass frequencies going BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! roaring out of their stereos, all cranked up to deafening volume. The sidewalk shook and coiled like a snake.
“Heads up, queer!” A beercan sailed past my head.
“What the fuck?” I said, and turned to see a pickup full of teenage white trash with stringy long hair, peach fuzz mustaches, and concave chests covered by tank tops or T-shirts with “Whitesnake” or “Slayer” written on them.
“You want to try something, motherfucker?” one guy got up like he was going to jump off the truck to fight.
“Cool out, Randy”, his friend pushed him back, “Asshole’s got a problem”.
A pack of Marines on leave were walking up the street, big young bulls of varying colors with regulation crew cuts and serious expressions on their faces, all obviously out to have a good time.
I reached the ends of the strip. Less cars, less people on the sidewalk, the casino lights dwindling down to darkness. Next to an old keno parlor was a run down hotel, The Oasis Crest Hotel. I took the elevator to the tenth floor to room 1013 and knocked.
The door opened and it was my brother Paul. I hadn’t seen him in five years, and I had an envelope of papers to deliver to him.
“Tommy, you made it, man”, Paul said, smiling.
“Yeah”, I said, “in one piece, just the way I like it”. The lights in the room were very dim and there was a green neon light from outside his window that flooded the room with a strange glow.
“Have it your way, just like they say at Burger King”, he chuckled. “Did you bring the papers?”
“Yeah, now you won’t have a problem nailing Prince John. You finally have all the evidence you need to put him away for a long time”. I handed him the envelope, and noticed the green neon glowing on him as he scanned the contracts. I noticed something strange. I don’t know if it was him or what, but for a brief moment the word FUCK flashed on his face. It was gone as fast as it appeared.
“Great, just great”, he put down the papers. “You know, I was thinking...isn’t it time you buried the hatchet with Dad? He asks about you all the time”.
“I’m not talking to Dad. You don’t talk to him, He talks to you and you just sit there and listen. I haven’t got time for that kind of shit”, I said, looking him straight in the eye when I noticed an impish gleam there with the word SHIT in bold type.
“Well, my place is with my father. He needs me, and I owe so much to him”, he burbled, the green light still bathing him and the word SHIT still twinkling in his eye.
“You should consider doing the same thing”, he continued. “Your family is what comes first. I’ve thought this over very carefully and I know I’m right”. He fumbled around with a pack of cigarettes.
“You got a light?”
“No. I quit last year”.
Paul walked over to the patio and opened the sliding glass door. On the floor of the patio were dozens of crushed cigarette butts. He picked one up and lit up.
“Mmm...anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. How successful the real estate company would be with you on the team helping me and Dad”. He no longer had the face of a human being any more. His face looked like the skull airbrushed on the ice cubes of a liquor ad. This was the boy I thought was my brother, the boy I played games with when I was a kid, the boy that shared my mother’s love with me, but I was wrong. He looked like a bad magazine advertisement. He took a deep pull on his butt in green neon, and like a fluorescent light turning on, DEATH and CANCER slowly materialized all over his body. Then FUCK came back on his face and RAPE was spelled out on his nose. I could see him for the very first time.
The phone rang. “Ah, excuse me”, he ran over to the patio, grabbed up another butt, and ran into the next room to get the phone. As he did this, he bumped into the coffee table and knocked over a magazine.
“Oh! Dad! We were just talking about you!” I heard from the next room. I grabbed up the magazine. The cover showed a pregnant woman with her legs spread, vagina exposed, squeezing her tits with milk seeping out, licking her lips seductively. Her face had the expression of a drugged toad. MILK SQUIRTIN’ MAMAS.
“Guess who’s here, Dad? Tommy! Yeah! He told me he’s coming back into the business. We’ll be coming back!”
The room swirled around me and I could hear the car horns blaring outside. Girls were laughing and screaming at the top of their lungs.
“Tommy! Dad’s on the phone! He wants to say hi! Tommy? Tommy?”
I quickly walked to the door and quietly shut it. I didn’t wait for the elevator. I took the stairs.