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honest. As I watch Dag and Claire piddle about the desert, I also realize that my descriptions of myself and my two friends have been slightly vague until now. A bit more description of them and myself is in order. Time for case studies. I'll begin with Dag. Dag's car
pulled up to the curb outside my bungalow about a year ago, its Ontario license plates covered in a mustard crust of Oklahoma mud and Nebraska insects. When he opened the door, a heap of clutter fell out the door and onto the pavement, including a bottle of Chanel Crystalle perfume that smashed. ("Dykes just love Crystalle, you know. So active. So sporty.") I never found out what the perfume was for, but life's been considerably more interesting around here since.
Shortly after Dag arrived, I both found him a place to live—an
empty bungalow in between mine and Claire's—and got him a job with
me at Larry's Bar, where he quickly took control of the scene. Once, for example, he bet me fifty dollars that he could induce the locals —a depressing froth of failed Zsa Zsa types, low-grade bikers who brew cauldrons of acid up in the mountains, and their biker-bitch chicks with pale-green gang tattoos on their knuckles and faces bearing the appalling complexions of abandoned and rained-on showroom dummies—he bet
me he could have them all singing along with him to "It's a Heartache,"
a grisly, strangely out-of-date Scottish love tune that was never removed from the jukebox, before the night was out. This notion was too silly to even consider, so, of course, I accepted the bet. A few minutes later I was out in the hallway making a long-distance call underneath the native Indian arrowhead display, when suddenly, what did I hear inside the bar but the tuneless bleatings and bellowings of the crowd, accompanied by their swaying beehive do's and waxen edemic biker's arms flailing arrhythmically to the song's beat. Not without admiration, then, did I give Dag his fifty, while a terrifying biker gave him a hug ("I love this guy!"), and then wa tched Dag put the bill into his mouth, chew it a bit, and then swallow.
" H e y , A n d y . Y o u a r e w h a t y o u e a t . "
* * * * *
People are wary of Dag when meeting him for the first time, in the same visceral way prairie folk are wary of the flavor of seawater when tasting it for the first time at an ocean beach. "He has eyebrows," says Claire w h e n d e s c r i b i n g h i m o n t h e p h o n e t o o n e o f h e r m a n y s i s t e r s .
Dag used to work in advertising (marketing, actually) and came to
California from Toronto, Canada, a city that when I once visited gave the efficient, ordered feel of the Yellow Pages sprung to life in three dimensions, peppered with trees and veined with cold water.
"1 don't think I was a likable guy. I was actually one of those putzes
you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. But at the slightest provocation I'd have been i willing to apologize for my working life—how I work from eight till five in f r o n t o f a s p e r m-dissolving VDT performing abstract tasks that in -I directly enslave the Third World. But then, hey! Come five o'clock, I'd g o nuts! I'd streak my hair and drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town."
Anyhow, the story of why Dag came to Palm Springs runs through my
brain at the moment, so I will continue here with a reconstruction built o f D a g ' s o w n w o r d s , g l e a n e d o v e r t h e p a s t y e a r o f s l o w n i g h t s tending bar. I begin at the point where he once told me h ow he was at work and suffering from a case of
pulled up to the curb outside my bungalow about a year ago, its Ontario license plates covered in a mustard crust of Oklahoma mud and Nebraska insects. When he opened the door, a heap of clutter fell out the door and onto the pavement, including a bottle of Chanel Crystalle perfume that smashed. ("Dykes just love Crystalle, you know. So active. So sporty.") I never found out what the perfume was for, but life's been considerably more interesting around here since.
Shortly after Dag arrived, I both found him a place to live—an
empty bungalow in between mine and Claire's—and got him a job with
me at Larry's Bar, where he quickly took control of the scene. Once, for example, he bet me fifty dollars that he could induce the locals —a depressing froth of failed Zsa Zsa types, low-grade bikers who brew cauldrons of acid up in the mountains, and their biker-bitch chicks with pale-green gang tattoos on their knuckles and faces bearing the appalling complexions of abandoned and rained-on showroom dummies—he bet
me he could have them all singing along with him to "It's a Heartache,"
a grisly, strangely out-of-date Scottish love tune that was never removed from the jukebox, before the night was out. This notion was too silly to even consider, so, of course, I accepted the bet. A few minutes later I was out in the hallway making a long-distance call underneath the native Indian arrowhead display, when suddenly, what did I hear inside the bar but the tuneless bleatings and bellowings of the crowd, accompanied by their swaying beehive do's and waxen edemic biker's arms flailing arrhythmically to the song's beat. Not without admiration, then, did I give Dag his fifty, while a terrifying biker gave him a hug ("I love this guy!"), and then wa tched Dag put the bill into his mouth, chew it a bit, and then swallow.
" H e y , A n d y . Y o u a r e w h a t y o u e a t . "
* * * * *
People are wary of Dag when meeting him for the first time, in the same visceral way prairie folk are wary of the flavor of seawater when tasting it for the first time at an ocean beach. "He has eyebrows," says Claire w h e n d e s c r i b i n g h i m o n t h e p h o n e t o o n e o f h e r m a n y s i s t e r s .
Dag used to work in advertising (marketing, actually) and came to
California from Toronto, Canada, a city that when I once visited gave the efficient, ordered feel of the Yellow Pages sprung to life in three dimensions, peppered with trees and veined with cold water.
"1 don't think I was a likable guy. I was actually one of those putzes
you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. But at the slightest provocation I'd have been i willing to apologize for my working life—how I work from eight till five in f r o n t o f a s p e r m-dissolving VDT performing abstract tasks that in -I directly enslave the Third World. But then, hey! Come five o'clock, I'd g o nuts! I'd streak my hair and drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town."
Anyhow, the story of why Dag came to Palm Springs runs through my
brain at the moment, so I will continue here with a reconstruction built o f D a g ' s o w n w o r d s , g l e a n e d o v e r t h e p a s t y e a r o f s l o w n i g h t s tending bar. I begin at the point where he once told me h ow he was at work and suffering from a case of
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