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Manic Depression

Johnny's been in town two days and we're both still alive—someone’s watching over us.

It's high pitched insanity, two lunatics together, loose in Hollywood, on our crazed rampage to take over the night, to take over the world, to follow our heroes and become the new legends. The Night and Tragedy and the Voice the goals.

Madmen, seven of us: Chad Williams—lost, maybe the craziest one, a dreadlocked lunatic; Sean Baldwin—our conservative sounding board, the movie expert; three shadows—Sean's friends, black clad, out to ‘go out’ and have a ‘good time’ (no idea what they’re in for); Johnny Jah!, shimmering intensity incarnate, cartoon skinny, freckled and fanatic, my comrade in madness and egoism, the vagabond poet; and me, Alexander Rees, the hopeless, tragic, ghost. All of us out to shatter reality.

I’m about twenty drinks deep and hyped. We’re drowning in scotch and on the run: A restless frenzy pitched us out of some foul, sweaty club, and we’re tearing down Hollywood Blvd in a fever. Johnny is out to conquer every moment, attacking every beat—passion from an innate drive to be that’ll one day create his majestic composition. His eyes beam on every opportunity to effect, to control, to live. He is a dirty, rugged, originality. I’m rambling, shattered—we’ve been drinking since 11a, or no, since Wednesday. And I am tasting the chill of the aqua neon air, lusting after every smile, every connection. Nibbling on every stimulus, just digging the mundane everythings of the night.

Sublime: J-Jah and A-Rees reunited, geeked up and gonzo, thriving on the chaos. (I think back to a night in Park City: me—deranged and ‘obliterated’ (a Johnny word); and Johnny—everyone’s hero that night—blasted, walking at a 45 degree angle on crumbling legs, skinny arms stuck straight in the air, screaming about ‘people’s rights,’ cuz our underage friends were denied entry to a club. An epic, cinematic moment, slow motion, the snow coming down, as he was finally tackled and arrested by the police. Wasted heroism. Just now I know his legacy will be realized.)

We swarm into another bar—I got us right in, someone I knew, (it pays to grow up in LA)—and we’re on the drinks, on the dance floor, swirling, screaming, my blood’s up. Johnny points out a booth, rambles over, collecting an audience to dazzle as he cries and wails. A maniac, he’ll have the whole group laughing, shouting, in love with him before I can get there. I nod at him in silence: the telepathy we heard about, what Burroughs and Joan had, a connection criminals have in devious allegiance. He rolls his eyes at the crew following him, the ‘masses’—I'm laughing, scotch and strobes, the bass of the room searing my skin.

The dance floor is chaos: ecstatic riot, pulse and sweat. Heart thumping. Hands, hot, are on me squeezing, tugging. Rapture. Inside the beat, a Dionysian fervor is erupting. The floor and the walls, rubbery and bumping, are elastic, dancing with the throng. Boundaries are all blurred, skin, the air, the music, blending, dissolving in the rolling quake of sound.I’m outside now, still smothered, two girls tangled, in my chest, at my neck. One of them pulling my pants, the other kissing my ear. Sirens: far off, on the street, going crazy—a maniacal whine. The girls are tight on me, tugging at me, squeezing, sucking, moaning. Everything is liquid, blending, swimming together. The girls and I are screaming, the moment on fire. Long, straight black hair flailing—cat’o’nine tails lashing my cheek—the first girl, tightening, writhing in the hum of ecstasy. Nerves itching and busting. A tingle of happiness, insanity and chaos, ripples through me. I’m crazy, I’m going crazy. The sirens are screaming, attacking my ears, rattling my skull.

"I need a drink…" On the brink, fists tight and throbbing, unfulfilled, on the edge, I shrug off the girls, slide back into the bar, ransacked and losing my mind. Something deep in my brain is starting to crack as I grab my drink and turn to find some help…I’m in a dream:

And there is the desert…I’m coasting, silent, through orange brick canyons. An empty ache, a slow dry heat. A horrible journey, sinking in a whispering, metaphysical void. The intoxication of space. I acknowledge the familiar emptiness—terrifying and bleak—as my second home. The rocks and the sky are huge and loud with light. A heaviness, a red, body heat is tugging at me from somewhere. I’m not moving but scratching under a dead throb.A slow, deathly drive through a dead desert. No alternate route, no caves to hide in for wet, cold, darkness. The chalky carve through rocks and sand and heat, alone with no illusions. Attacked by logic and brittle meaninglessness. The road isn’t even clear, no bright black line to freedom. There is nothing outside of this oppressive, pounding, desert.

"Everything is dead and everything is awake." From somewhere, a moan, a rumbling. And all of it is indifferent. The growling, choking heat is tying me up, and I’m itching in the miserable dirt, lucid. On a dry brink and alone.

It is the excruciating solitude, the painful, rich soil of creativity and thought. Everything is blank and clear. In the light, tragedy is mundane and dusty, no longer glamorous and exhilarating. "The luster is come off and I am stepped off the road, aching in the desert," a voice. There is no relief of the reality, the sting and the voice, and it’s my voice.

The wet, gritty reality comes sliding back like heavy iron locking into place. I stumble into Johnny and the crowd. "Good timing, man, I thought those girls kidnapped you, what’s next? We’re bouncin’ outta here…" Johnny and the rest of the crew, bigger and louder now, are filing out of the club. I’m snapping back. One more shot and I’m out the door. We hit the ground running, maybe twenty deep. Nothing can stop us from seeing it, from catching the fantasy and realizing the legend—now somehow more vague, intangible.

The street is clattering with cars and blinking lights. People’s shouts, the cars horns and coughs, wild cacophony of Hollywood, lit and alive. The glitter in the sidewalk is dizzying, trailing, making it’s own noise. Purple, blue and red neon, buzzing and blazing brilliant hot spots of hype across the boulevard. The flood of lights makes the shadows of the street, of the city, loom larger, more haunting, more harrowing. The crew is yelping, joking and shivering with intensity and anticipation in the cool air. Leading them through my stomping grounds—the seedy, grimy home of excitement and hope—I’m bumbling through my memory, trying to chant some Goethe. Remembering when J-Jah and I, on a road trip, pseudo-pilgrimage, chanted poetry and barked out Faust at Kerouac’s grave, on Christmas night, a communion in farce—a generation clamoring in the frigid, dark Massachusetts air, for the Romance, the poetry and hope, of hero ancestors—that night we chalked it up as another milestone in our legacy.

The next stop: an expensive French restaurant, its three bars. In the garden it’s tight quarters and loud. Rumbles of laughter and clinking martini glasses, a heavenly ambient. Conversation about the industry and LA culture is crackling across the tables. We’re storming in and equal to the atmosphere’s buzz. Johnny looks at me, always concerned about fitting in, but angry, competitive about it: "Are they gonna trip on my clothes and shit?"

Johnny in tight red bellbottoms, some loud ass thrift store shirt, a flashy old leather jacket, orange beanie, and flip-flops. "Nah man, you’re cool, this’s LA, everything goes. Besides, you’re beyond them. Don’t sweat all these rich cats." I’m sporting baggy nylon running pants, Hawaiian shirt, an Indiana Jones fedora and crazy purple aviator sunglasses. "Don’t worry, we’re cool."

We’re blitzed and flying toward the bar. I bump into the owner, a flashy, elegant Parisian woman in a sheer black slinky thing and 8 inch elevator pumps—Marie, the personality, the reason people come to the restaurant. I say hello, swaggering, playing shy.

"Is that you," she giggles out, looking almost coy over her shoulder at me, she waves me on to the bar—she knows me only too well. (I’ve done this all before, long ago, a psychotic lush, playing the game: Hollywood and glamour.) The bartender already has drinks lined up for us when I get to the brass and oak . It’s a dark, jazzy, smoky club in the back, half full, and our crew is bubbling all through the place.

Sean and I grab a booth, he wants some females to join us. I’m rambling, twisted, talking about Proust, or Gide. Or Camus? I don’t know, I can’t tell. Chad drops down next to me slurring and moaning: "What’s going on…Dude, I miss the old days man…remember that night at the film festival? That night we were right there" He’s physically pointing to something, an idea, a pinnacle. I don’t have to look to know what, and through his blurred words and obnoxious drone I see that point too. I can't think of any other night than when Chad, shattered and Xed-out, got up on a bar, dancing and shooting scotch—the wooden fire we both came addicted to, together in Scotland, climbing mountains, shouting poetry in the fog—the bar-tender and the owner were so impressed by his gusto and madness, an idealistic maniac outshining a room full of high-society, they rewarded him with lines of coke and shots in the back room. We took over a city that night, four of us, hammered and insane: from me and Jah in the back of a beer bar, guzzling, writing poems on napkins, to all four of us, chattering and charging, the sped-up-stars of an industry party, legends of the night, adored by the established celebrities, on that pinnacle.

A throaty saxophone is playing somewhere, the heavy moans rolling on my scalp. Chad has been talking this whole time about the night at the film festival. I’m back at the bar, Drew, the bartender pushing the air behind the glass of scotch with opened palms. I guess I don’t have to pay. And even here, in my home, wanted, welcome and secure, I’m cringing and soberly alone. As lost as the spoiled, wandering child in Chad. The dream we are searching for isn’t here. The legacy, like Hunter Thompson’s "tide"—his dream, their quest in the 60s—"rolling back," ours has dissipated and gone from here. I wish I’d admit I’m just flickering with fading shadows in a den of emptiness.

A fire is up and we blow a blunt. Now I’m itching and tacitly awake again, shivering, bobbing. Giggling for the night. "We’re out!," I scream and head for the back door, commanding an odyssey, champion of the new quest. Johnny is being thrown out just as we swing around a gate. He’s blazing. I’m shouting: "Follow Me." We’re charging, bouncing through bars in force. I ask Johnny why he was thrown out of the restaurant.

Amped, he answers: "Oh I was just bustin’ on this girl. She was getting’ loud about some shit so I had to put it down. She was trying to say some shit about Joyce’s talent, like his density or some shit, and he’s overrated. I was cappin,’ ‘Joyce isn't tight? Really!? I know, I know, you couldda written Ulysses’…just sittin’ there talkin’ shit. ‘Well lemme read your shit!’ I was going off. And then she had to switch into something else trying to get at me. Sayin’ I must be insecure if I’m getting’ all loud. Going into this whole thing about Freud. That’s all it was, I started getting’ down on her right then—she brought up Freud in a bar—just going off dude, stupid shit, and I guess the bouncers knew her and they threw me out. It’s cool, ‘cause she knows what happened. I fucked her up dude."

Johnny, in the mode of a fifties renegade, a literary hepcat, even tragically misogynistic—a Beat-like philosophy: Madonna and the whore—he hates nothing worse than pedantry. It’ll all be in the biographies. We’ve told each other that a million times. Just like that, my Cassidy, in a fever, loved and hated for the same things, I don’t even feign agreement, and I hold him in the highest respect. I’m proud right then of our friendship and we look for another bar where we can toast it.

Mad ass lunatic, I’m carrying a beer bottle from the last bar we stormed and smoking someone else’s cigarette, walking across Hollywood. What a picture: a tragic clown, fumbling drunk, showing off my vices, fedora tilted back, absurd. We get to a popular dance club, an hour and a half line. I yell at someone: "I’m on the list," and start to blunder off. At a side door, the exit, I hold up the bottle, stupid: "Oh no! I walked out with this." The bouncers usher me inside. It’s just dark purple, dead air and bass. I’m recoiling, haunted, alone in my saga now, looking for girls, conversation, drink, solidarity, solace—I can’t think about the dream, I need attention, warmth, sympathy, now!

And there is the desert. Everything is dropping down and I am frozen again in the rock and dirt. I can't move, everything is unbearable, naked and plain. How bleak this all seems to me. The screaming light shows every ridge, every detail of the horrible, dead land. I might as well be an invalid forced to watch the terrors of the universe—A Clockwork Orange. A frightening weight is crumbling down on me from somewhere. This is unbearable. I can't breathe, I can't move. There is dirt in my lungs and the hot, chalky air is stifling in my nose.

I will live for an indefinite time here, in undiluted suffering, not allowed denial. Why should I bother to move even if I could? I would only be running from this to end up here again. On the other side of that canyon I will find myself here. I am dead in here, in the nude awake and red sand.

On the street I can cool off and look for friendly face. A gleaming, silky black SUV, tinted out and brilliant, slows to a stop right in front of me. The moon is electric, screaming off the chrome rims. The driver’s window hums down. "What up A-R."

"Oh, what’s up fellas." I’m shattered, and even these, five of my oldest closest, friends won't be able to soothe me. Thomas, Marshall, Miguel, Joey, and Andre slide of the Expedition, giddy and hyped for a night of partying. I told them to meet me here years ago, at ten this morning.

"Are you just chillin’ by yourself Rees?"

"I don’t know. No." Sean, Johnny and Chad are gone, nowhere. "I just lost a few of my partners. I’m faded, man." Everything is dropping. The mania, the craze for the night, the power of myth, it’s all going out. "Eh, I’m’na go round up my boys. Why don’t you guys just hit this club an’ we’ll meet you."

"‘re there some females in there?" Thomas is numb in anticipation.

"Cool." I stumble back off in the direction of the dream. Maybe the others were going without me.

Two blocks later, out of the glare and racket of the neon and the pressure of social interaction, I drop down onto a glittery curb. My drunk is getting old and splotchy. Friday night in the city. Hollywood looks horribly ugly with the demons of the night prowling, leering at each other. In the shadows it all looks different. I wonder if everyone else sees this the way a native does: gloomy, washed out and depressing. The glamour of LA is gone. The romance of the thirties and forties, jazz clubs with a swing, icons of the silver screen—themselves drunks and legends—Intellectuals, writers and dreams. Ellroy's LA, brutal and romantic. It's all gone. The glitter is dust and decay now. The streets once roaring with the tide of hope are now wet and slippery. Failure and cancerous heartbreak, a loud hiss in the alleys and gutters. I get up before LA starts to look like the desert to go look for Jah.

After a blurry episode, screaming at street preachers about Chekhov and delusion, I find Sean and J-Jah in McDonalds. McDonalds! The antithesis of the dream. I go in. Johnny is nervous and blabbering: "A-R, thank god, these veterans dude." He is nodding toward a group of homeless Vietnam veterans slouching on the other side of the yellow-gray room. "We came in all loud and rambunctious. They got loud and told us that, ‘thank god there isn’t a real war right now ‘cause it’s us young-folk that’d be defending America.’ I felt fucking horrible man, we gotta go."

I’m scared to even think what this all means, the clash, the loss, but me and Johnny are together again and igniting like a banned chemistry concoction, reveling dreamers. Lighting back up we’re screaming at each other through the street: challenges, promises, praises. We’re talking about the heroes, London, Dean, Kerouac and Kubrick, the Greeks and Nietzsche, Tupac and Sartre, Alexander, Camus, Marley, our wall of fame. We’re placing ourselves among them, promising one another we'll be there—we will be the voices of our generation, our century, we'll get each other there. A flash: Johnny, crazed, gone on caffeine and Hendrix charging through the Smokies, blistering rain and black fog in Tennessee, ice and terror. Me in a gloomy madness in the passenger seat, dreaming of the car going off a cliff, tragedy and heroics. Johnny charged me through the fire to solace then and he was promising to do it forever. I replied ditto accordingly. The three of us, the only ones still standing, bang into a few more bars, warriors, embarking on the odyssey, unable to give up the dream for the night, until we’re stumbling into the apartment I’m house-sitting at just after four. I walk straight through the living room to the bedroom and fall out, disillusioned and depressed, my worlds meeting, blending—LA to sand. I hope that in a dulled sleep I won’t see the desert. Maybe I’ll never wake up to it again.

Right.

I tell myself for the thousandth time that I need the desert. It is the launching pad. In the desert is where I'll find the voice to be, my voice. Sean and Jah talk for hours on end about the genius of Kubrick and Kierkegaard.

I wake up at ten in shock to a seven and seven, hoarse, and headed for the desert.

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