Evening's Empire by Bill Flanagan

Author:Bill Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

People don’t remember now that when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 he never mentioned personal morality at all. He did not condemn sex, drugs, or rock and roll whatsoever. He preached laissez-faire government, every man a king, your home is your castle, no draft, no taxes, no one snooping into your bedroom, your wallet, your pharmaceutical files.

Reagan was a smart politician. He saw that greed and hedonism did not need to be adversaries. By uniting the right wing that wanted wealth with no obligations with the left wing that wanted pleasure with no consequences, he built a new American majority. From 1981 to 1985, a high tide of self-indulgence engulfed the Western world.

But as his reelection campaign grew near, the door began to close on illicit fun. As the autumn of 1984 got close, the club-goers, drug users, wife swappers, and social deviants began to wonder if Reagan really had their backs.

First came a series of magazine covers, TV news specials, and newspaper exposés announcing that the cocaine epidemic in the United States had metastasized to a size that was impacting the economy. Wall Street was apparently filled with hopheads who were crashing en masse and jeopardizing the stock market every day around two P.M.

I was visiting Charlie in Los Angeles when one of these panic reports came on television. “Say what you will about cocaine,” Charlie said while lighting a bowl of hashish, “you can’t knock it for making people work hard. Give a gal a little flake, go out for an hour or two, and see if you don’t come back to a clean house. If the productivity of the American worker is at issue here, I think Uncle Sam should hand out a packet of coke at every factory in Detroit. Might lose a few fingers in the gears, but boy, they’d build a lot of automobiles.”

The big headline was that cocaine–“long championed as the non-addictive high,” in newsman-speak–was in fact “psychologically addictive.”

“Never would have guessed that from watching those lawyers crawl around the toilet floor at Area,” I observed.

I asked Charlie if he had any new music to play me. He said he was working on some things. I suggested he might want to get off the weed and on to something more stimulating himself.

The second blow to the pleasure culture was the announcement of a herpes epidemic. This was old news to those who trafficked in the world of groupies, but it came as a shock to the civilians. Suddenly every newsmagazine was announcing the end of the sexual revolution and rise of the New Monogamy. Television news specials were filled with weeping young women with blacked-out faces bemoaning that their thoughtless seconds of pleasure had condemned them to a lifetime of shame and discomfort.

During a phone conversation with Simon the subject came up. I asked him if he was taking precautions.

“For herpes? Shit, Jack, I’ve had it for years. It’s just a rash, I get it when I’m worn down. Put on some ointment.

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