Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

Author:Jarett Kobek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

When Y Meets X

After the Fontenoy was a bust, Celia and Rose Byrne spent weeks and weeks exploring magical strands of smartphone navigation, which gave the women a decent internal map of Los Angeles and its surrounding environs.

One ropey strand of salvia took them to the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, where they wandered around a lake decorated with religious kitsch.

Another strand took them to the site of Jack Parson’s hermitage in Pasadena, where L. Ron Hubbard learned about ceremonial magick and imbued himself with the ideological basis of what would become Scientology.

Another strand, and by far the longest, took them out of Los Angeles and all the way to 274 Coast Boulevard in La Jolla, where, during World War Two, Anna Kavan had spent several months hard drinking and going ga-ga for an architect while looking at ridiculous California coastal splendor.

Another took them to 6026 Barton Ave, the address at which Samson de Brier held his cultural salons, where the former Francis Fuller had made the deal for Handspun Roses several decades before Celia wiped out any memory of the film or its director.

Another took them to a lecture at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard, which had the virtue of being very close to the house on the hill.

Another took them to the Bellagio gate of Bel Air, where buses from the San Fernando Valley dropped off the permanent servant class of Latino Americans to perform domestic duties in the homes of the Celebrity branch of American governance.

Another took them to a one-room structure behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard, where the members of Guns N’ Roses had lived in depravity.

And there were other places, arbitrarily chosen by authorial whims: the former St. Francis Hotel, and the shack on North Genovese where Marjorie Cameron spent the final years of her life, and the site of the former Motel Hell on Hollywood Boulevard, and the former Security Pacific National Bank Building on Hollywood Boulevard, where in the early 1980s AD a tribe of street freaks called the Night People took up residence while the bank still operated out of the bottom floor.

And there were others too.

Countless others.

But nowhere did they find Fern.

Meanwhile, the women of Fairy Land spent their evenings in bars.

They sampled places like Frank N Hanks and the HMS Bounty before settling on Tenants of Trees as their regular haunt.

Tenants of Trees was a Silverlake bar that was home to a fairly pleasant outdoor patio.

It was a human meat market filled with the sexual desperation of people who’d made the mistake of following their dreams and moving to Los Angeles.

Celia used the meat market to engage in reckless sex with some of the city’s more pathetic men.

One night, Celia and Rose Byrne were sitting in an open-air room off the patio.

“I have seen too much of this mortal world,” said Rose Byrne.

Rose Byrne was wearing a T-shirt that said: CRIMSON GLORY.

Celia was wearing a T-shirt that said: KING DIAMOND.

“Another drink, I think,” said Celia.

Celia had cast a spell on Tenants of Trees which gave them an open and bottomless tab.

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