Thompson - Screwjack: A Short Story

L.A. notes, again... one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article... test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert... but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends don't work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won't make it... especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York... the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end of anything.

And now the fire alarm goes off in the hall... terrible ringing of bells... but the hall is empty. Is the hotel on fire? Nobody answers the phone at the desk; the operator doesn't answer... the bell screams on. You read about hotel fires: 75 KILLED IN HOLOCAUST: LEAPING OFF BALCONIES (I am on the eleventh floor)... but apparently there is no fire. The operator finally answers and says a wire got crossed. But nobody else is in the hall; this happened in Washington too, at the Nixon gig. False alarms and a man screaming down the airshaft, Does anybody want to fuck? The foundations are crumbling.

Yesterday a dope freak tried to steal the Goodyear blimp and take it to Aspen for the Rock and Roll festival... carrying a guitar and a toothbrush and a transistor radio he said was a bomb.... Kept authorities at bay, said the L.A. Times, for more than an hour, claiming to be George Harrison of the Beatles. They took him to jail but couldn't figure out what to charge him with... so they put him in a loony bin.

Meanwhile the hills keep crumbling, dropping houses down on streets and highways. Yesterday they closed two lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway between Sunset and Topanga... passing the scene in McGarr's little British-Souvenir car on the way to Cover's house in Malibu... we looked up and saw two houses perched out in space, and dirt actually sliding down the cliff. It was only a matter of time, and no cure, no way to prevent these two houses from dropping on the highway. They keep undercutting the hills to make more house sites, and the hills keep falling. Fires burn the vegetation off in summer, rains make mudslides in the winter... massive erosion, fire and mud, with The Earthquake scheduled for April. Nobody seems to give a fuck.

Today I found marijuana seeds all over the rug in my room... leaning down to tie my shoes I focused low and suddenly the rug was alive with seeds. Reminds me of the time I littered a hotel room in Missoula, Montana, with crab lice... picking them off, one by one, and hurling them around the room.... I was checking out for Butte. And also the last time I was in this hotel I had a shoe full of grass, and John Wilcock's pack?age... awful scene at the Canadian border in Toronto, carrying all that grass and unable to say where I lived when they asked me.... I thought the end had come, but they let me through.

And now, by total accident, I find Property of Fat City (necessary cop-out change self-preservation -- Oscar -- looting) painted on the side of this borrowed typewriter. Is it stolen? God only knows... seeds on the rug and a hot typewriter on the desk, we live in a jungle of pending disasters, walking constantly across a minefield... will my plane crash tomorrow? What if I miss it? Will the next one crash? Will my house burn down? Cover's friend's house in Topanga burned yesterday, nothing saved except an original Cezanne. Where will it all end?