Hollywood Babylon

Devan Sagliani

October 2005

Adam works for a big insurance company that uses a cartoon duck as its spokesperson.

He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and his two children.

He goes to church on Sundays when he is in town, belongs to the local Masonic lodge, and is a former Cub Scout leader.

He’s a respected member of the community, a successful businessman who likes to dabble in golf, and real estate speculation. Last year he donated a tenth of his salary to several well-known charities, and his wife made sure that every single one of their friends heard about it.

He’s mag-fucking-nanimous.

5 points for being sneaky.

He’s also a terrible masochist, whose only hope of getting his dirty rocks off and making it through another year to his 12th anniversary, with the cow that ate his beautiful young wife, hinges on the possibility of seeing Sandra in the Marriot Hotel near LAX before he heads off to Pittsburgh for a sales meeting or Atlantic City for a conference.

Adam needs Sandra to abuse him. He needs her to blindfold him, tie him up, and put burning cigarettes out on his scrotum, after shoving vibrating sex toys up his lubricated rectum.

He needs Sandra to scream at him, beat him with a paddle, and piss on him.

He needs her to rake her nails over his delicate white skin, to torture his nipples with clamps, and to jack him off into her hand before rubbing it in his face.

He needs her to tell him that he doesn’t deserve this kind of attention and that he’s not worthy to be whipped with a braided cat of nine tails, or cut with a single tail whip, or have his testicles pierced with butterfly hypodermic needle points.

He needs to be left hanging in the dark for no more than an hour or he won’t have enough time to make it to the terminal, past all the terrorism security check points, and onto his plane. If you stop to think about it, it’s hysterical, considering we’re planning on using his gas guzzling, environmentally-unfriendly, midlife crisis mobile to commit a commemorative terrorist attack on the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. He won’t even have enough time to stop in the bathroom and relieve the persistent stinging on the inside of his bruised thighs with Aspercreme. He’ll just have to pop a Soma.

None of us needed the hassle of Sandra turning a trick the day before our big event but since Adam parked his Escalade at the airport while he was gone, so he doesn’t have to be at the mercy of a retard driving one of those blue shuttles when he gets home, tying him up and delaying him just a little ensured that we’d get a chance to swipe his keys and parking stub. It took Drew and I nearly a half an hour to find his SUV but no one gave us a second look when we pulled out, which is strange, for a guy with a pink Mohawk and a girl with dreadlocks and sleeve tattoos.

Fast forward to Oxnard, then to the parking lot of our abandoned office museum that never opens, and then add in everything that I have already told you and we’re current.

That means you can officially consider yourself up to speed, so if you need to flip the tape over or switch cameras before you continue your "unofficial government interview" without the presence of my lawyer, now might be a good time. I guess after Gonzalez, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo I should consider myself lucky. Right. Onward then.

It may have been the best night of my entire life, which means I should have known that I would never see her again.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I won the coin toss and so I would be brandishing the flare gun with which we intended to ignite our cargo, after crashing it head on into the Hard Rock at ground level on the northwest corner of the Beverly Center, at the cross streets of San Vincente and Beverly Boulevard across from Cedars Sinai Medical Center and the Jerry’s-fucking-Deli. We figured if we buried the bomb deep enough inside the café that the detonation would take out a large section of the parking lot and hopefully the Macy’s above it would tumble down onto the street in a fiery ball of melting merchandise.

Unlike Oklahoma City, we would reduce the chances of civilian casualties with an early attack. The famous Hard Rock Café, with its midnight blue Cadillac with painted flames jutting through the roof, opened daily at 11:30 am. It seemed only fitting that our Cadillac would prevent it from ever opening again.

I was supposed to dump the diesel fuel after we crashed, then we would rush across the street to the Tail of the Pup and fire off the flare gun until it ignited. After that, there was no plan. We would just sit there and watch all the confusion, we would breath it in like amniotic fluid and feel complete.

Call me Andy-fucking-Nihil baby.

0 points.

The guide we relied on for monkeywrenching suggested that we use brightly colored ski masks to distract and confuse bystanders. Drew, who is beautiful beyond the telling and who I miss more than words, recalled that a series of bank robberies were committed in the nude, which prevented eye witnesses from recalling what the robber looked like. She said that no matter how much the FBI questioned people making deposits on the days of the robberies, or tellers from the bank, all they could remember was the size of the bandits penis, that he was attractively well hung, and that he had pleasantly trimmed his pubic hair. The media later dubbed him the naked bandit. He was never caught.

It was her idea to go naked, wearing only 14 hole Doc Martins so that running across broken glass wouldn’t be any kind of problem. We were laughing most of the way, driving up Sunset, totally unconcerned with the morning traffic and turning left onto San Vincente, rolling down towards fate.v

Sandra had shot up early, way more than usual, and then when she came out of it she started snorting my homemade crank. Drew and I smoked some chronic then switched to the last of the peanut butter colored concoction I had whipped up the night before. We were all pretty well buzzing.

It wasn’t until we got up close, past Melrose, that I noticed the problem, noticed the ring of protestors out in front of the mall, all carrying signs with PETA stickers and cheap, catchy slogans smeared on them. All of the rush and bravado that I had been pumping myself up on began to diminish. There were going to be a lot of civilian casualties if we continued, not to mention way more press than I expected, and witnesses. I started to hyperventilate at the thought of hurting all of those people, and I tried to reach over for the wheel, but Drew held my hands and Sandra floored it into the crowd.

The protestors were chanting something while television cameras circled them.

There were models in the front row of protestors, Hollywood celebrities protesting fur, or red meat, or something.

There was an evil and malicious glint in Sandra’s eyes when she recognized what was happening.

It was what they had both been dreaming from the beginning. To the girls it was like Christmas and Easter and the Super Bowl all rolled up into one.

We were going well over 70 mph with no sign of stopping.

We were headed for the front of the Hard Rock head on and gaining momentum.

We were going up and over the curb before I blacked out, the first wave of protestors parting in front of us like a sea of people, and then all I remember is the sound of breaking glass.

When I came to there were people all around us, Drew was gone, and Sandra was lodged in the windshield. Her driver’s side airbag never deployed. She hadn’t worn her seatbelt and suddenly it struck me that maybe she hadn’t planned on living through this in the first place.

Everything around me seemed to be in motion, creaking or falling or bursting into flames.

I remember smelling the diesel, which meant that either the milk containers had burst in the crash or someone had already emptied them onto the fertilizer, mixing the bomb components.

The fumes were so strong they made me gag.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

I crawled out of the open passenger side door and into a swarm of people before I noticed that my flare gun was missing. No one would come near me. I was naked and covered in a film of white silt from when the airbag went off, and a stream of bright red blood was trickling out of my nose. I must have looked amazing.

I remember that some of the news cameras closed in on me, that there was a lady from one of the local channels with a large black microphone with an affiliate logo emblazoned on it, that she kept asking me if I was part of the protest.

I remember that I was having trouble focusing, that I didn’t remember how I had gotten there, or know why I was naked, wearing only blue Docs, but that it didn’t really bother me.

Within the minute or two that I stood there trying to get my bearings, cameras came out of everywhere, every channel I could imagine. There was a lady screaming from within the café and I heard a little girl crying near me but I couldn’t see her. I looked down at the ground, trying to catch my breath, and I saw a trail of white powder leading off across the intersection, mixed with blood. I raised my head and squinted and my eyes came back into focus.

There, standing across the street, was Drew, leveling the flare gun at me, stark naked.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

I raised my arms and spread them out like Jesus on a great big invisible cross and smiled. There was a popping sound, and hissing, and then I saw it coming towards me, a bright red glowing flare moving so fast that I barely had time to register what it was before it hit me in the face and the world went black.

I didn’t have time to wonder why she had left me in the car, if she had thought I was dead too or if she was angry at me for trying to make Sandra swerve at the last minute.

I didn’t have time to ask her if she meant to hit me with the flare or if it was an accident, if she had wanted me dead or why.

I didn’t have time to react to her being run down by an MTA as she stepped off the curb to fire at me.

Right before I felt the flare hit me in the head I noticed that everyone had stopped screaming, that the world had gone absolutely one hundred and ten percent quiet, and I thought, in a detached way, that it was very strange.

The blackness reached up and swallowed me into a dreamless void like an iron fist closing around me. There, in that complete darkness, one thing repeated itself in my brain, over and over again, the like hook from a bad pop song about love gone wrong.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence there is nothing, I know that now.

Everything is always in motion, thrashing headlong into the final abyss, a great and memorable self-immolation, just like we were.

So it really doesn’t matter what you do to me anymore. Feel free to take my confession and make an example out of me, like McVeigh, like Moussaoui, like any number of other freedom fighters who fell victim along the way to their nagging conscience or ineptitude.

She was my ultimate truth and now she’s gone.

You have to understand that this is entirely my own fault.

I was born to fail them. I know that now. It’s just in my nature, that’s all.

Devan Sagliani holds a BA in English from the University of California Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Impetus, Outsider Ink, and Thirst For Fire.

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