own pretensions. As a crank and seer, two out of every three things he writes may be ridiculous, but one of them is likely to be something no one else has thought of before or said in just that way. In other words, a completely original thought. Who else these days has one completely original thought out of three? Who else has one out of twenty -three? The same passion that mesmerizes those who love Ventura also drives other people fucking bananas, because if there’s one thing that sends people right over the edge, especially among the current Zeitgeist’s self-anointed watchmen, it’s a passion that never surrenders, and accepts none from anyone else. Ventura’s passion draws a line in the sands of our time. People get on one side or the other, but no one can straddle it.
Last time I caught a glimpse of my career as a novelist, before it disappeared altogether in the dark, was in New York City. I had been cordially invited by a local arts group to give a reading in Central Park with another author, all expenses paid including my hotel tab and the train fare east. For the first leg of the trip, from Los Angeles through Arizona and New Mexico, up into Colorado all the way to St. Louis, I had my own compartment, quite a spiffy little compartment too, where my meals were brought to me and my bed was turned down for me at night. “Why, I’m a big shot author!” I thought to myself in amazement, ordering vodkas and waving grandly from my window to startled passersby like I was the president. Circumstances deteriorated, however, as we advanced east. Somewhere beyond St. Louis I was transferred to another train, and as we slipped out of Chicago across Illinois my accommodations got rather less impressive, until I woke one morning in Pennsylvania to find myself sharing a cabin with several mops and a fire extinguisher. No one brought my meals and no one turned down my bed. “What do I look like,” the porter growled at me when I ordered my vodka, “the fucking porter?”
Just arriving in New York, just breathing its air, seemed to confirm that my trajectory had taken a decided dip. As with Los Angeles, if you’re not actually from New York it becomes, every time you go there, a greater and greater monument to what you’ve achieved or, more to the point, failed to achieve—the urbanology of your own particular success or failure. On the way to the reading in Central Park I wound up snatching a taxi from a woman who had been waiting for one some time; and as I was sitting in the back seat feeling bad about this, the taxi just narrowly avoided a head-on collision with another. Contemplating flaming, metal-crunching death I thought not about how I should have let the woman have the cab but how she would never know that if some asshole hadn’t stolen her cab, she would be dead. I couldn’t stop thinking about this all the way to Central Park, wondering if I should die in an accident in this taxi cab how I would let the woman know what a reprieve fate had narrowly granted her; I imagined clutching the paramedic’s arm and croaking out a description of the woman and making him swear to track her down and explain it all to her. And then I got to thinking about all the fatal accidents I didn’t know about that I must have missed in my life, and how the present is just a culmination of all the unknown near-misses that are part of an unknown past, and …
In other words, I had worked myself into quite a state by the time I reached the park. The other writer the arts group had paired me up with was a science-fiction novelist of phenomenal renown. He had virtually invented a whole school of science-fiction single-handedly and was always being quoted in important magazines. A very nice guy, actually; from time to time, in one place or another, he had said some kind things about my own work. We had met before in Los Angeles and hung out at the Cathode Flower admiring a beautiful Eurasian stripper named Kiyo while trying to have
Last time I caught a glimpse of my career as a novelist, before it disappeared altogether in the dark, was in New York City. I had been cordially invited by a local arts group to give a reading in Central Park with another author, all expenses paid including my hotel tab and the train fare east. For the first leg of the trip, from Los Angeles through Arizona and New Mexico, up into Colorado all the way to St. Louis, I had my own compartment, quite a spiffy little compartment too, where my meals were brought to me and my bed was turned down for me at night. “Why, I’m a big shot author!” I thought to myself in amazement, ordering vodkas and waving grandly from my window to startled passersby like I was the president. Circumstances deteriorated, however, as we advanced east. Somewhere beyond St. Louis I was transferred to another train, and as we slipped out of Chicago across Illinois my accommodations got rather less impressive, until I woke one morning in Pennsylvania to find myself sharing a cabin with several mops and a fire extinguisher. No one brought my meals and no one turned down my bed. “What do I look like,” the porter growled at me when I ordered my vodka, “the fucking porter?”
Just arriving in New York, just breathing its air, seemed to confirm that my trajectory had taken a decided dip. As with Los Angeles, if you’re not actually from New York it becomes, every time you go there, a greater and greater monument to what you’ve achieved or, more to the point, failed to achieve—the urbanology of your own particular success or failure. On the way to the reading in Central Park I wound up snatching a taxi from a woman who had been waiting for one some time; and as I was sitting in the back seat feeling bad about this, the taxi just narrowly avoided a head-on collision with another. Contemplating flaming, metal-crunching death I thought not about how I should have let the woman have the cab but how she would never know that if some asshole hadn’t stolen her cab, she would be dead. I couldn’t stop thinking about this all the way to Central Park, wondering if I should die in an accident in this taxi cab how I would let the woman know what a reprieve fate had narrowly granted her; I imagined clutching the paramedic’s arm and croaking out a description of the woman and making him swear to track her down and explain it all to her. And then I got to thinking about all the fatal accidents I didn’t know about that I must have missed in my life, and how the present is just a culmination of all the unknown near-misses that are part of an unknown past, and …
In other words, I had worked myself into quite a state by the time I reached the park. The other writer the arts group had paired me up with was a science-fiction novelist of phenomenal renown. He had virtually invented a whole school of science-fiction single-handedly and was always being quoted in important magazines. A very nice guy, actually; from time to time, in one place or another, he had said some kind things about my own work. We had met before in Los Angeles and hung out at the Cathode Flower admiring a beautiful Eurasian stripper named Kiyo while trying to have
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