Imagine you are an inmate of the Cahuenga Federal Penitentiary awaiting a hanging (not your own) while your mother, a religious zealot with a sizable following, protests outside the prison walls, and the warden, a great admirer of your work (you have starred in numerous 2-reeler silent films, including Bald Mountain Men whose title belies the film’s true subject matter), pays frequent visits to suck with you at the witch’s nipple and to goad you to complete your memoir, a growing mound of papers which you organize on your desk in ascending piles so you can climb to the prison window and watch your mother in the distance and the construction of the scaffold in the yard below.
Ah, the memoir. Imagine you are Thom Moss, bound with your unidexterous friend, Jefferson Foote, for high adventure in Hollywoodland, thrown from a train for cheating at cards (a lie, of course, but conveniently engineered by a fat man named Jensen, a card sharp who declares himself the greatest writer in the world, with such titles to his name as Buffalo Bill and the Nihilists), conscripted into the humiliating work of tule root (“fuck-pig”) hunting for 75 cents per set of tusks, and ultimately playing in the films of the insane Caspar Willison opposite the lovely Thespa Doon, who refuses to bathe in a tub and only cleanses herself by swimming naked in the ocean.
Imagine you have risen to the rank of minor star in the fledgling motion picture industry thanks to your skill at executing a Flying W, wherein you tumble from atop a galloping horse which has been brought to a dead stop by a piano wire strung around a hind leg, destroying the leg and prompting Caspar Willison to shoot the horse between the eyes, a practice he repeats in every film and a practice which attracts the attention of The Society For Peaceful Speciate Co-existence, which assumes it is you, and not the insane Caspar Willison, who is responsible for the destruction of so many horses, and so publicly hounds you at every turn.
All of this leads inexorably to Civilization, Caspar Willison’s 6-reel masterpiece in which he casts you as Elijah the Tickbite, swept up on a whirlwind in a chariot of fire, but lacking a special effects department, he douses your clapboard chariot and horse blankets in gasoline, sets it all alight and forces you to drive your chariot off a cliff.
Imagine all this and what you have is the late Paul Quarrington‘s wild Flying W of a novel, Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall, whose most notable feature (apart from its good-natured fun-poking tall-tale yarn-spinning, is its sheer delight in language.
An excerpt, just for fun:
I was surprised as hell to see old Charles Wild Horse, for the good reason that we had been separated some months back. There was no way you could have known that; the threads of the narrative here-in have become somewhat unravelled. This is a phrase I remember coming from the mouth of the Fat Man. J.D.D. Jensen often talked to me about authoring; talking about it seemed for him almost as worthwhile as doing it, which he almost never did. Sometimes, after a day of heralding another go at his typewriting machine – “I’ve got to finish up The Satyrs of St. Louis, or whatever the fuck it’s called, Thommy” – Jensen and I would repair to his dingy little aerie at the White Owl. “Thom,” he’d say, “crack open the rotgut, give us a suck at the witch”s nipple.” Before long he’d be too drunk to write anything, and he would spend the rest of the evening telling stories that were fanciful, to say the least. He’d lunge for those books of his, An Encyclopedia of All Things Animate, Housed in Three Volumes. Jensen would rip them apart and read aloud about some small lizard or bird. He’d keel over halfway through and no writing would be done that night, making it much like any other night in the Fat Man’s room.
But it seems that J.D.D. Jensen taught me a few tricks despite himself, for instance, the sorting of narrative threads, and how not to keep them hanging.
…
But one morning I was awoken by a strange and terrible sound. I scrambled up on to my feet at the same time my friends did, and that was the moment we all first laid eyes on a tule rooter. Jefferson Foote, who I’m willing to allow was usually the most eloquent amongst us, said, “Holy fuckin” Hannah.”