Amnesiascope: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

also considers larger than life, even more larger than life than his women. All the way down to the paper he’s in the next seat to me muttering it like a mantra: they’re different, they’re crazy, they’re funny. And then: Shit! he exclaims, they want everything ? “Well,” I answer, “to be fair, we do too.” I’ve worked at this newspaper about three years now, ever since things ended with Sally. It’s published once a week out of the hollowed-out cavern of the old Egyptian Theater, not far from the mouth of the sunken L.A. subway. First few months I’d arrive to the theater every day to find that during the night someone had carted away another memento of the theater foyer—a pharaoh s chariot or a slab of fake hieroglyphics, or a mummy and its papier-mâché sarcophagus—until all that was left of the grand entrance was a dirt plot. Inside, amid the decor of tarnished gold that ascends in decay to the ceiling, the advertising department is located up on the stage where the screen used to be, and the editorial staff is strewn among the ripped-out seats of the audience section. The editor-in-chief’s office is in the balcony and the receptionist works behind the snack bar. The publisher took the projectionist’s room, small but offering an obvious vantage point.
    My desk, happily, is near one of the old emergency exits. When I first arrived at the paper no one on the staff talked to me except some of the editors and the art director, a brilliant but tormented homosexual who was always raging at everyone. He admired a book of mine he read back in his more impressionable years and so we struck up a friendship of sorts, and I became the one others recruited to calm him down or negotiate various truces. I like the people at the paper but they tend to complain a lot about jobs I would have killed for when I was as young as they are. The level of envy is superseded only by the level of resentment. There’s all the usual political infighting and turf warfare; gossip pervades everything. At a party not long after I split with Sally, drunk and depressed and an all-around basket case, I wound up going home with one of the advertising reps, a cynical noirish blonde who chain-smoked and told me every last thing there was to know about everyone on the staff. Mid-seduction it occurred to me, in my drunken haze, that tomorrow everyone in turn would know everything there was to know about me, first and foremost that on this particular evening I was less than my most sexually formidable. Certainly enough, as Dr. Billy O’Forte put it to me later, “your wick wasn’t wet twenty-four hours before phones all over L.A. were ringing.” In the years since, every time I’m seen talking to this woman more than five minutes, the flames of rumor flare anew. People on the staff who have fucked everything that moves within the confines of the newspaper’s walls sadly shake their heads and whisper to each other their “disappointment” in me.
    What can I say? I’m a disappointing character. I only began to feel like I actually belonged at the newspaper when, having quickly mastered the art of disappointment, I went on to become completely practiced at the science of disillusionment. By now I’ve totally dismayed anyone still innocent enough to expect I’m capable of anything admirable, let alone heroic. When Ventura and I arrive this morning we immediately run into Freud N. Johnson, the paper’s publisher. Johnson is a five-foot-five failed movie producer who publicly and bitterly mourns the world’s lack of respect for him and deep down inside suspects he’s a homosexual. He often ends arguments by whimpering, “I know you’re right and I’m wrong. But you always get to be right.” He’s been trying to figure out how to fire the editor ever since I first came to this job, though what he’ll actually do once he succeeds is an open question, since he doesn’t appear to know the first thing about putting out a