Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [148]
I was actually afraid to go back to California. I was afraid that all the men would look like Robert Conrad or Richard Gere or both at once, and all the women of course like Farrah Fawcett, that every soul I met would talk like the zombies on TV, that my congenital hostility would be pushed so far past any line of socialized containment that I would end up murdering every living thing in my line of sight instead of coming back to New York and building a terrorist army of concerned citizens like the adult I thought I was.
As it happened, it wasn’t nearly so painful as I’d imagined. In fact, it was not long before I found myself being blatantly seduced by all of the most decadent aspects of the region. It is that insidious. I had been in San Francisco a total of three days when I agreed to enter a hot tub with three other naked humans. My will, not to mention my mind, had eroded that much already. But what residues clung to this brainpan were still too much for most of the natives. Everywhere I went in that state, I was told: “You’re so definite….” The response of almost everyone I met in any of the cities I visited to most any external stimulus perhaps calling for some sort of decision or value judgment was “Whatever…”
I got into arguments with two people in two separate cities, one in San Francisco and one almost a week later in Los Angeles, over whether or not est was an evil thing. Both were intelligent, hip, charming, attractive, modern citizens who otherwise would give me no call to look askance, neither was an adherent of said cult, both were “open-minded.”
I was learning by the second episode of this sort that on the whole it would be more politic to simply drop the subject and ingest heaping further helpings of whatever drugs we happened to be shoveling into our systems at the time. I should also mention here that it was not on this trip that I first learned that a great many Californians, especially in L.A., have somehow achieved a psychophysical state in which they can soak themselves in every kind of dope known to man for years on end and come out absolutely unchanged, the exact same human configuration that entered the chemical labyrinth perhaps a decade or more previous. For this I hate them all, even if everything else about them were perfect.
In San Francisco I said to a young woman whom I liked a great deal, “Do you mean to tell me you actually don’t sit in your apartment for days on end, staring into space depressed out of your mind, thinking life's not worth living but lacking the will to even turn on the gas?”
“No,” she laughed, “I’m happy.”
“Then you must be a sick dog,” I said.
The next day we rode around town in her car. It was the only automobile I’ve ever been in which had a device installed in it which purported to remove the negative ions from the air, or is it to shove more of ‘em in, I forget but anyway it was a mechanical addendum designed, advertised, and guaranteeing to create Good Vibes for whoever was lucky enough to be riding around with it. I was depressed out of my mind the whole time. So depressed, in fact, that after I’d left I called her back just to make sure that what I just described was, in fact, the purpose of this device. Sure, she laughed. I didn’t have the heart to ask how much it cost. When I got back to New York I told all my friends about it, it was my supreme California story, till I encountered one friend who’d owned one herself: her husband had been a terminal cancer patient, and they’d tried everything. He died, of course.
I did not see anyone die in California. They didn’t need to, being wedded to Stasis. I’m not sure why the disco-headphone roller skaters of Venice were more obnoxious than the ones in New York; I think it might have something to do with the fact that, as I first realized