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By Root 406 0

Jacuzzi's millions-maker became a cliché representing the very epitome of our American “decadence,” I feel ecstatic chills swirling up and pouring down my limbs and trunk as a day and night of methedrine slowly flakes from me like dried paint flakes from the barnacled bow of a gargantuan ocean liner, all night these mounting hours Senator Robert Kennedy slowly dying on L.A. operating table of sterile stainless steel I’ve been plumbing this Mainline's depths, new literature aborning in here my recent speed sessions, when that methedrine's in my blood and that blood is in my head, something new, I keep returning in allusions to the Velvet Underground, no, specifically, Lou Reed, mind made it out of New York maelstrom halfway intact, now I pick up his messages thanx to the R&R Renaissance the massive push of record companies hustling like mad beetles after hog-slopping troughs brimful of dollar bills, remember Grand Guy Grand's trick and people diving shamelessly into the massive vat of shit and piss and blood and pus and snot and come etc. after seasoning of U.S. greenbacks in the filth, everything flows in and lawd we’re all sittin’ pretty have been how long now? But confidentially although it shore ain’t no secret I feel the lid's about to blow. Driving Andy to school. Suddenly, after half our transit done in silence, she says: “America is disintegrating, Les.”

“I know it,” I say. “I’ve known it for a long time…. All anybody has had to do for the past year or so was read the editorials in magazines like Life, or the Post, and they would’ve known the whole thing was falling apart.” When sheets like that start predicting imminent apocalypse and monstrous social earthquakes, you know the keg's about to blow, because those mags are part of the Greater American Mainline at present, they shoot right out to reach in one way or another a majority of the populace every week, and the last thing they want to do is alarm Mr. and Mrs. America unnecessarily, to set the reactionaries to cleaning their ‘76 muskets or alarm the milk-and-sports-page millions securely ensconced in their stucco dugouts with unfounded rumors of indigenous explosions expected to rip out the quiet keep-off-the-grass parks, the shady cement sidewalks leaf strewn cross the illusions of permanence in the initials of lovers now friends walking precincts on Desenex feet and varicose veins for the Republican party and the Next President of the United States (as is obvious by today, since last night) Richard M. Nixon, no, these serene town centers proudly perpetuating quiet cracker images from 1853 must not be torn up madly out of that storied earth like the vertebrae of some ironically smiling Jesus of bril-liantine halo, after all, this isn’t France!

I said to Andy that I’d foreseen the seam-ripping of America's frayed old frock coat, and I added: “I supposed it couldn’t be otherwise….” and she said “Democracy won’t work, it's a shame but it just won’t work” and I said, “The reason it's falling apart this way is that the people of America have been living in the past too long…. For too long we’ve broadcasted the American Dream on all networks as gospel and everybody's been content… living in the past…. The nation is falling now because its people haven’t been able to face it when the granite thunderbolt plows square into their upper plates, that the American Dream is only a dream, and that the American Reality is imperative, a powder-keg situation.”

She started crying again. I put my hand on hers where it lay on the seat and she pulled it away abruptly, with the first touch. “Oh, don’t try to comfort me, you, I know that you don’t understand… it's the people like you… and that shit you read—”

“You mean the Free Press, and like that?”

“That crap, that filthy lying crap, and the crap those Right-Wingers put out, that's what's destroyed America!”

I won’t deny it, for all I know she's pretty right, in fact I’m sure she is, those hysterical paranoid Left-er New Left idiots are just as much to blame as anybody. America, which is essentially our universe, is having