Belly of the Beast
1986; Springer International Publishing; Volume: 12; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0311-4198
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoLate on Christmas morning we drove east into the Nevada desert and right into the belly of the beast. For twenty-four hours, day became indistinguishable from night. Then we were disgorged, looking pretty much the same, flesh intact, skins maybe a shade paler, perhaps a fraction slimy from being swallowed whole.On Christmas Eve his California kids preferred raspberry jello to the DJ's plum pudding that had nestled in my luggage across the Pacific. Its cellophane-wrapped journey among the T-shirts was as cramped and idiosyncratic as mine in seat 49E, green section, class Y, flanked by a pair of fresh-faced female surfers from Monterey and a tightfaced boy from Auckland via Bondi going home for Christmas.That night I whipped up brandy butter but they didn't much care for that glorious annual treat either. The snow white ersatz supermarket cream refused to thicken though I almost beat it to death. Then he and I drank microwave coffee after his girls ate cursorily and raced off, excited, to their mother's house where Christmas was Disneyland and they a blended Swiss Family Robinson, complete with newborn babe. Their Mom sported a red and white ruffled polkadot gown and sunbrowned wrinkles framed by a sunbleached pageboy and bangs. From the family album photo on her Christmas card, straight New World teeth shone out like rows of white bowling pins. Strings of plastic reindeer pulling crimson plastic sleighs galloped into space from neighbouring rooftops, heading gamely for the Pacific.California teenyboppers gag and grimace at the taste of real cows milk and Hollywood is just another suburb down the freeway. They like what they know. But I relished the strange, spaghetti squash and Zinfandel, and hardly paused for breath before the blueberry muffins. Oz Adventures Inc: we're the ones who made Earl's Court habitable for Arabs, before disappearing into Hampstead and Ealing and even Tooting Bec. Reality's a seasonal thing.I gave my order and he translated for the waitress, who failed to understand the polite decorations and alien inflexions of my words. We sank eggs easy over and wheat toast at our late roadhouse breakfast in a bedroom community sprawled like his along a southwest tentacle of the LA megalopolis. Smog hung a dull brown curtain over us for fifty miles into the Sierra foothills. Then the clean, clear, flat desert showed us Southern California before the moguls and their henchmen sucked water down from the north, snaking giant imperial pipelines through the scrub on their way to re-create the Garden of Eden. Never mind the gold rush. Forget oil. The veins of Southern California are plugged into a permanent intravenous drip. North feeds South and the South feeds the nation. Worse returns on venture capital have been known.This is America's Golden Girl, her Ten. The topsoil possesses the secret of Dorian Gray: with a skin like that beauty has no need to go deep. Mexican fingernails may be long and curved and daily cut deep into this springy volcanic flesh, but still not mortally wound, nor disfigure, nor even draw blood, but only rebound from the moist resilience, from this hormonally fertilised, cosmetically improved ripeness of eternal youth. In the shabby back room Mexico huddles in a cramped frame behind a grimy aged curtain, the terrifyingly wrinkled portrait of the other half of truth. We were planning to see Mexico before this year slid into the next.Vegas was bursting with refugees from Christmas. We saw its vast pearly glow filling the dark horizon at least an hour before his battered Chevy camper hit the brilliant dazzle of the Strip. In honour of Jesus some clubs had given their showgirls and singers a day of R and R. Did they watch TV in darkened rooms, make love, or go to church?I was goggle-eyed and he laughed at my stupefaction. I felt like a Lilliputian mouse surrounded by a ton of cheese before they invented traps. Caught right off guard. My vision of Vegas had been a tizzy giant assembly line of pokies and poker and matching faces smeared with subliminal Muzak. …
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