“I can imagine.”
“You have a very understanding way about you. I appreciate that. Cheers.” He polished off a finger of whiskey. I tossed down about a hand’s worth and resumed stabbing the service button.
“Yeah, thanks. Leave the bottle. My friend and I are very thirsty.”
“Good man,” he said, holding out his glass. “So. You and your lovely companion. What business do you have in Sin City?”
“Trawling through America’s sick underbelly in search of people who are holding a book the White House wants back.”
“Now, that sounds interesting. What kinds of things have you seen? This is such a wonderful, rich country. When you look under the covers it holds to its trembling little chin in the night.”
So I told him.
He considered, and then said, “Is that all?”
“That’s not enough?”
“Young man, I have to tell you: if you think that constitutes a trawl of America’s true cultural underground, you may have a nasty shock in your future. Let me ask you a question. Our meeting, here, tonight: do you consider this perhaps a waypoint in your perceived descent into the muck of modern life?”
“Sure. You kill people for wearing crap clothes, from what I can make out. The only reason why you’re not trying to fuck my girlfriend in the gall bladder with a screwdriver as she sleeps is because you can see her boobs and she’s wearing makeup.”
Yeah, I was pretty drunk. He took it pretty equably.
“Not as accurate a summation as you think, but, yes, I’ll allow it. My point is that I’m not the underground. You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There’s been twelve TV documentaries, three movies, and eight books about me. I’m more popular than any of these designed- by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I’ve killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I’ll be famous after she’s gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews.”
“And what about…all the rest of it?”
“I think I’ve seen a lot of it on the Internet.”
“I can’t use the Internet. My ex sends me things. Photos.”
“Perhaps I should send you some photos sometime. Consider this, though. If I’ve seen it on the Internet, is it still underground? ‘Underground’ always connoted something hidden, something difficult to see and find. Something underneath the surface of things, yes? But if it’s on the Internet—and I do praise the Lord that I lived long enough to see such a wondrous thing—it cannot possibly be underground.”
“People show pictures of their asses on the inner-web.”
“Yes. And it’s a wonderfully useful tool for stalking people. What’s more, my personal fetish—and it is a fetish, I fully appreciate and understand that—requires trophies of a sort, and I find that storing them as images on private Web space does very nicely. I don’t have to carry them with me, you see? Wherever there is an Internet connection, I can reach my collection. I mean, that’s just marvelous. My point, however, is that the Internet is more than a system for holding pictures, whether it be of people’s backsides or my hands all slick and yellow with human subcutaneous fat. It is the greatest mass-communication tool ever invented, and utterly democratic beyond the entry-level requirement of having a computer.”
“Now holllld on. A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”
“Seventy-one. And I think it’s important you learn this, for the future of your enterprise. We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream? It’s easily found. You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”
“Did I? Okay. I’m a little drunk.”
“There you are, you see? It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online. That’s not underground. It’s mainstream. Just like me.”
I lifted my glass. “Y’know? S been a assolute pleasure speaking with you. A lot v things r mushmush clearer now.”
He brought his glass to mine and we bumped plastic. “And you, young man, are on a great adventure, and I salute you.”
We drank, and poured, and drank, and really it was very nice. Me and the serial killer.
Chapter 34
From a distance, the Strip looked like it was covered in a dozen different colors of blossom on a wet spring morning.
Up close, the blanket of petals turned out to be a thick coating of discarded handbills from pimps and porn operations, stuck to the road by rainfall.
Reduced to a pulpy sludge by dirty rain, they dulled the footfalls. We squelched our way through ANAL HOOK- ERS and PHONE DOMINATION under the ugly gray dawn light, walking from the street up to the hotel I’d found us.
