through my mind. So I channeled Brian Lumley and added my particular American perspective. Please forgive me for the ending. The story was about choice, ultimately, and once someone makes that choice, well, the story is over. I allowed for a little denouement, just enough to allow Thomas’s decision to sink in, just enough to allow that it could be you who made the same decision… or not.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 4
Big Rock Candy Mountain
Starring Jethro James as the messianic crack addict
and the Host of Heaven as intergalactic garbage men
“Porn, crack, angels and government conspiracies—this is the quintessential Southern California tale.”
–The NoHo Reader
In 3D
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
it's a land that's fair and bright,
the handouts grow on bushes,
and you sleep out every night.
Old Folk Song
Jethro James tapped the last rock into his crack pipe and smoked it. The memories of his third grade field trip to the Natural History Museum in Omaha and his first sexual experience with his third cousin Alice at the age of twelve sizzled, popped and extinguished as the toxic drug took hold of his nervous system and turned him into a human disco ball. But that was okay, because smoking crack was his job; at least it was ever since the nice government men had gotten hold of him.
The van roared away, leaving him alone on the street. Old buildings, some reaching seven stories, huddled together and swayed as the warm Santa Anna winds threatened to blow them away. Graffiti covered every surface as unreadable as the small print on a drug bottle. The smell of urine and garbage mingled to become a recognizable uptown aroma. Cars sped by, driven by wild-eyed suburban drivers holding the steering wheels with double-handed, white-knuckled grips, afraid of those few who braved the urban walks.
Ventura, California. Once infamously known as the Porn Capital of the World, was now just another Los Angeles suburb where malls and prefab houses sprouted overnight like mushrooms on a shit pile. Who knew that the end of the 1980s meant the decline of hair metal, the Soviet Union and pornography as a capitalistic way of life? Sure, remnants of all three still existed. Ratt still performed in Northern Pennsylvanian VFWs to long tables of retired soldiers who remembered partying when Reagan was president. Russian government officials still had their dachas and dreamed of the return of a society where everyone was equal, and they were just a little more equal. The Internet resurrected the world's wet dreams allowing one-click viewing of anything and everything, in all time zones, and any position. And for those who desired a more permanent solution, videos could be rushed to their door in nondescript brown wrappers. But gone were the blockbuster porn movies. Gone were the triple-X theaters with thousand-bulb marquees illuminating the darkness like nightlights for the perverse.
Porn in Ventura had been as common as corn in Iowa. Porn and corn.
Jethro liked the way the two words sounded together.
Corn.
Porn.
Corn.
Porn.
The porn fields of Iowa.
He broke into crack-addled giggles as he imagined Ma and Pa Iowa harvesting fields of Ron Jeremys.
And in the Kingdom of Ventura, there was a time when Jethro had been king. He'd starred in one hundred and twenty seven movies and videos. He'd had every woman in the industry at least twice. Men wanted to be him. Woman wanted to be done by him.
But no more.
Crack was now his life.
The juicy rush as the raw smoke shot past his gums, terra-forming the surface of his lungs, exciting the vessels to turbo-charge the drug through his system and into his brain, until even his vision sizzled, was better than anything life could give him. Like now, normal sight had been replaced by a fusion of colors, gyrating in three dimensions like an epileptic kaleidoscope. His glistening eyes revealed the world as a chaos of Crayola. A poodle and an elm tree could glow pink as easily as not. Cars shown blue, their reflections in storefront windows bright yellow. Ochre streets ran beneath an umber sky. Purple and violet buildings cast green shadows from an orange sun. Telephone wires and power lines pulsed red like the veins of a great beast. People moved about, their solid colors random by assignment, yet vibrant with their mystery.
But it was one specific color that Jethro James sought. He swayed, the effects of the drug as it clenched tighter causing him to stumble. He steadied himself on a golden parking meter, and noticed off-hand that the time had expired. After fumbling