Only Americans Burn in Hell Read online

  I gave Arafat one of my tickets.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I said.

  At the front of the line, a pleasant woman tried to scan the barcode on my ticket.

  It didn’t work.

  “What about his?” I asked.

  She scanned Arafat’s ticket.

  It worked.

  We tried to convince her that she should let us both in. She said that she couldn’t. We’d have to talk with the box office manager.

  We walked away and then she called us back.

  Because she’d scanned Arafat’s ticket, and it worked, one of us would have to go inside.

  I took Arafat’s ticket.

  I went inside.

  He said he’d go talk to the manager.

  When I got inside, there was a table for General Admission tickets, and the young woman working at the table was checking barcodes and names against a list of people authorized to be in the pit. If your barcode matched an entry on the list, then she’d put a purple leopard-spotted paper bracelet on your left wrist.

  The bracelet was your pass into the pit, and even with that, you still had to get through about four more security checks.

  I got down to the pit, which was about five feet from the stage.

  Arafat would have loved this, I thought.

  It’s awful that he isn’t here, I thought.

  Everything’s ruined, I thought.

  There were fifteen other people in the pit. They were pressed up against a railing that separated the pit from the stage.

  I was the only person standing in the middle, not pressed up against anything.

  It felt awkward.

  I went back to the round concourse of the Staples Center.

  And then I did what all pathetic writers do.

  I found the bar.

  With a bloodstream full of overpriced vodka, I texted Arafat.

  I wrote that he shouldn’t worry, that he should just get a scalped ticket on his smartphone, and I’d pay him back.

  At the very least, I thought, he could get a ticket in the cheapseats. It’d be a shared memory even if we were apart.

  But he didn’t respond.

  Showtime was at 7:30PM.

  Around 7:20PM, I decided that I should go back to the pit.

  I again went through the phalanx of security.

  When I got into the arena, I saw only one thing.

  Arafat Kazi, standing in the pit, his circus performer costume as bright as the sun.

  He’d talked his way in!

  I was so happy that I insisted we pose for a picture where I was kissing his greasy fucking head.

  The show was amazing. Guns N’ Roses was the best band I’d ever seen.

  They were so good that they were even better than when I saw them at Dodger Stadium, where they’d been brilliant. They were good in the way that people are good only when they hate the alternative so much they’ll do anything to avoid it.

  And in the case of Guns N’ Roses, this was the alternative: go home and lead a normal life.

  The next day, Arafat Kazi woke up and took a train to San Diego.

  He sent me a series of text messages:

  My head is still spinning

  Nothing makes sense

  I think it was a capstone moment in our friendship

  That’s what the final scene in the movie about us would be

  This is as formative as anything we’ve shared

  There are two options here.

  You can believe that Arafat Kazi getting into the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center was the byproduct of a random universe acting out in its mechanistic complexity.

  But to believe this, you have to accept a chain of events so unlikely as to be incalculable in their probability.

  You have to accept a universe so random in its possibilities that it was able to produce the unlikelihood that Arafat Kazi, the only person alive who could talk his way into a $550 ticket, would have a best friend who would be mailed, by accident, two tickets to the same concert after stumbling into the impossibility of making a bunch of money from writing a novel, and that this best friend would see the second ticket and know exactly how it should be used.

  And you would have to accept that all of this would happen while someone was dressed like a circus performer.

  The other option is to do what I’ve done.

  You can accept that the universe, for whatever reason, wanted Arafat Kazi and myself to be in the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center. It wanted us to have that formative experience. It wanted to write that last scene in the movie about our lives.

  You can accept that a divine hand was involved in the whole process, easing our path, guiding the journey.

  You can accept that I saw the face of God.

  And you’re going to have to forgive me, because the worst possible time to see the face of God is in the middle of writing a novel.

  It’s going to make a mess of everything.

  The last few chapters of this book are going to dissolve into a hectoring lecture about Jesus Christ.

  Sorry about that.

  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

  Anyway, here I am, the author, Jarett Kobek, and I say to you, reader, that I was in the Staples Center, I was in the pit, I was at Guns N’ Roses, I was with Arafat Kazi, I was shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and I saw the face of God.

  And it looked like this:

  And this:

  Chapter Seven

  The House on the Hill

  And while Celia and Rose Byrne were seeing Wonder Woman at the Vista, another attendee at the same screening was a man named Francis Fuller. He’d been a director of films and television for about thirty years between 1950 AD and 1980 AD.

  Fuller began his filmmaking career as a young native Angelino who was queerer than a three-dollar bill and made short experimental films on 8MM and 16MM.

  These films were more expressionistic than narrative, featured aggressive editing, and were shown at makeshift cinemas for audiences of people who smoked too much marijuana and had too much sex with strangers.

  Embarrassed as he later would be by his works of youth, Fuller admitted that they’d helped earn him admission to the film school at USC, where he’d gained a fundamental understanding of the craft.

  After graduation, he’d bummed around Hollywood until 1963 AD, when his life had changed through a meeting at a cultural salon hosted by the former actor Samson de Brier.

  It was a night when everyone’d been smoking too much tea, and too many people’d been talking about Thelonious Monk. Everyone was crammed into a little house in the backyard of de Brier’s property on Barton Avenue.

  Fuller was bored. He didn’t know fuck all about jazz.

  He looked around de Brier’s tiny cottage and saw an exceedingly corpulent man pressed up against a Venetian mural.

  Fuller went over and said hello to the corpulent man.

  The man turned out to be a lush named Aram Menechian, who’d come to Hollywood with the intention of laundering some of his brother’s ill-gotten money.

  Fuller said that he had a screenplay. Fuller said that he’d gone to USC. Fuller mentioned that Time magazine had sneered at his short films.

  Fuller walked out of de Brier’s salon with an offer from Menechian to produce the screenplay.

  The screenplay was entitled Handspun Roses and for two years, it’d been sitting in Fuller’s bedroom at his parents’ house in Riverside County.

  Handspun Roses was a loose adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Poor Clare.” The action was transposed to the San Fernando Valley.

  Despite its reliance on narrative, the finished film exhibited the same qualities as Fuller’s experimental work, this time exercised in service of the horror genre.

  Handspun Roses caught the attention of Roger Corman, who gave Fuller work directing several more feature-length films, including a black-and-white psycho-biddy starring Myrna Loy.

/>   As the 1960s AD wore on and became the 1970s AD, Fuller found himself working in television. He directed bonecheap made-for-TV films and countless episodes of sitcoms and evening soap operas.

  He missed the old days of handheld 16MM cameras, when you could tell ultra-butch straight boys that you were making a movie and watch as they put themselves into homoerotic situations for the sake of maybe kinda getting famous.

  But the TV money was good.

  And Fuller retained a certain silverback-daddy sex appeal.

  And he’d bought his own home on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz, which was an upper-middle-class neighborhood north of the Vista Theater.

  Fuller grew old.

  Work dried up, but he’d managed his investments, and he drew a pension, and thanks to Proposition 13, the taxes on his property were almost non-existent. He’d never reached the Cash Horizon, but he’d gotten pretty close.

  Fuller lived on, a lonely geriatric in the pink house where once he’d thrown lavish parties full of rent boys and rough trade.

  Some fans wrote to him, and there’d been one last non-union effort with a crowdfunded adaptation of “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and there were always emails to be answered.

  By 2017 AD, Francis Fuller knew that he was nearing the end and that very little excitement would come again.

  He’d returned to the primary activity of his youth, when the world seemed full of promise: he went to the movies.

  The films had changed.

  The glamor and the glitz were gone. Most movies were parables about American foreign policy and had an intended audience of bloodthirsty men.

  That’s why he was at Wonder Woman.

  He saw everything that played the Vista.

  When Wonder Woman finished simulating genocide, Francis Fuller went to the lobby and thought about using the bathroom.

  There was a line of young men who needed to urinate. Fuller was too old to be pushed about in the queue. He decided to wait until the bathroom was empty.

  And it was while he waited that he saw the two most astonishing women.

  They were dressed a bit like Diana, the hero of Wonder Woman, but instead of wearing bondage-themed body armor, they were wearing animal pelts. Real fur!

  And they were so muscular.

  But not at all.

  And so femme.

  And yet not.

  He couldn’t determine their ages. Were they very old?

  Or were they very young?

  Francis Fuller couldn’t help himself.

  He had to talk to them.

  The conversation turned into Francis Fuller giving Celia and Rose Byrne a ride in his vintage Jaguar. He drove them to his house on Glendower Avenue.

  Celia and Rose Byrne ended up in Francis Fuller’s living room, where, because of effective sewage management, only one person had ever voided their bowels.

  The house was high enough on the hill that Celia and Rose could look through Fuller’s picture window and see the whole of the city.

  It was infinite lines of car headlights, the north–south avenues intersecting with the east–west boulevards, a fathomless grid of industrial pollution and greenhouse gases.

  “We are in a new world,” said Celia to Rose Byrne.

  “It is much worse than on our television,” said Rose Byrne.

  “One does not expect much,” said Celia. “But one maintains hope. The mortals I have known in my life have been pleasant enough. How can they have created such a nightmare?”

  “The human condition, my dears,” said Francis Fuller as he came from his kitchen, holding a tray with three cups of black Darjeeling tea.

  There were many things that Francis Fuller couldn’t imagine.

  He’d spent most of his professional life making films about supranatural entities and now he had brought supranatural entities into his own home.

  And he had no idea.

  Fuller couldn’t imagine the level of danger implicit in the women’s presence.

  If Wonder Woman was a genocide simulator, then Rose Byrne was genocide.

  Other than individuals in the military arm of the United States of America and former Presidents of the United States of America, she’d killed more human beings than anyone on Earth.

  They sat in Fuller’s living room, drinking his tea.

  Celia looked at the décor.

  It was shabby old furniture surrounded by vintage framed movie posters, all of which were advertisements for 1940s AD films produced at RKO by Val Lewton.

  Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim, and Isle of the Dead.

  “You have a wonderful eye,” Francis Fuller said to Celia. “Not many people pay attention.”

  “My queen is a rare being,” said Rose Byrne.

  “I’ve known some rare queens,” said Francis Fuller. “They’re all dead now. Except Ken Anger. I heard he was still down on Hollywood Boulevard, you know, screaming at anyone who’ll pretend he’s interesting. The last time I saw him was at Curtis Harrington’s funeral. Poor Curtis, he and Ken had a thing back in the ’40s. The funeral was ghastly. Ken was even worse than usual and spent the whole time heckling anyone stupid enough to speak from the podium. He made a whole show over Curtis’s body, kissing the corpse. But that’s Hollywood. It’s always been like this.”

  Like most readers of this book, Celia and Rose Byrne had absolutely no idea what Francis Fuller was talking about.

  “There’s something I have wondered,” asked Celia. “How do people hear the stories that they put into films and plays?”

  “Hear them?” asked Francis Fuller.

  “Yes,” said Celia. “How did the actors in Wonder Woman hear about Diana and her island and her journey into the world and her queen mother?”

  “Honey,” said Francis Fuller, “that answer is too long. We live in the era of the mega-franchise.”

  “But where did the story come from?” asked Rose Byrne.

  “Comic books,” said Francis Fuller. “These days, all of the movies come from the funny papers.”

  Celia and Rose Byrne had never seen comic books, which were cheap little periodicals that contained American power fantasies.

  But Fern had brought home many a newspaper and the women of Fairy Island had pored over them, paying especial attention to the comic strips that arrived printed in full color in the Sunday editions.

  “You mean that the story of Diana came from Krazy Kat?” asked Celia. “Or Blondie?”

  Krazy Kat was an old newspaper comic strip about a cat struck with love for a mouse that liked throwing bricks at the cat’s head. The cat was named Krazy. The mouse was named Ignatz.

  Blondie was an old newspaper comic strip about a Jazz Age flapper who married a man with an insatiable appetite for sandwiches. The flapper was named Blondie. The husband was named Dagwood.

  Celia had seen both strips in the early 1940s, when Fern had brought home copies of the New York Journal-American.

  “Something like that,” said Francis Fuller. “Recycled old pap. That’s what the flickers are these days. When I was in the business, things were different.”

  “You made films?” asked Rose Byrne.

  The doorbell rang.

  Francis Fuller jumped up. His octogenarian bones buckled under the sudden thrust of his mass.

  Fuller answered the front door, which was in a foyer off the living room.

  Standing on his doorstep was Adam Leroux.

  Leroux was Fuller’s makeshift assistant.

  He was twenty-eight years old.

  Leroux had first shown up in Fuller’s life after Leroux sent an email asking about Handspun Roses. A correspondence ensued, wherein many topics about old Hollywood were discussed. This led to Fuller’s discovery that Leroux lived in Los Feliz. An invitation was extended for Leroux to visit Fuller’s home.

  When Leroux arrived for the first time, Fuller was delighted.

  The young man was so handsome and butch.

/>   Fuller was fascinated by the short story of Leroux’s life, which had included a few military years in Iraq, where Leroux, who was poor, had shot Muslims at the behest of rich people.

  For his part, Leroux was drunk on proximity to someone who’d directed films and known people like Anaïs Nin, James Whale, Susan Sontag, Dorothy Dean, and Orson Welles.

  It wasn’t long before Leroux was coming over every day and helping Fuller with his memoir.

  They were a Hollywood odd couple of the Twenty-First Century AD.

  The old man, decaying in his earth-tone suits, and his young assistant, body covered in tattoos, head pierced with metal, dressed in black T-shirts and jeans.

  “Adam,” said Fuller. “You’ll never believe who’s here.”

  Fuller brought Leroux into the living room.

  Leroux had a sixth sense.

  He’d killed enough Muslims, and had enough Muslims try to kill him, that he knew when he was in danger. One look at Rose Byrne, broadsword dangling against her exposed thigh, and he understood that he was staring at death.

  Leroux had a seventh sense.

  He was a Hollywood assistant with no future who’d attached himself like a barnacle to an old ship. Fuller was his one shot.

  Leroux had an almost preternatural sensitivity to moments when his hold on the old man was threatened.

  There’d been other guests who pinged off Leroux’s seventh sense.

  The ones who wouldn’t leave.

  The ones who’d stolen memorabilia.

  The ones who’d take advantage of Fuller for the sake of social media.

  Leroux knew that Fuller was a man who collected stray dogs.

  But none of the others had carried a sharpened sword forged in the fires of Fairy Land.

  Fuller made introductions between his guests and Leroux.

  “They were just asking me the most wonderful question,” said Fuller. “They asked me how the people who made Wonder Woman had heard the story of Princess Diana and the island of the Amazons.”

  “I haven’t seen it,” said Leroux.

  “We just came from a screening at the Vista,” said Fuller.

  “How was it?” asked Leroux.

  “Moronic,” said Fuller. “But you know, at my age, and in this town, I don’t expect much.”