It took most of the weekend for Christy, my common-law wife and
latter-day traveling companion, to find sanctuary. The urge to flee
Los Angeles was understandable; the death of Mr. Rogers at the
hands of The Big 4 shook both of us to the core. And witnessing a
mafia-style hit at a Denny’s in Santa Cruz, courtesy of
Mickey Mouse, didn’t help either.
We found this quaint little ultra-vegan township up near Twin
Peaks, Wash., and passed ourselves off as a couple from Blanding,
Utah. When asked by the head of the commune Twiggy as to why we had
fled, I replied that our friends found I was using condoms as
placeholders in my Book of Mormon. She remained suspicious.
“What about the California plates on your car?”
Twiggy, asked.
“Never mind those,” I told her. “I switched my
old ones with an SUV down in Portland.” Twiggy frowned, so I
said, “Uh, then I slashed its tires.”
The woman, her head full of gray dreadlocks, brightened
instantly.
“Well, you’re welcome as long as you like,”
she replied. “Any enemy of over-consumption is a friend of
mine.”
Twiggy showed us around the place. During the day everyone
helped out around the farm. People ate and slept together. And each
night there was a huge orgy in honor of some deity called
“The Blue God.”
“The media doesn’t pollute our environment
here,” Twiggy told us. “All the news we get is from
other local farmers.”
My god, I thought. This is Xanadu.
“Perfect,” Christy said to me. “I can work on
my pilates, and you can get to work on your Great American
Novel.”
“Now you two better wash up,” Twiggy said. “We
have an orgy tonight, and I can’t wait to see who gets voted
off.”
Christy and I looked at each other.
“Each night we plug The Blue God into the Socket of
Undying Power, and he sacrifices someone new. Sometimes it’s
a tone-deaf teenager. Or some greasy I-talian. Or someone who
cannot stomach the holy horse-anus and ostrich-egg
smoothie.”
Rats, we’d been had again.
I was still in a daze of realization but luckily Christy acted
quickly, giving Twiggy a swift judo-chop to the throat. The old
woman buckled over and fell, her hemp pants splitting open and
spilling old copies of TV Guide on the ground.
We hit the road in seconds flat.
“They got to the hippie tribes too,” I said to
Christy while speeding down a highway to nowhere. “Is no one
safe? How about the Amish?”
She looked at me with grave seriousness.
“You can’t run from this,” she said. “We
need to face these weasels head-on. With your biting wit and my
judo skills no one can stop us. Not even Rupert Murdoch.”
Hot damn, she was right. We stopped by the nearest 7-Eleven and
stocked up on coffee and newspapers. Christy read the entertainment
sections out loud while I drove through the night. It was an
attempt to reacclimatize ourselves to the wretched TV nation we
left in Los Angeles. We were armed and dangerous and hurling
ourselves back into that seething hell-pot. But this time we were
going for the jugular.
I dictated a list to Christy: Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Joe
Rogan, Paula Abdul and Regis Philbin. They were going to go down
““ hard core, baby.
After all, what else is spring break good for?
While on his mission from God, Cobb needs your help and prayers.
E-mail him at ccobb@media.ucla.edu.