Crooked Little Vein

“Alan Alda! How he made me laugh in that show. And the women dressed well, too. Never enough blood, though. Which always made me a little sad. But I guess it was supposed to make you a little sad, wasn’t it? That rueful smile? Very clever show. He narrated the documentary about me. I’m not blaming him, obviously. He didn’t write it. One day I will meet the mediocrity that wrote that. I mean, do I look like the kind of man who has difficulty socializing?”

I had to be honest. “Actually, no.”

“No. Of course not. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but, really, do I look like someone who had problems meeting women? I’ve been married three times. And”—he leaned over the aisle and looked me right in the eye—“I only killed two of them.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. How about that? They can stick that in their pipe and smoke it. So much for America’s Terror: The Mad Virgin. I have four children.

Had four children. Funny thing. I always thought it was a joke, about liking children but not being able to eat a whole one. But it’s quite true.”

I started stabbing my own call button.

“The Mad Virgin. My God. I could sue them, you know. Some of the others have been better, mind you. I collect them. Twelve documentaries about me. Three Hollywood movies using aspects of my work. I sometimes hoped to be played one day by Sean Connery. But you just know he’ll use his own accent. I think that’d spoil it for me.”

“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.”