If this theoretical person insisted on entering the public sphere, I would say: recognize the binary presentation inherent in mass media. A public figure can either be good or evil. There are no shades of gray.
So recognize this binary and do yourself a favor: do not cloak yourself in virtue.
Cloak yourself in vice.
Being cloaked in virtue creates an impossible situation: the presentation of self as infallible.
And you will fail.
And when you do, the mass media will be waiting, and the public will feast on your corpse. Nothing tastes better than false virtue.
But cloaking yourself in vice?
There’s nowhere to go but up.
The early days will be difficult, but if you can last four years, you will be an unshakable fixture.
Who knows?
Do this long enough and you might become President of the United States of America!
If the Queen of England trips over a dog, it’s a national scandal.
When Liam Gallagher kicks an old man down the stairs, no one even blinks.
That’s Liam being Liam.
But when our kid hugs a jaundiced paraplegic?
All of that said, it remains a very peculiar experience to be sexually harassed by someone who pens opinion pieces for the New York Times on the social scourge of sexual harassment.
If there’s one aspect of every opinion piece on the social scourge of sexual harassment, it’s that they all contain an implicit core: that there are ways to make the world a better place.
Which, of course, there are.
But when the tools used to make a better world are owned by the Patriarchy, the best outcome you’re going to end up with is a discussion about the social mores in the workplaces of the haute bourgeoisie.
And, remember, that’s the best case.
Here’s one much worse: that, in the end, everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich. And that this new reality is exploited by the people who understand that appearances are more important than reality.
All of which is to say that by fixating on sex, the discussion around sexual harassment misses the key element.
Which is the harassment.
The people who end up in positions of power end up in those positions because they are very, very good at humiliation.
That’s their skill.
That’s how they end up as CEOs.
Everyone who has ever had a job has been humiliated by their boss.
This is the nature of the thing.
And, yes, it sucks that the men who end up in power are so fucking crude that the only way they can imagine humiliating women is with sex.
But every single boss who’s humiliating his women underlings is also humiliating his male underlings.
This is who we, as a society, put into power.
Remind me: how many obsequious movies and books and articles have been written about Steve Jobs?
In the end, having a job, even a job like writing, is about interfacing with money, and the biggest lie of our society is that the individual currencies of money are units that measure value.
Money doesn’t measure value.
Money is the measure of humiliation.
What would you do for a dollar?
What would you do for ten dollars?
What would you do for a million dollars?
What would you do for a billion dollars?
So of course Amber Tamblyn would sexually harass me at Literary Death Match.
Why wouldn’t she?
She’d been put into a position of power at an event predicated on the perpetual humiliation of writers.
Chapter Fourteen
When Y Meets X
After the Fontenoy was a bust, Celia and Rose Byrne spent weeks and weeks exploring magical strands of smartphone navigation, which gave the women a decent internal map of Los Angeles and its surrounding environs.
One ropey strand of salvia took them to the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, where they wandered around a lake decorated with religious kitsch.
Another strand took them to the site of Jack Parson’s hermitage in Pasadena, where L. Ron Hubbard learned about ceremonial magick and imbued himself with the ideological basis of what would become Scientology.
Another strand, and by far the longest, took them out of Los Angeles and all the way to 274 Coast Boulevard in La Jolla, where, during World War Two, Anna Kavan had spent several months hard drinking and going ga-ga for an architect while looking at ridiculous California coastal splendor.
Another took them to 6026 Barton Ave, the address at which Samson de Brier held his cultural salons, where the former Francis Fuller had made the deal for Handspun Roses several decades before Celia wiped out any memory of the film or its director.
Another took them to a lecture at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard, which had the virtue of being very close to the house on the hill.
Another took them to the Bellagio gate of Bel Air, where buses from the San Fernando Valley dropped off the permanent servant class of Latino Americans to perform domestic duties in the homes of the Celebrity branch of American governance.
Another took them to a one-room structure behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard, where the members of Guns N’ Roses had lived in depravity.
And there were other places, arbitrarily chosen by authorial whims: the former St. Francis Hotel, and the shack on North Genovese where Marjorie Cameron spent the final years of her life, and the site of the former Motel Hell on Hollywood Boulevard, and the former Security Pacific National Bank Building on Hollywood Boulevard, where in the early 1980s AD a tribe of street freaks called the Night People took up residence while the bank still operated out of the bottom floor.
And there were others too.
Countless others.
But nowhere did they find Fern.
Meanwhile, the women of Fairy Land spent their evenings in bars.
They sampled places like Frank N Hanks and the HMS Bounty before settling on Tenants of Trees as their regular haunt.
Tenants of Trees was a Silverlake bar that was home to a fairly pleasant outdoor patio.
It was a human meat market filled with the sexual desperation of people who’d made the mistake of following their dreams and moving to Los Angeles.
Celia used the meat market to engage in reckless sex with some of the city’s more pathetic men.
One night, Celia and Rose Byrne were sitting in an open-air room off the patio.
“I have seen too much of this mortal world,” said Rose Byrne.
Rose Byrne was wearing a T-shirt that said: CRIMSON GLORY.
Celia was wearing a T-shirt that said: KING DIAMOND.
“Another drink, I think,” said Celia.
Celia had cast a spell on Tenants of Trees which gave them an open and bottomless tab.
Celia made her way to the bar, passing a man and woman involved in a meat-market transaction. The transaction was comprised of monosyllables.
“That’s, you know, so dumb,” said the woman.
“Shit, isn’t it,” said the man.
“Right, don’t you think?” asked the woman.
“Fuck,” said the man.
“What you, like, do, I’ve done,” said the woman.
Celia sat on a stool at the center of the bar.
The bartender, a young woman with full-sleeve tattoos, was serving other customers. She didn’t see Celia.
A man on the stool to Celia’s left turned his body in her direction.
“Whenever I espy a woman in licensed tour apparel, I am stricken with a fevered and paralyzing round of myxomatosis,” said the man.