Welcome to Wonderland.
Your first freak show exhibit is a pair of glowing eyes.
The eyes are mine.
The course of action you elect to take will make all the difference in the world for a flimsy house of cards. The cards can either remain standing, or they can fall. It's up to you. Simply tell me what you see. Admit whether you see my eyes glowing.
Or not.
Before you answer, I'll tell you what really happened. But a word of warning--nothing here's real. Or really funny. In fact, nothing in the freak show's ever a goddamn comedy. It just seems that way at first, because you're a heartless bastard looking on. Eventually, once you let yourself get pulled in, it all gets dark and inevitable like coffee grounds on the bottom of a cup. Oh, and you're welcome to blame my initial flippancy on my damn optimism, my moron sense of humor.
What I'm about to relate has very little to do with eyes, glowing or not, but a lot to do with cars.
Cars are on my mind most of the time. We have a complex incestuous relationship. Or at least, I had one such relationship with one certain machine, before all of this.
So, let me start out nice and easy.
First of all, I hate exactly one half of the whole car business, somewhat like my wife does. I hate the ownership responsibility, the sit-in-traffic, tow-truck, flat-tire, oil-change, registration-renewal, liability-insurance, auto-loan-payment, uninsured-motorist, regular-maintenance crap. The waste of time that takes away from the real act of savoring.
And on the other hand, I love cars with a molasses-sweet passion. I guess some call it the "man thing." Nobody likes to be thought of as a cliché, but go ahead, think of me that way. To me, cars are sleek, sensual, pristine like newly minted coins, aggressive, an expression of my testosterone-powered V8 engine four-wheel drive thirty-something image, my salary range, and my tax bracket.
Or at least, that's how it was before the Aliens came.
It all began in Los Angeles, of all places, on a regular smog-flavored day in early spring. The Aliens landed all at once, like African killer bees, in their styrofoam fast-food takeout box-ships that we were later to take so much for granted. The box-ships filled the California skies like white helium balloons. They hovered slowly, and then landed on flat areas all around L.A. County.
Despite what you'd think, there was no panic. The Aliens came out, looking like--
Well. Whatever it was, they were dull, nondescript, vapid, insipid--I run out of vacuous synonyms. And even now, I don't remember anything, really.
What did the Aliens look like? Something so banal and un-alienlike, that most spectator crowds dispersed in minutes. Obviously, they'd been expecting at least a laser light show, and preferably something reptilian, but instead got Joe Blow.
I suppose, to those of us nurtured on televised special effects, this was a real letdown. But even now that I look back on it, where was our sense of danger, suspicion, excitement? Haven't we, as a society, seen enough flicks of alien landings to explore all the possible scenarios that included almost always a false initial sense of safety, a dangerous terrible facade? So then, how could these real Aliens, these apparently humanoid physical beings from somewhere else invoke in us nothing but a terrible sense of boredom? And how could I myself be no different?
An obvious answer is some kind of mind control. And what a loaded phrase it is. Well, I'm still not quite clear on that initial non-impression I got, but yes, mind control with its myriad connotations fits nicely within this set of logic--even if, conceivably, it's the wrong answer.
But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Well, so it happened. For whatever reason, boredom prevailed. The folks all went back indoors to the heady lure of static and flicker and light images upon a screen, to see the latest on-going TV celebrity murder trial, myself included. It makes sense.
As a result, the boring Visitors were quite free to make their way around this City of Angels of ours. Free to do as much as they pleased. They were merely observed from a distance by several morbidly bored LAPD and News helicopters for the local TV and radio stations. An event not worthy of national news.
Well, the first thing the Aliens did was march directly to City Hall. Actually, "march" they did not, but I enjoy the whimsical imagery it brings up. On the way to the Civic Center, their white styrofoam fleet took up half of the 110 Harbor Freeway, merging from the 405 all the way back from the 101 and the San Fernando Valley, through the Sepulveda Pass, past Mulholland Drive--all the while, hovering a couple of feet off the ground and sending up a lot of hubcaps and road dust. The Aliens' flying widgets merged and weaved like crazy, soon mingling with and passing mundane human vehicles--that inevitable L.A. mix of Toyotas, Honda Accords, Lexus, Mercedes, Beemers, SUVs like Jeeps and Ford Explorers, and a sprinkling of minivans, pickups, and old clunkers. This went on until, like a cholesterol-clogged artery, the whole freeway slowed down, Aliens included, and became a proverbial parking lot in the throes of a really sick parody of multiple sig alert rush hour.
"It's bad enough we got our own home-brewed traffic," L.A. motorists complained that day, while being stuck on the 405 South behind the Alien armada, "And now, after butting in, these UFO jerkoffs are crawling along the ground when they could very well fly instead. It's a goddamn Rose Parade."
And so the motorists sat there, flipping each other off, speedometers registering zero to five, fenders primed for intimate contact.
As we heard later, the Aliens, being what they were, got an immediate audience with someone in the Mayor's office. Eventually, the Mayor himself made an appearance. And--reported the local news--after originally flipping him off, and after being shown the error of that salutation, the Aliens very politely explained the nature of their mission here on this our planet.
Supposedly, they were here on business.
"We want to build--how you says in your earth language--a Factory," said the cliché we later came to regard as the Alien Leader, with an immigrant accent, over an AM/FM multi-frequency broadcast, "In this Factory--a joint venture with our kindness host, of course--we proposes to manufacturing machine for transportation. Vehicle to takes you from one place to another. You call it 'car.'"
"Will this be taking jobs away from the Citizens?" began the Mayor with the hindsight and foresight of an equine wearing blinders, and just a manure whiff of insecurity breezing through his political campaign smile.
"Of course not," said the Alien Leader, and its accent and grammar improved with every word and every breath, until it sounded like a prime time newscast, "This will definitely create jobs, Mr. Mayor. A veritable plethora of jobs. That we can guarantee."
"Guarantee in writing?" beamed the Mayor who was soon to be up for re-election, and was buttering all his sides in preparation for the political bump-and-grind.
"Certainly!" vapidly steamed back the Alien Leader. Obviously incapable of beaming, it manifested instead like sun through cloud mass over Britain.
Eventually, the Alien stuck a long very legal contractual example of red tape in the Mayor's face. "Study this, friend, as much as you need, and when done, sign here, next to the X and the squiggly called a tilde. And here ... and here ... and here.... No need to worry, this fully conforms with all your local, City, State, and Federal regulations, even in terms of format."
Well, to make an excruciating story short, within days, contractual obligations were clarified on both sides. The document--barcoded and laminated, and replete with glaring stylistic elements of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the Internal Revenue Service--was signed in multiple unexpected places by multiple people and Aliens, Factory land allocated, and the Aliens, well, they were in business.
Their business premise was simple. They made disposable cars.
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