The Scramble
In Hollywood, lives are changed by strangers picked up over sweet-n-low breakfast and calorie-free conversation. One night disposable love affairs drag innocent protagonists through the crushing of gearworks of half-hearted but still mounting definitions of true love, the kind you read about on Internet match-making sites, but behind door number three of the Love Connection lies a secret so dark that flashlights are afraid to shine on it and candles snuff themselves at a single smell of its steaming scent.
The mysterious woman in the pink pajama lipstick and cashmere high-heels works part-time for the underworld of life, peddling those pink lips on street corners for secret government plans, embossed on fruit-roll ups shoved in titanium cans. She drinks cocaine from champagne bottles in empty hotel rooms while wire-tapping the undergarments of the rich and famous for a rich eccentric's celebrity ball-scratching collection. She does the dirty work of a dozen different political figures from Pakistan to Iran. She is distinctly no good.
But Johnny Hero is blessed with the quest to redeem her, to save her from a shady life of half-baked stolen secrets and pills to make her forget an abused childhood of secret service training on broken hotel beds. Yesterday, he was just another ant marching to the drum of social mores and society dreams. Today, he is a savior of sunken spies, and success is irrelevent as either way he is forever changed, unable to see his world as sunshine filled, unable to see the point of another day of pencil-scratches and keyboard clicks in his suburan-imitation office.
He is changed forever by his brush with its agents.
But in real life such hotel bathroom encounters rarely amount to anything but ejaculation and missed phone calls, another walk down the sterlizied halls of acceptable deviance alotted as a margin of error in the experiment of stabalized existence.
In Hollywood, lives are changed by strangers picked up over sweet-n-low breakfast and calorie-free conversation. One night disposable love affairs drag innocent protagonists through the crushing of gearworks of half-hearted but still mounting definitions of true love, the kind you read about on Internet match-making sites, but behind door number three of the Love Connection lies a secret so dark that flashlights are afraid to shine on it and candles snuff themselves at a single smell of its steaming scent.
The mysterious woman in the pink pajama lipstick and cashmere high-heels works part-time for the underworld of life, peddling those pink lips on street corners for secret government plans, embossed on fruit-roll ups shoved in titanium cans. She drinks cocaine from champagne bottles in empty hotel rooms while wire-tapping the undergarments of the rich and famous for a rich eccentric's celebrity ball-scratching collection. She does the dirty work of a dozen different political figures from Pakistan to Iran. She is distinctly no good.
But Johnny Hero is blessed with the quest to redeem her, to save her from a shady life of half-baked stolen secrets and pills to make her forget an abused childhood of secret service training on broken hotel beds. Yesterday, he was just another ant marching to the drum of social mores and society dreams. Today, he is a savior of sunken spies, and success is irrelevent as either way he is forever changed, unable to see his world as sunshine filled, unable to see the point of another day of pencil-scratches and keyboard clicks in his suburan-imitation office.
He is changed forever by his brush with its agents.
But in real life such hotel bathroom encounters rarely amount to anything but ejaculation and missed phone calls, another walk down the sterlizied halls of acceptable deviance alotted as a margin of error in the experiment of stabalized existence.
rae