Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

Hye folks! Hey for a great central Texas excursion you could do worse than coming out 290 to Johnson City. Come through town and look for what looks like half a caboose on the right. That's the "Beth's Little Smokehouse in Texas." Right across the road is a cedar rail fence with beaucoup longhorns within. Oh yeah. The barbecue is great! Much better than the punny name.

I could be prejudiced by their turning me on to a coffee and a sausage sandwich after the dog an I woke up in a field covered with frost.

Twenty-four hours and I've only made it to Hye—which has a picturesque general store-cum-Post Office, and that's about all there is to Hye. Got a warning from the DPS for hitchhiking here. First time that ever happened to me in Texas. L.A. seems a long way away.

Lars.

Dear All,

Seventy-four hours out. We're in Junction and it looks as if we'll be here awhile.

There was no getting west from Fredricksburg, which is as beautiful as ever. But when we gave up on 290 west we got south to Kerrville on 16 in no time. Now we've got 456 miles of Texas ahead of us.

Some yellow-breasted birds are gleaning along the ramp here. The sun's bearing down. We've had overcast nights keeping us warm, but frustrating the amateur astronomer in me. A line of hitchhikers is strung out here between the two Junction exits, including another one with a dog—the only one I've spoken to has been here four days.

We've seen bunches of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cars being hauled westward—-the logos are on them—-and several convoys of huge prefab concrete I-beams being hauled by trucks. The I-beams are so long that the ass-end of the trailers are disconnected. This does not seem very safe to me: 14 wheels on the front, lots of I-beam, 12 wheels on the back. Lizbeth is pissed at me for doing this to us again, but she flushed a deer last night and found that very amusing.

Lars.

Dear Folks,

Here I am with the little dog, spinning the Wheel of Dharma at the Burnt Well rest stop, about seventy miles west of Phoenix on Highway 10. The road is Zen—-what can I say. Very now. Very here. Very all. And that's not to mention the desert.

When you ride, you have all you can hope for. When you wait, you must put hope away. The road is still there. The road will still be there. The next ride is one direction and the next stop, the other.

Then we were in Quartzite, twenty miles shy of California. Quartzite is the mother nest of RVs. It was just a few old folks parking their RVs at a crossroads. Now it ha a population, sometimes, of around a million—-almost all in RVs. Now there is a McDonald's and some decry the creeping institutionalism. More scary than that is to realize that these are the contemporaries of On the Road, in their long, tan RVs with satellite dishes on top and pickup campers in tow. And so you die of a heart attack watching TV in your mother's house in Florida or you cruise the desert with air conditioning and a very small, yappy dog. Almost no one in Quartzite is black or brown or under fifty-five.

Smuggling apples and a watermelon past the agricultural inspection station, our driver looks sidelong at me to see if I will narc. He lets us off at Blythe.

Three a.m. and big widely spaced drops of rain are falling. The little dog and I always get rained on in the desert. Why not keep on? Why not stay on the road forever?

Lars.

Dear Folks,

Here is my Hollywood Report.

In our last episode: after being homeless in Austin, Lizbeth the bitch and I were invited to come to Hollywood by a couple of fans of my second book. At the end of eleven treacherous days of hitchhiking through the desert, we arrived at this gay rooming house which is a converted suite of dental offices over a storefront on this seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard near Western Avenue.

This is Hollywood: you could see, air-quality permitting, the Hollywood sign if you stood at our kitchen window. obtained a typewriter, which has belonged to MGM and United Artists, from the Hudson House (gay mission) thrift shop around the corner, and set to work.

Soon I had a couple of stories to drop off at Major Gay Magazines, Inc., where my editor is a heterosexual woman. Manila envelope in hand, I walked west on Santa Monica with Lizbeth, who finds Hollywood a very smell-worthy place.

Although it was before 10 a.m., hustlers were already working the boulevard with some apparent success. How can you tell the difference between a young man loitering on Santa Monica and a hustler? Silly question. Any young man loitering on the boulevard is a hustler.

We passed a number of sweatshops with help-wanted signs in Spanish, a faint ball-point pen on brown cardboard. You'd never know from the pollo sausa con arroz y frijoles at the hole-in-the-wall around the corner, but there are few Mexicans and Chicanos here. The overcast operators are Guatemalan and Salvadoran. A hint: where there are Mexicans and Chicanos, they celebrate their relative affluence with flour tortillas. Except for Taco Bell, which doesn't count, you cannot find any but corn tortillas—-not at any price—-in my neighborhood.

Before Lizbeth and I reached Vine, we encountered a whitewashed building with a storefront and an number of bays which suggested a previous incarnation as a garage and auto parts store. Painted on the window, however, in script that soft-drink lawyers in Atlanta might view with suspicion, was the caption "Macola Records." The morning was already warm. The bay doors were drawn up.

And there, open to the air of Santa Monica Boulevard—-not exactly the clean room at Sematech [Austin semiconductor consortium]—-a brown-skinned man was operating a machine that was, yes indeed, stamping out LPs.

A poster in the window had led me to believe that Macola was whatever the record company equivalent of a vanity press is. But I backed far enough away from the building to see, displayed around the top, what I suppose were horrible airbrush renderings of Macola album covers—-rather of the Liberty-goddess [refers to statue atop the Texas capitol with hideous features, supposedly exaggerated to be distinguishable by observers on the ground] school of art and surely an embarrassment to every twelve-year-old in this town who has ever laid hands on a can of spray paint. Music is not my long suit, but I recognized a couple of titles, if not the covers: Rumors by Timex Social Club, something by LaToya Jackson.

Yes, Ed Ward [who had written in The Chronicle that it was unfortunate that record producers had stopped issuing LPs since CDs were introduced], if this is living, vinyl lives.

The machine kept stamping and Lizbeth and I kept walking.

Major Gay Magazines, Inc. is at a rather more fashionable Hollywood address. Lizbeth had to remain outside and entertain the tourist with her abandoned-bitch routine. She has a natural instinct for hustling and often picks up a couple of bucks, or at least a few dog biscuits. I found my editor staring at the wall over her keyboard, giving the impression of having just been struck in the forehead with a ballpeen hammer. When I first arrived in town, a senior editor at Major Gay Magazines, Inc. had cornered me and requested first refusal on all my stuff. I'd agreed because Major Gay Magazine pays the best and fastest in the market.

But my editor reads slowly, so two-thirds of my output goes elsewhere under various pen names.

You see, at Major Gay Magazines, Inc., one gets the feeling the staff is always hoping that they will look down at their layout and discover that they are actually working for The New Yorker. But every time they do look down, it's just a male skin mag. Virtually every time Jesse Helms takes the floor of the U.S. Senate, the editorial taboos are redrafted and illustrators and writers are sent scrambling back to their work with gallons of white out.

I occasionally drop a broad hint that—for the sheer novelty of it—Major Gay Magazines, Inc. might try to employ people who enjoy and believe in their work, who might be proud to put their names on the masthead, and who would have the gumption not to tremble at every idle threat from every Bible-thumping tobacco-death merchant and petty Canadian customs official.

Sigh. If only I were a feminist-lesbian porn writer. I could call my stuff erotica. And liberals would think it was art.

On the way back from Major Gay Magazine, Lizbeth and I passed a large plaster RCA dog in front of a record store at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Lizbeth sniffed it, but she still thought it was real.

"Lizbeth, we are in Hollywood," I told her. "It's just tinsel and glitter. No real dog is that big." But she barked at it anyway until I dragged her out of range.

Although I'm still surviving day-to-day on charity, I'm making a living, figuring 50 percent sales of my current inventory—-and, of course, in the past I've sold every line of erotic writing I've done. If the patronage and charity hold out, I'll be making a good living once that very long pipeline starts flowing and the numbers on the books are replaced by the coin of the realm.

In the three weeks I've written fourteen short pieces, sold three and collected on two. Being here with Major Gay Magazines, Inc. is no real advantage. At this rate of production I'm having to send material to magazines that pay in eight months, and to other marginal markets. I wonder, couldn't I have done this in Austin if I'd had a place out of the weather to set up the typewriter? Maybe.

I benefit from the creative atmosphere here. Sure, there are lots of wannabee writers on the streets and washing cars. But also, people do know working writers—it's not as if being a writer is the same thing as running a low-grade scam. I go to the sleazy neighborhood bar where the fights are over the Oscars, not baseball. I say I'm a writer. It's like saying you are a bankruptcy lawyer in Austin—-people have heard of this line of work. It's plausible.

One of my roommates, though a double-threat writer and illustrator, has been making a living in the same market I'm working in. That proves to me it can be done—something I had never convinced myself of, not whole-heartedly, in Austin. And if it can be done at all, then certainly I can do it.

People here have heard of me. Here. Fledgling writers show up. In many respects that is an annoying waste of my time. I'm not moved by their flattery per se. But I find it nice that they think I am someone they ought to flatter.

Scuzzy creeps want to represent me (at, say 40 percent—-as if I just fell off a turnip truck). They are very distressed that I don't want to go to lunch in Beverly Hills, but I prefer to know what they propose to do for me that I don't already do better for myself.

Now I'm back to work on my current piece. It's a foot-fetish-in-outer-space one. It's not as bad as it sounds. Maybe it is. Anyway, I know an editor who will buy the first foot-fetish-in-outer-space piece that gets to his desk. It's going to be mine.

It's just an ordinary day's work for the happy warrior of gay porn.

Lars.