I opened my eyes.

I was alone in Los Angeles.

It had to be the drugs. The last thing I could recall was that we were all nodding out into the dope zone which is where we lived mainly.

As I slid through that trembling of consciousness into unconsciousness, I had been surrounded at the party by people just like me who were taking the same train I was taking, and we were all in the observation car watching the turbulence of the earth chasing its tail.

Everyone had vanished.

The scene from the floor-to-ceiling window of the high-rise was of Los Angeles spread out through the dark leaves, disobedient, nine days wondering, pallid, the same as death, land of mummies, cretaceous, Denny’s 5751Sunset Boulevard, what visitations will ambition make, the stretched curvatures of lust, three-egg omelettes, strawberry cheese cake with whipped cream, pouring Kahlua from my flask into the coffee, befriending snakes from Beverly Hills whose face lifts were swarms of masks frozen in a resting place of stone, washed blue, and emptied like a drain, Los Angeles was eternally unmoved. No one loved anyone. Had it lived, self-control would have swallowed the bait. There had never been anything spontaneous here anyway. It had no backbone. Yet it remained unmoved. Los Angeles was dead.

Standing at the window, lighting a cigarette, peering at fifty stories up into the lantern of Diogenes, the desert, it was obvious that Los Angeles was a vacuum emptied of its people. Flashes like a star and then is gone. There was no electric. I walked down fifty flights to an outdoor silence that was just the wind whose instant lips said do not take him back.

Take who back. Back to where. Back into the fold. I could not remember a single person that I knew. It was all a blank, without a scratch, desolate, dogmatic, even the homeless had disappeared. You could rob a bank and no one gave a flying fuck. There was no one left to absolve me of my crimes. I was going to have to forgive myself, and it could never happen.

No explanation. No reason. Nothing.

Even the poets had lost sight of themselves. Trapping all their careful words spinning into trajectories flaming and hissing all the way to Disneyland. Up in smoke. Not a single poet left. Even the rich were an afterthought.

I was not a poet. I was a criminal. There were no cops to hide from.

No cops. No junkies. No teachers. No kids. No drunks on the street. No skateboards. No salesclerks. No movie stars. No rappers. Nobody.

I would miss the poets most of all. They always seemed to be pulling around a monkey grinder illusion machine spewing out a magical apparition of Everything Is Going To Be Just Fine If Only We Could Come Together hallucination nation ripe with mushroom juice and blinking pink on and off not unlike a motel vacancy neon sign signaling the repair of worries and the fix of fixes on the river Styx had taken hold among the kicks you got off on we all got off on and by the third week I started walking naked just naked and I was ashamed even while I stood there.

We had all been told that human culture would survive. It did not survive. It ended with only one small-time criminal to witness the transformation. A prison of shaven heads.

No one to send me to the madhouse. Where all the sad negative people, the ones who knew exactly what was happening lived in their patient gowns and frowns and forecasts of what would come, what would happen if. If. If. If. No one listened to the mad. The crazed in their pajamas eating swiss steak at Denney’s 5751 Sunset Boulevard where they cut their own tongues out with sharp white bones there was only this and then it shook.

I lived in museums.

In Venice, I found an old Cadillac with fins.

Swimming for my life, I had always wanted one.