Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

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.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.

“King Diamond, madame,” said the man. “Your shirt. Is this not a reproduction of the Abigail artwork?”

“I suppose,” said Celia.

Celia had no idea about King Diamond, the eponymous vocalist of the heavy metal band King Diamond, or the band itself, or the band’s 1987 AD concept album Abigail .

As with every other day, magic had chosen her outfit.

Through the coincidental power endemic to fiction, the man was also not wearing an outfit of his choice.

He was wearing a pair of banana-yellow shorts with a fringe trim.

And, like Celia, he was also wearing a T-shirt.

Unlike Celia, his T-shirt did not advertise a heavy metal band from the 1980s AD.

His T-shirt said this:

The man’s T-shirt was very long.

That morning, with his body smarting from the previous night’s Abu Ghraib-themed BDSM/taqiyya session, HRH had done a Skype interview.

The journalist was from Portland, Oregon. The interview subject was the Klaus Mann Center, a homeless shelter in Portland that HRH had opened in 2007 AD. The shelter had a specific focus on LGBTQIA+ youth.

“I believe,” said HRH into a laptop that displayed the computerized face of the interviewer, “that it is our duty to protect the least fortunate of society.”

“It’s very unusual, though, isn’t it?” asked the interview.

“I should hope that this belief is universally held,” said HRH.

“You’re a Saudi prince,” said the interviewer.

“The royal flesh is my own,” said HRH. “Yet do not forget, I am a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis.”

“I was only curious if things like the Klaus Mann Center made family reunions awkward,” said the journalist.

“Whenever is a reunion of family not a-drip with awkwardness?” asked HRH.

“One last question. Why name a shelter in America after a German writer?”

“I had wished to christen the enterprise after Annemarie Schwarzen bach,” said HRH. “An advisor warned me against both the length of her name and its linguistic closeness to that of film star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In her stead, I opted for that friend of her bosom, Klaus Mann, a man whom I rate as a personal hero. He was tortured by his father. When the Nazis willed themselves to power, Klaus fled into exile, and beyond the snug confines of the Weimar Republic, he found that his fey lust for the bodies of other men caused great pain. He committed suicide. Yet I consider his life a triumph. Through the torrents of suffering, he authored several brilliant books and one unvarnished masterpiece. He inspires us all.”

After the interview, HRH went to a board meeting at the Venice Beach offices of Snapchat.

Snapchat was a smartphone app that had achieved a long-standing dream of corporate America: cornering the ever elusive market of child pornography.

Following a tip received at an orgy full of unattractive men and female sex workers, all of whom were in the thrall of MDMA, HRH had gotten in on the Series A funding of Snapchat.

Snapchat was a late-period capitalist innovation: a corporation either worth nothing or everything, and one with such a complex relationship to money that it was impossible to judge the company’s failure or success.

The Series A funding had earned HRH a seat on the board.

HRH arrived wearing a suit that’d been tailored in London by Gieves & Hawkes.

By the end of the board meeting, the suit was so stained that HRH had to borrow clothes from an employee of Snapchat.

“There is a curious lacuna in Abigail , and one that is never revealed through the stylized vocals of King Diamond,” said HRH to Celia. “Speak not of the ludicrous sequel. We are not barbarians, madame. We consider texts unburdened by a priori knowledge. As King Diamond sings, we meet the ghost of Count de LaFey, and also his unfaithful wife, and their descendant Jonathan and his wife Miriam. One almost need not even mention Abigail herself. The stillborn child of de LaFey’s wife, conceived in the sullen pits of adultery. Although the main thrust of the album concerns itself with Abigail’s attempts to possess Miriam, represented as the symbolic transition from eighteen to nine, I remain struck by our ignorance of Abigail’s father. Her sire is the one player never identified. I wonder, madame, have you any theories as to the identity of this unfortunate progenitor?”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.

“Is this swine bothering you?” asked Rose Byrne.

From her bench in the open-air room, Rose Byrne had been keeping an eye on Celia.

At first, she wasn’t concerned when she saw Celia talking with HRH.

She’d seen Celia speaking with a legion of meat-market men.

But then she noticed HRH’s face pushing too close to Celia.

Celia was inching backwards on her stool.

Rose Byrne decided to intervene.

Her broadsword was in a scabbard.

The scabbard was hanging from her battle belt.

Throughout their journeys across Los Angeles, the broadsword had occasioned enough comment that Celia had cast a spell making the weapon invisible to mortals.

But it was always there.

HRH turned to Rose Byrne.

HRH looked Rose Byrne up and down.

“If there is any one thing that I am able to recognize within an instant, it is a servant,” HRH said to Celia.