O N E

They named him Oscar. He's a pet. They named him Oscar; then they cut his balls off. Who wants a pet with balls? Mosca was at the vet's. Mosca saw it all. Not much he could do about it. No sir-eeee. When they've all decided to cut the balls off a cat, what you going to do? Call the cops? Write your senator? Go to court for a restraining order? Assault them all? Once again the hot embers of outrage flare. Not much I can do. They're all bigger than me, aren't they? This was not the first indignity Mosca had seen inflicted on animals. Mosca had lived at the vet's since his escape. You bastards gonna be sorry.

So, fuck 'em all. Back to the street.

In a flush of cold blood, Mosca goes out into the poisonous air of the LA evening.

Can you believe it? In Arabic LA is not short for El Cuidad de Nuestra Señora la Riena de los Angeles de Porciuncula. Nor does it denote the sixth tone of the diatonic scale. No. In Arabic, LA means God.

Street night.

Lotsa light,

Perversion, squalor, and crime.

"Meat is murder, cheese is theft, eggs are abortion," sang Mosca.

Kill them all. Whites first.

Fuck you, Fort Meade!

A woman stood at the bus stop. A child spoke to her, this bus-stop patient.

"You're old."

"What made you say that?"

"Just kidding."

Across the street and its rush of exoskeletal monsters guided by endoskeletal parasites, a young woman tending bar spoke to her lone client, a bar-room patient. "It's going to be a beer night, it's so hot. I can tell already." This was one half of a double flirt. "What do you mean, a fear night?" said the other half.

Every night is fear night, thought Mosca, as he passed by, and indulged, no----consecrated, his passionate hatred of homo-sapiens, staff and distaff alike.

As he moved along among the sweating haltered shorts-people, he intersected more fragments of shattered speech.

"It's like waiting for snow."

"Everything's in the future."

"What's your reservation?"

"We don't have reservations."

"Shalom aleichem."

"Alaikum salaam."

All the more reason to hate.

"Cupid favors the bold."

"There's nothing beautiful about the truth."

That sidewalk walker, of course, was wrong. Mankind is exterminating itself. Such truth glows with beauty. So thought Mosca. The critical mass is passed. Quantity aplenty. Enough energy stored up to do the job.

Push the parts together.

Make the act-react chain.

"Them two novels started together, but it ain't a race."

"Nobody's that interested in depicting reality."

Fractures? Mosca?

Whites would have ruled the world long ago had they not slandered and shot one another.

I am the immortal Mosca, always at war with whites, with all.

Believe it.

Me, Mosca, this misanthrope, this human-hater, me, I am the World War; I am World War and I love it! When I'm ready, you shall see. I love Verdun. I cherish Dresden. Hiroshima overflows my heart with hope, with joy! Harbingers of a cleansed world! Rwanda! Albania, Bosnia, Algeria, Somalia, East Timor; Congo, Burma, Sudan, Afghanistan: my ecstasy! What do I see these days? Same thing you see, only you screen the view with a warp and woof of denials and lies. Don't you? I know you do. Today, the whites congeal into unity: Australia/Russia/USA/Canada/EEC. Stalingrad is passé. Solidarity! Embrace the honorary whites of East Asia! Cantcha hear it, you doomed trash people? The chain rattle of third millennium bondage?

Class war!

Yes, and more!

May they swiftly gather the crop greening up from their bayonet-plowed soil, fertilized with fauna blood.

Eternal future.

Theirs, a short eternity.

Little Boy Blue is doomed.

Mary! Your little lamb hungers for meat! Bambi'll drink your blood; Lassie will chew your bones.

Kill all the humans so life can live. That's my motto. What's yours? Life, you say, should be a sensual adventure? Real-y. I'm your dear little moshka. Cuddle me. And I'll suck out your eyes.

Meanwhile, as Mosca followed his course of sensual malevolence along the sidewalk, intercepting conversation bits, events were unrolling elsewhere, but you know about them already, so they have no place here.

"You farted."

"You're smoking."

That's right. The pedestrians pay no attention to Mosca. But surely would had they believed his mind boast: Ain't been nothing like me since Eve bred with the snake and bore Adam.

Oh yes that wounded snake drags its slow length along.

"One man's trash is another man's truth."

"One man's trash is every man's trouble."

See him there, sitting in a pool of vomit, his greasy T-shirt declaring: I like my job but I hate the work, arms emblazoned with ethereal tattoos. He's conversing with---- no, he's confiding in his bottle of Night Train. "Before you run Me down, Train, good old Me, I have to tell you, Me, Moi, I'm covered with art scars." His blond curls are matted into stained, stinking felt. "Art is the only tradition which has never disgraced itself." The train whistle shrills through lobes, both left and right. "I'm not talking skin scars. Mind scars, I say. Heart scars, healed wounds, artifacts of sensual adventure." Once, as a girl-faced boy, he'd gone to the Pheromone Picnic, where he'd relished his sandwich but questioned the meat.

Coming to the doorway of a dry cleaner, Mosca paused to sneer at yet another loathsome homosap. Me, Mosca, I'll focus you on what you truly believe.

Does he mean the night-train patient, or this new loathsome homosap, or the human race?

Homosap! I'll slice him ear to ear!

When I cut one throat I cut them all.

What do you think Mosca is thinking?

Around what parable would he have us gather?

Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Führer!

Tomorrow's Trinity.

That's Mosca speaking, not me.

Flaunting a virus that can kill us all.

Immune system defense?

Forget it.

Says we piss doubles. Says we piss bubbles.

Say: "Monterey, in the day, of the Great Fish Smell."

"Hey, are you walking the line where crime and art meet?"

They bounce by. Mosca peers scorn at that fatfold couple. Had Christ been as obese as Buddha, would the Christians have a cross? No matter. At my picnic, if you're too fat to crucify, we'll serve you the bot-u-lism tuna salad of . . . sudden . . . death.

"Pete, believe me, if the price is right, I won't mind coughing down a hairball or two."

I, Mosca, am your doom. You who claim dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all that walks and creeps on earth. Do you see him there, crossing the street between white lines in that polarized rush of foot-patients? Can you hear him mutter? E-coli. Eeeeee-collllli eat humans, so, Buster, tell me, who's on top of the food chain?

And in the restaurant, eating artichoke hearts, and charred fragments of dead birds, sipping a distinguished vintage red solution of yeast shit, the married couple dines, not talking, not looking at each other, yet united by passionate mutual hatred.

You understand, of course, in this mind movie, naught is what it seems. Mosca is acrobating among your synapses. Do you dream in color?

When you pulled the carrot, you and your veggie ways, when its root broke and the soil scoured its skin, did you hear it scream? Did I ask that, or did you, or did Mosca?

"The Scots invented golf."

"Why?"

Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, Francis X. O'Connell and Fatima X lust-look eye to eye across linen through candle light.

"The second millennium is over."

"Nonsense."

Three wishes.

"Get a job."

Three wishes.

"Take a bath!'

Three wishes.

"Imagine being smarter than you are."

Three wishes.

"What feeling thoughts lie at the bottom of your Mescal bottle?"

Does the late bird get that worm?

Three wishes.

"Is that slowly dragging wounded worm Alexandrine?"

Three wishes.

"One world, one people, no place, no lines, just space."

Three . . . wishes.

"What do veterinarians do with all those balls?"

Sensing the futility of further wishful thinking, Mosca headed north, coming to rest in Big Sur, at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, where a party in progress was celebrating the publication of a new issue of The HMML Review and the advent of Spring.

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