"Winona Ryder's Day Off"
The afternoon sparkles like a glass of grape juice. Of course, served up in a wine glass to mark one's ascent into the stratosphere, though she sure wouldn't know what to do with that Mercedes she dragged home like a puppy with a strip of raw-hide hooked up taut to a luxury railroad car. "The Little Girl Who Could", AND DID, for that matter, feels perhaps a bit existentially stranded and knows that "being cute" confers its advantages, and being humble about it "makes less enemies", as she holds out her hand and shakes her head with an agape expression like someone "who won the lottery twice".
And this is California, "The Golden State", a promised land of leisure where hard-core conservatism co-exists with extreme "loopiness", the most bizarre menagerie of UFO enthusiasts and penis cults where everyone is driving down the 8-lane freeway at 90 mph. Is this some kind of heaven? "More like California", as a Hollywood stuntman/bronco-buster spits tobacco juice at your feet to give you his opinion "of reaching such a place" unless you kept yourself under control and that brilliant idea for a low-rent television series "under your hat".
The only way "one can cope" as a low-fi cosmopolitan and nice girl is to speak kind of a "fluent Californian" which is kind of a language filled with ironic pauses and breaks as you nervously shrug and roll your eyes and let the void tell the rest of the absurd story which, at the risk of making people uncomfortable, has you going along with "the train of thought" so everyone can co-exist under "The Golden Parachute" of Proposition 187, when it's better not to think of how taxes are collected and the budget hammered out in the foundry of the Sacramento statehouse, and the wind-stabbed region threatens to slide into the ocean with a Doomsday earthquake.
But this is the land of "happy-end" thinking, and it skitters like a ghost on a radar screen.
The real fun is the world of comic book collectables and pinball machines, the cachet of "female outlaws" like Chrissie Hynde of "The Pretenders" or the sheer absurdity of a group like "The Runaways" staring into the camera with halfway bored, sinister expressions like latter-part-of-the-70's-scuzz and probably a contributing factor, in the swirling soup of national malaise, why Ronald Reagan was elected and on a symbolic level, "chased 'em out".
Woe to dope-smokers.
Or at least to drug scholars of the trans-mundane, essentially geeks of the 1960's subliminating all their rickety libido into whacked-out pastimes with meticulous, obsessive detail. . . . . tunneling beneath the establishment like cautiously-optimistic termites. Pull back the curtain-- whisssk!-- and find "New Left" debris who happened to burrow into this eeking, shaky-edificed gig by sheer virtue "of having been around forever", since the beginning.
Call 'em Winona's parents, and yes-- they did happen to know Timothy Leary. And as these things go, it was simply "not a big deal". There the visionary of the psychedelic experience was, working in his lab "like a mad scientist", all but wearing a wizard's hat stamped with the moon and the stars of cosmic promises, bounding his escape from law enforcement like "a keystone cops" moment in the history of the long-grueling, mostly-depressing "drug war" and making G. Gordon Liddy pound his fist on the table like "The Sheriff of Nottingham".
Yes, once re-captured, "Mr. Wizard" "rolled over" and talked. . . . . a dynamic no different than what happens when a gang of bank robbers and members of "The Aryan Brotherhood" are offered sweet-heart deals by the prosecution, in case "they turn witness". Perhaps they could use some LSD and go into a Wotanisic orgy of zonked-out enlightenment, though most people "that far out on the fringe" would look at this scuzzy situation merely for its pathos, "with absolutely no sense of humor" for mortal or immortal absolutes, whether tarnished or laid out on the table like a squiggling pile of weevils and maggots.
That was sort of the point of Winona's cult hit, "Heathers". . . . . like a "left-field" mafiso throwing a dead fish wrapped in newspaper that lands across the breakfast nook of middle America with a pathetic "slap!". Though certainly most of us would not get the homo-centric joke about "mineral water", rather instead thinking about mules and saddlebags and down on one knee with pans "and gold in them 'thar hills!".
And there the prospector makes his way up to the Hollywood hills to the door of Daniel Waters, the kind of character who would write a film about bitchy popular girls and an impossibly suave, clever "comic book" heroine, and what he finds is a moping, clawing queer with a Medusa-like expression "engaged in unholy congress", turning a snake into a rod "and back again" and make our porky, Red-State hero turn "white as a sheet", if not volcanic red in rage and embarrassment, and throw the 10 Commandments down from the mountain like Charlton Heston jacked up on methamphetimines. Then he leaves, condemning "the sick man of the Republic" to hell where it belongs with disco, Betamax, and dingy-lookin' Jane Fonda exercise books with other unholy, dank things in someone's "I'm O.K/You're O.K." West Coast basement.
If a fan should ever pester Winona for signed evidence of their meeting, she ought to take their hand and say her autograph is on their heart. And then depart, leaving them stunned.
Age and treachery. And maturity on her 38th birthday.
(From your Voo-Doo Necromancer of Pleasantness)
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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