Please welcome our new serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday

Crumbling Slowly Down to the Ocean Part 3: The Moss Foundation

The bar smelled of stale beer, piss, and disinfectant. A black dwarf with an eye patch and a hell of a bank shot was shooting pool with a tall, lanky albino dressed all in white. The pool table was positioned awkwardly near the entrance to the men’s room; the green felt was worn through and almost totally degraded. An old man in a wheelchair, his left leg lopped off just above the knee, sat in a far corner nursing a beer and quietly watching the dwarf and the albino with a suspicious gaze, as if he expected all hell to break loose at any moment.

“Care for some company?” Evelyn repeated. “I have the entire afternoon off and I haven’t been to the museum in years.”

I had to get to know her a little better first; in this part of Hollywood, jumping into a car with a stranger, no matter how attractive and appealing the imagination of the libido can make it sound, can be counterproductive to one’s attempts to remain above ground. Just ask the unclaimed bodies resting in shallow graves up in the Angeles National Forest.

“What do you do for a living?” I motioned the silent bartender for another round.

“I work for the Moss Foundation in Santa Monica,” she said, then ran the tip of her pink tongue across her crimson lips.

“Never heard of ‘em.”

“We’re a think tank, privately funded. We’re concerned with the idea of entropy, the tendency of energy in a fixed system to run down.”

“So you sit around and think about entropy all day?” I tried to keep a smile from playing on my lips but intellectual bullshit always makes me laugh.

“It’s not terribly amusing,” she said, batting her lashes quickly. “Machines cannot go on forever, you know. The whole process that keeps our modern society afloat – technology, capitalism, industrialism – is subject to thermodynamic entropy, which creates waste, and communication entropy, which creates silence.”

“You’re waiting for an apocalypse,” I said.

“We’re trying to forestall it. Or at least slow its progress.”

Part 2

Please welcome our new serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday

CRUMBLING SLOWLY TO THE OCEAN 2: THE SCREAMING POPE

Since she offered to buy me a drink I made it a top shelf selection (or what passed for top shelf in this dive): Maker’s Mark and a water back. She didn’t flinch when the bartender gave her the total, simply rolled a twenty off a wad of bills thick enough to choke a Santa Monica Boulevard streetwalker with and tossed it at the guy.

“You live in the neighborhood?” Evelyn said after introducing herself. Her voice was laced with whiskey and cigarettes and maybe something else I didn’t want to know about.

“Here?” I laughed. “No. I’m going to see a show at the MOMA.”

“You’re awfully far from the art museum,” she rasped with raised eyebrows, sipping her Canadian Club.

“I got thirsty.” I knocked back the Maker’s Mark, let it scorch and claw at my throat for a moment.

The bartender rolled a shot glass full of peanuts toward me.

“It’s a Francis Bacon exhibit, British artist, dead for awhile now,” I said while biting into a peanut shell. “There’s one painting I want to see, been dying to see it for some time. It’s called Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent, done in 1953; it’s sometimes called The Screaming Pope. He captures the cry of Christ on the cross through the shrieking image of Pope Innocent, sitting upright in his papal throne as if in an electric chair, everything shining golden and his jaw is dropped open in an eternal scream of damnation.”

“Torture and eternal damnation,” she said, coal-black eyes locked onto mine. “Sounds like my idea of a good time. Care for some company?”

Part 1 |

Please welcome our new serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday

Like every other wandering and shapeless fool in this wind-blasted, fire-ravaged town I used to believe in the myth of the future, and I shaped my life by this belief. I turned my back on the past and eagerly awaited the dawn of tomorrow.

The land is restless in L.A., restless and sliding like the high lurching cliffs that confront the ocean in Pacific Palisades; that should have been enough to clue me in to the impermanence here, the impermanence of life and of the city itself.

I knew that Evelyn LaScalles would murder me. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on her in that dive bar near Seward and Willoughby, a particularly nasty stretch of Old Hollywood. She smiled and asked if she could buy me a drink. I lowered myself onto the high-backed stool next to her and tried to ignore the obvious outline of a gun in her handbag. It was none of my business. A lot of people have good reason to carry a gun in L.A.