SCOOTER ORANGEWOOD AND THE ALIENS....AN ECO DYSTOPIAN FANTASY NOVEL

scooter orangewood and the aliens chapter 1-2

SCOOTER ORANGEWOOD AND THE ALIENS

ANECO- MAGICAL REALISM NOVEL:

COMPLETEWITH TRAINHOPPING,

TREESITTING, GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS

ELVIS,THE ALIENS

ANDMUCH MUCH MORE...

I bought this oldVW Jetta for $300 and started driving it around industrial areas ofEast L.A. by myself late at night. I was seventeen years old, asomewhat successful porn queen and living happily on my own terms inthe weird, small basement apartment that I rented out in Hollywood. Still, life made little sense to me. I called my parentsoccasionally, who kept suggesting that I go to business school withthe newfound capital I had been earning.

"You won't beyoung and beautiful forever", my mother told me. "You shouldinvest the money you have in your future now, before it's toolate."

Since I wasonly seventeen, I didn't imagine that it was going to be too lateanytime soon, because youth and beauty are, of course, the eternalpresent. Otherwise, my parents were of very little help and totallypreoccupied with this new account they had at their agency, whichinvolved the marketing of Dolly Madison snack cakes to conveniencestores around the country. They sure were making a lot of money, butsomehow their lives still seemed empty and unfulfilling to me. Theproduction and consumption of products, although it is necessary tosome degree, never struck me as the most important thing in life. Onthe other hand, I was having a hard time figuring out what was.

I loved thesurfers and the sleaze, the gay body builders and flea markets ofthe city. The absurdity, the glitz, polish and poverty of thedifferent neighborhoods took me to other worlds. And late at night Iwould go to the train yards. The organic chaos of the cars humpingand smashing into each other really turned me on. I'd watch themfor hours on end, traveling in and out of the yard in east L.A.

Late at night,leaning against the hood of my car I would dream of a fulfillmentI'd never felt before.

Cinnamon, one ofthe girls that I worked with, was from a small town in Alabama. Shetold me about how, when she was a little girl living on her grandma'sfarm, she and her brothers and sisters used to sit by the traintracks for hours and wait under trees in the shade for the freighttrain to go by. Then, they'd jump on the ladders and ride a mileor so to the other side of her grandma's property before theyjumped off and walked back along the tracks. Once, her olderbrothers and sisters had already jumped off the train when sherealized that the train was now going far too fast for her to stillget off at the end of the farm and she ended up at the next crewchange, somewhere in Mississippi. She got off the train at the nextyard and, being six years old or so, the railroad workers called herparents to come get her.

The romance andbeauty of this small child rushing across the southern landscape ofmythical shacks and sharecroppers, wild, wet heat from the southernsun burning across her limbs and other spaces made my skin prickle inthe LA night. In that moment she was a small child and terrified.Embarrassed and guilty, but completely free. Riding along on theAlabama train through a different landscape of internalized desire. Riding through beauty and love. Riding through the sun.

So here I was, inEast L.A. Waiting late at the train yard in the L.A., Mexicalisummer night. And...I just got on. A junk train full of boxcars,gondolas and grainers pulled up and sat across the road from me and Igot a warm jacket and an old blanket out of the car, one of thosewool Ecuadorian ones that I got at the flea market. I grabbed agallon bottle of water and some granola bars and just got on. Iwasn't even planning to. Ever. I just sort of did it. Somethinginside of me wanted to escape the bounds of what was here and gothere. Something inside of me wasn't rejecting anything, butmoving toward something else. The train was like a boundary toanother dimension I hadn't previously seen. It somehow symbolizeda Jungian shadow side of myself that I'd never really explored. Itstarted from here, but headed off into there. Into some other type ofinner space where the psychological and the physical intertwined. Jung always said that outer and inner space were a dialectic, meaningthat as you have more external stimulation in your environment youhave less internal stimulation. You have less internal dialogue anddaydreaming, less imagining as more things happen. The train yardwas weird in that, although there was a lot of stimulation, carscrashing together and shadowy shapes of trains and workers and lightsflowing by, it was still like a fugue state. There was a lot ofstimuli, lots of movement, but it was very boring and monotonous atthe same time, so the physical sights and movements of the train yardand your thoughts, feelings, ideas and desires all came together andbecame intermixed. Dreamlike. Intertwined in your psyche until youweren't sure where one began and the next ended.