Preface: (Madoro, long, thick and dark as a horse’s …)
Part I
White hot beaches of our cunning sea ocean my tongue, not fish, complexity marked “tincture of you” condensed in liquid womb life lubricant of milk, primordial, salt summer hair, wet thighs clenched muscular beneath a vinyl beach umbrella (ocean on my tongue?) and you.
Part II
I’m serious, no laughing now, I’m…ambidextrous?
The End
Author’s Statement
I’m a Sudden Novelist. I write tall tales in less than half a page, the focus-group-approved norm for “sudden fiction.” I stretch the truth, but at least, as is required by The Conglomerate, I only write about myself and minor goings-on, not anything dealing with world events or the Empire’s half-dozen simultaneous Vietnam-style “engagements.”
Okay, so we “free people” can’t get real opium or laudanum cause it’s more profitable to synthesize the stuff into oxycodone or morphine sulfate or dilaudid, etc. But I did indeed go to the beach with my prescription bottle of Big Pharma’s time-release goof-balls, and since real “Cubans” are illegal — both the cigars and the people — I stoked up my favorite E-Cigar (guaranteed 8-hour battery life and no ashes) and had me a good, long smoke — or rather, “vape.”
Aw hell, gimme a break.
According to my agent, Curt Clipp, The Conglomerate plans not only to turn Opium on the Beach into a feature film and book me on a special “come-back” showing of “Oprah’s Book Club,” but an appearance of yours truly on the cover of Time magazine is rumored to be a definitely hypothetical possibility.
Granted, Opium on the Beach is not a “novel,” in the traditional sense of the word, but neither is Gargantua & Pantagruel, or Tristram Shandy or Moby Dick or The Invisible Man (the book, by Ralph Ellison, not the film, starring Claude Raines), or Naked Lunch, or Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegan’s Wake or The Making of Americans or a prose translation of The Iliad, for fucks sake, they’re just LONG BOOKS!