Prick & Chuck meet Felicity’s “Trump Insider”. What can they reveal, what scandal do they know about, is Gonzo reportage about to make the big time?
Tune in for this next exciting instalment of ‘The Hitch-Hike…’ eh, A Prick in America. Oh, shoot. Hope there’s not any more almost plagiarism going about.
Transcript
Felicity’s revelation was related with the digital precision of a surgical strike, yet carried the theatrical flair characteristic of her clandestine operations. She said little. Her activism was always almost imperceptible to those who believed activities should be writ large and futile. Hers was not the activism of certain defeat. The mission parameters were stark, immediate, and laced with the usual absurdity: Las Vegas. The objective: a rogue “Trump insider.” And this mission she’d given over to her father because… well because she thought the information might spur me into some sort of positive, clean and sober gonzo experience. I’m afraid she really didn’t understand how deep the rot had set in this place she loved. Sober… clean… those things really did not exist in the way she understood them. They weren’t positive actions at all. They were negative, and their antithesis was crucial.
There was nothing left but to undergo the train journey to Kingman, Arizona. Before embarking on this forced pilgrimage, Chuck and I performed our own unholy sacrament. A concoction of substances was consumed, not merely for escapism, but as a deliberate, if chaotic, tool to sharpen our perceptions, or more likely, to warp them into a state of heightened, though paranoid, awareness. The impending trip was not just a physical movement across the fiery landscape, (and Los Angeles, by this time, had been set on fire by Herr Drumpf) but a descent into a drug-addled psychological wilderness, where the mundane would become grotesque and the absurd profoundly revealing.
Felicity’s parting words,”Don’t converse with her for too long. You won’t survive,” were ominous.
The journey proper commenced from Sacramento, a blur of urban sprawl quickly giving way to the rhythmic clatter of the tracks. We boarded the Amtrak, navigating the labyrinthine connections before transferring for the final leg to Kingman, Arizona. The hours stretched into a hypnotic drone… 25 hours of relentless motion and blurred landscapes. We settled into our reclining seats, the huge window becoming a cinematic screen for the unfolding tableau of America. My pink bats, I noted with a certain detached amusement, seemed to be able to keep up with the “Southwest Chief.” Some, indeed seemed to be speeding ahead to meet us at our surreptitious rendezvous.
As the train rumbled through the vast stretches of the American Southwest, my drug-enhanced perceptions transformed the passing landscape into a stark, monochrome, almost hallucinatory, representation of systemic neglect. We witnessed the visible signs of capitalism: dilapidated homes, struggling small towns, vast stretches of seemingly abandoned land. A voice, captured in some fleeting memory, echoed our observations, suggesting that well over half of the population here were on depression medication. The visible poverty from the train window thus became a tangible, living manifestation of the death of the American Dream.
Our conversation, fueled by the drugs and the desolate scenery, inevitably veered into the political. We began to connect the dots between the widespread poverty we witnessed, the riots we were witnessing on our phone screens… fuck the political campaigns targeting the poor to vote against their own interests! The hopelessness we felt was not merely personal disillusionment, but a shared societal burden, a poison seeping into the American psyche. A splintering of meaning. The shattering of all order except that which Drumpf and his chums were modelling – their new gold dream. Their new cubic zirconia collars.
“You know, Prick,” Chuck muttered, his voice low, almost mournful, as the train rattled past another neighbourhood of broken windows. “All that… all that we saw. From Portland to Sacramento. Those tent cities, those poor bastards walking the highways, the woman in the car… and then those poor sods in the bar. They’re being fed shit, aren’t they? A toxic, orange-painted lie. They’re struggling, truly struggling, but they’re convinced it’s the ‘woke’ or the ‘immigrants’ or the ‘elites’ who aren’t their kind of elite. Not the ones flying to Mars, but the ones who read books.”
I took a long pull from my Jameson, the warmth a fleeting comfort against the cold, hard truth. “Indeed, my dear Chuck. It’s a masterful piece of manipulation, isn’t it? Convincing people to vote for their own servitude. To blame the fellow sufferer, rather than the architects of their misery. Brenda the gruff barmaid, with her ‘feudalism’ and her ‘Elon Musk should decide who lives and dies’… it’s a desperate cry for a strong hand, any hand, to make sense of the chaos, even if that hand is crushing them. And I wonder, now the toddlers have been fighting, is she willing to give the executioner role so easily to the Africaaner car dealer?
And those workers, blaming ‘coastal elites’ while their bosses buy another jet. It’s a tragedy, Chuck. A grotesque, western tragedy.”
Chuck nodded, his eyes fixed on the blurring landscape. “They need change, Prick. They said it themselves, didn’t they? ‘Something needs to change!’ But they’re looking in the wrong damn direction. They’re being led down a rabbit hole of manufactured outrage while the real predators feast. We must do something, Prick. We absolutely must. This isn’t just about Trump or Musk or a political campaign anymore. It’s about the very soul of a new world order.”
A profound shift occurred within the rattling confines of the train. The initial chaos and cynical detachment gave way to a burning conviction. Recalling those desperate whispers of “needing change,” Chuck and I looked at each other, a silent understanding passing between us (and we were as stoned as Lord Pob of Torry during his heady Boris days of underground raves and alleged surreptitious homosexuality).
After hours of rattling through the vast emptiness, the train finally ground to a halt at Kingman, a dusty, unassuming outpost that felt like the very edge of civilization before the plunge into Las Vegas’s artificiality. The air was dry, the light harsh. We quickly secured a hired car, a battered brown sedan of some old American make that felt like a forgotten relic, perfectly suited for our Gonzo pilgrimage.
The drugs continued to warp our perception, turning the desert into a vast, shimmering canvas for our paranoia and heightened awareness, where every Joshua tree seemed to writhe and every distant mountain range took on an ominous orange glow. Finally, after a long, gorgeously hallucinatory drive, the towering hotels of Las Vegas became visible from afar, a beacon of artificial light and manufactured and disappointing wet dreams shimmering on the horizon. We navigated the chaotic Strip, a sensory overload of flashing lights and gaudy grandeur, before finding a cheap hotel tucked away from the main thoroughfare. A sanctuary of sorts, before our plunge into the heart of the neon beast.
Just as the desert sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in garish hues, my phone buzzed – our contact! The rendezvous was set for a famous Las Vegas venue. We arrived at the House of Blues Music Hall at Mandalay Bay, a space known for its eclectic music and slightly grungier vibe than the grand arenas. There, amidst the dim lights, the thrum of a distant bassline, and the murmur of the early crowd, we found our contact.
But she was not alone. Sitting with her was Jim Bob from Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. He was “just passing through on his way to a gig in a tiny dancehall in a dusty village in Nevada,” and he knew her from a tour Carter USM had disastrously undertaken through Mongolia in ‘93 that had ended with them having to hand over cash they’d just been wired from Smash Hits to a British indie hating local drugs warlord… a detail that could must be true in our current state of borderline reality.
I, ever the music aficionado and prone to embellished recollections, reminisced with Jim Bob about a legendary, almost apocryphal, incident: a private Carter USM gig in Sheffield in 1994, where Prince Ed. almost definitely crowd-surfed naked to “Surfin’ USM.” Jim Bob, with a knowing smirk or perhaps a genuine, drug-addled memory, laughed along, adding details to the fantastical tale of royal stage-diving amidst a sweaty, orgiastic aristocratic crowd. Some of what those minor Royals got up to that night will haunt me forever. And I’ve never eaten stuffed Ayam Cemani Black Chicken again, regardless of what was in there being royal or not.
Jim Bob, ever on the move and with the road calling, made his excuses and prepared to leave. But not before promising me a pint in “the French place in Soho,” a casual, familiar future meeting point that grounded our latest encounter in a sense of ongoing heightened reality.
Jim Bob’s departure left a slight vacuum, quickly expanded by the soul sucking woman who introduced herself. She insisted on remaining anonymous, a common enough request in this line of work. I immediately christened her “Sparkles” – a name that starkly contrasted with her genuinely depressed demeanor, her slumped shoulders, and the slow vomit of negative, depressive words that tumbled from her lips. This utter sucking abyss of a person was the “Trump insider,” a conduit for the bizarre, unsettling truth, a weary oracle in a city of manufactured, blinking neon dreams.
Sparkles began her revelations, her voice flat, almost drone-like. She had worked for Trump as a makeup artist, carefully applying his signature orange hue. But she left, she claimed, after Melania “installed Russian agents as his assistants, makeup artists and dressers.” I, ever impatient and feeling like I was going to be swallowed by eternity, dismissed this with a fearful sigh: “None of this is news.” Indeed, the public consciousness was saturated with such rumors of Trump’s Russian connections, with allegations of him being codenamed Krasnov, a Russian asset. This was already widely circulated and unverified. Chuck, meanwhile, had succumbed to the combined effects of the drugs; this churning vortex of a woman who was sucking life from us as we sat here, and the dullness of the “old news,” his head lolling onto the table in a deep, oblivious, exhausted sleep; he later described the feeling as his past, present, and future becoming a tangled skein, their distinctions blurred, their meaning lost. The light that once illuminated his world, carrying memories and dreams, found itself trapped, unable to escape the black hole’s clutches, seemingly leaving his soul in an eternal, inky darkness.
Sparkles surely would be an superb US Ambassador to the UN… if only Trump could recognise talent.
If I didn’t fucking well didnt get away from this talking void, I too could find myself falling…
With a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of a thousand orange-stained collars, Sparkles cut to the chase. Her voice dropped an octave, which had the effect of bringing on the fear throughout the entire venue as lots of people pulled on their jackets and made for the door in a synchronicity I haven’t witnessed since my ex-wife Mindy came back on stage at my mother’s funeral for an encore.
Her voice was a deep conspiratorial whisper that I had to unfortunately lean in to hear.
She told me that she knew exactly what he wore on his face.
What’s more, she knew precisely where it was made in special batches for him personally.
The revelation was delivered with a deadpan precision that made it all the more shocking in its depressing banality: “Bronx Colors Boosting Hydrating Concealer in the shade Orange BHC06.” And, she added, these special batches were made in Swiss design offices and flown over in a private jet.
I, jolted by the sheer specificity of the revelation – the sheer tangibility of it compared to the nebulous Russian rumors – shook Chuck awake, my voice low and urgent. “Chuck! Wake up! We have to act… and fast,” I declared, the weight of this absurd truth settling upon us with the force of a cosmic joke.
“But we need to get the gang back together…”
I slapped down a few hundred of Chuck’s dollars and we made our escape.
This was exactly what we’d been travelling for. Sparkles was the unlikely spark. Our Gonzo crusade was surely reaching its dénouement – a mission directed with precision at the orange-hued face of the devourer of the American Dream. A story so huge, we had to ensure we were insulated from what surely would be a face with the pallor of tinned, chlorinated chicken.
And, Chuck knew a ket dealer.
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