An exclusive excerpt from ‘American Lamento: Savage Tendrils of the Hollow Beast’
The humidity unfurled in torrid pulse-strokes drenched with soft-skinned summer musk, swooning like a locust swarm up and down Fifth Avenue. Chaos lingered in the waning wreckage of a strawberry moon. Shadows whispered under Saturn’s winking eye. American flags flailed recklessly as darkness hunkered down. I wallowed in the pale dusk, still reeling from a nuclear aftershock of psychosexual delusion. Red and white, seared together pink as flesh. The stars were out. I sang the blues.
It happened on a Thursday in Manhattan. The gnarled glass canopy echoed gleefully, yet mournfully, bathed in contradiction. I seldom set foot in the Big Apple. But for her—the Journalist—I always made exceptions. Always lurching toward her presence, always longing, always tidying her shoe rack on command. So when, days earlier, she had texted, “Debate night and chill?” I didn’t even clock the question mark. It might as well have been a bullseye.
I wrote back: “With you I am insatiable like the bamboo in your backyard. I crave the rain. I tremble at the rumor of monsoon. The skies could open up and carpet bomb the Earth with water. I will never be wet enough. See you then.”
That’s how it was with the Journalist. From the outset, our relationship thrashed like a rickshaw sprinting over ancient cobblestone. The plot didn’t make any sense, but the writing was authentically good. We met in 2023 at Stephen Bannon’s birthday/going-away-to-prison party in Las Vegas. I was technically still dating someone, whom I would rather not name, but I was ready to cut her loose. I didn’t want to sweat through another South Carolina summer, and I’d never be able to talk her out of running for governor.
I didn’t care that she was a journalist. Friends tried to warn me. “She’s a raving lib,” they said. “She dated Keith Olbermann.” I thought they were joking. That night, when we locked eyes during the chorus of “What a Girl Wants,” it was like gravity ceased to function. Reality and fantasy and destiny and fate converged, collapsing into the black hole of her relentless womanhood. We collided at once in a tangle of sinews, tendons, and feral blonde locks that slithered on freshly made sheets. Sensitive. Courageous. Sexy. Cool.
By the time we cuddled up in the honeymoon suite to watch the President and the Challenger exchange ideas on the debate stage, I had come to view our relationship as a metaphor for the national nightmare we had all been living through since Jan. 20, 2021.
Was it all a terrible mistake, the Journalist and me? Her brain glistened with wisdom. Her bosom heaved exceptionally, like the soul of America. But I couldn’t keep up. My brittle bones ached with age, threatening to snap under the slightest tension—the flap of a bald eagle’s wing, the smack of a bubble gum wad in a Little League dugout, the purr of daddy’s old Cadillac coming up the driveway after a hard day’s work at the steel mill. I was old enough to be her father. She was young enough to be one of the (alleged) daughters whose lawyers keep requesting my DNA.
Not long ago, the man who shuffled onto the CNN stage was someone the American people trusted to deliver them from despair. They’d locked eyes and belted out the lyrics to their favorite song. But the music was too loud, and the vibes too epic—otherwise they’d have realized that he didn’t know the words. He was simply nodding along to the jingle of the neighborhood ice cream truck in Claymont, Del., circa 1954. Not unlike the power of love, shadowy forces conspired to manipulate vote counts and ensure his “victory.” A better, more age-appropriate alternative was shunted aside and punished for trying to win us back on a cold day in January.
Had I loaded the gun, or merely cocked it? Either way, the barrel pointed straight at my heart.
It was a bad night for the President, but I hadn’t really noticed. The Journalist lounged on the sofa in her skimpy pajamas, scrolling on her phone. I got cozy under a blanket, sipping Scotch and trying not to fall asleep.
“My fiancé is losing his mind right now,” the Journalist said. “LOL.”
“Your what?!”
