novel: money and vulgar marxism

Topic: Money and Vulgar Marxism

Setting: SoCal. San Diego, to be specific. OB. Sitting next to a fire on the beach. Watching the sun go down. Surfers catching the last waves. Vodka, lime, and pot. A lot. They all just spent three days in Tiajana and are just now coming down. In fact, they are a little lucky they all made it back. One puked their guts out for three days off bad heroin and tap water, one was briefly abducted by thugs and beaten up enough to pee blood, and one was, for all intents and purposes, raped, except that she got in his car on purpose hoping to feel something beside numb and pointless in her own life, and when he asked her if she’d like to simply be taken back to the border, she said, limply and self-destructively, “no, please.” But this night they are all hazed out and calm and exhausted and thrilled to be alive and sitting around a fire in OB like regular old-school hippies.

Someone has just said: “Fuck it. let’s start taking caravans of clothes down into Mexico like a few times a year…maybe medicine too.”

To which someone else replies: “Are you fucking baked? You going to be the great white Robin Hood of starving artists? You have a short memory, asshole. The last time you decided to take a trek like that south of the border you nearly got yourself incarcerated. I don’t care how cool it was you talked to an ACTUAL Zappatista. We nearly had to come rescue your ass. So don’t gimme that shit about how we’re all going to don berets and get all CHE and shit. We all have places to live. We all have enough to eat. We all have the ability—the luxury to travel. We all get to make art. Think about it. None of us have our hands cut off working in diamond mud and none of us get slaughtered and buried with pig’s guts in anonymous pits and none of us live under any kind of real threat…let’s be frank here. Oh and do I need to narrate back to you what just fucking happened to us in the LEAST DANGEROUS MEXICO of all of MEXICO? I mean there’s a fucking TROLLEY to TJ. You wanna do something with your money that matters? With your art? With your big American bleeding heart? Give up your quest to make a difference and go work in a mine or a factory or a rice paddy. Be a janitor. Clean up other people’s shit. Buncha hypocrites. The only reason you have ideas like that is because you can. You come from a position of such privilege you can think benevolent thoughts. Christ. Gimme the weed. I need to be WAY more high than this to sit with you assholes. Oh, and one more thing, braniacs. Take a look around you. We’re in motherfucking SOCAL. That’s where we are, my friends. You can’t be an American Marxist or Florence fucking nightingale sitting on a beach smoking pot in fucking SOCAL. You can just be a cartoon of yourself.”