UNITED STATES—A touch of banana yellow brightens a bureaucracy. Graydon was really going places now. He had parlayed a Post Office Box on Crenshaw Blvd. into an office at City Hall. There was a method in his shadiness: it was a ticking time bomb, and even if only a handful of people read the newspaper, leaders, the political class and old timers, one day a busybody at the Times would dig into his actual Hollywood residence and uncover that he had been ineligible for the office he had run for and won. By then it was too late.
Miller occupied the seat of District 10. Everybody was looking for their own way or, more often than not, looking out after number one. He knew the territory inch by inch from his time at 23rd Street and Estrella Avenue, and then working at the census bureau, when it was dry and dusty, a lot of wig shops and storefront churches. Liquor stores with their colorful zany signs. That was in a previous century: an old photograph. After the riots, a lot of streets burned down, and you got shopping malls and chain stores.
“America, you’ve come a long way, baby. We’ve gotten rid of plantations,” said Miller in one speech, “But we still love our chains.”
The Emerald City that rises in the desert of the Valley of Smoke, a moniker the indigenous people gave the place even before smog was invented. The growing, expanding and multiplying city had to steal to live. It was a nasty job but somebody had to do it.
The Voice said America had to be saved, she had to undergo internally what she had perennially exported and inflicted on the outside. The cooked putsch, the overthrow, the surgical hit. That was the formula, trouble in the periphery and peace on the continental shelf, but more accurately, it was an uneasy truce, a chronic malaise. Surely it was treason what the Voice from the Sky had asked he mastermind. Doubtless it would lead to the supreme sacrifice and there would be a price, beyond the political cartoons with a Pinocchio nose like they had drawn of in the Washington Merry-Go-Round of Alvin Dewey when he said that the Montego Revolution was not carried out to protect American business in the country.
It too had been a desert, an arid unimproved wasteland, there was nothing there, only a jungle and beautiful coastline before the bananas were planted. Now the Marine, Smedley Butler who had an American Eagle tattooed on his back knew from the mission to Nicaragua that they were just there to keep their eye on the country as a favor to Allied Fruit.
Signs and portents. The new moon in Virgo was harshly aspected. The astrologers cautioned to moderate impulsiveness, anger and sexual frustration. There was a heightened risk of hate, violence and war. A dangerous Saturn square Uranus would promote cultural and political change. As well as a high risk of potential stabbings, arson, family strife, rape and assassinations.
“They want you upstairs,” an aide to the Mayor came to the office where a leak in part of the ceiling had made the plaster come down and exposed lathe. Miller had his boots propped on the desk.
“Mayor wants to see you.”
Miller got his boots off the desk pronto and put down the letter opener he was toying with. And went upstairs to the big marble office.
“You’ve got a new job, Miller,” said Madame Mayor. “You’re going to be Inspector General.”
“Wow. Thank you! My gosh. . . Inspector General.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Washington, Morgenthau. They may’ve lost the Senate. They’ve been watching you and recognize your ability. You can broker a deal with the devil without quarrel.”
To be continued…
