Friday, January 06, 2006

INTRO & CHAPTER 1 OF BOOK I STOPPED THINKING ABOUT(This is most of what's been written)

ARTISTE

INTRODUCTION

This is pornography. You are only reading it because you can not look at it. It is only interesting because it involves bloody carnage, money, and nudity. There is no vital information to be gleaned from reading this. No higher purpose, no life calling, no cautionary wisdom, and no caustic rebuke of general mores is to be found on this page or any that follow. It is just a story told in straightforward, factual reportage. It concerns a man raised in money who grew to become even more successful in his father’s business than said father had been. This one is for prurient interests. Please don’t find anything else here. There will be pictures.

When William Bush was a young man, he made a name for himself as the socialite brat son of a well known installation artist, Georgie Bush. While Georgie was bringing in a fortune by placing mimes next to a desk, his son W. was out enjoying the nightlife that New York had to offer. By the time Georgie had pieced together a living room in a gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, thus achieving billionaire’s status, W. was busying himself in a gay bar along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, during the early 90s rush among the glitterati to “go gay”. It was this implicit condoning of gay marriage that nearly toppled Georgie’s reign. But few things are as inevitable as an installation artist becoming staunchly wealthy. In the end W. recanted and publicly agreed that gay marriage would bring about the downfall of U.S.ian civilization. His little rich friends agreed, and thus Osama Bin Laden was defeated in the greatest battle in the War On Terror I, The Gay Marriage Amendment.

Nobody could accuse Georgie of not raising his boy with the proper respect for humanity. W. finally achieved respectable status in his own right several years later, with his now classic painting/mixed-media-piece “Hobo Who Got Stabbed In The Chest, Drowned In Sulfuric Acid & Melted”.

The questions that now surround the life of W. Bush are a sad turn of events for the man once hailed as “The Prince oF Pop Art” (Time Magazine, 1994). At what point did killing homeless people go from concept-kitsch to over-bearing bore? Is it really fair for a celebrity to fake his own death in a Pay-Per-View spectacle? Doesn’t the glamour-loving public deserve more? Or is First Amendment Constitutional double-speak about “free speech” (Los Angeles Times, May, 31 2003) more than just a string of syllables?

One thing is certain. W. Bush killed a lot of people. He was an innovator at a time when less corporal artists stood around doing nothing. And he was an American original. Nowhere else in the world could he have bought the modified Hummer H2 that he used to kill David Justice and seal him in a mylar pouch with lifetime statistics sewn onto the back (“Baseball Card”, currently exhibited in the Hague).

What is not so certain is what part W. played in cleaning up the rampant drug use in the professional athletic community. As well, what part did he play in stopping global warming? Ergo, did he actually do any of the things he took credit for? Aside from killing a bunch of homeless people? How much does any of this have to do with the actual story? Very much less than one might imagine.
Enjoy


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Chapter One – In The Beginning…

The night began at a party in the Hollywood Hills home of actor David Gourmet, grand-nephew of Edith Gourmet. He had decided to bring together the world of Young art and the world of young Hollywood. He succeeded in a way he had never dreamed possible.

It was a cool autumn night in a sleepy City of Angels. Winds rushed through the Canyon as though God himself were having a huge asthma attack brought on by the stress of bringing his most prized creations, celebrities, together for a night of revelry. He had to top his last outing, and now things were very cold as W. Bush drove his brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee along Mulholland Drive to the Valley-side home of his boyhood friend David.That date, October 16, held a special significance for the boys already. It was the day they had met, lo so many year a-prior (5 years), at the Santa Monica Crossroads school. David was on his way to an art class when he tripped over a sleeping W., who was in deep concentration preparing for an acting class. The irony of this chance meeting was not lost on the two, who had made it a year-marker. This particular year, they had invited many A-List guests to ring in their “New Year” together. Even though each man had his share of homosexual moments, it is not clear whether or not they have ever shared anything more than a passing sexual bond.

“W. wasn’t really a gay man, so much as he was an opportunist”

David Gourmet now resides in a California penal colony in the dusty backroads just south and east of Santa Barbara. Even though he has been in prison for “14 years, 6 months, and 13 days”, as he states repeatedly in our 3 days together, he still maintains a modicum of the youthful boyishness that made him so attractive to the teenage girls (and boys) of this country. He will be free on or around May 27th, 2007. It is a hard road to plow for this child of priviledge. Where he used to beg the pretty boys at The Prison (a high concept bar that ruled the club scene of Los Angeles for three weeks in 1987) for oral sex, he is now forced to perform fellatio on 400-lb men with syphilis. His neck is green with advanced syphilis of the throat. If he survives the next several years inside, noone can say how long he will survive once he is out. His once booming finances have certainly dwindled. Whoa is he.

“I remember when W. was happy just to get his picture in the WeHo Art Sheet. He’d scamper around the prison looking for boys to dance with just so he could get his picture taken. He wasn’t gay, just thought-provoking.”

David lights a cigarette, stares into the distance for a moment, takes a long drag, stares for a moment, then takes another drag. What is amazing is that he never exhales. The smoke escapes through several holes in his throat on the way down. He never really gets much of a nicotine fix.

“It was thought, at the time, that to be an important new artis you had to be die-hard gay. W. wanted to be important more than anything else in the world. His commitment to that idea sustained him through many an ass-plugging. All of us knew he wasn’t gay, so we would plow his ass unnecessarily hard every chance we got. Even though most of us didn’t like anal sex. I still don’t much care for it.”

He motions to his throat. I don’t know what the syphilis in his throat has to do with anal sex, but I nod and laugh. A moment passes between us.

“He never hit me.”

This small fact may have ultimately been the spring board for W. to escape the fun-boy ghetto of glamorous art and become an MTV icon. It definitely kept him out of jail.

As that fateful night began in earnest, there were about 3000 people crammed into David’s 2436 square foot home. Some of them were crushed and killed within seconds of entering the party. Paramedics waited outside, helplessly, while more hangers-on and pseudo-celebrity stragglers attempted to enter “The Main Event”. There were other parties around town to celebrate the meeting of these two momentous characters, but most of them were in dark church cellars, with prayers being sent up to the lord like kites every 13 minutes. The Hollywood Hills home of one of the two greaties was absolutely the hot spot.

As David and W. sat above the fray, lounging in near isolation on David 16’x 22’ mattress, W. turned to his old friend and let out a secret. It till haunts Mr. Gourmet to this day and, to this day, he will still not reveal what was said.

“He turned to me and told me that he believed in Jesus and that, under the One True Cross, he, William Bush, would become more famous than anyone – certainly any other painter – had ever been. And he would do it by destroying the devil.Now, you have to understand, up to this point in human history the devil is still seen rather benignly. Sure he plays gags on people, like telling little kids to go eat poop, but he’s a harmless prankster really. He’s this huge religious figure with this huge following of fans, but nobody believed he was really evil.But Georgie, W.’s father, had really had a profound impact on his boy. It’s too bad, I always thought he took more after his mom until that point.”

Georgie Bush was part of a radical Christian sect that had sought out the devil in all his many guises with the big idea being that the devil could be killed while he was wearing a white robe. What has never been made public is whether it was Georgie or The Devil who would need to be wearing the white robe. If you read the first sentence in this paragraph it isn’t really ever made clear. That’s the secret that David Gourmet holds, and he will probably take it to the grave.

It was at that point in the party that W.’s plan for cultural domination became clear to David and the several onlookers who were in the room not saying anything.Todd Grace was one of those onlookers. She remembers it like it was yesterday.“Just like it was yesterday.

”With a little prodding I explain to her that I wasn’t intending my question as a simple yes or know. “Do you remember what happened?”

“David was kind of tuggin’ at W.’s pants bottom, right around the ass, y’know? And he starts to shiver. David, I mean. I guess W. had let one go and didn’t tell anyone. He thought he was top of the cats pajamas, that one did. So David recoils, and we all gasped, you know, ‘cause we knew David was thinking he could just assault W.’s asshole. And W. had a different idea.”

Todd Grace is a woman with an ironically masculine name. Even though she is barely 40 years old, she has picked up all the annoying speech traits of an 85-year old. She also has the teeth and hearing of an 85-year old, and I assume those things are all related. On her driver’s license, her age is listed as 85, but she is only 40.

Even though they basically told the same story about this moment, I feel it is necessary to cut between the interviews of both Todd and David. It uses all my sources and makes this book seem much more thoroughly researched.

David stretches out his long thin frame. He still looks like a movie idol at times like this. He is reclining on a bench in the common area of the prison. One suspects that there is no reason for David to stay in prison. The guards barely notice him, and the door to his cell is never even locked. Still, he tried to walk out once and got shot in the foot. Never again.

“So W.’s sitting on my bed, and I tug at his pants bottom…”

Lost in David’s still ever-so-dreamy eyes, I had forgotten what he was talking about. With razor-sharp precision I am able to finally remember just in the nick of time. He is telling me about Georgie’s announcement of his plan to become a big huge celebrity. A plan that apparently worked all too well.

“He turns to me and says, ‘David, there’s a lot of dead people down on your front lawn.’ I just smiled and put on a goofy Southern accent, because what gay boy can resist a Southern cowboy? I said to him, ‘I reckon there maught bee.’ He didn’t laugh, but…”

“We all cracked up! Heaven’s to Betsy!”

Thanks, Todd.

“He just looks at me for a moment. Maybe 5 seconds, this moment was. And he says, he says, ‘I should go down and paint them.’ I thought he was gonna take a picture or draw a sketch and go home and paint that as a picture.

”No, thank you, David!"

According to witnesses and news reports, including the New York Times group interview with the security guards at the party (December 21, 1993), what W. did was walk downstairs from the bedroom to the common area, parting the crowds as he went, pick up seven of the dead trampled bodies, and pile them up neatly in the front lawn. He then returned to the house, made his way to the linen closet, and pulled out seven white flat-sheets. He went back to the front lawn and, in full view of guests paparazzos (not one of whom snapped a single photograph), and security personnel he laid the seven sheets flat in the yard and immediately placed one dead body face up on each sheet. Next, he made his way to the garage before materializing in the front yard with seven cans of house paint, each a different color. W. Bush then proceeded to denude each corpse. Their naked, bloody, glistening bodies now covered only by moonlight, and leaves and twigs, W. began painting them. He opened the cans of paint, and poured the full contents of each one on a separate body and sheet combination.Immediately, the crowd responded. They were obviously in the presence of greatness.

The reason that they were at the party had now been confirmed. W. Bush (and David Gourmet) was a truly great man, deserving of the Presidency of the United States of America. He had just created art.

Within minutes, there were bidders for each piece. “Yellow (No. 5)” pre-sold (since it was neither dried nor framed) for $16,000,000 to an “investor”. That night, W. pocketed well over $74,536,392 in total sales. It was shear pandemonium.

“I never actually left my room. I just went to sleep. He was still my best friend at that point."

Here in a California State Prison sits a tired broken man. His name is David Gourmet, and he did not paint any of the victims of his party. Beside W. Bush, 3 others followed suit. While none of them proved to be as successful, they all became billionaires in the late 90s. David Gourmet, however, became a prisonaire.

On the subject of Mr. David, sir, Todd Grace had this to say of his actions that fateful night:“He went to sleep.”