Fiddling while Rome burns, that's the latest anarchist home and garden entry into the hit parade in this lousy Bush Spring when living New York is just like being in Berlin after they closed all the good niteclubs. Here24 I have always theorized that good style would lean towards lean, brevity and concision have been my watchwords, but in my current funk when all I crave is avenues of mental escape I find myself thinking differently: apparently what the public want is evidence of the capacity to meander endlessly: why then I shall take you all on a long walk and over to your left you can see the cornfield belonging to Matthew Haney from whence a sunburned Koo emerged sometime in the late summer of 1933, fired with the knowlege of the date of his passing (Christmas Eve) and the desire to pick up something and play.
And maybe what he plays is a ukelele. Over the last six years as I have been building my silly mythos I have had Koo play any number of instruments. For instance he was for a time 'Koo Kowlick, the Kazoo Kowboy'. I may resuscitate him in that form if I ever have some kazoos to sell, but this morning I'm listening to him on the ukelele and the reason is that the prospects for my steppinfetchit career look pretty bleak and so I have been imagining myself a ukelele salesman. Maybe I could be a banjo ukelele salesman with a sideline in tulip seed. Koo walks out of Matthew Haney's cornfield sunburnt and hung over from tripping on the witchy woman's mojo bag and fired with the desire to spend his remaining days on this earth studying to play the ukelele. And in the serendipitous way of things pertaining to mythoses you have built for yourself what should just happen to exist on that warm morning hung up on the wall of Matthew Haney's porch? Can you see it forming itself of mythic ether? Why ain't it a uklelele? And not just any ukelele but one constructed of a tortoise shell.
Now I do tell you true: that tortoise, whose shell has been used to construct the ukelele hanging on Matthew Haney's porch, has just this moment arrived in the mythos of the empire of dr. bienke out of the nowhereville of my mind and yet I somehow know that his name is going to be Brett and that in his walking around days before he became a musical instrument he had lots of exciting tortoise adventures with Rabbit and Coyote and those other totemic beasties. In those days he sounded not like the ukelele he became in his dying, but like a flugelhorn with a mute (Rabbit a clarinet and Coyote a bassoon).
I don't think in any of the multiple dimensions and variations of my mythos that Koo and Cassie Dale have ever met. As I remember I killed Cassie and hung her up in a mesquite tree as the initial titillating illustration of a mystery before I even began to think about Koo. Someday I might go through the prodigious artifacts of the mythos of the empire of dr. bienke with the aim of chronologising the appearance of its creations or, even better, maybe someday I can pay somebody else to do so. Cassie has always died just about the time Koo appeared though I did run into some pages the other day where Koo and Big Nigger sliced on the dead Cassie and hid her body so that Owen would not know that she died at Mrs. Montoya's. Cassie is sort of the little girl in Hammett's Dain Curse though more actively involved and intentional about her degradation. Cassie's daddy has been most often a clerk in a bank in San Francisco and he hires the Continental Op to chase after Cassie when he gets a postcard from her postmarked Dos Passos.
Everybody knows where Dos Passos is that summer of 1933 when the most powerful radio station in all the world broadcasts from Lunaazul right across the border, and Dos Passos is the home of Dr. Earnest Bienke, witchdoctor of hard-ons. When the Op tells his colleagues he's on his way down to Dos Passos they all snigger. The Old Man decides it best to send the Op down because the Agency, which never sleeps from coast to coast, is embarrassingly without representation in Dos Passos because Sheriff Haney Scott has run off all outside law murmurring darkly of 'preverts and communists'. The Op takes the train down changing from the Southern Pacific, for whom my Momma's Poppa worked, to the Zilchard Overland in Alpine, where I visited my Poppa the summer of 90 when I was coming up to New York. I had just started drawing then. Copying Modliagani's(Sp?) in the ASU library.
The Op has his ear to the pulse of the city so he already knows that the hipster jigaboos, the jazzmen, the hop-merchants and their floozy clientele, they turn through the white noise of the radio dial each night until they hit the burning bright signal of Radio XEX and the Kountry Sound of Kowboy Koo Kowlick. The train out of Los Angeles is thick with gangsters on their way to get themselves some of them sweet Dos Passos cantaloupes just bursting with sugary sunshine. Owen Bright, Minneapolis mobster and Maryjane purveyor to the Mid-West, which is to say a major proponent of racket diversification in these last days of prohibition, is the new best friend of both Sheriff Haney Scott and Beagle Zilchard. They are together imagining Dos Passos as the 'Havana of the Desert'. We're pretty sure these days that it's Beagle who will be partially responsible for Owen Bright's girlfriend Cassie's death.
11:50:03 AM 
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