* * *

The cityscape is a hodgepodge of skyscrapers designed to look like wine bottles and martini glasses and nosebleed stilettos, all constructed from the recycled dreams of dead rock stars. Banana airplanes glide through the heavens on glittery feathered wings, and every Christmas Eve the pink cotton candy clouds rain psychedelic gumdrops.

Freshly gutted cherubs are displayed on meat hooks in the storefront windows along the sidewalk leading to my high-rise coffin at the intersection of Lincoln and Olympic Boulevards, otherwise known as the end of Route 66. I reside in a replica of the Statue of Liberty, way up at the top, in the torch. The building’s doorman is a life-size bronze statue of the prior doorman, who worked here for fifty years before he was killed in a doorman-related incident.

The penthouse suite (where I kick up my feet) is ultraintrauterine, with sky blue carpet and fluffy white pillow-clouds shaped like couches and recliners, wallpapered in dove feathers. Two wide-eyed windows afford a panoramic view of the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which is currently on fire. Don’t ask me why. All of our answers are mansions aflame. The whole world is burning in slow motion.

My refrigerator is stuffed with roadkill marinated in Dom Pérignon. My toilet is made of cholla cactus... my bathroom mirror is made of yellow misaligned teeth, closetful of fizzled neon Narnia. If you lift up the carpet in the far left corner of my bedroom, you’ll find a knothole in the fleshwood floorboard where you can peek at the kaleidoscopic clockwork universe within me.