>>12193
Sunday, April 24, 2005
The Farmer’s Market on Fairfax and 3rd is a Los Angeles landmark, attracting tourists and everyday Angelinos alike, as well as many famous faces. Among the celebrities I have seen there are Muhammad Ali, Terri Garr, Tyra Banks, Laura Linney, Keenan Ivory Wayans, the guitarist for The Cult, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, and Weird Al Yankovic.
But Ann Coulter is the only celebrity I’ve ever spotted at Farmer’s Market that I wound up fucking in the ass, hard.
It would be fair to observe that my feeling obligated to present the list of celebrities above in roughly Black-White-Black-White order is indicative of my own carefully Liberal sensibilities. And that this sort of conscientiousness is more than a little ridiculous, on examination. But what I notice about myself only on reflection, Ann Coulter seemed to recognize and respond to in an instant, like a puma recognizes an injured giselle. For Ann Coulter is a predator. A predator with a hungry asshole.
I first spotted her sitting at a table in front of The Gumbo Pot with another woman who looked not unlike her, but a generation older (I neglected to ask her at any point subsequently whether this had in fact been her mother). I vaguely recognized her—there’s always a lag time placing faces you know from cable when unconfined to a telescreen—and began to notice, stealing furtive glances up from the copy of Steinbeck I was reading, that she was eyeing me with unsettling scrutiny.
The next thing I knew, her companion (mother?) had left and Coulter was standing over me, looking skeptically at my reading material.
‘The Grapes of Wrath, huh?’
‘Yes’ I said, faking composure. ‘It’s fantastic.’
‘It’s a fantastic primer for vacuous proto-Communists everywhere,’ she said dismissively.
‘I don’t know about that..’
She sighed. ‘I don’t have enough ink in my pen to keep a running list of what you don’t know. May I?’
She motioned to the empty chair next to me.
‘Of course.’ It would be fair to say my voice trembled a little.
She sat and said nothing. Ann Coulter evidently takes an unappreciative view of small talk. That she was eager to continue antagonizing me became evident when I re-opened my recently-insulted book to resume reading. A young man passed in a t-shirt proclaiming ‘Iraq Nam’. She stopped him.
‘1. Haircut. 2. Shower. 3. Get a job, you sniveling hippy,’ she glowered. ‘You’re probably too high to remember that, so write it down–if you can write.’
He looked at her with dismay and scampered away like a kicked cat. She turned to me with bloodlust.
‘What do you think of the war: complete success, or very nearly complete success?’ she asked.
‘Well, in no time—barring the strong possibility of Civil War–we’ll have a democratically-elected anti-US Islamicist government in charge of the world’s second-largest oil reserves, so I’d have to say only very-nearly, on the complete success scale, at a hysterically distorted best.’
She showed her teeth. ‘It sounds to me like you don’t support our troops.’
‘I think that ‘Support Our Troops’ business is the most crass, craven cowardice ever to go unquestioned by the allegedly Liberal media.’
‘Yes? Yes?’ There was oddly growing excitement in her voice.
‘It allows the Administration to absolve itself of responsibility for its own flawed policy. It’s no different than if you sent a classroom of 2nd graders into a burning building, and when anyone objects you throw in their face that they "don’t support our 2nd graders"’
‘Where do you live?’
‘A few blocks away.’
‘Take me there.’