An Attic Of Forgotten Toys And A Copy Of The Doomsday Book: The Los Angeles Lunar Society's Excellent Literary Adventure

“No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic." --Anonymous

"If you look deep into a young actor's eyes, you're likely to see an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Doomsday Book." --Sir Laurence Olivier

This past weekend I spent some time cleaning out the Los Angeles Lunar Society attic with my assistant, Alphonse, when he finished work on the graveyard shift at Pink's Hot Dogs on La Brea. He has lots of anecdotes about drunk celebrities, having manned the counter of this savory snack stand at the witching hour of 3 a.m.

Always wishing for the betterment of my employees, I encouraged Alphonse to publish these witty recollections of public displays of affection, open flies and coke-ringed noses--not to mention the attendant bon mots that go with them--in a leather bound Lunar Society chapbook entitled "Painting The Town Pink." This book is available to Los Angeles Lunar Society members only, alas. But you need only meet Alphonse and get him talking, as I unhappily learned after drunkenly sharing some of my own embarrassing moments with him.

So there we were in the attic, filled to the rafters with many painted Keith Moon portraits, hundreds of ornate silver absinthe spoons, hundreds more pairs of my barely or never worn designer shoes (sshhhh! private use of attic storage is against club regulations!) and my old letters. (I intend to donate my letters to the club's ephemera collection. I hope to be buried with the shoes.) Some of these letters are from writer William T. Vollmann about this and that, and one is from John Langford of the great punk band The Mekons telling me he loves me for my mind. I recall too that Cynthia Plaster Caster later reported to the Village Voice that Langford had the second biggest "cast" after Hendrix, prompting me to write him a letter of my own including this newspaper clipping and his own words "I love you for your mind" echoed back to him.

Anyway, amid all this epistolary treasure--underneath last year's Tory Burch cork wedges and beside a stuffed Ibex head--Alphonse and I were astonished to find the 1866 diary of our first Lunar Society librarian, Nora, who died in one of Los Angeles' mental institutions. We were so breathless with discovery after reading aloud for nearly an hour that we laid aside our work, tucked into our breakfast (a Pink's dog, they're good cold too) and chewed slowly, ruminating.

Now, if you said "mental institution" on the East Coast, one would immediately think of a couple celebrity nut houses, like the one where Robert Lowell and James Taylor went crazy up in Massachusetts, or Silver Hill, or St. E's, where they kept Pound after he went Nazi-nutsy, or even Bellevue. But let's face it--the whole idea of a loony bin just seems redundant in Los Angeles, and therefore our nervous hospitals remain nameless and the greats who have unravelled there suffer additionally from their mental nervousnesses being uneshrined, literary-wise.

So The Wit Of The Staircase, as a public service no less than a Los Angeles literary-scoop big plumy peacock feather in our (chic, netted) bloggy cap, will begin excerpting Nora's diary entries this month. So now Los Angeles will have at least one totemic Victorian nut case, and Oliban Acres, the institution which alternately cradled our nutty Nora like an infant in its bosom and imprisoned her in its gloomy labyrinthine gothic corridors where she retreated ever further into the Overlook Hotel-esque shrub maze of her own formerly well manicured mind will be emblazoned across the literary landscape like that pink flowery viney shit that climbs and chokes and entwines every-fucking-thing in Greater Los Angeles and surrounding counties. Thanks to us.

For just as Freud had Schreber and Scott had Zelda, we at the Lunar Society want our very own crazy person to project the parts of ourselves we are too weak to acknowledge and want to disown onto. And you know us anyway at the Lunar Society--no matter what you've got going on in your limousine or below your belt, drunk or sober, sane or California cuckoo--we love you for your mind.

Diary excerpts to begin next week. Direct press inquiries, scholarly research requests, offers to "join" the Church of Scientology and other communications/threats to Alphonse in my office at The Los Angeles Lunar Society. Offers for the cinematic rights to the story are to be sent to my representative at International Creative Management on Wilshire Boulevard.