The Physics of Crime

by Tom T Gradeczek (Email Tom at tomtgradeczek@yahoo.com)

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Summation:

The main character ignores the huge risks he is taking during 4 action-filled days, while trying to arrange a happy and financially secure future wedded life. The rewards for performing many feats of legerdemain are much greater than he thought they would be. But they are shocking as well, a fitting end to a thriller.

Preface: The Los Angeles Zone of Sold Souls

Along the San Andreas fault north and south, and the Los Angeles - Las Vegas corridor, east and west, lies the center of the mercantile body culture for the USA, and perhaps for the world. Those who live there know they are in a low human value zone. Anything human or bestial is for sale. Bodies are glamorized in movies, advertising and television. Body builders are held in high esteem, with Arnold Schwarzenegger elected governor. In the early 1900s the silver screen sold larger-than-life images of the first "movie stars", many with lives that ended badly. No matter! The media made it seem glamorous to die after being made a god or goddess. In the 30s radio even sold voices by Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, George Burns and Hopalong Cassidy. Even the porno industry has societal status in this dead-soul world.

The image of any or all your body parts can be sold in LA. There are fashion models for every type of clothing imaginable from swim suits to Oscar gowns, gangsta clothing to green hemp, desert clothing to high style "rags" worn by the rich and famous in Palm Springs, La Jolla and Beverly Hills. Many of our biggest pop music stars also live in Los Angeles. The bodies, images or fantasies, the real and the surreal, are all flushed into the LA Basin.

It isn't just bodies that are for sale in Los Angeles. It's everything about bodies that is also for sale in LA. Body parts can be reworked, toned up, implanted or lipo-sucked. The siren song of fame makes people yearn to sell themselves, or to sell bits of what they have, even if they are hand models, hair models, or shoe models. Or maybe they sell every body part in between. People in Los Angeles seem to be willing to trade away what they are today and could be in the future, for a day of glory, perhaps, tomorrow. The glamor-addicted faux-famous give everything, and anything, they've got to achieve "stardom".

Everyone who goes near this "mercantile body vortex", can be sucked into it. Being swept away by celebrity or fashion, being glamorized or idealized, seems to be many a life-goal. People are indoctrinated as children by Disneyland/or/Disney Studios or Barbie (the idealized teen from LA), or Home(s) Alone, or all the TV and movie studios in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City. But the most idealized image flim-flam of all is HOLLYWOOD. There is a huge tide of "wanna be's" constantly being sucked into the vortex of this "bodies for sale" whirlpool in Southern California and Nevada. Most get digested by the quagmire.

In this flesh-consuming environment you are either selling your body, helping to buy and sell others, trying to just get along while ignoring the body trafficking, or living apart. Even those who try to live apart can be tainted in LA. It's corrupting and invasive. Some people think they are above it all, but the more they get down into the dirt (or up, as in air pollution), if they try to get something done in Smog City, it always pollutes them, like the very air they breathe.

Few can stand up to the attraction of selling out in Los Angeles. Many try to just be themselves amongst the ebb and flow of this enormous septic body-culture universe. Even most of the pure or innocent (like Shirley Temple) eventually sell out in this body world. But those with a critical eye might try to use this body universe for themselves, surfing on bodies (and the people who live in those bodies), zooming along in the Green Room of swirling humanity, trying not to pearl dive, face plant and go under. They may try keeping apart from the buying and selling of bodies, while retaining the important bits of themselves that they can call, "Me". Those people don't want to change or glamorize who they are, THEY JUST WANT TO BE. Sadly, even these hard cases with "sang froid" can fall prey to the lure of the "body universe."

Just get in, get yours and get out, that's the best philosophy. Don't try to become one of the glamor people, or the style people, or the power mongers. Just try to be yourself and then, take reasonable risks, use your successes to find a future-world to be real. People put themselves out there to be used, a la Marilyn Monroe, or Groucho Marx. If the need to use those people arises, try to be fair (even when it's "cruel but fair"), because It's more than most will offer the addicted. People for sale hurt themselves. Sometimes a few folks actually try to help them. It's good to try to help others, especially if they can help you.

Be a Good Samaritan, but not every minute of your life. The cooler you are about the sea of humanity surrounding you, the better you see where the cracks, and tubes and seams are. Those are your passageways to find out what you need to know. It isn't just who you know that matters, it's how you play them and how you let them think they are playing you. "LA Poker" is the mental game going on behind everyone's eyes. You always want them to think you know more than you do, AND more than they do. Best of all, you want others to dream about how you can make them more fabulous (famous, rich powerful etc., you fill in what's fabulous for you). It's about what you are going to do with all the special knowledge you really KNOW that help you negotiate the waves. Just don't tell them you want to get what's yours and then get real, because that's one way you'll lose at LA Poker. You should never play games using your real self, because no one is perfect. Someday you'll make a mistake, and lose. That's when you only want to give away your illusion as loser's loss. Then you can just move the real you, further along, towards your goal of living "real" in the unreal realities of LA, Vegas, Hollywood and San Fran.

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