DFW (Dallas Fort-Worth in this context; not David Foster Wallace [www.davidfosterwallace.com], the prodigious postmodern writer who committed suicide in 2008 and whose maximalist prose always impressed me as a refreshing interlude among the steady chords of Hemingway minimalism, and to whom I am dedicating this piece of writing, if only by virtue of style—elements of style; no, on second thought the dedication is inappropriate and the delineation is decidedly more surrealistic, at times even abstract-impressionistic—a form, anyway, that filters rather obtuse objects floating through space and time into the distillation of a central concept, a singular meaning) is a Texas metroplex which, per capita, boasts more mullets (www.mulletjunky.com) and more Lot Lizards (their offices:  truck stop parking lots; their customers:  truckers mostly, with the occasional resourceful sex addict acquiring a big rig and infiltrating the scene) than any other locale in the United States.

The particular Lot Lizard being featured here also rocks a mullet (a femullet, to be precise), and she shares a double-wide with her morbidly obese emphysemic mother who continues to smoke a carton of Old Gold 100s per diem while lethargically picking at fungi-laden toe nails during a syndicated episode of “Cheaters” on which button-puncher extraordinaire Joey Greco, larger than life in a hip black leather bomber on the Lizard’s  prized 62” JumboTron screen, and Mr. Greco is crashing through a base-thumping house-party, the partygoers raising large red plastic cups of Hawaiian Punch and Georgi Vodka into the air and toasting Mr. Greco and going, Go Joey It’s Your Birthday, we’re gonna party like It’s your birthday,  his entourage of steroid security goons and the shaky camera crew in tow, as always, and Liz predicts That trifling bitch-ass trick’s gonna get hers, and she says this over again, but much louder, and adds Right, Momma?, and her mother laughs wheezily in approval as she reaches over the inconvenience of her oxygen tank for another Old Gold 100.

Outside the walls of the double-wide the wind howls and knocks over some of the fatter yard gnomes in the rhubarb garden in which their eight year old nephew planted some marijuana seeds at the BBQ yesterday, and many of the wire legs on the flimsier pink flamingos bend and lean the flamingos almost flat against the ground, and empty cans of Steel Reserve are whipped across the freshly mowed patches of grass off of which the wind scoops up a greasy superSONIC hamburger wrapper and carries it high above the trailer park and out into the adjacent thoroughfare that is gridlocked with morning rush, and the hamburger wrapper lands, and actually sticks, on the windshield of a gigantic metallic-white ($950 extra for the metallic) Mercedes SUV whose driver drops his electric nose hair trimmer down into the footwell, and he bangs his fists on the Nappa leather-wrapped steering wheel and growls Oh Scheisse! and in the back seat the twin ten year old girls begin giggling and even look away from Sponge Bob frolicking about on the drop down DVD screens, and they look at each other and in unison say, Daddy!, and it dawns on daddy that the twins hadn’t been too young after all to remember the foul-mouthed outbursts of their Nazi grandpa who they preferred tucked away behind the drawn shades of the locked pool house and whose English was very limited, but the old man nonetheless successfully learned how to say Asswipe, McGriddle and Don’t take  fuckin’ deal!, adamantly refusing to acclimate to ze American vay after fleeing the motherland, and when he died at 105 of autoerotic asphyxiation two Christmases ago the family, rather than being shocked by the oiled-up manner in which his nude body was found, was considerably more shocked that the addled former war criminal had willed his entire fortune to George H.W., whose wife Barb used the generous inheritance to re-landscape the sprawling grounds of their Houston estate, 240 miles southeast of DFW, where some landscapers are working right now on finishing a fat joint as they huddle around one of those old color Casio portables that they continue to watch even after the “Cheaters” credits roll, and since the homeowners have gone to Kennebunkport for the week (to keep it real—on the Blueblood tip, if you will—rather than ride the Bluebonnet gravy train that reinvented the wealthy Easterners into home-fried Texans) and the marijuana is strong, possibly dusted, and the soap opera that follows “Cheaters” has its hooks firmly in their baked brains as the newest cast-member fumbles his lines in a scene that was left unedited, as it suits the character’s charming nervous disposition that had garnered the actor the part in the first place, this 21 year old so extraordinarily good-looking that it was difficult to punch his ticket too quickly, and the casting directors always wanted at least a second look at how everything flowed together: his rich black hair, his glistening—almost wet looking—pale blue eyes, the creamy white complexion that is not so white as to render him Goth.

He’d landed the soap after one such casting director saw his Revo sunglasses ad in Los Angeles magazine; he had felt very comfortable doing the ad, which required only fifty quick shots to capture a keeper;  he felt safe behind the large mirrored shades, his black hair uncharacteristically slicked back, even as he played around in the phony surf of the fabricated beach, because he was still a bit paranoid that he would somehow be recognized, and it was a sensation that hit him at seemingly random moments, and his ears would burn and his face would flush and his heart would beat very fast; he would be reeling, suddenly, from the relatively brief gay-for-pay gig in North Hollywood, whose long, grueling shoots required needles jabbed increasingly often between his toes, and he still thinks of the ritual quite often—the blood drawing slowly into the rig, his penis erect in anticipation of the subsequent plunge, the rush, the instant high; but at crystal meth anonymous they explained to him that to think of the ritual only was normal—euphoric recall, is how they described the phenomenon—and he would indeed so easily forget about the irritability, the edginess, the gruesome cracks of reality through which the light was always far too bright, and how he had to wash down entire blister packs of Lortab with cheap rum handles, repeating the process like an obligatory chore until five or so in the morning in order to sleep after what was typically four days and five nights of countless still shots and endless film shoots of locomotive marathon sex, and when he’d fall asleep at last he’d be lucky to get ten minutes, his progressively darkening eyelids fluttering and unable to close over the bloodshot into which the director would squirt one Visine bottle after another until those tender eyes would again glisten innocently during the crucial money shots, and he’d begun to chew handfuls of Viagra for breakfast and drink entire carafes of luke-warm Fiji water from the catering table cluttered with day old bagels and Wenchell’s donuts and mini-muffins and other such food items that had to be forced down, and then there were the various lubricants and sex toys and magazines like Hustler and Penthouse requested by the performers, most of whom claimed to be straight but deep down, alone in the awkwardness of sober reflection, weren’t really sure anymore, and while his sister walks the DFW truck stops perched above a jammed up stretch of I-35 she’s thinking that the morning’s off to another slow start, and as she kicks an empty bottle of Shiner Bock across the truck-stop parking lot, she considers her actions, and she considers the world, and she considers how the world is cold like her actions, and she retrieves the bottle and angrily smashes it against the asphalt, and she wonders why she is here, stuck in DFW, while her brother is living his dream in Hollywood, and when Soap Digest recently asked him about his family, he said that they had died when he was too young to feel the impact, that he was raised by his grandparents, and he didn’t even mention that he had a sister, and she had never felt so hurt by anything, not even when their father left them, and the answers to the interview questions were lies, all of them, even his age, because he was ashamed.  Because he is ashamed.