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out through the bug-splattered windshield, the highway system will wipe all this out --- smother "the Mother Road" ... strangle Route 66 and the Old National Trail . It will all look alike then, whipping by at seventy or eighty miles per hour; you won't see details, won't see the citizens.
    The graveyards, the towns, the Victory gardens --- hell, you'll never see those. You'll never fucking see 'em. One day, probably one day soon, they would fix it so you could drive from Seattle to the Jersey shore and never see an authentic city or civilian. I smoked my cigarette and shook my head. What will we have then? What will we be? I wondered this, gazing through the bug-splattered windshield of my Chevy as my poet/interviewer drove us through the darkening desert.
    I glanced over at Bud. He was sucking down his fifth or sixth cigarette by my calculation. And he was on his third beer. I shook my head at my own terrible influence.
    10
    Touch of Evil .
    Picture this: Venice, California standing in for wicked Mexico and the mythical border town of "Los Robles."
    There used to be canals threaded through Venice, but they backfilled most of those bastards in '29 when they knew the car was here to stay. Those filled-in canals sucked away nearly all the charm Venice ever held. Oil wells and cricket pumps were now in abundance.
    Welles was having a false bridge built --- a phony gateway to the promised land of El Norte . The bridge was for Orson's own death scene --- a fat, tragic bastard floating out there dead in the muddy Rio Grande. A great bad man finally called home to Hell or Valhalla ... wherever all the great bastards finally go to be safely out of the way of the herd.
    The crafty auteur was shooting almost exclusively by night to keep the studio suits and the bean counters at bay.
    Orson's directing of the picture resulted from an accident --- an-honest-to-god mistake . Chuck Heston signed on as star because he erroneously thought that Orson was to direct the picture. When he learned otherwise, Moses threw around his weight --- and secured weighty Welles the gig.
    OW had grabbed a hold of the job with gusto, still chafing from being fucked over Citizen Kane ; fucked over The Magnificent Ambersons ; Mr. Arkadin ; fucked over The Trial and Don Quixote . You name it. He lost Rita Lady-From-Shanghai Hayworth to fucking Ali Khan. Christ , the luck of the Irish --- all that getting fucked but never off .
    Once he was seated as director, over-eager Orson commenced upon an aggressive script rewrite. Heston's gringo cop became a Mexican. Chuck dyed his thinning, sandy hair black and slathered on the skin dye. He grew a pencil-thin moustache --- some greaser lip gravy that looked to have been lifted from Cesar Romero. Heston's gravitas, it was hoped, would offset his falling-short makeup.
    Welles next cast busty and lusty Janet Leigh in some quasi-virginal/Joan of Arc role.
    Call it more gone-wrong casting.
    But Jesus, Leigh's sure something to look at on screen. Her character's handle? Well, that was "Susan Vargas." And with those tight sweaters, she was a Vargas girl, okay.
    And Marlene Dietrich --- my favorite Kraut --- Welles had her playing a svelte, cigar-smoking Mexican madam with a mystery accent who drifts in and out of the picture in two or three key sequences.
    It all struck me as insane .
    But some others I trusted who had seen rushes swore to me that the picture cohered and sizzled at some oddball, gut-to-crotch level that bonded with truth. The visuals, always great in a Welles' picture, were said to be stunning. And Welles' rush-job-doctored script? That sucker was mostly cooking, sources said. On the other hand, the original material, a noir potboiler called Badge of Evil by "Whit Masterson," wasn't chopped liver.

    Orson looked like shit. He had truly packed on the weight, but the special effects crew had added extra blubber --- rubber cheeks and chins to make him a mountain. Captain "Hank Quinlan" ... that was Orson's