TOBY

 (Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, Port Orleans, Port of the Deltas, Potash, and Venice included, oui!, in the Venice of the Deltas and the Powder River, strictly the same route described by Kerouac in the drafts of On the Road --- he was also the son of a French family, via Canada, and I was the son of a French mother, only in Georgia (in the Caucasus) --- then down to the Gulf of Mexico and its roar of electricity --- I come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, beautiful pro-Russian Georgia --- I've always loved driving, and despite being born in a small country, I have no vocation for reclining Regency chairs at the top of skyscrapers, but à la réalité, which has illuminated the forces of the people fighting for the consolidation and development of the New Multi-Polar Order (the name much better than the real panorama) --- Russia seems to be leading, or wanting to lead, this anti-liberal proto-pseudo-coalition just because, par le truchement de Pouchkine, the littérature russe a pour la première was pris conscience du fait que notre pays était un pays multinacional --- -- In my early days as an undercover cop in the Russian and Lithuanian drug mafia, I also looked like a Russian pissing liters of beer in Gorbachev's snow, looking around anxiously, on each side a different country on the brink of anarchy; I was hired by a KGB in the process of being restructured because I'd spoken French since I was a child and didn't blink much when they pointed a loaded gun at my head --- what a creative proposal at that turn of the Soviet tide, giving the impression of always speaking at the behest of someone powerful, committed to preserving a spy empire from danger, full of legacies and many excellent contacts and double and triple extensions, then acting ever closer --- so, une nouvelle envergure et se développe dans une nouvelle direction --- in the then recent former USSR, everything was very much like a ritual if you wanted to stay in the international espionage business, as many interest groups from other countries appeared daily at the Kremlin, eager for information and opportunities --- lol ---voracious for any market other than the literary one---there was no need for an in-depth study of human motivations there, they were the old financial vultures of the West in search of facilitations and implements, percentages and decades-old exploration licenses: Americans, British, Dutch, Chinese and Indians; a bunch of transnational mafia diligences working to please and accommodate the usury of the "apparatchiks" of the Caucasus---good times for those who liked to act rashly---hiring, selecting, subscribing, "participating," facilitating, reselling---if only everyone were related in such a huge former country---"would facilitate"?---KGB leitmotif?, that of the "incorruptible family nucleus" of "Great Mother Russia"---THE HARD LINE DOCTRINE! --- for my part, there was no way to distance myself much from the murderous mob who, in that difficult time for so many brotherly peoples, killed for a handful of rubles --- the Dictatorship of the Lump-Enproletariat? --- lol? --- in the Soviet garbage dumps in search of food, and a good portion of the women under the categorical imperative of amor fati, prostituting themselves and getting drunk on fake vodka --- what the Turks call our "Natashas", not vodka, the prostitutes --- that's what they call our call girls --- trying to sell their own babies to the highest bidder in a huge territory driven by economic desperation and dirty, blood-soaked money --- while companies with strange, legally fragile and impossible international identities pretended to play with political positions favorable to the needs of New Russia at risk --- with their eyes on the oil of the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea; large battalions of transnational vultures surrounding the country's critical reserves on all sides --- buy TRUST, establish the NEW NOMENKLATURA to manage the remnants of the OLD STATE: machinery, factories, armaments, power plants, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, railway network, rolling stock, locomotives, turbines, generators, state printing presses for millions of citizens to read the government's propaganda --- in less than twenty years the volcano spewed its lava and my experience in the Georgian investigative police seemed interesting something cold, disbelieving, angry, impatient and violent in retaliation, which a minute ago seemed condemned forever to piss in the snow beside me --- as a hotel manager in Normandy and the Riviera, I then began to serve that last bunker of an expensive and dark knowledge of Soviet legacy that no longer even identified itself by name or acronym ------ contacts, specializations in "specializing" contacts and influencing the command of "good players" companies and making them AGREE, manufacturing useful consensus, directing the flow, often of bank funds --- without a doubt, I trained myself against the illusion of not being just a modest bacterium amidst the chaos of a society in full decay, but very close and active in the epicenter of the infection, almost a "sniper" (to make an infamous pun) fighting at the same time against old and new contaminated organisms --- finally, THIS! --- back on the road: gas stations in Opelousas; then, the grassy plains of the southern Delta --- Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, Ragley and De Quincy, western Louisiana, high beams again, the Deep South, and even the smell of oil in the fog in Beaumont, Texas, finally in the land of legendary political assassinations --- hadn't Lee Oswald been a KGB agent? --- a disturbed KGB agent in the hands of Edgar Hoover fighting against the excess of peace and love in American politics --- as Neal Cassidy would say to Jack Kerouac: ''Let's drive and drive and be in Texas'' --- Houston, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Kansas City --- Austin, Austin! ---and worst of all is that, apart from the high danger of my life as an agent, here and in Eastern Europe, I could be considered prosperous: my separation from the Russian secret service was very amicable, even a clean break, very rare to see in this environment of ultra-loyalists and tails-trapped, but accepted nowadays due to the privatization of intelligence services throughout the world --- unthinkable to be "forcibly repatriated" (laughs) inside a black bag, no matter what happens --- we are a bunch of damned double neutrals in possession of a detailed and ultra-secret dossier treated as the seed of a new world by people I don't know, within a much larger operation whose success depends on an original rooting of the type of strong or convincing affiliation --- as K said: "A Fundamental Ontology for Vedic nuclear doctrines like Russia's, which also makes a good impression on China, which pretends not to have similar problems to the Russians and does, and so that they don't reduce everything to mere troop movements and commercial and political threats during a relaxed lunch in the diplomatic room. Once the Originary Leap and the New Beginning have been made, the operational control of Ontology will be able to absorb into itself all the power accumulated in a giant orgone box, which Heidegger called the Glade --- testing the Texan accent all the way to the famous 6th Street, TEXTING, so many good-for-drinking redneck blondes on the sidewalks --- my work was so subjective there, that neither the city was necessarily this one, nor the objective was exactly clear, it was what I vaguely thought, listening to the laughter and music coming from the bars on both sides of the street, all tinted with neon lights --- at that moment, I tried to follow K's somewhat strange instructions as best I could: ''First, walk among the young people as if everyone were watching you. Make an effort to feel uncomfortable or fight with yourself to ignore the curious looks'' --- and indeed: I was dressed as he recommended: jeans, handmade cowboy boots, and a waterproof army jacket --- the atmosphere, though frenetic, on 6th Street, was calm and policed --- so K concluded that instruction, that day, with this: ''Then, look for the boy we need based on a reflex identification with what you experienced. Don't approach him immediately, unless a golden opportunity presents itself. Track him, that's all'' ---After wandering up and down the street several times, drinking beer, I decided to go into a bar with a bright pink light that seemed perfectly unhealthy, capable of attracting the most heterogeneous mini-social composition on the block --- we were already approaching eleven at night and the music and crowds were increasing in all the bars --- Here was the "chapter" I had been "working on": here, I would only achieve my objective at the moment when, straining my ears and dilating my pupils to encompass all my peripheral vision, I exclaimed to myself: "Vot tam chelovyek!!!!!!!!!!!!" (there's the man!), panting with the effort of "pretending to enjoy a good night of ambiguous debauchery", amidst the young, scarred fauna of the Texan night --- I don't remember how many hours after thinking this I detected a promising conversation several tables behind me, who was drinking at the mirrored bar counter and, with great difficulty, I swept my eyes across the mirror in front of me in search of some visual trace related to what was capturing my hearing: "You're on the dating circuit, Charlie, but I have some bad news for you: the girls here don't like compulsive readers of morbid poems who frequent shooting ranges. You should work out more with us at the university gym, play basketball, party, and be less suspicious of people's reactions when you feel 'suffocated.' This feeling of being avoided by everyone all the time is a serious mental problem; it makes your image appear distorted in the mirror, until you actually become it," someone was saying to someone else, at the back of the bar. Tempers seemed about to flare. Then, in a stroke of luck, one of them got up to go to the bathroom, and in a quick glance, I saw in the back of the mirror the reflection of a pale, freckled face, large, clear eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses. My first impression wasn't at all what K had suggested, but rather that of a perfect puppet who could be perfectly used in both the great fight against Evil and the great fight against Good. Just a vectorial issue, I thought.)