The Lake Of Fires-When The Whore Of Babylon Strutted Her Stuff-A Cautionary Tale Of One Sarah Roe Sanders

By Leslie Dumont

[Thank the Gods I don’t have to be a free-lance writer these days because I am not sure I wouldn’t going into something safer and less anxiety-driven like being a safari guide or trapeze artist. Everybody who has read any of my columns in Women Today where I had a by-line for many years before knows even on the toughest assignment days, days when the irate editor screamed into respectively the telephone or cellphone wondering where my copy was and threatening bloody murder if it didn’t appear ASAP if not faster I would take my beating, grouse in public and secretly pray to some ancient press god for that steady job. The reason that I mention the whole question of free-lance is not only because I started out as such, including a short stint here when this was a strictly hard copy publication and only got out when it looked like I was going nowhere and Josh Breslin coaxed me into seeking more steady work but because my long-time companion and fellow writer Sam Lowell here happened to mention the trials and tribulations of one Hunter Thompson, the late Doctor Gonzo who for whatever reason committed suicide about a decade ago.

Sam had claimed that he was in need of a “hit” of Doctor Gonzo to try to figure out what the hell has happened to this country socially and politically and whether this Ice Age doomed denizens American world we live in had any previous such human sink periods. And of course all Sam had to do was grab Thompson’s General of Swine about the low-bar life of the Republic in the 1980s Reagan-Bush years when the country was first put up for sale to the low-bid junkies, the fixer men, the con artists and the voodoo economics boys who made it their business to sink the ebb tide. Junk bond artists, cowboys in the basement of the White House running foreign policy, political whores of all genders displaying their wares without embarrassment in the public square. All Sam had to say was that re-reading the columns from Hunter’s days as the gadfly outlier at the formerly staid San Francisco Examiner  was that seemed a “golden age” compared to now. Jesus.

All this prep though to wonder aloud about what made Thompson tick, why did he always seem to be on the edge of controlled panic when his assignments were due. Frankly unlike Sam (and Josh and Frank Jackman) who all worshipped at the Gonzo shrine I never paid attention to this Gonzo journalism then and the whole junkie, druggie, male dominant, weirdly out of step with the times and self-indulgent (a trait of all writers but Hunter had them on steroids) word games reminiscent of the Beats. What has recently perked my interest was that slavish devotion to “just in time” copy and his love of the Whore of Babylon.     

                 

I don’t think I need to go into the theory of Gonzo journalism except to say that its positive effect has been to break the silly journalism school nonsense about objective journalism, nothing but the facts Jack. In an age of “fake news” blather and alternate facts bullshit facts are under attack and need serious defense although that is not enough. Hunter Thompson got right down into the mud with his stories including his indulgences and his down to the wire way of operating in the publishing world. In an age of citizen journalism and expert channeling frenzies this is probably quaint now.   

  

What separated out Thompson and what has given me a bit more respect for what he tried to do was he fearlessness of going after the big guys and gals (Richard Nixon a specialty) and the foibles and follies of lots of people who back themselves or get backed into some crazy situations. With eyes wide open. That is where the imaginary of the Whole of Babylon is appropriate. My good friend and fellow writer here Laura Perkins has actually done some research on the subject via her series of articles about art that interests her. Without going into detail she has staked out a claim for the centrality of sex in 20^th art. I don’t know. What I do know is that she received all kinds of blow-back from evangelical types who have attempted to scourge her in defense of their children who might happen upon Laura’s articles. Yes, weird. What set her research up though was that they would call her either the Whore of Babylon or the devil’s servant for her activities. Laura was not familiar with that Whole of Babylon expression so when she looked it up she was surprised that all the blather was about some beautiful courtesan who used a wolf’s head and fur to advertise her profession. No big deal whatever the evangelicals thought.    

Where Hunter Thompson fits in, probably more accurately than the religious folk, is that he ripped apart the pretensions and predilections of the hustlers, con artists, fixers, junkies of all sorts, apologists for every angry yahoo and their enablers, objective journalists, White House cowboys, bottom dwellers, magpies, holy rollers and whatever other flotsam and jetsam crossed his path. He saved a special place though for what in his mind was the Whore of Babylon via the Book of Revelations and those dame lakes of fire and eternal burning of all the cretins mentioned above.]

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It is an awesome awful  fistful of horrible dreams to force a tiny six year old girl to read the Book of Revelation, yes, that hard-ass no holds barred barren section of the Old Testament, in front of adults just because she pissed her pants and lied about it to dear father, Preacher Roe. That stuff about the lake of fires and the devil’s 666 handiwork is tough enough for lonesome adults in some dry gulch Beat Western during a snowstorm with the electricity out and no other reading matter around except the leavings of the goodly Gideons who long ago left Gilead to spread what they called the good news once the Second Great Awakening burned over the rural upstate parts of the American Republic. But to under some wicked spell, and a sack full of dope and a keg of raw whiskey, do what Preacher Roe did , everybody called him that although who the fuck knew his real name except his benumbed daughter was beyond the pale even if it would explain why that vagabond frightened urine smelling rag doll turned herself into the Whole of Babylon’s unholy daughter when she came of age, and beyond. A lot of strange and awful things have been played out but Preacher Roe’s bloody sins will never be washed away even though he claimed he did those terrible things in the name of the Lord Zoroaster or whoever he was shilling for in his long hustle of a career.

See the Preacher, Preacher Roe had been “ordained” in the hard church of life which included a few necessary courses in not only scaring the Bejesus out of innocent daughters but how to keep the revenue stream flowing through good times and bad, jail time and freedom time, and how to scare the Bejesus out of the brethren, now the Brethren of the Fire in the Lake into that big new church edifice and television studio adjacent (along with other more personal items like those previously mentioned bags of dope and whiskey). Money no question. So six-year old let’s call her Sarah since that was her God-given name paid with her soul in the end for her father’s greed, avarice and incestuous desires.

That piss-induced stand-up for your sins had not been the first of the tortures Sarah went through but she always claimed that was where it started, where the lying started and the modern- day public stool-dunking as well. She told a fellow classmate once in third grade that she had seen the fires in the lake and that she had been beaten for lying about that by the old man in one of his righteous whiskey rages. The classmate had dismissed her thought except it proved true since Preacher Roe was “travelling the circuit” out toward Lake Erie way and the lake had actually been on fire for containing so many flammable chemicals. A few more incidents like that and it was no wonder that poor Sarah never could go forward either way, telling the truth or telling lies got so mixed up together she just gave up and decided Keil (the old name for the Whore of Babylon in Aramaic I think) was right to do her dirty work in public. Working behind her father’s rackets came easier than trying to figure out why her head ached so when she thought about the fires.

Almost the minute Sarah came of age, meaning turned from stick-like girl to shaped young woman she was a lure to all the boys in whatever neighborhood Preacher Roe happened to be working in (and not just boys either as she got just a little toward sixteen older and not without something from Preacher Roe along the way although she never would talk about it, never utter the word incest when questioned). We don’t have to spend much time on the details of where our Sarah fell down early on because where and how she wound up there is the real subject of our cautionary tale. Beside it has all the earmarks of story we have heard of and seen too many times beginning with that first dire understanding that what Sarah Roe had to give she would not give freely but make a profession out of in the time-honored way many young women with little or no resources except hunger for something different sought. Sought her version of the courtesan’s trade, the modern sordid way. Nickel and dime stuff until she got one of Jimmy Swag’s boys to pimp for her taking his cut and a cut of her. But Jimmy Swag and I think it was Balls Margene took their cut, took Sarah Roe down in sister cocaine land turning all her nightmares into dreams-they said. Courtesan pretentions or no she took the fall, took the path downward once Jimmy Swag’s had no more use for her wasted body at Madame Sonia’s high-end bordello in Santa Monica. Wound up doing the streets after some bum married her and took all her last dough, had a few kids by accident, had a few abortions by plan and was headed to be one more unwashed, unmoored, un-mourned potter’s field denizen like I said a not unfamiliar story.

Then like manna from heaven, a God send I guess somebody like Preacher Roe would call it in his sober moment fell down on Sarah Roe, now Sarah Roe Sanders she was calling herself after that deadbeat father and ex-husband combination exhausted other possibilities.  A self-satisfied businessman turned politician of a new sort from New York City, a guy named Donald J. Trump pulled lots of gags and gaffs and became POSTUS (you figure it out). His problem was that he needed to dump his current weak-kneed press secretary who would not absolutely toe the boss’ line, or rather lines, as fast as necessary and had turned into a donkey, an ass really. Trump, beautiful Trump called in his HR guy, a guy who used to be governor of New Jersey or some place like that and commissioned him to scour the earth, the American earth I guess I should say looking for somebody who could “take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black” without blinking. Everybody associated with the operation thought it was bizarre since the boss, unlike ghostly ex POSTUS Jimmy Carter was not known to throw out lines from king of the folk Bob Dylan’s playbook.       

                          

The connections are somewhat murky but somehow one of the that Jersey governor’s operatives had contacts with Preacher Roe who was working some “mission” scam in Arkansas and had asked him for references for that press job. Thinking of milk and honey he automatically thought of his daughter Sarah if only she could be found. One virtue of unlimited Executive office dough and connections is that almost anybody but a pure hidebound hobo can be found. And so Sarah was found working some dive whorehouse up in Half Bay south of Frisco where wasted whores have their last round-up.      

The rest of the story you know since Sarah Roe Sanders took the job (her father would ask her after a while to stop using the Roe maiden name since it was hurting his revenue flow at the Church of the Seventh Redeemer where he had been raking it in before all the media started calling his daughter Pinocchio). She lasted for a while, longer than most thought given her background but eventually the boss told some underling to give her the boot when even she couldn’t keep up with the bullshit. That’s the cautionary tale such as it is, even a bend whore has a hard time keeping up with “fake news” and alternate facts these days. As Hunter would say Selah.