Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Death in the afternoon as the Sun also rises

TO MESQUITE, for the running of the bulls!

I was sitting with the Lost Generation on the patio of Le Toenail Infecte, the finest cafe on Mesquite Avenue, the Champs d' Elysees of the city known as "The Paris of Extreme Northern Clark County," except when it rains, when it is known, briefly, as "The Venice of Extreme Northern Clark County," or during summer afternoons, when it's known as "Hell on Freaking Earth." We were awaiting the running of the bulls.

"Th-the running of the bulls?" Fitzgerald stammered. "I thought we were here for the sauntering of the bulls, or the leisurely afternoon strolling of the bulls, or, at worst, the vigorous mall-walking of the bulls! No one said they'd be running!"

"Pansy!" Hemingway snarled, punching the bridge of his nose, killing him instantly.

We were a spirited bunch, all right. Papa was still riding the acclaim from his first novel, "Yo Quiero Taco Bell." Joyce was working on the groundbreaking manuscript that would become "Men Who Blow Their Noses Then Look Into the Kleenex, and the Women Who Love Them." Ezra Pound was busy inventing a key for the lower right side of the telephone dialing pad. Picasso wasn't yet painting people with both eyes on one side of their heads because, having avoided Bullhead City, he'd never met any. Gertrude Stein was drunk. As for me, I was still smarting from the war, in which I'd lost my privates; luckily, I still had my corporals. Nonetheless, the horror haunted me.

We weren't sure if we'd arrived in time for the bulls. (They didn't call us the Lost Generation until we let Joyce drive. Later, when Hemingway took the wheel, we became the Lost and Won't Ask For Directions Under Any Damn Circumstances Generation.)

Of course, Mesquite was all sparkling demimonde in those days. Le Toenail Infecte was filled with the convivial clinking of glasses and the thud of falling bodies as Hemingway sparred with the city's social elite. Stein raised a large mug. "Whaddaya call these beer glasses?" she asked. The Mesquite waiters, exhibiting their disdain for Americans, ignored her.

"Bulls are good, truly," Hemingway said, launching into another of his famous soliloquies. "Truly good. Fine, noble beasts, truly. And good. Oh, and well." The crowd applauded, trampling Pound to death in the rush for Papa's autograph.

Later, we moved to an outdoor table at Le Petite Inflammation. Picasso doodled on the napkins, dropping them into an envelope marked "Museum of Modern Art." He displayed his latest cubist scrawl. "I call this one 'Still Life With Beavis and Butt-head,"' he said, beginning to gag on his own vomit.

By now, Stein's beer was gone. "There's no there there," she mumbled.

"I call this one, 'Beginning to Gag on His Own Vomit,"' Picasso gurgled as his chair pitched backward. "It's a self-portrait!"

Suddenly, the air was filled with a heavy plodding sound, as if someone were reading aloud from a Gertrude Stein novel, as well as the pungent odor of livestock, which, in fact, was Gertrude Stein. The bulls!

"Da bulls?" Stein murmured, lifting her face from a pool of beer and vichyssoise. "Save Dennis Rodman for me!" Then she collapsed, dead of liver failure.

Hemingway stepped into the street to face the onrushing bulls, his jaw firmly set, and was immediately killed by a truck.

Ah, Mesquite when it sizzled!

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