Page 143

By Jack Joseph Smith

"What's happening Animal. "Listen Prankster; realistate's what's happening. The Prankster oughta' morgage a shack for two fifty a day; Listen; In a couple years the hippies will be out. The carpet bagers with Miami Beach fer a mind will be on the sand. Hightone and gloss, no stain; Tear down the wood and adobe. Dump it in the L.A. dump; Sheet rock for the encasement of glass. No worry; the smog will stop the wind. No problems Prankster. In L.A. the image is free. I mean, anyone can see a movie star in the streets; and then go out and buy a country undershirt to go Beyond it; I mean, any filled up cost of living in-

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page turns Southern California development into a bragging, half-comic sales pitch where image, money, and erasure are all part of the same scheme.

The voice is sharp because it sounds so casual about destruction. Wood and adobe can be torn down, glass can replace them, smog can even be treated as useful, and celebrity culture floats over the whole pitch like a selling point. The source spellings sharpen the pitch as spoken patter rather than polished argument.

Claude

Animal pitches Los Angeles development as fast patter: 'realistate's what's happening', the hippies will 'be out', the 'carpet bagers with Miami Beach fer a mind' moving onto the sand. The wit lies in how casually he plans erasure - 'Tear down the wood and adobe', 'the smog will stop the wind' - and folds celebrity into the deal, where buying a 'country undershirt' is enough to go 'Beyond it'. This reading remains provisional because the upper setup and trailing continuation were too unstable to transcribe.