The Porno Master

Coho City wasn't much of a city.population 3389. It was strung alopng the lengthof Coho Creek before it finally fed into the West Branch of the South Fork of the Eel.
Currently it was running water in all direction. The rains kept the otherwise neglected Coho shiny clean. This was once the capital of the County before Paul Bunyan junior, the first of the successor to the first Emperor of Logging, thru and threw a fit relocated the seat to Bunyana.
I visited Wishy Whitehead, hippie detective, at his office in the amazing copper castle - the Vets Building. It had been the Opera House or the County Court House or the Whore House or something public and showy. A flimsy cage of an elevator was there to take me to his third floor rooms.
The ceilings were low on the third floor and the wrap around windows were narrow enough to run artillery out through.
Whitehead accentuated that with a huge desk, an oversized armchair, a coach of similar proportions amd several heaps of cushions. He also had a half dozen rope chairs hanging like mobile at face level and which could be locked to the floor through deck rings.
Whitehead was not alone today. The lawyer. Albion MacMoon, had angled his Lincolnesqe frame onto one of the armchairs. They stopped their talking to fix a steady gaxe upon me, something of a smirk of macMoon's and a look of pity on Whitehead's.
"Ah, said MacMoon,it's the secretary of the Marquis de Sade."
"The Porno Master," said Whitehead in a tone of feigned awe.
Their response was typical of the reception given to my publication of the Memoirs of a Class Warrior: the 5th Paul Bunyan
I think that was the title i had place the manuscript with my notations with a vantage publisher who printed the book one order at a time. It sold, or was Whitehead put it, soiled well in Coho and the adjacent counties where the Bunyans were prqctically coexistent with the white man's way in northcoast California. The almost mythical Paul Bunyan the first caqme into the area in 1853 with a passel of rowdies including a dozen children, with several wives and exwives and began putting together the huge holdings which established his fortune for his old age, which went well into his ninties = before, legend has it, one of daughters poisoned him for attempts on a grandaughter.
My scrnful friends didn't want to hear any of this. It's not the individuals who should outrage us, but the system that harbored them. But the fifth Bunyan was part of a lineage of evil that had strewn the landscape with Sophoclean, Faulknerian, Ross MacDonaldian crimes. My point is that the Bunyans stood out as though a Great Gatsby had been a Snopes.
It's an all male ensemble here. Gatsby begat upon Snopes. Genetic Engineering of course, not some gay intercourse. Meanwhile they went through women like a colonial Plantation owner. In the successive seraglios where the Bunyan family played out its culture, there was a number one wife but no legitimacy of one child over another.
I had discoveed how much this Paul Bunyan was like the previous ones. There really was something to them - a charisma, an archetypal energy that stopped traffic.