Page 131

By Jack Joseph Smith

Colonel went on with a realistic joke? The way the carpet bagger contractors use sheet rock and stilts for their hustle, there ain't gonna be no problem in trash hauling business, cause there's always going to be walls fallin down." Animal spread his right cheek up to his ear saying, "the L.A. sun lets no snow; but there sure is alot of sinking in the sand. No; be- neath the sand the walls and roofs will lean; They'll float, then cling like cardboard ships upon the property of Fieberling and Erben Guy- ot;" "Who?" "Sea people living on places like Mount Bald- ey beneath the map."

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page keeps the barroom satire going by turning real-estate language into a joke about collapse, sinking sand, and makeshift ownership.

What makes the page work is the way boosterism and ruin sit in the same sentence. Trash hauling, sheet rock, stilts, sun, sand, and cardboard ships all belong to a world built on unstable ground, so the humor carries a real sense of fraud and drift beneath it. This reading remains provisional because handwritten note fragments still need closer scan-backed review.

Claude

Real-estate satire delivered in Animal's voice — carpet bagger contractors, Mount Baldey, sand as the new currency of American desire. The passage sets up the book's running theory that L.A. sells image as land.