it's reasonable to assume
that a reptilian
Fear of the State
welling up from the timid
reptile region of me
is what caused
the tears to spill over my
wine and salt-fattened cheeks
that day some years ago,
when the nice policeman circled back
and accosted me for
walking in the open air
with an open bottle,
and not, as he said, the decency
to disguise it.
But when he was done administering
his version
of Justice-by-tedious, drawling, solipsistic lecture,
and i was then obliged to offer
my minute's minuet of being
cowed and eager to explain myself, officer,
what should happen
but a big greasy plump tear
of sick-souled heart-burn
spilled greedily down my right face.
he got the unstately raw version.
I clutched that bottle
like an I.V.
and told him why i looked
like i did,
and then he was the one
who felt cowed,
and sorry for his crimes, and drove off with his
officer's mind all heavy
with some permanently open
and weeping love wound
from his past,
it's reasonable to assume.
Showing posts with label nightmares. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nightmares. Show all posts
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Demons and Mildred
It can be very dull living with oneself. I have trouble imagining a condition more tedious than always knowing the exact plan for each and every day is centered around an inescapable form and character—your own---around God's chaining us forever only, inconsolably to ourselves. It cannot be easy being anybody, surely. For instance, you always know just what you are going to say, even if it's only in terms of fractional seconds, and there is a very good chance that you will behave as pretentiously as possible at all times, fearful that others may recognize and dislike the horrible honesties always brewing inside of you, which you can only try to disguise. I refer simply to the eternal pretense of the mind's sleepless view of itself: its reflexivity, its judgments and its many fears relative to other people and our own need to be loved, acknowledged, respected. "I don't care what other people think" is a mantra for the self-delusional, as well as the truly free.
The mind, it's said, is the enemy of existence. A quite disturbed but brilliant man once told me while we rode mass transit that "the Truth exists but it is independent of the mind." Thankfully we have each other to help temper some of this dreadful existential tedium, to needle and gather good stories from. Friends are often cynically compared to sounding boards, but they are just as useful as black holes into which we can totally disappear. That beings as crude and self-obsessed as we are can forget ourselves is a necessary blessing.
I've found that cab drivers are vaults of especially insightful, even esoteric knowledge. You just need to prod them a bit and show how you're a nice person and they will probably give you a good shot for the brief time you know them. Several times they've reminded me of the blind lunacy in being anything less than pleased about living, that life is not necessarily captivating, but interesting at least; and we must deal with the fact that we are captured by it.
And I'm gonna tell you
....
It was before the time when we all had cell phones and the Africans had generously agreed to supply us with cheap Coltan so that we could run around burbling all day into the little tumor factories, before the inexhaustions of the Global War on Terror. I asked the waitress at Lucille's to call me a cab and needed to get to work in twenty minutes or so. She was a nice-looking lady of an indistinct age and it was sad leaving her. She wore black and little, but there's nothing special about this, in that line of work. It seemed that she was thirty or more but she was also a girl with spry hot blood and a young cannibal spirit, as suggested by her style of dress, her smirk, and prominent ankle tattoo. The smirk was a queer workplace enchantment: it couldn't be suppressed or guessed at, and probably deterred thirty drunken suitors every night, even as it attracted them. The cab arrived and I was watching the Knicks game. I hurried out and saw a sleepy heavy black man in the driver's seat. I got in next to him. He was very heavy indeed. There was an exchange of coordinates and he drove a ways while I thought of how to approach talking to him, in some meaningful or at least satisfying way. I relied on a dependable venture.
....
"How have your fares been tonight, man?" I nearly resisted the use of the strained soulful familiarity. That ease which white folks like myself have in relaxing their normal speech patterns around black people has always aggravated me, and to address a man this way when he is your elder by far is disrespectful. I felt slightly off on the wrong foot, but as usual, this self-doubt owed more to neurosis than reality. Southern black folks, after all, are used to centuries of white foolishness.
"A Roadmaster," he said with some flourish in a sarcastic but appreciative way. Apparently he spoke of his automobile. He had misheard me.
"…How have your fares been?"
Without looking at me he said, "Oh. I've had a couple of doozies tonight. Had a lady who wanted to smoke in here. She asked if she could smoke and I told her 'No, ma'am this is a no-smoking cab,' and she said she was gonna smoke anyway."
"So what did you do, let her smoke?"
"Well, no. I called up my boss. My boss is a woman. So I told her there's a woman in here who says she's gonna have a cigarette and I let them talk. Figured it was a woman thing."
This guy wasn't looking at me too much. He was about fifty with a massive belly and expressive, slightly popping eyes and big lovely nostrils. He wore a sparkling garish ring and a matching blinding watch. He was extremely likeable.
"You know how women are," he insisted.
"So was she able to convince her not to smoke?"
"Nope. She told her not to but the lady lit it up anyway. She was very intoxicated. I picked her up from Lucille's. She was with two guys. They were all pretty drunk."
"Yeah, I was at that bar. Of course. I saw her and their party. They spoke at a…very loud level."
"Yeah, she was pretty loud." He seemed reticent, as if he was withholding judgment or just didn't want to recount the other coarse behaviors they had brought into his coach.
"But you said you had a couple of doozies? Who else did you have in here?" I knew this man might agree to tell me something interesting. I hoped he'd treat me to a good story.
"No. Not really, I was talking about those people-"
Car 5, what's your 20? Got one for central.
I looked at the radio and waited to see if that was for him. He turned it down low and said he hated talking over that thing. At this point there was a small dead spot in the conversation so I hastened to ply him with my prized ghost story.
"Well I've got the crazy cab fare story to trump your story. This guy picked me up on ....Gay Street.... once. We talked a bit and he told me about picking up a guy on ....Cumberland.... at Rocky Top, who told him to take him out west, to Sequoiyah or something. So he starts driving and he starts to hear noises coming from behind him,-"
…and I gestured behind us with some jerky flapping motions…
"-like snarling and slobbering and whipping around shit like he was a wild animal. Now this man, this cabdriver seemed like a rational science-grounded guy, we had talked and he seemed well-read and smart. He told me that he was a skeptic and a rationalist and if he didn't know better he would have to say it was demonic possession. He said he wouldn't believe it himself if someone had told him. And the guy was scared he might die and he looks in the rearview mirror to see cause he was scared to turn around, and he sees the dude, like… transforming into some beast with a muzzle protruding out and tongue all flapping around and his head's whipping around- (here I added some more theatrical wagging.) -So he keeps driving straight on until he gets there, petrified, and then when he gets there the guy is normal and gets out and gives him his money." As I usually did, I was getting excited about telling the story.
"Do you believe in ghosts and all that?" And this was what I really enjoyed asking strangers who might have had a lot of experience with other strangers. It's what I like asking cabbies and often they have something wild to say on the matter.
"Hoo," the driver said. "Yes. I've seen demonic possession. I've seen some crazy things, man. I'll tell you about one thing. My brother, he's a little guy, like you, and extremely good-lookin. Small guy, really good-lookin. But he always gets my girlfriend scraps, mean, he always just gets my girlfriends after, you know, I'm done seein them. So I had this friend Arnell Davidson and he was tryin to hook me up with this girl, Kathy Roberts, he said she was very pretty. So he set us up and she was gonna cook me dinner over at her house. So I went over there, you know. And she's really fine now, really pretty with a really fine build and all. This is the first time I've ever seen her, met her, anything. And we're in the kitchen and she's goin around cookin and we're talkin and I hear this noise. Like comin from the back room back there-"
The driver was looking at me more now: ask and ye shall receive. He was clearly an apt spinner of tales, and I took him to be absolutely serious. There was never a question of my belief, anyway. He was lively and I was embraced by this story that seemed to be swelling towards something fine and grim and outrageous. Periodically I would offer the small blasphemous words that indicate interest and attention paid.
"-and I ask her what was the noise and she tells me "Oh, it's just Mildred." I just assume that Mildred is her roommate, just livin back there. But now, I thought the noises were like people fightin-"
We had come to where I work and I was not interested in working yet, so I told him to keep going. "And a while later I hear the noise again. I ask her again and ask… you know when she met Mildred and stuff. She said when she moved in, she was movin stuff into her back bedroom and Mildred just walked out of the wall. So that was it with me and her. Got the hell outta there. I didn't see her again."
Holy shit, I said.
"Well my brother ends up telling me…"(and in a tough little raspy voice that immediately set me grinning and that he would use again to imitate his brother…)
"…Man, I got a good piece last night. Her name is Kathy Roberts….
"And I said, oh man! So he starts going out with her and he's with her for a while. They go out one night and they get drunk and he gets angry and he hits her. Knocks her around some. They're back in bed at her house and they're still fightin. He said he reached over to backhand her and hit her and soon's he does something grabs holda his balls with Two hands and won't let go. Squeezes the shit out of them, hard. So hard he is like cryin and screamin. And it just keeps squeezin. He said it was squeezin so hard he bled out his nose."
Oh my God, I testified. My body had stiffened a bit when he told me this business about phantom retribution. Here and there skin tightened and individual hairs asserted themselves. Things like this unnerve and delight me.
"So it was light, the lights were on?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"So he could see it wasn't her, Kathy?"
"He was looking at her. She had to beg the thing to let go a him. She said, please stop, Mildred, please let him go he won't do it again."
"Damn. I can't believe that. But I do, I bel…"
"Oh, I'm not done. And I'm gonna tell you. He stays with her and moves in with her. Musta really liked that scary sex. But one night he comes to my house and says man, I think she got a spell on me or somethin. He would be out playin pool with some friends or about to get with a girl, cause you know they weren't married he was just livin with her, and he would just…stop; he wouldn't do it. He'd just stop and go home-"
Holy shit, I said. The implication was that his body would rebel and he was compelled by something inside of him to leave.
"So he asked me he said brother I need you to help me. I need to stay here tonight and I want you to make sure I stay here no matter what I say or what I do. So I said, yeah, man. Alright. You're staying here. So we were all hangin out, my girlfriend was livin with me. We watched a movie, you know, smoked a couple joints, and it gets late, around ..midnight.., and he starts getting fidgety. You know he just starts moving around, getting fidgety. So he says--
'lemme go to the bathroom.'
–and I said alright. The bathroom was toward the back of the house, through a door, by the back door. As soon as I heard that door close I knew he was makin a run for it. He was headed for the door and my girlfriend's able to tackle him. Now I couldn't move as fast as they were movin, I weighed 450 pounds at the time (I've lost a lotta weight) but she got him down and that gave me enough time to get over there and try and hold him. Like I said he's a little guy, like you, and I was tryin to hold him and couldn't. He had superhuman strength. And he was all talkin out of his head. I could not hold him and you know I was pretty big. He was gonna get away so I had to just kinda bring him down and get on him with my full weight. And he was still cussin and fightin, sayin crazy shit and his eyes were bright red-"
bright red? I said. Fangoria, this shit was incredible.
"-That's right. Bright red. He had no pupils. No pupils at all. Just inflamed red, like, have you ever seen a drunk that's been on a bender for a week, with their eyes completely red?"
yeah, yeah, I said, though I wasn't sure—Bush hadn't been elected president yet, but I felt I knew what this would look like from horror movies.
"But what got me, man,"- the driver reached over and touched my hand briefly. - "Was...I'm real close to my brother and always have been since we was little. I'm his big brother and I help take care of him, you know. We always been very close. But I'm right on him and he turned his face to me…"
And the driver turned his fist to point directly in his eyes an inch from his face,
"…and he growled. He said,
'errrrrrr. I hate you, motherfucker.'
…And I looked right back and I said 'I hate you too, motherfucker,' just like that. Something was inside of him, truly. And that was when, I don't know where I brought this up from out of my psyche, but I told my girlfriend, I said 'get a Bible.' And she went and got one and opened it up and we put it flat on his chest…and he screamed and cried like a baby. And I still had him in this bear-hug and he was still fightin and so for about twenty minutes, she read from the Bible. I don't know which part of it we read but after a while he was calmer. He was just crying like, just like when he was a little kid. I said man, Tony, you don't know how you was actin. You were crazy. I know man, he told me, 'I told you she's got some power over me.'"
This was simply one of the best stories I had ever heard and I told him to drive up on the hill by the science buildings and just park there for a while, even though I was twenty minutes late. He hinted that shit, there was much more. Up on the hill he continued.
"That same night we all decided he was gonna get his things from her house. He was gonna move out-"
I was incredulous. "That same night?" I said.
"-Yeah, and my sister came with us. My sister is a fighter now. Man, she will throw down, she will fight the red-eyed devil-"
It's a good thing, I mumbled.
"-And my brother said that Kathy wasn't gonna let him just leave her like that. My sister said shit, that bitch better not do shit or she was gonna really have to get rough. So we got there and they had words and they got into it. And my sister really dogged her out. Whipped her ass around the yard a bit. So my brother started movin his stuff. We were in the driveway and he was gettin the last of his things and Kathy came to the door, all calm and collected. She stood there in the door and said right to him,
'You'll be back. You'll be back. I got you,' like that.
And my sister was mad as hell and said,
'No he won't be back, bitch,' and all that. But no, man. He went back to her, after a while he just left work one day and went back to her and didn't say anything to any of us."
"Damn, that's crazy," I confirmed.
"Well that ain't all. He was with her for a while again and he found a jar while she was gone, that she had kept hidden. A little jar that had a picture of him…some of his hair…and some personal belongings of his. Like some voodoo spell." He was very matter-of-fact.
"oh man-" I think I said, and again felt a kind of constriction in my chest and a tingling along my tender scalp.
"Around that time, we had all, my girlfriend and some other friends of mine had been saved. And I guess Kathy wanted to be part of that, cause she was with my brother or something. So she volunteered to go meet Reverend Burnham and be saved, quit all that voodoo shit and the shit with Mildred. Have the spirit cast out and all. But I wondered, you know, I thought it might be a scam-"
And then there was a good long sidetrack and I heard about a mighty seer, the sooty-skinned middle-Tennessee oracle of God, the Reverend Burnham.
"Now Reverend Burnham, this man. This man was an Apostle. Everybody thinks Apostles, they just lived back in the old times, but some of them are around today. Reverend Burnham could just pick you apart. He could look you in the eyes for the first time and tell you who you lost your virginity with, who your first girlfriend was. Who was your third grade teacher. Man, CBS came down and wanted to do a thing on him and he wouldn't take money for what he did-"
"Really? Damn." Incredulous again.
"He was black, black. I mean coal-black, as far as the color of his skin, you know?-" He wanted to clarify and paused.
"Yeah, I know."
"And when this man got to feelin God in him (and everybody knew he could feel God in him cause everybody had seen it) his eyes would turn clear crystal blue. Just his whole pupils turned beautiful crystal blue. It was just beautiful to see. The man was amazing…Well Reverend Burnham agreed to see her and try and cast this spirit out. And we all went over to his house together and from the minute this woman went in the door to when she got in there, she hit the floor and wriggled like a snake all the way-"
And he moved his hand in the universal slippery motion of the snake. This gesture and those words were as unsettling as any he had laid on me until then. I could only murmur something inane, asked if the Reverend had been used to that sort of thing. My friend said that he was, and described the man's renowned ability to remove demons and such from people. Now the subject of the Reverend was deep in my mystical courier and he wanted to tell me something else about the holy man.
"Man, let me tell you somethin else about Reverend Burnham. There was this lady that lived over by me with her husband in this old house. And she was upstairs makin a bed one night and she was lifted up as if by four men or somethin and put on the bed. She could feel…like two sets of hands holdin her arms down, and some other hands movin down her body here…she could see her skin being touched, it was like, being rippled like someone was touchin her. Fondlin her breasts. But she was able to get away. Well she asked the Reverend to come and pray at the house. Well you know, he had done that sort of thing, cast out all kind of spirits before. So I drove him over there and as soon as we pulled in the driveway…he took a look at the house and he stopped. Didn't even want to get out of the car. His eyes got all blue and he turned to me and said,
'If you could see, if you could see into the spirit world like I do, you would be scared out of your mind right now. The things I am seeing are horrible. Tell them if they don't leave this house soon their marriage will not last.'
"…What had happened there was, you know the Trail of Tears? Well that went right through there and the house was a stop for the Indians to stay and rest. One night when they were all camped out there some white soldiers and some other men came and raped a bunch of women and killed some people. Those spirits were still there. And about a few months later, those two divorced and moved. But the next woman who lived there got it worse. She said she actually felt penetration."
"Oh, man," I said. "Do you think those spirits were just the vengeful spirits of the Indians, or were some of the soldiers killed, too, and they're still around?"
"I think that was probably it."
"And even this Reverend was a little scared?"
"Mm-hm. And Reverend was used to this kind of thing. He seen the devil. He saw the devil around all the time, hangin around here and there. He would see him in church and stuff. Most people think the devil would look all horrible, but he said he's just a little guy-"
And he indicated with his hands that the devil was a small fellow, less than two feet tall.
"Yeah, he's a little guy, but he acts big."
It took me a minute to come to grips with this news about the actual and metaphysical size of Satan, and it remains some of the most important information I ever heard, but I was getting pretty late and wanted the man to finish.
"But what about Kathy and the exorcism and all that?"
"Yeah. Well one of the things he does durin these exorcisms is have you repeat scripture. I guess he thinks if you say certain things over and over that's a way you can cast out these demons. So what was one of the things he kept sayin to her and she was sayin over and over? 'Jesus is Lord,' that was it. And 'He is my God and protector,' and things like that. So I was in the other room just sittin, just waitin there. And they went on like this for a long time and they finally thought she was saved. She was goin to the bathroom and she had to walk by me there. So she turned to me while she walked by and looked at me with this mean smile in her eyes and said-
'Fuck Jesus.'
He whispered this just as a person thoroughly or even irretrievably corrupted by evil might.
"So she went in and I went back to them all and they said she was saved. And I said she is not saved, ya'll. I told them what she had said and they went through it all some more. They finished again and they felt like she was finally saved, but you know I just can't really believe it. My brother isn't with her anymore."
"Where does she live now?" I asked, hoping that she had not moved to ....Knoxville...., along with Mildred.
"I think she lives in ....Knoxville.... now."
"Alright. man, That's some crazy shit. And you have…an amazing skill at telling stories-"
"Oh man, that's not even anything. That's not half of it. I'm from the country. There is some wild spirit shit going on from way back out there. I could tell you plenty more."
"Well I'd like to hear some more. Can I get your number? I 'd like to give you a call."
"Car 10. I got a fare for Shannondale, you copy?" interrupted the woman's clipped rugged voice, the voice of a dispatcher dedicated to smoking.
"Yes, I copy."
"It's out West, you know where Shannondale is?"....
"No, I don't, but if you could tell me I'm sure I could find it."
"You're gonna have to get you a map by Friday or Saturday. You gotta have a map in there."....
"I bought a map but it was too small. I couldn't read it. My eyes are funny and I couldn't make that small stuff out."
"They sell big maps you can read. It gets real busy on the weekends and we can't be looking up everything all the time for you."
"Alright. I guess I'll get a big map."
"Yeyp. They sell 'em at the Rocky Top store there. Bigger maps. You head out towards Farmborough, get off there." ....
"10-4"
"Well, sir, it's good to meet you, I'm Nat Prosser. I'll call you and we can talk some more if you don't mind. I'd like to write about this…it's kind of what I like to do. Thank you very much." I gave him a good tip.
"It's good to meet you, I'm Rick Gillespie. Call me. I know more stories like that. Call me."
We shook hands after I got his number, and I headed off to work at something more than a jog. I had a strange energy in my stride, as if suddenly I knew how to run comfortably without being chased or trying to score. I always prefer walking and think joggers are masochistic. Of all the queer and original stories I have been lucky to hear in my life, I thought, how highly this one about voodoo-Kathy ranked. And it was occurring to me that sometimes life manages to be compelling, when it allows you a glimpse of the arcane, of the mysteries that shroud death and love; it gives one reasons to wonder and not just go through our days muttering about television and shuffling through the other ephemera we must secretly or loudly regard as unimportant. Knowing I had a unique tale to tell my coworker, I got to the computer galley and came in 35 minutes late, thinking about the otherworld, about demons shifting between there and here, and how near these things are…depending on where you happen to be sleeping, how deep your certainties go, and when and where you catch a cab. Some people regard maps more importantly than others.
The mind, it's said, is the enemy of existence. A quite disturbed but brilliant man once told me while we rode mass transit that "the Truth exists but it is independent of the mind." Thankfully we have each other to help temper some of this dreadful existential tedium, to needle and gather good stories from. Friends are often cynically compared to sounding boards, but they are just as useful as black holes into which we can totally disappear. That beings as crude and self-obsessed as we are can forget ourselves is a necessary blessing.
I've found that cab drivers are vaults of especially insightful, even esoteric knowledge. You just need to prod them a bit and show how you're a nice person and they will probably give you a good shot for the brief time you know them. Several times they've reminded me of the blind lunacy in being anything less than pleased about living, that life is not necessarily captivating, but interesting at least; and we must deal with the fact that we are captured by it.
And I'm gonna tell you
....
It was before the time when we all had cell phones and the Africans had generously agreed to supply us with cheap Coltan so that we could run around burbling all day into the little tumor factories, before the inexhaustions of the Global War on Terror. I asked the waitress at Lucille's to call me a cab and needed to get to work in twenty minutes or so. She was a nice-looking lady of an indistinct age and it was sad leaving her. She wore black and little, but there's nothing special about this, in that line of work. It seemed that she was thirty or more but she was also a girl with spry hot blood and a young cannibal spirit, as suggested by her style of dress, her smirk, and prominent ankle tattoo. The smirk was a queer workplace enchantment: it couldn't be suppressed or guessed at, and probably deterred thirty drunken suitors every night, even as it attracted them. The cab arrived and I was watching the Knicks game. I hurried out and saw a sleepy heavy black man in the driver's seat. I got in next to him. He was very heavy indeed. There was an exchange of coordinates and he drove a ways while I thought of how to approach talking to him, in some meaningful or at least satisfying way. I relied on a dependable venture.
....
"How have your fares been tonight, man?" I nearly resisted the use of the strained soulful familiarity. That ease which white folks like myself have in relaxing their normal speech patterns around black people has always aggravated me, and to address a man this way when he is your elder by far is disrespectful. I felt slightly off on the wrong foot, but as usual, this self-doubt owed more to neurosis than reality. Southern black folks, after all, are used to centuries of white foolishness.
"A Roadmaster," he said with some flourish in a sarcastic but appreciative way. Apparently he spoke of his automobile. He had misheard me.
"…How have your fares been?"
Without looking at me he said, "Oh. I've had a couple of doozies tonight. Had a lady who wanted to smoke in here. She asked if she could smoke and I told her 'No, ma'am this is a no-smoking cab,' and she said she was gonna smoke anyway."
"So what did you do, let her smoke?"
"Well, no. I called up my boss. My boss is a woman. So I told her there's a woman in here who says she's gonna have a cigarette and I let them talk. Figured it was a woman thing."
This guy wasn't looking at me too much. He was about fifty with a massive belly and expressive, slightly popping eyes and big lovely nostrils. He wore a sparkling garish ring and a matching blinding watch. He was extremely likeable.
"You know how women are," he insisted.
"So was she able to convince her not to smoke?"
"Nope. She told her not to but the lady lit it up anyway. She was very intoxicated. I picked her up from Lucille's. She was with two guys. They were all pretty drunk."
"Yeah, I was at that bar. Of course. I saw her and their party. They spoke at a…very loud level."
"Yeah, she was pretty loud." He seemed reticent, as if he was withholding judgment or just didn't want to recount the other coarse behaviors they had brought into his coach.
"But you said you had a couple of doozies? Who else did you have in here?" I knew this man might agree to tell me something interesting. I hoped he'd treat me to a good story.
"No. Not really, I was talking about those people-"
Car 5, what's your 20? Got one for central.
I looked at the radio and waited to see if that was for him. He turned it down low and said he hated talking over that thing. At this point there was a small dead spot in the conversation so I hastened to ply him with my prized ghost story.
"Well I've got the crazy cab fare story to trump your story. This guy picked me up on ....Gay Street.... once. We talked a bit and he told me about picking up a guy on ....Cumberland.... at Rocky Top, who told him to take him out west, to Sequoiyah or something. So he starts driving and he starts to hear noises coming from behind him,-"
…and I gestured behind us with some jerky flapping motions…
"-like snarling and slobbering and whipping around shit like he was a wild animal. Now this man, this cabdriver seemed like a rational science-grounded guy, we had talked and he seemed well-read and smart. He told me that he was a skeptic and a rationalist and if he didn't know better he would have to say it was demonic possession. He said he wouldn't believe it himself if someone had told him. And the guy was scared he might die and he looks in the rearview mirror to see cause he was scared to turn around, and he sees the dude, like… transforming into some beast with a muzzle protruding out and tongue all flapping around and his head's whipping around- (here I added some more theatrical wagging.) -So he keeps driving straight on until he gets there, petrified, and then when he gets there the guy is normal and gets out and gives him his money." As I usually did, I was getting excited about telling the story.
"Do you believe in ghosts and all that?" And this was what I really enjoyed asking strangers who might have had a lot of experience with other strangers. It's what I like asking cabbies and often they have something wild to say on the matter.
"Hoo," the driver said. "Yes. I've seen demonic possession. I've seen some crazy things, man. I'll tell you about one thing. My brother, he's a little guy, like you, and extremely good-lookin. Small guy, really good-lookin. But he always gets my girlfriend scraps, mean, he always just gets my girlfriends after, you know, I'm done seein them. So I had this friend Arnell Davidson and he was tryin to hook me up with this girl, Kathy Roberts, he said she was very pretty. So he set us up and she was gonna cook me dinner over at her house. So I went over there, you know. And she's really fine now, really pretty with a really fine build and all. This is the first time I've ever seen her, met her, anything. And we're in the kitchen and she's goin around cookin and we're talkin and I hear this noise. Like comin from the back room back there-"
The driver was looking at me more now: ask and ye shall receive. He was clearly an apt spinner of tales, and I took him to be absolutely serious. There was never a question of my belief, anyway. He was lively and I was embraced by this story that seemed to be swelling towards something fine and grim and outrageous. Periodically I would offer the small blasphemous words that indicate interest and attention paid.
"-and I ask her what was the noise and she tells me "Oh, it's just Mildred." I just assume that Mildred is her roommate, just livin back there. But now, I thought the noises were like people fightin-"
We had come to where I work and I was not interested in working yet, so I told him to keep going. "And a while later I hear the noise again. I ask her again and ask… you know when she met Mildred and stuff. She said when she moved in, she was movin stuff into her back bedroom and Mildred just walked out of the wall. So that was it with me and her. Got the hell outta there. I didn't see her again."
Holy shit, I said.
"Well my brother ends up telling me…"(and in a tough little raspy voice that immediately set me grinning and that he would use again to imitate his brother…)
"…Man, I got a good piece last night. Her name is Kathy Roberts….
"And I said, oh man! So he starts going out with her and he's with her for a while. They go out one night and they get drunk and he gets angry and he hits her. Knocks her around some. They're back in bed at her house and they're still fightin. He said he reached over to backhand her and hit her and soon's he does something grabs holda his balls with Two hands and won't let go. Squeezes the shit out of them, hard. So hard he is like cryin and screamin. And it just keeps squeezin. He said it was squeezin so hard he bled out his nose."
Oh my God, I testified. My body had stiffened a bit when he told me this business about phantom retribution. Here and there skin tightened and individual hairs asserted themselves. Things like this unnerve and delight me.
"So it was light, the lights were on?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"So he could see it wasn't her, Kathy?"
"He was looking at her. She had to beg the thing to let go a him. She said, please stop, Mildred, please let him go he won't do it again."
"Damn. I can't believe that. But I do, I bel…"
"Oh, I'm not done. And I'm gonna tell you. He stays with her and moves in with her. Musta really liked that scary sex. But one night he comes to my house and says man, I think she got a spell on me or somethin. He would be out playin pool with some friends or about to get with a girl, cause you know they weren't married he was just livin with her, and he would just…stop; he wouldn't do it. He'd just stop and go home-"
Holy shit, I said. The implication was that his body would rebel and he was compelled by something inside of him to leave.
"So he asked me he said brother I need you to help me. I need to stay here tonight and I want you to make sure I stay here no matter what I say or what I do. So I said, yeah, man. Alright. You're staying here. So we were all hangin out, my girlfriend was livin with me. We watched a movie, you know, smoked a couple joints, and it gets late, around ..midnight.., and he starts getting fidgety. You know he just starts moving around, getting fidgety. So he says--
'lemme go to the bathroom.'
–and I said alright. The bathroom was toward the back of the house, through a door, by the back door. As soon as I heard that door close I knew he was makin a run for it. He was headed for the door and my girlfriend's able to tackle him. Now I couldn't move as fast as they were movin, I weighed 450 pounds at the time (I've lost a lotta weight) but she got him down and that gave me enough time to get over there and try and hold him. Like I said he's a little guy, like you, and I was tryin to hold him and couldn't. He had superhuman strength. And he was all talkin out of his head. I could not hold him and you know I was pretty big. He was gonna get away so I had to just kinda bring him down and get on him with my full weight. And he was still cussin and fightin, sayin crazy shit and his eyes were bright red-"
bright red? I said. Fangoria, this shit was incredible.
"-That's right. Bright red. He had no pupils. No pupils at all. Just inflamed red, like, have you ever seen a drunk that's been on a bender for a week, with their eyes completely red?"
yeah, yeah, I said, though I wasn't sure—Bush hadn't been elected president yet, but I felt I knew what this would look like from horror movies.
"But what got me, man,"- the driver reached over and touched my hand briefly. - "Was...I'm real close to my brother and always have been since we was little. I'm his big brother and I help take care of him, you know. We always been very close. But I'm right on him and he turned his face to me…"
And the driver turned his fist to point directly in his eyes an inch from his face,
"…and he growled. He said,
'errrrrrr. I hate you, motherfucker.'
…And I looked right back and I said 'I hate you too, motherfucker,' just like that. Something was inside of him, truly. And that was when, I don't know where I brought this up from out of my psyche, but I told my girlfriend, I said 'get a Bible.' And she went and got one and opened it up and we put it flat on his chest…and he screamed and cried like a baby. And I still had him in this bear-hug and he was still fightin and so for about twenty minutes, she read from the Bible. I don't know which part of it we read but after a while he was calmer. He was just crying like, just like when he was a little kid. I said man, Tony, you don't know how you was actin. You were crazy. I know man, he told me, 'I told you she's got some power over me.'"
This was simply one of the best stories I had ever heard and I told him to drive up on the hill by the science buildings and just park there for a while, even though I was twenty minutes late. He hinted that shit, there was much more. Up on the hill he continued.
"That same night we all decided he was gonna get his things from her house. He was gonna move out-"
I was incredulous. "That same night?" I said.
"-Yeah, and my sister came with us. My sister is a fighter now. Man, she will throw down, she will fight the red-eyed devil-"
It's a good thing, I mumbled.
"-And my brother said that Kathy wasn't gonna let him just leave her like that. My sister said shit, that bitch better not do shit or she was gonna really have to get rough. So we got there and they had words and they got into it. And my sister really dogged her out. Whipped her ass around the yard a bit. So my brother started movin his stuff. We were in the driveway and he was gettin the last of his things and Kathy came to the door, all calm and collected. She stood there in the door and said right to him,
'You'll be back. You'll be back. I got you,' like that.
And my sister was mad as hell and said,
'No he won't be back, bitch,' and all that. But no, man. He went back to her, after a while he just left work one day and went back to her and didn't say anything to any of us."
"Damn, that's crazy," I confirmed.
"Well that ain't all. He was with her for a while again and he found a jar while she was gone, that she had kept hidden. A little jar that had a picture of him…some of his hair…and some personal belongings of his. Like some voodoo spell." He was very matter-of-fact.
"oh man-" I think I said, and again felt a kind of constriction in my chest and a tingling along my tender scalp.
"Around that time, we had all, my girlfriend and some other friends of mine had been saved. And I guess Kathy wanted to be part of that, cause she was with my brother or something. So she volunteered to go meet Reverend Burnham and be saved, quit all that voodoo shit and the shit with Mildred. Have the spirit cast out and all. But I wondered, you know, I thought it might be a scam-"
And then there was a good long sidetrack and I heard about a mighty seer, the sooty-skinned middle-Tennessee oracle of God, the Reverend Burnham.
"Now Reverend Burnham, this man. This man was an Apostle. Everybody thinks Apostles, they just lived back in the old times, but some of them are around today. Reverend Burnham could just pick you apart. He could look you in the eyes for the first time and tell you who you lost your virginity with, who your first girlfriend was. Who was your third grade teacher. Man, CBS came down and wanted to do a thing on him and he wouldn't take money for what he did-"
"Really? Damn." Incredulous again.
"He was black, black. I mean coal-black, as far as the color of his skin, you know?-" He wanted to clarify and paused.
"Yeah, I know."
"And when this man got to feelin God in him (and everybody knew he could feel God in him cause everybody had seen it) his eyes would turn clear crystal blue. Just his whole pupils turned beautiful crystal blue. It was just beautiful to see. The man was amazing…Well Reverend Burnham agreed to see her and try and cast this spirit out. And we all went over to his house together and from the minute this woman went in the door to when she got in there, she hit the floor and wriggled like a snake all the way-"
And he moved his hand in the universal slippery motion of the snake. This gesture and those words were as unsettling as any he had laid on me until then. I could only murmur something inane, asked if the Reverend had been used to that sort of thing. My friend said that he was, and described the man's renowned ability to remove demons and such from people. Now the subject of the Reverend was deep in my mystical courier and he wanted to tell me something else about the holy man.
"Man, let me tell you somethin else about Reverend Burnham. There was this lady that lived over by me with her husband in this old house. And she was upstairs makin a bed one night and she was lifted up as if by four men or somethin and put on the bed. She could feel…like two sets of hands holdin her arms down, and some other hands movin down her body here…she could see her skin being touched, it was like, being rippled like someone was touchin her. Fondlin her breasts. But she was able to get away. Well she asked the Reverend to come and pray at the house. Well you know, he had done that sort of thing, cast out all kind of spirits before. So I drove him over there and as soon as we pulled in the driveway…he took a look at the house and he stopped. Didn't even want to get out of the car. His eyes got all blue and he turned to me and said,
'If you could see, if you could see into the spirit world like I do, you would be scared out of your mind right now. The things I am seeing are horrible. Tell them if they don't leave this house soon their marriage will not last.'
"…What had happened there was, you know the Trail of Tears? Well that went right through there and the house was a stop for the Indians to stay and rest. One night when they were all camped out there some white soldiers and some other men came and raped a bunch of women and killed some people. Those spirits were still there. And about a few months later, those two divorced and moved. But the next woman who lived there got it worse. She said she actually felt penetration."
"Oh, man," I said. "Do you think those spirits were just the vengeful spirits of the Indians, or were some of the soldiers killed, too, and they're still around?"
"I think that was probably it."
"And even this Reverend was a little scared?"
"Mm-hm. And Reverend was used to this kind of thing. He seen the devil. He saw the devil around all the time, hangin around here and there. He would see him in church and stuff. Most people think the devil would look all horrible, but he said he's just a little guy-"
And he indicated with his hands that the devil was a small fellow, less than two feet tall.
"Yeah, he's a little guy, but he acts big."
It took me a minute to come to grips with this news about the actual and metaphysical size of Satan, and it remains some of the most important information I ever heard, but I was getting pretty late and wanted the man to finish.
"But what about Kathy and the exorcism and all that?"
"Yeah. Well one of the things he does durin these exorcisms is have you repeat scripture. I guess he thinks if you say certain things over and over that's a way you can cast out these demons. So what was one of the things he kept sayin to her and she was sayin over and over? 'Jesus is Lord,' that was it. And 'He is my God and protector,' and things like that. So I was in the other room just sittin, just waitin there. And they went on like this for a long time and they finally thought she was saved. She was goin to the bathroom and she had to walk by me there. So she turned to me while she walked by and looked at me with this mean smile in her eyes and said-
'Fuck Jesus.'
He whispered this just as a person thoroughly or even irretrievably corrupted by evil might.
"So she went in and I went back to them all and they said she was saved. And I said she is not saved, ya'll. I told them what she had said and they went through it all some more. They finished again and they felt like she was finally saved, but you know I just can't really believe it. My brother isn't with her anymore."
"Where does she live now?" I asked, hoping that she had not moved to ....Knoxville...., along with Mildred.
"I think she lives in ....Knoxville.... now."
"Alright. man, That's some crazy shit. And you have…an amazing skill at telling stories-"
"Oh man, that's not even anything. That's not half of it. I'm from the country. There is some wild spirit shit going on from way back out there. I could tell you plenty more."
"Well I'd like to hear some more. Can I get your number? I 'd like to give you a call."
"Car 10. I got a fare for Shannondale, you copy?" interrupted the woman's clipped rugged voice, the voice of a dispatcher dedicated to smoking.
"Yes, I copy."
"It's out West, you know where Shannondale is?"....
"No, I don't, but if you could tell me I'm sure I could find it."
"You're gonna have to get you a map by Friday or Saturday. You gotta have a map in there."....
"I bought a map but it was too small. I couldn't read it. My eyes are funny and I couldn't make that small stuff out."
"They sell big maps you can read. It gets real busy on the weekends and we can't be looking up everything all the time for you."
"Alright. I guess I'll get a big map."
"Yeyp. They sell 'em at the Rocky Top store there. Bigger maps. You head out towards Farmborough, get off there." ....
"10-4"
"Well, sir, it's good to meet you, I'm Nat Prosser. I'll call you and we can talk some more if you don't mind. I'd like to write about this…it's kind of what I like to do. Thank you very much." I gave him a good tip.
"It's good to meet you, I'm Rick Gillespie. Call me. I know more stories like that. Call me."
We shook hands after I got his number, and I headed off to work at something more than a jog. I had a strange energy in my stride, as if suddenly I knew how to run comfortably without being chased or trying to score. I always prefer walking and think joggers are masochistic. Of all the queer and original stories I have been lucky to hear in my life, I thought, how highly this one about voodoo-Kathy ranked. And it was occurring to me that sometimes life manages to be compelling, when it allows you a glimpse of the arcane, of the mysteries that shroud death and love; it gives one reasons to wonder and not just go through our days muttering about television and shuffling through the other ephemera we must secretly or loudly regard as unimportant. Knowing I had a unique tale to tell my coworker, I got to the computer galley and came in 35 minutes late, thinking about the otherworld, about demons shifting between there and here, and how near these things are…depending on where you happen to be sleeping, how deep your certainties go, and when and where you catch a cab. Some people regard maps more importantly than others.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Crap in the form of Man, or, Shit-Man, Despoiler of the Planet or, Poohpooh on the prowl
i have seen you creeping and strutting down
the halls of Hell’s highschools
and I don’t like the looks of you,
Motherfucker.
Your father would not acknowledge my father on the street.
Your pa’s a judge, a state senator, an engorged butcher-flea
and a member of various Boards,
he is a prison camp pimp,
a nighttime reaper and swallower of fat.
He sells gristle to the poor
at great profit.
Your mother smiles weakly, placidly,
and disguises the rank patriarchal ooze
that brings you in and about this world
using her lotioned kleenex and lots of fruit-rollups and juice-boxes,
hiding from herself the obvious fact
that you’ve grown up to be
a slithering shithead and a boorish
punk with none of the manifest promise she hoped would make you different
from your father.
A bumptious swagger topped with a brutal leer,
i see you as a well-tailored ape,
a spiritual asthmatic worse than myself---
a scientific oddity whose tumid ego is fused
to his head like an unseemly goiter for all to see,
weeping and emitting the vile gas of mindless pride,
Confidence existing for no reason
other than the heinous pleasure
that dimwits enjoy, through being
entirely physical beings and
flagrantly
failing to perceive a universe
Crawling with honored horrors and a billion
unrecognized, unloved forms of beauty,
truth, goodness and the like,
failing to know even their own precious exalted bodies
which breathe in so much of life but
sweat mean futility and narrowness.
You take too much pleasure in the meat
that hangs from your corpse and your life,
in meat-appraisal.
Yours is the plain and vicious pleasure of an idiot stoning frogs
trapped in a great puddle, all day long,
while bloated mosquitoes
roar their approval,
or of the infant’s static delight in attention---believing it is
as charming when it creates a shitty mess
as when it glows and giggles:
that’s what your pleasure amounts to,
you marrow-sucking white wampum-dealer.
You should have been a potato.
I would buy you at a propped-up price and let you rot in the sun,
or slice you into slivers and boil you in oil,
then feed you to the poor.
Eventually your casual deadly vanity, your slavish self-worship and
your stance on race issues
and the redistribution of wealth
and such shit will rip you open.
At that point there will be more cheering than tears among the angels.
You have never cried over anything but the gimmicks of Hollywood,
your own fitful idea of self,
and the death of your fat dog.
But reason, temperance allow me to see that I can’t escape you…
you will hound me
until I learn to accept with grace
the loathesome lurch of muscle-bound dandies,
your shiny-toothed insolence and pack mentality,
the chattering stench all your gatherings provoke,
the smug slatternly sanctity of the women who willingly consider themselves yours---
until I accept the whole
ruinous
Order of the Popular, Gastronomic and Sharply-dressed Philistine;
No i cannot escape you and so I will linger and ambush you,
lie in waiting
with key-weak fingers and a strong tongue,
ready to spread on you
a thick masterful revilement….
or to be your pal,
Churl, my friend, because you must have something I want
or i wouldn't dislike you so…
…which is foolish and just like
the remedial little toady in me,
but the point is that you are a gentrified milquetoast popinjay
and among the differences between you and I are
the fact that I have no wish to drive a nicer car than the next pottering mammonist
and never had a scintilla of respect for a president
except Reagan when I was eleven and Satan nearly had me in tow,
Singing in his beautiful jellybean voice,
…And there’s this: when I wish I was black
it is not for added virility or athleticism or rhythm,
but some extra, super-strength conviction
in what is currently, at best, only
a middling desire to mau-mau every
stupid and heartless white man i see.
the halls of Hell’s highschools
and I don’t like the looks of you,
Motherfucker.
Your father would not acknowledge my father on the street.
Your pa’s a judge, a state senator, an engorged butcher-flea
and a member of various Boards,
he is a prison camp pimp,
a nighttime reaper and swallower of fat.
He sells gristle to the poor
at great profit.
Your mother smiles weakly, placidly,
and disguises the rank patriarchal ooze
that brings you in and about this world
using her lotioned kleenex and lots of fruit-rollups and juice-boxes,
hiding from herself the obvious fact
that you’ve grown up to be
a slithering shithead and a boorish
punk with none of the manifest promise she hoped would make you different
from your father.
A bumptious swagger topped with a brutal leer,
i see you as a well-tailored ape,
a spiritual asthmatic worse than myself---
a scientific oddity whose tumid ego is fused
to his head like an unseemly goiter for all to see,
weeping and emitting the vile gas of mindless pride,
Confidence existing for no reason
other than the heinous pleasure
that dimwits enjoy, through being
entirely physical beings and
flagrantly
failing to perceive a universe
Crawling with honored horrors and a billion
unrecognized, unloved forms of beauty,
truth, goodness and the like,
failing to know even their own precious exalted bodies
which breathe in so much of life but
sweat mean futility and narrowness.
You take too much pleasure in the meat
that hangs from your corpse and your life,
in meat-appraisal.
Yours is the plain and vicious pleasure of an idiot stoning frogs
trapped in a great puddle, all day long,
while bloated mosquitoes
roar their approval,
or of the infant’s static delight in attention---believing it is
as charming when it creates a shitty mess
as when it glows and giggles:
that’s what your pleasure amounts to,
you marrow-sucking white wampum-dealer.
You should have been a potato.
I would buy you at a propped-up price and let you rot in the sun,
or slice you into slivers and boil you in oil,
then feed you to the poor.
Eventually your casual deadly vanity, your slavish self-worship and
your stance on race issues
and the redistribution of wealth
and such shit will rip you open.
At that point there will be more cheering than tears among the angels.
You have never cried over anything but the gimmicks of Hollywood,
your own fitful idea of self,
and the death of your fat dog.
But reason, temperance allow me to see that I can’t escape you…
you will hound me
until I learn to accept with grace
the loathesome lurch of muscle-bound dandies,
your shiny-toothed insolence and pack mentality,
the chattering stench all your gatherings provoke,
the smug slatternly sanctity of the women who willingly consider themselves yours---
until I accept the whole
ruinous
Order of the Popular, Gastronomic and Sharply-dressed Philistine;
No i cannot escape you and so I will linger and ambush you,
lie in waiting
with key-weak fingers and a strong tongue,
ready to spread on you
a thick masterful revilement….
or to be your pal,
Churl, my friend, because you must have something I want
or i wouldn't dislike you so…
…which is foolish and just like
the remedial little toady in me,
but the point is that you are a gentrified milquetoast popinjay
and among the differences between you and I are
the fact that I have no wish to drive a nicer car than the next pottering mammonist
and never had a scintilla of respect for a president
except Reagan when I was eleven and Satan nearly had me in tow,
Singing in his beautiful jellybean voice,
…And there’s this: when I wish I was black
it is not for added virility or athleticism or rhythm,
but some extra, super-strength conviction
in what is currently, at best, only
a middling desire to mau-mau every
stupid and heartless white man i see.
For the Troops
Just where would
you like me to support you?
What if I held and patted your hand,
and told you some ghastly official lies,
about planes that can take down giant skyscrapers
merely by flying into them,
or about black muslim snipers
gone conspicuously haywire,
or anthrax attacks reeking of fake melodrama and
military-grade chemicals?
I will tell you outlandish myths
about the evil of foreigners
that would offend the reason
of a half-educated toddler,
and then order you to go kill such toddlers
in support of my myths.
What if I held your head and poured the boiling sap
of blind patriotism into your ringing ears,
with an assurance that the people
you killed yesterday are fanatics and savages,
and those you’ll kill tomorrow
would have stoned your middle-school daughter to death
for enjoying pop music or
the casual fellatio she has engaged in for some time now?
Do you need the support of my foot in your ass,
for going on a
mercenary mission to
lands where you do not belong and are sure to
mess things up to the
point where your host will wish upon you painful and
lingering death?
You didn’t know they had swords still,
in Mesopotamia. Swords for decapitation.
All that shit the army told you about them being
primitive tribesmen somehow
didn’t include mention of their ferocity
in settling scores and re-establishing manhood
under occupation.
when the thoughtless are made headless,
that is symmetrical warfare.
Yes, I think you do need me to lean on,
now that one of your legs has been
exchanged in Ramadi for a fine
steel and polymer get-up,
now that you have had time to brush up
on your history,
and are feeling ill.
Hoo-ah Hooey!
you like me to support you?
What if I held and patted your hand,
and told you some ghastly official lies,
about planes that can take down giant skyscrapers
merely by flying into them,
or about black muslim snipers
gone conspicuously haywire,
or anthrax attacks reeking of fake melodrama and
military-grade chemicals?
I will tell you outlandish myths
about the evil of foreigners
that would offend the reason
of a half-educated toddler,
and then order you to go kill such toddlers
in support of my myths.
What if I held your head and poured the boiling sap
of blind patriotism into your ringing ears,
with an assurance that the people
you killed yesterday are fanatics and savages,
and those you’ll kill tomorrow
would have stoned your middle-school daughter to death
for enjoying pop music or
the casual fellatio she has engaged in for some time now?
Do you need the support of my foot in your ass,
for going on a
mercenary mission to
lands where you do not belong and are sure to
mess things up to the
point where your host will wish upon you painful and
lingering death?
You didn’t know they had swords still,
in Mesopotamia. Swords for decapitation.
All that shit the army told you about them being
primitive tribesmen somehow
didn’t include mention of their ferocity
in settling scores and re-establishing manhood
under occupation.
when the thoughtless are made headless,
that is symmetrical warfare.
Yes, I think you do need me to lean on,
now that one of your legs has been
exchanged in Ramadi for a fine
steel and polymer get-up,
now that you have had time to brush up
on your history,
and are feeling ill.
Hoo-ah Hooey!
The Ogre Vespucci, or,
America the Purply
And the clatter sanity made when it scrambled from the room,
with vanity and cruelty biting and snapping at its
heels and pummeling it with a cudgel,
filled our tinny, cauliflower ears.
She could not stay long,
as our emperor is red-eyed crazy
and our people hopelessly subjugated
to the merest of his
Lunatic whims and prejudices,
such as cable TV and hip hopscotch
and vast child abduction schemes
run by intelligence services.
Already we had witnessed the broadcast rape and murder
of our collective pride,
during the election.
We watched the gleeful sadism in their sick little eyes
as they snatched the presidency
and encouraged us to think it mattered.
America sure is something.
Yes something like a cave-dwelling monster
that demands continuous sacrifice,
of many things:
Not of virgins and strong men, any more, because along
with slavery some pleasures had to be surrendered, but instead
the sacrifice of humane and
universal impulses wherever they have
the sniveling, trilling temerity to occur…
And, still to this day, massive animal sacrifice, of quadrupeds and fowl, to feed our
blubbery bellies,
and of dirty, shrunken foreign bipeds to provide
labor ever-replenishing and scarcely compensated,
yes, sacrificial bipeds who drag their thin bodies across
bloodthirsty deserts just to prepare you
a cheap and wasteful breakfast;
just to stoop in your fields.
“Give me animal products and lazy Mexicans” bellows the monster, while engineering space laser programs for
the protection of the fanatically rich.
We in the real world must fear the Beast’s need
for perpetual target practice and
submit to his taste for products
made by the sweaty little palms of the underdeveloped world at 1000% profit.
“at least a third of my calories will derive from miserable birds and mistreated cattle, the global lawn will forever be patrolled by lantern-clutching niggers in full battle-rattle,”
--- such are his unsteady and insupportable decrees.
We must be careful, now that sanity has been chased into the night, bleeding from her eyes and ears, nursing an ass
full of shrapnel and semen.
The monster is feeling his oats and is drunk
with the power that grows from designing a nightmare
tailored for all and resisted by none.
Oh, he has stumbled, there go
the Empire's Masonic Twin Towers and the estate tax,
Oh, he is paranoid, several amendments lay gasping and disemboweled…
Oh, he wants a snack, look out in Haiti, beware, Venezuela,
My, how he seethes, in his delirium blaming monkeys for AIDS
and Africans for African famine and these civil wars
that can go on for 40 years but never for a second fail to provide
Diamonds and cell-phone bits
for the diseased pleasures of the West,
as his monstrous and cynical system soaks up
the earth’s moisture and drains it of life.
Beware the ogre, he is
the Pursuit of your Happiness
and the Standard for your Living.
Flight of the Chickadees
Editor's note: this screed was written shortly before the Day of the Tragic Events. The subject matter has gotten much worse since then.
They are all getting back and flitting
near the moat, the residence hall desk monitor:
Klackety klack
Not one not in black.
At least three tightly-clad body types,
each indistinct in that uniformly vacuum-wrapped way produced when
insecurity buts against a pandering to the loins,
they glide and stamp about in tight skirts and stretchy flared pants,
and overcoats of glamorous manufacture,
they shine in the cold of autumn.
against the cultural backdrop of normal non-Greek girls,
they are outstanding,
like nuggets of golden corn,
gleaming in ordure.
A gamedays' gross disappointment
has fueled their frenzy full to a
strident uncontrolled silliness
by this point,
packs of plump and anorexic banshees
shrieking through the streets as
they return from floating about in
impenetrable class nuclei,
from on high heels
presenting steady and disdainful resistance to all
but the most reassuringly groomed stock of fat-headed Anglo-Saxon princelings…
Klackety klack all in black
Thrusting and busting out
In clusters of three they
seem alien, an ethereal race with
impeccable taste in
the art of the unvarying face-paint
and unremarkable dark clothing,
interminably exchanging peppy stories, defamations and
hydrochloric rumors,
one hears, and
radioactive plastic plans
in a shrill, hoarse, lazy luxury tongue
made snappy by the cheap beer sloshing in their
well-nourished pouchy guts,
parading with urgent, forward-looking walks and gestures,
backs rigid and arms folded in some
dull protective fear before their
paraded schizoid bosoms,
scarcely noticing anyone not
similarly about their business and chatty
The demimonde, the attaches, the satellites,
the herds of kept women,
these minglers mixing and mating with kappa sigs and sigma chais and sometimes a lowly pike or unaffiliated athlete:
they blister the air with badinage
and in their drunkenness scrape the pavement like
they have hip displasure,
wiggling their lactose-rich bottoms with
a sense of invigorated and privileged idleness,
practicing distraction and mirthfulness
and anything to please
the men with the khakis and bullwhips and expensive cars
and hooked penises and minds squirming
with mean little lab-rat desires—
Young courtesans indifferent to the masses and the unmade-up,
Klippety-klop,
Kluckety-kluck
Waiting or longing for their dates,
their dashing granitic caravaners,
who constitute an exclusive race of martian suitors
Broad and yet narrow,
symmetrical but uneven and unfair,
who come choking on their crude clannish jokes.
Their sniggering is malicious
and they often speak of genitals.
Still on safari, still keeping the red man down,
still plashing angrily in the bay of Pigs
they come in a ceaseless belching flow of
the bulkiest bandwagons,
Durangos and Expeditions, Escalades and Grand Cherokees,
Trail and Forest Blazers,
seating up to seven scions of
reliable commerce and more than middling prosperity, each,
Neat, aggressive, drunk---leaking
the salacious charm
of the southland’s gallant ways…
Ready to spend money and time with boredom, as if fun were
a continuous burden
interrupted only in a small way by classes and forced nearness to the
grubby non-Greek,
as if fun were taking too long
for these patrician pups
arrayed in fatigues of caps and khaki
Kappa khaki pie
my burly posse do or die,
gonna Bustya in the Eye
A grotesque clay-footed dance performed by rich ciphers in drab costume,
filled to their gills with the awfullest swill,
these whelps of the
limp
and heartless
Master Class.
The revelry is unforced,
it is easy.
there are established and precise methods for
dissipation, oblivion,
for the nightly torture and sacrifice of notions like
humility and decorum:
There’s a certain bearing
of wretched genteel over-confidence
one is obliged to maintain
as he reels and hoots
with the royal belligerence of first-string cornerbacks
at the women of his clan,
and of course, at pedestrians,
and from a secure distance, niggers also.
The bearing is easy enough: it relies mainly on alcohol and dressing in a collar,
in collared shirts of
nauseating girlish pastels that demonstrate
their preening, unassailable manliness,
or a specific style of pants that tend to sag and
expose the wallet,
and this bearing depends
a lot on---derives its ludicrous prideful essence from---the formal claquing,
supportive, throbbing gestures
and verbal huskiness of one’s litter,
or entourage.
The womenfolk have a line they will never forget, and seem never to tire of:
it goes, “Whoooo!!”,
which in piety they blend with another favored, incredulous
ejaculation about O, their God, over and over.
As much as mixers, blackface hazing, a clothing codex, the theft of lawn decorations, Carnacus festivals and other
ritual manglings-together,
these fits of vigorous weekend drinking
and spasms of collective brawn
epitomize and gild the sparkly drama and precious pageantry of Greek Life,
Kappa khaki pie
Gonna bustya in the eye
A war with the suicidal Arabs is coming,
but the duty and post of these flushed young sauce packets
is on the dance-floor and
by the keg,
and in learning Business and Broadcasting,
bolstering american privilege and the
Power to say when and from what altitude
and I can be a fucking homicidal idiot if I please.
And though we shall bleed blood while
they may only hemorrhage dollars
and stock value,
still, in their hearts, flags will wave,
and the rhythm of Baghdad’s bombs
will pump in their frantic, loosened legs,
and then—tottering wildly with the canter of the well-stuffed---
they’ll retire to their hives to mate
in webs of smoke and clouds of beer,
fat with product,
bleeding black into khaki, air into stone
Klickety-klackety-clac
Yickety-yackety-yak
They are all getting back and flitting
near the moat, the residence hall desk monitor:
Klackety klack
Not one not in black.
At least three tightly-clad body types,
each indistinct in that uniformly vacuum-wrapped way produced when
insecurity buts against a pandering to the loins,
they glide and stamp about in tight skirts and stretchy flared pants,
and overcoats of glamorous manufacture,
they shine in the cold of autumn.
against the cultural backdrop of normal non-Greek girls,
they are outstanding,
like nuggets of golden corn,
gleaming in ordure.
A gamedays' gross disappointment
has fueled their frenzy full to a
strident uncontrolled silliness
by this point,
packs of plump and anorexic banshees
shrieking through the streets as
they return from floating about in
impenetrable class nuclei,
from on high heels
presenting steady and disdainful resistance to all
but the most reassuringly groomed stock of fat-headed Anglo-Saxon princelings…
Klackety klack all in black
Thrusting and busting out
In clusters of three they
seem alien, an ethereal race with
impeccable taste in
the art of the unvarying face-paint
and unremarkable dark clothing,
interminably exchanging peppy stories, defamations and
hydrochloric rumors,
one hears, and
radioactive plastic plans
in a shrill, hoarse, lazy luxury tongue
made snappy by the cheap beer sloshing in their
well-nourished pouchy guts,
parading with urgent, forward-looking walks and gestures,
backs rigid and arms folded in some
dull protective fear before their
paraded schizoid bosoms,
scarcely noticing anyone not
similarly about their business and chatty
The demimonde, the attaches, the satellites,
the herds of kept women,
these minglers mixing and mating with kappa sigs and sigma chais and sometimes a lowly pike or unaffiliated athlete:
they blister the air with badinage
and in their drunkenness scrape the pavement like
they have hip displasure,
wiggling their lactose-rich bottoms with
a sense of invigorated and privileged idleness,
practicing distraction and mirthfulness
and anything to please
the men with the khakis and bullwhips and expensive cars
and hooked penises and minds squirming
with mean little lab-rat desires—
Young courtesans indifferent to the masses and the unmade-up,
Klippety-klop,
Kluckety-kluck
Waiting or longing for their dates,
their dashing granitic caravaners,
who constitute an exclusive race of martian suitors
Broad and yet narrow,
symmetrical but uneven and unfair,
who come choking on their crude clannish jokes.
Their sniggering is malicious
and they often speak of genitals.
Still on safari, still keeping the red man down,
still plashing angrily in the bay of Pigs
they come in a ceaseless belching flow of
the bulkiest bandwagons,
Durangos and Expeditions, Escalades and Grand Cherokees,
Trail and Forest Blazers,
seating up to seven scions of
reliable commerce and more than middling prosperity, each,
Neat, aggressive, drunk---leaking
the salacious charm
of the southland’s gallant ways…
Ready to spend money and time with boredom, as if fun were
a continuous burden
interrupted only in a small way by classes and forced nearness to the
grubby non-Greek,
as if fun were taking too long
for these patrician pups
arrayed in fatigues of caps and khaki
Kappa khaki pie
my burly posse do or die,
gonna Bustya in the Eye
A grotesque clay-footed dance performed by rich ciphers in drab costume,
filled to their gills with the awfullest swill,
these whelps of the
limp
and heartless
Master Class.
The revelry is unforced,
it is easy.
there are established and precise methods for
dissipation, oblivion,
for the nightly torture and sacrifice of notions like
humility and decorum:
There’s a certain bearing
of wretched genteel over-confidence
one is obliged to maintain
as he reels and hoots
with the royal belligerence of first-string cornerbacks
at the women of his clan,
and of course, at pedestrians,
and from a secure distance, niggers also.
The bearing is easy enough: it relies mainly on alcohol and dressing in a collar,
in collared shirts of
nauseating girlish pastels that demonstrate
their preening, unassailable manliness,
or a specific style of pants that tend to sag and
expose the wallet,
and this bearing depends
a lot on---derives its ludicrous prideful essence from---the formal claquing,
supportive, throbbing gestures
and verbal huskiness of one’s litter,
or entourage.
The womenfolk have a line they will never forget, and seem never to tire of:
it goes, “Whoooo!!”,
which in piety they blend with another favored, incredulous
ejaculation about O, their God, over and over.
As much as mixers, blackface hazing, a clothing codex, the theft of lawn decorations, Carnacus festivals and other
ritual manglings-together,
these fits of vigorous weekend drinking
and spasms of collective brawn
epitomize and gild the sparkly drama and precious pageantry of Greek Life,
Kappa khaki pie
Gonna bustya in the eye
A war with the suicidal Arabs is coming,
but the duty and post of these flushed young sauce packets
is on the dance-floor and
by the keg,
and in learning Business and Broadcasting,
bolstering american privilege and the
Power to say when and from what altitude
and I can be a fucking homicidal idiot if I please.
And though we shall bleed blood while
they may only hemorrhage dollars
and stock value,
still, in their hearts, flags will wave,
and the rhythm of Baghdad’s bombs
will pump in their frantic, loosened legs,
and then—tottering wildly with the canter of the well-stuffed---
they’ll retire to their hives to mate
in webs of smoke and clouds of beer,
fat with product,
bleeding black into khaki, air into stone
Klickety-klackety-clac
Yickety-yackety-yak
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
I Didn't Mean to Bash America but She was Drunk and Out of Line.
The writing seems to be very clearly plastered across the wall, and the T-shirts, and the music videos, and the television news and adverts, and the newspapers, and the modes of official speech. You may have to search among lots of other distracting, useless information and messages, or have the proper spectacles on, to read the script. I'm talking about the non-roseate glasses worn by the somewhat rare, informed citizen of this country who is not a self-absorbed, teat-guzzling donkey wage-earner. To see the writing, you do not necessarily have to have access to the internet, but it's only there that you can exercise any amount of control over the data being entered into your hard drive, as opposed to letting data flow neatly, one-way, into your mind-drive from a dodgy TV screen which knows all the petty secrets of human thought and impulse, and sucks its life from them. If not for your pick-pocket fondling by the television that knows you so well and is there for you always, you might have no sex life, many of you. The TV and its disease-carrying alpha waves are destroying your humanity, what is left of it. The TV is an altar meant for child sacrifice.
(Our Lady of Gaga, pictured above, as below, demonstrating that one has to suffer, and even sacrifice themselves on live television, for their art. Interestingly, one of the earliest etymological origins of the word "celebrity" comes from the Old French, meaning "solemn rite or ceremony." And of course a "star" is a heavenly body. As below, Our Lady of Ritual Gibberish, hanging out inside a Zodiac Costume.)
If, if you feel pity and contempt at the same time for the imbeciles, for these other rose-tinted mind-cripples, wardens, executives, security analysts, lewd choreographers and wealthy pornographers surrounding you, pity and contempt for their drugged inability to see the obvious when they are being practically raped by it, then you shouldn't be ashamed. You can't be criticized. You can't be reasonably called "wild-eyed" just for having opened them, or when you are in fact squinting against the obscene, blinding glare which the awful blingbling state of things gives off.
("Jay-Hova's" esoteric Bling-bling pictured above; note the exacting position of his eye)
(More god-damned esoteric mind-controlling cuteness from Madonna's high-priestess Kabbala-spawn, below. She has eyes to see, you know, even if they seem empty.)
If you have a vague sense of an impending News-Real terror that will be encased in lies and spawned by the sick power-lust of Judaeo-Anglo-Saxon reaction, (and certainly not by any jihadist revolutionary sentiment) then a bloody hearty congratulations to you, indeed. You are not as fucking stupid as you should be...as it was intended that you be. You are more than your vanity and your need for a plastic peace of mind. If you smell something foul in the formula we are plugged into and which has been slipped into our nippled bottles, and that a war with Iran or mass swine flu vaccinations are not the wisest or most humane courses for America, then you should pat yourself on the back and become a diplomat, or a medical doctor. But do not marry or have children or love anyone deeply because these weaknesses will eventually be used against you. If you do embark on a mission of righteousness and truth-telling, remember to declare openly and often that you would never commit suicide, so that when you are murdered, the newspapers can't as effectively lie about your demise. Above all, should you ever rise to a position of real influence and yet still choose to publicly attack or contradict the official state version of events, then you must avoid flying in any sort of airplane, no matter what.
I tend to feel there are no "Muslim extremists" alive today who are not either fake or merely reacting, as they are the target or pawns of extremely belligerent and mostly indescribable evils being practiced by the Occult extremists of the West, by the godless Capitalist Radicals in their Mystery Schools: Those same inbred sociopaths that put all that alchemical nonsense of eyes, pyramids, numerology and bizarre talismanic images of the Towers collapsing on your money as if it were a folding Tarot card, and who are methodically devaluing that money, and who would like nothing better than to abduct and rape your children because it is for them such a pleasant pastime, when they are not planning invasions and fake terror attacks. The same spooky devils who use the MTV Video Music Awards and the Super Bowl half-time "shows" as staging grounds for not very well-concealed high-Occult ceremonies and magic rituals, with mock blood sacrifices and the baring of so many bejeweled pop-star titties as to make the mind reel over the concept of "malfunction," if not coincidence. There never was an Islam-o-fascist as frightening as the devil worshippers, neo-nazis, Kabbalists and wet-mouthed sadists that we call our celebrities, elected representatives, and clergy, whom we heed and obey like so many lobotomized serfs or redrobed acolytes. Even now I obey their orders, committing my objectionable opinions to their permanent, clever trap, the internet.
With America's noted taste for tradition and ritual, we now acknowledge the 70 year anniversary of the day we tested some technology on Japan, a terrific weapon of mass destruction which has guided our noble destiny since that day of Primal Shock and Awe, or primal "Shekinah," if you prefer.
On August 6, 1945, we fucked up Japan terrible bad, for generations, and it was more a kind of controlled experiment than a military act. In our mighty flying craft, we flew over the old island autocracy, a land full of suffering serfs, and dropped these brand-new market products and wonders of science on it. According to the court history of the incident(s), we did this because we were at war with the Japanese People, an involvement we are told arose from the devious yellow devils' decision to entangle us in another undesired world war, when they stabbed our broad, honorable back in Hawaii, our beautiful lily pad to the Orient, wrested rightfully from the Spanish, another grasping race of religious fanatics who also once surprised us with a surprise back-stabbing in foreign harbors, back in 1898. There was no democratic vote in 1945: it was the Executive Branch that carried out the mass execution of children, Taoist priests, Allied POW's, and every breathing house-pet within range of a poisoned atmosphere, but our Western-Civ and American history texts do indicate that each of these seal-clubbing vermin deserved it, because they were definitely sleazy back-stabbing fanatics with slanted eyes suggestive, reminiscent, and provocative of evil. Then, as now, our military intelligence was simply not competent enough to prevent massive surprise attacks, whether delivered by entire, disappearing Japanese Navies or by a small gang of homicidal Muslims from South Florida armed with box-cutters and a remarkably clunky plan that reeked of Hollywood. It is that fundamental, institutional incompetence, we have therefore perhaps reluctantly learned, that forces us in the end to resort to more brutish and proactive means of defending our way of life, etc.---Means such as atomic bombs, bio-weapons, continuous wars of aggression, and the various methods we have of turning recognizably human beings into creatures like this...
And didn't we teach them, didn't we spread democracy and not terror by melting and poisoning and wiping out in an instant 140,000 mostly non-combatant types, and then doing it again three days later, on a slightly more modest scale? Wasn't the sacrifice worth the immeasurable prosperity we and our professional sports leagues have enjoyed since ww2? What right do any protesting god-damn Nuns have to object to an act of courage and valor and calculated life-saving which brought an end to a tragic, unloved world war? These thankless virgins could not protest without F-16s even now shooting the hell and the blasphemy out of foreign dictatorships, without having themselves been nourished by the blood of the fanatics of Falluja and Nagasaki, and Jonestown, Guyana. It's true. And yet the crazy nuns protested once again when the military was called upon to soak the lands of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia with fancy toxins and napalm and millions of bombs and scores of redneck CIA assassins, and more innocent blood than can ever be washed away or remembered.
Undesirable carnage is demanded by the struggles for Democracy and the primacy of our Occult Mystery Religions. We have seen this from the movie, "300," and from the nakedly self-evident successes of our ongoing holy war against countries with no military force whatsoever. One can't very well savor something as diffuse and ethereal as Kabbalistic/Western individual liberty without getting concrete and dirty by chopping off the fanatical monotheist arms and hands of the barbarian, which are regularly trying to assassinate our liberties and our access to fuel. Remember that these are the same vile extremists who do not want your wife, lover, or girlfriend to wear pants, or receive diplomas, or give blowjobs without being commanded, or admire Lady Gaga as she seizures around the award stage, shrieking and covered in blood, or, as in her videos, she copulates with some man beneath a mounted goat's head, before murdering him.
It is for this reason, the sheer difficulty of securing religious freedom and democracy in a world of sooty, backwards zealots and dark, hairy despots who despise our goodcleanfun popular culture, that we must steel ourselves and employ every weapon in the Republic's arsenal. No matter how wicked or reminiscent of terrorism. We must flavor the beard of every Mohammedan with our liberal monthly discharge. We must water-board all enemies of the wight-manse free market and of the objectives of the coy astrological paganism of our ruling class, until the enemies are no longer thirsty, until they are bloated with the need to tell us everything about their next surprise and unactionable attack. Those who do not prostrate themselves before the goat skull and the petrodollar will be made to do so, and their comfort will not be considered butt sadistically. The clever use of anthrax is not off-limits, even in the homeland, nor the alchemical power of occult insignia and mega-rituals, sprinkled over the money and throughout the entertainment. Accept that depleted uranium-stuffed munitions are just the thing for the cause, as they have proven deadly to fanatical terrorists in the womb. Eat these stuffed shells, they are magic: they're so filling that your grand-children may never know hunger... It can perhaps be relied on that the embryos hatched by in-theater American soldiers are more durable and resistant to the cancers caused by these powerful weapons, as the embryos' parents have better diets, and are extremely well-vaccinated. We can only hope with our singular united statist optimism that our obedient boys on the battlefields do not succumb to the poisons we're using on them, just as we can only hope that the sorcery bubbling over on our televisions doesn't make too many Crowleys and Bush's, too many Jay-Hova's and Michael Aquino's of our somewhat attentive children. But the odds suggest that we have disfigured many of our future generations already. Hopelessly and in a host of ways, in part because we have turned much of the world into a mass-grave and a toxic dump.
There is one thing about our collective and massive failure to read the writing on the walls and screens and death notices, that gives me reason to be less disgusted. It is the nearly unavoidable state of our blindness. We are esteemed by our masters to be stabled plow-beasts, or laboratory subjects only, and it's for good reason. It's a refined and well-controlled operation. We are subjected to a persistent, organized program of blinkering and eye-gouging, all very scientific. Our diets in everything are finely limited to the things which delight and enervate us, or that can only give us the brief and meaningless enthusiasms of cocaine and speed addicts.We engage in religious pursuit of onanism, sculpted cores, orgasm. The rejection of the endlessness or eternal rebirth of organic life, and thus in a way the murder of its safe-guarded dignity, is replaced by Yolo. Yolo has sincere traction right now. It explains much of youth behavior and is more than a catch-phrase milked by the capitalist.
How are we to make sense of anything with Gaga and Jay-Z and the Bush clan and Rupert Murdoch and Rudy Giuliani exerting an influence on the collective mind and heart? When the whole of academia, media, and the intellectual classes insist that 9-11 was an authentic terror attack launched by Muslims and has "changed everything forever," and that we had better toe these absurd, fatally murderous lines if we know what is good for us? When now, because of these treasonous mass murders of 2001, our armies are slaughtering and encouraging the slaughter of innocent people every day in the name of an evil hallucination? There is most certainly an end game strategy at play here, but it is definable, visible only to those with sufficiently focused or interested vision, with "eyes to see." It is never treated in bold-face, in any headline: the occultic end game is only described as if by the microscopic and morbid cautionary script on potent pharmaceuticals that the state mandates some sad anxious child must take, and which script is never intended to be read. The semi-secret blood-Rules of the game are written into an invisible but no less real contract that exists between slave and Master. It is all very much between the lines, while we are taught to take all things literally. One result appears to be that we become schizophrenic, with a bizarre, sublimated taste for the flesh and suffering of our neighbors, which used to be called "cannibalism," and "sadism," but is now merely living in what is called a "free market system." Truly, the market has freedom, and we have mystery diseases, and wars.
Blindness is merely living, getting on with it, in this slave and bordello system. And so we accept having been blinded, warped, pimped and rendered to a very sloppy state of semi-awareness; but to the extent that we were always an unsophisticated species dependent on the dull, reliable satisfactions of herd life, maybe, after all, we can't really be blamed for this compliance, or even for relishing our diet of gruel-thin propaganda and ninety-nine scent bloodburger sandwiches. All we seem to want is consistency---but a thin consistency---and more calories and possessions than we need or deserve. All we seem to want are these things, and for the milk maid to come and relieve all the pressure in our tits and bellies. Then to leave us alone and let us go on chewing and fucking and rubbing ourselves, inside the golden pen.
(Hey, Kids! Can you spot the Baphomet in your favorite Rhianna, Lady Gaga, or Omarion video? Is that what you don't think it is? Could they all just be simple goat-herders?)
...For further illuminating (if glossary) reading on the subject of the arcane and wicked-smelling world of Kabbalistic/Mystical American show business:
here.
and here.
SPECIAL AND IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Of course, none of this mess about the Kabbalist/esoteric agenda within modern popular entertainment may mean a thing. It could all exist simply to keep us confused and afraid and paranoid, as a kind of fear-based psychological operation, a la the mass murders of 9-11. There is always that possibility, but we are left to judge it all quietly as individuals. The crowd might stone you to death, after all, if you pipe up.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Christian Supplication List, Volume 2
Jesus Christ,
something is rotten in the state of America.
help us to root it out and dispose of it.
i've read of satanic adventures
and young mr. Potter--
but nothing so evil and craven as the
story of our modern national life
has crossed my eyes;
may Christmas pass the land
of Land Rovers over and leave
a smear of shit on her electric gate.
She will get hers without my help, for sure,
the vile, grease-painted hussy;
the crazed, grease-painted hussy!
"My country's Vill-ai-ny,
It's plane for me to seee,
But still i stay..."
there are angles here impossible to measure,
resembling
Owls and pentacles,
Pentagons inside of Pentagrams
destined to be damaged through
the dedication of dollars
called reserve notes
that illustrate a prophecy
laying silent in your pockets, niggers all of us together---
drunken, depressed, debased
load-bearers of guilt and evil talismans,
soon to be out of work and purpose, even as vessels,
even as porters.
A nation of overworked weasels
who never knew one moment
without rabies or fear.
a hurricane of blood-soaked shit and murder that
began at the millenium's dawn
and has continued unabated since,
seems like only a troubling breeze
from a distant outhouse
to the lotus-eating zombies
that shuffle across America,
and pewl over her,
and who still cry for revenge against terrorists,
one supposes,
between mouthfuls of brain and milkshake.
Each horrid security and intelligence "failure"...
....and simultaneous right-wing advance,
one upon the other,
is merely a coincidence.
no connections can be made.
the zombies hear an ugly noise
and en masse jerk their heads in the direction of a
great loudspeaker...
some people have managed to hole themselves up in
a great library with broadband,
and have begun broadcasting:
"your government, it may be hard to believe,
is a brotherhood of vampires.
if the real Light of Truth were
ever to shine over the sacred pagan district of
those two venerated white supremacists,
George and Christopher,
all one would see was a throng of outraged, twitching devils,
momentarily blinded,
their game of playing drunken cricket or polo
with a child's battered head, interrupted.
you have been made to consume the filth
of these evil sportsmen,"
says the voice,
"To eat and drink their lies
all your unpitying lives.
You are now almost totally satisfied
with your unwholesome diet of lies, brains,
and dirty sweets.
You do not want to eat each other
but you are told it is in the spirit of competition.
It is parallel to the ethic of the Big "C" herself,
Capitalism, vanquisher of all womanish scruples.
But maybe it is not too late,
even for we selfish, sluggish ghouls and
flesh-eating child-herders
of the united states,
to turn from our fat cannibalism...
If the worm of change is very tiny,
then just allow it to nibble,
just nibble at you,
there is much to eat!!"
O Whitest Hebe!
guard me against
the poisonous sanctimonies
and powerlust of the
deranged Zionists,
the gibbering occultists of State,
and their many decadent cronies.
steel me versus the thousand diseased temptations
of the good life they sell.
deflect their laser sights
and their night vision
if they get to me.
Let their children feel the
shock of the Tazer, again and again,
if they manage to succeed;
let me die peacefully
and not in one of their camps,
playing basketball or tennis on Soma,
or enslaved in their army,
fighting the deathless suicide bombers.
Let the
bleeding imbeciles who read this, develop
weeping lesions where their thighs meet,
and their lower intestines boil with
hot stinking crude
if they snigger at me or think me
less than serious or informed.
When rationed,
i will want only enough
water to spit, whereas they will beg for the piss of their captors.
Jesus let us
go forward together, in a bi-partisan way
on this day of giving,
blessing other countries with our scraps,
once America has had her
bountiful portion,
Amen.
something is rotten in the state of America.
help us to root it out and dispose of it.
i've read of satanic adventures
and young mr. Potter--
but nothing so evil and craven as the
story of our modern national life
has crossed my eyes;
may Christmas pass the land
of Land Rovers over and leave
a smear of shit on her electric gate.
She will get hers without my help, for sure,
the vile, grease-painted hussy;
the crazed, grease-painted hussy!
"My country's Vill-ai-ny,
It's plane for me to seee,
But still i stay..."
there are angles here impossible to measure,
resembling
Owls and pentacles,
Pentagons inside of Pentagrams
destined to be damaged through
the dedication of dollars
called reserve notes
that illustrate a prophecy
laying silent in your pockets, niggers all of us together---
drunken, depressed, debased
load-bearers of guilt and evil talismans,
soon to be out of work and purpose, even as vessels,
even as porters.
A nation of overworked weasels
who never knew one moment
without rabies or fear.
a hurricane of blood-soaked shit and murder that
began at the millenium's dawn
and has continued unabated since,
seems like only a troubling breeze
from a distant outhouse
to the lotus-eating zombies
that shuffle across America,
and pewl over her,
and who still cry for revenge against terrorists,
one supposes,
between mouthfuls of brain and milkshake.
Each horrid security and intelligence "failure"...
....and simultaneous right-wing advance,
one upon the other,
is merely a coincidence.
no connections can be made.
the zombies hear an ugly noise
and en masse jerk their heads in the direction of a
great loudspeaker...
some people have managed to hole themselves up in
a great library with broadband,
and have begun broadcasting:
"your government, it may be hard to believe,
is a brotherhood of vampires.
if the real Light of Truth were
ever to shine over the sacred pagan district of
those two venerated white supremacists,
George and Christopher,
all one would see was a throng of outraged, twitching devils,
momentarily blinded,
their game of playing drunken cricket or polo
with a child's battered head, interrupted.
you have been made to consume the filth
of these evil sportsmen,"
says the voice,
"To eat and drink their lies
all your unpitying lives.
You are now almost totally satisfied
with your unwholesome diet of lies, brains,
and dirty sweets.
You do not want to eat each other
but you are told it is in the spirit of competition.
It is parallel to the ethic of the Big "C" herself,
Capitalism, vanquisher of all womanish scruples.
But maybe it is not too late,
even for we selfish, sluggish ghouls and
flesh-eating child-herders
of the united states,
to turn from our fat cannibalism...
If the worm of change is very tiny,
then just allow it to nibble,
just nibble at you,
there is much to eat!!"
O Whitest Hebe!
guard me against
the poisonous sanctimonies
and powerlust of the
deranged Zionists,
the gibbering occultists of State,
and their many decadent cronies.
steel me versus the thousand diseased temptations
of the good life they sell.
deflect their laser sights
and their night vision
if they get to me.
Let their children feel the
shock of the Tazer, again and again,
if they manage to succeed;
let me die peacefully
and not in one of their camps,
playing basketball or tennis on Soma,
or enslaved in their army,
fighting the deathless suicide bombers.
Let the
bleeding imbeciles who read this, develop
weeping lesions where their thighs meet,
and their lower intestines boil with
hot stinking crude
if they snigger at me or think me
less than serious or informed.
When rationed,
i will want only enough
water to spit, whereas they will beg for the piss of their captors.
Jesus let us
go forward together, in a bi-partisan way
on this day of giving,
blessing other countries with our scraps,
once America has had her
bountiful portion,
Amen.
Christian Supplication List, Volume 1
In the Name of Our December 25
once again Jesus i have
stumbled into the pit
of an American Christmas.
the green gore and the red money,
the fake holly hector me,
leaving me singed and not toasty.
i would like to
enjoy these beatific holidays
but it is raining and these are
the End Times,
and i think i have a tumor behind my right eye.
there are also a number of other
small concerns that
keep me from rejoicing
in togetherness with the glad, hapless
race of cretins, consumptive cattle, and child molesters
that populate the land,
and whom you have
wisely placed all over the Earth
in positions of Power.
their gladness surely is attractive,
though i am equally sure they need alcohol to be pleasant,
and Cialis to rape their servants:
Of course you know
i sort of don't know if i'm waking or dreaming these days, Papa.
it may have taken me longer than others
to see that i am spinning through
time and space with no understanding,
pissing on myself like a puppy
in a state of mixed dread and happiness,
strangling on my own brain, my own tongue,
laughing atandwith others while
i struggle to love, gain approval,
and deceive us all in turn,
forced like a captive insurgent to observe
endless torture, sadism, rape and corruption,
this constant human mess-making.
it is not at all my fault
and you fucking well know it,
Omniscient One.
i resolve for the New Year to reject all blame,
all censure and criticism from
intellectuals, weaklings and club-footed moralists.
if i had achieved manhood
in 1955,
well before the scientific and existential revolutions that now
make a simple and decent life so preposterous,
then i should have no troubles
keeping track of things,
winking at problems, and carrying on,
like a good worker or manager.
but this is 2007, an age of
relentless lunacy, of violent silliness,
of pedophiliac buggery packaged as child care.
i have to wonder, then, why you don't share blame,
wherever you are,
if you hog all the credit and purpose,
fondling atoms and shit while
generally neglecting to relieve
even the slightest suffering
which your vast horde of cross-draggers
has sown throughout the world.
Jesus Christ, enough
with perspective, deliver us
from every person's particular slant on things.
Print life and make a mortal sin of cursive.
I'm tired of argument and stifling Egos
and the ideas of stupid people who
have been born lucky
and never outgrow the megalomania of infancy
lordy Christ
i see you forgot your shroud
when you beat it,
how forgetful.
you left us to fend off the Romans
and join in their many dirty circuses,
left us to depend on their debilitating, clean water,
their mindless Mammonism,
their inescapable phallic symbols and phallic logic,
and their deep-occult rituals,
which in our daftness
we no longer comprehend,
thank you ten thousand times,
Prince of Light and Truth.
will Ye please bless the vegetarians
this holiday,
for their refusal to join in the slaughter
of the ungulates and the fowl,
even the fish,
bless these holy soldiers
but smite them behind the ears,
thereafter,
for paying taxes and fealty to the Empire,
and worrying so much
about other species
when their own lacks
proper scrutiny and care.
Jesus will you pay a visit to Africa,
when you get a chance,
and help them smash the shackles of Anglo/Arab/Class/Tribal-hegemony,
will you send to them a scientist
brave and capable enough to prove
that man made AIDS, fausting away
in his laboratories for
the perfect depopulation mechanism
to use in that land
of precious minerals,
fuels and memories?
Jesus, have pity on the blacks for once.
People will begin to think
that, like so many other orthodox Jews,
you regard the negro
as an inferior, animal race,
and believe in the curse of Ham.
O Lord, will you call
upon your sea-monsters,
as in the old days,
and affix the largest and hungriest,
most terrifying
Serpent to the
mind of America,
bid it suck dry our stuffed,
nearly rusted-shut brains,
and make room in there for ethics and journalism,
and free enterprise guided by civics
and sober state planning?
I'm praying to you Lord.
Son of Man, will you add salt
to the cookies of the money-rich?
will you withhold from them
every cheap bauble that they pray for and covet
in their dementia,
and then rape their retirement plans
as they have raped ours;
will you play on them a dirty trick:
eternally rouse them from fatty, peaceful,
drugged slumber
with bloody phantom shrieks
that dissipate immediately like liberal guilt
and cause them a maddening, paranoid confusion...
looking about in terror
for the lower classes and their knives?
It is petty of me and mean
but it is all i ask...
i know, thou baffling, wiry old contrarian,
that you lack the fanbase, notoriety and weight
of Santa Klaus,
but see to it that i get some fucking
action figures this time around,
and the diamond bracelet
whose hints i have dropped
to my husband for the past two years,
on this fearful American christmas.
once again Jesus i have
stumbled into the pit
of an American Christmas.
the green gore and the red money,
the fake holly hector me,
leaving me singed and not toasty.
i would like to
enjoy these beatific holidays
but it is raining and these are
the End Times,
and i think i have a tumor behind my right eye.
there are also a number of other
small concerns that
keep me from rejoicing
in togetherness with the glad, hapless
race of cretins, consumptive cattle, and child molesters
that populate the land,
and whom you have
wisely placed all over the Earth
in positions of Power.
their gladness surely is attractive,
though i am equally sure they need alcohol to be pleasant,
and Cialis to rape their servants:
Of course you know
i sort of don't know if i'm waking or dreaming these days, Papa.
it may have taken me longer than others
to see that i am spinning through
time and space with no understanding,
pissing on myself like a puppy
in a state of mixed dread and happiness,
strangling on my own brain, my own tongue,
laughing atandwith others while
i struggle to love, gain approval,
and deceive us all in turn,
forced like a captive insurgent to observe
endless torture, sadism, rape and corruption,
this constant human mess-making.
it is not at all my fault
and you fucking well know it,
Omniscient One.
i resolve for the New Year to reject all blame,
all censure and criticism from
intellectuals, weaklings and club-footed moralists.
if i had achieved manhood
in 1955,
well before the scientific and existential revolutions that now
make a simple and decent life so preposterous,
then i should have no troubles
keeping track of things,
winking at problems, and carrying on,
like a good worker or manager.
but this is 2007, an age of
relentless lunacy, of violent silliness,
of pedophiliac buggery packaged as child care.
i have to wonder, then, why you don't share blame,
wherever you are,
if you hog all the credit and purpose,
fondling atoms and shit while
generally neglecting to relieve
even the slightest suffering
which your vast horde of cross-draggers
has sown throughout the world.
Jesus Christ, enough
with perspective, deliver us
from every person's particular slant on things.
Print life and make a mortal sin of cursive.
I'm tired of argument and stifling Egos
and the ideas of stupid people who
have been born lucky
and never outgrow the megalomania of infancy
lordy Christ
i see you forgot your shroud
when you beat it,
how forgetful.
you left us to fend off the Romans
and join in their many dirty circuses,
left us to depend on their debilitating, clean water,
their mindless Mammonism,
their inescapable phallic symbols and phallic logic,
and their deep-occult rituals,
which in our daftness
we no longer comprehend,
thank you ten thousand times,
Prince of Light and Truth.
will Ye please bless the vegetarians
this holiday,
for their refusal to join in the slaughter
of the ungulates and the fowl,
even the fish,
bless these holy soldiers
but smite them behind the ears,
thereafter,
for paying taxes and fealty to the Empire,
and worrying so much
about other species
when their own lacks
proper scrutiny and care.
Jesus will you pay a visit to Africa,
when you get a chance,
and help them smash the shackles of Anglo/Arab/Class/Tribal-hegemony,
will you send to them a scientist
brave and capable enough to prove
that man made AIDS, fausting away
in his laboratories for
the perfect depopulation mechanism
to use in that land
of precious minerals,
fuels and memories?
Jesus, have pity on the blacks for once.
People will begin to think
that, like so many other orthodox Jews,
you regard the negro
as an inferior, animal race,
and believe in the curse of Ham.
O Lord, will you call
upon your sea-monsters,
as in the old days,
and affix the largest and hungriest,
most terrifying
Serpent to the
mind of America,
bid it suck dry our stuffed,
nearly rusted-shut brains,
and make room in there for ethics and journalism,
and free enterprise guided by civics
and sober state planning?
I'm praying to you Lord.
Son of Man, will you add salt
to the cookies of the money-rich?
will you withhold from them
every cheap bauble that they pray for and covet
in their dementia,
and then rape their retirement plans
as they have raped ours;
will you play on them a dirty trick:
eternally rouse them from fatty, peaceful,
drugged slumber
with bloody phantom shrieks
that dissipate immediately like liberal guilt
and cause them a maddening, paranoid confusion...
looking about in terror
for the lower classes and their knives?
It is petty of me and mean
but it is all i ask...
i know, thou baffling, wiry old contrarian,
that you lack the fanbase, notoriety and weight
of Santa Klaus,
but see to it that i get some fucking
action figures this time around,
and the diamond bracelet
whose hints i have dropped
to my husband for the past two years,
on this fearful American christmas.
Monday, September 14, 2009
My very third crushing disappointment in Life. Or, How you beat my pants off in our race to hurt one another.
Trouble-woman,
although you are still maybe
the finest and most desirable
trouble on my planet,
the one fee male above all 2 others
who ever knocked me out
---but my only first-round TKO suffered yet---
and for good god damn reason
i would give my incisors to
sit with you and drink
and feel your eyes and interest on me again,
i knew i should have never
messed with you
and i called that shit when the pistol sounded,
when the bell rang, when the
frantic bulls
of this shameful sloppiness over you
were first loosed
on my slow, fat, tourist's mind.
You might have come sealed by a tamper-proof cap
to keep all that wonderful poison
from hasty pudding tamperers like me,
but no,
you were wide open from the start,
like a snare,
because you enjoyed me so then, when our splendid
sled-ride towards the suckingswamp of pain and shit began,
just last Sunday...
But I guess your natural composition
is hasty pudding-proof, anyway.
like most puerile 30 year-olds of today,
you recoil from earnestness, emotion, and intensity...
all your energy is sucked dry from the sleepless need to be cool,
invulnerable,
and firmly positioned behind your turret.
No, one has to be determined,
not to get inside of you, with you,
but to stay there,
or else to get out unhurt.
One has to be determined and subtle,
and not just be fucking around and shit,
because that leathery bloodpump of yours
is centered deep in a minefield scattered
with the bodies of
plenty who wanted you,
a dangerous
and bewildering zone
where any affection you might give
ends up only as hot shrapnel
near the spine.
Besides all this,
you are possibly just a sensualist whore,
a sex industrialist,
a distracted collector of thrills,
a modern woman who resembles a modern man.
Never openly desire
the heart of a liberated wild-woman
who only recently had it broken and poisoned,
and bashed with an electric guitar.
although you are still maybe
the finest and most desirable
trouble on my planet,
the one fee male above all 2 others
who ever knocked me out
---but my only first-round TKO suffered yet---
and for good god damn reason
i would give my incisors to
sit with you and drink
and feel your eyes and interest on me again,
i knew i should have never
messed with you
and i called that shit when the pistol sounded,
when the bell rang, when the
frantic bulls
of this shameful sloppiness over you
were first loosed
on my slow, fat, tourist's mind.
You might have come sealed by a tamper-proof cap
to keep all that wonderful poison
from hasty pudding tamperers like me,
but no,
you were wide open from the start,
like a snare,
because you enjoyed me so then, when our splendid
sled-ride towards the suckingswamp of pain and shit began,
just last Sunday...
But I guess your natural composition
is hasty pudding-proof, anyway.
like most puerile 30 year-olds of today,
you recoil from earnestness, emotion, and intensity...
all your energy is sucked dry from the sleepless need to be cool,
invulnerable,
and firmly positioned behind your turret.
No, one has to be determined,
not to get inside of you, with you,
but to stay there,
or else to get out unhurt.
One has to be determined and subtle,
and not just be fucking around and shit,
because that leathery bloodpump of yours
is centered deep in a minefield scattered
with the bodies of
plenty who wanted you,
a dangerous
and bewildering zone
where any affection you might give
ends up only as hot shrapnel
near the spine.
Besides all this,
you are possibly just a sensualist whore,
a sex industrialist,
a distracted collector of thrills,
a modern woman who resembles a modern man.
Never openly desire
the heart of a liberated wild-woman
who only recently had it broken and poisoned,
and bashed with an electric guitar.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Poisoned Dates
She was almost ten years younger than me and I met her on the internet. The third dangerous thing to understand about this woman is that she has an extraordinary power over me. I even typed “her” in place of “me” in the last sentence, originally. Even though I’ve loved females of my species before and am familiar with the results, I seem to be trying hard to love her, too, and there’s little room for that sort of emotionally suicidal randiness in the life of a
dignified man like myself, it is now clear to me.
Her name is Julia and the desire for her started quite naturally in the eyes and loins, but then spread like an efficient virus or a hot welcome cancer throughout my head, hands, and intestines. She posed beautifully in her pictures, without posing, really. There was a bright, glossy shine to her eyes and her lips that is basically surreal, almost too sexy, like she has been dipped in some slippery coital fluid. But there was something lonely and shy and unusual in her look, I guess, and her replies to me, and in the things she posted online were clear signs that this hot young lady was more kind and intelligent, more loving and sensual than a lot of the people I normally deal with. All these things thrilled me. I confess I was swept into a predictable chain reaction of desire and suffering, and forgot my mouthpiece or to sacrifice a chicken to guard against the perils ahead.
“If you want something to play with…go and find yourself a toy…”
She appeared to coo and lounge in almost obscenely gratifying and voluptuous fashion at the crossroads of many things I admire in the human character, wherever they dare to sprout up against every motherfucking odd. There was the comely joining of the four essential qualities people were alleged to be composed of, long, long ago, in the old days of good: the Spiritual, the Intellectual, the Physical, and the Emotional. She was, to appearances, in all of these ways a good, attractive person, and so she touched my thumper warmly. And she is so pretty that I know she inspires random sex and love fantasies every single day when she is seen in public, and carried home thereafter by countless men to their private moments. Beautiful in the way that startles and grabs you, whether you’re a lesbian, a fag, or a breeder. She had grown up under so many hungry, desirous eyes that she bore that weight somewhat uncomfortably.
Round and full and in her eyes and nose and sexy, sometimes pouting mouth a flagrant hot glossiness, as I’ve tried to describe already. Her lips were naturally wet. Her soft mellow flesh produced its own alluring make-up, and her nose was described often as “cute.” The tits she had been granted spilled out extravagantly no matter what she tried to contain them with. These gorgeous breasts fairly dared you to ogle their sumptuous milky excess. All other women eyed them hissingly, they were burned and insulted by them. The kind of cleavage that hypnotizes even Ass-men and homosexuals, and makes you feel for a second as if the abyss was calling, tottering there like a horny schoolboy, ready to spill over into those firm pillows of soft lovejoy. If all this were not enough, and it was, she had a stunning, softening, sexy voice that clung to me like a lustful koala and which I had managed to trap once on my cell phone’s memory.
But there’s a profound soul lurking in her anyway, for all that magical sexy gloss, and in any language this spells trouble, and wounds that suppurate long after inflicted. I’m telling you this girl is like a tempest among rotted trees, and lots of men probably either flee from her in terror or stay transfixed and hope they can survive the psychic trauma of so much fantastic, howling physical presence, while struggling to make a decent impression.
Yes when you talk to her you can see that she is good and has substance. It is confusing. She follows the philosophy, she says, of loving everybody in the beginning and letting them prove themselves from there; adamantly she suggests she does not judge people’s hearts and she appears sincere and humble, in all. Her mind is good and she can rely upon herself; she told me she sometimes sits in the dark and quiet and thinks for hours. I knew this to be an un-American way to carry on, and it made me hot. There is more.
She likes to take baths. She sent me a picture of her in one. At first I could not make out the subject, as it was all foamy and dusky and candlelit. But finally I made out her huge floating mammaries and one winky serpentine eyeball. Then one night she sent me a picture of her bed, aglow and soft, piled with the insurmountable number of pillows girls will sometimes enchant their lives with. That did me no real good, it sent me wandering straight into the desert, slobbery-faced into the cruel dry desert of wanting someone I had never met, and worse and more parched a reality still, a lush internet coquette at that. This girl was a sex panther and liked and intimately knew Kahlil Gibran. What tender-souled sex panther does not? On her internet social profile she posted the Lebanese god-child's work. I saved the bath-time pic on my phone and it was there for me to see all the time, for days, a subtle sample of screen-saving sex magic, with flames. The afternoon before our first date, I spent a couple of hours making a mix of soul music that would please her as she bathed, and it’s playing now. She hasn’t heard it. I erased that picture and want a new one now but that depends on her. This will not happen, my stomach and its cradle of ulcers say.
I wanted to see her and I’d been pushing her in that direction for a while. She had once before said yes. And I was one of innumerable, insufferable internet suitors accessing her profile, pushing to see her. My one picture was sufficiently handsome, and I could write decent sentences. These were my ins. So we started a flirtation and after a discreet period of time she gave me her number. I wrote her and talked on the phone to her a bit about politics and the truth and such irritating, potentially lethal nonsense. And yet having a brain, to the eyes of an American woman raised in the "deep" South, is a fascinating and strange thing. It’s an unaccustomed pleasure for them to find one in the male, very often. She was able to see that I was not a total fraud, moron or sadist, not a typical boy, and yet she dug me. I fancied her immediately for that, anyway. She claimed to enjoy our conversations and she meant it seriously I think. Then again I couldn’t see her eyes.
I asked her about her dreams and she did not disappoint me. Vivid strange descriptions that intrigued me completely. Even I had to write some of them down, but I won’t go into her dreams here, or probably anywhere, at anytime.
Men can fall in love based purely and only on physical beauty that contains great sweetness. The beauty part is elementary. Sweetness is metaphysical, and I know this, in part, because I see it displayed and gleaming from people’s eyes, mostly. It can’t itself talk very well and doesn’t wear bright livery, and one of its hallmarks is that people do not really ever speak deeply or meaningfully of it, or of kindness; as if these qualities were ghosts, or space aliens, or foreign policy. When they do speak of it, it’s with the imprecision we reserve for speaking of our age or body weight, or finding the g-spot, or defining gallicisms. I rarely find these qualities in print, or in politics, or exhibited among society. Generated by something much bigger and finer than us in the oversoul, kindness and sympathy are like long golden shadows cast forward by a good individual and you can almost see them coming if you are attuned. They exist of their own power and they can’t be forced or suppressed. Kindness is so hounded, so rare, so wretched, in a sense, that I glow in fascination and worship if it ever comes blazing briefly through my view. She had a kind heart and amazingly, didn’t even try to hide it beneath layers of protective shit and posturing.
So, early on she said yes but I called her that weekend, precipitously, after her caving in. I called her after drinking some alcohol. It was after midnight but before indecency, I felt, on a weekend, maybe the Sabbath. And I left a message that was both harmless and drunk. She was none pleased and I didn’t hear from her for some many, many days. During that time I wrote to her as if things were not hopelessly smashed apart. I did not realize she had a real problem with guys calling late and drunk, not to speak of being a stranger totally. Her father, she said, had been a drunk and that bothered her. I could understand this.
But I was also hurt at being hung out to dry until I disintegrated. I never could understand or deal with that sort of thing and my friends are also nonplussed at having in their own lives been lopped off coldly as if by a mute executioner, whenever they have disturbed some seismic female whim. There is Certain Ruthlessness to the female prerogative. They don’t mind making you dance the craziest jigs for It, out of the blue, in part, maybe, because they assume you are after only It. And if you are a poor dancer, or if you fail to preempt some silent caprice or another, then you may get to enjoy all her ancient powers of contempt and chilliness.
(I think few people, of either sexual encampment, can deal very well with being stymied with no charge of conduct, no bill of sale, no receipt or explanation. It seems I have always been especially unable to take rejection well, unless I was given a detailed explanation of the unimaginable impetus. This may be my own vain idiosyncrasy.)
Once it was clear she was ignoring me without a statement of purpose after we agreed we would meet, I wrote letters describing my outrage in terms calculated not to drive her away completely. As all men know, this brand of female fickleness has to be treated gingerly and with grim resolve, like a gangrenous and possibly untreatable wound. But the Very Beautiful Woman has an even more radioactive sensitivity, owing to her millions of options and suitors and the distinct, constantly reinforced idea of her rare and extreme appeal. She cannot be told how wrong and hurtful her behavior might possibly be, for instance----only how slighted one’s manhood or humanity is, and shit like that.
I eventually reeled her back in through careful literary pleading, and the sheer fact of my serious, empirical goodness. This was authentic emotional business. I wanted her badly, and I knew exactly why. This girl would not get away easily; I vowed to expend energy, and make a small meal here and there of pride, and burn votive incense. She later told me that in the end my persistence was a good thing. But she appeared to admit that she hadn’t read the letters entirely. She didn’t feel in the mood for bad news or rebukes so she skimmed some of them. There are some things in her life that are very seriously sad, I think, and oppressive. And if one lives in a tiny space they shouldn't let loose with the gratuitous farting, it's only wise. In addition to my words I sent several other pictures of me. I am modestly confident in my physical composition and I felt these pictures could not hurt, particularly those I had manipulated with a computer. These and a shameful poem I wrote about my fiendish, demoniac love for cunnilingus seemed to have some regenerative effect on our friendship.
Before long we were writing notes and exchanging quips and entendres again, with more enthusiasm, even. She was interested and curious, the two best things in Life. One thing bothered me about her, or rather, about this half-imaginary figure whose profile I had been admiring and poring over for weeks, but still had not met.
The bothering problem was she was simply too uncommonly beautiful and she could not help but know it and what a common problem this is. There are many pretty women but her beauty is exotic. It leaps at you and snarls and leaves you visibly upset and cramped. That is the nub of it. As I have tried to explain, she is an unusually sexy girl. Her features paused men and made them both glad and unsure. She was not one to go without attention in public places, and there was a flock of men gurgling and stamping and frothing around her social internet profile page. But strangely---and this is perhaps the last time I try to express this---she was also the sort of woman a fellow instinctively knew he could flirt with while not being a total anxious ape, because she felt as if she were nice. She was sweet. She was not definably vain or off-putting like so many rare beauties. Hot and sweet yet wholesome, like some kind of nourishing sweetcake prepared not in a factory but in your grandmother's oven. She changed one or two pictures often and there was not much to her profile. But there was enough for men who were only heat-seeking, and also men who looked deeper. And modest, too, did I mention…
There was not much to her profile until you found her blogs. She has written very few, but almost everything she writes is limned by mysticism. When I read her more recent stuff, I couldn’t avoid slipping closer. She was yearning for some lost insensible man, who had forgotten his scent in her bedroom. I ached in various places and hated the internet, and loved it, and felt strongly about things in general, all because of this stranger. Her remarkable sweetness and glossy, elvish peculiarity pinned me to the wall for Science and Anthropology. So fertile and voluptuous, such a fine meaty woman: My gibbering, aggressive, inner Paleo-Man adored her mountains of estrogen and wanted to form words of praise to paint on the cavewall of the web. Instead it moaned through heavy animal lips and clutched at its cudgel and denied the urge to repeatedly hammer the "send" button. She wrote of needing somebody to hold her. There was a snuggling deficit.
I say she is a fine stroke of humanity and if she doesn’t find happiness soon (with mating, also, and consistent, toe-twisting orgasms of every sort and method) then the world is a far more insane and barbarically stupid place than I had thought. As to being too beautiful and how this is a poisonous problem---which was my departed point---Julia did not, as I’ve tried to express, suffer from the eclipsing vanity that blinds so many beautiful creatures, male and female. Perhaps she suffered only from the Sensualism that the beautiful are physiologically prey to. All the animals will do their proper thing, and to the greatest extent possible. Rams want to bash heads, for example, and Bonobo chimps have lots of creative sex hanging from the canopies because they are so much like us and the females understand and love orgasms; and hugely proportioned men are drawn to mindless self-aggrandizing rituals like combative sports, and to roles like intimidator and bully, and law-enforcer. The beautiful person’s rare exception seems to drive them to want to get laid a lot, to feel that copious and expert fucking is their deserved Fate, or at least the experience of plenty of intimacy. Preferably or exclusively with other beauties. That’s the active ingredient, or the sine qua non of the beautiful person’s sex life. They fuck and mate with other rare beauties. They do this because they can. It is just a matter of getting a very enjoyable use of fine tools one is lucky enough to have been born with, and it’s all extremely logical: but it follows from this that many beautiful people are fickle and deteriorated from excess, their minds droop from the weight of their bodies, and many of them become shallow, vapid whores: in this way they are exactly like talented athletes. But when she tells me the shockingly small number of men she has been with and talks of her “selectiveness” I completely believe her because it fits. She has the sweetness, shyness, and brains, after all, to know what she is worth.
We finally agree to meet. The day arrives, a Saturday, named after Saturn, and a day intended to be festive. Again, my failure to sacrifice to the Olympians may have been costly. We talk on the phone and I learn that her cousin and a friend of his named after an American Blue Jeans company are attempting to go out with her also, that night. The friend must surely be heat-seeking the girl, I deduce. The Heavens beam later and I get a call, an unnatural call because she is the hot pin-up girl and I normally call her, and she informs me we are to meet, after all, and the implication is that we are to be alone, free of any cousins. She is less imperious than all that, but nonetheless the power lies entirely with her, the awful, core equation that simple Man labors beneath. She dictates the time and the places and the moods, Woman. So then Julia is to check into the issue of clothing and I ask her to wear red jokingly and I am got back to in the form of a text message which says, mysteriously, “Meet me at such-and-such-a-House-of-Liquor-and-Fun at 9:30.”
Anyplace is fine with me and I do not fear the crowds of pomaded mongrels and their stupid, sinister bitches. That’s how I chose to think of it, even though these places tend to make me feel like I've been picking at corpses. This is the extra-fetching girl who drips with sweetness and some kind of shining, affectionate, sexually magic dew which I am confident only I can see and harvest, probably. I’ve made her a nice lovely musical mix of soul music, and bought her a fragrant gift of green tea body applicant, which is an unction that turns me into a raging sultry romantic as soon as it grazes my consciousness. I see us taking a bath because her tits will float nicely like half-submerged holy mountains wreathed in downy clouds and she seems perfect and because I like treating myself to fine sexual fantasies.
I’m off but I have to take a taxi, which is my peculiar handicap in our motivated land. This act alone could have proved lethal. and I don’t know yet because the investigation is not yet complete. The story lacks a tight, proper ending.
The cab service I relied on, so to speak, provided me with a series of outrageous lies and also, exactly 56 minutes after I called them, the same odd, slow-moving, bug-eyed female cabbie who had once before transported me and told me she liked rap music though she was pushing 50 in her whiteness. So I was just over one half hour late for my date with this fascinating and lovely lady I sort of adored against Better Judgment, may my ancestors bless that rare condition and give it higher accord in my future. I had text-messaged her and apologized as profusely as I could through the gadget, saying I’d be there soon, twice or so. She responded twice that it was not a problem and she was going to wait outside in her car. It was then that I broke the dreadful and irreversible news to her: I did not own an automobile. This was alright with her and there was no pause at all that I could detect with the sensitive radar of my proud pauper’s ego. Another reason to appreciate and love her.
“Am I Blue? Was I gay…till today?”
I tipped the flirtatious bug-eyed cabbie five Federal Reserve notes with a bold suggestion that she scold her dispatcher for being a fork-tongued blood merchant. ‘Two people driving cabs that night,’ she leaked. I know I could have run there faster, but I had been thrown by all the tricky lying. This is a provincial town, a cursed, slow, redneck town.
Julia had waited long enough and had gone in and that was fine with me. I got there and looked around and the place was a bourgeois mad house that I immediately regretted coming into or near. What was this about? A trick? A sadistic game? My subconscious must have been alerted but I thought not much of it; it was sort of exciting with all the noise and bluster and spiritual chaos. Not the kind of place I figured she wanted to be for a first date but there could be many reasons. She could be insane. Or an age difference thing.
Not a normal bar, but one of these modern flesh emporiums. Lots of lightly dressed nubiles striving to in, out, and overdo each other; people staring at and through their companions blankly in search of better cuts of meat. Lots of tanned white southerners in decent clothing and a horrible scene altogether. I sensed a hipness of a crippled Anglo-Saxon fashion and saw too many large muscle-bound men displaying their thews and bristling at one another. I later learned from a local musician friend that the place was called ‘Cocaine Alley.’ This was as fine an explanation for the ensuing depraved scurviness as I have had, yet. The men were just the sort who would come there with Viagra in their bloodstream because of the place’s reputation for attracting all the fine flitting ingenues, and, occasionally, someone like Julia snuck in. This was a place I could relax in and feel superior and little did I know that this kind of hard cynicism turned her off. In hindsight, I appear as any other hero of fables entering the dragon’s dank den, looking for the perfect maiden, but not deserving her without a nasty fucking trial.
The bar was a shaped like a horseshoe and the people thronged it like a life boat; a wing of the establishment was partly sectioned off for a private party. I looked around a bit and got whiskey robotically. There she was. At the curve of the horseshoe she was surrounded, flanked by two evil solicitous white men. At least, two were openly leering at her and enjoying the glow she emanated. There’s just a good stupid feeling of naturally feeling like a man when you’re around a woman that beautiful. It elicits a moronic, genetic felicity that can’t be stifled or contained any more than an erection that rises from a sleeping body. The cheer comes out of you despite your limitations and lasts as long as they favor you or until you wake up or are caught somehow. Truly, it is a pleasure to see men in the company of a beautiful woman, most of the time. Bathed in the softening glow of the double X chromosomes, they look for a moment less like cannibal trolls to me.
I savored the thrill of searching out and recognizing someone I had only seen in images, and being wildly attracted to them all over again. A dream realized, like seeing a movie star in the flesh finally. It’s funny to think so many people are enjoying this feeling these days, under these cyber-circumstances, for the first time in history really. I suspect these relationships might often lead quickly to meaningless sex and poor relations. At its core, the internet strikes me as an elaborate skein of triviality and lies; and myspace a brilliant forum for fools to affect a faux-celebrity. We become famous in miniature, on borrowed code, and it does make it exciting in some insipid theatrical way when we finally meet someone we have been lusting after only in j-peg---even so, as if they had been distant Hollywood personalities. It appeals to our vanity.
She was herself, exactly like the gorgeous pictures and I wasn’t surprised. Her features couldn’t be faked or muted or changed. She was hot and luminous and a girl like this can’t ever go five minutes without attracting frantic insects at the bar, if she is alone.
Well I couldn’t resist the urge to spy. I had to see if she recognized me at first. I sort of looked towards her until she looked at me. She looked at me over there and no, she did not linger or seem to place me. Perhaps she was very engaged. This was a marked disappointment, and possibly the first of many subtle points against me.
I circled around her and her suitors, and it was clear that the one standing next to her was attractive and aggressively seeking nectar, fruit, or hindquarters, depending on his diet. The determined urge to consume her was immediately apparent in his disgusting, well-conditioned body. The other insect attendant had practically faded out and was a bit too old to be in the place. I had a nice hat on and have pleasant enough angles along my body, which give me confidence and unusual balance. Under the hat I have begun to lose my hair, but not so much that I am frightful. We three bar flies formed an interesting spectrum, all attracted to this one light. Few people in the south wore Kangols in those unfashionable days and I felt like a freak among freaks, but not minding at all. She probably wondered at the hat a bit. I stood there right behind them for almost fifteen seconds listening and watching, with my arm resting on her bar chair. I heard him say
“So how long until your friend gets here…how long have you been waiting now?” or something evil and soulless like this.
He was handsome, I suppose, with a square jaw and a very tight shirt that displayed his physique to advantage. The confidence of the alpha-male who is not totally moronic diffused from his scrubbed pores. His somewhat noticeable pock marks may only have aggravated his aggressiveness. He was leaning into her like a conspirator and the plotting had to be stopped, and I was thirty minutes late, fuck it all mercilessly. I poked her gently and softly in the ribs. Perhaps another point against me.
Julia turned around and I regret to say that I can’t say for certain whether she regarded me with the quick spark of visceral favor or not, and in large part because I felt the quick genetic urge to look into the eyes of my contender and grip his extended hand and sort of ignore her. We men are total idiots when it comes right down to it. A large, greasy smile was on his smiley face as he revealed his name was actually “Brad.”
“Oh is this your friend?” and all that from him. No matter how admirably formed a man like this is, he is usually horribly ugly to me and I hold women in contempt for their fawning allegiance to his type. But there was nothing especially contemptible about him at first, aside from his general malignance as my competitor and the excessively firm handshake he gave.
I can’t recall the first words she said. Affirmation, recognition, and surprise, quickly altogether. We looked at each other for the first time, we two phone and internet play-dates, through a kind of brand-new, temporally strange filter, and paddled for a second near the hybrid shark-insect called Brad, uncertainly. The situation was too knotty for rational thought, and so Instinct carried the day. I had actually wandered around a bit before locating them, and found a nice secluded VIP style booth up in the reaches of the private party sector. So I was introduced and quickly offered my totally sincere and flummoxed apologies.
And then I said something to the effect of “well let’s hasten over here away from this vicious land shark sucking at your neck, shall we?” But in reality I kind of spoke low to her and suggested and just sort of guided her over into the curved red vinyl corner. It proved not to be private enough.
I don’t think the spark was necessarily there, but I was late and all and she had an obvious tendency to keep her eyes downcast, or not meet mine at least. We never truly have an idea if we make a good first physical impression, unless there are some pure gestures one can’t possibly mistake. There is always doubt, initially, within the minuet, and intrinsic to it. The more boldly demonstrative a person, the less difficult it is to gauge their interest. And she was shy, sort of, and there is the universal instinct to hold one’s cards in check. In my general experience, we are totally unsubtle people practicing a self-conscious child’s subtlety, it seems.
We sat there in the red pleather curves and every single minute I was with her I felt high and pleased and aroused. Yes I was more than a little excited. Her hair framed and hid her face beautifully and she was an indistinct mix of all the prettiest American races, a perfect genetic mystery needing to be loved and cataloged and fucked very well. We sampled of and pried respectfully at each other and nothing was going especially right except for the simple, queer, inescapable male problem of mine: I dug her completely and so it was pleasant merely being near her even though the needed signals were not exactly flowing forth. But she tolerated me and did not grimace at my comments. She seemed to like me well enough. Those downcast sweet eyes. Points were scored for her because she was shy and thoughtful, just as she had been in writing and on the phone.
There was no immediate burst, except inside me and that did not surprise or shake me because I felt it early and somehow knew it would continue to be that way; I could not help but feel a sense of an uphill struggle. Only two or so references were made to my glaring tardiness, and we did not dwell on that I was a pedestrian. I wanted her as much as I had feared and fantasized, and it rushed and throbbed through me.
There was a mirror behind me in the booth and she would occasionally and even often spy activity and look behind her and each time was a slight pain because who does not want to be fascinating and entrancing and all? Further, how is it, I thought, that this rambling and noisome crowd of sexual buzzards holds any more attraction than me? She had a thing with looking at my chest. It seemed so at least. To look back on it I enjoy this thing of hers a lot, it’s sort of crazy. Once she spoke of her old boyfriend with whom she would physically fight, and said she kind of liked that. She looked briefly at my arm and bicep when she was talking then. Measuring my manhood. I looked at her eyes and thanked God I suppose. She wore a red shirt that showed her lovely lines and curves. That was nice of her all around. She heard me and catered.
There are so few times in an average man’s life, I know mathematically, that he may sit with such a gorgeous and queer, likable and subtle woman for an hour or two. I am not an average man, and I’ve sat with a few gorgeous women, but she is something, God damn.
She spoke of being with another woman in the past month or so, for the first time. At a party a six-foot beauty had begun a furious flirtation with Julia and they eventually repaired to one of the mansion’s bedrooms, and behind a carefully locked door, spent the night gratifying one another. She said they were kind of clumsy. I asked her if she made her cum, if the six-foot beauty had made her cum. These obtrusive, gritty questions come naturally to me, as if from an impish or angelic voice that demands audience from somewhere at the fore of my brain. She called me bold and seemed genuinely taken aback, slightly annoyed. But she said “yes.” Actually I can’t remember what she said and you can imagine how badly this aggravates me. Yes, she said yes. I think so at least, but I was off balance, I suppose, because she was slightly offended, or made a show of it.
But it is also past my memory whether or not this talk of lesbianism was before or after the first visitation of the Aryan predator, Brad, with the silvery chain necklaces and the mousse, wrapped like an obscene gift to silly women in his constricting shirt. He appeared at the cozy entrance to our Very Important retreat, tucked away from the sloppy foolishness as we were, and flashing his teeth bright and wide, brought us a ringing, foolish, corrosive sloppiness that we had not been missing, whatsoever. With this one, this blind evil ape, it would get gooder and gooder.
“Whoa I am here” and all this bluster and then he was sitting, carrying on in a tireless, spastic way that had me later deciding he was skilled at snorting cocaine, among all his other daring skills.
Within one minute I was far too acquainted with Brad. He is the kind of marvelous and toxic specimen who should be hunted, shot, and stuffed before he passes beyond his prime. I say this with no malice or cynicism. He was a curiously difficult to like human being. Some people would call him shitty, or a pestilence. His willful breach of normal conduct and manners would continue on throughout the short evening like a disease that I had not been inoculated against. I would learn the hard way with Brad, and later during this tortured imbroglio I had an idle comic fantasy in which I gravely asked him if he were possessed by a demon.
Julia did not withdraw her attention from me so much as she directed it to the unavoidable force of this attractive man’s sterling, rat-fink personality. The boy had that allure which seems to be dreadfully universal to Woman. It may involve a woman’s genetic attraction to a kind of confidence singular to the highway bandit and the boxer: an apparently sexy sort of brutal pirate charm.
His chatter was deadly to my designs and he knew it. The words flew out of him and he and I knew he meant harm. He had the gift of bar-room gabbing, I will give him that, and he wanted the girl. It does seem obvious to me now that he was enchanted by Cocaine.
What Brad greatly seemed to enjoy pretending here was that he was not a poisonous Rhinoceros stampeding into my first date with Julia, a girl he actually worked with, in some real estate concern, as it turned out. During the week, he had ample time to flirt with her and threaten her dignity, and yet here he was, targeting our first weekend idyll.
He sat there and jabbered relentlessly about himself and his dim opinions, as they were. I could not make them out, but I didn’t try hard. His gelatin head and his shocking insolence put me in a bad mood, I’m afraid, and his shoulders hunched towards Julia. I watched as she might perhaps have inadvertently glanced at his chest, and perhaps at his arms. It was all one of the worst injustices I have ever slogged through, you see. To have the company of this woman I found so beautiful and rare, pretty much ruined by this raging idiot who had the satanic nerve to sit and blather on and on… It was perverse and troublesome. I dug her so much and she would later admit that it turned her off that I seemed unable to deal with either the place or the Brad’s behavior. She did not seem to sympathize enough, by my almost Teutonic standards.
“The Rockies may crumble...They’re only made of clay.”
Brad was an accepted and seemingly popular quantity at this bar. The private party was hosted by his close lady friend. Brad had bought the first drink for Julia while I was being late. During the course of his sociopathic interruption he managed to unctuously acquire for us two more drinks, one for me the gracious bastard, and then bragged that he never paid for them because his close friend was the bartender. Brad was a wonderful host and I know that I could make many sword handles out of his skin.
Within three minutes something unpleasant happened and I felt sort of like I was at the auction house, bidding for Julia. She began describing the main, outstanding talents of Brad, in various areas. Maybe the first thing she announced was his enrollment in the VMI. She had thought it stood for something else. I am glad she did not know what VMI was because who the bloody fuck needs to know about that fascist animal shit anyway.
But Brad had learned her I guess and the coke enthusiast was on his way to being a military officer, if he could not start a durable business in assassinating other men’s fantasies, probably.
He eventually commented that one of many potential futures of his could include “commanding the world’s best troops.” He referred to American troops but I’m not sure if he was aware of the endless world war at all.
Julia, with repeated gestures of the fist and arm, then demonstrated that Brad played Lacrosse and practiced some kind of martial arts, to my great delight. Not only a belligerent and intolerable asshole but an accomplished athlete and roughneck. She didn’t know the name of his discipline, and good. She was torturing me with all this talk of Brad but at least she didn’t seem to be totally digging him. After all, they worked together but nothing had happened between them that was apparent. Still, I felt there was some subterranean workings underfoot, some evolutionary challenge being suggested. Soon there could even be violence.
He said he was a “fly fighter” and said something else about Brazil, where his school of tusslin’ heralded from. This bloated narcissist needed to be gone but it was clear that he was comfortable in his role of execrable social menace, and was in it for the long haul. He eventually showed his greasy tattered cards and got up, boisterously insisting that we abandon our first date and go join his party, so that he could flourish and preen on his footing, among his friends. At this point I resolved that the virus needed containment, and I looked into my drained drink he had generously stolen for me, and spoke. I insisted that he give us privacy because we were on a date. I would have enjoyed adding that he could not possibly hope to respect himself, for years to come, after this display of semen-filled hubris, but my tongue was proper.
He replied, rebuffed, “oh alright dude, I didn’t mean to but in, offend, etc..” and all this. He had mistaken my silence and my willful show of ignoring him to mean that I was a total pushover, most likely.
I could not at this point tell if Julia dug me. Dug me in any lasting sense that is bound to get past the dependable and sleepless fickleness of female behavior. At that point I started to talk about how I felt about the offensive toy soldier and fly-fighter, why I dismissed him as I felt I had to, and before long I knew that I might have fumed too much for her tastes. I was ranting mildly against the archetype of the devilish white male storm-trooper, possibly. I know now that she did not see Brad as a Nazi storm-trooper. Even so, she may have desired me more than she desired this one-dog stampede of bleating smarm. It was all in limbo, all unknowable, as it often is with the white man. And I am half-white.
Battling, and drinking the gentleman’s drinks as I was, it was getting harder to work out, but I was feeling limber and kept my eyes fixed upon the receding hope of shit going right.
We talked for a while longer. We talked for maybe another twenty minutes or thirty. But the fact is that when you are with someone who pins you with dreams to the wall of Reason, the sense of time fades and is challenged. It has been a while and I don’t remember what we talked about. She showed me a phone picture of her mother and her, and her mother’s young child, too. She told me she didn’t like angry, bitter men. Julia, that is. Me neither. I felt she was trying to tell me I came off like that. The circumstances were not good for allowing me to seem otherwise. At one point she remarked or confirmed that I am sort of serious. Beyond the fact that I am a winsome, impetuously light-hearted gagster that must laugh regularly in order to live, I am somewhat serious in my temperament but I want her to want me anyway and this weighs upon me as the fact of our age difference weighs upon me, struggling to maintain my dignity and my Kleos in this society of child-worshippers and self-fondlers.
I hadn’t been on a date in a while. She’s intoxicating and when you find someone like this there is a silent terror one feels about seeming too turned on and attracted. A long time ago it ceased being very fashionable to show more than a basic chilly interest in someone you were interested in. With extreme beauty comes even more extreme tactics. Think of the jungle cat that pretends a kind of indifference precisely when it is uncommonly hungry (this is what rare beauty inspires, uncommon hunger) and roaming near the ungulate herds that normally half-tolerate his familiar presence. It moves in a relaxed way though its belly is tight and noisy. When you’re with someone very attractive, I suppose you have to pretend as if you are not stunned, or too mindful of your hunger, that exact, disappointing distance between desire and reality. If you wanted to be novel about it all and further compare the rituals of courtship to the predatory life, then you might say this was a mixture of hunting while strenuously giving the impression that you are already well-fed, or could be hunting elsewhere, just as well, among perhaps sleeker and vaster herds.
Instead, fatuously, I act just like myself and tell her at one point that I wish she were my girlfriend. Many times I’ve wondered what it was I answered when she asked me “why?” Because I know what I want, I think I said something like this. It is true. I make it known that I want to leave the place with her. I thought I was not being creepy, sleazy. Other places would have been nice, to talk with her in some kind of quiet, to be away from predators so that I did not have to keep the spear close. She did not warm to my entreaties to leave.
After a little while she went to the restroom again. The first time she had done so, Brad and I were left alone together and he wasted no time at all throwing down the gauntlet. It was to the point at least, and I respect that alone of all his actions that night.
“You seem kind of quiet, man.” This was the gauntlet. A little sentence laced with a challenge for me to explain myself and show my grit. Ah, what a contemptible, vicious little rag-doll of a man, I thought. His parents must have been dumb and hateful. I informed him of our unique triple position there. With admirable civility we then moved on to talking about my accent and my obvious threatening difference from him. I was from New York and was intellectual, and decent. I didn’t dislike the French and disagreed with his opinions on the greatness of our mercenary troops. As we sorted our differences in a kind of martial secret code Brad repeatedly took stock of his physical beauty in the mirror behind me. Before long he got a call from a stooge friend of his and Brad made chauvinist talk about all the hot ladies there that wanted the friend to take them home tonight, and that he should come down because of their VIP status, etc. He did not slip from character, he only relaxed his grip. When she returned that first time he played a cute trick of saying that I had misrepresented my provenance to him; that I was in fact a southerner just like them by the statute of limitations, I suppose. Everybody loves and fears the cachet of the Empire State, you know. He pulled it off with aplomb, like the unwashable rascal he is: as if he was not trying to insult me.
“He’s a fool and don’t I know it…but a fool can have his charms,”
She had pardoned herself for a second time. I sit alone and watch Brad out there among his only partly self-appointed subjects, because my limited purview just happens to be that punishing and evil. He is an odd fascinating display of uncloaked idiot bravado. He shadow boxes a man’s face, curling around him from behind. He is very drunk and hyper, it seems. Probably this play tussling is meant to remind people of his dangerous physical skills, but I also get the impression that it’s a basic release valve for his childish energies, which, as I’ve tried already pointing out, may have been enhanced by the processed powder of the opiate coca leaf. The idea that he was not on coke is now equally disturbing and annoying to me. I am still waiting for Julia, you can imagine. This damn lovely girl with all her options.
“I went out of my wa-ay to get into a lot of …trouble...
“…I went out of mind, when you stopped being kind…and gentle.”
Julia, the fine, fey woman with the sweet personality that had something totally essential and interesting in reserve, came out from the restroom. I then see a rather impressive show of either monomaniacal heat-seeking or keen peripheral vision. All females that are hot are constantly on the officer’s radar, one assumes. There are only maybe twenty footsteps from Julia’s entrance, to the booth, but Brad somehow extricates himself from his performance among a nearby knot of pals and emerges from them to offer one of those confident male invitations that you may have seen before.
These seem to involve using physical interpolation, and grabbing and holding. There is an ineluctable male force about it, but we are only talking of the invitations of handsome alpha-males who are not used to considering much of anything apart from their brilliance and undeniable beauty. Of course, the shang-hai, under these circumstances, is patently illegal.
For several minutes or whatever she receives their gang attentions. He is “introducing” her, a harmless blustery introduction by lasso. She returns. We continue to practice a weird half-dating. It’s not very clear where she sits with me and I slide closer to her, perhaps, at this time. Nothing could change how beaten into a frenzy I have become over this woman. I know from the distant seat of Reason that her allure has to have been increased because of the challenges and the sense of her slipping away. It probably doesn’t register because the seat of Reason is not at all like this VIP booth, all squishy and immediate and dimly pornographic.
Later I wonder how it is that I could not make lemonade out of Corporal Rainy Parades’ sabotage tactics, or from the sheer gaudy silliness of the bar. Neither of these forces is insurmountable, or very threatening to me. It all had something to do with the freakish climax of meeting someone I had formed real feelings for, and yet, bizarrely, for and towards whom all the timid advancing steps of the first date still needed to be made. Not only were the signs not totally there---though she’s a shy girl with some substance and reserve, Man, believe me---but the experiment was hopelessly tainted by the presence of this heat-seeking shark-borne disease. I am tired of wondering if I over-reacted. It is too much, to see some idea that is sweet and desirable smashed in one evening.
Eventually the pestilence returns, remorseless, frothy, from out of the horrifying din. He sort of reminds me of the man who stole a girlfriend from me, sort of, three years ago. It was all my fault then, and my fault that he and I had a nasty fight in front of Alexia’s apartment that morning, spitting, bleeding, head-butting and hating one another pointlessly for no more than five minutes. (The psyche digresses, not me.) Brad has more drinks in him of course and his insolence is now in full swing. It is almost impressive, or exciting, to see doggish animal cunning and impertinence like this in action, and not in some movie that makes you merely annoyed and uncomfortable. I wonder later if Julia had not asked him to watch out for her, this being an internet date with a stranger. Maybe she knew he would be here, and so was guilty of a small harmless lie when she said it was coincidence.
It is during this bout of dealing with him that he confesses, as I suspected, that he does not like the French, and asks who does? Perhaps he was trying to bait me with this highly charged trick question. I raised my hand because I know that the French cannot possibly be worse than the Americans, with whom I am deeply familiar. More and more I am familiar with them. Mock stupefaction, a glib defense of our Gallic and Frankish brethren that is not worth remembering. He had already said something about wanting to perhaps command the world’s greatest troops, among his various widely spread options, which is all too hilarious and revealing, as I’ve tried pointing out already.
It has been clear the whole time that he knows he is being wrong, but is still on the offensive. Julia seems to enjoy him and I am bothered by this and am…sad, embarrassed for us all. Troubled surprise is called disappointment, I believe. This seems to be a breach of decorum, the voice of reason murmurs, like a dying heart.
I am complacent with my drink, I am capable of realizing. The foolishness rages and I sip. The drink drains and I listen to his egotistical talk. I did the bare minimum and probably longed to be alone with her or at least out of the path of the VMI heat wave. I might admit that this barbaric and asymmetrical second offensive had caught me by surprise. Greater stores of chemical energy might have won the day for Brad, or maybe just the inexhaustible fount of will that a huge, oblivious ego supplies.
Eventually I reach for the cell phone as they converse at my expense. As much a show of having something else to do aside from listen to these pitches of snake oil, as anything. I begin to text Julia. Right now as I write this, I understand this was stupid. Then it was a kind of tender joke, a protest against something for which I could only muster quiet disdain. This time I wanted her help, basically, and felt it was due and proper. I wanted to know that she would not mind him gone, to be with me and talking again. The possibility that she had made some sort of choice in favor of this human scarecrow had occurred to me but repulsed and did nobody any good so was discarded. I was in the process of typing to her,
“Save me, Julia..” something remotely like this but it’s foolish and less significant because at that moment the shrewd young fascist leaped upon my preoccupation and got up. Textbook tactic of the white man, it is said, to befuddle the primitive when he is mystified with western technology.
More of the unctuous words came from him. The delivery was a memorable yet unimaginable broadside. He said this was cool and all, this booth but it was time we mingled. Like so. He said something rude and foolish just like this to two people on their first date. This second blatant attempt to fuck with another man and assert his own self threw me. I pretty much gave up, even as I saw Julia stand up slowly and seem to beckon me. She was observably hesitant, expectant. I will always like her even more because I could tell she wanted me to come, that she expected me to come, indeed. Or not. Maybe I imagined this. Later it was clear from her few words to me that by the end of the date she wanted to know if I could get past all this, and whether I was capable of having fun in this place which I had shown distaste for, and which she didn’t seem to mind.
But I had had it and I sat there pretending to be engrossed in texting, when it was her I was trying to reach and there she was leaving, with my consent. Odd stuff. Odd, heinous business. Oh I’ll catch up; I waved them on. My contempt had to have been obvious.
I drank the drink my date Brad had bought me. No…this was one I had bought myself. In a freely admitted and somewhat shocked haze I sent the message on to her. God only knows how many times a man may emasculate himself in one evening while courting. I was literally writing this one off, as I sensed that I had made some grave errors, some related to how women often have a mystic attitude that recognizes many behaviors as irreversible or taboo. The worst, of course, was that I had no certain idea that she was attracted to me, or not. The mixed romantic signal is the worst. It corrodes long after the broadcast.
Through the crowd of revelers. The idea he had put forth as he led her away was to mingle and give her an introduction, of course, what else? To the birthday girl, who he assured us was crazy---in the way of fun. "She's crazy!" The hosting gambit of his was so base, thickly spread and ham-fisted, that it made a thudding noise when initiated. It was under these conditions the only decent ruse for a murderous, talking shark to employ. So I looked for them among the birthday minglers. But I found them at the bar, near the bartender and the register, Brad’s good friends. A place of power and plenty. The alleged introduction to the crazy birthday girl must have been fast and furious, but not fun enough, for there they were, the officer and my date, his victim, cadging more cheap or free drinks and being guided by his carnie-charm, four minutes after they had left the booth, toward a more lubricated fun, the easier to make her forget me and love his inviting staleness.
So I did more of the watching bit, like any forlorn lover and detective. Perhaps the worst part of the date came then, when I watched her unsolicited and exuberant hand grab Brad’s bicep. In a poem I described this as the girl checking on the quality of the goods without realizing their rottenness. In truth I had no idea what kind of friendship they had. I could have landed in the middle of something. It certainly smelled rank.
That touch of his arm got me because she had not touched me at all. I was keenly aware of the obvious drama the three of us formed and it was time to go. An observant person could have watched us, even casually, from the time I arrived to the time Brad left the booth with her on a beeline to secure her greater, gratis drunkenness, and the observer could tell what was going down, and might have reasonably expected a fight to materialize because men are stupid and this is a Culture of Honor around here.
I sat there gratifying myself with such self-conscious, dull thoughts as I saw some folks looking at me, sitting there with a very nearly empty drink… I made only a slight effort at not obviously watching them, mainly her. At this point, an attractive young woman in a difficult to make out elastic number that showed she was tanned, above perhaps all things in the world, came past me and got Brad’s attention. She seemed to hesitate momentarily as Brad was standing with the pretty Julia, but Brad looked at her and they greeted. He hugged her I believe and I was very very glad he had another chance to display his extreme desirability. I also saw this as my chance to take my leave or see what was up at least. Walked towards her and ignored Brad entirely. I moved close to her with my back to him and said something about the birthday girl, a jostling, petulant kind of comment, and Julia told me they were having shots…perhaps she thought I had suddenly lost my eyesight. The sugary mini-drink sat before her. It was probably called the Adam’s Apple. I was anxious and hurt and determined to leave and I don’t know if she was somehow suggesting I join them. She was uncomfortable, as anyone would be, but I don’t know how much.
I told her I was leaving and let my irritation, my aggrieved offended aura speak for itself. Who speaks well, in times like that? Julia put an arm around me in a half-hug and it touched my heart and lessened the pain of whatever wound I can be said to have suffered at this moment of being terribly fucking alone and shocked by the carnal, idiot savagery of things. She did not have to hug me but she did, and it may mean nothing. But this was the first time we had touched since the initial meeting at the bar, and I was glad to know that this woman had the tenderness and warmth to see me leave with some sliver of affection.
Times like these nobody, I think, but a pretentious fool knows what to say. It’s a time for speech-making and pulling out our hidden stuffing and that is difficult and unpleasant, for most. The things that are deep and valuable within us are at play and want to be expressed. But it’s not the place and drama between strangers is pointless anyway. The look on my face is totally past my memory or my ability to analyze. There was some intensity to it, to be sure. The words might as well have been gibberish but I didn’t stammer. I left cocaine alley and a woman I deeply wanted, and briefly imagined that she was coming after me because wishful thinking had transformed some girl behind me in red into Julia.
“My Baby Don’t Care for Clothes…My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
I went to have some sushi and sake nearby before leaving by cab. Thought maybe she would want to meet again tonight, and discuss our lukewarm meltdown, as it were. The dying suspicion that the woman you want wants you but is slipping away, that doubt, is poison and lingers somewhat too long, you’ll agree. It is even more insidious and mournful a thought when you aren’t sure if she wants you at all.
The Japanese restaurant had a good many youngsters into DJ’s and electronic music and acting a little bit too hard for mannerliness. After drinking and eating, while waiting for a cab, I complimented a guy on his very pretty Asian girlfriend, but though my language may have been slightly off, I did it like a gentleman, all things considered. I was at this point sort of drunk and you could say a little bothered by my unpleasant experience. This young man was in no mood to have his girl complimented abruptly by a stranger, though the girl was inside and we were outside.
He bristled like an unloved mutt on a chain. But he could not make me out, from a genetic, flight-or-fight standpoint. He was tall but skinny, and I might have carried a dark presence then and do not look, physically, like a pushover. His outrage was confined to calling me a faggot as he walked away, after mock-complimenting my shoes, and throwing his cigarette butt violently out into the parking lot. I wished him a good night as he quickly went inside, defusing his own insult in the process. My shoes, I felt, were nice. I didn’t realize they looked uncool to the DJ sect and I made a mental note to buy more fashionable styles. It had been a while, I guess, since I bought me some shoes. They were brown and I regretted they didn’t strictly match my pants and here I was paying for it with horrible public shame, and I had been in such a good mood before that.
My own genetic combat system stirred and I reminded myself that I didn’t like angry, bitter men. Twice during this shameful and juvenile sake-based miscommunication, I told the offended party that I meant no disrespect, but nobody gets three kow-tows, I reminded myself. And I was absolved by the Golden Rule: I know I would not have minded at all if the tables were turned, and would probably have been flattered, but I am used to being more civilized than other men. So much of this nonsense comes from fear and doubt and the vast territory over which the ego reigns.
But I had gone from an evening in Purgatory to a potential instance of mindless fisticuffs. I was on a roll.
All around me the tension of insecure little boys grew. I didn’t necessarily want to fight three people at once but a plan of action began to form. I am sure that the dull nerve of manhood was already excited by the shark attack and the loss of the heavenly beauty beneath the dark waves. Fortunately it did not come to all that. During the entire time, before and after my grave offense, I had managed to impress two of DJ Princeling’s “boys,” or emissaries, with my even tone and dignified nature. They kind of stood up for me and calmed his highness down. The DJ might have smelled it out almost immediately that his girl was attracted to me, and his tantrum of stamping insecurity had probably not helped her opinion of him. He did need calming.
The cab came and I beat it without a beating. From the time I regretfully left Julia with that black hole of male egotism to the time I got home and started listening to the soul mix composed for her, I sent her four different text messages altogether. There was not a reply. I left one phone message. Little dignity in all that messaging and I know how dangerous that is but sometimes it does not matter. The thought of her hanging with him throughout the night, and of the foul taste generated by the whole debacle clinging longer than it needed to… more because I could not talk with her….that thought was powerfully present with me, with the music, and with the solitary drinks I took. I don’t know what happened to her that night or when she left. Of course, the writing of these words took the place of my need to sleep, which could not be met.
No man can send five unreturned texts in one night and easily recover his dignity. Especially sent within two hours. Even when women do it, they are generally considered to be in hysterics. But I am different.
Still I can’t expect her to see or care about that. She eventually returned my messages, which grew longer, and then shorter, and possibly more bitter. I cannot be blamed too harshly. Those whom I tell about this night almost always sympathize with me and I can see in their eyes that the experience would hurt them, too. If there is one thing our kind have forgotten that is more disastrous than the forgetting of anything else, it is the use of that tool, and I don’t mean the wheel or the gatlin gun, which made us what we are, and I don’t here mean bloodthirsty killers: it is our tongue, connected to our mind. We don’t communicate well, for all our talking, and we are hurtful, as we are selfish. We must not bite into one another and then claim that the blood in the water threw us into a frenzy.
Julia apologized for not getting back to me, but there was never an apology for her letting it go down as it did. Even a fool and a beauty has her charms, though, and the story is far from over, I am hoping. She wanted to know why I became upset, morose, fed up. It started when I sensed that she might have stopped being kind, gentle, and desirable.
Behind me, Buddha sits and is pleased. I hear laughter instead of the laconic Voice of Reason. I managed to produce lemonade after all, and am not ashamed that it had to be heavily spiked to be taken.
dignified man like myself, it is now clear to me.
Her name is Julia and the desire for her started quite naturally in the eyes and loins, but then spread like an efficient virus or a hot welcome cancer throughout my head, hands, and intestines. She posed beautifully in her pictures, without posing, really. There was a bright, glossy shine to her eyes and her lips that is basically surreal, almost too sexy, like she has been dipped in some slippery coital fluid. But there was something lonely and shy and unusual in her look, I guess, and her replies to me, and in the things she posted online were clear signs that this hot young lady was more kind and intelligent, more loving and sensual than a lot of the people I normally deal with. All these things thrilled me. I confess I was swept into a predictable chain reaction of desire and suffering, and forgot my mouthpiece or to sacrifice a chicken to guard against the perils ahead.
“If you want something to play with…go and find yourself a toy…”
She appeared to coo and lounge in almost obscenely gratifying and voluptuous fashion at the crossroads of many things I admire in the human character, wherever they dare to sprout up against every motherfucking odd. There was the comely joining of the four essential qualities people were alleged to be composed of, long, long ago, in the old days of good: the Spiritual, the Intellectual, the Physical, and the Emotional. She was, to appearances, in all of these ways a good, attractive person, and so she touched my thumper warmly. And she is so pretty that I know she inspires random sex and love fantasies every single day when she is seen in public, and carried home thereafter by countless men to their private moments. Beautiful in the way that startles and grabs you, whether you’re a lesbian, a fag, or a breeder. She had grown up under so many hungry, desirous eyes that she bore that weight somewhat uncomfortably.
Round and full and in her eyes and nose and sexy, sometimes pouting mouth a flagrant hot glossiness, as I’ve tried to describe already. Her lips were naturally wet. Her soft mellow flesh produced its own alluring make-up, and her nose was described often as “cute.” The tits she had been granted spilled out extravagantly no matter what she tried to contain them with. These gorgeous breasts fairly dared you to ogle their sumptuous milky excess. All other women eyed them hissingly, they were burned and insulted by them. The kind of cleavage that hypnotizes even Ass-men and homosexuals, and makes you feel for a second as if the abyss was calling, tottering there like a horny schoolboy, ready to spill over into those firm pillows of soft lovejoy. If all this were not enough, and it was, she had a stunning, softening, sexy voice that clung to me like a lustful koala and which I had managed to trap once on my cell phone’s memory.
But there’s a profound soul lurking in her anyway, for all that magical sexy gloss, and in any language this spells trouble, and wounds that suppurate long after inflicted. I’m telling you this girl is like a tempest among rotted trees, and lots of men probably either flee from her in terror or stay transfixed and hope they can survive the psychic trauma of so much fantastic, howling physical presence, while struggling to make a decent impression.
Yes when you talk to her you can see that she is good and has substance. It is confusing. She follows the philosophy, she says, of loving everybody in the beginning and letting them prove themselves from there; adamantly she suggests she does not judge people’s hearts and she appears sincere and humble, in all. Her mind is good and she can rely upon herself; she told me she sometimes sits in the dark and quiet and thinks for hours. I knew this to be an un-American way to carry on, and it made me hot. There is more.
She likes to take baths. She sent me a picture of her in one. At first I could not make out the subject, as it was all foamy and dusky and candlelit. But finally I made out her huge floating mammaries and one winky serpentine eyeball. Then one night she sent me a picture of her bed, aglow and soft, piled with the insurmountable number of pillows girls will sometimes enchant their lives with. That did me no real good, it sent me wandering straight into the desert, slobbery-faced into the cruel dry desert of wanting someone I had never met, and worse and more parched a reality still, a lush internet coquette at that. This girl was a sex panther and liked and intimately knew Kahlil Gibran. What tender-souled sex panther does not? On her internet social profile she posted the Lebanese god-child's work. I saved the bath-time pic on my phone and it was there for me to see all the time, for days, a subtle sample of screen-saving sex magic, with flames. The afternoon before our first date, I spent a couple of hours making a mix of soul music that would please her as she bathed, and it’s playing now. She hasn’t heard it. I erased that picture and want a new one now but that depends on her. This will not happen, my stomach and its cradle of ulcers say.
I wanted to see her and I’d been pushing her in that direction for a while. She had once before said yes. And I was one of innumerable, insufferable internet suitors accessing her profile, pushing to see her. My one picture was sufficiently handsome, and I could write decent sentences. These were my ins. So we started a flirtation and after a discreet period of time she gave me her number. I wrote her and talked on the phone to her a bit about politics and the truth and such irritating, potentially lethal nonsense. And yet having a brain, to the eyes of an American woman raised in the "deep" South, is a fascinating and strange thing. It’s an unaccustomed pleasure for them to find one in the male, very often. She was able to see that I was not a total fraud, moron or sadist, not a typical boy, and yet she dug me. I fancied her immediately for that, anyway. She claimed to enjoy our conversations and she meant it seriously I think. Then again I couldn’t see her eyes.
I asked her about her dreams and she did not disappoint me. Vivid strange descriptions that intrigued me completely. Even I had to write some of them down, but I won’t go into her dreams here, or probably anywhere, at anytime.
Men can fall in love based purely and only on physical beauty that contains great sweetness. The beauty part is elementary. Sweetness is metaphysical, and I know this, in part, because I see it displayed and gleaming from people’s eyes, mostly. It can’t itself talk very well and doesn’t wear bright livery, and one of its hallmarks is that people do not really ever speak deeply or meaningfully of it, or of kindness; as if these qualities were ghosts, or space aliens, or foreign policy. When they do speak of it, it’s with the imprecision we reserve for speaking of our age or body weight, or finding the g-spot, or defining gallicisms. I rarely find these qualities in print, or in politics, or exhibited among society. Generated by something much bigger and finer than us in the oversoul, kindness and sympathy are like long golden shadows cast forward by a good individual and you can almost see them coming if you are attuned. They exist of their own power and they can’t be forced or suppressed. Kindness is so hounded, so rare, so wretched, in a sense, that I glow in fascination and worship if it ever comes blazing briefly through my view. She had a kind heart and amazingly, didn’t even try to hide it beneath layers of protective shit and posturing.
So, early on she said yes but I called her that weekend, precipitously, after her caving in. I called her after drinking some alcohol. It was after midnight but before indecency, I felt, on a weekend, maybe the Sabbath. And I left a message that was both harmless and drunk. She was none pleased and I didn’t hear from her for some many, many days. During that time I wrote to her as if things were not hopelessly smashed apart. I did not realize she had a real problem with guys calling late and drunk, not to speak of being a stranger totally. Her father, she said, had been a drunk and that bothered her. I could understand this.
But I was also hurt at being hung out to dry until I disintegrated. I never could understand or deal with that sort of thing and my friends are also nonplussed at having in their own lives been lopped off coldly as if by a mute executioner, whenever they have disturbed some seismic female whim. There is Certain Ruthlessness to the female prerogative. They don’t mind making you dance the craziest jigs for It, out of the blue, in part, maybe, because they assume you are after only It. And if you are a poor dancer, or if you fail to preempt some silent caprice or another, then you may get to enjoy all her ancient powers of contempt and chilliness.
(I think few people, of either sexual encampment, can deal very well with being stymied with no charge of conduct, no bill of sale, no receipt or explanation. It seems I have always been especially unable to take rejection well, unless I was given a detailed explanation of the unimaginable impetus. This may be my own vain idiosyncrasy.)
Once it was clear she was ignoring me without a statement of purpose after we agreed we would meet, I wrote letters describing my outrage in terms calculated not to drive her away completely. As all men know, this brand of female fickleness has to be treated gingerly and with grim resolve, like a gangrenous and possibly untreatable wound. But the Very Beautiful Woman has an even more radioactive sensitivity, owing to her millions of options and suitors and the distinct, constantly reinforced idea of her rare and extreme appeal. She cannot be told how wrong and hurtful her behavior might possibly be, for instance----only how slighted one’s manhood or humanity is, and shit like that.
I eventually reeled her back in through careful literary pleading, and the sheer fact of my serious, empirical goodness. This was authentic emotional business. I wanted her badly, and I knew exactly why. This girl would not get away easily; I vowed to expend energy, and make a small meal here and there of pride, and burn votive incense. She later told me that in the end my persistence was a good thing. But she appeared to admit that she hadn’t read the letters entirely. She didn’t feel in the mood for bad news or rebukes so she skimmed some of them. There are some things in her life that are very seriously sad, I think, and oppressive. And if one lives in a tiny space they shouldn't let loose with the gratuitous farting, it's only wise. In addition to my words I sent several other pictures of me. I am modestly confident in my physical composition and I felt these pictures could not hurt, particularly those I had manipulated with a computer. These and a shameful poem I wrote about my fiendish, demoniac love for cunnilingus seemed to have some regenerative effect on our friendship.
Before long we were writing notes and exchanging quips and entendres again, with more enthusiasm, even. She was interested and curious, the two best things in Life. One thing bothered me about her, or rather, about this half-imaginary figure whose profile I had been admiring and poring over for weeks, but still had not met.
The bothering problem was she was simply too uncommonly beautiful and she could not help but know it and what a common problem this is. There are many pretty women but her beauty is exotic. It leaps at you and snarls and leaves you visibly upset and cramped. That is the nub of it. As I have tried to explain, she is an unusually sexy girl. Her features paused men and made them both glad and unsure. She was not one to go without attention in public places, and there was a flock of men gurgling and stamping and frothing around her social internet profile page. But strangely---and this is perhaps the last time I try to express this---she was also the sort of woman a fellow instinctively knew he could flirt with while not being a total anxious ape, because she felt as if she were nice. She was sweet. She was not definably vain or off-putting like so many rare beauties. Hot and sweet yet wholesome, like some kind of nourishing sweetcake prepared not in a factory but in your grandmother's oven. She changed one or two pictures often and there was not much to her profile. But there was enough for men who were only heat-seeking, and also men who looked deeper. And modest, too, did I mention…
There was not much to her profile until you found her blogs. She has written very few, but almost everything she writes is limned by mysticism. When I read her more recent stuff, I couldn’t avoid slipping closer. She was yearning for some lost insensible man, who had forgotten his scent in her bedroom. I ached in various places and hated the internet, and loved it, and felt strongly about things in general, all because of this stranger. Her remarkable sweetness and glossy, elvish peculiarity pinned me to the wall for Science and Anthropology. So fertile and voluptuous, such a fine meaty woman: My gibbering, aggressive, inner Paleo-Man adored her mountains of estrogen and wanted to form words of praise to paint on the cavewall of the web. Instead it moaned through heavy animal lips and clutched at its cudgel and denied the urge to repeatedly hammer the "send" button. She wrote of needing somebody to hold her. There was a snuggling deficit.
I say she is a fine stroke of humanity and if she doesn’t find happiness soon (with mating, also, and consistent, toe-twisting orgasms of every sort and method) then the world is a far more insane and barbarically stupid place than I had thought. As to being too beautiful and how this is a poisonous problem---which was my departed point---Julia did not, as I’ve tried to express, suffer from the eclipsing vanity that blinds so many beautiful creatures, male and female. Perhaps she suffered only from the Sensualism that the beautiful are physiologically prey to. All the animals will do their proper thing, and to the greatest extent possible. Rams want to bash heads, for example, and Bonobo chimps have lots of creative sex hanging from the canopies because they are so much like us and the females understand and love orgasms; and hugely proportioned men are drawn to mindless self-aggrandizing rituals like combative sports, and to roles like intimidator and bully, and law-enforcer. The beautiful person’s rare exception seems to drive them to want to get laid a lot, to feel that copious and expert fucking is their deserved Fate, or at least the experience of plenty of intimacy. Preferably or exclusively with other beauties. That’s the active ingredient, or the sine qua non of the beautiful person’s sex life. They fuck and mate with other rare beauties. They do this because they can. It is just a matter of getting a very enjoyable use of fine tools one is lucky enough to have been born with, and it’s all extremely logical: but it follows from this that many beautiful people are fickle and deteriorated from excess, their minds droop from the weight of their bodies, and many of them become shallow, vapid whores: in this way they are exactly like talented athletes. But when she tells me the shockingly small number of men she has been with and talks of her “selectiveness” I completely believe her because it fits. She has the sweetness, shyness, and brains, after all, to know what she is worth.
We finally agree to meet. The day arrives, a Saturday, named after Saturn, and a day intended to be festive. Again, my failure to sacrifice to the Olympians may have been costly. We talk on the phone and I learn that her cousin and a friend of his named after an American Blue Jeans company are attempting to go out with her also, that night. The friend must surely be heat-seeking the girl, I deduce. The Heavens beam later and I get a call, an unnatural call because she is the hot pin-up girl and I normally call her, and she informs me we are to meet, after all, and the implication is that we are to be alone, free of any cousins. She is less imperious than all that, but nonetheless the power lies entirely with her, the awful, core equation that simple Man labors beneath. She dictates the time and the places and the moods, Woman. So then Julia is to check into the issue of clothing and I ask her to wear red jokingly and I am got back to in the form of a text message which says, mysteriously, “Meet me at such-and-such-a-House-of-Liquor-and-Fun at 9:30.”
Anyplace is fine with me and I do not fear the crowds of pomaded mongrels and their stupid, sinister bitches. That’s how I chose to think of it, even though these places tend to make me feel like I've been picking at corpses. This is the extra-fetching girl who drips with sweetness and some kind of shining, affectionate, sexually magic dew which I am confident only I can see and harvest, probably. I’ve made her a nice lovely musical mix of soul music, and bought her a fragrant gift of green tea body applicant, which is an unction that turns me into a raging sultry romantic as soon as it grazes my consciousness. I see us taking a bath because her tits will float nicely like half-submerged holy mountains wreathed in downy clouds and she seems perfect and because I like treating myself to fine sexual fantasies.
I’m off but I have to take a taxi, which is my peculiar handicap in our motivated land. This act alone could have proved lethal. and I don’t know yet because the investigation is not yet complete. The story lacks a tight, proper ending.
The cab service I relied on, so to speak, provided me with a series of outrageous lies and also, exactly 56 minutes after I called them, the same odd, slow-moving, bug-eyed female cabbie who had once before transported me and told me she liked rap music though she was pushing 50 in her whiteness. So I was just over one half hour late for my date with this fascinating and lovely lady I sort of adored against Better Judgment, may my ancestors bless that rare condition and give it higher accord in my future. I had text-messaged her and apologized as profusely as I could through the gadget, saying I’d be there soon, twice or so. She responded twice that it was not a problem and she was going to wait outside in her car. It was then that I broke the dreadful and irreversible news to her: I did not own an automobile. This was alright with her and there was no pause at all that I could detect with the sensitive radar of my proud pauper’s ego. Another reason to appreciate and love her.
“Am I Blue? Was I gay…till today?”
I tipped the flirtatious bug-eyed cabbie five Federal Reserve notes with a bold suggestion that she scold her dispatcher for being a fork-tongued blood merchant. ‘Two people driving cabs that night,’ she leaked. I know I could have run there faster, but I had been thrown by all the tricky lying. This is a provincial town, a cursed, slow, redneck town.
Julia had waited long enough and had gone in and that was fine with me. I got there and looked around and the place was a bourgeois mad house that I immediately regretted coming into or near. What was this about? A trick? A sadistic game? My subconscious must have been alerted but I thought not much of it; it was sort of exciting with all the noise and bluster and spiritual chaos. Not the kind of place I figured she wanted to be for a first date but there could be many reasons. She could be insane. Or an age difference thing.
Not a normal bar, but one of these modern flesh emporiums. Lots of lightly dressed nubiles striving to in, out, and overdo each other; people staring at and through their companions blankly in search of better cuts of meat. Lots of tanned white southerners in decent clothing and a horrible scene altogether. I sensed a hipness of a crippled Anglo-Saxon fashion and saw too many large muscle-bound men displaying their thews and bristling at one another. I later learned from a local musician friend that the place was called ‘Cocaine Alley.’ This was as fine an explanation for the ensuing depraved scurviness as I have had, yet. The men were just the sort who would come there with Viagra in their bloodstream because of the place’s reputation for attracting all the fine flitting ingenues, and, occasionally, someone like Julia snuck in. This was a place I could relax in and feel superior and little did I know that this kind of hard cynicism turned her off. In hindsight, I appear as any other hero of fables entering the dragon’s dank den, looking for the perfect maiden, but not deserving her without a nasty fucking trial.
The bar was a shaped like a horseshoe and the people thronged it like a life boat; a wing of the establishment was partly sectioned off for a private party. I looked around a bit and got whiskey robotically. There she was. At the curve of the horseshoe she was surrounded, flanked by two evil solicitous white men. At least, two were openly leering at her and enjoying the glow she emanated. There’s just a good stupid feeling of naturally feeling like a man when you’re around a woman that beautiful. It elicits a moronic, genetic felicity that can’t be stifled or contained any more than an erection that rises from a sleeping body. The cheer comes out of you despite your limitations and lasts as long as they favor you or until you wake up or are caught somehow. Truly, it is a pleasure to see men in the company of a beautiful woman, most of the time. Bathed in the softening glow of the double X chromosomes, they look for a moment less like cannibal trolls to me.
I savored the thrill of searching out and recognizing someone I had only seen in images, and being wildly attracted to them all over again. A dream realized, like seeing a movie star in the flesh finally. It’s funny to think so many people are enjoying this feeling these days, under these cyber-circumstances, for the first time in history really. I suspect these relationships might often lead quickly to meaningless sex and poor relations. At its core, the internet strikes me as an elaborate skein of triviality and lies; and myspace a brilliant forum for fools to affect a faux-celebrity. We become famous in miniature, on borrowed code, and it does make it exciting in some insipid theatrical way when we finally meet someone we have been lusting after only in j-peg---even so, as if they had been distant Hollywood personalities. It appeals to our vanity.
She was herself, exactly like the gorgeous pictures and I wasn’t surprised. Her features couldn’t be faked or muted or changed. She was hot and luminous and a girl like this can’t ever go five minutes without attracting frantic insects at the bar, if she is alone.
Well I couldn’t resist the urge to spy. I had to see if she recognized me at first. I sort of looked towards her until she looked at me. She looked at me over there and no, she did not linger or seem to place me. Perhaps she was very engaged. This was a marked disappointment, and possibly the first of many subtle points against me.
I circled around her and her suitors, and it was clear that the one standing next to her was attractive and aggressively seeking nectar, fruit, or hindquarters, depending on his diet. The determined urge to consume her was immediately apparent in his disgusting, well-conditioned body. The other insect attendant had practically faded out and was a bit too old to be in the place. I had a nice hat on and have pleasant enough angles along my body, which give me confidence and unusual balance. Under the hat I have begun to lose my hair, but not so much that I am frightful. We three bar flies formed an interesting spectrum, all attracted to this one light. Few people in the south wore Kangols in those unfashionable days and I felt like a freak among freaks, but not minding at all. She probably wondered at the hat a bit. I stood there right behind them for almost fifteen seconds listening and watching, with my arm resting on her bar chair. I heard him say
“So how long until your friend gets here…how long have you been waiting now?” or something evil and soulless like this.
He was handsome, I suppose, with a square jaw and a very tight shirt that displayed his physique to advantage. The confidence of the alpha-male who is not totally moronic diffused from his scrubbed pores. His somewhat noticeable pock marks may only have aggravated his aggressiveness. He was leaning into her like a conspirator and the plotting had to be stopped, and I was thirty minutes late, fuck it all mercilessly. I poked her gently and softly in the ribs. Perhaps another point against me.
Julia turned around and I regret to say that I can’t say for certain whether she regarded me with the quick spark of visceral favor or not, and in large part because I felt the quick genetic urge to look into the eyes of my contender and grip his extended hand and sort of ignore her. We men are total idiots when it comes right down to it. A large, greasy smile was on his smiley face as he revealed his name was actually “Brad.”
“Oh is this your friend?” and all that from him. No matter how admirably formed a man like this is, he is usually horribly ugly to me and I hold women in contempt for their fawning allegiance to his type. But there was nothing especially contemptible about him at first, aside from his general malignance as my competitor and the excessively firm handshake he gave.
I can’t recall the first words she said. Affirmation, recognition, and surprise, quickly altogether. We looked at each other for the first time, we two phone and internet play-dates, through a kind of brand-new, temporally strange filter, and paddled for a second near the hybrid shark-insect called Brad, uncertainly. The situation was too knotty for rational thought, and so Instinct carried the day. I had actually wandered around a bit before locating them, and found a nice secluded VIP style booth up in the reaches of the private party sector. So I was introduced and quickly offered my totally sincere and flummoxed apologies.
And then I said something to the effect of “well let’s hasten over here away from this vicious land shark sucking at your neck, shall we?” But in reality I kind of spoke low to her and suggested and just sort of guided her over into the curved red vinyl corner. It proved not to be private enough.
I don’t think the spark was necessarily there, but I was late and all and she had an obvious tendency to keep her eyes downcast, or not meet mine at least. We never truly have an idea if we make a good first physical impression, unless there are some pure gestures one can’t possibly mistake. There is always doubt, initially, within the minuet, and intrinsic to it. The more boldly demonstrative a person, the less difficult it is to gauge their interest. And she was shy, sort of, and there is the universal instinct to hold one’s cards in check. In my general experience, we are totally unsubtle people practicing a self-conscious child’s subtlety, it seems.
We sat there in the red pleather curves and every single minute I was with her I felt high and pleased and aroused. Yes I was more than a little excited. Her hair framed and hid her face beautifully and she was an indistinct mix of all the prettiest American races, a perfect genetic mystery needing to be loved and cataloged and fucked very well. We sampled of and pried respectfully at each other and nothing was going especially right except for the simple, queer, inescapable male problem of mine: I dug her completely and so it was pleasant merely being near her even though the needed signals were not exactly flowing forth. But she tolerated me and did not grimace at my comments. She seemed to like me well enough. Those downcast sweet eyes. Points were scored for her because she was shy and thoughtful, just as she had been in writing and on the phone.
There was no immediate burst, except inside me and that did not surprise or shake me because I felt it early and somehow knew it would continue to be that way; I could not help but feel a sense of an uphill struggle. Only two or so references were made to my glaring tardiness, and we did not dwell on that I was a pedestrian. I wanted her as much as I had feared and fantasized, and it rushed and throbbed through me.
There was a mirror behind me in the booth and she would occasionally and even often spy activity and look behind her and each time was a slight pain because who does not want to be fascinating and entrancing and all? Further, how is it, I thought, that this rambling and noisome crowd of sexual buzzards holds any more attraction than me? She had a thing with looking at my chest. It seemed so at least. To look back on it I enjoy this thing of hers a lot, it’s sort of crazy. Once she spoke of her old boyfriend with whom she would physically fight, and said she kind of liked that. She looked briefly at my arm and bicep when she was talking then. Measuring my manhood. I looked at her eyes and thanked God I suppose. She wore a red shirt that showed her lovely lines and curves. That was nice of her all around. She heard me and catered.
There are so few times in an average man’s life, I know mathematically, that he may sit with such a gorgeous and queer, likable and subtle woman for an hour or two. I am not an average man, and I’ve sat with a few gorgeous women, but she is something, God damn.
She spoke of being with another woman in the past month or so, for the first time. At a party a six-foot beauty had begun a furious flirtation with Julia and they eventually repaired to one of the mansion’s bedrooms, and behind a carefully locked door, spent the night gratifying one another. She said they were kind of clumsy. I asked her if she made her cum, if the six-foot beauty had made her cum. These obtrusive, gritty questions come naturally to me, as if from an impish or angelic voice that demands audience from somewhere at the fore of my brain. She called me bold and seemed genuinely taken aback, slightly annoyed. But she said “yes.” Actually I can’t remember what she said and you can imagine how badly this aggravates me. Yes, she said yes. I think so at least, but I was off balance, I suppose, because she was slightly offended, or made a show of it.
But it is also past my memory whether or not this talk of lesbianism was before or after the first visitation of the Aryan predator, Brad, with the silvery chain necklaces and the mousse, wrapped like an obscene gift to silly women in his constricting shirt. He appeared at the cozy entrance to our Very Important retreat, tucked away from the sloppy foolishness as we were, and flashing his teeth bright and wide, brought us a ringing, foolish, corrosive sloppiness that we had not been missing, whatsoever. With this one, this blind evil ape, it would get gooder and gooder.
“Whoa I am here” and all this bluster and then he was sitting, carrying on in a tireless, spastic way that had me later deciding he was skilled at snorting cocaine, among all his other daring skills.
Within one minute I was far too acquainted with Brad. He is the kind of marvelous and toxic specimen who should be hunted, shot, and stuffed before he passes beyond his prime. I say this with no malice or cynicism. He was a curiously difficult to like human being. Some people would call him shitty, or a pestilence. His willful breach of normal conduct and manners would continue on throughout the short evening like a disease that I had not been inoculated against. I would learn the hard way with Brad, and later during this tortured imbroglio I had an idle comic fantasy in which I gravely asked him if he were possessed by a demon.
Julia did not withdraw her attention from me so much as she directed it to the unavoidable force of this attractive man’s sterling, rat-fink personality. The boy had that allure which seems to be dreadfully universal to Woman. It may involve a woman’s genetic attraction to a kind of confidence singular to the highway bandit and the boxer: an apparently sexy sort of brutal pirate charm.
His chatter was deadly to my designs and he knew it. The words flew out of him and he and I knew he meant harm. He had the gift of bar-room gabbing, I will give him that, and he wanted the girl. It does seem obvious to me now that he was enchanted by Cocaine.
What Brad greatly seemed to enjoy pretending here was that he was not a poisonous Rhinoceros stampeding into my first date with Julia, a girl he actually worked with, in some real estate concern, as it turned out. During the week, he had ample time to flirt with her and threaten her dignity, and yet here he was, targeting our first weekend idyll.
He sat there and jabbered relentlessly about himself and his dim opinions, as they were. I could not make them out, but I didn’t try hard. His gelatin head and his shocking insolence put me in a bad mood, I’m afraid, and his shoulders hunched towards Julia. I watched as she might perhaps have inadvertently glanced at his chest, and perhaps at his arms. It was all one of the worst injustices I have ever slogged through, you see. To have the company of this woman I found so beautiful and rare, pretty much ruined by this raging idiot who had the satanic nerve to sit and blather on and on… It was perverse and troublesome. I dug her so much and she would later admit that it turned her off that I seemed unable to deal with either the place or the Brad’s behavior. She did not seem to sympathize enough, by my almost Teutonic standards.
“The Rockies may crumble...They’re only made of clay.”
Brad was an accepted and seemingly popular quantity at this bar. The private party was hosted by his close lady friend. Brad had bought the first drink for Julia while I was being late. During the course of his sociopathic interruption he managed to unctuously acquire for us two more drinks, one for me the gracious bastard, and then bragged that he never paid for them because his close friend was the bartender. Brad was a wonderful host and I know that I could make many sword handles out of his skin.
Within three minutes something unpleasant happened and I felt sort of like I was at the auction house, bidding for Julia. She began describing the main, outstanding talents of Brad, in various areas. Maybe the first thing she announced was his enrollment in the VMI. She had thought it stood for something else. I am glad she did not know what VMI was because who the bloody fuck needs to know about that fascist animal shit anyway.
But Brad had learned her I guess and the coke enthusiast was on his way to being a military officer, if he could not start a durable business in assassinating other men’s fantasies, probably.
He eventually commented that one of many potential futures of his could include “commanding the world’s best troops.” He referred to American troops but I’m not sure if he was aware of the endless world war at all.
Julia, with repeated gestures of the fist and arm, then demonstrated that Brad played Lacrosse and practiced some kind of martial arts, to my great delight. Not only a belligerent and intolerable asshole but an accomplished athlete and roughneck. She didn’t know the name of his discipline, and good. She was torturing me with all this talk of Brad but at least she didn’t seem to be totally digging him. After all, they worked together but nothing had happened between them that was apparent. Still, I felt there was some subterranean workings underfoot, some evolutionary challenge being suggested. Soon there could even be violence.
He said he was a “fly fighter” and said something else about Brazil, where his school of tusslin’ heralded from. This bloated narcissist needed to be gone but it was clear that he was comfortable in his role of execrable social menace, and was in it for the long haul. He eventually showed his greasy tattered cards and got up, boisterously insisting that we abandon our first date and go join his party, so that he could flourish and preen on his footing, among his friends. At this point I resolved that the virus needed containment, and I looked into my drained drink he had generously stolen for me, and spoke. I insisted that he give us privacy because we were on a date. I would have enjoyed adding that he could not possibly hope to respect himself, for years to come, after this display of semen-filled hubris, but my tongue was proper.
He replied, rebuffed, “oh alright dude, I didn’t mean to but in, offend, etc..” and all this. He had mistaken my silence and my willful show of ignoring him to mean that I was a total pushover, most likely.
I could not at this point tell if Julia dug me. Dug me in any lasting sense that is bound to get past the dependable and sleepless fickleness of female behavior. At that point I started to talk about how I felt about the offensive toy soldier and fly-fighter, why I dismissed him as I felt I had to, and before long I knew that I might have fumed too much for her tastes. I was ranting mildly against the archetype of the devilish white male storm-trooper, possibly. I know now that she did not see Brad as a Nazi storm-trooper. Even so, she may have desired me more than she desired this one-dog stampede of bleating smarm. It was all in limbo, all unknowable, as it often is with the white man. And I am half-white.
Battling, and drinking the gentleman’s drinks as I was, it was getting harder to work out, but I was feeling limber and kept my eyes fixed upon the receding hope of shit going right.
We talked for a while longer. We talked for maybe another twenty minutes or thirty. But the fact is that when you are with someone who pins you with dreams to the wall of Reason, the sense of time fades and is challenged. It has been a while and I don’t remember what we talked about. She showed me a phone picture of her mother and her, and her mother’s young child, too. She told me she didn’t like angry, bitter men. Julia, that is. Me neither. I felt she was trying to tell me I came off like that. The circumstances were not good for allowing me to seem otherwise. At one point she remarked or confirmed that I am sort of serious. Beyond the fact that I am a winsome, impetuously light-hearted gagster that must laugh regularly in order to live, I am somewhat serious in my temperament but I want her to want me anyway and this weighs upon me as the fact of our age difference weighs upon me, struggling to maintain my dignity and my Kleos in this society of child-worshippers and self-fondlers.
I hadn’t been on a date in a while. She’s intoxicating and when you find someone like this there is a silent terror one feels about seeming too turned on and attracted. A long time ago it ceased being very fashionable to show more than a basic chilly interest in someone you were interested in. With extreme beauty comes even more extreme tactics. Think of the jungle cat that pretends a kind of indifference precisely when it is uncommonly hungry (this is what rare beauty inspires, uncommon hunger) and roaming near the ungulate herds that normally half-tolerate his familiar presence. It moves in a relaxed way though its belly is tight and noisy. When you’re with someone very attractive, I suppose you have to pretend as if you are not stunned, or too mindful of your hunger, that exact, disappointing distance between desire and reality. If you wanted to be novel about it all and further compare the rituals of courtship to the predatory life, then you might say this was a mixture of hunting while strenuously giving the impression that you are already well-fed, or could be hunting elsewhere, just as well, among perhaps sleeker and vaster herds.
Instead, fatuously, I act just like myself and tell her at one point that I wish she were my girlfriend. Many times I’ve wondered what it was I answered when she asked me “why?” Because I know what I want, I think I said something like this. It is true. I make it known that I want to leave the place with her. I thought I was not being creepy, sleazy. Other places would have been nice, to talk with her in some kind of quiet, to be away from predators so that I did not have to keep the spear close. She did not warm to my entreaties to leave.
After a little while she went to the restroom again. The first time she had done so, Brad and I were left alone together and he wasted no time at all throwing down the gauntlet. It was to the point at least, and I respect that alone of all his actions that night.
“You seem kind of quiet, man.” This was the gauntlet. A little sentence laced with a challenge for me to explain myself and show my grit. Ah, what a contemptible, vicious little rag-doll of a man, I thought. His parents must have been dumb and hateful. I informed him of our unique triple position there. With admirable civility we then moved on to talking about my accent and my obvious threatening difference from him. I was from New York and was intellectual, and decent. I didn’t dislike the French and disagreed with his opinions on the greatness of our mercenary troops. As we sorted our differences in a kind of martial secret code Brad repeatedly took stock of his physical beauty in the mirror behind me. Before long he got a call from a stooge friend of his and Brad made chauvinist talk about all the hot ladies there that wanted the friend to take them home tonight, and that he should come down because of their VIP status, etc. He did not slip from character, he only relaxed his grip. When she returned that first time he played a cute trick of saying that I had misrepresented my provenance to him; that I was in fact a southerner just like them by the statute of limitations, I suppose. Everybody loves and fears the cachet of the Empire State, you know. He pulled it off with aplomb, like the unwashable rascal he is: as if he was not trying to insult me.
“He’s a fool and don’t I know it…but a fool can have his charms,”
She had pardoned herself for a second time. I sit alone and watch Brad out there among his only partly self-appointed subjects, because my limited purview just happens to be that punishing and evil. He is an odd fascinating display of uncloaked idiot bravado. He shadow boxes a man’s face, curling around him from behind. He is very drunk and hyper, it seems. Probably this play tussling is meant to remind people of his dangerous physical skills, but I also get the impression that it’s a basic release valve for his childish energies, which, as I’ve tried already pointing out, may have been enhanced by the processed powder of the opiate coca leaf. The idea that he was not on coke is now equally disturbing and annoying to me. I am still waiting for Julia, you can imagine. This damn lovely girl with all her options.
“I went out of my wa-ay to get into a lot of …trouble...
“…I went out of mind, when you stopped being kind…and gentle.”
Julia, the fine, fey woman with the sweet personality that had something totally essential and interesting in reserve, came out from the restroom. I then see a rather impressive show of either monomaniacal heat-seeking or keen peripheral vision. All females that are hot are constantly on the officer’s radar, one assumes. There are only maybe twenty footsteps from Julia’s entrance, to the booth, but Brad somehow extricates himself from his performance among a nearby knot of pals and emerges from them to offer one of those confident male invitations that you may have seen before.
These seem to involve using physical interpolation, and grabbing and holding. There is an ineluctable male force about it, but we are only talking of the invitations of handsome alpha-males who are not used to considering much of anything apart from their brilliance and undeniable beauty. Of course, the shang-hai, under these circumstances, is patently illegal.
For several minutes or whatever she receives their gang attentions. He is “introducing” her, a harmless blustery introduction by lasso. She returns. We continue to practice a weird half-dating. It’s not very clear where she sits with me and I slide closer to her, perhaps, at this time. Nothing could change how beaten into a frenzy I have become over this woman. I know from the distant seat of Reason that her allure has to have been increased because of the challenges and the sense of her slipping away. It probably doesn’t register because the seat of Reason is not at all like this VIP booth, all squishy and immediate and dimly pornographic.
Later I wonder how it is that I could not make lemonade out of Corporal Rainy Parades’ sabotage tactics, or from the sheer gaudy silliness of the bar. Neither of these forces is insurmountable, or very threatening to me. It all had something to do with the freakish climax of meeting someone I had formed real feelings for, and yet, bizarrely, for and towards whom all the timid advancing steps of the first date still needed to be made. Not only were the signs not totally there---though she’s a shy girl with some substance and reserve, Man, believe me---but the experiment was hopelessly tainted by the presence of this heat-seeking shark-borne disease. I am tired of wondering if I over-reacted. It is too much, to see some idea that is sweet and desirable smashed in one evening.
Eventually the pestilence returns, remorseless, frothy, from out of the horrifying din. He sort of reminds me of the man who stole a girlfriend from me, sort of, three years ago. It was all my fault then, and my fault that he and I had a nasty fight in front of Alexia’s apartment that morning, spitting, bleeding, head-butting and hating one another pointlessly for no more than five minutes. (The psyche digresses, not me.) Brad has more drinks in him of course and his insolence is now in full swing. It is almost impressive, or exciting, to see doggish animal cunning and impertinence like this in action, and not in some movie that makes you merely annoyed and uncomfortable. I wonder later if Julia had not asked him to watch out for her, this being an internet date with a stranger. Maybe she knew he would be here, and so was guilty of a small harmless lie when she said it was coincidence.
It is during this bout of dealing with him that he confesses, as I suspected, that he does not like the French, and asks who does? Perhaps he was trying to bait me with this highly charged trick question. I raised my hand because I know that the French cannot possibly be worse than the Americans, with whom I am deeply familiar. More and more I am familiar with them. Mock stupefaction, a glib defense of our Gallic and Frankish brethren that is not worth remembering. He had already said something about wanting to perhaps command the world’s greatest troops, among his various widely spread options, which is all too hilarious and revealing, as I’ve tried pointing out already.
It has been clear the whole time that he knows he is being wrong, but is still on the offensive. Julia seems to enjoy him and I am bothered by this and am…sad, embarrassed for us all. Troubled surprise is called disappointment, I believe. This seems to be a breach of decorum, the voice of reason murmurs, like a dying heart.
I am complacent with my drink, I am capable of realizing. The foolishness rages and I sip. The drink drains and I listen to his egotistical talk. I did the bare minimum and probably longed to be alone with her or at least out of the path of the VMI heat wave. I might admit that this barbaric and asymmetrical second offensive had caught me by surprise. Greater stores of chemical energy might have won the day for Brad, or maybe just the inexhaustible fount of will that a huge, oblivious ego supplies.
Eventually I reach for the cell phone as they converse at my expense. As much a show of having something else to do aside from listen to these pitches of snake oil, as anything. I begin to text Julia. Right now as I write this, I understand this was stupid. Then it was a kind of tender joke, a protest against something for which I could only muster quiet disdain. This time I wanted her help, basically, and felt it was due and proper. I wanted to know that she would not mind him gone, to be with me and talking again. The possibility that she had made some sort of choice in favor of this human scarecrow had occurred to me but repulsed and did nobody any good so was discarded. I was in the process of typing to her,
“Save me, Julia..” something remotely like this but it’s foolish and less significant because at that moment the shrewd young fascist leaped upon my preoccupation and got up. Textbook tactic of the white man, it is said, to befuddle the primitive when he is mystified with western technology.
More of the unctuous words came from him. The delivery was a memorable yet unimaginable broadside. He said this was cool and all, this booth but it was time we mingled. Like so. He said something rude and foolish just like this to two people on their first date. This second blatant attempt to fuck with another man and assert his own self threw me. I pretty much gave up, even as I saw Julia stand up slowly and seem to beckon me. She was observably hesitant, expectant. I will always like her even more because I could tell she wanted me to come, that she expected me to come, indeed. Or not. Maybe I imagined this. Later it was clear from her few words to me that by the end of the date she wanted to know if I could get past all this, and whether I was capable of having fun in this place which I had shown distaste for, and which she didn’t seem to mind.
But I had had it and I sat there pretending to be engrossed in texting, when it was her I was trying to reach and there she was leaving, with my consent. Odd stuff. Odd, heinous business. Oh I’ll catch up; I waved them on. My contempt had to have been obvious.
I drank the drink my date Brad had bought me. No…this was one I had bought myself. In a freely admitted and somewhat shocked haze I sent the message on to her. God only knows how many times a man may emasculate himself in one evening while courting. I was literally writing this one off, as I sensed that I had made some grave errors, some related to how women often have a mystic attitude that recognizes many behaviors as irreversible or taboo. The worst, of course, was that I had no certain idea that she was attracted to me, or not. The mixed romantic signal is the worst. It corrodes long after the broadcast.
Through the crowd of revelers. The idea he had put forth as he led her away was to mingle and give her an introduction, of course, what else? To the birthday girl, who he assured us was crazy---in the way of fun. "She's crazy!" The hosting gambit of his was so base, thickly spread and ham-fisted, that it made a thudding noise when initiated. It was under these conditions the only decent ruse for a murderous, talking shark to employ. So I looked for them among the birthday minglers. But I found them at the bar, near the bartender and the register, Brad’s good friends. A place of power and plenty. The alleged introduction to the crazy birthday girl must have been fast and furious, but not fun enough, for there they were, the officer and my date, his victim, cadging more cheap or free drinks and being guided by his carnie-charm, four minutes after they had left the booth, toward a more lubricated fun, the easier to make her forget me and love his inviting staleness.
So I did more of the watching bit, like any forlorn lover and detective. Perhaps the worst part of the date came then, when I watched her unsolicited and exuberant hand grab Brad’s bicep. In a poem I described this as the girl checking on the quality of the goods without realizing their rottenness. In truth I had no idea what kind of friendship they had. I could have landed in the middle of something. It certainly smelled rank.
That touch of his arm got me because she had not touched me at all. I was keenly aware of the obvious drama the three of us formed and it was time to go. An observant person could have watched us, even casually, from the time I arrived to the time Brad left the booth with her on a beeline to secure her greater, gratis drunkenness, and the observer could tell what was going down, and might have reasonably expected a fight to materialize because men are stupid and this is a Culture of Honor around here.
I sat there gratifying myself with such self-conscious, dull thoughts as I saw some folks looking at me, sitting there with a very nearly empty drink… I made only a slight effort at not obviously watching them, mainly her. At this point, an attractive young woman in a difficult to make out elastic number that showed she was tanned, above perhaps all things in the world, came past me and got Brad’s attention. She seemed to hesitate momentarily as Brad was standing with the pretty Julia, but Brad looked at her and they greeted. He hugged her I believe and I was very very glad he had another chance to display his extreme desirability. I also saw this as my chance to take my leave or see what was up at least. Walked towards her and ignored Brad entirely. I moved close to her with my back to him and said something about the birthday girl, a jostling, petulant kind of comment, and Julia told me they were having shots…perhaps she thought I had suddenly lost my eyesight. The sugary mini-drink sat before her. It was probably called the Adam’s Apple. I was anxious and hurt and determined to leave and I don’t know if she was somehow suggesting I join them. She was uncomfortable, as anyone would be, but I don’t know how much.
I told her I was leaving and let my irritation, my aggrieved offended aura speak for itself. Who speaks well, in times like that? Julia put an arm around me in a half-hug and it touched my heart and lessened the pain of whatever wound I can be said to have suffered at this moment of being terribly fucking alone and shocked by the carnal, idiot savagery of things. She did not have to hug me but she did, and it may mean nothing. But this was the first time we had touched since the initial meeting at the bar, and I was glad to know that this woman had the tenderness and warmth to see me leave with some sliver of affection.
Times like these nobody, I think, but a pretentious fool knows what to say. It’s a time for speech-making and pulling out our hidden stuffing and that is difficult and unpleasant, for most. The things that are deep and valuable within us are at play and want to be expressed. But it’s not the place and drama between strangers is pointless anyway. The look on my face is totally past my memory or my ability to analyze. There was some intensity to it, to be sure. The words might as well have been gibberish but I didn’t stammer. I left cocaine alley and a woman I deeply wanted, and briefly imagined that she was coming after me because wishful thinking had transformed some girl behind me in red into Julia.
“My Baby Don’t Care for Clothes…My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
I went to have some sushi and sake nearby before leaving by cab. Thought maybe she would want to meet again tonight, and discuss our lukewarm meltdown, as it were. The dying suspicion that the woman you want wants you but is slipping away, that doubt, is poison and lingers somewhat too long, you’ll agree. It is even more insidious and mournful a thought when you aren’t sure if she wants you at all.
The Japanese restaurant had a good many youngsters into DJ’s and electronic music and acting a little bit too hard for mannerliness. After drinking and eating, while waiting for a cab, I complimented a guy on his very pretty Asian girlfriend, but though my language may have been slightly off, I did it like a gentleman, all things considered. I was at this point sort of drunk and you could say a little bothered by my unpleasant experience. This young man was in no mood to have his girl complimented abruptly by a stranger, though the girl was inside and we were outside.
He bristled like an unloved mutt on a chain. But he could not make me out, from a genetic, flight-or-fight standpoint. He was tall but skinny, and I might have carried a dark presence then and do not look, physically, like a pushover. His outrage was confined to calling me a faggot as he walked away, after mock-complimenting my shoes, and throwing his cigarette butt violently out into the parking lot. I wished him a good night as he quickly went inside, defusing his own insult in the process. My shoes, I felt, were nice. I didn’t realize they looked uncool to the DJ sect and I made a mental note to buy more fashionable styles. It had been a while, I guess, since I bought me some shoes. They were brown and I regretted they didn’t strictly match my pants and here I was paying for it with horrible public shame, and I had been in such a good mood before that.
My own genetic combat system stirred and I reminded myself that I didn’t like angry, bitter men. Twice during this shameful and juvenile sake-based miscommunication, I told the offended party that I meant no disrespect, but nobody gets three kow-tows, I reminded myself. And I was absolved by the Golden Rule: I know I would not have minded at all if the tables were turned, and would probably have been flattered, but I am used to being more civilized than other men. So much of this nonsense comes from fear and doubt and the vast territory over which the ego reigns.
But I had gone from an evening in Purgatory to a potential instance of mindless fisticuffs. I was on a roll.
All around me the tension of insecure little boys grew. I didn’t necessarily want to fight three people at once but a plan of action began to form. I am sure that the dull nerve of manhood was already excited by the shark attack and the loss of the heavenly beauty beneath the dark waves. Fortunately it did not come to all that. During the entire time, before and after my grave offense, I had managed to impress two of DJ Princeling’s “boys,” or emissaries, with my even tone and dignified nature. They kind of stood up for me and calmed his highness down. The DJ might have smelled it out almost immediately that his girl was attracted to me, and his tantrum of stamping insecurity had probably not helped her opinion of him. He did need calming.
The cab came and I beat it without a beating. From the time I regretfully left Julia with that black hole of male egotism to the time I got home and started listening to the soul mix composed for her, I sent her four different text messages altogether. There was not a reply. I left one phone message. Little dignity in all that messaging and I know how dangerous that is but sometimes it does not matter. The thought of her hanging with him throughout the night, and of the foul taste generated by the whole debacle clinging longer than it needed to… more because I could not talk with her….that thought was powerfully present with me, with the music, and with the solitary drinks I took. I don’t know what happened to her that night or when she left. Of course, the writing of these words took the place of my need to sleep, which could not be met.
No man can send five unreturned texts in one night and easily recover his dignity. Especially sent within two hours. Even when women do it, they are generally considered to be in hysterics. But I am different.
Still I can’t expect her to see or care about that. She eventually returned my messages, which grew longer, and then shorter, and possibly more bitter. I cannot be blamed too harshly. Those whom I tell about this night almost always sympathize with me and I can see in their eyes that the experience would hurt them, too. If there is one thing our kind have forgotten that is more disastrous than the forgetting of anything else, it is the use of that tool, and I don’t mean the wheel or the gatlin gun, which made us what we are, and I don’t here mean bloodthirsty killers: it is our tongue, connected to our mind. We don’t communicate well, for all our talking, and we are hurtful, as we are selfish. We must not bite into one another and then claim that the blood in the water threw us into a frenzy.
Julia apologized for not getting back to me, but there was never an apology for her letting it go down as it did. Even a fool and a beauty has her charms, though, and the story is far from over, I am hoping. She wanted to know why I became upset, morose, fed up. It started when I sensed that she might have stopped being kind, gentle, and desirable.
Behind me, Buddha sits and is pleased. I hear laughter instead of the laconic Voice of Reason. I managed to produce lemonade after all, and am not ashamed that it had to be heavily spiked to be taken.
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