Scope and peekaboo of informants’ eyes. From behind half-slat blinds. Through the apparent intimate innocence of a looking glass. In disguise as a potted mother-in-law’s tongue. Basketed mid-air on an uncurtained third floor balcony.
Death’s hirelings, spider subalterns in flux and rising lux.
(Those, that is, not engaged in the limoed tussled harvesting ; the ménage-a-quatre trashing of the Duchess.)
Like quicksilver, light as air. Necromantic and illusory opalescence. His Majesty’s pachucos. Les gamins of the Dark Lord.
Ubiquitous. Perennial. De rigueur. Bad pennies. Oxidized, owl-lit, and omnivorous.
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As in episode 2?
Having just finished recording her for posterity?
Sunlit bruise of Fiona’s fire-fringed iris?
Puss is lotused on the floor. Oddly and utterly nude. Within an arm’s-length of warmth Peter sits opposite. Same state of perfect undress. Their eyes are locked. As they sip from teacups of ice-cold vodka and orange juice. To offset Python’s blur and headache.
Python takes the blame. Provides the ancient excuse. For what has taken place an hour or so earlier. Under other circumstances …. O unthinkable! Not even to be dreamed of. But now, not only dreamed of but energetically consummated.
They did it, Puss realizes, right next to the sliding glass door.
Prey to ocular discovery. Any old neighbor gazing out to ascertain the posture and the ballet of the rush-hour clouds.
And what precisely was it they did? (Seems a shame to leave the limning to the spyglass demons.)
A smorgasbord. A sideboard of damp notions, wiry connotations.
This much he remembers. Peter, crying out. A feminine muscular rapture, collapsed with a half-laugh. Much-pleasing to Puss, flushed with beginner’s luck as much as with a serpent’s chubby lust. Vaseline-gleam in triumph over raw red carpet burn.
In any particular order?
Playback, rewind, edit as you wish.
One of them got ______ __ ___ ___ ; one of them got his ____ ______ ; both of them ______ the other’s ____.
They lay, cat-cradled afterwards. As shadows spread like happy barbarians over the frontiers of sun’s dying empire. Covered in, and leaking, each other’s temperate quicklime. So much for the redhead’s aura.
Peter plays with Puss. First right, then left. Puss, not unpleasantly, sees stars.
-I’m not really gay, I don’t think, he says.
A propos the obvious. As his truffled numen shivers, flexes, staggers upwards to fat salute.
-Oh, that’s alright, Peter smiles.
And strokes his own to a similar ovation. A sympathetic pregnancy, of sorts.
-for now, Peter continues, for now all that matters is that you’re not unhappy.
Thug’s emerald eyes wink like a ferret’s. The lads’ve got their work cut out for them. His Lordship will be His usual tortured, bright enigma. Cursing in thirteen lingos and grinning like an Aztec caricature of Himself.
Perhaps his perseverance will warrant a tot’s reward? A steaming goblet of Duchess’s pee? Perhaps?
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Not all of Baron Sunday’s cohorts are bacillus-boys. More than a few of the fair sex disport in rough obedience. Dusked in purgatorial blue.
Calumnia is such a one. Cornsilk shag, northern Italian curves, treacherous as Eden.
Calumnia, full-lipped as a king’s mistress, blue-veined as a Medici Madonna. She’s made the rounds of Penelope Street. Dark spillway of possibilities, running randy east to warlock west. Where every Mister’s a potential pistol. And every Missy’s poison. Or so the jukebox bellows.
The males she dismisses, save one.
From the furtive relative youngsters (porcelain typographically pimpled) whose foreheads would look the more normal were they laser-stitched with the true nature of their brittle quest:
i am no closet queer
To the networked gobs, whose dirty money is as clean as anyone else’s, either end of Penelope.
Even the better looking of the lot still criminal in their ugliness. Expensive suits in sore need of pressing. Calumnia loathes their bluster. Which brings her to Simon. Grim, druidic, whore-mongering Simon.
Why haunts he so relentlessly the titty-bars and peepshows? Why pauses he to light some hennaed harlot’s Havana?
No mystery there, he says. His daily quest the same as thirty years past. Pursuit, negotiation, purchase, and possession. A warm wet snatch in which to pump his latest thousand-tailed load. Thus he says. And thus he sometimes even thinks.
Calumnia, being a woman (a dead one, at that), Calumnia knows better.
His quest is love.
A sock-darning, lunchbox-packing, sweater-knitting, back-patting, patient-with-hangover sort of love.
In the worst of times.
No bed of roses.
In the best of times.
All Brahms and blowjobs.
Calumnia’s smile is a captivating thing. She has good reason to iconize her pearlies to a sickled ivory. She was there, after all, when he opened his mouth for communion with the hook. Bagged in the fishnet of a dancer’s legs. Like a braindead, mercury-laden salmon. Bounding his way upstream to spawn and die.
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Flashcut, jumpcut.
Melissa, asleep on a bullet train, hurtling (not that she knows it), Wendywards.
Simon, in stunned sincerity at her absence. Who will now tend to his orphaned erections? Who will kiss him grateful at orgasm’s mid-caterwaul?
He hunches at the bar of Venus Venue. Before him a glass of South African white. And a shot glass of bourbon and crocodile tears.
Her voice is musical and somewhat thin. Not at all like Melissa’s memorized husk.
-I haven’t seen you in here before, have I?
Simon looks at her. From head to toe and back again. His blear subsides as his guilt gets up and walks to the back of the bus.
-You’re night shift?
-Dusk till closing, she nods.
-I usually do the lunch hour here.
-You come here to … eat?
The last word’s a fairy-slippered, insinuating whisper.
-Yes. The potato salad’s excellent and the Reuben’s not bad.
-Hm. I guess I should try it sometime. Except that I’m still in bed at that hour.
-Are you just gonna talk to the lady or are you gonna buy her a drink?
If the bartender were a cop he’d be bouncing a nightstick off his meaty palm.
-Yes, of course. Sorry. What’ll it be? Simon asks.
She speaks directly to the bartender and when she smiles one side of her mouth lifts slightly higher than the other.
-A grape soda, please, Ian.
-Coming right up.
-What’s your name? Simon asks, offering her a cigarette.
She takes it and sets it down on the bar.
-Mel … isande.
Truly?
Fountain-music, echo’s bones.
-And yours? she asks.
Ian returns with a napkin and an enormous chalice into which she might slosh the contents of her tiny, imperial can.
-That’ll be seven dollars for the lady’s drink.
Simon hands him a wrinkled bill.
-Keep the change … my name’s Simon.
His tone effortless affable gravity.
-Simon, she says, popping loudly the tab of her grape soda.
-Simon, she repeats, ‘Simon says’, ‘Simon says ‘suck my dick’, … it’s a nice name.
He swallows hard. Wine’s soft burn. One of apartheid’s better years.
Melissa used to charge extra when he wanted her to talk dirty. He’s no punter when it comes to the foreplay of small-talk but for the moment he wants to take her in, feed on her with his eyes.
The sign on the marquee of Venus Venue. ‘Totally Nude Girls.’ He should report them for false advertising. The once-over of a lecher’s trained eye.
Her stilettos an S&M wet dream. Her black thigh-highs sheer Mandiargues, sheer Maupassant. Before, after, but most of all, during. Her g-string unsubtling the hint of pouting pink. Clinical white pasties an antiseptic eclipse. Dark aureoles rounding the adhesive edge like twin fringes of smoke. Necklace of craftless Egyptian hieroglyphs, black, red, gold.
Her fingers stroke the stem of her purpled, fizzing chalice, roll the unlit cigarette to and fro upon the dark polish of the bar.
It’s the fingernails that spike his interest. Long, and square at the tips. A porn star’s cliché. Painted a deep hunter’s green. With her light brown, shoulder-length hair, her pale blue eyes, and the rude scarlet of her tired lips … it’s painfully evident. The girl has no sense of color-coordination.
-So, Melisande, Simon begins.
-where do you fit in? Here, in the hierarchy of Venus?
-What do I do, you mean?
She shifts her weight, relaxing slowly back against the edge of a bar stool. He can almost taste the salt drops of light sweat beading the firm fatty underside of her small breasts.
-I’m strictly runway and slow-strip. And chatting up the guys at the bar. For now.
-Ah. And I’m obviously a guy at the bar.
-Obviously. Though not …
She pauses, smiles. Takes a first quick sip of fizz.
-let’s just say you’re the same genre but with a distinctly unique call number.
Simon bets she says that to all the …
He changes tack.
-‘For now.’ You said ‘for now’?
-Yeah. Next week, on ‘Ladies’ Nite’ I’ll be available for lap dances.
-A promotion?
-It’s where the girls get their hands on the big bucks. So to speak.
-‘Ladies’ Nite’? Must be kind of odd.
-You get all kinds. None of my concern. Some people tithe to their churches and others pay girls like me good money to turn them and their wives or girlfriends on. I’m in the marital aid business.
She laughs. Like her voice. Musical, pretty, thin.
-Is it to turn them on or humiliate them, do you think?
-Is the glass half empty or half full? Like I said, none of my concern.
Simon grins. Wants to keep her chatting him up. He’ll gladly stand her grape sodas a while longer.
-You know what I think is odd? she asks.
-the Tuesday Night Businessman’s Special.
-What’s so special about it?
-Steak and loaded baked potato and minimum four mixed drinks gets you two girls at the same time, table dancing while you chow down. Imagine.
Simon imagines. He sees it, despite himself. Beauties and the beastly. Swollen captain of industry. Suitcoat draped over the back of the chair. Necktie loosened for the trough. Heavy, jewel-swogged wristwatch, bending, dipping golden above the grandiose platter. Juice of prime rib glistens at the corners of the opened mouth. Fork, rising beneath its load. Burden of mash and sweating cheddar, rivulets of sour cream mobbed with chives and bacon bits. He chews to the bowelshaking rhythm of quadraphonic bass and drums. Observes what he deserves, a pleasure paid for by others. Mere tongue-thrust beyond the lifted, steaming tines. The hard rock metronome of a lipsticked clit.
-Well, time for me to go, Simon says.
Abrupt, casual. Certain that he could nail her. Wanting, inexplicably, to wait.
-But I haven’t finished my drink, she purrs.
-No, but I’ve finished mine. Nice talking to you, Melisande.
-Yeah, see ya.
But her eyes are already moving over his shoulder, gauging the frail Chinese guy who is just about to light the filter end of his cigarette.
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Is there any sin under sun or moon which, once committed, isn’t worthy of serious relapse?
Take Giselle Whitman. Little bitch backslider. Ah, lay off, she’s just a kid. Precisely the point.
Giselle’s scribbling in her Peter Cottontail diary. Stuffing her mouth with handfuls of potato chips. She’s got her headphones on. Horny Stuart’s latest gift of courtship. A homemade compilation tape, culled from his big sister’s record collection. Sisters Of Mercy, International Brigade, Joy Division, Empty Glass, Midnight Oil, Dangerous Curves. And her all-time favorite, favorite song. ‘Word On A Wing’ by David Bowie.
Giselle is profoundly stoned. She’s telling herself it isn’t her fault. It’s Stuart’s. Maybe. And her parents’. Definitely.
Her Mom and Dad are cuddled downstairs in the living room. Not quite midway through a six-hour television documentary.
‘Negro Nihilism: the early years of rock n roll.’
Her Dad at his most solicitous, doing his damnedest to spark her daddy’s-little-angel-guilt to prairie fire.
-Sure you don’t want to watch TV with your mother and me? I bet you wouldn’t be bored. Besides, it’s good to know the background, the roots to your music.
Her music? Oh, how she resents that! She’s not some dimwit teenybop, she knows perfectly well she’s just another pale pretty face in the crowd. (Even if David is obviously singing just for her.)
From her bedroom window it had been a neat quick scramble over the patio roof. A short drop onto the sod piles destined for some future gardening project of her Mom’s, which Giselle has diligently avoided showing the least interest in. Thence to the larch-copsed shadows towering the back fence.
-Yours, Stuart says, handing her the tape, brushing a casual twirl of jet from his eyes.
(Earlier gifts: a purple, white-tusked stuffed elephant she’d admired in a storefront window on the way back home from detention hall ; a black plastic cigarette lighter lifted from the assistant principal’s desk ; most surprising (he remembers that she likes to read!) a translation of the Iliad by Peter of Arabia, with creamy angular nudes, watercolored by Edmund Dulac, Lancelot’s baby brother.)
Stuart and Giselle smoke a joint and watch for shooting stars. Or, rather, Giselle drags the lion’s share, eyes turned to the heavens. Stuart is busy wriggling his fingers past the waistband of her chastely-cinched, eight-day shitters.
A police helicopter sweeps overhead in pursuit of the usual homicidal prison escapees.
Stuart’s breath is warm as he licks her neck, tickling the stain of an earlier lovebite.
-Oh, that’s so cool, Giselle whispers.
Does she mean the high tracer-burn of a freefalling star? Or something else?
Meredith Warwick’s sick of the Zeitgeist.
At the very instant that Stuart infiltrates his playmate’s gush, Meredith sighs and leans his head back on his pillow.
Having just finished masturbating into his ‘I Got Scrod In Boston’ sweatshirt.
But the Zeitgeist isn’t sex, this time.
It’s Homer, that blind composite minstrelboy.
Meredith closes his eyes and surrenders into a piteous dream.
(Odyssey – Book VI)
unhappy king swept stripped over hard shoals
pestering hands knees with blood & fish-mess
don’t argue Poseidon hates your guts but
girls indubitably once these eyes slew sun-bright
prepubescent heiress “one day all this will
be yours” heat-mothering harbor savage toll
selfless toil only plunder rots ungorged wind
blots shadowy sails pubic bush seeks coverlet
plaything jars imposed sleep feral oaf she
does not see but you naked modest
man humbly requesting visibly noble what wide
circumstances? & Nausikaa’s just a kid isn’t
she? “clothed, stranger, I’ll bring you to
my father” what better ruse Nausikaa? maids-
in-waiting wait observe how queenly different little
brat is in presence of this man
(descending on oiled wings gods bring curtains down)
harpers episode music please smoke-light
borne upwards thru smoke-hole hall’s omphalos stars
spray universe’s purple smells mix an unbarbaric
people after Troy civilization stinks putrid your
heart Noman borne upwards? this episode’s
nostalgic & we learn soon enough that
narrative breathes like a man is Nausikaa
love-interest? thumb-twiddler this princess keeps
her eyes on our hero great glimpsed
nakedness now perfumed & barbered virile &
gorgeous how common his myth to all
the givers of bounty? Calypso? even Circe
surely they were winded of any sequel
that he meets bluestocking goddess shocks dog
to touching death dissects suitors strings up
sluts & beds his madam beneath marriage-oak
pitying his misfortune does he ignore Nausikaa’s
sculpted drawers? Hey watchman! son Telemachus aged
to her highness’ tenderness Ithaca’s favorite no
Lot would sooner bounce her on his
graying knee Love though no moly to
save one where that’s concerned & crush
or passion Nausikaa loves! no matter he
sails anyway edifying her a redemptive goddess
in memory hoarded at least that’s what
he says in his grievous goodbye &
didn’t he beached & naked pretend to
confuse her with divinity? does she even
guess it’s flattery or do the ruts
down to the laundering rocks fatigue her
pining ghosted with memory of his fatigue?
her white-armed dreams welcome him again
& again virgin hands anointing slowly the
bare darkness swept stripped over hard shoals
oh unhappy king
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An exam looms. Any takers? No? Maestro Beckett, so eager, so persuasive, primed for smarting-down or dumbing-up. Maestro Beckett, S.J., will be most disappointed.
Longueurs, dying for a trim? Gentlemen, unsheathe your scissors.
Checkhov’s dictum. Firepower in the first act … … stiffs by curtain-time.
Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Thomas A Kempis.
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
What’ve they got in common?
Nothing which springs immediately to mind.
You see the problem?
No?
Young Father Isherwood does. Writing furtive, desperate, passion-drenched fragments in the high claustrophobic perch of his garret. Fragments he daren’t yet call poetry, but words to live by, words to keep hidden from his superiors’ eyes.
In twenty years he sees himself half-drowned in narrow straits. Up to his argyle shins in notebooks. Faith a little less steady but pumping blood from heart to brain on a regular narcotic basis. The alcoholism of a middle-aged lonely priest in full, victorious bloom.
He puts no stock in prophecy. Although this creepy dustcloud gives him pause. The entire city beginning to smell like a terminal ward.
He puts his ballpoint down. Souvenir of that peripatetic Pope’s last visit. He puts his pen aside and prays:
-Oh Mother of God ……. the Old Man’s really pounding us now …… sweet Mary, save us …….. spare us, if you choose …… (please choose!) …….
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In the street below, Gwendolyn assumes a prayerful pose. On her knees beside a grimy, cobbled curb. Her fingers clumsy, gentle, tinkering the sudden slackness of her bicycle chain.
Tears run down her face. Her heart is that of a put-upon, long-suffering dowager. Having lived long enough to see the violation of a beloved kingdom.
Once-lovely boy-princes, eunuched and humiliated at the hands of unwashed, rum-spilling, meat-eating foreign devils. Whose knowledge of the kingdom’s precious language has reduced it to a few barbaric, guttural phrases.
‘Come here, now’ ‘go away’ ‘bring me more’ ‘whip that slavegirl’
Gwendolyn exaggerates her sorrow. She has the desirable body of a forty-year old. And for this she sobs, deeply penitent.
It’s time. Time for Gwenju’s groom and snack. Time to lay carnations on her daughter’s grave. To play Jocasta to a new crop of vulnerable, forgettable boys.
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(Postcard XIII)
Malcolm McDowell as the Emperor Caligula, barelegged, tunicked, and stunned
with professional weariness, lighting a script-girl’s filter king.
Dear Sob Sister,
do you know what You & He remind me of?
He’s Brian Jones & you’re the swimming pool.
Humboldt’s Latest Whore