Stories

If only the story had a clear beginning or a clear end then I would give it to you straight instead of in these helix-like curly cues. I intent to purposefully obfuscate the truth, not because I want to lie to you, because if I tried to speak directly to you THAT would be the lie.
It was very unfortunate that I had not recently suffered the proper amount of brain damage to initiate the multidimensional scanning process. I knew he would ask,
"Is this a mash up?" and I would say no, because the mash up was coming from inside my head rather than through an external process of combining seemingly disparate texts. It's the natural beauty of my mental illness. He would say from his crystal palace,
"I connect things too, that seem unrelated."
At this juncture it is wise to explain that clearly there is only one "he" ever. It may seem that there are a multitude, that I am in fact sitting around an octagonal table with multiple individual "he" right now, but I have learned the deeper secrets. I understand that all along I have only known one primordial he and have interacted with him through various emissaries both conscious and unconscious of their roles as high priests within the order of the shinning eternal nil.
The music, by the way, was noise and we listened with gusto, filling me with hope. Sometimes I met one who was both he and she, a creature capable of invoking all the powers fluidly. I am one such of these creatures, a rainbow unicorn once held sealed within a lead tomb beneath layers of Korean soil waiting to be unearthed by the emperor. You will see that there is some internal logic, a special hidden system for decoding the sacred texts. I could no longer be a human woman although I had played the part well in biological excess and had difficulty separating myself from MOTHER.
I wanted to tell him not to ride that motorcycle straight towards death, but his life and death were not mine to dictate and I would not like to interfere with his appointment with destiny.
Such strange beautiful mysteries I have questioned and viewed from the observation deck. I was thoroughly interviewed on entry myself . They examined my oral cavity for contraband that I was attempting to smuggle in from the womb, so I took it into my lungs and held it there for 30 years.
I saw a movie about a girl with a friend and it reminded me a little that one time I did have a friend like that one. She had an opportunity to escape and said she didn't want to leave me, but I told her that she had to go, that I wanted her to go, that it was the opportunity we had both wished for, so she flew away trailing rainbow streamers. We met at the estuary where we were both hatched and learned to manipulate him.
I look in amazement through the oculus and wonder how anyone could have stomached me when I was the arch-duchess of Coldsville conducting psychological experiments on those alien entities I called "friends."
I had of course been warned by my father, the duke, that these so called friends would be my ultimate demise if I let them get too close to me. It happened just as he had said it would, but not as he had imagined it. When the walls came down and I let the alien other in, his little proxy was damaged beyond repair allowing for the multidimensional scanning process to be performed with this bio terminal. The angels began the process of molecular distillation that altered my basic shape retrofitting me for the other process without leaving a bad taste.
Of course none of that was real. None of this is real either. If you want to understand this text you will need to find the other two books but I wont tell you where to look.
I believe that I am "her" which has made it difficult for me to see or interact with her often. While I have amphibian capabilities, they have been little exercised and my time above water has made aquatic flips more challenging than they were after I first hatched. Initially I was uncomfortable with being "her" but eventually I escaped his expectation that I replace him and learned to embrace my subverted femininity. Thus I learned to walk and paint my fingernails, but at a much later date.
In the end, the end that I thought could not be found, it was Miley Cyrus who showed me the secret to storytelling. She said:
"A flower is a rose, a rose is a whore, a whore is a sailor, a sailor is a mermaid, a mermaid is a hippo, a hippo dances in a ballet, the ballet becomes a circus, the circus has clowns, clowns wear flowers that spit water from their lapels."
Even then, as he busily ushered orgone from the lower dimensions into the crystal palace, he answered:
"Some day together we will shine."

D is for...

In the morning I had a phone call from my mother. My hands were covered in egg whites so I didn’t answer right away. Instead I finished making breakfast and then listened to the voicemail that she had left. It was strangely brief.
“Hi, it’s mom. Call me back when you are not busy.”

Her tone was dark and I wondered whether something specific was bothering her or whether it was the same general note of depression her voice usually carried.
I went to open the garden gate to carry out some bags of garden waste and discovered numerous black widow webs. I could barely make out a dark form behind a panel of wood and knew at least one spider was hiding there. I shivered all over.
The day before I had turned over an inverted flower pot and moved some bags of stone unearthing five of the deadly arachnids. I killed them with my boot heel when possible and the shovel tip when my foot couldn’t reach. I had been fairly brave in the moment, but now, knowing that there were more sent chills rippling through my body.

While I brought the pickup truck around to the gate my friend started carrying out the bags of leaves and weeds. We drove over the mountain and I kept my window rolled down, breathing the ion charged air.
At the county dump we pulled up to the scale to weigh our load and I noticed a trio of plastic skeletons arranged in a bush. I admired their creative placement.
Our county dump is full of artistic talent. An enormous installation of fascinating rubbish has long graced the hill behind the chemical waste shed and there is always some fetching creation to greet us when we reach the main warehouse. I smiled. The installations were spreading.

After purging ourselves of leaves and dead grass we headed towards home. Paused at a traffic light we watched palm bearers struggle to unload a coffin from a hearse. I was enjoying the bright orange of the flowers atop the glossy casket, the picture perfect ensemble of men in dark suits struggling under the weight as they carried it awkwardly into the yawning doors of a church.
“That’s intense.” my friend said.
“What is?”
“Somebody died and those five guys are carrying the body in. I guess we don’t have a lot of opportunities to confront death in this culture. We’re not usually face to face with it.”

At home I called my mother back.
“I have sad news. Jimmy’s daughter died last night.”
“I didn’t know Jimmy had a daughter.” I said.
“Well you know, I think we told you that just before Shanna was born Jimmy had another baby with another woman, Pam... and when he told her Kelly was going to have Shanna she took her baby, D’Laney, to Oregon so her parents could help.”
I digested this. I had been thinking of my mother’s other cousin Jay. I wasn’t sure if he had any kids. I knew about Shanna. Shanna had been to our house a number of times while I was growing up. But I had never heard the name D’Laney. I had never met her or even seen a photo.
“It’s so sad. She was only 34.”
“How did she die?”
“A cat bite. Isn’t that weird? It was her own cat. Apparently if a cat bites you it can lead to an infection and cause systemic failure.”

After I hung up I found D’Laney Ford’s Facebook page. She liked Philip Glass. I also like Philip Glass. Some of her friends mentioned her tribe. I figured she must have been a groovy burner from Seattle.
I felt a little emotional and looked out the window. A neighbor I had never met was standing in his backyard which is directly behind mine. He was wearing only a white bathrobe. I tried to write something .

“Dear D’Laney,
Why didn’t I know you? My mother called this morning to tell me that my second cousin D’Laney had passed away last night. D’Laney. Now I’ve seen your Facebook profile and I feel like we would have liked one another if we had ever had the chance to meet. I wonder if you ever knew I existed. I didn’t know about you. We never played together as children.”


I stopped. I really didn’t know what else to say. I looked at my neighbor in his bathrobe. He had something in his hand. What is that? I wondered.
I watched him for a few moment and felt a wash of surprise when he lifted his arm and started swinging a machete. What is he doing? I wondered. He was swinging it in a leisurely half hearted way, swinging it at nothing at all. Then he wandered a little and hacked briefly at a bush before meandering back into his house.

Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

Anything You Have Held

Ronnie was a gymnast. That’s how they met and that’s also the story of how music became a part of Dennis. 
He says that anything that you have held holds you.
They were in ninth grade when they met and had no social options at the time for expressing the depth of their love. It was a love affair nonetheless. Ronnie taught Dennis to sing and play drums and Dennis taught Ronnie to fight. He was like a perfectly chiseled Greek statue and would do a hand stand on a signal light on 42nd street in Manhattan if you asked him to. He was beautiful and that beauty drew attention, jealousy, and resentment. Boys who perhaps felt that same attraction to Ronnie that Dennis felt but wanted to stop it sought peace by punishing the beauty of that face with their fists. So Dennis taught Ronnie to fight.

Ronnie took Dennis to a club to listen to music. They were the only white kids in a black jazz club. Dennis worried a little but Ronnie said:
“Listen to the music.”
And he did. After a while Ronnie was invited up onto the stage to play. Sublime moment for the kid too young to get into the club to be on the stage.

In college Ronnie fell in love with a beautiful woman. Her face was severely deformed, she had three fingers on each hand, but like Ronnie she was a musician. This is a sad story. They tried to have children and after several miscarriages they at last had a son, Sean.

On Christmas Eve Dennis was on his way to a party being held in honor of his recent nomination for a Pulitzer. The phone rang. It was Ronnie’s wife. Ronnie had just been hit by a bus crossing the street.
For several days they all sat around the hospital bed reading to Ronnie from the yearbook, but Ronnie was gone. His beautiful wife gave his drum kit to Dennis. Dennis  brought it with him to the west coast where he continued to make music.

13 years later the telephone rang again. It was Sean. He wanted to know if he could have his Dad’s drum kit back. Dennis cried.
“I know that you were my Dad’s best friend. I know that you loved him.” Sean told him.

Anything that you have held holds you.
Ronnie was a Gymnast. He would do a hand stand anywhere anytime. If you were walking down 42nd street and asked him to, he would do a handstand right on the traffic light.