Sarasota VII (an excerpt)

Sarasota, Florida

The room has a calico couch and an ugly print—angular slashes of salmon, Howard Johnson blue—on the wall behind it. Off its hinges, a door leads to a gravel-filled deck with a lounge chair. The Atlantic’s breath sweeps the room from all sides and curls my stomach with lust and awe. Here alone for five weeks to rehearse and perform a musical in which I play a grisette.ⁱ Two wigs, three costume changes. The ocean makes me dizzy. I want to remain with my new phantom lover chasing memories flattened by a salt breeze on a single bed. The chamber of space suggests something else, and the round white table—like a dais—draws me to it and to the pen I now use. This dais demands an incantation, an explanation for my languishment here. I slither in wetness or coax out the tapeworm of the story. Let the salt air dry it out. Fossilize the monster.

The phone’s unplugged and placed in the top drawer of the dresser so it won’t start to whine, transmitting voices from other spheres. So I won’t receive anyone else’s voice but be seduced by silver knots that escape my hemorrhaging lungs, safe and drowning, let me etch with that contradiction—mount shifting memory mists and land. The others wonder why I choose to stay in the studio overlooking the water with the blinds drawn. At times they seem insulted. What blunt tools do I scrounge for in the midst of this frothy occasion? Who do I punish? I wonder myself.

i Dressing room joke that made the guys howl: What’s a grisette? A grisette’s what’s left over when you eat a whore.

1.

The lovers were both protecting dead people who they couldn’t protect at the time of death. What’s the time of death? How does it intersect with place?

2.

The enemy at the time of his loved one’s death had become the world: evil winning in the motives of a handful of boys. His sister had been taken away by a party, by alcohol, by the times, by her judgement, by her free spirit, by evil winning in the motives of a handful of boys. The lovers had both experienced evil winning. It emerges with that lack of something: virtue, charm, street smarts, calm or all of these and nothing else—leads to murder and becomes a hole. You’ll fill this hole with whatever satisfies the absence of what God’s removed. God being the force behind extremes. The ghost and savior are one: remorse, lust, fame, stoicism, wandering, narcissism. But you’re always protecting the dead one somehow.

3.

I never met your dead one. She has a name—Teres—and she formed a point of the star of your family, the body from which you sprang like a vagrant comet. Little boy who vomits at Christmas presents, from the need, the desire, the fear of presents wrenching his stomach up. Who grows up in Canada watching the Flintstones and comes to know a hunger for America, with his ice-skates and Paddle to the Sea. Boy in a closed world that death opens up. The planet of your origin is harpooned by a rummaging god who collects fates to shelve somewhere as conch shells are pulled from tumbling waves at a dinner table for the beaches—as a boy collects baseball cards to sell later at a profit or perhaps to assure himself he’s a boy.

Teres was sacrificed for you. For God. For the story. Through the evil that sprouts—a snatching plant—one night from alcohol, from the motives of a handful of boys. She’s taken from you. You’ve been vandalized by a rummaging god. She’s become a compacted star in your cosmos, the rings through which you become, like Saturn, denser than before—heavy with shame and longing—but furious enough in your suspension to fly. She becomes your North Star. Your rings grow from her bright point in a yawning darkness, a spot of diamond at the bottom of a glacier-formed lake. The star’s beautiful; very cold, very distant. The star becomes your guide, the emblem of your destiny, a pinpoint of pain aching through your years.

With every death we’re given the opportunity to expand or contract. You expanded by compacting yourself. You committed crimes. You fed your hunger. You turned against society. You became a sword-swallower willing to cleave yourself to yourself, a thief. You mistrusted the world enough to hone your secrets into a fantastic fuel. And Teres, the lost sister, became all women. Became the buried part of your spirit. The chip of wholeness cast into eternity. And then Mary became Teres, until she spun away to glow at a distance.

The point is those of us who lose a reflection of ourselves in childhood have two lives. We know ourselves against life and against death. As a tree knows itself against a space of sky and against a density of earth. As simple and complex as the family portrait cracked by a ghost in its midst. The one gone, the one still there. It’s as simple and complex as letting the ghost follow you out of pity because it’s acquired the strength and brilliance and illusory control of a world you can only fear and imagine. You become the bottle for its genie.

Participating somehow in the darkness that scored against us, we owe something to evil in being reborn as we are: stranger, darker, with a craving for bright lights and blood. The mania, some mania, of death. Isn’t greed at life a kind of death?

4.

ACCORDING TO ONE HYPOTHESIS SATURN’S RINGS ARE CONTINUOUSLY CREATED TO BALANCE THE STEADY LOSS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RINGS’ YOUTH. THE RINGS’ YOUTH CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO A COLLISION OF A COMET THAT CAME TOO CLOSE TO THE PLANET AND WAS TORN APART BY TIDAL FORCES. THE RINGS COMPRISE THE REMAINS OF THIS COMET AND ARE RECREATED WHENEVER A SMALL MOON IS DESTROYED IN A COLLISION WITH A COMET OR AN ASTEROID. THE RINGS MAY, IN FACT, BE VERY SHORTLIVED, SO THEY MUST BE CONTINUALLY REPLACED TO BE VISIBLE.

5.

“A wonderful liar you are indeed!” Athena laughs magnanimously at Ulysses as he turns over his drum sticks and Jack Stein leading man base with a recitation of Richard II he copped from Laurence Olivier. Enter Mary. Constant and wry. Inviolate. Either she doesn’t fathom the pathological splendor of your eruptions, or she admires your total commitment to them and saves you—as Athena spares Ulysses, with her scrubbed armor and golf swing. She subverted, or might have subverted, the tragedy of your killing Teres—who’ll always supersede you in her dying—because Mary survived. Survived what killed Teres and survived your awful need for her. Her adjustment was not your adjustment. You loved her more than any other because you couldn’t kill her and you didn’t need to protect her. She was allowed, somehow, to protect herself. From the hunger and violence of boys. From you. Teres became Mary. And a sister, lost and eternally good because unchanging, unageing must occupy a distant sphere to exert grace. Up close she may demand too much. She may come to resemble more and more a product of particular tastes, contingencies, career, country, this world. Too real then. She won’t allow you to feed off her, to fill the hole of death. For a time you protect Mary—the whole living-dead one, absent but living—and you handle, give your appetite to other women. Girls who become mistresses through whom you become a man, not the boy that death fueled. You protect your sister against your love for her, the dead one. Mary and Teres possess virtue. For you, Puritan-friend, virtue and pleasure don’t mesh. There are mistresses and Mary. You’re split in your devotion and whole only in your rendering of yourself, of secrets kept secret, on stage, on screen. You protect the slain. You offer yourself to destiny. You sin bravely: you sin. A survivor sins.

I remind you of a girl you left behind in the panic of New York summer turning to fall. Tying you up. Arching her back. She threatened to swell before your eyes. You remind me of something I must swallow —have swallowed—for my own sterility. A medicinal plant that will have the wrenching side effects of poison and leave me immune to further collisions of this sort.

6.

There’s money, art. Good girls and mistresses. Dead sisters and living whores. (The Lenas, Ninas, Lulus, Lolas. The four-letter girls.) The dead shed perpetual light and the living envelope you with the naked darkness of this world. Where nothing’s pure and nothing’s stable. Now I’m a simpleton basting the air with polarities: a piano whose music issues from the disassociation of its black from its white keys.

7.

What’s the time of death? How does it intersect with place?

8.

What are the obstacles in this scene, the scene of a young woman writing in her room alone in a retirement resort? The smell of barbecue rising through the open window, caress of wind, a desire to lie on the floor and feed kisses with kisses on some mouth, even a woman’s, even her own. The sensation makes her dizzy and enormous. Enormously earth-bound and stupid. Smarter than words. The body defies all ideas and projections of ideas. The body wants only to move, to rest and to touch. It offers ecstasy and expression. The mind dangles spiders, spins cobwebs, and explanations that mummify the rest. Split? I’m split too. All this can be overcome. Is overcome when I grasp the pen and make these marks on the paper. Not cobwebs, butterflies. Star-chips. Word-kisses. Perhaps a sentence or two will explode in someone else’s mind and we’ll be bound for another eternity. Some stranger who’ll judge it harshly. Some stranger who’s become you. Or the you I know who judges it more harshly still.

9.

We’re implicated in each others’ crimes: the source of our goodness and evil.

10.

Backstage on two rocking chairs. I’m in a black velvet husk and Madame X wig. You’re in a tux. We’re shifting furniture in a blue light. Waiting for our cue. We hold hands and you say: “Let’s pretend we’re an old couple. On our porch.” The dialogue from on-stage swarms the womb of our pretending. Before we’ve had a chance to give birth to it. We’re cued to shift by the stage manager’s voice. We fall in line, you hoisting an armchair, me balancing a champagne glass on a scalloped table past the leading man who sits an ogre in his crimson cape, dying to itch the glue at the sideburn of his fake beard.

Of actors and criminals I ask the same question. Both refuse a set place. A legitimate space. They ribbon graffiti on the walls of worlds solid hands and straight minds have constructed. They wear masks. What distinguishes the outlaw, the actor? His long-term cowardice or his continuously summoned, quickly spurted courage? His cowering framed by artificial lights? Is it so hard to hold a gun of emotion or language or steel to a stranger’s head?

11.

I wish, looking at myself in one of the many mirrors of this room, you’d come here and fuck me. I want you to see me as I do, fuck me as this and we could fuck in the mirror claiming our images for ourselves. We could, in doing that, make the rest go away. Isn’t that what we did? Explode it with blue flames and fury? A common death? Let us feed ourselves in the scarcity of here and now. Not protect the dead. Forget them. How permanently—in our fucking—dislodged we are.

I promise not to cry. I’ll leave the little girl in her photograph with Santa, her eyes darting off his lap toward a toy-mouse of her own forsaken power, as you’ve left your little boy in Canada with his boats. They can sit on a dock in New Brunswick or Boston together, their feet dangling into the Atlantic. He can teach her to spit or to fish. She’ll look at him and know him and give him a bouquet of wildflowers she collects from a walk in the woods. She’ll dive into the ocean and swim like a mermaid gurgling, slashing tail, and laugh. The laugh will carouse him for an eternity. They’ll bear the burden of each other’s souls because their souls are boomerangs of lightness.

While you and I fuck. Adult-artists. Wage-earners. Deserters of family. Creatures of death and desire in our salty Dead Sea with vices writhing like eels from virtue slain. Slain by a green tongue that curled like the wicked witch’s punk black lips. The authentic dead are by definition good. They don’t contend with evil in this world. We’re vanity-spoiled. Sad-sucked. Strong and doomed. Here in this room in Florida where you’ll never come. To here I got away from fudgy remains. You cling to the spoils of Houston, domiciled in your wily victory. I’m locked in this juggernaut of my undoing: a universe I pass through confessing. The neutrality of this place allows it, allows a purple vine to rise against the placid silver of the waves tantalized to gleaming by the ignoring sun. You stay behind to move ahead. To capitalize. You avoid the heart-stopping haunts. I smash them with my spiral vision. The tornado in which I travel. My sense. My nonsense. My sword. The musical repeats itself in this tinkering town: I’m a whore for love; I’m a whore for money. My part’s so bit on stage I balloon in mirage on this paper.

This writing’s dangerous: it makes me want something that can’t be. I was banished by our malady from the first moment of our tango. And before that, by my own. I’ve joined the far-flung saints and reach for the vanishing point. I melt the compacted star of you into this river of desire that swells my pelvis and will, when I finish filling up this supermarket pad of paper with phrases, spill through my eyes. This writing’s dangerous: it makes me want you again. I promise only to kiss and fuck and say the survivor’s lie: forever, forever. This writing’s dangerous, it impels me to pick up the phone, break the rules and say: I want to fuck you at this distance. With my voice and my imagination. Not as the mistress. As your sister. Your double. I’ll swim the Gulf and be there by tomorrow night. It will all take place outside of time. Like Texas. Like Teres. Like anything foreclosed before it grew wings. Like all beauty, all theatre. Like the house we shared rooted in the denial of season: in buzzing cicadas and sultry moon and violet hurricanes where you twisted me for the movie of my face. It will take place in the parenthesis of desire, the ghost of a fire. I’ve unplugged the phone. I’ll drown if I swim. I’ve vowed self-rescue. First I finish writing, then you’re licking my nipples and I can have you whenever I want. My best defense. My furious weapon of the moment, the only way to beat back the ghost. Seduce it. This seeing, this writing, this knowing: the words tumble from my buried desire like hot socks in a dryer spinning. Atomic, unwearable yet plucked from the armchair of a perverse domesticity. Harrowing. All taming’s harrowing. And my beauty and my pride. A surrealist splicing objects of many landscapes onto one, pasting myths onto prairies, fusing dreams with ordinary scenes. I want to fuck you but I must write. I protect you, my dead one, by writing. I fuck you this way.

12.

Can one form a work of art without attention to form, without a basis in it? Might form be an accident—a function of disorder—and is it merely then a grotesquerie and not a preference, the truth? Won’t a blind person create a map of a territory encountering that territory without seeing eyes? Without dog or cane, prop or guide? The real trick’s rendering the invisible visible, devising a language, compacting bits into a furnace of glass and erosion: the psyche of our planet into the rings of Saturn and letting it spin. Isn’t the real trick to disappear while remaining visible?

Doesn’t this account for our youth and collisions? We must tend our rings like vain kings.

13.

No, you might say, the real trick’s to know where you’re going. The real trick isn’t to know but to get there. To an unknown place. To get there, I construct a map out of memory: words. I allege, I recount.

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Endnote:

#4: Paraphrase from News and Views article, “Ever Decreasing Circles” by Larry Esposito, p. 107, NATURE, Vol 354, 14 Nov, 1991.

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Originally published in its entirety by Cervena Barva Press, Somerville, MA, 2008