(continued)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xxii — xxv)

Cool handbills posted in Maria’s neighborhood say: 

Every first Thursday Jesus Drinks Free: free Soul, R n B, Country, and Gospel starting at 8pm at the Jeannie Johnson Pub and Grill, 144 South Street, Jamaica Plain.

Another says:

“Baby Born with Sun Ra Tattoo…”

Bubbling brain cells at the bar, the corner pub without right angles or corners, and she’s back in flesh, back in flesh and you can’t tell her what to do.  No, you can’t tell her what to do.  Well, fuck you!  

I’m not waxing nostalgic for punk, post-punk, new wave, or no wave; I’m seething with abstemiousness, rankled by random name generators and somewhere beyond broadcasting at 7am with breaks every hour on the hour and half.  

There is nothing I desire but a desire that eats the heart down to its left ventricle, and then hatches out a clutch of stink bugs in synchronicity in a swale near a swag at the foot of a spur.  I’m not writing this for nothing.  I’m serious here.  I’m the writer here.

***

Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk.  It has something to do with the wiring in her head.  

I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru.  She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco.  Her alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves.  I should know, I  saw the vacation photos.  Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.  

She can’t stop chewing the leaves.  I make tea out of them.  She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.  

I’m a just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning.  They were spry then.  Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold.  Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood borne illness from said beasties.”  

She says this thing between us will never work.  “Let’s forget this all altogether and just fuck,” she says.

“Wha—”

“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.

“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting — ”

“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”

***

Near the end of the month Maria tells me:

I’m not your cheap factotum.  I’m a sex engineer, and I service you in a highly skilled manner.  Don’t speak to me of trashy whores and floozies.  And furthermore this is not a flophouse.  It’s a proper Limehouse, and only the most discriminating junkies crash and score here.  So readjust.  And reacquaint yourself with me and where you are.  This is not a place that panders to dilettantes.  This is a fine house of the illest repute.  Check yourself.  Leave your privilege at the door, swoon, and adore me, and bask in my agency.  The music will start shortly.  The young boys will be here to wash you at six.  The heroin will arrive in fifteen minutes.  Enjoy your cisgendered stay.  It won’t be long.

She meant I wasn’t long for the place.  She played The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on repeat for the better part of the day.

***

On the penultimate day of the month:

Love.  It can’t help but bloom.

***

(xxvi – xxvii)

On the last day of the month, on the news:

Miners discover a baby 700 feet below ground with a Sun Ra tattoo on its back.  No one inspects it to note its sex — had they checked they would have found that it was the baby who fell to earth.  Truly sexless.  There was a skronk of improvisational horns and syncopated percussion and rapid fire snares.  One miner pictured himself mating with the hydra and producing this child.  The foreman miner imagined this being his and Medusa’s love child.  While yet another thought it his own immaculate conception.  

But the baby was a blatherskite — its senseless volubility, a logorrhea without words, shaking the earth to its core.  There was one full minute of confusion while a horn sounded, and the miners ran pell mell leaving the child to its own devices — which were very specific and well-calibrated devices: Geiger counters and magnetometers dating back to 1973.  

“Space Is The Place” played on a continuous loop for 114 hours, until the fissure that split the earth sent the stereo console and the baby flying off into the murk.

***

Post-mortem:

There is no story — only peonage and pauperism.  But there is a moral here.  

I once dreamt I was eleven and elevated onto the precipice of a tall building.  I was asked to carefully look over the edge at the street, 62 floors below.  Why I was asked to do this and not just thrown over beats me, because whomever was asking touched me ever so gently, just tenderly enough for me to lose my balance when I was looking over the edge.  

Why’d you ask me to look, I thought, as I passed the 48th floor.  What were all the histrionics about?  Just do what you gotta do and push.  But now what I had to do was find a way out of smashing my skull open on the street below.  I quickly angled my body to the right, but that only caused me to tumble head over feet past the 26th floor — oh, jeez, control yourself because you ain’t got that much time or space left, boy.  

This was all so surreal, as if I fell into that Frida Kahlo painting on the same subject — you know the one, you’ve seen it: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale —  except there’s not even the slightest hint of cerulean or cumuli in the sky — above, it’s all a leaden gray mass smeared with charcoal gray corrugations.  

I flap and flap again, and lo, I flutter up a few feet and arrest the fall briefly.  I’m surprised, and then I’m falling again, down by the 5th floor.  Flap flap flap.  Hey, this works.  Flap flap flap flap flap flap flap, and I smash through The Plymouth Assurance and Annuity, LLP., office window on the 9th floor.  Glass, typing paper, an upended typewriter and phone all discombobulated on the floor.  I landed on top of this pile.  The lady that was at the desk is now on her back spread eagle beyond me and the pile of her work.  The boss man peaks his head out of his office and says: “Ms. Haversham, please clean up that mess, and show our guest to the claims forms and pray, tell us the moral to this.” 

“Is there one?”

  Just then cheering is heard from the street below.  It started to snow for the first time this year.

***

(“Hey?!  There are four pieces of the auto-sedition quilt missing!”

“Ay, I’an sorry con ‘escuse me.”

The End.)

What I’m Reading:

Life is not what one lived, but what one
remembers and how one remembers it in
order to recount it.

— Gabriel García Márquez / Living to Tell the Tale