M83

The alien did not come in peace, but he did not come in war.

Not alien, really. More hybrid beast, bearing the physique of the creature in Where the Wild Things Are, extending an elephant trunk with a pig snout, and gazing out of eyes like roses made of Jell-O, fanned by the plumage of moth wing eyelashes.

He came to us, an audience of fans, children of all ages, who were not civil, but not violent; doting, yet demanding. The introductory music climbed into rapture as he reached the edge of the stage. He raised his arms and we raised ours, like poles, carrying power lines, alternating currents. Thus, considering his ambassadorship duties finished, he exited, and the band entered.

The band M83, named after Messier 83, a barred spiral galaxy, named for the spiral structures that extend from the center into the disk. The spiral arms are sites of ongoing star formation and are brighter than the surrounding disk because of the young, hot OB stars that inhabit them.

Not everyone can be a young, hot star. Not even in America. But that night, we, the stars, stellar remnants, gas, dust, dark matter… formed a system, bound and clustered. Next to me, a teenager, high on marijuana and hormones, flailed his limbs like a child’s push puppet toy, sweat glimmering all over his skin like dew. I watched him and listened to the music and wondered how long it could last.

Cover

The TV screen was thick with vultures – “news anchors,” “experts,” “friends” – circling her corpse, clawing for their carrion carryout. There will be no viewing at her funeral, I thought, there will be nothing left to see.

A co-worker sat in front of me, back to the TV. She was a fat anime character, eyes squinting smug stupid, magnified by glasses, and her sausage link fingers bloated white as she gripped a foot long sub and sunk her itching teeth into it. And so began her monologue, despite the sandwich’s preemptive strike.

“I’m not surprised,” she jabbed a thumb at the screen. “You saw the interviews, right? She kept saying she wasn’t doing drugs and then she’d get all crazy excited talking about how they used to roll up joints?” She grinned mayonnaise. “Come on. You’re not kidding anybody.”

“Yes,” I started. Like a bad actor, she paused with her eyes blank and mouth open, already ready for her next line, already ready to interrupt if I took too long. ”But in the last few years she had made some changes and was -”

“Oh I’ve got nothing against her. She was really talented – “

“Addiction is really hard,” I started again, “It’s a lifelong struggle, and you have to celebrate any amount of recovery – “

But I was just a gunshot, and she was off and running again. The voice blabbered and the lips smacked and the teeth chomped and I smiled and nodded and looked across the room. There he was – the ’80s Robert Smith hair, the beautiful Egyptian nose, the jeans that held things I wanted to hold – I was mad about the boy, some boy, any boy, oh boy oh boy -

“She was always using. She never stopped using. She was only fooling herself…” Then she swallowed, and I snapped.

“One of my best friends is a recovering addict.”

Through two scopes I had a view to a kill. The target squirmed. ”Yeah, yeah. I don’t mean, you know, that’s – yeah,” she nodded, stuffing her mouth with the rest of the sandwich, eyes darting at her cell phone. “Oh,” she said, “sorry, I’ve got to go to the bathroom before the end of break,” and her white ass wobbled away.

That night, at the gym, I was on the treadmill, keeping my pace, walking in place, not watching the flesh sculptures flexing, watching the TV. It was all about her. The talking heads talked and the bobble heads bobbled in agreement. The interview played and replayed. “Is it alcohol, is it marijuana, is it cocaine, is it pills?”…”It has been at times.”…”All?”…”At times.”…”If you had to name the devil for you, the biggest devil among them?”… “That would be me.”…”So, for the people out there who say, ‘we want to help,’ what do you want them to pray for?”… “Don’t pray about the drugs.”…”Why?”…”Pray for me. For my soul. That I’m stronger. No, man, I don’t care what anybody says or did or what they claimed I was. I know I’m a child of God. And I know he loves me.”

with without

Only two weeks of doing without and he was doing fine.

Well. His mind was moving in a strange pattern. Not so much plaid as paisley. Curlicued, flowered, dizzied. All of the hallways led to the same room, a room with a pillar and its glistening tip at the center, like that episode of The Avengers. Maybe it was the fumes from the shower cleaner.

Well, and his hormones were holding him hostage. But you can’t meet their demands. If you do, they’ll increase their demands. You die fighting or you die running. Also there were some tingles. Some aching. Some tension. When someone touched him. When he moved the right way. When he woke up in the morning. When he was cleaning the shower naked.

That was to expected though, with all the rubbing and bucking and sweating. The yellowish stains on the shower were shaped like streams, rivers, ponds – who was he to try and clean up nature? Better to paint stain over stain over stain until any nostalgia for the white canvas was safely moot. No. That was not higher logic.

And what a dirty window. It looked like ghosts having an eraser fight. The instructions on the container didn’t say anything about not using it on windows, but that could be because he didn’t read the instructions on the container. The window was clear on top and blurry on bottom, which made sense; as much as a window in a shower can make sense. Somehow the cleaner made the clear part clearer and the blurry part blurrier.

Two weeks or not, he was not doing fine with doing without.

But when he finished, he could see the rooftop of his neighbor’s house. There was a flaky frost all over it, but it didn’t seem to have just appeared, like it normally does; it seemed to have fallen from the sky.

The Civil Wars

We are waiting for the music.

Before it was even written we were waiting, without knowing, like deer frozen in the woods, ears twitching.

The music, bewitched and betrothed and bitter. The music, a snake slithering around a cross, sickness and healing. The music, a Flannery O’Connor story as told by Over The Rhine. The music, divinely inspired, divinely possessed.

We are waiting for the music and the waiting, the waiting is like Russian dolls wrapped separately that we rip and open and open and rip.

In a moment, in the shapely and shifting sea of darkness, a stagehand appears, his flashlight a mobile lighthouse, leading two figures toward the front of the stage. The closer they come, the louder we scream and clap, playing a crazy game of hot and cold - yes, hot, hotter, we’re on fire, we’re melting -

The lighthouse is switched off and daylight floods the stage, exposing them, self-conscious and smiling, somehow larger and smaller and closer than I expected: individually, they are Joy Williams, a nymfairy with butterfly hands, and John Paul White, an early 1800s philosopher in need of a drink. Collectively, they are The Civil Wars, dressed in their Sunday best and blackest, with the gothic whimsy of a Tim Burton film and the passionate reverence of a Southern Baptist Funeral. Through the raucous waves of our adoration, they keep their balance, keep their smiles.

And the music begins.

Ran

“Hi Ben, this is Terry from American Family Insurance. There’s been a legal action filed for that accident in ’08. Do you remember that?”

Oh, Terry, I remember. I remember the ’01 Chevrolet Cavalier in yellow.

When it was mine, many people tried to name it – the banana, mellow yellow, sunflower – but I never tried; I knew it was too cool for a name, even a nickname. I coated my acne-afflicted skin in makeup, indulged in $50 haircuts, hid in vintage outfits, got lost in craigslist, climbed in that car and saw through the windshield.

Then a man ran a red light in his blue car, I ran a green light in my yellow car, the colors ran together. We got out. It was not a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but this neighborhood didn’t have beautiful days. We stood around waiting for the policeman, locked in the walk-in freezer of a Wisconsin winter; me shuddering in a thin sweater which I had decided that morning was too incredible to be concealed by a coat, him making conversation instead of making amends. When the policeman arrived an hour later, he asked questions, we answered them. There was only one Witness, and He was respectfully silent.

The insurance company determined that the car was a Total Loss, which I could have told them before the accident. It always needed repairs, maintenance, attention.

“…Do you remember that?”

Oh, Terry, I remember. The car’s grill hangs on my wall, the only piece intact, set apart from the wreckage. Blazing eagle beak yellow, with the Chevrolet cross in the middle.

The Night Before

Only the threat of nakedness persuaded Vera to do laundry. Hugging a mound of clothes, she lifted, lowered them in the washer, closed the lid…and they floated around and around. For a moment she considered climbing in with them, but that seemed redundant, or parallelistic, since she already felt like she was swimming inside of herself. Her scientific hypothesis: it was the wine. Best to repeat the experiment to prove the hypothesis. She walked away from the washer and dryer – which had started rattling spare change like Lucy at her psychiatric booth – and into the kitchen, to fill her glass.

The freezer was still there. She opened it, just a little bit, and the carton of chocolate hazelnut ice cream saw her. She laughed once, at it, at herself, at herself for laughing at it. There was no longer a reason to crave it, no longer a reason to cave in to the craving. Gripping the carton, she held it over the trash until her hands were numb. She thought about it. She thought about not thinking about it. She thought, it takes more effort to think about not thinking about it than to just think about it. So she started thinking about it.

Well, not about it. But about the night before.

It began with her having a staring contest with her wardrobe. They both won – the closet didn’t blink and she found something to wear: a pair of tailored trousers, a collared blouse. It was sort of Marlene Dietrich. Maybe it was just lesbian. But pretty lesbian. Vera didn’t like ugly lesbians. She never admitted to herself that she didn’t like them, she just avoided them, like spilled tomato juice in a grocery aisle. Not that she knew lesbians by sight. Just the ugly ones. Anyway, the pants fit, and that was important.

A large painted sign on the theater read “Carneville.” Now this was not a new word; Shakespeare made new words. This was a hybrid word, a half and half word. Of course it was supposed to be a fusion of carnival and vaudeville, but Vera thought it sounded more like a very festive town of carnivores.

After reading that sign, the bar sign seemed earnestly simple. Vera smiled at her waving friends, Ron and Louise, and ordered a glass of white wine, a gin and tonic and a screwdriver. Carrying all three drinks over to them, she said, “you two fight over the cocktails; the wine is for me.” They were married, Ron and Louise, but that was incidental; she had known them both individually before that. Their tastes were different but complementary; their mutual interest in this show convinced her to accept their invitation.

Most of the show was rather tedious, the juggler accidentally catching the balls and purposely dropping them, the fat singer punching the stuffing out of every consonant, a strong man who could bend a license plate but couldn’t do a proper victory pose.

But Vera was not prepared for the masochist.

The title “masochist” irritated her. Yes, it presumed credibility, as though he had earned a degree and did his clinicals and now he was an -ist of some kind. An -ist with tattoos stitched all over his skin, and a vest stained with thread, and black grease clinging to his teeth. What was that for? She didn’t know. He rubbed his cheeks with a clear liquid and swished it in his mouth. What was that for? She didn’t know. Long needlenails were held high, one end sparkling with beads, the other gleaming with sharpness. What were those for? She knew.

The first one went in easy. Through one cheek, through another.

The second one was a little harder. Angled from one corner of the mouth to the other. Why was she watching? She couldn’t understand why she was watching. She stopped watching.

The third one was very hard. She could tell from the audience’s reaction. She couldn’t understand why she looked up, but she did.

On the underside of his chin, the needlenail was pushing to poke through, raising a steep teepee of skin.

She looked away again. It felt as though there were millions of miles between her and the floor, and she was afraid of heights. One of her hands attacked the other, squeezing and blanching and cracking.

She looked up again. It was through. People were clapping. The masochist, smile glinting with metal and grease, was leaving the stage. There was a woman waiting in the wings, holding out a baby to him. Taking it from her arms, he held it high, whooped, danced, the poltergeist of a primitive.

Something shifted and clicked in Vera’s mind. Legs lifted her body, fingers curled into fists, neck extended head forward. A mangled growl of words came out of her mouth:

“Put down the baby.”

Louise looked up at her. “Vera – “

“Put down the baby.” People, and the masochist, were staring now. Her voice was crumbling in pieces, and everyone was afraid one would fall on them.

Louise reached out a hand. “Please. Let’s go. I’m sorry.”

“Put down the baby!“

She dropped the ice cream carton in the trash. There was no longer a reason to crave it, no longer a reason to cave in to the craving. She thought about losing the weight. It was pitiful to people who knew what happened. But the weight held her in place.

Why hadn’t the dryer buzzer gone off? She hadn’t set it. She hated being reminded. Sometimes when someone reminded her of something she had forgotten, or even worse, something she hadn’t forgotten yet, she would imagine herself as a criminal in an interrogation room, developing the most contemptuously decadent lie that irrefutably proved her superior intelligence. She was getting damn good at it.

The dryer buzzer went off. She hadn’t forgotten. Opening the dryer door extinguished the invisible fire – sent a little flood of light into the dark hall – and out came the clothes, scorched and limp and pure.

Prime & Paint

A fashion designer would describe it as “mesmerize.” I would describe it as “slate.” A normal person would describe it as “bluish gray.” It is the color of our new church building.

I grab a roller and a tray, position my headphones and pick Steve Reich’s The Four Sections. It is minimal and meditative without being simplistic or repetitive. The mallet percussion become little monks ringing little bells in my ears, calling me to divine serenity.

And I need SERENITY NOW! It’s that damn Dallas Willard. Such a harmless name, isn’t it? Like a southern small town high school math teacher. To me, he’s more dangerous than Michael Jackson. Particularly for referring to a certain Bible version’s translation of a verse as “terribly mistaken.”*

Terribly mistaken?

This statement is like selling bombs to terrorists. It’s like giving Satan the key to the front door, the back door, the cat door. It’s like, wrong? God’s not powerful enough to ensure accurate translation of this verse? What about the rest of His Word?**

I remove my headphones and release all of this to my Pastor, who is painting next to me.

“Yeah, well, you know, the original Hebrew doesn’t say Mary was a virgin,” he informs, “it says she was a young maiden.”

“What has been primed and what has been painted?” I snap, waving at the wall. “I can’t tell the difference.”

“I know they’re close, ” he says, “but get some light on it, you’ll be able to tell.”

—————————————————

*Context of the quote, for those who care: ”…translations of Matt. 5:28 that say, ‘everyone who looks at a woman and desires her,’ or ‘everyone who looks at a woman with desire,’ are terribly mistaken.” And now the context of me, for those who care: Although I look at women, especially when they are talking to me, I do not and desire them or with desire them. I do desire to be them, but only when they are touching some intolerably attractive man.

**The slippery slope argument, or, as I call it, the Slip ‘n Slide argument. It’s all fun and games until someone breaks their neck. Which, sadly, actually happened a couple of times.

Holding Pattern

I can turn wine into weakness faster than Jesus turned water into wine. Which is what I am doing tonight.

A night where we sit on the patio, dabbing our pulse points with vanilla extract. It’s supposed to repel mosquitoes. It makes us smell like cupcakes.

Everyone is husband and wife, or boyfriend and girlfriend. Two candles on a mantel, glowing with the relief that at least they aren’t alone. Everyone except me, the one burning at both ends.

This incites a brief debate in my mind about whether to have a second glass of wine. Against: some nice 89 year old with Alzheimer’s. For: a horny Harvard senior with a high IQ. It is a merciful victory. A third glass is poured in celebration.

“I’m so glad you have one another,” I address a candle set, “But I don’t think God wants that for me.”

I’m beginning to resemble Bobby in Company so I walk away. I scroll through my cell phone book. I collect lint from my navel like cotton candy out of a machine. I select someone. I drill for more lint. I text:

“So mysterious and sufficient is the love of God. And yet, some nights I just want someone to hold me.”

It’s a miracle my phone doesn’t throw up after eating that shit.

The next morning, as I undress to shower, there is a gleam of encrusted blood in my navel. Gingerly I clean with Q-tips, who, in their soft sterility, imply I should have employed them to do this job at the start.

When I turn my phone back on, it groans, remembering what it did last night. Pause. Then it receives a text message:

“If you were my son, I would hold you.”

In Our Midst

We are young but we used to be younger.

Then we were children of the revolution, determined to enjoy ourselves, wringing the beauty out of every moment. Now we are adullts, trying to understand ourselves, wringing our cell phones:

“I’m afraid if I went back to then I wouldn’t take things back like I sometimes say I would. I’m afraid I would do more of them. And that it would be as good as I remember,” She says.

“Now it’s like we’re always before or after and never in the middle of it,” I say.

We hang up. I walk to my car to drive to a safe neighborhood to walk.

Minutes later I am 20 blocks away and several social classes up. Surrounded by huge, staring homes, I light a cigar. The tip grows and burns.

“Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Rosalind Russell shouts in my mind. We’re not starving, we’ve forgotten how to be hungry.

I almost walk into a low hanging branch of a lilac tree. Cupping the blossom, like it will leak through my fingers, I lift it to my face. The smell of cigar and lilac drive into the two-car garage of my nose and crash into something in my mind.

I’m laughing. I’m thinking of Him. I’m texting her: He knows the plans He has for us.

It Had To Be You

a restaurant should not have a stage. isn’t food entertaining enough? but this restaurant does and i am on it. the piano player begins  ”it had to be you,” and speaking of which, You are somewhere in the dimness.

my lips part and my voice lilts with timid desire.

talking – (disrespectful but i will be merciful) – scREEching microphone – (i smile louder to dissuade a duet) - bReAKing diShEs – (my eyes shock closed and my shoulders jerk, soldiers disobeying orders before i can give them) – Waiter takes an order and telephone rings – (i grip the microphone like a bullhorn)

Sabotage is a multitasker. i’m distracted by the noise, enraged at the noisemakers, disgusted with being distracted by and enraged at the noisemakers.

finally we’re outside and walking and You’re telling me, “you have a wonderful voice.” i can’t believe it but then i remember: it is a new song, i’m still learning it, and it is for You.