Baby Geisha

by Trinie Dalton

  The diva and the slut move seamlessly through the night, at events of great importance, while their bees toil in wax, and the boy slave only occasionally gets paid because his employers always forget to cut him a check. They are forgetful because they are often flying on jets between countries, and who wants to write checks while seated on a private plane? Oops, they tell him, we left our checkbooks at home, and Defithedra can’t pay his rent but he’s so dedicated to the bees that he can’t abandon them, for if he quits the bees will be orphaned, no one will recommend different pollens, no one will suggest they eat sage now, clover later. Rhododendron this afternoon? he asks his bees. Buckwheat bud? Thistle hair?

  The bees need guidance. Bees need structure. They build honeycombs. Who would tell them what kind of honey to make if Defithedra left them? He works for a pittance, and the celebrity beekeepers take all the credit for the petite jars of honey they pass out at dinners, galas, and benefit brunches.

  I was going to write a story about the three-tiered employee pyramid in which ladies hoard acknowledgments that should really go towards the miraculously generous boy slave and his bee carnival. When I give honey as a gift, I don’t take credit for making that honey. If I had a bee colony of my own, I would individually name my bees and label that honey according to which bee shat it out as waste product, wishing I could make honey in my ass, dreaming of the day I could squeeze into a hexagon to produce something so sugary that people pay twenty dollars for a dab of it. Bees are the real celebrities on this planet.

  But to turn this into a real story with real characters, would be to macerate the metaphor. The allegory is already obvious, right? People taking credit and calling themselves celebrities and failing to spread the wealth. I decided not to write that story, because Dorothy Allison said not to write in anger, that a text is better with distance between anger and the self. Let anxiety’s allegory emerge in hindsight, let the metaphor sink in, glorious metaphor! I can write that angry story about the privileged class treading on the less fortunate in one word now—Bees. The word bees encapsulates it.

  Every time I see a bee hovering over the jade plant in my yard from now on the metaphor will click and I will think of Babylon and my hatred of capitalism. And I hope it doesn’t enrage me, I hope it doesn’t, because I might take it out, accidentally, on innocent bees. I might see The Celebrity Beekeepers, instead, when I look at those black and yellow buzzbots.

  See? It’s already happening, I can’t look at bees anymore. Whatever, it’s for the best because I’m allergic to bees. I was trying to find a way to hate bees anyway. It was torture loving something that could kill me. Not like loving something that can kill me is a new concept, but bees, before this very moment, this turning point, embodied my self-destructive force. I haven’t had the wherewithal to dual with my self-destructive force in any complete way, but that’s another story. The sad story, right here right now, is that I suddenly detest bees, they remind me of the snooty women who will try to steal their honey, The Celebrity Beekeepers, those proprietary madames who claim ownership of bees underhandedly, who humiliate bees into submission. Don’t even get me started on this, I hate bees so much now. I despise bees because of their symbolic affiliation with potential enslavement. Though, I have that potential too, that potential to be enslaved. Does that mean I have to hate myself as well?

  BRONX SQUIRRELS

  The black squirrels are fighting the gray squirrels in the park today, pouncing each other like royal alligators in the Roman dungeon. Red and yellow leaves trickle down like victory wreaths onto the squirrels’ heads in this neighborhood where gay men dare not roam, where my lover almost got his ass kicked for wanting to wear a dress, where a tranny only blocks away got a baseball bat shoved up his ass. Maybe the black squirrels own the park just like their thuggish brothers own the block? I am not referring to those humans willing to see through color and gender, but the thugs. That’s fine with me; the thugs can have this place. Black squirrels deserve territory just as much as those who connote classic squirrel. If Squirrel was a crayon color, the thug squirrels ask, do you think it would be black? No. It would be the embarrassing Classic Gray Squirrel hue. These problems still exist. But I’m not here to teach squirrels about crayons. They draw brilliantly in dirt with their dainty hands. I understand the phrase going nuts better today than ever: it’s about fall, squirrel war season, it’s about race wars and queer wars, frantically burying nuts under trees, those leafy allies.

  Squirrels, I am here today to tell you that I do not wish to fight anymore. My dog stares at me with one eye. The other was poked out on a branch while hiking. The animals surrounding me are frazzled and haggard. I have recruited my dog to perform one last guard job in this neighborhood where crack and junk rule. My neighbor, whose apartment door is two feet from mine, deals to the local toothless citizens. His two pit bulls fight, so he keeps them in separate rooms. I often hear them tearing each other apart. Squirrels, how do you expect to survive winter when you’re excluding each other according to fur color? Shouldn’t you be banding together to form a furry rainbow flag? I know, I know, the world is not ideal. Every squirrel for him or herself, cruel nature… This morning, I surrender.

  I’m not telling you, squirrels, to give up fighting and sacrifice your stash for the good of your species, to starve to death so that the other colored squirrels can take over, to find hippie peace pre-winter instead of a nut. I don’t want to see one more emaciated creature around here. Black squirrels, I love you. I’m fighting off despair too, while you wage warfare to secure nourishment. To be queer in this neighborhood is a beat-down. The destitution here is terrible. I wish a helicopter of money would hover over my building and rain cash so the tenants would stop feuding on their cell phones about unpaid bills. All that has rained down upon my dog and I so far is chicken bones, after one day someone munched greasy meat on the sixth floor.

  It’s difficult for me not to pity this one bony woman who solicits my neighbor. She has a deformed hand that she hides under a too-long trenchcoat sleeve, and loves my one-eyed dog for his related lack. At least he is not a junky, I want to tell her, but she stares at me vacantly, smiling with her front teeth gone, saving her remaining eye contact energy for the dog. Hello hello, she coos to my dog in our elevator going down, stroking his red fur, aren’t you a sweet thing. She exists on an animal wavelength, and in that, her and I are alike.

  ESCALATOR INTO THE GANGES

  The trail to the escalator is lined with pigeon entrails, from diseased city birds that were gutted by Bengali tigers. The tiger population has increased, I read in a guidebook, due to their eating of rock doves. These ferocious cats have extended their range north of the Ganges Delta where previously they had faced extinction. I am not afraid of cats or avian innards, and I march right over these intestines that look like curly fries cross-bred with raw shrimp. Slippery! I am not the kind of person who flies over revolting stuff; I get right down in the shit and wade through it like a devotee.

  Don’t go, don’t go, shout the street people loitering at the locked gate leading down to a broken escalator that dead-ends in the rushing mother river. (This river motif won’t leave me alone, I’m telling you, once you get the bite the infection spreads.) The mother river, the mighty Ganges, where the ashes of the dead are scattered to reincarnate, what happens if you ride an escalator into its churning maw while still alive? Will I become that phantasmic freshwater pearl? A thyme bush, a bower bird, a toothache, a Christmas light bulb, or a garden gnome? Paneer or a metal bucket those women adjacent to the chapati vendor are scrubbing their laundry in on the other shore? What will become of me? The escalator descends into something as treacherous-looking as the foam below Hoover Dam. I hope I never have to see Hoover Dam, that cement monstrosity. What kind of idiot sees the Colorado River and thinks they’d like to build a concrete condom to contain it, to squelch its orgasmic rush? I’d like to punch that guy. Anyway, I channel the Bengali tigers, feeling refreshed and encouraged and ready t
o sacrifice myself after predatory cats have sniffed the same river’s shore grass. Each of their whiskers is pencil-sized and each paw is the size of my front door at home, back in the USSR, a frigid place I’m done with.

  I bought the travel guide and a one-way ticket, had enough with wearing leg warmers as hats and weaving old t-shirts into shirts that look country-maiden festive, like I went berserk in a strawberry patch. I’d found myself sucking lemons too frequently and mooning neighbors for cheap thrills, and I knew it was time to hurtle myself into the mother to toss a coin in the nature church’s collections plate. The wisteria vine, the clown balloon, the white candle back home, it all smacked of ritual in a really faux way. It all smacked of going down on a woman I met stoned in a club when the real woman is a sumptuous river. The Ganges, suddenly, was the woman I really wanted to go down on. To think she has enormous fish doing flips in her whitewater makes me twinkle. I’m so there, what am I waiting for, lamely jogging the same Soviet block daily, running around like a beheaded chicken, there are more important things to be doing like worshipping a water goddess whose currents pump with a velocity a thousand times mine. I did the math and packed my bags.

  Ma, the first word, I sip hot tea and take a whiff of that inescapable incense burning everywhere I look. Over there, a man pulls a business suit over his swami gear like the American superhero Clark Kent. Over here, ten dogs form a hump line, each mounting the last in a canine sex chain-gang. A lotus-shaped paper lantern drifts towards the rapids until a green kingfisher swoops down and flies it back to his mangrove branch. Holy moly, is that a pygmy hippo on the other beach? That was at the top of my list of things to see before I die. The escalator is broken so it’s more like stairs whose crevices are slimed with algae. Algae is the same as me. I’m a drop of water on a mega wet trip, and in three minutes I’ll be part mammoth aquifer.

  Before I left Minsk, I took a field trip with two girlfriends to a waterslide park where we took saunas between vodka shots at the pool bar. Obese, hairy men in speedos lounged in the artificial sun under silk palm trees belying the cruel winter outside. Minus twenty it was, as we ice-skated home in our van, past the onion dome and back past the half-timber house that is now a wolf sanctuary. My beaver fur coat insulated me, preserving what body heat I’d derived from steaming and swimming in sizzling pools all day. I remember feeling like a seal and wondering—see? I’m telling you it’s a water obsession—how it would feel to surf glacial floes in a cold ocean. Will frozen saltwater paralyze you? Then, my sister called and confessed her fear of fountains, not drinking fountains but the kind synchronized swimmers undulate through in Busby Berkeley films. We’re both Pisces. I warned her against watching Kenneth Anger’s L’Eau D’Artifice, that salacious film du nuit, because it’s a fifteen-minute classical cum shot starring fountains in a French jardin. I hung up. I put the film on, located my oyster, and reconnoitered the lower half of my body with the day’s watery glory in mind. It was then that I grasped my true need to return to primordial sludge. Mudpuppies scare me stiff but only because I know in the seat of my soul that I’ll be pulling a reverse maneuver, losing my legs, right about now.

  SCARLET GILIA

  The cinderally was one enormous coke-can cock fest, men tearing the sides of the volcano up in their off-road vehicles, skimming the scabby, red-black scree for a trophy and a fuck in a truck bed after the race. It is an antique activity, the cinderally; I met a man nostalgic for it as we gazed at the majestic volcano across the valley from our scenic view pullout in Arizona. It was real, defacing the volcano that the Hopi consider the center of their universe. How amazing—that disparity—two variant lifestyles on the side of that pointy black hill over there that looks like a shadow, a silhouette.

  In the past, if a fellow like that would have told me about how he longed for the re-legalization of cinderallies, I would have launched a rocket at his crotch or at least cursed him privately when I got home, made a little voodoo doll and poked its testicles on his behalf. But this time, I took a wider view, the volcano was framed in a panoramic vista and I wanted to be strong like the volcano more than lowly like him, so I borrowed its panorama during that moment of opinion. Cut my judgment and opted for removed annotation: a piecing together of a complex societal puzzle, a man and his loser redneck friends destroying multiple rare crops of my favorite endemic wildflower, the scarlet gilia, plus the Hopi fighting for protection of the site where the first katchina was born. Here I am in the middle, mining the collision in the 21st century. It makes me weepy often enough; it used to make me so sorry for the Hopi that I felt like stabbing my eyeballs out because I am white, part of the colonial race who fucked them over, a member of the race they most despise. But pity is derogatory. I am in my car parked next to this trailer trash, not privy to friendship with a member of the Hopi hummingbird clan. I should be sacrificing myself to that volcano, throwing myself into its cone—that is how I felt ten years ago.

  But this time the volcano’s endurance bolsters me. It is still kicking ass before and after humanity, and that is what brings a tear to my eye this time. The volcano weathered cinderallies, and nevertheless I had just been on its trail, now part of a national park, and had photographed a magnificent crop of scarlet gilia, the brightest crop I’ve ever seen, a wondrous fuschia flower that I had discovered on my way to a powwow as a teenager. That flower blooms only in black lava flow, that flower that grows out of destruction is God, hands down. That is God for me. That wildflower.

  We are not in an age where we can afford to tiptoe around, making conceptual art and literature that’s exclusively for white intellectuals because political art is out of style; it has never been out of style and if you thought it was, effete critics, well it’s back in style starting now! I don’t know where these elitists have been hanging out but on the side of this volcano communities ruminate and that is politically demanding of identity art and literature. Both the Cowboys who used to destroy volcanoes on their motorcycles and their Indian enemies are unemployed and missing what they used to have; there is a lot of loss going on. I will take a position, stake it out, and make art about what I love. Why am I writing and What change do I wish to enact? What is art and What is love? Don’t be shy about it, I tell myself, be direct, act with intention, be a volcanic eruption, a fury. I don’t want to make characters, I want to speak directly to you.

  Some critics claim that first person autobiographical voice is not fiction or that it is fiction’s weakest form, but I say that is a tired battle, I say I can use whatever point of view I feel like and call it fiction. Am I emphatic about this because I am a woman? Who cares, everyone I care about is part man part woman, everyone I care about is part queer, everyone I admire cares about love first and foremost, nobody but me knows if the volcano story is true or false and you know what? Who cares? What I care about is the message I am sending out to my people. That this story’s residual symbols square with what I believe. I am tired of people telling me that I need fictional characters in my fiction and that to speak directly to you, reader, from my first person female point of view is inferior. Who are you to tell me I am not inventing the best fictional character right now as I speak? You don’t know me or own my voice. I tell people off, then apologize. I take license to change the approach. That is a fiction, no it’s not, yes it is, who are you to say?

  I live for Arizona crash-pad days like that, when stuff explodes and I can watch it crumble. It’s not fun or pretty but it’s real, that cinderally rider was real, he was a nice man, and the Hopi bean dance is real too, I just missed it, the Hopi are still out there, ruling the desert. I love my country, I am a patriot who spends half her life on cross-country road trips, I have crushes on everyone on a daily basis, the men and women who extrude conflict, a little more comprehension everyday, some minute intelligence, it’s what I live for. I am so far from being anti-intellectual it’s not even funny. This is totally fiction and it’s real too. Fake fiction is fiction that’s forgotten fiction and poetry are si
blings.

  I had another experience on a volcano, Picaya in Guatemala. I hiked it at twilight led by a short, dark-skinned man who went barefoot. He didn’t give me a flashlight until I was sliding down igneous rock in the dark; I couldn’t make out ground from sky, it was so black. But from the top, as six of us watched the sun go down, the sky went William Blake and I bawled then, too, for the terrifying beauty of disorientation. I didn’t know how we’d get down the hill as night fell, the ground around us was puffing and smoking; I anticipated asphyxiating on sulfuric air. Veins of flowing lava around my feet. That volcano was the fixed winner in a boxing match, my flashlight was pathetic shining into lava rivers, their light so powerful, I would have tossed my flashlight in to watch its metal melt. If I made it down, I cried, it will only be because the volcano granted me permission; volcanoes are essentially control freaks. Picaya was why I was able to laugh along with the man’s cinderally memory: I could relate. In one way, yes, one could tear it up all over a volcanic peak and the volcano will obviously reign supreme. Yes, I can see where he got that idea, I chortled as we worshipped the volcano, commemorated our experiences on it, mine with the flowers and his with motorcycles. Then I felt nauseous, for nothing is indestructible, even hardcore forces need a buttress, some talismanic appreciation. The barefoot man on Picaya had it right, walking barefoot on those pebbles, cutting his feet up. He was so bloody by the end of the walk, once he felt the soft rainforest’s floor that night, he was hurting. Years later, I realized that was sacrifice, his pain was Picaya love. My memory of these experiences hurts, my love for writing hurts, I want to share everything with you so much. If it doesn’t hurt, I’m lost.