The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  The problem is, now that my body is radiating adrenaline, I probably won’t be able to return to sleep anyway. But it’s the principle of the thing. Another ping sounds at the window. Goddamn you to the seventh level of Dante’s inferno. I don’t care if you’re Ed McMahon in tow with the Virgin Mary here to present me with a karmic credit slip good for release from the wheel of samsara and an eighty-five-million-year vacation in heaven after I die. You can come back when I’m good and ready to rouse myself. No matter how many rocks you throw, no matter how many knocks on my door, I will ignore you.

  I shove my blue rubber earplugs deep into my ears and put one of my pillows over my head.

  But the disturbance grows. I can’t fucking believe it: the sound of a female voice through a bullhorn. My curiosity overwhelms my outrage. I take out my earplugs. The message is decipherable only in spots. But from among the jumble of chuckles, singsong words, and portentous sighs, I can finally make out a recurring phrase:

  “Rockstar, Rockstar, let down your hair.”

  It occurs to me that I may be listening to a cracked variation on Grimms’ fairy tale of Rapunzel. Before I can decide how to respond, a fresh interruption assaults me. It’s my answering machine, which is on a shelf at the foot of my bed: I neglected to turn down the volume before I collapsed in bed last night.

  Damn. It’s my stalker, Patricia. She’s the psychotic who calls, emails, and snailmails me with prolific devotion in order to keep me up to date on the latest developments in the massive conspiracy she’s being victimized by—a conspiracy in which I am at the hub, along with the Queen of England, Bill Gates, baseball star Ken Griffey, the Holy Ghost, and the puppets of Sesame Street.

  “Well, Mr. Sleazeball Scumbucket,” she greets me, “you really kill me. I was at your show last night, of course. I wouldn’t’ve even gone except for that dream I had where you said you’d get the Queen to chop off my little fingers and feed them to my cat if I didn’t go. Why do you hate me so much? Motherfucking piece of garbage. Last night’s show was a new low, even for a shithead drug-dealing asswipe like you. First you stuck all those subliminal curses in your stupid speeches. Gave me a rash on my thighs. If that wasn’t enough, I had to deal with you getting your little friend the Holy Ghost to astral-project his big milky sperm right into my ovaries. Jerkoff dickweed. You hate me so much you’d even risk wrecking your inane little show just so you could torture me. Guess I showed you, Crudfucker. Didn’t know I’m a wiccan voodoo priestess, did you? Used my mojo to grab a hold of that tall chick’s mind and send her up on stage to mess with you. You looked so stupid when she stung my poison into you. I’m glad they had to carry you off stage like a bag of trash. I hope you’re still unconscious. Now get this, you clucksucking jibberjabbering dunderstubber: I am not going to take your big dick in my mouth even if you do melt the Antarctic ice pack and flood my house away. Even if you do use your so-called poetry hexes to storm those meteors down on my head. And just keep in mind that the district attorney is a personal friend of mine.”

  Much as I hate to admit it, I’m entertained by this madwoman’s rap. I keep listening to the end, even as the invader with the bullhorn outside repeats her absurd announcement. And besides, it’s perversely comforting to imagine that I might have had some excuse, however preposterous, for my behavior at last night’s show. I have never before blacked out during a performance, even in those three gigs, during my brief period of youthful folly, when I poured a blend of cocaine, Mad Dog wine, and pot into the holy temple of my body.

  And yet, from the pissed-off though bemused reports of my fellow band members at 2:30 A.M., Rapunzel’s magic gob of spit—or was it a knock on my head?—had plunged me into a daze so profound that I had to be hauled off stage and laid on a couch in the rear dressing room. For the first time in recorded history, World Entertainment War played for an hour and a half without me.

  Even worse. My bandmates assured me that the fantastic love-making my darling and I enjoyed had in fact happened entirely in my own imagination. It was a damn fine hallucination, that’s all.

  The megaphone’s lyrical crackle has died down. I’m about to drag myself to the window to investigate when I hear a sharp whap, like the sound of metal spiking wood. The whole wall of my house shakes. Next there comes a series of gritty clangs against the wall, beginning near ground level and ascending. My imagination whips up a picture of a woman climbing up my wall.

  When a feminine hand lifts the window and reaches in through the curtain, I’m finally moved to sit upright and put on my glasses.

  A tidal wave of auburn hair thrusts itself through the open window, some of it bound in two massive braids, followed by a vision of the woman with whom I’ve packed a year’s worth of living and loving since I met her formally yesterday.

  As the vision climbs casually into my red stuffed chair and removes her crampons, I record the details with the same concentration I devote to noticing my surroundings in a lucid dream: black tights beneath a purple silk mini-skirt; gold satin bikini top; red, white, and blue beaded vest with a picture of a baseball that looks like the planet Jupiter being hit with a bat by an angel or goddess in long white gown; and a silver beaded headband with a tail of yellow and red feathers trailing down her back.

  But here’s the shocker: Blooming out from beneath the nub in her bra where the two cups are fastened, there’s a gnarly scar in the shape of a cross. Both marks must be five inches long. They’re not manicured lines but textured gashes. Ouch.

  “I was hoping you’d let down your hair or a reasonable facsimile so I could use it to climb up,” Rapunzel says matter-of-factly. “I know it’s kind of early for you, though, so I brought my mountain-climbing gear just in case. By the way, you’ve got some sleep in your left eye. Want me to get it out for you?”

  In my embarrassment I don’t answer but reach automatically to remove the accumulated fairy dust. Meanwhile, my fresh-from-dreams imagination is working hard to remember which of my already-extensive experiences with Rapunzel are not also engraved in her memory bank. The most important one, of course, was our fuck of the century, which she was not privy to.

  Only two exchanges can I count on having been real in the traditional meaning of the word “real”: the eternal moments in the women’s bathroom, and the delivery, from her mouth to mine, of the elixir of saliva. Well, I guess I could count the “Eater of Cruelty” event I saw, where the pregnant woman I assume was Rapunzel in disguise gave her cracked little presentation.

  When I tally up the extent of our objectively factual interactions, though, there’s not really much to go on.

  I can’t help but notice, here in the bountiful present, that I have been given license to gaze at the veil guarding the mysterium. Rapunzel is surveying my room as she tugs off the crampons, leaving me free to lay my line of sight where I may. Her skirt is short, her legs are parted to facilitate the crampon-removal, and the view is clear all the way up. There in the crotch of her tights is not just a blank black screen onto which I can project my hallucinations, but an emblem of the bull skull, red head with silver horns. The sight of it causes me to involuntarily close my eyes, as if it were an instruction to go inward. Instantaneously, a picture erupts of the dream I had been having when Rapunzel’s rocks first pinged my window.

  I’d dreamt I was in a singles’ bar talking with a really good-looking radical feminist gossip columnist about the art of hitting a baseball. I was telling her that she had a politically savvy animal grace that would be very suitable for playing on the socialist libertarian baseball team I managed. And that I’d be willing to install her, without even a tryout, as my starting second baseman—in return for a favorable mention as a “sensitive man” in one of her future columns.

  She was too drunk to understand what I was driving at. In a slurred voice she kept repeating, “If you sell your soul for art, make sure you get a receipt.”

  Rapunzel interrupts my reverie. “I must say, my dear muse,” she begins in her dusky voice, “t
hat I’m shocked by the advertisement on your curtains. Isn’t it unseemly for a world-famous feminist pawn like yourself to so brazenly announce ‘I want three wives’? Even if it is in Chinese?”

  In the five years since I had a Chinese calligrapher paint the characters for “I want three wives” on my curtains, Rapunzel is the first to have ever translated the meaning.

  I want to respond wittily. I want to say something like, “It’s just my little private joke with myself. A reminder not to take my rabid feminism so seriously that I wound my masculinity.” But I’m too garbled to actually get the words out yet. I’m still getting over my anger at having been awoken … steeping in my dream … settling into my delight at Rapunzel’s divine presence … wondering what the hell she meant when she called me her muse.

  “If you’re interested, I can interpret your dream for you,” she offers.

  “What dream?” I mumble.

  “The one you just had, silly. With the radical feminist gossip columnist you were trying to seduce.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Your dream is telling you,” she says, “that it’s OK to exploit your feminism as a means to try to pick up women—as long as you make lots of self-deprecating jokes about how successful and varied your love life has become since you’ve become an avowed feminist.”

  It’s almost easy to hide the feeling of intimidation that wells up in me in the wake of Rapunzel’s apparent telepathy. All I have to do is switch my attention to the lust that her telepathy has kicked into even higher gear.

  Next instruction to self: Got to calm down. Pace myself. I’m yearning to ask her about her version of last night’s on-stage encounter, but I must stall. If this budding relationship we have is a seduction, it is an arty, convoluted, inscrutable one. My moves must be crafty, not obvious.

  She strolls over next to my altar and examines the place in my room I call the “Wailing Wall.” There I’ve assembled a museum-worthy exhibit of artifacts that document those adventures with women that’ve caused me to wail, both in the old-fashioned sense of grieving and in its more modern usage as a description of a vocalist who sings with bluesy authority. There are photos of the Big Ones Who Got Away—the love affairs that never quite got consummated—headed up by the half-Italian painter Giulietta, whose series of “Burning Chairs Sailing through Yellow Skies” paintings, numbers 1–22, included one masterpiece in which I’m the model for the Greek mythic figure of Prometheus. The thing has hung here on my Wailing Wall ever since she presented it as a gift in lieu of having an actual relationship with me. As a rather vulture-like eagle nibbles my liver, I’m gazing at the sight of a red stuffed chair tumbling aflame past a choir of female angels flying in chevron formation through a bruised yellow-orange sky.

  Tacked to the frame of the painting is the last postcard Giulietta sent before she absconded from my life. Therein she informed me that she could never risk consummating a relationship with me because every instinct in her body told her to have children with me and the only children she ever wanted to have were her paintings.

  Rapunzel has got her back to me, examining a dream interpretation written for me by another Big One Who Got Away: Erzebet, the teacher of my dreamwork class. Five years my senior, she had written two books, A Feminist Revision of Jung and Loving the Dream Body. Both psychic and intellectual, brilliant and loving, feminine and feminist, she had a truly ambidextrous brain. I used to swell with pride as I fantasized how one day I’d make love with the goddess who had the most highly developed corpus callosum in the western world. But that day never came. Only when it was too late—when she had already married another man—did she tell me that she’d always hated the way I tried to turn her into a perfect idol.

  “Who’s the babe there with you in bed?” Rapunzel deadpans without turning around. She’s referring to the seated, three-foot-long totem doll that’s leaning against the wall next to me, partially under the covers. Bought for me from a local doll-maker by my ex-lover Cassidy, Scaramouche is made mostly of roots and vines. Her legs are coyote jawbones and her hair is dried greenish-brown seaweed.

  “That’s my imaginary girlfriend Scaramouche,” I say, finally managing to recover some of my wits. “Actually, she’s half-bird, half-woman—a harpy, to be exact. She probably doesn’t look too lively to you right now, but she’s a powerhouse in my dreams. Takes me places. Rides me on her back. Last night she flew me to be a contestant in a male beauty contest in the radical feminist secessionist state of Santa Cruz, formerly a city in Northern California. I got to hang upside down naked from the world tree while the judges evaluated my knowledge of how the Norse god Odin bluffed his way into Freya’s good graces so he could steal the magic goo from her cauldron. It was a very successful night. The crones who ran the ritual promised me a role as breeder next time I come.”

  “You know, Rockstar,” Rapunzel replies without a breath, “I truly wish I could adore your imagination. It is so close to but so far from my ideal. It’s vivid and unpredictable and all that—which you already know so I don’t need to tell you. But—and I truly hate to break this to you—most of the time you unleash it I feel like you’re masturbating in front of me. I mean, some of the stuff in your rant at the Catalyst show last night was honest and engaging, but other parts sounded like fantasies you wrote to get yourself off.”

  “Is that why you pumped me full of some weird drug?” I ask.

  She doesn’t say a word, but merely grins and makes her eyebrows quickly flit up and down five times.

  “And what’s wrong with masturbation, anyway?” I say, taking a different tack. “Don’t tell me you buy into the prevailing prejudice that female masturbation is liberating, sexy, and empowering, while male masturbation is pitiful, indulgent, and gross?”

  “I have nothing against jacking off, as the male of the species has so eloquently named it. Some of my best friends are jack-off artists. I’m not even offended by onanistic displays of the imagination. In fact, some of my favorite patriarchal literary masterpieces are the work of jack-off artists. Finnegans Wake comes to mind. Most of Thomas Pynchon. John Ashberry. Dylan Thomas. Kathy Acker. Mark Leyner. Lots of their work reminds me of ejaculate spewed into heaven so high that it never falls to earth. It impresses but doesn’t fertilize. You get the idea that the authors regularly got inspired to write by jacking off to a five-story-high billboard image of themselves.”

  “Well, thank you I guess for comparing my imagination to that gang.”

  “No. Don’t thank me. Beg me to take it back. Cajole me to tell you my opinion about how you can learn to anchor your long, hard imagination in Mother Earth before spewing.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going down in history as an artist the caliber of the ones you named.”

  “Here’s the news, Rockstar. You can go down in history—which will be sputtering to an end here in a few years—or you can go down in herstory, which has a far more stellar future. You can be famous with the millions of amnesiacs who regard newspapers and magazines and TV news shows as oracles of truth, or you can be famous with the Goddess Herself. Which’ll it be? You want to dribble away your kundalini in a fatuous attempt to perfect the art of the onanistic imagination, which phallocracy brought to its pinnacle long ago? Or do you want to plumb the mysteries of menarche for men, and be sanctified and certified as a genuine lesbian man, proud member of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail?”

  “Is it really so clearcut a case of either-or? Do I need to utterly purge myself of all wicked patriarchal onanistic memes before you will be my friend?”

  “If you want to know a secret—don’t tell any of my co-conspirators—I actually wouldn’t mind if you preserved a healthy supply of those wicked patriarchal onanistic memes. They’d be spicy. Or maybe yeasty would be the better term. They’d be the leaven in my dough, oh yeah.”

  Rapunzel sings that last line, jacking up her attractiveness yet one more notch: Her voice is limber and expressive.

  “Yeah,”
she continues, “those wicked patriarchal onanistic memes do have the tendency to keep all us fuzzy warm Gaia-worshipers from getting overly set in our nuzzle-comfy ways. Still, Rockstar, if it were up to me, I’d ask you to relocate your spermatazoic fireworks displays. Inseminate the wild blue yonder less and the good brown earth more.”

  All the while, Rapunzel continues to peruse my Wailing Wall. She seems fascinated with the most controversial artifact in my display: a photo of the fetus Cassidy and I aborted. We insisted the doctor let us take a roll of film so as to ensure that we wouldn’t let the memory of the trauma slip into the realm of abstraction.

  I am, of course, still in bed and under the covers, pyjama-less as is my custom. The whole time Rapunzel and I are talking, I’m thinking, I would fuck this woman in an instant. Just exactly like I did last night on the Catalyst stage. Or hallucinated that I did, rather. I’d fuck her with craftsmanlike devotion, sincere compassion, gentle insatiability. With my tongue and my hands alone if she’s a lesbian and doesn’t fancy penetrating cocksmanship. I’d fuck her as a woman fucks a woman if necessary, her clitoris rocking against my pubis bone.

  I would fuck her any way she wanted. Up in a tree that thrusts dangerously over the edge of a cliff. Recovering from the flu with a grocery bag over my head. Dressed in a lobster suit lying in muddy turf at midfield during halftime at the Superbowl.

  I would fuck her like a ballet dancer, wrapping her legs around me just below my waist and thrusting as I twirled her in figure eights. Like an egoless saint with telepathic powers, I would channel angelic hymns to sweet spots she doesn’t even know she has. Like a Fortune 500 CEO, I would fly her to Cancún for breakfast and let her ride me cowgirl-style in a bed full of hundred-dollar bills.

  I would fuck Rapunzel any way, any time, under any circumstances. Only if she would let me, of course. But then I wouldn’t want her merely to let me fuck her. I’d want her to want me to fuck her. I’d want her to want me voraciously and uninhibitedly, and not desperately or neurotically. I’d want her to lust for me without even being tempted to surrender any of her sovereignty. No power games ever. I hate power games (despite the fact that Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and company insist that hetero men know no other way to make love). And yes, I’d want her to love me—not just because I’m a long-distance runner of a fucker, and a lyrical Buddha of a fucker, and a magnanimous poised servant (not a sniveling infantile slave) of her passions—but because I’m all those things and I don’t care that I’m all those things. That I’m accidentally those things. That as a side effect of my intense devotion to the project of cultivating her inner male and facilitating the sacred marriage of her inner male and inner female, I just happen to be a long-distance runner of a fucker, and a lyrical Buddha of a fucker, and a magnanimous poised servant (not a sniveling infantile slave) of her passions.