by Rob Brezsny
We didn’t groom ourselves with great care before making a foray to the crummy food market a couple of blocks away. We were barefoot and tousled and deliriously happy. It was amusing to witness the reactions of innocent bystanders as we foraged for our Ritz crackers, string cheese, lemonade, and celery. The latter was far from my favorite vegetable, but it was the only one in the store that didn’t look like it had been invaded by rot.
I might have preferred our conversation during those first couple of waking hours to have centered on our excursion into the Drivetime. I wanted to compare notes and analyze the meanings of the experiences we had shared. And Jumbler did agree to a modest exchange that made it clear her experience had been identical to mine. It was not merely a creation of my unconscious mind.
Perhaps driven by Madame Blavatsky’s parting words, though, she was mildly obsessed with questioning me at length about the story of my life as Rapunzel, which for some mysterious reason she knew nothing about even though she seemed so knowledgeable about my alleged other incarnations. I answered her inquiries happily, spilling out deep secrets about the circumstances of my birth, my upbringing as the avatar, and how and why I ran away. It was the first time I’d ever talked so much to an outsider about my history. My mothers had always forbidden such self-revelation.
Later, after we shared late-afternoon breakfast in bed, her interview finally ebbed. For a while we closed our eyes and were silent, my right leg and her left playing together.
“You are surprisingly receptive for such a flaming narcissist,” she said suddenly.
“How can I possibly be a flaming narcissist,” I replied, determined not to be offended though I had instantly gone rigid. Would this be our first fight? “All my life I’ve been trained—brainwashed, really—to believe that my life is devoted to serving all of womankind. More than anything, I want to be of use.”
Nervously, I lurched away from her to the middle of the bed and began running my hands through the thicket of my hair.
“Yes. I see that. I don’t mean to condemn.” She glided behind me, lifted my tunic, and began stroking my belly with her almost supernaturally feathery touch. “But all that stuff is really just skin-deep, isn’t it? Your underbelly imprint is very different. And how could it be otherwise? You’ve never had any other experience except as a dearly beloved object of devotion. Day after day for many years, women who cherish you deeply have poured their life energy into you.”
“I can’t help that.” I was annoyed at her even as she was arousing a sweet warmth in my body.
“I know you can’t,” she said. “But what it means is that you have never had the chance to feel wrenching, gut-level yearning for anyone who makes you feel the way your devotees feel about you.”
“Oh.” Was it really necessary to discuss this now? I didn’t feel like defending myself, even though I had a good rebuttal: the memories, which had surfaced the day before, of my relationship with my birth mother Magda.
“And until you can add that primal emotion to the mix,” Jumbler continued, “all your service to the world will be one-dimensional. By rote. Uninspired. You’ll be a charismatic leader who’s programmed mostly to feel special about yourself, not to bestow great blessings on other people.”
I did not enjoy being told I was superficial, even by my beautiful new lover. I got up from the bed and went to the mirror to check the status of Dr. Lilith’s slash in my forehead. As I applied some cleanser, Jumbler continued.
“But I will say this, my dear. According to my tantrically trained reading of your character, you actually possess equal potentials as beloved and devotee.”
“And will you deign to teach me the path of the devotee, O Great Master Jumbler?” I said, daring to be sarcastic. “Will you lead me to the feet of the alluring idol where I might immolate myself in the fires of ecstatic surrender?”
“Gladly will I do this, O Great Master Rapunzel. Gladly will I offer my humblest parts to be kissed by the beloved avatar.” She stretched out on the bed, arching her bare feet in my direction.
“Ah I see. You yourself are the solution that you are recommending. You are the beloved who will cure my flaming narcissism.” I blew her feet a kiss, then returned to the business of applying a fresh bandage.
“My goal would not be to expunge your sense of yourself as the beloved one,” she said. “Only to add an additional sense of yourself as devotee. As I said, you have extravagant potentials for both. And I think both are crucial for your ascendancy to goddess-like power and splendor.”
“So are you criticizing me or praising me?” I still felt slightly petulant. “Will you make up your damn mind?”
“I would like to quote now from the book that, with your help, I hope to write someday. It’s called The Dictionary of Tricky Love. Please listen to the definition for the term ‘radical intimacy.’ Ahem. Radical intimacy is a virtuoso art that requires me and my freaky consort to master two seemingly contradictory skills: naming and nurturing the highest, holiest, best in each other, and thriving on the fact that our relationship will inevitably draw out and ask us to redeem each other’s ugliest ignorance.”
“So what you’re saying is that the deeper you and I fall in love,” I replied, “the more uninhibited we’ll both feel about unveiling our worst qualities?” I had returned to the rumpled bed and was making grotesque faces just inches from Jumbler’s face. “You’ll get to spend lots of time with my inner gargoyles, and I with yours? And that’s a good thing?” I grunted like a hippopotamus and licked her hand sloppily.
“It is a good thing,” Jumbler murmured self-assuredly as she allowed me to chomp on her arm and shoulder, “because it will give us great ongoing practice at killing the apocalypse right down at the most microscopic levels.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” I allowed. “Each of us, even great masters like you and me, carry a little portion of the apocalypse within us.” I got up from the bed and retrieved a black felt-tip pen from a drawer. Slipping the back part of my tights down a little, I drew an oval on my left butt cheek and wrote “The End” inside. This was rather forward of me. Despite our wonderful all-night trance-dance, Jumbler and I had not yet been naked with each other except incidentally in Madame Blavatsky’s golf cart.
“Jung called our personal portion of the apocalypse the shadow,” she said, taking the pen and drawing an oval on the sole of her left foot. Within it, she printed “Do not look at this” along with a picture of a single eye. “It’s the unripe or wounded part of us,” she continued. “It becomes evil only if it’s repressed.”
“So in radical intimacy,” I replied, curling into the fetal position to stare into the off-limits zone she’d just created, “I get to practice killing off the apocalypse in you, and vice versa? Sort of a corollary to Jesus’ plea to love thy neighbor as thyself. ‘Love thy neighbor’s shadow, and work with all thy tender adrenaline to summon its most constructive expressions.’ ”
“Hmmmm. I like that. But I was thinking more about how I will kill off the apocalypse in myself because I have such a high regard and attraction to you. And you’ll do vice versa.”
“So like when I suddenly turn into a jerk because my flaming narcissism has demonically possessed me, I’ll rise up with a banishing spell. ‘Begone demon, for I cannot allow you to trick me into hurting the feelings of my sweet groovemate.’ ”
I did the trick my mothers had always hated so much, which was to roll my pupils back so far in my head that only the whites showed.
“Yes, exactly,” she laughed. “You won’t just naturally assume that the demon to be exorcised resides inside me. Which in itself is so contrary to the style of the six billion apocalypticians on the planet that you might just shock armageddon into expiring right then and there.”
“I catch your drift, Professor Jumbler. Or is it Guru Jumbler?” I saluted then prayed then bowed to her. “As Jung said, we tend to attribute to other people the very stuff we hate and fear most about ourselves.”
“Radical intimacy means we kill the apocalypse at the source.”
“So what is your ugliest ignorance, anyway, Jumbler?” I asked slyly.
“Wouldn’t you rather have the fun of provoking me into accidentally leaking it at an unguarded moment?” she returned. “And there’s also the possibility that I don’t even know all the subtle varieties of my own ugliest ignorance. Maybe you can help me discover them.”
“As long as I also always tell you how beautiful and wonderful you are, too, right?”
“Exactly.”
The front half of Jumbler’s body was on the bed while she knelt on the floor and held my feet, one in each of her hands. She placed her tongue on the top of the middle toe of my right foot and kissed and licked very softly and slowly in a straight path up the front of my foot all the way to the spot between my ankles. She repeated the gesture with my left foot. Then she returned to my right foot and began again. This time she murmured a wistful tune as she proceeded. I couldn’t understand the words, though I thought I detected syllables that sounded like Sanskrit. Whenever it came time for her to take a breath, she would keep her lips on my skin and suck gently as she inhaled. After she finished with this sweep, she performed the same operation on my left foot.
A third time she returned to my right foot. This time she added a new move. Instead of lightly sucking my skin on her inbreaths, she turned her head up and sipped the air. As she brought her mouth back to my foot, she made a delicate spurting sound, as if she were taking the essence of what she’d sipped and infusing it into my flesh. All the while, she kept singing her mysterious tune.
By the time she completed my feet and began applying a similar rhythm to my calves and shins, I was slipping into a most relaxed rapture. She continued with amazing patience, methodically but gracefully covering my entire body, removing my clothes as she wandered.
Then I was naked before her. It pleased me profoundly. I wanted to peel myself open for her, find ways to let her more deeply into me. I wanted her to wash over me, pour into me, turn me inside out and touch me in my oldest fantasies about myself.
“Come and find me,” I sighed. “Surround me. Fill me. Engulf me.”
A strange and wonderful feeling arose in the midst of this spreading expanse of surrender: a tremendous potency. It made no sense at first, and I held it at bay. How could relinquishing my will generate such strength? But as it continued to build, I accepted it, allowed it to billow. Confidence and authority surged through me crazily. I felt wildly powerful, as if I could do anything. This in turn cracked open a fresh intuition—a prophecy, really: that in the years to come I would indeed be called upon to take on assignments that would test me to my limits.
In the wake of this revelation, I wanted to plunge back into the Drivetime without delay. I longed to collect more clues about the destiny Madame Blavatsky had been unveiling. But I willfully held myself back. I didn’t want to slip over to the other side unless Jumbler accompanied me.
“How can I give you what you’re giving me?” I asked dreamily. “Let me rev you up too.”
“You can’t imagine how much you’ve given me by allowing me to worship you like this,” she sighed. I could hear the other world in her voice. “More and more, I sense the truth of what Madame Blavatsky said about you. You are the Sex President. The Supreme Adept of the Fuckissimus.”
“But I want you to come with me to the Drivetime,” I insisted quietly.
“I’m almost there already,” she said. “Lie on top of me.”
I helped her take off her clothes. She lay down spread-eagled on the bed.
“Crucify me with your love, girl,” she whispered. “With all your most furious gentleness.”
I eased myself down onto her, matching her pose in every way except for my head, which was face down on the bed to the side of hers.
“Visualize that I am you and you are me,” she said. “Imagine that you are me feeling Rapunzel’s thighs on yours, and Rapunzel’s breasts on yours, and Rapunzel’s arms on yours.”
As I obeyed her suggestions, we synchronized our long, slow breathing. Rippling swells of liquid velvet textures glimmered up and down the length of my body. Soon I felt like a syrupy slow-motion waterfall cascading into Jumbler and then spiraling back into myself.
So gradually I wasn’t aware of the moment when I crossed over the threshold, I found myself in the Drivetime. It was a familiar yet strange place. I was lying down inside the husk of my old lightning-struck redwood tree on the grounds of the Pomegranate Grail. Jumbler was sprawled on top of me but just lifting herself off. We were naked.
The first thing I noticed was that the woods were missing. My redwood sanctuary looked and felt like it always had except for the fact that there were only a few yards of wild nature around it. Now it was inside a building with a high roof punctuated by a large skylight. In front of us a few yards away, visible through the “door” of the redwood husk, was a sizable image screen, maybe eight feet square, which I guessed was a Televisionary Oracle. At the moment, the screen was filled with a line of naked men snaking up to the back door of a red and black double-decker bus that bore a sign saying, “Global Initiatrix of Fuckissimus.”
Suddenly, Madame Blavatsky’s stout form trundled in front of the screen, blocking my view. She was clad in a black conical witch’s hat, pearl necklace, red cashmere mini-slip, and burgundy satin bra. The latter was far too small for her corpulent breasts.
Smoking a cigarette and chewing gum, she was sitting on a giant red tricycle that had a basket attached to the handlebars. Her saturnine face peered in at us.
“Wake up, sleepyheads,” she snorted. “It is high time for your next Drivetime University class. But first put on your sacred underwear.” She removed her gum so she could stuff her mouth with a spoonful of what looked like mashed potatoes from a bowl in her basket. Then she hurled a bunch of clothes towards us. It was the same stuff from before: for me, the Grail-shaped bra and the panties decorated with replicas of my birthmark; for Jumbler, the flesh-colored leotard painted with the realistic likeness of breasts and a penis.
I put on my costume and strode out of the redwood husk to survey my surroundings. It was a cross between a temple, a toy store, and the studio of a sculptor who uses junk as raw materials. I saw three majestic altars crammed with elaborate candelabra, big bouquets, and tiny, brightly colored UFOs, some of which were hovering in mid-air. A giant metal and wood scarecrow with glowing eyes and many arms was clapping in rhythm to a guttural melody that was flowing from her mouth. Next to a “garden” of fantastic Salvador Dali-like flowers and vegetables made of painted dishes and kitchen utensils, a miniature roller coaster reeled along a wooden track. Its cars were filled with puppet versions of fanged Tibetan deities and crones.
“Where are we?” I asked Madame Blavatsky.
“Glorious Universal Diddlemaster,” Madame Blavatsky replied, taking another spoonful of mashed potatoes from her bowl, “I am glad you asked. You are on the grounds of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, the mystery school with which you will replace the Pomegranate Grail. We are visiting the future again so as to further instill in you the confidence you will need to oversee the many mutations it will be your fate to initiate.”
Jumbler had joined me as I stood with Madame Blavatsky.
“We did it again, baby,” she grinned as she took my hand. “We’re pioneers of Drivetime collaboration.”
“You must be a very skillful tantric magician, my love,” I said admiringly, kissing her on the mouth.
“I am not nearly as experienced as you might imagine,” she replied, “although it’s true I have received an extensive education. But I swear I have never before done a shamanic journey together with anyone to the Drivetime. You and I must have a natural talent that we bring out in each other.”
“I’d like to claim a bit of credit, too, if you don’t mind,” a familiar voice called out from behind us. I turned to behold a shocking but welcome sight. Rumbler was walking towa
rds us. “It’s not as if Rapunzel is a virgin in these collaborative out-of-body experiences, after all.”
He strode over to Madame Blavatsky and handed her a blue popsicle. She seized it eagerly and began to slurp. Then he glided over to Jumbler and me and offered one to both of us. I took mine and hugged him, unable to speak. After a moment, I partially broke away, grabbed Jumbler, and pulled her into a three-way embrace. I was aware that neither of them knew who the other was—I had included only a bare mention about Rumbler when I told Jumbler the story of my life—but I fantasized that both of them loved me so much they would just naturally love each other.
“Looks like I’m overdressed,” Rumbler said as we finally dissolved the hug. In contrast to the skimpy attire Jumbler and I had on, Rumbler was dressed like an actor I once saw playing Robin Hood in a movie: bright green linen tunic with a rough leather belt, deerskin pants and green wool cloak, and leather boots.
I was still having trouble making intelligible sounds. Cognitive dissonance ruled my brain. The first impossibility was seeing Rumbler in this place, the Drivetime, which was so much more like the daytime world than the Televisionarium landscapes he and I had always frequented. We were not lying beneath a lemony sky right now, afloat on an ocean of geraniums where giant flakes of orange snow that tasted like butterscotch fell on our delighted tongues.
The second impossibility was being with Rumbler in the company of an actual flesh-and-blood person from my waking life. In all my years of consorting with my male playmate, there had never been such a crossover. Our companions in the Televisionarium were creatures like Firenze the Musical Sasquatch, Snapdragon Dragonfly the Firefly, and Itchy Crunchy the Beautiful Empress of the Trolls. My shamanic travels and my life in ordinary waking reality were strictly segregated.
“I’m Rumbler,” he said to Jumbler, reaching out to shake hands. “Rapunzel might prefer to tell you I’m her muse or animus or her vivid imaginary stand-in for her dead twin brother, but I like to think I have an objective existence aside from her.”