The Mediterranean rolled, in thick waves that almost responded to the music. It was just a little too dense to move like water should. I stared at it, clutched my stomach, recalling the smell.
People, all barefoot, ran on tiptoes to splash a crystal glassful as if from an immense punchbowl. Coming back with red in their goblets that was so purple it was almost black, fading backward as they returned to the fire: to violet, to red. Clattering that frustrating cacaphonic jazzdiddle.
My head hurt.
Todd coughed again, his shoulders spasming. He turned and spat, ticktocking, into the fire.
“Excuse me.” He bowed his head, mortified.
“Sure. You’re not an American?” I asked him.
“Sydney, Australia,” he replied. He was thin as a rail, his cheeks as sunken as those models who have their molars pulled to make their faces seem more classic.
My god but I was tired! It seemed as if every bit of energy had gone into the bonfire. This was too strange. Was it me or was even the beach beginning to roll?
Of course, I hadn’t taken my medication since morning. That meant I’d missed at least two doses.
The ocean undulated, seismic wine, bubbles of it frothy around the reeds along the sand.
“I didn’t see you here earlier,” I said.
“No, I felt so—uh—I stayed over there.” Todd pointed to those same reeds. He’d been camouflaged.
I tottered on my feet, weaving. I put my hands up to my cheeks.
“I think I’d better go back to the village,” I muttered. “I need medicine back in the hotel.”
Soon my chest would begin to hurt. I would probably die in this ridiculous couture pearl gown, bruise blossoms on my bare shoulders, wishing they would turn down the music.
It didn’t sound like German really. More Russian. Or even Aztec. Or the sound Todd made as he coughed up blood. Or the sound I’d make soon when my heart did a ragged tantara and I couldn’t catch my breath. With the sea chopping right along with it, rising with each wheeze, grunt, and grating yammer. The waves were looking dangerous, climbing high, falling in heavy lymphatic slaps, sputtering down to shoot into the bonfire which roared with each fueling droplet. Not like seawater at all. Like wine.
I started to turn, slowly rolling the dress up to my thighs so I would be able to walk. Ashamed of my toothpick, blotchy legs but badly needing my medicine. The golden woman from the comatose sands took my arm.
“No, no, chérie. It is time for you and all the dreamers to swim,” she said. Her hair was a nimbus of strange aurora borealis. It was much too far south for that atmospheric condition.
“Swim? You must be kidding.” I sighed painfully, trying to pull away.
The blond, tanned beauties were leading a few other obvious tourists from the ranks. All marked by their less-than-robust appearances. One woman in a ruby dress was pocked all over her face in nearly the same shade. Blisters covered her throat. Her eyes were rheumy. The bones poking her flesh were much worse than mine; she was a study in skeletal anatomy. Another woman in emerald had lost much of her hair, and there were dark gaps in between her spongy teeth. A man was a gray-yellow in the fire’s glow and his skin was the consistency of muenster cheese. These and Todd and I were gently but firmly led to the water’s edge. What could we do? Our kung fu skills were probably hopeless, and body parts could seize up or fall off entirely if we put up a struggle.
“What the hell are you going to do? Drown us?” I tried to cry out. I couldn’t even manage to windmill my arms.
“No, chérie,” the beautiful Bardot creature assured us. “We wish you no harm at all.”
They sang louder as they stripped us from the evening clothes. We stood naked again, shuddering together in a huddle, our body odors and breaths as rank as dying people had. We tried to cover our nude imperfections with our hands, ashamed.
“What now?” asked Todd as the beach people stepped back.
“Swim out.” A tall, lion-maned Conan gestured toward the water. His shoulders were so broad that they strained against the seams of his evening jacket. The tails fluttered absurdly behind him. “Swim out as far as you can.”
So what was this? A headstart? Some kind of whale hunt?
“Is this a joke?” asked the woman with the bald spots. Her words whistled through her bloody gums.
“No,” Diane replied, no malice in her tone. “I hope you will be healed.”
We wouldn’t go. They ran forward as a mob and pushed us in. Once that initial splash was accomplished, the ocean swelled up under us to buoy us out. It was too fast and so high.
It gouted down my throat and up my nostrils: cohesive plasmic. Not like wine at all. Like blood.
But not. Then what was like blood?
Meat?
Salt and metal. Sulphur.
I screamed, it was so hot. My skin was reddening, swelling. I choked on the brackishness, my stomach jerking up gummy strings of nausea from the bitter stink and taste. Did Gidget weigh nothing at all as the liquid rushed up in one mountain in the dark? I saw the woman with the pustules bob close to me. Her eyes bulged as her hands flailed, lesions growing into the size of a child’s fists to afterward burst. Her throat thickened into a shadowy goiter and she strangled as she began to go under.
“Give me your hand!” I yelled. Yet I wasn’t sure how I could save her if I did manage to grab her. I yelled but my voice was lost in the sea’s roar, bellowing as it swept us farther out. I could still hear the singing on the beach: necrojazzy, bongomancy, saxwitchery.
Something glided under the surface. I barely had my head above the line of wave as I felt it graze my ankles.
Her face came up again. I shrieked, gulping raw sea curds when I saw the blob of it draining and swelling, eyes pleading. But her arms were paddling now. Perhaps she would find her rhythm in the raging sea.
“There’s something down there!” she shouted.
Then she was yanked under. There was thrashing and the liquid became pulpier.
(The shark has pretty teeth, dear.)
Discord and caterwauling syncopated from a direction that must have been the beach. Strange how there were no lights, no lights at all. Not from the many cities along the Riviera nor from the stars that had to be above us. Even the bonfire was gone. But the sea shone somehow, luminous as a cat’s eye.
Someone else wailed out in the surging storm. The man with the diseased liver perhaps, since Todd’s lungs were too full of clots to produce such a protracted noise of terror.
Something touched my legs as I furiously kicked them back and forth, scissoring to keep swimming, the noxious liquid making me dizzy.
Light-headed. Heavy-chested. A weight strong and wicked in gravity was a black hole behind my little ice cream cone breasts.
It wrapped around my legs below the surface. Wormy, arm-like. A tentacle. Feverish.
Sharks were attracted by movement, so I’d read.
(Sharks don’t have long appendages, stupid, I argued.)
Pretty teeth though.
I forced my legs to become still, as unmoving as possible in the terrorizing sea. If they swayed at all, it was by the ocean’s purpose and power, not by my own volition. I tried not to so much as shudder as the roasting rubbery thing touched me. A snake of fire. An eel of burning slime. I could hear a voice nearby crying, choking, praying. Voices on the beach whose direction spun away and turned upside down were howling in chops, clatters, wild ululating saxophone and pandemonium drums.
It loosened like a length of bowel, moved away in slippery slips, the sea oscillating with it, humping in scales the size of small cars.
The sea exploded. A mass rose up: so huge, so dark, that it drew all the light from even my memories into itself. It seemed as if the moon—which hadn’t put in an appearance all night—had fallen from the sky to bob like a massive ball upon the sea. It seemed as if the volcanic floor of the Mediterranean had shaken itself awake to sit up. It had no face, no face at all, and then one by countless one
of its limbs came up from the depths. The little hole in my heart vortexed, ripping into a chasm from its original pinprick. I thought I heard it tear down the length of my heart like a great canvas sail.
Gidget Sees The End Of The World, Meets The Big Kahuna Cthulhu, Doubts That Contracts For Further Sequels Will Be Forthcoming.
Help. Gidget Wants Out To Talk To Her Agent.
Wrong, the teeth aren’t pretty at all.
««—»»
When I opened my eyes again I was lying on the sand. I was back in the pearl sheeth, silk panties hugging the angles of my ass. There was a blond Adonis in tails and a bow tie talking to me. He was softly caressing my breasts through the fabric.
My large, supple breasts with the cleavage to die for…
I sat up. Hair the color of lemon drops and meadow-flower honey in streaks fell over my flawless, unbruised shoulders.
“Not every night is like this. Only one a year, I promise,” he said, touched, handed me a glass half full of dark red wine. “Most of the time we just party and make love.”
“What the hell happened to me?” I trembled, trying to remember.
He put his muscled arm around my shoulders. He smelled of musk, salt, burgundy, and roasted sausages.
“You have been healed, chérie.”
We danced waltzes and did rumbas by the bonfire. I got very drunk. I lost my virginity.
In that order, I think.
I don’t know if any of the other dreamers made it back to shore. I don’t suppose I’d recognize them if they did. It’s easier to think this than to wonder if Todd’s lungs tick-tocked with the others in the “clock shop” in the village.
Francois and I got passionate, my whole heart pounding, racing, delighting without ever breaking.
“Do I really look like this?” I asked, breathless, overjoyed. Everywhere he touched me and that I touched on myself was curvy and unmarked, like a perfect beach of golden sand.
“Even your body which lies on the beach in the sun at this moment looks like this now,” he said.
The sun has a little hole in its heart. We bleed it and it flares, growing weaker with every year. In a few million years we may yet bleed it cold.
The whisper of life is cardinal, thick. It smells of metals heated in a crucible. It blinds with explosions which flare in corona, burning what it fails to heal, healing what it doesn’t burn.
(Gidget Gets Laid, Then Gets Sanctimonious.)
The world goes on. The great train passes by Le Sang De Le Soleil, never stopping. Our bodies bronze on the beach, unable to move, unable to see as we vampirize the sun into the gold of our veins.
But with our eyes closed and our naked bodies thus, we go to where it is always a summer’s night.
| — | — |
JAZZ
Memory is like a shadow. In mine I see from time to time this shriveled matzah of a man who takes turns whispering in my ear and crouching in a circle of chalk.
There are others there but I can’t make them out. They don’t speak, either out of reverence for him or because they are shocked by the extent of their hunger. They provide a window dressing so that he will not be seen if any guards happen by. It might be their sole purpose in this world, I don’t know.
Where is this place? It is where things begin and end. It is a circle.
««—»»
Forward to October 30, 1956.
THE NEW YORK TIMES is an ongoing twentieth century Talmud. It says that the “Budapest Rebels Refuse To Yield Until Soviet Troops Leave.”
It prints that “Eisenhower Bids South Fight Bias On A ‘Local Basis’”.
It reports that “Stevenson Says U.S. Gets Less Than Truth On Strife”—(about the Middle East).
It doesn’t say anything about a chick in spiked heels with her arms ripped out of their sockets, that ol’ friendly needle still in one vein and the tubing knotted tight to make it pop. Junkies buy a lot of farms, doin’ that ee—ii—ee—ii—yowl into the night of nixes and mighty eighty-sixes. New York City’s always had too many murders for all of them to make the papers. Especially about junkies on a rush, seeing lions and tigers and bears—and a few wolves. A monster or two. Baby, it’s a jungle out there or ain’t you heard?
It’s the night before Halloween but none of the hipsters dress as monsters to go to the club. We dress up every day for Christ’s sake. There would be enough monsters there as it is.
We wait in the wings behind the next act. He’s dressed in blue jeans up to his chin, and he jabs his cigarette outward with his fingers like he hopes to put a few eyes out in the audience. At least it would liven up his act, as far as I’m concerned. His discombobulated poetry rattles off in a caffeine rapture, in a stylish protest/incoherent. I listen because I’m so close by that I can’t miss it, but Ich verstehe nicht. I don’t get it.
He wants us to believe he is a goyim galus, an exile from society. So who in Greenwich these days ain’t that already? At least he’s an outcast with a little musical accompaniment. But, jazz that ain’t, baby.
A sample of his dismal diatribe:
Beat: “The Russians are hungry for Budapest.”
A single, poignant guitar string: “James Dean died for your sins.”
Two flippant guitar strings with bongo: “Where’s the bomb shelter, Betty?”
There he pauses but the audience doesn’t clap here. Wouldn’t be cool. They just nod. Enough said.
The Club Eye is swinging into the dark of night jazz. All that. Mickle Mantle of hip. Blue and violet spots on a flat black stage raised in the round. Spotlights made with colored hotwatts strung through empty coffee cans are the stars that make our shadows grim. They make circles, beginnings and ends. I get a little sick to my stomach looking at them but I feel exhilarated as if I’m about to be zoomed alive.
The preceding act continues to darkmouth us. “There are no curtain calls/but twilight falls/all the time/Armageddon halls. You listening out there, Betty? Your entrails red as atomic fallout?”
Enoug to bring any cat out of his reverie. Those beardy, beat poets…like, they’re fond of end-of-the-world topics. Still the audience nods. People snap their fingers. One. Two. Yeah, with his unfiltered cig ashes jumping toward the white stickies of their eyes. They’re into what I like to call the toit hungerik.
Dead hungry.
Me? I’ve had my fill. Sometimes spills over. Overflow, you know?
So life is cool cool cold, dig it? Man, so far from where I’ve been that it might as well be smoking on Mars. Planets/round, starts and finishes where life gestates or crumbles depending on a great, baffling Tetragrammaton of judgement. All circles that leave my head swimming. Is this the same planet I was on ten years ago?
The now fifties are supposed to make the forties seem like part of another century. Away from the era of annihilations and hot, unspeakable crimes. Into the new dawn of cool cats and cold wars. I like Ike. (But I’ll vote for Stevenson.)
The United States is the starched and pressed poodle skirt of the world. Some of us who escaped the holocaust fled here to live under the petticoat. So ghettos swelter and gangsters patrol the lower east side looking like dybbuks in silk suits. So winos sprawl across sidewalks like victims of The Night Of Broken Glass. So unnamed Gentiles into the toit hungerik suffer an end that might make it into a momentary poem but will never be carved into The New York Times eternal stone. It’s still cleaner than where I’ve been.
(I look out into the audience from back stage. See shriveled matza men chanting. See shadows that don’t say a word out of fear.)
“Man, you okay?” Milt asks me.
It is the fact that he whispers in my ear that makes me freeze. What comes in such a confidential murmur must always be magical, commanding, threatening.
“Sure,” I reply. “Just lookin’ at the dead people in the crowd.”
Our gig. We file up onto the stage as the poet comes off. Serious. Mozarts dressed as undertakers. Take our instruments out of their cases as if we were
raising the dead. My Lazarus saxophone comes alive. The dead in the audience automatically seem to grow meat on their bones, grow new teeth in their vacant mouths, sprout generous heads of hair from those scraped and shaved scalps.
Nothing sparkles like jazz. It spirals down and patter pats around. Just sort of looses itself as it loses you.
Asleep tempos. The syncopated nightmare, Hector.
Like the beat-king’s poem only without the distraction of words. “Your entrails red as atomic fallout?” So what’s that? Total toit. Give me the pure sound. Let it loosen me. Let it lose me.
We’re jamming, getting hot, burning up. I barely notice the needle bruises on my arms, my inner thighs, while I’m cooking. Heroin ain’t no brave lady but she sends me.
The spotlights are stars. I forget shadows and circles for a while.
On cue from G-sharp.
I remember that the spotlights could burn me, freeze me, make me feel like a very small person trapped in their light. Along the wall, pinned by that light like a bug to a collector’s card.
Are there Jewish butterflies? The imprint of the orthodox forelock on their wings?
The brown shirts were running through the shop, and Papa was on the floor. Our inventory of liquors was all smashed. A thousand or so bottles of Schnapps leaking until everywhere was the smell of mint. I associate that smell with going on trains. Now the scent of a roll of peppermint Lifesavers is enough to make me cry.
««—»»
Dance on, baby.
She sways to my saxophone in those long legs wrapped in dusk leotards. Black all over. Hair like oiled chains, dragged in soot. Calls herself a beat. Thinks the world is black like her clothes, her poetry.
It is. It is.
Look at her. (And, ooh, she looks back.) Yeah, you, baby.
It’s more than black.
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