Nine Kinds of Naked

by Tony Vigorito

  Elizabeth was indignant. “That’s good? Look at you, frothing with talk of cons, and here you are conning yourself into presuming to approve of another. I require neither your approval nor your permission to be myself. And no offense, Pappy Gramps, but the last thing I need is a hypocrite’s approval.”

  “I am an American,” Diablo interrupted. “Hypocrisy is my birthright.”

  “Well that’s good.” Elizabeth nodded in surly imitation. “Honesty.”

  Diablo stuck up his stub in demonstration and dismissal. “Do me a favor, Junior, and don’t bullshit me like I’m your constituency. So you see the security blanket for the lie that it is. So what? It’s still false confidence. You like to think of yourself as a con artist, so let me say this to you, and remember, I’m your climatological godfather, so listen up.” Diablo leaned forward. “If you really want to be a con artist, then learn the artistry of confidence, the courage to know—not to think, not to believe, but to know—to know that there is something a great deal more revolutionary happening here and now in this vast expanse of space and time than next year’s SUV model or last year’s political coup. This is the magic, the artistry of confidence.” Diablo sat back, and Elizabeth smirked in spite of herself. She rather liked the idea of Diablo being her godfather.

  “Be your biggest,” Diablo went on. “True confidence derives from the awareness that you are playing hide-and-seek with yourself in the shade of the Tree of Knowledge. The unself-conscious enthusiasm of play. That’s the goal, you know what I’m saying? The boldness to be carefree, no hesitation, no reservation, no uncertainty. But most of us, instead of accepting this dare with cool aplomb, most of are Linus on a bad trip, stifled and sweating beneath the security blanket of our social structures.” Diablo paused. “It’s like this: Have you ever heard of a Dutch oven?” Elizabeth shook her head, and Diablo continued. “Basically, a Dutch oven is when you fart and then stuff your lover’s head underneath the blankets.”

  “That’s disgusting. Why are you telling me this?”

  “What, you who bark cherry vulgarity are suddenly offended?” Diablo reprimanded. “Eproctophilia, flatulent affection. It happens, apparently. I didn’t invent it, fer chrissakes, and I don’t think the Dutch invented it either, but what the hell do I know? But listen, swapping repugnancies is not my point. My quodlibet is this: The Dutch oven is society, holding a security blanket over our heads and suffocating us with the foul winds of false confidence. And society, of course, society is none other than we the people. So essentially, we fart in our own face.”

  Elizabeth wrinkled her nose. “You say fart too much.”

  Diablo pointed at her. “I’m not going to let you throw me off my thunder. Listen, godchild: There’s no rude and crude lover stuffing our heads under that blanket, just rude and crude ourselves, the lower versions of humanity, the chimpy-grinned braggarts of obsolescence. But for those of us who awaken from this social lullaby, or even those who stir restless in their slumber and pull aside a corner of the blanket, what we get is . . . ” Diablo hesitated and shook his head. “See, there’s no other way to say it. Ancient Sanskrit had over eighty words for it, but today we only have one. It’s love, but no one wants to hear about that, do they? It’s like that one guy, what the hell was his name?” Diablo snapped his fingers a few times. “Jesus, right? Look what the fuck happened to that dude. We’d sooner nail someone to a tree than hug a tree, right? Everyone knows that. We’ve all heard of it—all of us still roasting our souls in the Dutch oven—we hear the rumors and we ridicule. ‘Love and all that peacehuggery,’ we chortle and snort and suck on maraschino cherries, hiding our existential insecurity behind our urbane cynicism.” Diablo shook his head. “But I’m sorry, I don’t mean to demean love by disclaiming against it. It’s love, like it or not, one love, and I’m not gonna goddamn apologize for talking about it.” Diablo fell momentarily silent, and Elizabeth was wondering if it was incestuous to be attracted to her godfather, but then he had to go and say fart again. “Anyway,” Diablo sighed. “Like I was saying, maybe it’s time for some impatience with the fart breathers and their confident stupidity. The bus is coming, and they’re not on it. Spark the confetti cannons, I say. Evolution is at hand.”

  “Hmm,” Elizabeth observed. “Evolution doesn’t sound very loving.”

  Diablo shrugged. “Fuck that. The bus has room enough for everybody, it’s just not going to slow down. The evolutionary moment is here, right now, and everyone has to take responsibility for their point of view. If your point of view is nothing more than the make-believe meanings of the long-ago dead—which is what you are if you’re confident that the world as we have it constructed is fine—you are obsolete, as far as evolution is concerned, simple as that and later on, Captain Cave-man. Ignorance is not a point of view, and the fact of the matter is this: We’ve inherited a broken civilization. A stupid civilization, even. If this is the best that we the living can do, then I hate to interrupt all the war and stamp collecting, but we have failed, and it’s not even like we failed trying. We’ve got a smorgasbord of jumpy catastrophes all jockeying for position, and we just sit around in our burning house flipping through glossy catalogs.” Diablo shrugged at his own jeremiad. “But then again, history has already ended. In fact, it never really even began. People just haven’t realized that yet. The new evolution sees beyond the confines of culture and social role, and knows that the security blanket their ancestors stuffed them under is threadbare. And without that security blanket, we’re entirely unprotected from the dazzling sunshine of love.”

  “So this new evolution,” Elizabeth pressed. “What do we do, just dance around, masturbating in hedonistic self-righteousness?”

  “No.” Diablo shook his head. “Don’t sell me that sorcery. Narcissistic posers don’t change the fact that there is an awakening afoot, an adventure beyond the security blanket. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you’re not awake, you’re just mumbling in your sleep, drooling on your pillowcase. If you’re awake, you live in ways our ancestors did not, and humans have tried everything twice except for one thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Love, goddamnit! Haven’t you been listening?”

  “Okay, but how do you wake up?”

  “How do you wake up?” Diablo repeated impatiently. “What kind of a crazy question is that? You wake up the way you wake up. This isn’t allegory. Little by little or all at once, it depends on what kind of a dream you’re having. I guess maybe it helps to start by realizing that you’re having a dream, and once you realize that, you can do anything you want to do. Life as a lucid dream, right? That’ll kick you awake eventually. Or better yet, think of life as a novel where the most heroic characters are those who suspect the dream. That’s probably not a metaphor either, by the way. Haven’t you ever felt like a character imprisoned in some bizarre novel? Life has some chilling twists in it, you have to admit. Ironies of kindness and cruelty, symphonies of synchronicity, metaphors of meaning. And the proof is all around us. The human experience and books are made out of the same thing—words, right? Language. So, human life is a con, a fiction, a novel, and that makes us characters, clueless characters, and the roles and identities we take so dreadfully serious are the characters of some divine drama. Our lives are bookended by silence, the pages in between are the only opportunity we’ll ever have to make any noise, and most of us spend more time sitting in traffic than we do on vacation. How’s that for a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing? It’s this surreal, dystopian satire that we live in, stranger than fiction, actually.

  “So maybe it works like this: Maybe the more you kick at the security blanket, the more you attract the attention of the divine novelist, who, seeing an interesting character, arranges plot twists and synchronicities to dazzle and delight, and maybe even a climax beyond any expectation. But I think the truth is that there is not one master novelist. I think the truth is that God is the sum of all histories, and we fear to see that we are free.
The story we are caught in is written only by ourselves, and too many of us are insecure and uninspired hacks. History is pulp fiction, another spy thriller, another trashy romance, another courtroom drama. Or maybe, maybe human history is all just spoof, did you ever consider that? I mean, is it possible to conceive of a more ridiculous tragedy than the human condition, a more farcical parody of pride and self-importance? History, as it turns out, history is a slaphappy spoof of nothingness, and here we are.” Diablo gestured broadly. “The sleeping godhead, and the fact is this: We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. So the question, my godchild—and I don’t want you to forget this—the question to you becomes this:

  “Are you writing your own story, or are you being written off by someone else’s story?”

  77 IN THE MOMENT, Elizabeth had no ready answer to Diablo’s query. Later, while she was wearing a G-string and writhing around a pole at Red’s Cabaret, she finally came up with what she should have said.

  “I am in this world as I am,” she should have said. “And not as others might prefer. No one masters my marionette but I.”

  And here she imagined that Diablo would interrupt and attempt to correct her grammar. “Me,” Diablo interrupted and attempted to correct her grammar. “You meant to say, ‘No one masters my marionette but me.’”

  “No,” Elizabeth imagined her mighty reply, twirling expertly down the pole. “I said what I meant. No one masters my marionette but I. Me is someone’s else’s directed object. I am under no one’s direction. I am a subject. I know who I am, and I will not be confused.”

  So there, she thought feebly, doing all that she could to disregard the taunting truth that there would never, under any circumstances, be any do-overs.

  78 DIANA ONCE told Elizabeth about a divination practice called bibliomancy. Bibliomancy, as she described it, is when you pick a random book off the shelf, open it to a random page, and read a random sentence or two. The synchronicity between the text and your mind is supposed to bear insight on the situation at hand. It worked, sometimes.

  The next day, while walking the French Quarter, Elizabeth impulsively wandered into a random bookstore, strode down a random aisle, picked up a random book off a random shelf, and opened it to a random page, where her eyes, blinking with dismay, fell upon the following words:

  You are fooling yourself.

  79 HAVING LONG AGO lost her patience for uninspired social gatherings, Elizabeth might have guessed by the naked light-bulb that illuminated the barren décor of the sparsely attended party in which she found herself that she was waking into a dream. But nonetheless she stood, vaguely contemplative, watching lifeless conversation slurch about the room as if drunk on its own drabbery, stoned on the catatonic madness of the mundane.

  It was a deeply unremarkable dream, until a little girl abruptly presented her with a crumpled strip of leather. “I dare you to untie this knot,” she said, very cheerful.

  Elizabeth accepted the strip of leather and the dare, noticing that the little girl’s grinning face and bare arms were swiped with scratches, as if she had just run the gauntlet of a cornfield. Unalarmed by any of this, Elizabeth simply untied the single knot and handed it back to the little girl, who responded by handing her a seashell pipe.

  “I dare you to smoke this,” she said, again very cheerful.

  Elizabeth accepted the pipe in automatic courtesy. “What is it?”

  “M2.”

  Having no recollection of her waking consciousness, Elizabeth had never heard of m2. “What’s m2?”

  “Just smoke it.”

  Careless experimentation with exotic drugs offered by unsupervised children at lame parties not being her custom, it might have been another clue that she was dreaming when Elizabeth unhesitatingly hit the pipe twice in rapid succession. But she had no time to piece these clues together, for no sooner had she exhaled her second hit than each moment of her formerly dull dream began to pulse against her in all its unreduced infinity. She felt her body collapse under an unrelenting tremendum, freeze-frames of her fall trailing after as she heard her own whispered help strobe across a dozen syllables. Her entire being shattered as she hit the floor, abandoned by her every illusion: no party, no drab décor, no wild child, no room, no floor, no clothing, no body, no time, no identity, no concept, no point of reference anywhere. There was only a scream, the scream, the scream of a self, a crackling bolt of electricity arcing across eternity like a supernatural synapse, and neither horror nor hell can describe the unspeakable terror of a spirit choking on its own life, howling and blackened, a writhing wraith of wrath, the subjectivity of the damned.

  Hatred, fury, rage, and fear, her existence screamed nothing else and nevermore. There was nowhere else, there was no one else, there was actually nothing at all, but then there it was nonetheless, blinking awake like a child forever from a dream, beginning to stir and starting to stretch, yawning and dawning and glowing and growing and offering only its unfathomable chorus of being to soothe the tars of nothingness into their slithering nonexistence, and no longer is there nothing.

  Lux profundo, there is something, a cheering chiming shining, and it vanishes into Elizabeth’s gasp, and she’s back at the lame party, bolting upright just as a chain mail and cheerful crusader with a sprig of mistletoe behind his left ear and a strip of leather in his grasp jangles forward and says, “Unnerved, I am, sometimes in the stillness of an approaching sleep,” just before touching the side of his nose and fading into the blinks of Elizabeth’s awakening.

  80 THE MORNING AFTER her ultimate nightmare, Elizabeth felt like she’d eaten a salad of four-leaf clovers for breakfast. So much more than luck, Elizabeth was feeling love. Not a love for anyone in particular, but a love for everyone in spectacular, an ecstatic sort of madness, the rumored paradise of mind known to mad poets and rowdy saints, and whether it was truth or mania does not really matter. For Elizabeth, it was truth. Absolute truth.

  And it probably was truth. After all, having just survived her own worst nightmare, Elizabeth awoke to find her life transfigured. Suddenly, the universe was saturated with meaning and purpose, and it was so perfectly evident that it was impossible for her to imagine a shroud that could ever again shadow such brilliance. And that is how it goes. Slapped by the grim reaper, lives formerly mundane take on a sudden luster: TIME EXPIRED parking meters offer red-flag reminders of impending impermanence, JUST DO IT advertising slogans reveal a deeply mystical significance, and the irate “watch where you’re going” grumbles of passing strangers present sagelike suggestions.

  Thus was Elizabeth’s morning, awakening from her m2 dream refreshed and reborn. Synchronicity was no longer a concept, but an irrefutable experience as obvious as the sunshine itself. It was in this soaring state of awareness that she showed up at Red’s Cabaret for another day of flaunting her assets and taunting the libido of the lunchtime crowd. Diana was not working that day, and so Elizabeth kept to herself in the dressing room and was even left to herself by the others, exacerbating her sensations of depersonalization and detachment. Unable to ascertain whether it was the world or herself that was the ghost, Elizabeth merely observed with passive equanimity the antics of the other dancers, drinking, smoking, bitching, arguing, and gossiping. Someone even passed her a joint, and she could have participated if she had wanted to, as she certainly had on countless prior occasions, but today it all seemed unreal, dreamlike, nothing more than an elaborate ruse, a hoax upon humanity, and she couldn’t possibly take any of it seriously. Not in the dressing room, not anywhere.

  Yeah right, was all Elizabeth could think as she watched one of the other dancers choke on her toke, as if this is really happening. The other dancer’s chest heaved repeatedly concave as her body desperately tried to cough the burn out of her lung tissue, and Elizabeth resolved right there that she was done smoking pot. There was no way she was going to grow into another one of these kvetching pot hags. There was no derision in her attitude, only an inescapable awareness that her pe
rception of the ongoing con of life had deepened into undiscovered depths. The chatter of existence felt absurdly unreal, and this somehow seemed closer to reality. Enchanted by this yeah right metaphysics, she couldn’t escape the sensation that there was a man behind the curtain, not one of the poor saps out front, of course, but an entity, a presence that was pulling strings in her life, an angel, a demon, or her very own spirit.

  Upon entering the stage and the maroon atmosphere of the club, however, the arched asses and inflated breasts became altogether too preposterous. The flash and dazzle of the girls strutting about the stage, grinding up and down the poles, writhing along the perimeter, tossing their heads back in false abandon, Elizabeth found herself unable to fathom the circumstance. Holy mother of God, Elizabeth thought to herself, what the christ is going on in this place?

  Blinking as if someone had just removed a blindfold from her eyes, Elizabeth watched herself move through the motions of her floor routine as a genteel frenzy of twenty-dollar bills hailed her for private table dances. Aiming automatically for the wealthiest-looking gentleman, she began her dance of mutual exploitation as she had so many times before, selling her sincerity and sexuality to another pinstriped lout desperately seeking an encounter with the feminine.

  While teasing her mark with the hidden forbidden of her near nudity, Elizabeth observed the club and saw for the first time that every woman in the place—coke whores and boob jobs included—was a muzzled priestess of Aphrodite, and oblivious to her own reduction. Here was the tremendous mystery of female beauty. Here was the noble divinity of sexuality. And here was it enfeebled to these demeaning displays of gaudy gratuity. Elizabeth and Diana had frequently amused themselves by believing that they weren’t just tip slaves stamping out plastic simulations of sexuality in a fantasy factory, but that they were performing a vital service. They were the temple harlotry of rites long forgotten, the sacred whores, the sexual healers, the slut goddesses, and their sustained encounter with the erotic was generating immense spiritual energy and thereby raising their kundalini, and whether they were aware of it or not, the men were there to worship the goddess.