PARADOXIA

by Lunch Lydia

  Born into a circle of fated pain, he learned first how to turn his hatred against himself and then against everyone else. By the age of twelve he had moved in with three other delinquents, themselves no strangers to cruelty. The Whoresome Foursome, as they came to be known around Hollywood, began practicing and fine-honing their skills of verbal manipulations. Irresistible and charming, the teen terrors had the rules of the house spray-painted in DayGlo green near the front door. ONE FOR ALL AND FUCK YOU TOO. Filthy Swedish magazines littered the rancid squat, inspiring them on to new sexual horrors.

  A string of teenage girls would wander in and out. The more-often-than-not intoxicated young bait was usually blindfolded, beaten, and raped by whoever was present at the time. Cigarettes seared inner thighs, bottles broke on kneecaps, fists and bricks did what they do best. Batter, bruise, bleed. Sex came as the final reward. The final insult. Here the young lords lacerated every opening with a vengeful deliverance. Tortures employed were waylaid upon the recipients who stood before them, reminiscent of the mothers they abhorred. They, like their fathers, harbored the disease of a sexual affliction whose credo was dominance.

  After one particularly gruesome incident involving the genital scarification of a fifteen-year-old girl from the Valley, the police force were summoned, thus ending their two-year reign of terror at 452 Franklin Avenue. Since all the assailants were still underage, no charges could be pressed. The cops simply destroyed the squat, sealed the lot it sat on, and sent the Whoresome Foursome packing.

  At fourteen he was forced to return to his mother. Who by now couldn’t stand the sight of him. Or the way his presence seemed to interfere with the endless flow of two-bit fuck-ups and assholes through the family home. She had a thing for alcoholic pill-poppers, cast-offs from Easy Rider, Dirty Harry, A Streetcar Named Desire. Men who had suffered through long stretches at Sing Sing, Camarillo, San Quentin. The kind of men who didn’t give a fuck how hard their lives had been as long as they could make someone else’s life equally miserable. And that usually meant him.

  He started shooting dope with a gang of strung-out transvestites he befriended in the alleys and back streets of downtown L.A. Pimping and prostituting right alongside them. Collected twenty percent off the girls’ take for playing lookout. Sixty percent when pulling three-ways. Enough to keep up a $125-a-day habit. Which helped to deflect the pain from the endless beatings administered to him by the Peter Fonda lookalike who was shacked up with his mother. The third time “Peter” tried to break his nose, he turned around and stabbed him twice in the chest, screaming at the prick to “Hit me again and I’ll fucking kill you …” It landed him in juvie for two years. The judge didn’t buy the self-defense plea.

  Once incarcerated he learned the joys of self-mutilation. How by hurting yourself more than anyone else would ever want to, he could earn the respect of the other inmates. Always the first to fight, the hammering blows that pounded into him when outnumbered three-to-one could never match the viciousness that he would later reap upon himself. Alone in his bunk, the head-bashing would begin. Smashing his skull into damp cement walls, he tried to disappear the pain. Tried replacing an indescribable pain, somewhere in the base of his brain, with a concentrated self-inflicted throbbing. It somehow made the burden of his hatred easier to deal with. It was the same with the broken glass and rusty knifetips. It brought relief waiting for the scabs and bruises to slowly heal, knowing they eventually would. The psychic scars might not.

  His mother always told him, “Don’t get mad … get even.” So on the afternoon of his release from juvenile detention he set her house on fire. Minor damage, she refused to press charges. Small admission of her own guilt.

  He got strung out again. Hanging out at the sleazy bars near Hollywood and Vine. Picking up aging go-go girls, exstrippers, prostitutes. Women used to his kind of abuse, mistook it for attention. Victims themselves, years lost to opiates, alcohol, addiction. Hook them on him. His own addiction to bone-crushing power fucks. Twist them up inside until they’d love him just enough to support his various bad habits. Dust, speed, dope, coke cocktails.

  Every sexual escapade became an act of unmitigated violence. Using any available icon, he punished ferociously the sins of his mother. Banging his full bodyweight into the willing receptors, blood would race from brain cells, fists become engorged. Pounding inside them, punching would follow. Black eyes, bruised lips, blood clots, teardrops. He took out on them what the rest of the world took out on him. His only satisfaction came through someone else’s annihilation. To make them hurt as much as he did was the only way he knew how to relieve the pain he could no longer bear reliving.

  It was a late autumn night after a serious session of titty torture and humiliation involving Patty, a burned-out thirty-three-year-old ex–Vegas showgirl fallen on hard times and bad luck, that he stumbled upon his mirror reflection. A beautiful teenage Latina girl sprawled out in the alley behind the showgirl’s crash pad. Thinking her just drunk or fucked up, he stumbled over and kicked her in the ribs. Hard. No reply. Kicked her twice in the ass. Nothing. Cracked her head against the dumpster. No response. Slapped her soft velvety face. Again. Dead. Crumpled in a small wet heap. Steaming with piss and vomit. Stuck his hand in her pockets. Thirty bucks and an out-of-town ID. She was fifteen. He took the needle from her inner elbow, tasting the blood-crusted junk. Not bad. He lifted the tiny girl up over his shoulder, slipping her quietly into the trash receptacle. Making sure no one noticed. He travelled east, hoping to score a quick bag. Within minutes he was fixing a couple of alleys away, using the needle recovered from the human wreckage left rotting in the garbage. No sooner had the shit started rocketing into his bloodstream before the bile pushed upward, pulsing into his throat and out of his mouth. “Not bad …” he grumbled before dropping to his knees. Crying. Heartbroken. He picked up the filthy needle, began plunging the spike over and over again into his arms, wrists, hands, neck. Stabbing wildly, searching frantically for a valve that would unhinge, release, set free. Trying to find that black hole, somewhere deep inside, that once plundered would concentrate all the pain, horror, heartbreak into a solid-bodied center. Looking for a way into the void that would lovingly engulf, lovingly embrace, lovingly surround, lovingly erase. Looking for somewhere, somehow, someone who could help him to house the unending cycle of pain and hate.

  Looking for someone like me, who’d believe him whether he made it all up or not. Looking for a sister, mother, lover, fucker, white witch, goddess, wench, someone drenched in loving sympathy who could comfort him with unconditional understanding. Someone who KNEW. Someone who had been there before. Someone who could explain to him that there were no easy answers. No easy way out. No escape. From yourself. You had to LEARN to DEAL with the cards you were dealt. Had to learn the hard way that the world doesn’t OWE you a fucking thing. Not a reason, nor excuse. No apologies. Had to learn that some forms of insanity run in the family, pure genetics, polluted lifelines, full of disease. Profanity. Addiction. Co-addiction. Inability to deal with reality, what the fuck ever that’s supposed to mean when you’re born into an emotional ghetto of endless abuse. Where the only way out is in … deep, deep inside, so you poke holes in your skin, thinking that if you could just concentrate the pain it wouldn’t remain an all-consuming surround which suffocates you from the first breath of day to your last dying day. Day in. Day out. Day in and out. I knew all about it.

  He’d been clean for eight months. Met him at a small party. First reaction was to smack him in the fucking face. Something about him crawled under my skin. Immediately. He walked in with Jennifer, a friend of a friend. She took me aside and asked me to take him off her hands. Wanted to just unload him, couldn’t deal with his bullshit anymore. He was beautiful but fucked up. Sober but full of shit. A pathological liar, petty thief, nonstop hustler. His smile could charm the panties off of you. She told me to beware, but thought I might be able to straighten him out. I was still trying to straighten myself out.

  He
bothered me so much it made me curious. You’d think I’d be able to recognize a soul-sucking predator. Being one myself. Maybe that was the attraction. The challenge. Like any charlatan he was charismatic. Magnetic. He glowed. His force field irresistible. His smile decimating. He seemed so incredibly happy. His hook.

  I was warned about him by everyone who knew him. I ignored it. Thought I could make it different. Feed him the understanding, knowledge, wisdom to drop the victimturned-victimizer guise. Even though I was still working on it myself. Still working on it.

  He followed me out to San Francisco. Unloaded his life story on the front porch of the local Acid Guru. A brilliant Argentinian professor who I was staying with. Specialized in collecting memorabilia from Leary, Kesey, Liddy, the Haight. Offered us his pad for the weekend. Took off for Big Sur. Asked politely that we not set the bed on fire. The quilt once belonged to Janis Joplin.

  My latest flame’s magnetic charm soured suddenly during foreplay. Once a junkie, always a junkie. Hooked on drama. Like myself. The sex was a brutal test of physical endurance. Both of us battering the other into submission, neither one of us wanting to be the first to throw in the bloody towel. We passed out for a few hours. Woke up and started right back in. The sex ugly, vicious, hot.

  We spent the weekend in bed. His stint with the Church of Satan recollected through sex magic, hypnosis, past-life regression. Brought me back to a place in time I had frequented often in dreams, fantasy. Assumed his role of Spanish Nazi Dictator during the bloodthirsty Inquisition. I played arrogant Heretic chained to the master’s chamber. A willing victim of murderous pathology. Blind. Bound. Gagged. Hogtied. Sliced up, strung out in a time zone past/present/future not wanting to return to the here and now, but be forever lost, trapped inside a haunted limbo, a sexual vertigo. Entombed in a self-obsessed sarcophagus of torture. His torture. My torture. Hundreds of years of endless collective torture role-played out again and again.

  I should have known better. In truth I did. I had been warned. But I knew exactly what I was doing. I always knew what I was doing. I just didn’t stop myself. I never stopped myself. Especially when I knew better.

  To escape from the extreme psychic pollution shrouding New York, I ran off to New Orleans. Whose culture of psychic extremes has been cultivated for hundreds of years under the guise of voodoo, hoodoo, Santería, black magic, Creole folklore, and congenital vampirism. Atmospheric toxins contribute to a geographical sickness plaguing the city whose seat lies three feet below sea level. Its mouth a gaping maw sucking the muddy sludge off the banks of the filthy Mississippi.

  I was drawn to New Orleans’ decaying beauty, ripe with overgrown vegetation which both blossomed and rotted in the very same breath. Swooned by the intoxicating delicacy of lush gardenias, night-blooming jasmine, and sweet olive trees whose healing aromas and heavenly perfume would subdue even the sourest dispositions. Then, as suddenly as one turns a corner, the olfactories are assaulted by clouds of noxious fumes boiling over the flimsy manhole covers used as trash-can lids for the underground garbage receptacles. Which offer no protection from the gruesome stew of dead fish, bell peppers, and dirty baby diapers left decomposing in the still afternoon swelter, its stagnant humidity and oppressive heatwaves conspiring to produce fainting spells, narcolepsy, and shortness of breath.

  I was spellbound by the decadent architecture, the elaborate sprinkling of wrought-iron balconies. Sweeping porches flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows, darkened with wooden shutters to help beat back the midday sun. Backyards full of weeping willows whose droopy arms would form plump tents canvassing the trees.

  My only contact in New Orleans was Bettina, a sexy German ex-patriot on business leave from a career as chanteuse of a post-industrial cabaret act who specialized in stealing haunted melodies out of Dietrich’s scrapbook. Bettina, bored with the labored machinations of the music industry, became an investment banker. Was managing a dilapidated mansion situated on the edge of the French Quarter, which she bought at a city auction. She petitioned to have it granted historical status, was renovating and planning to sell back to the city. At a two-hundred-percent profit margin. In the meantime it had been vacant for almost a decade; they’d already cleaned the place out, I was welcome to play house sitter until I landed an apartment.

  A few days after my arrival a man lay dead six blocks from the front door of the mansion on Governor Nicholls. Bettina and I were returning from coffee. We gunned it in under a red light on the corner of Esplanade. An elderly black man stepping off the crosswalk was too entranced by my flaming red hair and too-tight white T-shirt to notice the donut delivery truck barrelling at him from the other direction. He was thrown thirty feet straight up in the air and landed with a skull-splitting shudder in the middle of the street. Welcome to the Big Easy.

  I rented a small house with a backyard bordering a convent. Morning coffee was taken on the huge screened-in back porch, whose view afforded me the daily spectacle of nuns frolicking, often engaged in vicious games of volleyball or badminton. My next door neighbor was a teenage queen with borderline personality disorder and musical aspirations of attending Juilliard. Until then, every Sunday found him banging out hymns at a local Baptist church. I Ieft New York sick of being crowded, hassled, harassed, hounded, and ogled, to reside beside a flaming peeping tom whose rampant voyeurism would often lead him directly to my bedroom window. A blank stare, frozen smile, flippant demeanor. There was nothing I could do to discourage him. One afternoon he telephoned to invite me to lunch. I sarcastically replied, not today, I was busy, engaged in a naked ritual communing with the devil. He interrupted to correct me. He could see me sitting in a sundress, fully made up, my legs crossed, daintily bouncing my left foot up and down. He was watching me through a small crack between curtain and shade, standing on my front porch, cordless phone in hand. I screamed at him to go home. And stop his obsessive spying. Of course he wouldn’t.

  I assumed relocating to New Orleans would offer up a fresh start. I had removed myself from everyone I knew, wanted to settle into a comfortable numbness and recuperate from the previous thirty years. That lasted about a month. I got a call from the Spanish Nazi, inviting himself down for a short visit, bored with L.A., or more likely, neck deep in bullshit from spinning one too many lies to the wrong party. I foolishly relented. He showed up two days later. And stayed for three weeks. By the end of which I was ready to kill him. Sure he had come to kill me.

  Demented fantasies of him being ordered down from high-ranking officials in the Church of Satan, who had elected me a ritual victim worthy of sacrifice. What better location than Death’s Other Kingdom, where the electricity of magic is forever illuminating the doorways that lead to the next dimension.

  I was originally attracted to the Spanish bastard under the misguided impression that through therapy and recovery he had miraculously been transformed from battered child out to avenge the world, to mischievous imp ready to forgive, forget, and get on with it. So smooth was his ruse. I was hoodwinked.

  His glee, an effervescence whose sparkle could anesthetize, was regrettably endlessly overshadowed by deep depression, black moods, temper tantrums the scope of which could darken an entire city block. There was no crawling out from under such a specter. Like a torrential spring downpour, one could only pray that it would soon pass.

  We’d spend days transfixed in sexual delirium, his cheap parlor tricks effective enough to delude me into believing he was indeed the Prince of Darkness he mirrored his image upon. I should have known better. Master of schemes, scams, rip-off. A beautiful package. Unfortunately, he was full of shit.

  Had probably lied to me about everything. I didn’t even know his age. He’d given me at least three different interpretations of every story that left his lips. I myself was prone to weaving fanciful yarns spun like fairy tales of mysterious origins, but still maintained the capacity to inject enough realism to steer the punch line toward fact, not fantasy. He had somehow lost the ability to differentiate. When tra
pped in a web of his own fiction, he’d turn defensive, lash out. It became stifling, intolerable. I sent him away.

  He continued to stalk me. Hour-long phone calls, begging apologies. When I refused him reentry into my life, my house was bombarded with electrical discharges, which would send cupboards and closet doors banging open and closed like a spastic child having a seizure. Rooms would be flooded with negatively charged atoms producing a force field impossible to navigate through. An exorcism was in order.

  Holy water, salt, sage. An effigy of the bastard who I had imagined had been pursuing me through multiple lifetimes. An attempt to remove the burden of his curse, whose weight was a heavy cross made unbearable by his belief that I was born to shoulder it.

  I rebounded by having an affair with a beautiful teenage manchild. I was biking toward the park one day, trying to untangle myself from the Spanish Nazi’s long-distance tentacles. He was still phoning. Still stalking. Still obsessing. It was awful. Suddenly, a lanky vision dressed in black sped past me in the opposite direction, legs and arms akimbo, towering over a ratty bicycle’s rusty frame. My nipples responded. I vacantly pinched one. I wanted to call out, to follow him. Kicked myself for not trusting my instinct. On arriving home, I ran into the queen from next door. Commiserated over returning empty-handed, disappointed for having let slip such a tasty morsel. The queen probed, begging me to relive the details. Where did I spot him? What make of bike? Blue or brown eyes? Black, blond, or brunette hair? Boots, shoes, or sneakers? Turning conspiratorial, he insisted he could set up a date for the following night. Eddy lived only a few blocks away. The queen had been offering him blowjobs for months. At least now he’d be able to have a ringside seat, no doubt outside my bedroom window, to witness the deflowering.

  The next morning my backyard was resplendent with quaint wrought-iron tables and chairs pilfered from a local café or wealthy neighbor. A small handwritten note read, Purloined for your pleasure … at your service … Edward Rex. Fuck flowers, Eddy was courting me with furniture. That it was stolen made it even more precious.