by Lunch Lydia
He arrived promptly at 9:00. Regaled in knee-high storm troopers, black button-down shirt, red armband, raging erection. A fetishist’s wet dream. A well-mannered, highly evolved, self-styled Hitler Youth. Seventeen years old. He’d live with me for a year and a half, making the occasional trip back to his parents’ to retrieve books, clothes, his twelve-year-old brother.
We shared an interest in the secret life of inanimate objects. Constantly foraging for rusty implements, fascinated with rebirth, decay, regeneration. Construct small pouches of potent gris-gris, which we’d fill with powerful herbs, white birch, cicada wings, teeth, small bones. A white witchcraft configured around the purity of youthful intuition. My vampirism returning to suckle on the sun’s (son’s) blood.
It was heavenly spending time with someone whose limited life experience had spared him the endless cycle of affair, anger, entropy, recovery, relationship, affair, anger, entropy etc… . which I, just like everyone I know, have suffered from.
And I, far from perverting the tender blossom of his youth, allowed him the freedom to fully express his natural tendencies. Encouraged him to explore his every desire. Make real his fantasies. I would tie him to the bed, handcuff him to the bars on the bedroom window. Sitting upright in a kitchen chair. Bound and blindfolded. Leave the house for an hour or two. Allow his mind to wander. Fantasies to overwhelm. Return to the musky scent of his orgasm, still warm, wet. Teenage lust ripe in the air. Free him from his self-satisfied bondage. Take him roughly. Squirting all over him. Pounding him off. Until, light-headed, we’d collapse. Infants at nap.
But bliss is short-lived when one prefers to sup on melodrama. I had been pleasantly numb for months. Was starting to get itchy. Eddy and I were ready to move on, both felt our relationship had reached a glorious peak and to continue would only produce stagnation.
I was offered a short teaching stint, one semester at the San Francisco Art Institute. Invited to take over the Performance/ Video department. Run it as I saw fit. A paid vacation, hired to experiment in mind control, group hypnosis. I took it on a lark. Pulled once more in a westerly direction. What could be easier than taking twenty students, weaning them off their idealistic trust-fund lollipops, renouncing their theories of art grants, and giving them a dose of hardcore reality? The themes of my class were fearlessness, how to create without a budget, and the importance of autobiographical bloodletting elevated to a new art form.
It wasn’t long before vicious rumors circulated throughout the school. Of course, I insisted my students encourage gossip. Spread little white lies about how we had formed a coven rife with black magic, devil worship, ritual sacrifice. Orgies. Outlandish exaggerations, or merely an insight into the inner workings of a twisted head mistress who knowingly cultivated the abuse of power. The line was very fine indeed.
I began an affair with one of my students. A tortured Italian graffiti artist whose tag read, SICK. He’d slink into class dressed in trench coat and stocking cap. Screwdriver in right pocket. Steel-toed boots. Questioning whether it had been me who was psychically stalking his Oakland loft, encouraging late-night sessions of mind-blowing masturbation. My spectral aura hovering over his bed. Urging him on. In my direction.
I admitted having been summoned to San Francisco. Knew something, someone was waiting. Had spent weeks prior to my departure with my mind’s eye wandering an astral roadmap through train tracks, back streets, bedrooms, alleys. A blind search for the source of what was calling. I knew it was him.
I was installed in a Mission apartment, compliments of the school, strangely enough a few blocks from my first liaison with the Spanish Nazi. Who still continued to plague. I had invited Sick over under the premise of reviewing a piece he had performed for the class. A monologue detailing the struggle of deprogramming one’s self from the clutches of organized religion after having been brainwashed by their brilliant bullshit for four years.
I was intrigued by the concept of translating the knowledge and worship of Divine Love into layman’s terms. Applying Love of God into Love of Goddess. Casting myself in the starring role. Infatuated with the vision of one so selfless that he would willingly put his life on hold as he travelled door-to-door preaching the gospel. He had spent two years as a missionary. Was still in the process of extricating himself from religion’s morbid death grip.
I offered to give Sick a healing. An alchemist’s ritual of using positive energy to purge the negative ions surrounding the body’s force field. His, a ten-foot shield riddled with suspicion, paranoia, doubt, and fear. Drastic measures were called for in an attempt to aid his recovery from the ministry’s stranglehold.
The “psychic” invites the “recipient” to relax. To draw in deep breaths allowing the mind to neutralize, drift. Empty. With a calculated series of hand gestures, one circulates the blocked energy, clearing a pathway for the chakras to open. When done correctly, euphoria usually follows. But it’s an unpredictable science at best. The last time I had been the beneficiary, I was sent spinning into a previous incarnation, twisted nightmare. Forced to witness my own vivisection. At the hands of a madman reminiscent of the Spanish Nazi. A technicolor bloodbath as real as it was hundreds of years before.
Sick sat on the edge of the bed. I began to manipulate the atmosphere. Scattering energy to the four corners. Stimulating air flow. The room began to expand. Its dimensions doubling, tripling. Quadrupling. We had blown a hole through a doorway into another realm. The walls turned a sickly gray nimbus lined with slippery entities whose evil demeanors undulated, taunted. I felt possessed by the tortured ghosts of beings both living and dead, who were seeking a vehicle through which they could translate their ungodly anguish.
An orgy of ectoplasmic slugs began forcing themselves out of Sick’s mouth. Scattering to the edges of the room. Swelling in size and number. A hideous vision that both repulsed and amazed. A corrupt intermingling of voodoo, black magic, and exorcism. The entire room bathed in cloudy shadows. A milky fog. We collapsed, petrified, clinging to each other in desperation. Fearful of being sucked into the vortex, that sewer of lost souls whose polluted origins were impossible to decipher. An endless Limbo unfolding before us.
I ran to open the window. Fresh air to disperse atmospheric sludge. Demagnetize the electricity. A cool breath of salt current slices through the pus. Which puddles out into the street. Whose empty silence is shattered by a single gunshot boomeranging off the wet sidewalk. We duck for cover. A squad car’s siren follows within seconds. The block gets a lockdown. Bookended in black-and-white. A merry-go-round of red lights. Our sickness a contagion.
We spent the weekend consumed in sexual nirvana. Surrendering to the freedom of censoring from our psyche all but the most voluptuous sensations. An otherworldly union which opened celestial gateways through which we disappeared for days. Impossible to return to clock time while still bathed in efflorescent light, healing from a psychic purge.
The semester was over. I was returning to New Orleans. Hesitant to leave Sick behind. But I was still living with Eddy. I’d have to ask him to leave. Plan my next move.
Sick called me a week later. Had dropped out of school, quit his day job, and was locked out of his loft by his roommate. A beefy Latino sculptor who smoked enough pot to realize that if you dabble in magic, even subconsciously, you risk losing your mind. Which he assumed Sick had. Convinced he would end up institutionalized. Incarcerated. Fearful for him, of him, fearful of the spell we had cast. So he kicked Sick out. Who by now was suffering from delusions of grandeur, chemical imbalance, hypoglycemia, borderline schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorders. Neuro-chemical transmitters overloaded by the electricity in the atmosphere. San Francisco nearly vibrates with electrical disturbances. Another city whose geographical peculiarities rifle the atmosphere. Disequilibrium shatters the sensitive soul.
Sick was forced out into the street. A self-appointed martyr with a Christ complex turned urban shaman. Where once he walked the streets preaching to others the path to loc
ating the gods within themselves, he was now reduced to cohabitating with the godless and ever-present evil loitering on every street corner in any city whose sidewalks and doorways are your only shelter. His only protection, the screwdriver in his trench coat pocket. I sent him a ticket to New Orleans. Death’s Other Kingdom. Insane with anticipation.
The moment he stepped inside my living room, the portals once more expanded, our combined chemistry lit the room with diffused light whose amber rainbow puddled in corners. We celebrated our reunion with hours of glorious fucking. His prison sentence of celibacy, which had lasted for four years under the ministry’s meddling eye, forever commuted. As a lover he was madman, twisted minister, devout follower, expert conjurer. Wrapped inside the teenage body of a demented artist poisoned on aerosol fumes. An intoxicating combination.
Time would evaporate. Days melted into each other. New Orleans’ endless summer alchemy, a magician’s delight. Travelling both backward and forward in time, the psychic landscape a battlefield where wars once waged would rage again. Revisiting multiple lifetimes whose victories and sorrows were ours to relive. Heavenly torture.
Our psychosis had escalated. Illuminations would manifest off of inanimate possessions. Haunted by history’s insistence on repetition. Visions emanating in furious succession. We were both losing it. Sick questioning if I was spiking the food. Feeding him acid, mescaline, mushrooms, cyanide. I confided I would often flavor meals with my body’s juices. Blood, urine, mucus, secretions. Old Cajun recipe. You could train a dog by feeding it your sweat. Worked just as well on humans. Practiced by many a seductress. I doubted it was causing hallucinations.
We were trapped in a voodoo of our own design. Fucking four, five, six times a day. Too hot to sleep. Too wired to eat. Dehydrated. Our bodies, dirty little puppets whose master would not reveal himself, preferring instead to entangle us in a mystical hotbed of lust, dementia, madness. Forced to do battle against ourselves, each other, and the multiple others who were fighting for dominance and possession of our powers. To reason.
Both of us rippling through hundreds of personalities, as if the remote control had crashed, flipping from one channel to the next, occasionally stalling over the renunciations put forth by an ex-member of the clergy who had spun 360 degrees many times over and had returned to the pulpit to once more deliver yet another speech which would fall upon deaf ears. Sick attempted to warn me, I was too stubborn to listen. We were both insane.
An all-day battlecade. My vehement denials the target. Windows were shattered. Books burned. Photos destroyed. Dressers and desks tipped on their sides, spilling their orphaned contents in sad little piles, the tattered remnants bruised by an unholy home invasion. The enemy within let loose to rampage. Neither safe from ourselves nor each other. A brutal exorcism inflamed our madness.
The police were summoned. I contemplated shooting both of us before they arrived. At thirty-three I was suffering from my own Christ complex. Convinced that this was the culmination of my sordid death trip. I was sure it was my time to go. It was. To Charity Hospital Psychiatric Ward. To check Sick in. Before we killed each other. He was under the delusion that our entire misadventure was an elaborate performance piece, staged without script, being videotaped and docudrama’d as a televised event simulcast over the airwaves. It should have been. The opening credits, a schizoid graffiti scrawl … The Animals moaning, “There is a House in New Orleans …”
The cops escorted us into the reception area. Full of alcoholics, drug addicts, manic depressives, the parents of acid casualties. Old men and women with nowhere else to go. Hoping to escape the afternoon’s swelter.
New Orleans by nature is a swamp whose gases ebb forth from the murky pools of stagnant water encircling its perimeter. Humidity expands the gas, trapping its poison close to the surface. Rotting vegetation emits fumes of carbon dioxide. Electricity runs through the center of the city, powering trolley cars that transport stale souls housed in bodies poisoned from overrich food, pollution, and bad genetics. Over-and underground cables form a barrier shield that prevents negative energy from escaping the boundaries of its primordial polarity. It is a breeding ground for illness, virus, sickness, self-destruction, and insanity.
Sick had never looked more beautiful. A real latter-day saint like Martin Sheen in Badlands. Handcuffed behind his back, dirty bare feet, low-slung Levi’s, and a bare chest, chicken-dancing around the lobby, making small talk with the other outpatients, who all appeared desperate to bum a cigarette, get their medication refilled, or insist that they were only there on a visit.
I filled out the forms for his admission. He assumed I was checking us both in. I probably should have. They brought us up to the ward for evaluation. First strapping him into an ancient wheelchair whose rusty tires squealed and wheezed. The anteroom stale with dead air, sour breath, body odor. Crowded with inmates whose delirium tumbled forth in fits and starts. Hysterical laughter followed by alligator tears. Rambling monologues quoting Shakespearian rhapsodies. Spates of uncomfortable silence. Facial tics. Vulgar gestures. Obscenities.
I knew I had to get him out of there. But once you entered the ward, a pass was needed to appease the armed guard who kept watch outside the locked steel door. We were summoned into the doctor’s office. Scaly and reptilian, as twisted as any of his patients. Apologized that an evaluation could not be performed until Monday. Two days away. He was finishing up his rounds, didn’t have the time to squeeze us in. Suggested Sick relax at the hospital until then. Panic set in.
I shut the door to his office. Barricading the three of us in. Urged the doctor to listen to me. I had made a mistake. What I had misdiagnosed as madness, loss of self-control, schizophrenia, was merely exhaustion. Malnutrition. An allergic reaction. Stress. Explained how Sick’s childhood had been haunted by both human and otherworldly hellraisers who had plagued an only son’s lonely nights. Forced into solitary existence while his single mother moonlighted on the graveyard shift; many midnights would come and go to find him intoxicated with fear, searching for the source of hushed whispers, sudden flashes of light, the tapping on the glass. And now, sent forth on a whim, landing in a strange city, he was unable to derail the morbid vertigo that trails childhood’s brutal memories. Memories that had only recently begun to surface. Hoping that illumination would put an end to his paralyzing fear of abandonment. His hatred of other men, both his horrible father as well as Daddy’s replacements, his rebellion against authority. Coupled with having been homeless, thrown out into the street by his best friend, forced to walk for days on end, unsure of his next meal, fearful of being made victim in his sleep. All he needed was rest. Food. Water. To recover. Promising that if the doctor would be so kind as to allow me to check him out, I’d assume full responsibility for his well-being. The doctor, too tired to argue and unable to outsmart me, reluctantly let us go. We ran to the exit. Delirious.
Years lost in vicious accusations, bitter curses, myopic monologues. Followed by infernal silence. Thick, sour air hanging like a noose dangling obscenely. Blood rush consumes reason. Dislocation follows. A hollow forms. The vortex swallows. It is absolutely impossible to talk sense into me under such conditions.
Time after time, with one man after another, I would find myself engaged in endless conversations, practicing the art of spinning circles around them. No doubt, in part, due to my stubborn inability to admit anything other than the most incriminating. Few men actually want as much revealed. And I’ll admit EVERYTHING. Except that I’m wrong. Except that I’m guilty. I’m sure I’ve been wrong on any number of things, in many given circumstances. But I’d never admit it. Ever. I don’t remember ever FEELING guilty. EVER. But I’m sure I am. Of just about everything.
I’ve never lost a single argument. I wouldn’t admit it even if I had.
I’ve been called insane, a sociopath, out-of-my-fucking-mind, a lunatic, deranged, demented, heartless, a bitch, cunt, slut, whore, manic-schizophrenic paranoid … an evil, cold, calculating, controlling al
ien-robot. All by people who loved me or said they did or thought they did. Although they probably didn’t ever really know me. Didn’t know the REAL me. Knew only what I’d let them know. Knew only so much.
I was very open, loving, responsive, supportive, giving, generous. When I wasn’t a deranged, schizophrenic, sociopathic, heartless cunt, possessed with an incredible ability to fluctuate wildly at any given time under many given circumstances.
So good was I at compartmentalizing every aspect of my life that there were huge sections of myself which even I would lose sight of. Massive sweeps of memory would disappear. Chunks, blocks, years of time would evaporate. As if nothing before that very moment had existed as far back as I could recall. As if life and death hung suspended between the four walls around me now. Time fell away and with it every day of the last thirty years was erased. I could remember a backwash of history, but not my own.
My moods could swing violently between breaths, lasting a few moments or for years. At times each new sentence, every syllable would sing a separate song filled with dissonant melodies and fractured harmonies. A single word could trigger a chain reaction in the right brain which would catapult my opponent, partner, lover, fucker, into a contrary conversation with a distant relative of whoever it is they perceived me to be.
Often in that split second of a mood shift, I would forever lose interest in the passive victim who had prodded the arrival of another disparate personality. Of course, I would seek out men who themselves were victims of radical adrenal overload, manic fluctuations, chemical imbalance, wild mood swings. This game became a dance of two fighters shadow boxing. Each trying desperately to survive not only the self, in its multiple fractures, but to dominate and triumph over the deadly opponent who spits back with equal venom the poisoned rantings of an equally disturbed psyche.