PARADOXIA (12 page)

T
o 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 trapped 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.

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.