PARADOXIA (13 page)

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 locating 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.

Y
ears 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 alien-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.

A vampirism I was reluctant to admit to, even when exposed to the dying remains of my latest kill.

I started to get frightened of my own libido. My sexual urgings, ravenous desires, a beast forever banging on the door. Continuing to seek out nameless, faceless strangers. Hoping to find one, ten, a hundred who could quell this sickening hunger, quench an unbearable thirst. Who could abate this exhausting search for other, another, more.

I was a sexual predator, consumed by the need to feed. To feed in. To find someone, anyone, something, anything that could feed into me what I needed. The need became an impossible irritant. I was looking to possess, to consume what they possessed that most reminded me of myself. That most reminded me of an inextinguishable luminescence, that radar of a dead star whose ghost shall never cease to cast shadows. I was looking in vain for myself as I willingly disappeared inside of others.

Of course, to fill the void within only the self will suffice. We reach this realization only after we've stuffed every hole, every orifice, every opening with an indiscriminate array of pointless junk. Wreckage. Waste. Human offal. And still hunger remains unsatisfied, especially when the object of desire is forever in flux. Gluttony is never satisfied, whether it's for sex, food, or drugs. It begs to be fed an enormous amount of useless stimulation, information, trivial soundbites, random affections, unrelated facts and figures. Forgettable fucks.

And the more you've had … the more you want. An endless cycle of multiple frustrations. Where nothing seems to satisfy. Not even in dreams.

And my dreams were full of blistering hallucinations on an epileptic scale. A crash of limbs and legs, crusty with the browning blood of a transgenerational orgy. Where hundreds of bodies flail wildly in slow-motion like a bad acid flashback marrying Bosch to Bundy. Bruises and scars rippling like varicose veins under black light. The returning ghosts of all those I had sexed began reemerging like a flash flood bursting the memory banks.

History, reduced to thousands of snapshots rifled through the air like a broken filmstrip ripped through an ancient projector forcing the mind to work in multiples, tripping over images begging for recognition. Begging for deliverance from the place where time smolders.

I longed to escape the perimeter of this fleshy prison, to disappear into milky nimbus, blurry-eyed, light-headed. Longed for a permanent amnesia, a catatonia which forgoes responsibility, the enemy of freedom. Wanted to erase dreams, memory, vision, to ultimately forget every word, every face, every nightmare. But I couldn't. I can't forget. I remember too much. Remember every detail, nuance, am forced to repeat even the most repellent occurrence. My sanity insists upon it. Insists upon expulsion. Purgation. Insists I wring from every cell the poisoned thoughts, polluted deeds, malicious intentions that would, if not puked forth, riddle me with disease. Sickness. Death.

And I feared that death picks up where life left off. An endless barrage of unbearable obstacles. A godforsaken terrain where lost souls find even less mercy. A shattered dreamstate where every somnambulant second is plagued by the nightmarish preoccupation of one's own fears. A bleak panorama where not even death offers any release, for what you wrought will come back to haunt. As if the struggle never ends. As if there is not now, nor ever has been peace. Peace being foreign to my nature. The nature of the fucking beast.

I feared the repercussions of hundreds of thousands of lifetimes sweeping through a sea of history, threatening to drown me. I was married to the invisible anniversaries which celebrated the accumulation of everything I was, of everyone I had known. Of everyone I had been. And it still wasn't enough. I felt somehow removed from my own experiences, as they washed over me, blurring the interpretation between reality and fantasy. Past and present. My life and the thousands of others I had consumed both in daydreams and nightmares.

I had to de-program myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from the needy leeches who looked to me to swab their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness.

Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction.

I decided to lock myself in. A forced segregation. Sabbatical. A retreat into myself. My selves. Play hide-and-go-seek in the looking glass. The mirror angled at the foot of my bed. Twisted reflections bouncing off into infinity. Obsessed with my image, the myriad of distorted figurines who danced in front of me in rapid succession, every feature exaggerated, every slight imperfection a new delicacy. Glorious wonder at the body's capacity for renewal. Regeneration. Every self-induced orgasm an exercise in life extension. My narcissism unbound, marvelling in delight at the sculpture of the female form.

I began to realize exactly how much of my energy I had been squandering on other people. On men. Men who would never understand that I would always want more than they were ever capable of giving. More than what was even fair to demand. More than they would ever be able to give, even if they knew how. Because I didn't need them. I needed myself. To reclaim myself. To reclaim my capacity for pleasure. I was simply using men to stimulate myself. To stimulate that necessary adrenal rush, that ultimate kick, that heavenly high, that blinding white light that accompanies every orgasm. Those extracelestial explosions which cascade in ripples, reminding you that you are truly, truly alive.

And that surely you must also die. And is death not the ultimate orgasm, a return to that otherworldly ether, whose very origins were indeed a Big Bang, the ultimate explosion, the supreme chaos, whose resonance is the vibration we constantly seek to reproduce in everything we do. In every breath we take. In every orgasm. Faked or not.

I was always vain. My vanity saved me. Kept me sane. Kept me from falling overboard. I suffered from extremes of passion, insatiability, gluttony. But I always knew when to pull away. Pull out. Knew how far I could go before being swallowed, before sinking into the pitfall of self-loathing, addiction, depression.

I was surrounded by manic depressives who battered themselves with the nearest available weapon. Vodka, Scotch, beer, coke, dope, pot, pills, poppers, uppers, downers, in-betweeners. All of which I too indulged in. None of which I ever gave myself over to. None of which ever applied the stranglehold.

I have lived surrounded by entire communities drunk on oblivion. Drunk on death. Drunk to avoid the nauseating confrontation that pits the user against that which they abuse. I was drunk on fuck. Drunk on the charged electricity coursing through the vortex between muscle and bone, expanding inches, feet, miles beyond the skin. Stimulating an itch in inner space. I was strung out on the elevation of blood pressure, the escalation of heart rate. Shallow breaths that starve the brain of oxygen. Suffocation. Hooked to an extraneous power source which I bled like a cipher from the souls of unsuspecting victims.