The Televisionary Oracle (45 page)

“If I was truly Robin the Mouth, the Sin-Eater, in a previous incarnation,” I prayed silently, “let me tap into the powers I possessed then. Dear Persephone, help me melt down the torments and blights I’m absorbing, that they may become a source of beautiful raw energy for Jumbler and me.”

As I sipped, Jumbler’s sobs evolved into a half-rapturous, half-anguished moan, even as her tears continued to ripple.

“Do not stop,” she whimpered. “It feels so real.”

At the peak of her intensity, she let loose a breathy grunt and broke away from me.

“Unggggh,” she said. “Got to lie down.” She slumped over to the bed and lay down. “Come here,” she commanded with a weak laugh.

“What happened?” I said, alarmed, as I slipped into position next to her.

“You made me come,” she smiled, “in a manner of speaking.”

“What manner is that?” I asked, confused but enjoying my confusion. My weeping, after a long copious run, was abating.

“You sucked down my sins so hard you brought on my period,” she replied in a quietly maniacal voice.

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, disappointed.

“Do not be sorry in the least,” she said, shaking her head drowsily. “I have never felt so perfect in my entire life.”

“You’re lying,” I cackled. “I hate people who call menstruation a curse, but it’s not as if I ever heard anyone say it feels pleasurable.”

“The onslaught of bleeding is always orgasmic for me.”

Her streams of tears were following a different course now that she was lying on her side facing me.

“I’m flabbergasted,” I said. “Flummoxed and flubadubbed.” Delirium
had begun to possess me, too.

“Not that I bleed all that often,” she added with a cracked giggle. “Before tonight, it has been almost eleven months.”

“Should I go out and buy you some pads?” I said, trying to force myself, against every inclination, to be practical. “I don’t have anything here.”

“No. Too late now. Let it flow. I apologize to your pajamas.”

“But why has it been so long?”

Instead of answering, she grasped my head and pressed her whole open mouth around my mouth. It wasn’t a kiss. She didn’t flutter her lips or swirl her tongue. She simply held this pose and slowly breathed into my mouth, like a rescuer doing CPR. On her inhales, she maintained the seal, forcing me to exhale back into her.

To my surprise, I felt no instinct to pull away. As unnatural as it might have seemed to me in a more rational mood, I was enthralled with the searing intimacy of it all. From deep inside her body, warm, moist air wafted deep into my body. But it was more than air. Tasting and touching it now so vividly, its smoky persimmon amber, its maple syrup mingled with seawater, I had no doubt that it was thoroughly infused with her daimon, her life-force, the distilled essence of her most personal genius. And I returned her gift to her, suffused with my own concentrated potion. Now and then, one of us would unfurl a singing moan as we breathed out.

Gradually, I began to notice a fresh marvel. Or maybe it had been unfolding before, and I was just tuning into it. On her exhales, I saw but also felt a subtle ray of light streaming out of her teary eyes and into mine. There was an actual erotic sensation in my pupils, as if her dewy eyelight were a loving caress. As she inhaled, I sensed or maybe fantasized that she was drinking in an analogous beam from my gaze.
Dear Goddess
, I prayed,
I am making love
. Without stroking or churning or undulating, without doing anything more than breathing and looking, I was flooding with sexual pleasure. It sprang from my heart and my eyes as much as from my lowest chakra, and rippled out in pulsing spirals to the ends of me.

I swear that the very molecules of my lover’s face began to vibrate and throb, until I imagined I was looking at an electrified cloud in the shape of an ever-shifting mask. The only constant, in her eyes, was a
relaxed concentration mingled with mirthful excitement. She betrayed no restlessness, no distraction. There was nothing else we had to do, nowhere else to go, besides this. I felt utterly at home.

Our tears throbbed in celebration, tiny waves pulsing in rhythm to our heartbeats.

A
s you glide closer towards invoking the exact intimacy you need, we’d like to offer you a few love spells.

I
love to sleep. And when anyone else but me wakes me up for any other reason except for dream recall—especially the night after a show by World Entertainment War—I am very cranky. Several budding relationships of mine have foundered because my lover refused to respect the web of rituals with which I surround my sleep. The UPS delivery person has been trained never to knock at my door before 3
P.M
., lest he be greeted by a dragon.

So as I am startled awake in the here and now, the day after last night’s partially brilliant, mostly failed show at the Catalyst, by what sounds like rocks hitting my second-story bedroom window, I am immediately running hot with the adrenaline of anger. The clock reads a few minutes after high noon. Leave me the fuck alone. Go away.

The problem is, now that my body is radiating adrenaline, I probably won’t be able to return to sleep anyway. But it’s the principle of the thing. Another ping sounds at the window. Goddamn you to the seventh level of Dante’s inferno. I don’t care if you’re Ed McMahon in tow with the Virgin Mary here to present me with a karmic credit slip good for release from the wheel of samsara and an eighty-five-million-year vacation in heaven after I die. You can come back when I’m good and ready to rouse myself. No matter how many rocks you throw, no matter how many knocks on my door, I will ignore you.

I shove my blue rubber earplugs deep into my ears and put one of my pillows over my head.

But the disturbance grows. I can’t fucking believe it: the sound of
a female voice through a bullhorn. My curiosity overwhelms my outrage. I take out my earplugs. The message is decipherable only in spots. But from among the jumble of chuckles, singsong words, and portentous sighs, I can finally make out a recurring phrase:

“Rockstar, Rockstar, let down your hair.”

It occurs to me that I may be listening to a cracked variation on Grimms’ fairy tale of Rapunzel. Before I can decide how to respond, a fresh interruption assaults me. It’s my answering machine, which is on a shelf at the foot of my bed: I neglected to turn down the volume before I collapsed in bed last night.

Damn. It’s my stalker, Patricia. She’s the psychotic who calls, emails, and snailmails me with prolific devotion in order to keep me up to date on the latest developments in the massive conspiracy she’s being victimized by—a conspiracy in which I am at the hub, along with the Queen of England, Bill Gates, baseball star Ken Griffey, the Holy Ghost, and the puppets of Sesame Street.

“Well, Mr. Sleazeball Scumbucket,” she greets me, “you really kill me. I was at your show last night, of course. I wouldn’t’ve even gone except for that dream I had where you said you’d get the Queen to chop off my little fingers and feed them to my cat if I didn’t go. Why do you hate me so much? Motherfucking piece of garbage. Last night’s show was a new low, even for a shithead drug-dealing asswipe like you. First you stuck all those subliminal curses in your stupid speeches. Gave me a rash on my thighs. If that wasn’t enough, I had to deal with you getting your little friend the Holy Ghost to astral-project his big milky sperm right into my ovaries. Jerkoff dickweed. You hate me so much you’d even risk wrecking your inane little show just so you could torture me. Guess I showed you, Crudfucker. Didn’t know I’m a wiccan voodoo priestess, did you? Used my mojo to grab a hold of that tall chick’s mind and send her up on stage to mess with you. You looked so stupid when she stung my poison into you. I’m glad they had to carry you off stage like a bag of trash. I hope you’re still unconscious. Now get this, you clucksucking jibberjabbering dunderstubber: I am not going to take your big dick in my mouth even if you do melt the Antarctic ice pack and flood my house away. Even if you do use your so-called poetry hexes to storm those meteors down on my head. And just keep in mind that the district attorney is a personal friend of mine.”

Much as I hate to admit it, I’m entertained by this madwoman’s rap. I keep listening to the end, even as the invader with the bullhorn outside repeats her absurd announcement. And besides, it’s perversely comforting to imagine that I might have had some excuse, however preposterous, for my behavior at last night’s show. I have
never
before blacked out during a performance, even in those three gigs, during my brief period of youthful folly, when I poured a blend of cocaine, Mad Dog wine, and pot into the holy temple of my body.

And yet, from the pissed-off though bemused reports of my fellow band members at 2:30
A.M
., Rapunzel’s magic gob of spit—or was it a knock on my head?—had plunged me into a daze so profound that I had to be hauled off stage and laid on a couch in the rear dressing room. For the first time in recorded history, World Entertainment War played for an hour and a half without me.

Even worse. My bandmates assured me that the fantastic love-making my darling and I enjoyed had in fact happened entirely in my own imagination. It was a damn fine hallucination, that’s all.

The megaphone’s lyrical crackle has died down. I’m about to drag myself to the window to investigate when I hear a sharp whap, like the sound of metal spiking wood. The whole wall of my house shakes. Next there comes a series of gritty clangs against the wall, beginning near ground level and ascending. My imagination whips up a picture of a woman climbing up my wall.

When a feminine hand lifts the window and reaches in through the curtain, I’m finally moved to sit upright and put on my glasses.

A tidal wave of auburn hair thrusts itself through the open window, some of it bound in two massive braids, followed by a vision of the woman with whom I’ve packed a year’s worth of living and loving since I met her formally yesterday.

As the vision climbs casually into my red stuffed chair and removes her crampons, I record the details with the same concentration I devote to noticing my surroundings in a lucid dream: black tights beneath a purple silk mini-skirt; gold satin bikini top; red, white, and blue beaded vest with a picture of a baseball that looks like the planet Jupiter being hit with a bat by an angel or goddess in long white gown; and a silver beaded headband with a tail of yellow and red feathers trailing down her back.