The Televisionary Oracle (59 page)

I
’m back. It’s me, Rapunzel. The chick with the seven mommies and the invisible twin brother and the forehead that used to have a blotch and the impossibly grandiose reputation to live up to.

I’m coming to you now from a new, improved version of my life. The Pomegranate Grail has married The Eater of Cruelty and brought forth an offspring called the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. The rigorous schooling of my mothers has blended seamlessly with the tantric trickery of my freaky consort Jumbler and the uproarious training I’ve received at Drivetime University. And the old schism between my outer and inner worlds has been healed.

In this new life of mine, five years after I kidnapped myself and erased my blotch, I have become the avatar of the ancient mystery school on my own terms. Sacred fun and erotic prayer are the esthetic ethics at the heart of my reign. My mothers’ love steadies and nurtures me as my freaky consort’s love challenges and inspires. I have figured out how to have my cake and eat it too.

How did I pull it off? The better question would be, how could I
not
have pulled it off given how much help I’ve had: an eternal yet earthy secretary who keeps track of the master plan I’ve been working out over the course of countless incarnations during sixty-six million years; a soul twin-shaman brother-doppelganger muse who has lubricated my travels to the other side of the veil since I was six years old; a lover and best friend who is an unpredictable, multi-gendered genius with tantric training and an inexhaustible supply of brainstorms; and
the Televisionary Oracle itself, the sacred “machine” that always reveals to me exactly what I need to know exactly when I need to know it.

There was a rough patch back when Jumbler and I first returned to the Pomegranate Grail six months after I’d run away. My mothers wanted to blame all my crazy new notions on her bad influence. Besides, they had long ago decreed, drawing their authority from the Pomegranate Grail’s prophetic tradition, that I would never marry, and they had difficulty accepting how thoroughly Jumbler and I had already woven our fates together.

But the Televisionary Oracle guided me every step of the way through the crisis. I had already seen in abundance how practical its wise and often wacky revelations could be, but that was the first of many times it helped me come up with creative solutions in the face of intense conflict with people I loved.

The breakthrough was, of course, when my mothers agreed to become my students so that I might teach them how to personally access the wonders of the Televisionary Oracle. Once Vimala, especially, began accessing the secret identity of her own “holy guardian angel,” my battle was won.

For more than four years now, not only my mommies but the entire worldwide membership of our ancient mystery school have fed on the funny medicine of the Drivetime. As a result, their individual evolutions have sped up just as mine and Jumbler’s began to during the First Seven Days of Creation back in the tear-stained bed at the Villa Inn. Yesterday Vimala confided in me that she has become more herself in the last four years than she did in her previous forty years.

And yet in a sense, the last five years have all been prelude for what is to come. Since Jumbler and I first discovered the tantric practices that allowed us to milk the Drivetime for all it’s worth, we have been preparing for today’s coming-out party.

It was all spelled out near the beginning. Day Four of the First Seven Days of Creation brought the revelation that the Menstrual Temple’s inaugural blast into the wider world would materialize right here and now, a little after noon on the first day of May, known by us funky pagan tantrics as the holiday of Beltane.

Strange but true. Jumbler and I divined way back then—are living
out the divination in actual waking life and broadcasting it to wherever you are—that the most profanely holy spot on the planet, the grossly sublime vortex where beatific splendor is most thoroughly interwoven with trivial squalor, resides in a women’s lavatory in a nightclub on the main street of a small California beachside town called Santa Cruz. That’s where the vision of the Menstrual Millennium is hatched. That’s where we’re staging the “Kill the Apocalypse” festival, which is also the official public launch of the Televisionary Oracle.

In the initial scene of that original Drivetime University revelation, which is being fully materialized in physical reality right now, Jumbler and I are in that grubby little lavatory, getting ready with a private ritual.

To an untrained observer, the ambiance here may seem less than ideal for such a pregnant moment. The place stinks, and it’s ugly. The dingy yellow-white walls are marred by idiotic grafitti, and the mirror is cracked. Our nostrils twinge with the fragrance of stale bleach and the fresh droppings of our prized pet vulture, Yo Mama Death, who’s perched on the top of the stall.

Only a precious few thousand initiates truly understand why this is the epicenter for the most intimate revolution in history. May that all change in the prankishly reverent future that awaits us.

In a few minutes Jumbler and I will go outside to the street in front of the Catalyst to meet my public, which has gathered for the joyous funeral procession I will lead down Pacific Avenue to the Evergreen Cemetery in Harvey West Park. But right now we are building a guerrilla shrine next to the sink to summon forth the divine allies whom we want to bless our event.

Next to the sink, there’s a bouquet of chrysanthemums, flowers for the dead, and a large silver chalice filled with what we like to call dragon’s blood. Around them we’ve arranged these items: a miniature Mexican candy sculpture of a pink-hatted skeleton pushing an ice cream cart; an inkpad and rubber stamp that says “GENIUS”; an unopened package of freeze-dried “Astronaut Strawberries”; a small oil painting of the Goddess Persephone wielding handpuppets resembling me and Jumbler; a bowl of pumpkin seeds that I saved from the
first jack-o-lantern I carved when I was five years old; a hammer painted lavender and decorated with drawings of bees and unicorns and snakes and bull skulls; a fossilized vulture egg; and the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail Tarot deck, in which all the human figures are wearing menstrual lingerie.

To be honest, I’m already crying. Not continuously, but in short bursts, which is a good sign. It means I’m tapping into the sexiest zones of the Drivetime, but not with such overwrought intensity that I’ll be a blubbering mess for the duration of today’s event.

Jumbler is sniffling a stream, if not a raging river, herself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it swell as the day goes on. She has never had to share me so wildly; never had to witness, let alone assist in, me giving others the riches I give her. It’s not that she’s resisting this breakthrough. I’m in awe, in fact, of how generous she has made herself in the face of this new phase of my work. Still, I can’t help but be aware that her heart is breaking, too.

My own heart is not exactly a stronghold of serene stability. I’m at the threshold of harvesting the fruits of my menarche. I mean my
real
menarche—not the literal spilling of virgin menstrual blood that was induced by my mothers—but the self-abduction I plotted and carried out by myself.

“Remember back at the Villa Inn when you first started telling me all the contradictory stories of how you grew up and where you came from?” I ask Jumbler, wanting to take the edge off the portentousness of this, the party we’ve been planning for so long.

“That was, I believe, on Day Three of the Creation,” Jumbler says sweetly. “When we branched out from Ritz Crackers, string cheese, and celery, and also got some corn chips for our only meal of the day. You were so cute, the way you wanted so much to believe every last crazy thing I said.”

“But remember how pissed off I was at you when I finally realized you were dumping a heap of pretty lies on me? Rat-bastard.” I speak this last curse with a honey tone and loving grin. “Condescending to me like I was a gullible child.”

“But you suspected even then that it was for your own good, freaky.
And as you know now, it wasn’t all pretty lies. Quite a bit of raw truth mixed in there.”

“First you said you were motherless. Said your father was a born-again Christian satanist general at the Pentagon who kept you locked in a cage your entire childhood. Fed you nothing but grits and chicken gizzards and black-eyed peas. Made you perform ridiculous assignments in order to get permission to go to the bathroom, like reciting the Periodic Table of Elements.”

“Which is why I’m such an idiot-savant to this day. Want to know the atomic mass of tungsten? It’s 183.85.” She arches her left eyebrow like a mad scientist but somehow makes the rest of her face go blank.

“Ten minutes later, totally straight-faced, you were telling me you were a coddled child genius whose mom and dad gave up their careers so they could devote themselves to your education. You enrolled in Duke University when you were ten years old.”

“Hmmm. Doesn’t that have a certain resemblance to the biography of someone we both know and love, initials R.B.?”

“Yes it does, goddamn you,” I say as I take the “Genius” rubber stamp and decorate Jumbler’s right arm. “How dare you claim the right to be more megalomaniac than I?”

“I would have done anything to help you, my darling. Anything to liberate you from your enslavement to excessive factuality. It was choking off the growth of your myth-making skills, therefore preventing your full flowering as the avatar of feminismo.”

“And then there was the tale about how you were brought up by deathologists. Your mom ran a hospice and a graveyard and collected black-market skulls and black-market orchids. She taught Kubler-Ross everything she knew. Your dad specialized in guiding dead souls through the Bardo realms during the first forty-nine days after they departed their bodies.”

“Every bit of every one of those stories was an absolutely true hallucination,” she says as she dips her finger into the dragon’s blood and creates a simulation of my old birthmark on my forehead. I don’t resist. These days I’m no longer sensitive about the blotch that was once upon a time my worst curse. Besides, I’m pleased she wants to have fun.

“My favorite version of your life story is one you didn’t even tell me until Day Five,” I murmur, feeling almost romantic. “About how
you were a so-called ‘magickal child,’ conceived by four men and four women on a tantric commune. How they meditated their four sperms and four ova into the womb of one woman who was only really one-quarter your mom but they never told you which one she was.”

“Though later I was blessed to learn your diabolically precise anamnesis technique, my dear,” Jumbler says, “so I was able to recover all my preverbal memories. Jacinto was the mom who physically birthed me.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, creating two streaks of dragon’s blood warpaint on each of Jumbler’s cheeks. I also break open the Astronaut Strawberries and offer a few to Yo Mama Death. “And I’m very grateful for your service on my behalf, how you disabused me of the curse of literalism. ‘Hello, I’m Rapunzel Blavatsky, international spokesmodel for Heroically Unified Multiple Personalities, also known as HUMP. We’re dedicated to overcoming negative stereotypes about people who live too many different lives to be contained within a single personality.’ ”

“The universe is not made of molecules; it’s made of stories, my dear,” Jumbler singsongs, repeating her favorite mantra. “But shouldn’t we be finishing up? The masses are awaiting our arrival, and here we are chatting about old times.”

“Ever since then,” I press on, not quite ready to leave the intimate space for the spectacle brewing outside. “I’ve been in love with your idea of how two people who are standing next to each other can have such wildly clashing internal schemes of reality that for all intents and purposes they live on different planets.”

“Yes, and who would have thought that a breeder chick like you and a hermaphrodite queer like me could ever have ended up inhabiting Znipwof Arksty together. Or I forget, what’s the name of our planet again? Zwofpin Starkty? Pozwinps Traksty? It seems to keep changing.”

“It hurts my feelings when you call yourself a queer hermaphrodite,” I complain, truly perturbed. “That’s just so damn reductionist.” I’m wondering if this is a passive-aggressive leakage of the sadness Jumbler promised me she would suppress tonight.

“Just a temporary, extremely relative truth,” she says, “provoked by the reckless emotions of tonight’s historical turning point.”

“Well, OK,” I pout, looking in the mirror to wipe away the dragon’s blood Jumbler anointed me with. I survey her face for any signs of grief writhing just under the skin. “But before we go, address this question for me, please, Jumbler darling. I know we’ve discussed this to death, but it’s my ritual duty to ask what you have to say about it here in the heat of the moment, when the flip is about to flop.”

I push my shoulders back, stomach in, and chest out, simulating the formal posture my mothers used to make me assume during the “Confront the Guardian of the Threshold” portions of my childhood rituals of initiation. “Is it really one-hundred-percent ethical,” I say with mock solemnity, “for me to use our sacred tricks to get people to come live with us on
our
planet? What gives us the right to invoke the full power of the Televisionary Oracle to seduce
anyone at all
into imagining that our confabulation is truer than all the other half-truths out there?”