Dancing to Clifton Chenier at the Cotati Cabaret

Some 25 years ago I was dancing with Clifton Chenier’s son Julian, who was a long way from the bayou. Bon ton roulet, he said, let the good times roll. And we danced a hot Cajun style under the harvest moon during the break. We all stood in constellations under the oak trees, admiring the spin that only a cold, clear night can put on the stars, and the beauty stained the retina for a moment, we forgot ourselves and gazed rapturously at those pinpricks of light. But in the shadows, a drunk leaving the parking lot, blinded us with his headlights, and we were thrown into the small cages of self walled against the night. Unfortunately the drunk was also taking another car with him, doggie bumper style, and then I realized it was my poor VW bug being dragged through the gravel like a recalcitrant donkey. I ran down the parking lot after the drunk, screaming, but he kept driving with my car in tow. Just as I got up to him, he disengaged and took off down the road. I was screaming like a banshee, and Julian was holding me back, saying it’s cool, it’s OK, let it roll. Let it roll right off your back. Come on back inside and dance dance Cajun style with me—and with that he climbed up the stage steps and played a lick on his guitar. Soon we were all dancing dancing in a sea of kelp arms, reaching for the disco ball, myriad stars dancing on our bare shoulders, dancing, dancing, dancing. 

11/21/2003 Writers’ Group

JFK freewrite what’s sex got to do with it?

The writing prompt: what was the best sex you’ve ever had. The best what? Seriously? Fuck. That’s not something I’d want to share with the group. It’s been so long, I barely remember having a sex life. It’s like a rock, inert, and inanimate. I did dream that I was with JFK and we were standing in a plaza. It was like a holiday, but the fall air was nipping at the resolution of our discontented youth. 

And then I was thinking in Navajo, blessing the sky, the Earth, and all my relations. What gave me the inspiration, I will never know. Maybe it was the wind or the past regrets that edged into dreamtime. Always we wake up before the climax ending, awakening to that feeling of discontent. Come on, surely you don’t have to pick dead presidents to have sex with. After all I was only 10 years old.

In a few days, I’ll be 51, and tomorrow is that famous anniversary we baby boomers all can remember so clearly, as if etched in stone, or frosted like Victorian bathroom windows. When I was four, I figured out how to turn the latch in the bathroom, and I remember looking up at the skylight, so impossibly high up, no way out, and someone was talking to me through the door. They said turn the key. An impossibility of time caged in a white room and the specks in the sky were an afterthought for birds.

Like my nursery school teacher, she was French, and she was always asking us to reach to the sky in French. I guess she didn’t ever speak to us in English. I just remember the gurgle of the basement pipes on the ceiling and we were reaching for them as if we were tiny gorillas, reaching for the stars. I was already doubting the sanity of grown-ups and I was only four. I knew little enough about the stars. Only the fog rising from the street vents whirling around my ankles, so dreamlike.

That landscape we inhabit in dreamtime, in suspended animation. Sting writes about eight hours of Tantric sex equals dinner and a movie and a whole lot of begging. So why was I so promiscuous in my dreams? Because the last night I dreamed, I married a man I never saw before. Here I was, a bigamist in sleep, while Neil cavorts, like a narwhal under ice, stewing in his own private hell, where there is no room for sex. No time for movies, no time for dinner, let alone, begging for sex. I’ll certainly never beg for it. Life is so much less complicated without it.

And so I spend my nights alone, dreaming of phantom lovers and the past. What does it mean when ex-lovers jockey for position in my dreams? My nights are populated with all the faces of the past, and in dreams it is always better because you can heal the rough edges and smooth over the places where the the dite of angels are suspended in time, so that you forget the parts where you know it wasn’t the best sex you ever had. But memory is a two-timing slut always sleeping with the enemy. I can’t get over the idea of sleeping with Jack, but he was good, very good—or at least Marilyn thought so. Or was that a myth?

The best? Perhaps Galway Kinnell was the best but dare I mention that in public? Surely it was at least among the top 10 but then Kitty was another one. Actually, that was just too fucking much, skewering me like a shish kebab, just like Edwin Drummond. Ironically my first boyfriend was probably the best sex experience I’ve ever had—only I didn’t know it at the time, because I was so young and inexperienced.

11/21/2003 Writers’ Group

On infomercials and insomnia freewrite

On the TV, a late night panacea offers infomercials on everything imaginable. You’d think they would play movies to lull us back to sleep, but no, it’s how to roast a chicken with a bottle up its ass. the poor thing looks like a conductor with wings outstretched, post rigor-mortis. 

Or perhaps you need a knife so sharp that it will cut through the bottle. The chicken is spinning around like a Venus of Willendorf taking ballet lessons in the oven. No matter that our ovens aren’t tall enough to host a chicken with a bottle up its ass. No matter, they’ll sell you a tall chicken oven to boot. 

Then there’s the ab guy—it’s too much of a shock to see his naked torso on 70 channels in the middle of the night, so I keep looking for the chicken on a bottle and then it becomes a meme, weaving together disparate commercials. Nads, I know it sounds obscene, but it’s a hair remover with a personal groomer, tiny sheep clippers for Lilliputian sheep—or women’s mustaches. 

I am so enthralled by all this bizarre celluloid snakeoil I hardly notice that the dawn has slipped in unnoticed, except now all the yoga ladies are strutting their stuff on sea cliffs, or by the poolside. It’s hard to distinguish them from the real estate tycoons.

Onto motivation with Tony Robbins, I’m mesmerized by his large mouth. I can’t look away. All those teeth. How does he manage them all, not like the Wife of Bath with her gap-tooth smile. A hefty come on for all the world to see. Each time she smiled, men revolved around her like the sun or satellites, for that promise of her smile, she, who buried four husbands and was still game. But I’ll be dragging my ass forward all this day long.

11/7/2003 Writers’ Group

Harmonic Convergence freewrite

All this unexpressed rage, I’ve had too much of that lightly, so I’ll write in red ink. The vein is trying for blue, the color of blood returning home. Bluebloods. It’s true that blood is blue. The lonely wail of a train returning to the yard, like stock to the slaughter house. I am dwelling on the past these days, an artifact of the fall, merging towards winter, nothing to do with rage.

So I’ll switch ink, nothing to do with mood, or mechanics. Vito runs out of ink at the same time, must have something to do with the harmonic convergence, all those planets and ballpoint pens lining up to make the star of David before the eclipse. 

Last harmonic convergence, I remember was anything but harmonic. We were in Oaxaca, San Cristobál de las Casas, and I was being plagued by monstros in my sleep, the dead wanting voice and shape, my mouthpiece. All of them crowding into my dreams, what was I to do? I kept waking up, screaming and telling John they what they looked like. 

One he recognized as Kayla. Only I didn’t know Kayla so I described her. And she was saying goodbye to John. And then Dave Evans appeared, too. They were all crowding in, taking turns. I was a mouthpiece. I kept screaming to make them stop, to make them go away, but then something unbearably dark emerged, like unexpressed rage loosened in my dreams.

There was a being so malevolent I didn’t dare go back to sleep. It was a devourer, pre-Columbian, neither god nor goddess. Something larger, wanting voice, wanting mouthpiece. I said it had black blood in its veins. And so we crawled onto the roof, John and I locking arms, linked back to back, waiting for the dawn. Venus, beading on the horizon, dawn slicing up the sky like a mango. Thin boundaries, walking the dark hours before the dawn promising a deliverance that never comes after hours of harrowing experiences. 

(It turned out that both Kayla and Dave Evans had both died while we were in Oaxaca. Weirdly, no one knew where we were staying, yet John got a call from Alta or Jan that Kayla had died.)

11/7/2003 Writers’ Group