July 3, 1986

Dear Reader,

KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather, "The Reader likes to feel situated." It's a cool clear San Francisco night, streetlights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens but if you drive an hour north the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff, so many holes in the black your heart speeds for a moment what if the black collapses a misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck, a livid face leans toward the bed, translucent claws lift my hem immobile thighs, white, white over my breasts floats Nosferatu's head, an exaggerated egg-shape, powdery with pointed ears, his lips stretch open pencil-thin, taut I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue so tender is his bite but I will never love him, he's too weird too intense from my open throat dark rivulets curve sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxie Theater and suck dissolve in the audience's laughter faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn I shout, "That's me on the screen you assholes!" The laughter pauses then soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway? In Dracula, "Mina Harker" was this plain-Jane secretarial adjunct to the great European vampire killer, Dr. Van Helsing. I'm the one who gathered the notes, the journal entries, letters, ship logs, newsclippings, invoices, memoranda, asylum reports, telegrams--I transcribed them and ordered the morass so the Reader can move through it without getting lost no hassle, no danger--i.e., a plot or an amusement park, Safari Land, Transylvania Land for my performance evaluation Van Helsing wrote, "Oh, Madam Mina, how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time." After my girlfriend Lucy fell victim to Dracula, I was next on his hit-list, but four brave Christian men destroyed 50 coffins filled with dirt to save my soul--but turn to the last page of Stoker PRESTO ABRACADABRA on the anniversary of Dracula's death my "saved" loins heave forth an offspring. A.k.a. "sequel." A big tease, a big mistake--for the past hundred years imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough sequels to fill a library bunglers with no credentials they keep shackling me to the most insipid suitors macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents their acting as wooden as their stakes: these men save my soul? Dodie's the latest intruder, getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized (who wants to read that book)--forget about her forget about them--this is The Letters of Mina Harker THE AUTHORIZED VERSION if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself sucking sounds suck up the silence my throat is a cunt never will I perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine--I dart across the moor fog condensing on my long plait of hair, my lives my deaths multiple as orgasms HARKEN THE WORDS OF MINA HARKER, FORTUNE COOKIES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.

Springs poking my butt, his arms and legs jutting in all my directions KK and I sit on the velvet sofa in front of a twelve-inch black and white TV, eating our first wedded meal, champagne and Kentucky Fried. He coos, "Don't you just love Hill Street Blues?" I look deep into his eyes, "Whatever." I'm happy as a hen, reminiscing eleven o'clock last Thursday night, frantic meows at the foot of my bed were driving me crazy he appeared on the landing with two cans of cat food. I was wrapped in chenille from neck to ankles, an irregular V of flesh splaying from cleavage to throat, I opened the door _ reaching for the can opener my gaze skimmed the bulge in his tight white pants, "Kidney in gravy is nice but how do you feel about Bits O' Beef or Kitty Stew?" The chenille was so hot so heavy--one tug at the tie and I became a shattering of V's, a Duchamp nude. I reach for an extra-crispy drumstick my wedding band gleaming white gold for the moon when he slipped it on my finger he whispered, "I'll follow you anywhere, like death follows life." I wipe my greasy mouth, wonder now that we're in the happily ever after _ Later that evening there's a power outage carpe diem on the dresser burn three brown candles, two in monolithic stands cut from red brick, the other borne on the arched back of a wrought iron beast with a bird's head overdetermined archetypal but I'm not immune the spaghetti straps of my leopard-skin chemise slide off my shoulders--KK's still in his street clothes, he rubs the burnished silk across my hipbone, lowers his lashes, "Oohhh." I gobble the perfect air that touches his face. The shadow of a jade plant looms across the drapes and onto the ceiling, a tropical phantasm from the 40's, he says, "I've come to meet you in the jungle, jungle girl." I rub his ass the tarnished cotton glides easily over the firm muscle, I wedge my fingers beneath the waistband tender ridge across his lower back candlelight beats warily, as though nervous, along his thighs--I crack them apart and rub my nose against his soft-hard cock, nostrils itching with fabric softener and urine. Less than a year ago I stood in his hallway and wailed, "I love you" sob sob "I love you. Please let me spend the night." He said no a mind like a ring sliding shut on some quick thing. But now I have him, today was my wedding.

Clothesline binds her arms and feet, gaffers' tape her mouth; carpet burns sting her elbows. An hour ago she gave up struggling, lies on the living room floor still as a doorstop intermittent rush of breath, heart, brain she watches her captor, a knife-happy ex-con, slouch on the sofa, waiting. The phone rings, "Okay boss." He wraps an arm around her waist, lifts her to the sofa and wrestles a pillowcase over her head, she twists and grunts as he grabs tighter, locking his ankles around her slim calves, pressing his jaw against her muslined cheek he put a bag over her head the pillowcase sucks against her nostrils and their bodies heave with the isolated gyrations of her fear nipples erect this man is a serpent he plunges his switchblade in her side, with each plunge she is more hole, more woman outside the bag is God and cold steel, inside visions lunge forward in jerks and stops but, Reader, where are you inside the future outside the past this letter is addressed to you but who/what are you, some kind of William Gibson plug-in to my virtuality? An audience distant and nameless as the billions of herbaceous plants in the Amazon unimaginatively strange, potent I never know which nut or berry will wind up on my kitchen table in San Francisco, tiny chunk in my Rain Forest Crunch inside the bag the woman recites the rosary of privations: privation of light (terror of darkness), privation of others (terror of solitude), privation of language (terror of silence), privation of objects (terror of emptiness), privation of face (terror of Reader), privation of life (death) my friend Sam D'Allesandro said it's all about putting yourself on the line: engagement: and Dr. Van Helsing agreed but I countered with repression's more interesting. KK's tongue is an oil rig drilling into my soul. Bad metaphors are the only way we can approach the really important things, don't you agree?

This book is the bag. So is my cunt.

Blue eyes angular skull lips thin as sin thick brown hair bent from brushing against his creamy shoulders lucky hair he's thirty-three, the age of all my suitors, so many suitors flickering past Abraham Arthur Quincey Jonathan Renfield Jack I grow ancient but the suitor, always replaced, doesn't change--except for KK--I've made him one of my kind. Last Friday I held his wrist to my lips and sucked his blood was tasteless but I couldn't get enough of it, determined as I was to quench the unquenchable he groaned with consent then I pricked my finger and squeezed a few precious drops on his outstretched tongue, "Yum." By Sunday I was bent over the toilet bowl heaving like Susan Sarandon in The Hunger though I could never look that gorgeous in a sweaty T-shirt maybe I should have worn a condom over my tongue but too late now--alien cells have taken over my veins my vocal cords neither red nor green like Christmas or motion I am the yellow light the spit, the flaw in Newton's machinery we signed a pact on the back of a letter from Sam forever implications beneath our names two rapidly browning thumb prints, blood prints. No matter how light I set the Xerox machine, on KK's copy Sam's typewriting showed through. Then we had sex on top of the letter (not on purpose, it was just there) I climbed on my hands and knees and he fucked me from behind which made me think: "bow wow" but I didn't say it even though it would have been fun because--have you noticed this--people who are about to come have a lousy sense of humor the air gushed from his lungs he dropped forward, I lay down on my stomach careful to keep him inside he nibbled my right shoulder and I wagged my ass like a tail. Sam's letter got crinkled but this he didn't witness; love is blind.

I eat my lunch by a fountain, water arching I followed Grandma into the bathroom, watched her lean against the chipped porcelain sink and cringe as she stuffed bits of tissue paper in her ears, "Grandma can I have some Kleenex too," she handed me a couple then turned toward the door bracing herself to re-enter my Grandpa's drunken rage, I followed her into the kitchen with wads of tissue arching out of my tiny ears half of my lunch is good for Deficient Spleen Qi, the rest too green, too raw, with a bite of vinegar--if one combines the good and the bad does one get neutral--I almost typed "neural"--why does everything have to coil back to the mind--why can't I stick with the body. A bench away, clouds of smoke curl above the head of a Chinese man with a long gray beard--thumb and forefinger holding a cigarette to his lips, he sits erect, the still core of this continuous ghostly churning. I close my eyes lapping waves, rushing water, darkness and favouring winds, someone's moving closer, Reader is that you? When I open my eyes I'm looking down at my palm, upon its surface so many etchings that might be read as love, death, travel, I have this one line that curves to the left while KK's goes straight up and down--but it's all scrimshaw to me. Back at my office I phone him and make two jokes in one sentence, one joke about a nightmare, the other about sex--the two poles on either side of coziness, in the varied activities one can do in bed. Have you noticed how any activity can be classified into that which does and that which does not stain? My dear Reader, which do you prefer?

Dr. Van Helsing pokes a craggy finger at my manuscript, says, "You can always perk up your Readers' interest by asking them a question no matter how shallow, can't you?"

Remember: my kind can slip through keyholes, slide beneath doors. Alone in his pale blue bed KK lay beneath a blinding overhead light with his paperback, a man who dreamt books instead of Real Life. The first night we slept together was an "accident," our bodies fell between the sheets, rustling the cool air two soft voices on a hard mattress he said I made him feel too sexual how could anybody feel too _ I leaned back and I leaned back if I don't get an extra couple of inches quick _ beyond the plate glass eucalyptus struggled toward a vast black broken by pinpricks. The next morning we pretended it never happened. I needed to take something with me to convince myself I'd been there, so I took his writing, I left his pale blue bed his nicotine-stained walls with a manuscript instead of a kiss:

Once [he had written] I found a used sanitary napkin perkily sitting atop the wet crumpled paper towels in the men's room of the restaurant I worked in. The picture it presented, the triumphant incursion of the female principle into a Pharisaical waste land, struck me forcibly: I took the bloody napkin home with me that night in the car, now and again glancing carefully down at it as though it were half alive or only unconscious. I had no immediate plans. The variations in color, and in scent, of the dried blood denoted a variety of sensual experience I felt excluded from. . . . Several nights later I parted the warm reddened cheeks of Sean's ass and inserted the mass into his rectum sidelong, using the bowl end of a teaspoon for leverage. He gave no sign that this intrusion was anything new in his life, giving off the impression, rather, that he welcomed its renewal. The language he spoke said as much. It hurt, but only a part of his body he was starting to believe belonged to somebody else entirely.

I thought here's a man who knows the difference between sex and arousal. My heart parted like those pages, that ass--so what if he's gay I had to steal that spoon for myself the silver of his privileged birth shoving the old up my new it's all about needing an edge to be up against--I seek a prose style precarious as crystal: words that crash against the Reader and shatter, bloody words that cost and cost Dear Sam, Dear Gail.

He said I was standing in his kitchen one day and his heart slid open like elevator doors. He let me in and after that nothing else mattered. Like Mina he has the soul of a secretary, this man who's read so many books Bob GlŸck calls him The Library of Congress.

I stop in at the Caffe Trieste to smoke cigarettes and write in my diary. To my left sit a young German couple life force racing in paisley patterns beneath their translucent skin. Gregory Corso's leaning against the jukebox, he catches my eye and staggers over. "It's been a long time," he says. When I reply, "No it hasn't," he sits down anyway, half an inch from just about every part of my body. I finger the tiles inlaid on the table, primary colors in abstract 50's swirls and dots--I've seen him with a small boy in a Superman cape, the two of them standing in front of City Lights, pants unzipped, big dick and little dick pissing in the street. He flashes his plane ticket to Boulder and tells me to remember: poetry is the opposite of hypocrisy. Then the German guy exclaims, "Well, the unknown is a known word." And when I leave a woman trails me down Vallejo yelling, "That was an isolated occurrence that was an isolated occurrence that was an isolated occurrence that was an isolated--" This goes on for half a block until I step on the 30 Stockton. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into-- how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." A naive assumption for a man who sustains his plots better than most men do sex, or even a conversation. The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregory Corso where I come from it is always dark and everybody is always in bed Dodie keeps insisting I sit in chairs, have opinions-- I can take a hint, but I make her pay for her demands--she's lying in her cotton nightie, eyes closed, mind blank all the Readers are a million miles away, they might as well be stars her breathing is shallow and regular, I stretch my long thin fingers around her heart, it feels heavy and obscene like a balloon full of water, I squeeze, tighter and tighter--a jolt hits her solar plexus undefined fear she rolls on her stomach, toes hanging off the edge, slips her hand down and plays with her clit, it's dry at first then warm, slippery as raw egg white she rubbed her cunt juice behind her ears parting the soft nest of verticals when she went out on "dates" she runs her thumb along the center groove I clamp her heart again--another jolt then fear then another jolt like hiccups jolt fear jolt fear jolt fear she sits up and throws her hands to her chest. Nightly. In figurative language the word is "anxiety" but that's so lukewarm--she feels helpless and persecuted, jumps off the top of a building but KK catches the hem of her ever-diaphanous gown if only Dr. Van Helsing could discover the secret to make the fear go away, something simple like a brain tumor wrapped around the optic nerve there's a 90% chance it's benign he operates saving her life but not her sight the truth is: Dodie is much more constructed than I. She makes a clone of herself, Mina Harker. When Mina needs a steroid injection her right eye glows pure white--this is the only time you can tell them apart. Emotions, like everything else, are new to Mina, and they hit her with a violence; she hits whatever is nearby. She falls in love with Dodie's husband, KK. Mina and Dodie battle it out. Dodie goes up in a blaze with her computer, and I crawl in bed with him the top sheet rises to the surface winds around our necks long and bunched and blue I look down at Dodie's charred body, poor little fool, dead on her wedding day.

Yet all that was sick or hysterical about her behavior in day-to-day life could be turned into something valuable through the act of writing.

I Love KK, Mina Harker in the starring role of "I" a flurry of ostrich feathers glitter pumps descend the winding marble staircase comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarite we stood beneath a street light, his body from knees to lips sucking me in I pulled back and said, "Do you love me?" After a long pause he replied, "Yes, but with a tiny asterisk at the bottom of the page." I buried my face in his neck and delivered my critique: "I'm not sure this is a good idea." The night before I dreamt his tongue ejaculated covering my face with a thick creamy fluid, and my cheeks began to melt like wax. "I'm not sure this is a good idea." His tongue swelled to the size of John Holmes shoving the words back down my throat he tasted of cigarettes and whiskey I opened and I opened _ he pulled back, whispered, "Take away the asterisk."

Light passed from my body into his eye.

Into your eye. I rub against your hands your brain your cunt or cock--this is me alone in my very private moment playing to the camera notice how I favor my right side. Dear Reader, I could fuck you better if I knew what you looked like--I imagine you at my kitchen table fumbling with a corkscrew, black leather jacket thrown over the back of your chair, vintage dress ripped under the armpits, nipples erect, your breasts move beneath the rayon print like fat ghosts, when you stand up and reach for the wine bottle your skirt catches in the crack of your ass, your face is striking with just the right touch of acne, your wavy hair needs washing. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to that agitated zone between life and death it's so lonely here, like in one of those dreams where you're walking down the street naked and strangers stare, offering you nothing--or where you're a flapper perched on the hood of a Model-T like a silvery ornament, knees in midair legs spread so wide who do you think you are--Winged Victory? In the picture postcard I'm holding your stockings are the lightest gray barely discernible from the white inner thigh, your smile is provocative but with your clunky strapped shoes the ultimate effect is awkward. Moving closer to the lamp KK sticks his nose between your grainy legs insisting it's just the crotch of your panties. I huff, "Look at that slit in the center--can't you tell the difference between a woman who's been shaved and a piece of silk!" I can't bear the contradiction the hypothetical panties imply: to be simultaneously exposed and covered I mean the nasty part might as well have been severed. Earlier this evening in Re-Animator a bloody though lively decapitated head went down on a woman strapped to an autopsy table--but this must be confusing, obviously a severed head can't move around all by himself--this one maintained a psychic connection with his body (which wore a fake plastic head and carried the real head in a zippered bag so nobody'd think anything strange was going on). So the body held the head by the hair and guided it dangling veins esophagus and all along the screaming woman's torso, sort of like a plane on automatic pilot a trail of blood from her left nipple to her pube I laughed, though I empathized--her pale flesh quivered beneath the greenish light obscene not because it was naked but because it was too soft (the way a 50's pin-up is obscene in practical cotton briefs) as if something were rotting beneath that smooth unblemished expanse. If only I knew what you looked like-- Dear Reader, you're twenty-two years old, you're a senior at Santa Cruz with a family in show business--I'll meet you in 1994 when this book is over, a boy twenty-two, so eager and dewy, sandy brown hair, hazel eyes, skin as smooth as my chemise, you slouch on my living room couch in Doc Martens and a fringed suede jacket, a bead of sweat in the groove above your full upper lip, that goofy smirk you're so cute it makes the enamel on my teeth go hard the bottom button of your 501's is undone, a hole for the future to poke through the tense air between us condensing with musk I feel like a pervert just thinking about you, yet here I am putting on the moves--you greet me with aggressive cheek-cramping smiles then instantly flip to zombie-eyed autism perverts are notoriously able to make the best of a limited situation while the neurotic is always demanding something more I perch beside you on a stool getting drunk on cognac that tastes like soap everything about you so warm and untouched and me breathing _ why do you have to wear a T-shirt bare arm propped on the bar with just the right amount of muscle never a Mr. Atlas but strong enough to make me feel gorgeous you utter the phrase self-referential text. Suddenly I am that gory decapitated thing lapping tongue, 20/20 vision _ I cross my legs beneath the counter my right knee brushing the dark peeling wood I feel a psychic connection stirring and this one isn't wearing any panties the involuntary pleasure of the unseeable hole it's difficult to sparkle in a body that's contemplating the Void--I'm as tense and gnarled as the gargoyles peeking from the armrests of my antique sofa. I need an Ann Landers of the soul, a mind sharp enough to slice the dark psychic surgery from across the room the Reader's X-ray eyes chase away the infection, blood bubbles from unbroken skin. See me as I want to be seen and see me as I am. And don't lie. C.U. TO MINA'S FACE, ALIVE.

KK stood beside the bed nude and relaxed, he looked down at himself, shrugged, "You know--it's just another human body." I had my doubts about that. Across his midriff a smudged black line a quarter of an inch thick and maybe three inches long, tracing it with my finger I knew it was an interesting story. "What is that?" Throwing his arms in all directions like a confused traffic cop he said, "It was used to measure my height it's nothing just magic marker it doesn't mean anything it has something to do with midgets it was a random accident a mistake, I lead the most boring life you can imagine": an intriguing subtext but there IT was in black and white: the naked truth and I felt as awkward before it as an illiterate woman who compulsively fills her house with books.

Like mother, like daughter, the last time I died was in Corozol with gold trumpets sticking out my ears with a bag over her head she's not so bad just sticky.

Our marriage certificate, the embossed announcement, this year's journal, a Long Island newsclipping, letters from a handful of sex-crazed gossips (my writing community)--I lay the pieces out for you one by one but they refuse the easy linearity of my earlier manuscript. "All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact." Oh, Madam Mina, good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read; and we men who wish to know have in us something of angels' eyes. I wrote Dracula nearly a century ago--you'd think by now narratives would spout from me like fountains, their meanings clear as water black letters black paragraphs black pages, black gash across the naked torso of my desire Reader, you're probably too young to remember Newlyweds, but in my childhood it was my favorite dessert, a jelly roll of devil's food cake and vanilla ice cream, a stripe of brown beside a stripe of white, spiraling together, neatly, serenely in a slice on a plate you could eat it with a fork I haven't seen it in stores for years--I have to make due with the chaotic fragmentation of Cookies 'n' Cream, the taste is similar but what a mess--it looks like a Newlywed roll that's been pushed through a paper shredder or tossed beneath the blades of a lawn mower who's the jigsaw, who's the puzzle fingers wrap around my neck, pull me towards his whiskered face my cells open like snowflakes and KK says, "I can only push my words so far like a knife through butter, then the butter stops and the knife is still useful, and the knife is so useful." From my open throat dark rivulets curve; it's like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time I lie back and he ravages me like the Amazon rain forest.

Love,

Mina

lingo 4

Books in print by Dodie Bellamy

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