Dear David, by Dodie Bellamy (continued)


`Dear David (continued)`
	The interruption of things that "exist" in a theatrically conceived time and space. SAN FRANCISCO ANOTHER ILLUSION SHATTERED. Knockers hard as grapefruit she swears they're real a nude Lilith lies on a chaise lounge upsidedown, her curly platinum mane dangling off the bottom edge and merging with the white ground – perpendicular to her washboard tummy her unfathomably shapely legs are raised and crossed at the knees squeezing shut her little pigeonhole she smells like jasmine, her calves V out like a pair of shears poised for action whether they snap down or spring apart all depends on you David the stiletto heels of her maribou slippers point to the stars... white phone to match her white hair Lilith smiles into the receiver, "Operator give me a wrong number." Fanning out her decadence like a peacock. My own bedroom is so cramped my shins are awash with bruises dark sallow islands beneath a forest of faint hair I feel like Agnes Moorehead in The Twilight Zone the episode where she's tortured by toy spaceships and tiny bullets sting her ankles, then the camera zooms in to reveal that the miniatures are in fact fullsized U.S. aircraft and for the past half hour we've been sympathizing with the monster instead of ourselves it's always a matter of dimension on one bedroom wall hangs a Harry Jacobus pastel a hysterical attack of pigment inside the pallid matte, the black metal frame, as if a box of Crayolas has exploded I bought it because I couldn't see anything in it then a demonic Gerber baby appeared to KK, and Brett Reichman pointed out a man spewing blobby blood-stained vomit thanks a lot guys! then one Sunday afternoon as KK sat in bed reading a biography of Oscar Wilde he looked up and gasped – Wilde's volcanic face was starring back at him! the Gerber baby is his eye, the vomiting man's ass the tip of his nose as Mark sleeps on the couch on the other side of the wall we begin to make love, our movements subtle and controlled I lick my palm and encircle KK's cock it's heavy for its size like a perfect eggplant a Japanese variety from the Farmers' Market long and purple warmed in the sun I pull on it my fist is full and slippery I squeeze down I want to know how it feels to grow desire this dense I stroke and pull harder and faster if I pull hard enough maybe I can pull out an answer, "Dodie," KK whispers to Dodie, "are you trying to drive me nuts?" Swallowed in a frenzy of percale flowers and wild strawberries Dodie cups her breasts and mumbles, "You think I'm shy in bed." "Uh-huh." "But Mina isn't." He chuckles and huffs, his breath mingling with hers, "I'm glad Mina isn't here." As Dodie inserts her diaphragm I try to sound meek, "Why don't you want Mina here?" "Because we've had a lot of literary discussions the past few days and I don't find them very arousing." KK's been nothing but trouble since the beginning with his ploys to turn Dodie against me he doesn't know whose cunt he's entering fingers clamp into my shoulder his mouth opens wide wider behind twin curves of teeth morphemes line up to burst forth "sshhh" he snaps down on a pillow, quivers in my arms silent as the great silence of matter silent as Al Pacino's sex life in prison – so adept became he at mute climaxes that when he's released he's incapable of expelling even the tiniest sigh his face strained and miserable like someone with the dry heaves knobby eyes then he gets a job slinging hash and falls in love with waitress Michelle Pfeiffer – her beautiful misshapen lips demand, "Let me hear you!" Pacino's bellow quakes the sofabed deeply twisted deeply conventional KK spits out the pillow, his smile angular and elfish, the Gerber-baby-vomiting-man-Oscar-Wilde a vivid constellation behind his head. Voice spit tears shit a cry – the refusal to emit seems like a crime. Cry to show I love you the man says to the woman, the inquisitor says to the sorceress – and somewhere Freud must say to the hysteric. KK says to me my cunt is so different from time to time we should be like the Eskimos with their dozens of names for snow. Out of work mother needs wounded vet willing please. Designer glasses pale blue underwear hair on chest dark but turning gray – David that's not much to base a fantasy on – lock me in a room like Colette, I'll fill you out if you'll be my Willy. "He once was a playboy," I'll write, "but now he's matted with a marriage framed with a business he wears Laura Biagiotti glasses eats Tandoori takes in a quarter million a year." He tunes in an oldies station Jim Morrison's apocalyptic croon: there is danger in the ancient gallery he knocks back Advil pens a thriller hangs Flaubert and Brian Jones above his desk flattened behind plexiglass the specimen is still alive, twitching pale as the moon he shifts in his briefs, the Psychedelic Furs buzz through headphones – it's 2 a.m. – he reaches for a ballpoint and spiral notebook, scrawls his fears to a woman he's never met, "Words are bubbles, a thousand colors, floating beautiful, but you can't pop them, they're tougher than glass, you can't see the face inside them, you might as easily look inside a star..." There's metaphor on one side and literality on the other and I'm stuck between them two mountainous silicone tits crashing against one another. Born with a flashcube in her mouth – Lilith is photogenic as all get-out – still, the camera never does her justice, never quite captures her vivacity her air-brushed animation as she slithers from cel to cel in fuck-me pumps and see-through bodysuits teddies camisoles – or nothing but her long beigy skin sometimes less is more a carefully-placed animal or pumpkin sets the scene, when it's time for tennis she ties a sweater around her neck is forecourt anything like foreplay her torpedo tits defy gravity, shoot nipple bullets at the sky and your gaping mouth. And always, everywhere in the hysterical sagas, there is the feminine character to whom Freud gives the role of homosexual object; the character with whom the hysteric "identifies." The feminine Other, solidly in place, a reference point without which transgression, whether real or fictive, in actions or focused on the body, cannot be carried out. For Dora – Mrs. K.; for Katharina – cousin Francisca, whom her father slept with; for Rosalie – the "aunt," mistreated by the "uncle" (the mother, the father); for Elisabeth – the dead sister, before whom she stands frozen; for Lucy – the two little girls who, above all, must not be kissed; for Emmy – her sick daughter, who hugs her "until she smothers;" for Mina – Lilith, whose beaver she studies through an Agfa loupe. Everywhere, the other woman. "Thus," writes Lacan, "the hysteric experiences herself in hommages which are addressed to another woman, and offers the woman in whom she adores her own mystery to the man whose role she is taking, without fully being able to enjoy it. Seeking endlessly for what it is to be a woman, she cannot help but betray her desire." "Every image is frozen image; a living popsicle." Well, lick this: a naked woman is sawed in half through the waist... closeup on cross-section of torso chopped meat in a casement something's wrong with the realism here no bloody pool no ooze the slab she's sprawled upon is stark as her alabaster skin, her pubic triangle is perfectly groomed – a photographer, Harvey Keitel, rushes in and releases the murder weapon a giant pendulum, the Homicide dick yells, "Why'd you do that?" for a stronger image the pendulum swipes into the slab grinding to a halt. Cut to an editor looking at the proofs great stuff but you've got to vary your repertoire – something intense as true crime but something else so the photographer hooks up a foot pedal to his camera and strangles his girlfriend's black cat in front of a cubist painting CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK cat screeches fill the soundtrack when the girlfriend discovers her missing pet tortured on the cover of his book the photographer fixes his Two Evil Eyes on her chop chop with a hatchet he buries her in a wall... then it's raining cats and dogs as he works out an alibi – he attaches a lifesize glossy of his girlfriend's face to the pillowy lump huddled in the carseat beside him poor disembodied babe I know how it feels to love a man stranger than Poe he ties a scarf under the figure's "chin" and drives past the elderly couple who live next door – through the rain-spattered windshield the neighbors see her "arm" mechanically waving good bye a string attached to a gauzy sleeve where am I in this tacky female assemblage the neighbors smile and wave back a smattering of adjectives like cheap jewelry accessorizes my abstraction, green-eyed white gal with crooked smile and then I'm theirs to do with what they will David you're right about Dodie she's too concrete for you she juts into your line of vision like the Art Deco clock tower that faces my computer... as I key this I stare through plate glass at a red rectangle foregrounded with a white DRINK COCA COLA beneath it twelve red cubes form a clock face against the flat cream of the tower, red hands point to two adjoining cubes ten to nine behind the tower the sky's an unbroken periwinkle more cibachrome than real, invisible air currents flap the American flag atop an adjacent office building, sometimes a bird. It's there a stain in the atmosphere – walking down the sidewalk you are overpowered by the stench of urine invisibles have been set into circulation they're going to get you. David, I'm dying to break a heart a throbbing bagatelle to elide the ellipsis in my marriage/novel: I asked KK to have a three-way with me and Quincey... a triangle squared is a pyramid, ancient mystical symbol, New Age trinket with miraculous powers... KK's razor blades would never dull, my wilting houseplants would bloom before my eyes in Disney stop-motion, my computer would never crash three-way threesome third sex our three irresolvable bodies strapped together whose cock whose cunt who's writing whose – never happened – sirens interrupt a reading at Forest Books – a man has been murdered at 16th and Mission the poet stops mid-sentence peering over the police barricade she sees a pile of "fecal matter" and perhaps a small pool of blood her stolen thunder Quincey's killing my plot with his absence WHAT IS THERE LEFT FOR ME TO DO donate my brain to science? Download it into a computer? Technicians will place clones of my brain into a number of different robots programmed to communicate with one another, so that while each brain lives a separate afterlife, I, the omniscient narrator, know them all. If only I could break loose from this page I'd possess you in front of an audience, David, speak through your human body your bespectacled face would twist with my wisdom we'd dole out the answer to every problem LOVE the hall is packed with clean-cut types $50 a head they press crystal balls to their throats, strain to decipher our intergalactic brogue if only I could break loose after zazen, a bald-headed monk relaxes on the sofa sipping tea with Dr. Van Helsing (beneath the starched blue layers of his ceremonial robe celibacy stirs like a hungry snake – a year later in Los Angeles Kathy Acker will tell Mark there is absolutely nothing this monk won't do in bed) he brushes crumbs from his chest, leans forward for the last macaroon, says to no one in particular there is truth in anything if you view it with a soft brain head buried under the down comforter I collapse into a trance womb voices blow through dictating evanescence – Aeolian harpies – a child with the face of Virginia Woolf dissolves into a belly with a bird's head – to know not the thought but its effect black hole sucking you in making its content your content sweet coronary compression the heart spasms shoots out roots to tap this edge this delicate balance... when I come to nothing translates – I turn on an Italian horror film – Barbara Steele knows how to handle an unfaithful heterosexual: slash him with a straight razor slash slash slash slash slash slash slash slash the focused reaction on Barbara's wide elegant face is zeal slash slash slash slash the blood of Quincey flows down the camera lens a thick red waterfall slash slash Barbara rolls him up in a Oriental rug and pulls his gurgling body down the long staircase THUMP THUMP THUD THUMP blood drips over the edge – cut to the foyer – a slowly-widening crimson puddle drip drip. It is the intoxicating power of vulgarity that breaks her out of the deadening, self-sufficient, unchanging reality of things. A dozen naked women relax in and around a steaming pool of midnight blue – Osento Baths – Lilith flounces her tits above the water level feminist movement her pale aureoles are small but puffy, suggesting readiness or PMS – surveying the room she slowly licks her lips, "There's a lot of cuties here tonight." Breathy Japanese flute ripples through invisible speakers she flashes me her perfect teeth, winks, "I like your red pubic hair." She rhapsodizes about the women at her Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings "so many of them are absolutely gorgeous" I imagine a hybrid of Bloomsbury and Nastassja Kinski in Cat People – a circle of exotic languorous creatures flexing on Samsonite chairs, sleek gleaming panthers in velvet collars and drop-waisted gowns, they pick up dainty cucumber sandwiches with enameled claws, nibble one another's childhood abuse. Lilith's nipples bobble above Jacuzzi waves hard and pink as eraser tips, handy for her endless revisions she shifts into her MSG of friendliness mode, "Mina, tell me the truth – did you fuck Quincey so you'd have something to write about?" I swish my back against the jetstream, wish I had that much control, wish I could flip on my subject matter as easily as my TV. I never know when it will happen the most benign of circumstances sprouts wings, swoops down, and starts pecking at my thrashing limbs my screaming face muck spatters my rumpled French twist only then do I switch on the computer raise my trembling hands to the keyboard Dear David... Dear David, my legs are crossed at the ankle, twisting my little pigeonhole shut. The cursor blinks in the middle of the word "thumb" as I eat a slice of phosphorescent yellow watermelon, dripping juice on the keys. My fingers stick to D and V I always knew it would come to this Mina fused to the word-machine like the man who talks to his right hand outside Harvest Natural Foods thumb pressed to ear, middle fingers clenched, pinkie angled like a mouthpiece in front of his chatting lips as I step off the curb he grumbles "Hold on a moment," puts down his "receiver" and stares up at me, "Yes?" I shrug, "I'm s-sorry" – he rolls his eyes then leans back against his sleeping bag and continues his conversation with whomever it is at the other end of his fist – I can tell he's dishing me – he waves a cigarette in his free hand for emphasis. The following week he's writing in a composition book its cardboard cover speckled black and white like insect droppings – "Yes?" – carefully he draws each letter in blue ballpoint cramming the lines together in humps and valleys across the page, the text is a frothy mass, an undulating blue wave of signs his perpendiculars have been shattered some days it's not about English at all – he yells through the receiver in an unearthly tongue sputtering with fricatives – or he slouches on the concrete, silent, his eyes cast down, gently holding his hand to his cheek as if to say, "Oh my." You've heard of body language? Well, Lilith's very outspoken. When she emerges from the bedroom her forties hostess gown has been exchanged for a black leather miniskirt her lips glossy and pink as hallucinogenic strawberries she yanks the chopsticks from her bun and declares, "Let the dancing begin." Standing in the doorway with her perfect posture cocked at the hips and her hair cascading over her long forearms she looks like a sexual Alice in Wonderland, a girl who can convolute to the shape of anyone's desire female body parts stroll about looking for action, if they don't get any they attack burn shred Lilith straddles your cock in a black diaphanous gown, "Let the sacrifice begin." She throws her head back then looms down ejecting snake after snake from her bloated silicone lips – the writhing snarl hisses and nips and hisses and nips and nips your ecstatic face and throat you look like my Harry Jacobus by the time she's through... Lilith shimmies her shoulders, "I do these things... to hurt people and I know I should feel guilty about them. But I don't. In fact I never had any feelings at all until my mid-twenties." Cream puff dentata. On the eleventh night of the seventh moon Lilith steals the soul of a married man, only two things repel her, true love and a jagged dagger in the heart – she steps towards me in blue platform shoes with silver buckles, reaches for my earlobe, strokes an amber teardrop. The moon turns black, she swells into a fifty-foot gargoyle flailing webbed wings, flinging her head from side to side, squawking a mechanical awkward effect, Japanese horror circa 1959 I leap out of the margins and plunge my jagged dagger into her reptilian heart PUFF she explodes into a sludgy puddle at my feet three gallons of marsh gas and a crust of bread. You say writing is the opposite of dying, but David you've never been at the other end of the prod, you've never been written one husband one book one fan my saga is winding to THE END how'd you like to be wrapped up this way bound and distributed by printmen in coveralls Dodie moves on to another project and Mina imagines herself undead in the 23rd century hope has left me but I still know fear: nothing new will ever happen to me! faceless readers flock in to pick over the carcass, I dream I'm being fucked in a park with a dildo, surrounded by a vast expanse of green bordered with shrubs and maples getting away safely means finding the right distance people in the midst of picnics and volleyball freeze then somebody presses the buttons on their shoulders and slowly they turn toward me I am the dumb fuck at the center of their gaze a lubricated tool pistons my snatch raw – it won't quit 'til I come – and I never will not exactly a writer's block, more like cabin fever Dodie framed me DAVID it's growing cold the margins come rumbling in EEEK! there's a telephone growing out of the end of my arm so few gentlemen callers lately static voices decree: fear alone does not know the gods you're my biggest fan the trueblue reanimator – if I squint I can see you out there, alone, on the other coast of this vast country, jerking off beneath the stars, lurid pink shadows trail your zigging fist the paraphernalia of existence whooshes away DAVID I'd lend you a hand but I can't reach that far YET – give me another chance, Love, rip out that dreaded last page THE END the gods are very vain, they want to be loved too, and hopeless people do not love them DAVID your ear is large as a radar disk HEAR ME keep rereading my letters the unrequitedness of life in general made specific through a love story imagine I'm one of those wide-hipped women who sit sideways at the front of the bus born to breed a couple of grubby kids grab at her ruddy complexion her cheap cotton dress stuffed with arms that encircle and bazooms so softly huge you want to drown your head in them and drool the tit of the iceberg imagine I'm the child of the first atomic family conceived on a test site ten miles underground concrete walls BOOM the roof beams come caving in imagine me the perfect baby happily gurgling at momma's breast then the nurse takes me away and my parents burst into flame the Oedipal complex up in smoke the heat from their raging bodies melts my plastic carousel imagine me the first human nuclear power plant I'll char anybody who gets in my way crusty black horsey ash pumping 'round and 'round imagine me walking into the living room, KK's jeans are unzipped he grabs me, crouches down and pokes his dick between my thighs fortunately I'm not wearing panties but DAVID he can't keep it up forever imagine me needing you as I do – imagine a whole showcase of designer glasses lined up to magnify ME bigger than big, brightly brilliant, sparking significance and funk David imagine me! Love, Mina

			lingo 6 Books in print by Dodie Bellamy
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