Prose and Poetry from Web del SolThe Needful One
We met at the office. I assumed the pose. Several failures later I couldn't help but notice how often you floated and frowned upon contact with earth. It appeared that my Chevalier-like tiptoe into the delicate heart valves had only succeeded in pricking to life a trait you might consider dangerous, one hardly concealed with wounded duck gesture. So I smiled at you, my former love gravity, signed a hieroglyph of life in the air, and left a xerox of my ear taped to your bedroom window. It was only after I ignored you that you began to visit me often, as one might visit an asexual father thing.Uncertain on how best to absorb your new show of desperation, I convinced you of my potential as a crying shoulder (the least I could do), then anchored myself to contain your various onsets. You nicknamed me Daddy Boy. In return, I dubbed you, The Needful One.
Each morning my phone would ring at three am and when I answered you would say something like, Daddy Boy, I woke up in a closet tonight, or, Daddy Boy, I woke up gasping for breath high above the earth tonight, or, Daddy Boy, I woke up on the Massacre Coast tonight, and so on till I became exhausted from insomnia and threatened you with ending all relations. Whereupon you immediately raged over to my apartment to strike me about the head area with a blunt dose of your personal trauma regarding age, death, love, neurosis, past abuse, the horror of your job, etc. till I gave in, and cushioned you, and stroked your cheek like a Daddy Boy. I kidded and cajoled you into believing you were simply passing through life's first panic zone, a kind of funhouse foyer wherein the jackets of old hopes and illusions snagged unexpectedly on the coat hooks of new realities. No matter though, I knew you had to avoid a descent into madness in order to restore yourself.
Of course, you did not believe this, not at all.
In the weeks which followed you dreamt recklessly of Instant-Rub lotto wins, swimmingpool limousines, and impulsive Internet revenge. As a Nemesis-in-embryo you drowsed in my cradle, sheathing my fingertips, mutely apologizing for your earlier violence, and offering apology too for your bouts of life-terror. Each afternoon you drove me from work to your dollhouse Cape Cod, sobbing as you led me sophomoric and awkward as a drunken boy through the gravel of your drive. And my hallucinations at this time, naturally, came fast and furious.
See the girl with the Alps in her hair, you said, and there you were, my Needful One, eclipsing an Ansel Adamesque shoreline at dusk. You pointed and laughed at your posterphoto taunting us from the bedroom wall: an aroused and godlike sea-maquette of black-window eyes and seraphic resolve poised to ascend from the shore of La Punta Spartivento, Italy, 1986 . . . My immortal, partisan pose, you said, dosing your voice with a fatalist sarcasm. I blanched and turned away. Apparently, I was jealous of your history.
Within the womb of your Cape Cod, watercolored with lighthouses and eyeless masks, you opened up to me even more. Night after night you pulsed with tales of absent-but-fondly-hated Mother, ghostly U-Boat towers near Kitty Hawk, the ponies of Asateague, and the Outer Banks till seventeen. Your lips were moist and pulpy as heart, warm with love as you released to me whatever child-self or paternal hand returned to comfort you. Only a larger question remained. How might you atone for your schizophrenic meandering, seek forgiveness too? It was unnecessary, for your very change of nature had frightened me.
It was our first attempt at a suspense-thriller kind of love: my wok-steamed prod, your ticking time vault whose time had not yet come. Dear Daddy Boy, I think the panic zone is to blame, you said, exasperated with both of us, Even steam won't help me, now. But this explanation of yours did not satisfy me; I was afraid that somehow I still hugged the cliff of your expectations, my next step a death plunge.
In vain then I tried to console you, Needful One (as well as myself), with tableaux of a sanguine future full of us and bereft of the American life sicknesses we knew so well. I spoke to you of Calvino-like city-worlds, beat poet histories, comical schemes of dadaesque vengeance. But you would hear none of it; you only imagined horizons dark with strobings of rage, red-penny moon tides of recalled disappointment, voluble ecosystems of anguish old as Africa's Rift Valley and pointlessly nourishing the stones of an ungrateful earth. I explained you were part of it too though, that the lament of all Thebes and Europe's lost nobility steamed from your lungs, trickled out of you even as you spoke. You only smiled and replied softly to me, What would you expect, Mr. Sun King? I am ninety percent tear.
Early one morning you drink your coffee with shaking hand and complain to me of feeling swallowed. I immediately know what the problem is. You're aching for new climes, full of Roman baths, orca herd, and the New Guinea coast. Above the water, young gods of Portugal are crucified. Old gods of the Tamil and Trobiander walk the cliff-rocks on bare knuckles of moon.
How to conjure further for you? How to distract you?
Playing the father again I tell you to relax, to imagine the grandeurs we can never compare to, the wastes we can never cross, the delusions we can never create. Ignoring me as usual though, you casually speak of a new utopia, a House of Life you have erected in your spare time, and one devoid of government, religions, and therapists. You also describe to me the strange dream you had before waking. You drifted in a cloud of stars above the earth. Tiny holes opened like a squall of black eyes in the space around your body, drinking you in parts like tiny vacuums. You believe this dream portends your death.
That reminds me, I say, Did I ever tell you human telescope eyes have just discovered the universe to be newly fractured and drifting? No? Well, I read about it in the Post science column yesterday. You see, parts of it, like the Hydra-Centaurus Galactic Supercluster, even the Pavo-Indus have been cured from the disease of Bang, summoned off like warming bergs, become plasma factions persuaded to revolt by a sun-engorged tyrant somewhere beyond the rim of the universe and so distant that no one can see it. While you, my Needful One, are steaming towards this enormous sucking thing at thousands of miles a second and all you can do is dream and sketch utopias. The great anarchist Bakunin, and even the smartest human on earth, Marilyn Vos Savant, would be proud of your audacity.
Come the weekends and you and your Daddy Boy attempt the nature, poetry, and alcohol antidote. Off we go, to the skylight espresso malls and Grade-B matinees, the Bukowski-laced picnics in liebraumilch sun beside the Gasoline Mountains; undoglike days of fried chicken, colada thermos, and Ann Sexton at Accotink; chicory coffee, smoked bluefish, Hart and e.e. at Occoquan; Tetelestai, Ashbery, and Blue Moon Ale at Mason Neck. But poetic revelation fails to console and I assume solutions more inebriating, more vast and final are in order: hemlock boughs would suit you, perhaps Orion's Belt or the poet Roetheke's quiet-at-the-heart-of-form. Just strap our bikes to the rack of your crisp yet clunky MGB and cruise, soon adjusting our eyes to bask in the fog of the Appalachians.
On our drive up to the mountains that day, you tell me stories of Great Falls and the Widow's Mite, the Shenandoah River Valley and the bikepaths there which steam free of treacherous window ice by noon. And you tell me that if you go deep enough into the valley to stand and face the Mennonite Church of Murphreesville, say a prayer to Jacob Wisler, then abruptly about face and walk about thirty yards, picking your way over the shallow bed of Lubber Run and up the stiff grassy bank, you'll come upon the childscarred ruin of a 1936 Packard chassis. At this point you'll reel, stumble like an Oz-struck scarecrow, narcotized as you are by the morning gold-boil of aphid dew which deluges the onsweeping valley rift before you, the damp turn of earth on this particular day like a swarm of sunflakes on the grass blades and moist meadow hair.
While coasting the valley path on our bikes in search of trees that echo our usual embrace, the remnants of past encroachments become visible. My God, I say to you, the ancient farms are here. Farm homes, old farm songs. With water and lonely atom for companion they lean, slacken and decay in the hollows and in the sapped out glebes now grazing field. We pick the children out, the dresses of yellow and peach, Sunday biscuits, the autumn geometries of John Deere. Farmer Joe and Mary slip their hands around our waist and we do-si-do very so-so in that old barn behind Miller's place. It all returns to bury us: the edge and beauty of the day weighting us down cold as nuggets of sunlight on rain-sharpened iron--and all opposed to, floating high above, the many fields of swallowed plow, the yards of homely silo tin.
Only it doesn't matter to you, Needful One--or it matters too much and you inhale the place like a toxic vapor, for as you examine all the pallors and fragility your excitement soon mellows to pensive drone. You darken and appear weakened by tales of tragic loss only you can imagine. I can only think once again of cheering you. You cry and I want to make your water mine. You leave me wondering what to do.
Later, as we pass through stands of sun-pale beeches, clatter over small wooden bridges fording cobbly streams, and soar at a coast through pasture lands all sloping and fog-puffed and filled with grazing horse, I try to make you laugh by badly imitating your favorite comedian imitating a macho-faced actor, only my effort falls flat.
Then, while skirting the bank of the river minutes from the car, you abruptly and calmly swerve your bike from the path. I call out to you several times. You pretend to hear none of it. You clatter on alone towards an old and cancerous spine of fishing pier. Loudly you whistle Rock Me on the Water, your face frail and blank as you coast off the pier edge, your back end cartwheeling up and dumping you head first.
Driving home, I'm shrieking Godfuckingdammit Princess Needful! the oncoming burbs soft and slippery as boiled papaya under my feet while you, wearing my jacket--the heat drumming dull in the car and about fourteen cups of Quickie Mart styrofoam littering the seats and floor--either vomiting hot and brown into your empty purse or else scooping out a droll Rock Me on the Water from your waspish throat hollow, or else waving your hands like a maestro of your own silent-film comedy while at the same time making just the kind of eccentric demands and proclamations you might expect to hear uttered by any goddess of self-imposed immortality who is convinced the human race should repent its ways and worship her as a myth . . .
Naked as light at dusk, Needful One, and your Electric Melon shooters made of vodka and cran-orange have not only cured you but cajoled you into searching your drawers for candles. Locating five in a box, you insert them into holders, place them on the mantle and fire them all. Another few Electric Melon shooters and you begin cavorting and dipping in ritual circles like a deranged Beelzebub, becoming more ridiculous and violent by the moment. Your forefinger shadows rise and crowd the wall, substitute for horns. And as you move away from the light, arousing to grotesque proportion your chthonic blades of loin, you shout with a raucous and channel-like voice words I cannot understand: Antecessor! Antecessor! Come, and carry us to Blockula!
How much time do we have?
Well, only seconds are left, uncaptured . . . Towards midnight and you and your pre-boastful âme damneé are cuddled at your place watching television: a perfume commercial of slo-mo erotica, lots of lean arrogant bods and windy silk fluttering against a background of monochrome Wyoming. Daddy Boy, you say, Do you see that magnificent woman on a motorcycle sculpture, the moon in her hair, prairie and cliff at her breast, snow in your eyes?
I cannot answer.
Being a romantic is killing me, you say. Meaning is extinct. I have only this niggling piece of grey life pie. What of trips to Singapore and the Cote d'Azur, junkets to Rio and the power of corruption over Congressmen?
Since I cannot control what I cannot give, I relate to you my own favorite fantasy of total earth transfiguration, a subtle and faster-than-time rusting of all sapien creation in order to begin anew. But instead, oh Needful One, you would cut corners, choose the form of a gang-busting God, a mere wave of hand. Frustrated and changing the subject, I purposely recall that pop singer you really hate, and her past wanton frolics in my sexual shallows.
So how do you react?
You only snort in disgust before laughing and swimming towards your Daddy boy, become a face of teeth and bubbles, and eyes of tombless summer blue--you must have noticed my isolation, seen the fruit of agony in the sea and taken pity.
Lowering your dark autumn hair beneath the swell of television light you come nibbling at my thighs and stomach, tickling as a minnow up to my neck, higher and higher till your face fires light and hot in the sun-glassed blue gleam and your lips flutter like curious sea-quail on my cheek. I embrace you then and carry you to the shallower bath of my bed, overcome with your perfect whiteness snuggled in soft glisten laps; I kiss you and push till you say More with the suddenness of it, Yes you are.
Later, as we lean to the current, our eyes caked with saltspray, our bodies finally collapse where the sea as a drowning man weakens, and the sand blankets spray in fossil fans from your fingertips.
Now at the end of our cycle and we're having a downtown lunch in some chic-heavy glass and crocus bar, and I hesitate before taking the temperature of your eyes and noting your fever has broken. You've learned to accept your fate only so far as necessary. Your first panic zone has been left behind.
Once I've demonstrated my relief, my Needful One, the penance chains loosened, you poise for a brief moment on the verge of a new era, just long enough to irradiate me into senselessness before a great wind carries you off and leaves me with the check. Feeling despondent and ridiculous (and furious at you), I open myself up to all kinds of self-esteem depressions. Then a week, two weeks go by and I hear nothing; meanwhile, I become an alarm clock insomniac, awakening above the earth every night at three am.
And as I lay awake till dawn, two-and-twoing how long it will take for a new bout of madness to overwhelm you, to make you melancholic, fearful, and desperate enough to call me, I wonder what you would say if only you knew.
