pretty dumb things

at the saloon at the ends of the worlds

Because I'm powerless over the sweet-evil wiles of Molly Crabapple, I agreed to curate a series of flash fiction written in celebration of the fifth anniversary of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, the life-drawing franchise that happens with alcohol and naked people, a winning combination if ever I've known one. Below is the piece I wrote for the series. You can read earlier incarnations both on the Dr. Sketchy blog and on its Tumblr. If you want to write something your own darn self, I suggest you do so. Because like Molly, I make art, and then I encourage others to do it too.

The dead continue to dance, drink and make sportive in this story from chelsea g. summers. Belly up to the bar and pour yourself a tall frosty glass of what-the-fuck, here at the Saloon at the Ends of the Worlds…

The Road Warrior, Satan, Kali-Ma and the Whore of Babylon walk into a bar.

“Gimme a pint, ey?” The Road Warrior spat at the barkeep.

“Why do you have to be so insufferably cliché?” the Whore of Babylon said. She looked around the room, through its crepuscular gloom. “Jesus, what a dump.”

“I know,” said Kali-Ma, “I could crap a better existence than this.”

Satan tried to order an Irish Car Bomb. The barkeep told him they were out of C-4. Satan pointed to a dusty bottle of Jameson’s tucked away on a shelf behind a bottle of 1896 Absinthe Robette. The barkeep looked blankly at the Prince of Darkness, who unfurled his wings menacingly, knocking Kali-Ma’s crown askew. Satan, enraged, pointed at the Jameson’s and screamed at the barkeep, “No, clay-brained guts, you knotty-pated fool, you whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch! You are unfit for any place but hell.”

“I swear to Christ,” the Whore of Babylon shot a withering look at Satan, “you are so goddamned lacking in originality.”

“Fer fuck’s sake,” added the Road Warrior and waved drunkenly at the room.  “Gimme another pint. Give ‘m all a pint.” The Road Warrior grabbed his beer and stalked off to the jukebox.

The Whore of Babylon rolled her eyes. “Jesus Fucking Christ, Max, if you play ‘Cracklin’ Rosy’ one more time, I’m going to call the horsemen and make them draw and quarter you. I’ll wear your guts for garters.” She brightened at the prospect and sipped her beer.

“I miss Shiva.” Kali-Ma slumped in a chair. “I wanna dance.”

“I know you do, honey,” said the Whore of Babylon. “Why don’t you come over here and kiss the Mother of Harlots with that mouth?” The Whore of Babylon stared at a shadowy man in a booth. “Hey, is that Godot?”

Satan demanded, ever louder, his fucking Irish Car Bomb right the fuck now. The barkeep pulled a sawed-off shotgun out from behind the bar. He took aim and blew a hole in Satan’s head. Gore flew and blood misted. Satan wobbled, shook his head like a dog, and grimaced. The hole in his head grew back together with a sucking sound. Satan leaped over the bar. He poured a Guinness, but every time he reached for the Jameson’s, it slipped out of his fingers, like smoke, like a mirage, like heaven.

The Road Warrior looked over. “He told you they was out of C-4, mate. Have a pint.”

Kali-Ma began twirling, desultory at first. Her necklace of skulls clattered like sepulchral cutlery. She twirled, ever faster. Sparks flew from her blue feet. It was a pretty sight, and everyone in the bar watched, transfixed at their own imminent destruction.

And so it goes, another infernal night. All apocalypses, all the time. Never a cover. Ladies free on Wednesday, but it’s always late Sunday afternoon at the Saloon at the Ends of the Worlds.

If you're interested in being part of this cavalcade of revenant fiction, email me. We'll do this thing.

wherein it's complicated (but not meaningless)

Late Friday night, dressed in my jammies, I went to an expensive mid-town hotel and had sex with a virtual stranger. I’m less interested in reflecting upon the sex right now. However, as it is conceivable that the man with whom I mussed that expansive hotel bed may read this, I do note genuinely and sincerely that the sex was lovely. He’s a champion hair-puller, no mean feat indeed. He has an atavistic understand of sexual cadence, of play and release, of teeth and lips and tongue, of nails and fingertips. His body is long and white and thin, a lovely creamy thing, and his cock is similarly tasty. More than that, he’s smart as a whip and twice as honest. He’s hard not to like as a person and a lover, and I do.

He probably thinks this post is about him, but he’d be wrong. It’s about me, and about melancholy and the billowing not unpleasant melancholy that comes with fucking a virtual stranger.

This man was one of those men that I clapped my eyes on with great delight. It’s not merely that he’s a beautiful geek. It’s that he’s cynical, funny and smart. His mind visibly goes tick-a-tick-a-tick and his words sometimes come out garbled and weird in his intensity. These are things I like in a human. He stuck out his hand upon meeting me. I clasped his long white fingers in my own and got greedy with lust. It’s one of those things that blindsides me from time to time, though recently a lot less often than it once did.

He is, as is my wont, younger. And I suppose that youth is part of the melancholy that I’ve been marinating in so willingly all weekend, since I left that broad white bed around 7:00 on Saturday morning and cabbed home to my Gotham apartment. The youth is so significant as to be overdetermined, but mostly what it seems to be screaming with is the press and clutch of great loves of my past.

Three years ago, I broke with the last of those loves. I’ve healed. I no longer pine. I left pining behind a long time ago. Pining is so far retreated in my rearview that I saw Donny last December. We went to a play together, and it felt much like visiting your old high school does. Everything seemed a lot smaller than you remember it. It felt a lot like closure. But although I’m over that last broken relationship, it’s written on my body and in my heart. My next love will walk past that relationship’s mirror; it’ll get caught, refracted, however briefly. That lost love marked me. It was there; then it was gone; I hurt; and now I don’t. But the chalk outline, blurry and ill-defined, remains.

These days, I’m fine. I’m alone, single, and I’m fine. I had a brief, moderately horrid ill-calibrated relationship with a man last winter, and when it ended, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I haven’t dated since, and I didn’t date before the moderately horrid ill-calibrated relationship. I’ve been alone, fine, single, content with my friends, who are undeniably fabulous.

I’m fine and I’m fine and I’m fine. I ignore the call of my wild libido. I masturbate like I wash the dishes: efficiently and matter-of-factly. Flirtation rolls like tumbleweeds through the ghost town of my social life. I really am ok living on my onesie; I’m not even angry at Sunday afternoons. I’ve achieved a zenlike calm about my solitude.

Nothing wrecks that calm, shreds the tissue of my self-delusion, or shines a Klieg light under my bed to illuminate the dustbunnies of my love life as fast as six hours spent in the cool confines of a high-end hotel utopia wrapped in the hot limbs of a stranger. I left the hotel striding the earth as a Colossus. I sauntered down that dim corridor and sashayed into a taxi. Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of bright white 7:00 a.m. sunshine. I had been tumbled, rogered roundly. I had fucked and it had been good. I was still sticky with come. All was shiny delight.

Then the endorphins left the building, and I fell cowering in their wake, a raw mess. The man I’d fucked loomed large and became the silver-flecked screen for all my most filmic projections: the Zeffirelli haloed glow of infatuation, the Hawks chiseled relief of witty banter, the Altman clarity of real adult love, the Allen jitter of insecurity, the Carpenter blood-splattered horror of rejection. I got hit with the ice truck of melancholy, and it was all I could do not to write poetry. Nothing should drive me to poesy.

I've been fortunate to have had two great loves in my life. The luck, the loves, and the history are incontrovertible and intrinsic. I don’t dwell on the loss—my life is as my life is—and my current state is one of content solitude. But the flesh knows. Like the way my body can recollect the choreography of dances I learned twenty years ago once the music starts playing and I let my conscious mind hang numb, so too when I’m having sex does my body remember what it’s like making love with a man whom I love with every nerve ending, every dendrite, every particle, spark, byte and bit of matter that is me.  It’s not unpleasant, but it is disconcerting.

The keening truth of the matter is this: I miss being with someone and being completely. I miss the trust and the eddying swirl of feelings. I miss making plans and breathing the same air. I miss snuggling warm at night and waking up sticky. I miss knowing someone's body and feeling secure in the knowing that he too knows mine. I miss shared history and the sanguine hope of shared future.  When I haven't had sex, when I haven't kissed and touched and felt my breath catch in the back of my throat, when I haven't felt the sharp loss of an inch of space or the fluttering hush of anticipation, I don't acknowledge that bricolage of losses. I can fool myself into feeling fine alone. And mostly I am fine. But I'm not plush with the rush of love.

It’s Sunday, the day of the couple, and I’m still melancholic. It’s not unpleasant; it’s just complicated. I’m glad for what I did and what I’ve done and what I’ve felt. I just wonder if that is all there is, and if that’s all there is, my friends, I suppose I’ll just have to keep on dancing.

 

mind/body/split

It’s interesting having a body. I just turned 48, which makes me soundly middle aged. I don’t often feel it, no one seems to think I look it, and I don’t think I act it—which is to say that I don’t feel, look, or act as I expected I would at this age. I really thought my life would feel much more solidified when I got here, but here I am and all is as fluid as it has ever been.

“Fluid” is an eldritchly apt term for me right now. I just wrote a piece for Filthy Gorgeous Things on fluids, which is to say more exactly the white tiger of female sexuality, which is to say more exactly squirting, which is to say yet more exactly female ejaculation. I wrote the piece for FGT’s Discovery issue, and I did indeed suffer a recent discovery in fluid form. The piece is free, and you can read it here.  I’ve heard it’s kind of hot, and if you’re in the mood for hotness, you should just click that link and abandon this post, which is not hot.

This piece of writing is less about pimping that piece of writing and more about the confluence of events that made that discovery possible, and that confluence of events is most simply aging.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I grow old, and if you’re lucky, one day so too will you. Rolling of trousers is optional, aging not so much. If you live, you will get old, and there it is in its stark, jolie-laid, and wabi-sabi glory. You have a body; it’s interesting. In fact, there are two points when your body seems most interesting, and those two points are pubescence and menopause. I’m not sure how you men-folk understand the great Change of Life, but those two prolonged moments seem to me the bookends of physical interestingness.

I am not yet menopausal, in point of fact, but I see it looming as a monolith. It’s in the distance and every day it gets larger until one day I won’t have a choice but to confront it. Every month, I still get my period. The Change is yet to come, but come it will; in fact, comes it does. From my perspective, watching The Change come incrementally closer is not unlike my experience at eleven of watching my nipples grow soft and my mound grow downy. It’s just less quick, less sanguine, and less anticipated. I’m in the middle of Change, and it makes my body interesting.

Most of my adult life, I’ve just lived in my body. Sure, I waged war with it, and I found détente with it. I hated some parts and loved others, I got angry at its shape and its feel, its size and its contours. I vainly primped and stroked and patted, as women do. I have shaken and shimmied and paraded and pranced, both for money and for fun. I have shared my body with many people, and I’ve shared great passion with a handful of them. But mostly, I lived in my body. I felt emotion and sensation. I didn’t feel much of a split.

A few years ago, I got pneumonia. I was sick enough to spend a week in bed and crack ribs coughing, but I was so poor that I didn’t go to the doctor’s, and I couldn’t afford to take time off from work. It was the first time that I felt the crush and press of my own mortality. Your body can—and will—fail you, I thought. It was sobering, weird and ironic. Being a morose and depressive type whose daily thoughts had often been punctuated with thoughts of suicide, I ought not to quail at my own mortality. I should be pretty accustomed to it. And yet.

So there I was, hacking so hard that I cracked my ribs from the inside and living for several weeks with the lingering pain, a stabby reminder every time I reached too quickly for a book or a can or my dog. I had an epiphany. I realized that one day my body, this body that I had loved and hated myself and with which I had loved and hated others, would fail me. It wasn’t a question of if; it was a question of when. And then, as one does, I got better, and the thought went with the illness.

I have a high pain tolerance. Part of it is the deeply Protestant nurture of my family. Part of it is dancing for six years and lifting weights off and on for thirty. I treat my body cavalierly, pushing through the pain because pain is for pussies. Injuries are for the weak. The strong are Cock-D, and I am the strong. I am, in fact, such a commando that I had been walking around with my rotator cuff torn about 75% for untold swaths of time, a fact discovered by my doctor about six weeks ago. He scheduled me for surgery the next day.

I’ve rarely been an invalid. I broke my wrist when I was 21, and I tore my ACL when I was 9. That’s it. For the past six weeks, I’ve been walking around in Sling, a giant black two-piece Velcro-and-foam ensemble that both holds my right arm and straps it to my waist. Judging from how much people avoid me in public places, there might not be anything more spectacularly invisible than me in Sling. Walking into Sephora or American Apparel, I feel as if I ought to wave my debit card while shouting, “I have a $1,200 balance and I’m not afraid to spend it!” Anything short of that makes salespeople’s eyes slide off me like I’m coated in Teflon. Ditto those of my fellow consumers.

But Sling, which ruins the lines of my clothes and marks me as invalid, is not the worst of it. The pain might be the worst of it. For six weeks, I’ve been in near-constant pain. Sometimes the pain has been such a great and keening beast that I cower and go fetal. Most times, the pain is a low susurrating animal, like a mewling rat. It hurts, and it’s exhausting. I went a month not sleeping more than two hours at a clip. Now I’m sleeping as long as my Tylenol lasts, and then I wake. I count Tylenols like coffee spoons.

Actually, no. The worst of it is the envy and the longing. I watch people with their hands in the air, waving them like they just don’t care, and I marvel. I recollect the ability to wash the top of my head, but it’s probably a month away before I’ll be able to do that again. I crawl like a toddler toward a full range of motion. I was overjoyed when, for the first time three weeks, I was able to apply eyeliner. Some day soon, I’ll be able to put my hair in a ponytail without bending over at the waist. I hear that one day I’ll do a push-up again, but that day is about six months away. I mourn.

I miss feeling whole, hale, and healthy. Mostly, I miss the fact that I can no longer, not ever, treat my body cavalierly. I will never, ever be able to slam weights around like a fucking Marine. I’ll never be able to dive in all commando and, as I did when I began running, go out and do the six-mile Central Park loop just to see if I can. I can’t be Cock-D. I have to work slowly, incrementally, pussily. I have to pay attention to my body, listen to it. I hate that. I feel like a schnook.

I age and that’s interesting, but I’m not young anymore and that’s not. I hear there’s wisdom as pay-off for this necessary winding down. I have yet to appreciate it. All I want to do is jump rope as the Ramones blasts in my earbuds and my breath catches and my quads burn and gorge rises. All I want is to push my body with Spartan abandon. All I want is to be able to hug fiercely and long. All I want is to be me again, and that’s not possible, not as I have been. I may be more than my pained, healing, and afflicted shoulder, but I’m not sure who that is.

There has been a split far larger than the two tiny scars in my shoulder would suggest. Time will not heal the rift; it’ll only make it larger.

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