by Camille Roy
“I don’t break windows for no reason, Lima.” Dusty gave me a look which seemed to say, these girls drive me crazy.
Then she snapped up Trixie’s coins. “Let me do your oracle, Camille.” I was watching her big scarred hands shake the coins when Professor Hemorrhoids stumbled back into the lobby.
“Goodnight, Professor,” Lima trilled.
“Bye bye,” he mumbled. And was gone.
Dusty Bean threw the coins nine times, making marks on a paper after every throw. It was pleasantly mysterious. A bit of suspense got spanked every time the coins hit the floor—that was the future, telling me to back off.
“Hey, your oracle came up as Revolution (Molting),” Dusty announced. I leaned over and read from the yellow book—Wrapped in the hide of a yellow cow? That seemed pretty strange. But there were parts that Dusty read aloud:
Not every demand for change in the existing order
should be heeded. On the other hand, repeated and
well-founded complaints should not fail of a hearing.
When one’s own day comes, one may create revolution.
Starting brings good fortune. Remorse disappears.
No blame.
“I like your oracle,” said Dusty Bean, her eyes sparking. “I am motivated. I have the revolutionary motivation.”
Something began to chug. Blood spirits. I sort of liked this girl. She clapped her arm around my back and I stumbled, almost fell to my knees under her sunny shine.
But I waved it off. “Well, you take the damn oracle. You threw it. I don’t like it. I’ve been flunking and flailing all over the place. Now I just want to rest for the fucking rest of my life.”
“You’re not failing,” she said firmly. “You’re relaxing. Don’t think of it as taking a hit. Tumble like Alice down your little hole. Falling is relaxing…” Then she looked at me as though her eyes were rolling down my gullet. I mean, it was intimate. “You’re floating really. So, spend that time looking around. It’s good, what you’re doing. You’re here, with us.”
“What happened to my oracle?” It was Trixie, sounding pissed. She’d come back in and was leaning against the door jam.
“It’s Camille’s oracle now,” bubbled out of Pink Lima’s mouth. “Dusty Bean threw her oracle and it’s better than yours was anyhow. She got revolution!”
Trixie’s look was bottomless.
Dusty tapped my knee with a finger. “Listen, you can do anything you want. You want to make some money, go ahead. It can be easy. But that depends on you. It’s not for everybody. You have to be trained.”
Trixie said, sort of glumly, “It’s like cleaning toilets for a hundred an hour.”
“Take Chad, for instance. He’s mine, but if you want him, take him. He’s very very easy. Chad is like this…”
“One of my regulars gave me a car,” chirped Lima. “When was the last time someone gave you a car?”
Dusty Bean described this guy Chad. It was hard to pay attention. Such an old story and I couldn’t care about it. Rejection, shame. Boy, did he try not to go to the whore house, but he could never make it through the month.
Dusty, she was interesting. So sinew. A girl that muscular in barely any clothes, it seemed an exception to every rule. I wanted to lift the silly webs off her little titties. She looked at me with hot blue eyes, her big hands grinning.
Maybe, I thought, I took this job because I was supposed to find a girl with a heart. My whore with a heart, big and warm. I could spend awhile staggering through her chambers…
“Chad,” said Dusty Bean, “is mostly a head case. His wife won’t touch him, and he won’t touch you. He just needs to look at pussy.”
“Well,” I said doubtfully, “it doesn’t sound like a big deal.” It was just another thing I couldn’t think about. Choices. Dusty said I had some. What came up was sitting on Dusty’s hips, twisting her nugget. If I could, I’d choose to be her little sex witch… Better believe I would.
You can drag a hook but HOW to make it catch.
I said in a panic, “Dusty when is your next softball game?”
“Uhh,” was all she said. She looked confused. Trixie gathered up her coins and gave me the game date, then began tossing another oracle. I shot a quick glance at Dusty. We connected as if our eyeballs were attached. Awkwardness rippled through our every nerve. Something happened. It felt sort of like blood pushing into damaged tissue. Sort of ugly. One of those love moments. I relished it. I felt sick. I knew it would be ages before Dusty and I calmed down enough to carry on a conversation.
My imagination is a private museum, but some people just move in. They get swallowed. Then deformity starts. My histories have no accuracy to them, but they are crammed with facts.
When I first met Barb, she lived in a Victorian flat which had cherubs carved into the doorway arches. It was Christmas, and strings of colored lights decorated the hard white tree and the pinball machine, rescued by Barb from a dumpster. Barb had a job in a massage parlor, as the receptionist. It was her job to say, “These are our models tonight,” which was a signal for all the women on the couch to stand in a half circle around the customer who’d just climbed the stairs. My lover was one of those women, and her whore outfits were carelessly butch halter tops and drawstring pants.
I show my girlfriend the above section and she protests sharply, as she always does when she encounters my version of the facts. She says they just made eye contact with the customers. They didn’t stand up. She sounds insulted by the idea of standing up. I vaguely remember that the image of prostitutes in a half circle around a new arrival comes from a book of photographs.
It’s odd to think of my sexual imagination as starting out empty, a blank that drew a body along behind it. Then bits of other people fell in. I remember Barb at a party when we were both in our teens, her eyebrows, long strokes of black, her swiveling wit. She was the kind of cute tomboy butch I wish I could carry in my pocket. She came up to me and, without a word, ran her finger along the neckline of my t-shirt, which had a deep round neck.
Nothing else happened. But after that party I couldn’t wear the shirt. Whenever I put it on, I was distracted by the moment when Barb ran her finger along the neckline. In fact, I was distracted whenever I just thought of the t-shirt. When I did put it on, I had to stare at myself in the mirror and try to imagine what Barb had seen. This always frustrated me, although the charged feeling returns faithfully, at moments associated with the t-shirt and on other occasions—mystified arousal.
Once every few years I’d try again. I’d pull it over my head and stare in the mirror at the long sleeves, the pinkish red—a rose color, with a peculiar bloodiness. The neck was narrow but low-cut. The swells of my breasts at the neckline looked like tree roots, just where they turn and bulge before going into the earth. I yanked the shirt off. My breasts were drained and white.
It ended up in the basement, and I finally threw it out a couple of years ago, after I held it up to the light and noticed it was lacerated by tiny holes. Eaten by some insect. I suddenly felt disgusted by its age and my hoarding. Instead of taking photographs, I avoid throwing out clothes. I keep them stuffed into old suitcases in the basement, where they get dusty as mummy cloth and smell of mildew. I’m all packed—ready to take a trip backwards in time, with every version of my body.
I walk into the bar where Barb is now a bartender. It’s a small place and sparsely decorated, but it has a reputation for interesting music. Mostly men patronize it. Barb comes out from behind the bar and gives me a ferocious hug. “It’s so great to see someone I’ve known for 20 years, who isn’t dead,” she says.
Elise is in the bar. She pecks my cheek, then turns away with a husky laugh. She’s piled her hair on top of her head, leaving drizzly long strings around her neck. When I first met Barb, Elise was her roommate, and here they are, still friends. Barb has good hair, really thick, and long black brows that are wicked and sexy. She cultivates a butch melancholy, and Elise is her buddy, the femme
part of gender’s artificial flower.
I’ve never been able to write about Elise. Her stubborn silences coupled with an extraordinary and very feminine fluency resist description. Today, she is savory and plush—with her padded pink satin kimono and pink shoes, her dry husky laugh. She smells like cigarettes. When she’s sad or just thinking about something, her eyes narrow and she draws her thumb along her lower lip.
No matter what I write, I believe I will make her angry. I decide I’ll change her name and her physical appearance, which immediately gives me a feeling of relief.
I remember waiting with her at a bus stop. The bars had just closed, and we were going home after a night at the clubs. Elise’s metallic leggings gleamed neon pink under the streetlight. Her long hair blew back and forth in the wind, and she was smoking a cigarette. Elise was fearless in the dark.
I’d dressed for her that night—a black lace camisole under my long & tangled hair, big paste jewels, something red. Clothes as a stream of erotic gestures. It was my pleasure to be in a sphere dominated by her style, though she unnerved me. We danced separately, with the cute ones who said yes. It felt like working the crowd. All I really wanted to do was observe Elise from the corner of my eye. Of course, she came home with several phone numbers, and I watched—the cool edge to the way she could jot down a phone number or take one, and then slide it somewhere interesting, like the top of her stocking or her bra.
The girlfriends Elise acquired this way were bright funny stories, if also a pain in the ass. The one I remember at the moment was the Swedish countess, a sugary-looking blond named Ingrid. What good is Eurotrash when it’s hasn’t got any money? She was unbelievably rude. Anyone in her way got a wicked shove, and no matter how many times we were introduced, she never recognized me.
One day Elise told me about Ingrid’s childhood, and reality popped, like cracking a knuckle. That shimmer of delirium is the best thing about a story that is both funny and true. Elise had a phrase for those moments: It’s the Funkadelics. They’ve reincarnated and entered our lives in a new form.
It seemed that the Count, Ingrid’s father, invested all the family’s money in rubber boots—not a wise move, as they were living in a country where it never rained. All through Ingrid’s childhood that money lay in the basement, in the form of thousands of pairs of red and yellow galoshes. Eventually they disappeared into the dump.
Elise’s femininity is permanent (I’m tempted to say eternal). For her fourth birthday, she demanded white go-go boots. When I try to tell the same story as someone like her, I can feel myself falling apart. Parts slide off, chunks of hair and skin—the ones I’ve rummaged, acquired on the sly. I’ve assembled a sexual identity that’s like another body—my personal Frankenstein. Bony and full of nerves & suffering. It includes me but is detached, like the mirror’s alienating resemblance to myself.
There’s no question about my sexual tastes. Bottom’s up. I prefer desires that lacerate and spread, like cracks through porcelain. But the feeling persists, that just around the corner is the room where I started, and it’s empty.
Now I live in a house with my fetishes. Like that rosy t-shirt, which sometimes still preoccupies me, even though I threw it out ages ago. It’s really my body, multiplying itself, arousals migrating around the tufted living room set and the home entertainment center. Then, like dust bunnies, they float out the window, bouncing slowly, driven by a breeze across my broad suburban lawn.
(I’ve never lived in the suburbs, but their peculiar melancholy is everywhere.)
Think about it. Your female body. Focus on the young flesh. It has a kind of radiance that other people believe in. You discover, to your surprise, that belief can be aimed at you without being personal. Like that night in the bar, when you glimpse Elise’s red thumbnail crushing a phone number. Ink smudges on a wet cocktail napkin—someone’s private message disappears between the hem of her stocking and her thigh. With Elise, I imagine the perfect coincidence of inside and outside, although I’ve never asked her about it.
Ghost Story
One day about a year ago, a book came in the mail. It was called When Ghosts Speak and it arrived by mistake. No one had ordered it. The author, a devout Catholic, was on relaxed terms with that part of the spirit world which had not ‘transitioned’ by entering ‘the white light’ (her terminology). Her attitude towards ghosts was offhand and extremely assured. I scanned the book for a few moments before tossing it into the recycling bin.
It turned out to be preparation for an odd incident which occurred a few days later. I was driving on 8th towards Potrero Hill when suddenly a dead friend was sitting next to me in the car, his familiar presence resonant in the empty space. You might say it made a ghostly noise (although he didn’t speak). Just then a rotary phone loudly rang.
What to make of this? I reflected on my friend’s life, which had been rich in unfortunate experiences. In fact, these were the kind of experiences which become lurid and deformed by representation. It’s as though a voyeuristic appetite gets released in language and then preys upon the subject—my subject. As a consequence, I feel attracted by the manifold protections of silence. But I will give one example, because the image it creates is, for me, so weirdly Christlike. While sleeping in Golden Gate Park, my friend was once woken up by rats licking the blood that seeped from scabs on his arms. Such stories burst from him in language that had so much vividness and energy it possessed its own uncanny life. When he died, I had to mourn the death of his language as something distinct from his physical death—a separate loss.
Today I think that the presence of death in life characterizes language. That is the most true part of the story I’ve just told. Like any native speaker, I handle English with a sense of ease, but over time its uncanny aspect has become more present. Words are the oldest human objects which enter my daily life. Yesterday I was reading some of the riddles of the Exeter book and this word shone forth unchanged:
swaþu swiþe blacu swift wæs on fore swift!
I’m not construing death as an abstract barrier. It’s more of a thin curtain drawn over the churning mass of former times—always present, always invisible. As a joke, I once told a student that language was a zombie—acting alive but composed of dead parts. We both found the idea oddly satisfying.
What does it mean to be close to a person’s language? My friend who died had a way with it which meant anything could happen: many startling fabrications. Once he was going to Canada to attend a festival for skateboarders. Probably it was one of those extreme sports events. At the border, they pulled him into a room and showed him a printout from an American law enforcement agency that went on for pages and pages. It contained the details of all his thirty-one aliases.
I’m hesitant to characterize my experience of my friend’s ghost as a delusion. This is not because I think that ghosts are real, or, at least, they are not exactly real. It is this: the obscurity of language makes the real quiver.
A speck reads its future from its path through the
shock corridor
that place which resides
in the ghost. Similarly, I make my pants
from drought
leather.
Just so. In the manner.
Furl.
An Obscure Text
+ One which is difficult, self-indulgent, private, exclusive.
+ Or, a text which is characterized by the use of codes or slang terms of marginal communities. It is (by intent) incomprehensible, fractured, distracting, irrational, or illegible to outsiders.
+ Or, a text which contains unregulated and confusing erotic elements. In this case, it may be also thought of as an adult game. Such private codes have the communicative density of erotic coupling.
+ Or, in the occult vein: a text which is mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic.
The writing I prefer is packed with sensation, relation, insight, but it has a very small audience. In the wider cultural marketplace, such writing is regarded dism
issively and the specific basis of this dismissal is its obscurity. This skew troubles the perceptions even of those who resist it.
What I find curious is that obscurity has powers of attraction in cultural fields outside of literature, particularly in popular music. The book Infidel Poetics by Daniel Tiffany is an exhilarating exploration of lyric obscurity and it begins with this paradox:
In popular music today, there is a flourishing market in poetic obscurity—in lyrics composed in various kinds of slang, jargon, or patois, which make little or no sense to most listeners. Animated by the inscrutable or garbled refrain, eclectic communities take root in the urban chatter of hiphop, the Haitian creole of Wyclef Jean, the cockney slang of British punk, the Jamaican argot of reggae… The practice of including song lyrics and occasionally even glossaries in liner notes appears to have fallen from favor, precisely because the task of deciphering lyrics defies the latest poetic and cultural ethos of obscurity. At the same time, lyric obscurity in this context appears to function as a potent ingredient of publicity and celebrity, as the inevitable condition (and the indelible object) of exposure. (1)
In popular music, lyric obscurity is an efflorescence that arises in response to a need for concealment (criminality, stigmatized community) or under conditions of social disorder. The sense of risk that is communicated is risk of and to the body. The communities which are represented have failed to assimilate—that failure is what is present—and this, fundamentally, is a failure of communicability, and perhaps, too, a failure of legitimacy. The paradox being that this is the locus of powerful expression.
I suspect that the fundamental cause of the disconnect between social undergrounds and poetic communities is class, specifically the academic context for contemporary poetry. In other words, it isn’t logically necessary. Of course, observing that class is a barrier does not yield insight into crossing it. Perhaps, as non-academic contexts for poetry proliferate, poetry as a project will mutate wildly on either side of this barrier.
