I closed my eyes, waiting for my heart to return to normal. Two more hours until six.
Bells on Her Toes
M. Christian
Jasmine died two years ago. She showed up three weeks ago. Should have expected it, knowing Jasmine as well as I did.
I didn’t know she was back, not really, for almost a week. Stomping around my little Long Beach bungalow, the one she had called my shell, I caught glimpses of faint reds, gold, of the hazy glow of sunlight through baggy tie-dyes, and of God’s Eyes turning in the windows. They were just there enough so you knew you saw something, but was always a part, always a fragment of something. Same with smells: incense, patchouli oil, pot, cheap wine, and that simple lemon perfume. Same with sounds, walking from the little kitchenette into the living room you would catch the slap of leather sandals on the hardwood floors, the opening clap of Stairway, and that tiny sound, that special sound that would always mean bells on toes. Jasmine.
She had outlasted the ghost of the sixties by a few years, Jasmine had. Even though she’d been born in ’71, she was a spirit of the Merry Pranksters, of Airplane, of the Summer of Love, acid, pot, Fat Freddy’s Cat, the Stones, and tie-dyes.
It wasn’t easy being a flower child in the age of the World Wide Web, ecstasy, coke, NIN, Courtney Love, Belly, and body piercings, but Jasmine pulled it off. She drifted with a smile on her face, and those fucking bells on her toes, through life – hitching rides with only good people, taking only the best drugs, being friends with only good people. She was a ghost of the sixties, a spirit of the Haight and the Diggers.
Now she was just a spirit.
I never could figure out how she could exist. She was fascinating in the same way a Mary Keene painting (admit it, you’ve seen them – big eyed children) can be: innocence distilled to the point of being surreal. Jasmine could hitchhike with Jeffrey Dahmer and get out alive, and with some money to help her on her way.
If there was a sin in Jasmine, in her perfect fortune, this unblinking good luck, it was that it didn’t leave much room for depth or brains. Jasmine was a spirit who walked slowly through life, letting it bump her this way and that. Never ask her to meet you anywhere, never make plans around her, Jasmine was pot and incense and a soft, warm body that fit so comfortably in your arms, but she wasn’t someone you could count on. No one who knew her said it, but we all knew it was true – and having her turn up two years after we all put her to rest in the Long Beach Municipal Cemetery proved it. She was late for her own funeral.
I can’t really remember the first time I met Jasmine. Maybe it was that party to celebrate Rosie getting her first gig at the Red Room. Maybe it was that picnic that Robert and Steve threw down at the remains of the old Pike. Maybe she had just shown up on my doorstep like she always seemed to, jingling her tiny silver bells and lazily sweeping her tie-dye skirt back and forth. No place to sleep that night and Roger Corn was always up, awake, and willing to take her in.
God knew what we had in common, save we . . . fit somehow. We didn’t talk music (Airplane! NIN! Joplin! Love!) or books (Kesey! Coupland!) or anything else for that matter (You’re always so damned happy! What do you have to feel sad about?), we just fucked and played and took our respective drugs (Coffee & weed! H and Pot!). The spirit of the 60s and one hack writer, making his bread and butter writing porn, True Detective Stories, and articles on how to get your cat to use the toilet. We just seemed to go together somehow. We tolerated each other because we liked to fuck and kiss each other. Relationships can be based on worse things.
When I got that call, Rosie so calm and collected, I was sort of ready for it. Jasmine wasn’t someone who collected a lot of uniqueness. She did kind of what you expected her to, so when the phone rang and Rosie said that Jasmine had “passed on” I knew almost exactly how, where and why.
The funeral was sparse and sad for such a little spirit. The four of us in the cemetery. We had all pitched in to get the coffin. It was a colorful affair, you had to give it that: Rosie in a gaudy color-blast of a red sequined gown and boa, Robert in his own retro seventies platforms and polyester, Steve in his sixties with his beads and (where the fuck did he score that?) Nehru jacket. I wore something aside from black. It was hard to find, but I managed to score a brilliant red shirt from a friend of mine. In many cultures – my shitty education not enough to tell me exactly where and who – red is the color for the dead.
Two years later she was paying me a visit.
The first time I realized that something was going on I was scared shitless. I was washing my coffee cup out (my only lucky one), high just a wee bit from this shitty Mexican that Rosie had scored for me, and I felt someone behind me. Thinking it was Montezuma’s revenge acting through the weed I shrugged it off. Then the someone put their arms around my waist and hugged my little pot belly. I screamed, dropped my cup (Java is the Spirit of Creativity) into shards of ceramic, jumped into my Docs and ran over to Steve and Robert’s.
You’d think that ODing on H in Rosie’s apartment would be enough to keep a girlfriend down.
After a day or so Rosie had convinced me that it had just been lack of sleep, too many sips from my favorite mug, and a sudden flash of missing Jasmine. Rose said she felt her own late ex touch her sometimes – when she was in just the right mood. Of course there are differences between a dyke who’d gone off a bridge on her Harley and Jasmine the flower child overdoing the nostalgia just a bit.
Back in my place I kept seeing those flashes of Jasmine’s colors, smelling her smell, and hearing her bells. And sometimes, just before drifting off at three A.M. I’d feel her body warmth – just the heat of her at first, you understand, slip into bed with me.
Then, about two weeks after that first touch in the kitchen, I was coming from the living room into the kitchen, new mug in hand (Coffee is the Last Refuge of the Sleepy), straight for my Saint Coffee machine and there she was: sandals, tie-dyed drawstring pants, simple white cotton shirt, scarf tied over her head. She was just there – as I’d seen her a million times: joint burning in one hand, twirling a few strands of her blond hair in the other, chewing her lips at some newspaper headline or another and – while she’d never actually said it – you could still hear her thoughts clear and distinct: Why don’t people get along? Like she had on many mornings, as she had countless times.
And there she was again, after two years cold in the ground.
Then she wasn’t. She was there for about as much time as it takes to blink and think, for a panicked second, is that really her?
That was the first time. There were quickly others.
Jasmine liked to get in the bath tub with me when I was practicing my Death Trance Meditations. I like to sit in warm water with the lights off and think about myself in terms of flesh, blood, bone, hair and where all those pieces could end up, say, in a million years. You can get into some profound thoughts, lying in the dark, in the water, like that. And it can really mess with your head when the door would crash open and this demented hippie chick, all bounce and giggle, would come storming in jingling her tiny silver bells to pull off her balloon pants and squat herself down on the john to take a piss. We used to fight about it, especially when she and I didn’t even know she was in the house. You can imagine the shock she made after she was dead.
Mornings were Jasmine’s favorite time of day. If I’d let her she would go on and on about the opening of the day, with the accompaniment of birds singing and the soft applause of butterflies. She would wax cliché about the possibilities “dawning” (and giggling at the pun) with the new day and wonder how many adventures she’d have by sunset.
I am a Creature of the Night. I run from the burning rays of the sun and seek solstice in the cool darkness of my shell. But, still, I would always get up on a cheery blast furnace of a morning and be happy as a clam – especially when Jasmine treated me to one of her early bird special blowjobs. She liked that word, “Blowjob” – said it sounded so cute. And, boy, was Jasmine skilled in its p
erformance. Just the right amount of tongue, suction, lips, wet, dry, hands. She used to wake me up with soft kisses along my leg to let me know she was there and what she was up to. Then the kisses would run up to my stomach. A hand carefully placed over my cock and balls would warm them and add some sensation. When her mouth did finally touch my cock, it was after those soft, soft hands had stoked, teased, tickled and coaxed me into a painfully intense hard-on. Then the mouth. Then the real ride.
Mornings haven’t been the same since she died. The sun must be a little brighter, stronger now. But then that one morning came. I was sleeping off my usual late-night writing stint (with a celebration of a new one finished: I was a Teenage Trailer Park Slut) when I got this amazing hard-on. I was so zonked that I really can’t tell you if it was because of Jasmine or just because I was remembering my past with her, but there it was: long (no brag, but seven inches), strong and mighty. It was a mechanic’s cock, a soldier’s cock, a fuckin’ basketball player’s cock (okay, one of the white ones). I was proud of my cock, pleased with it that morning. With a hard-on like that, even hack writers can go out and become president (if you know the right people).
Then Jasmine started to work on it. Dear dead Jasmine. Maybe because of my half-zonked condition, maybe because I just missed those lips, that throat, but I didn’t do what I should have done: run screaming into that intense morning. But I didn’t and dear dead Jasmine started to really get down and suck at my cock.
Death did not diminish her knowledge of blow-jobs, it seemed. She was all of Jasmine rolled into that one cocksucking. I could, in fact, just squint enough and see her as I had seen her on all those mornings: her firm, slightly heavy body folded over, her face concentrating at my cock, with her right hand between her legs as she humped herself along with her sucking.
God, I could feel every inch of Jasmine – even if I couldn’t see her. I could feel her tongue playing with the ridges and corona of my head, I could feel her lips play over my skin and veins, I could feel her throat – hot and firm – as I grazed it during her sucking. When I came, it was so good it hurt real bad, and my come shot into an invisible mouth and vanished into ectoplasmic nothingness just as real, live Jasmine had liked to swallow it.
Other people would have run – to their pastors, to the cops (why?), to some science guy with a gizmo to exorcise the latent spectral energies, to their priest (who would rattle their beads and speak some Latin). But most folks don’t consider themselves a Child of the Night, groove on gloom, or hate any color save pitch black. Besides, Jasmine had been a sweet girl (tinkle, tinkle) and one motherfuckin’ hot lay.
The fact that she was dead and haunting me didn’t really seem to bother me at the time.
Jasmine was great for surprises. She liked to catch you unawares and get caught unawares herself. I can’t remember how many times I’d “caught” Jasmine in the living room, or on the toilet, in my bed, rubbing one of her little, soft fingers up and down on her little moist slit. She was like a little kid in that, her body and other people’s used to give her so much pleasure. Death didn’t even slow her down.
Listening to the newest Lycia, all moan, cemeteries, statues, clouds, rain, and mourners, I would get the strong impression of flowers, macramé, pot and the distinct sound of the tiny silver bells on toes jingling merrily away and look next to me to see Jasmine, half there and half not, not quite developed, not quite visible, legs spread wide, fingers gently rubbing up and down on her gumdrop-sized clit.
She became, over those weeks, to be more and more in my life. More so than she had when she was alive. Flesh and blood, Jasmine used to come over maybe, tops, three times a week. Then I wouldn’t see her for months. Once a year passed before I walked in to see her dancing, naked, with headphones on in my living room, the air thick with Mexican greenbud. But now that she had passed on, time seemed different to her. I would expect to feel or feel this spirit of Morrison, of Cream, of Sergeant Pepper at least once a day. Dancing in the living room, reading the Sunday paper in the kitchen, masturbating on the toilet, spooning with me in bed.
Bad? No, not at all. I felt special that of all the people she lived with, had fucked, had fought with, this one grungy hack writer living in a cheap-ass bungalow in Long Beach was the one she wanted to spend eternity with.
But there were other times, too. I would walk from the kitchen into the living room, coffee cup in hand, straight for my Mac with visions of Truck Stop Bimbos running through my head like a pneumatic chorus line, and I would see her, standing by the window looking at something only the ghostly Jasmine could see. What bothered me more than anything was that Jasmine, alive, never really had an interest in the traffic on Oleander Street. Jasmine wasn’t just an echo drilled into me and my cheap-ass stucco walls. Something of the real Jasmine was here with the spectral one. Something that was missing something.
It became pretty obvious when she started to get . . . distracted by things. Right in the middle of one hot and nasty morning blowjob, her ghost would stop right in the middle (coitus spectoralus) and I would get the definite impression that she was either looking out that window again or maybe trying to remember something that she had forgotten.
Rosie, my only expert on dead relations coming back to cop a feel, got real quiet as she poured me Darjeeling tea, then said: “When Bolo left this world—” Rosie’s ex who tried to jump her Harley from the Queen Mary to Catalina “– she came back to visit me a couple of times. It was like she just wanted to say good-bye in a way she couldn’t when she was living. When she had done that, she just faded away.”
“Yeah, but I don’t get the vibe that Jas is here for a reason. It’s like she just sort of moved back in.”
Rosie stirred her tea with a chiming that reminded me way too much of Jasmine’s tiny silver bells. “I got the impression from Bolo that she knew where she was going and that she was just stopping by. Remember, we are dealing with Jasmine, here. She could have gotten lost.”
Great, a girl who could get lost in a Safeway had taken the wrong turn between death and the afterlife and was now trapped in my house.
It got worse soon after. The sex was still there, but now it was . . . sad. The one thing the flesh and blood Jasmine wasn’t was sad. The best way to get rid of her, in fact, was to get depressed: she’d vanish like pot smoke to find someone more cheerful. I have always had a hard time putting on a happy face, the one reason why Jasmine and I never stayed together for too long a time. Now, though, it looked like she was stuck in my dark little bungalow.
And it was making her sad. It wasn’t something she was used to, getting sad, and it was hitting her hard.
I heard her cry one day. I was hard at work on something for a porno mag specializing in dirty buttholes “– and the guys who love to lick them” when I heard this weird sound. A sort of choking, wet sound. I hadn’t ever heard it before.
I found her next to the bed, curled into a partially invisible fetal position. Jasmine was crying. It was that heaving, nauseous kind of crying, the kind you do when your cat gets run over, when you know you’ve taken way too much of the wrong kind of shit, when you’re lost and know you can never find your way back.
I’m not a very altruistic kinda guy. I don’t really know where it comes from, or doesn’t: I just really don’t give a flying fuck for a lot of folks. Yeah, I’ll take Steve to the hospital when his T cells are low, or hold Rosie when she thinks too much of Bolo, but I don’t really see those things as being good. Good is, like, helping fucking orphans or something, or giving change to the smelly crackhead who hangs out, or passes out, at the Laundromat. I don’t have that kind of temperament.
I really didn’t care that much about Jasmine. Yeah I’d bail her out when she got busted for forgetting her purse and eating up a storm at some diner. Yeah, I’d give her whatever I had in my checking account when she really needed it. Yeah, I’d always let her in, no matter what was going on in my life. But she was just a pal, and a really good lay. I honestly didn’t think o
f her in any other terms.
But then she was dead, and crying in my bedroom.
I could guess the cause. Bolo was a dyke who always knew where she was going and how exactly to get there. She was an iron-plated mean mother who knew what the score was – despite her profound depressions and mood swings. Jasmine was flowers and pot and the Beatles. She could get lost walking from the bathroom into the bedroom.
It wasn’t all that hard, once I made the decision to do it. One phone call, to Rosie. Then into the bathroom.
I hadn’t done my Death Trance since she had manifested herself those two weeks ago. It was just too much of a temptation for her and the shock of her walking in had been way too much when she was flesh and blood. Since she was a ghost – well, I don’t really want to see if I’m cardiac prone.
Had trouble sleeping a few years back. I was lucky enough to have health insurance at the time, and so was able to see a doc who could actually give me pills. I had only taken one – the fuckers were so strong that I stopped taking them and simply started staying up late.
I took five and lay down in the warm water.
We are nothing but matter. We are nothing but the flesh than hangs on your bones, the blood that gushes through our meat. Bach took shits, Aristotle got piss hard-ons, Mother Teresa the runs, Ghandi really liked enemas, Lincoln got wind. We are animals that have learned to walk upright, that have trained themselves to use the next best thing to fishing with termites with a stick: the nuclear bomb.
I didn’t have to think long. About the time I was drawling analogies between Sartre and seals that know how to play Lady of Spain on car horns, I was interrupted by a tiny sound, the sound of cheap Mexican toe rings chiming their tinny, cheap tones: the tinkling of tiny silver bells. Then the sound of Jasmine pissing into the toilet.
But this time it didn’t sound mischievous: It sounded sad.
The pills had started to take effect, I braced my feet against the tub so I wouldn’t drown and whispered, as loud as I could (which was just loud enough for the dead to hear), “Follow me.”
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