And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning ...
Like a spell, the surprise blindsides me, and I'm in a kitchen I remembered from long ago. The redhead is uncorking her two-buck chuck like it's the finest. She climbs up an uncertain stepstool to get her fancy plated goblets with the relief of grapes on them for us, her well-proportioned Italian posterior centering the balance of her fae Irish form, barely keeping her from falling down like a beautiful disaster. The reels on the tape player turn slowly, the white teeth in the spools grinding forward toward a foregone end as we smile at each other. Nick Cave continues rasping out his ballads of murder & seduction, the listener uncomfortably attracted to the ouroboros of the idea that both those things swim in the same dark, warm water.
 |
| [she looked something like model Laura Schuller {photo by Marc Laroche}.] |
All the red rings of hair my eyes cannot help but follow around and down, and I am lost, so lost in their warp & weft woven to crown this actress, a sketch group comedienne, this woman of talent who decided to come to a holiday party with me. And then there we were, at her place.
The stained livingroom couch has a gypsy fringe throw, and she drops into my lap like a gift. Our mouths are sour with her cheap wine. We walk the goblets into the bedroom. The fancy party clothes drop away in slow rounds of lingering movements.
Three hours later she tells me, "You fuck like the Devil." I whisper, "And you love like a pale, beautiful angel." The hours continue.
Somewhere during a breather, this important life changing moment happens, where she says, "'Bill'?!? Guillermo is soooo much better. You should take it back. Be Guillermo."
After, we lay there and talk of magick, and talk of curses, and talk of dreams, and talk of secrets, until the birds of dawn join our conversation, their song finally letting us drop into sleep.
I would call her later, asking if she wanted to watch Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, thinking our shared love of literature and her stagecraft could coo together over the spectacle. Many voicemails, but she would never answer. I saw it with someone else, who didn't appreciate it at all.
She would later go join her boyfriend in California, her future husband. I would get an email a few years after, with a subtle admission that perhaps her marriage was an ill fit. I never answered.
Between that unrequited pair of communications but before her intended move, I starred in a friend's poetry reading performance trio onstage at Club Congress, The Drunken Poet's Highball Hour, where 60 people I knew showed up just to hear my two poems. I'd mailed her a flyer. A heart milagro pinned to my jacket's lapel buttonhole, the emotional boutonniere that I would've unpinned to gift her in the audience during my reading. She doesn't show up to hear me speak the words to everyone:
"I would have gone.
I would have gone."
Years later, at an unexpected nightclub encounter, she tells me between tears of regret that she scripted a character based on me in a play she wrote.
Somewhere outside of time, there's a version of me on a stage, my hand pressed to the small of her back, my fingers wedded in the red rings in the curls of another her, and we are together, still kissing.
[For Kimberly, who gave me the gift of my name.]
# # #
While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.
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