Into the Velvet Darkness: Vincent Price & The Masque of the Red Death.

During the mid-1960s aspiring director Roger Corman was wrangled by producers into making a series of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, most starring Vincent Price. Unforeseen by anyone, it would be this unlikely congruence of resourceful auteur, gothic progenitor, and incomparable leading man which resulted in the dark miracle that is "The Masque of the Red Death".

Set in early renaissance Europe, a plague known as The Red Death makes everyone it touches bleed from every pore of their body -- an excruciating end to the lives of millions. Yet safely within the sealed keep of tyrannical nobleman Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) an endless party of sinful delight and decadence goes on. Three peasants are also trapped with them whom Prospero plans to use as both fodder for his court's entertainment and object lessons to spread his satanic gospel.

As inhuman as Price's Prospero seems, he's also potently charismatic, and slowly convinces and compromises peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher), whose life and faith (and the lives of her fiancee and father in the dungeon below) hangs in the balance, towards her first tentative steps to a darker illumination. At the same time his courtship of the naive Francesca destabilizes his relationship with fetching princess and disciple Juliana (Hazel Court), making for poisonously royal intrigue.

[It almost looks like they've been caught doing something ... .]

While much of this plot is not in the original 30-page short story, Corman integrates Poe's "Hop-Toad" too, and adds fitting elements to flesh out a top-notch hour and a half. And a viewer would never know Corman worked on a less than shoestring budget, with only five weeks to deliver it. Early Universal monster films aside, there are few other horror offerings more classic than this parade of costumed revelers, garishly gorgeous path color splash, and soul-stirring dialogue.

So put on your best Venetian mask and listen as Prince Prospero mellifluously intones, "The way is not easy, I know, but I will take you by the hand and lead you through the cruel light into the velvet darkness." Thank you for the soirée, sweet prince.

[Francesca listens to Prospero!]

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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 via LinkedIn or G+.

Your Future Looks Like a Danish Luxury Hotel: Aeon Flux's Sexy Dystopia.

The future will look like a very large Danish luxury hotel. At least if "Aeon Flux" has anything to say about it.

Set 400 years from now, a disease has decimated the world's population to a mere five million, all enclosed in the walled city-state of Bregna run by an iron-handed committee, opposed by righteous alt-looking Monican rebels who feel not all is right with the way things are. Disappearances and strange dreams for starters.

The attraction of the 1995 cartoon, aside from the obvious machine pistol toting lanky domina in catsuits with ram's horn tendrils, is the dichotomy of order versus change set within a mysterious Moebius-esque world. Totalitarian Chairman Trevor Goodchild and anarchist-assassin Aeon Flux are more than just characters -- they're concepts that give the other context. They need each other. And in that need there's a palpable lust that electrifies the story of their working at crosspurposes. They recognize they require each other to mean something, and that internal conflict of individual desire against a greater duty (whether it's to the state or the revolution) always made the outcome uncertain. Translating all these qualities to live-action movie, however, only works in some ways and not others, but the basic spirit is captured.

The severe design of the sets, some shot in Berlin with its Bauhaus concreteness, is gorgeous. By contrast, bad props, such as very plastic explosive charges, stick out like sore thumbs, along with fake computer generated elements. Costumes are all wonderful. Charlize Theron's black numbers are all winning. It's a shame that her performance doesn't hold up under equal scrutiny. Oh, it's mostly good like Marton Csokas' Goodchild, or Jonny Lee Miller ("Plunkett & Macleane"), but for all the principals there's moments where the emotional integrity just isn't being delivered, and those moments fail to skate by on looks alone.

Direction's from an MTV school -- understandable since it's an MTV property. But like many action films using tight shots and quick cuts, we lose a sense of space and fight choreography, and the far too trebley foleys do not help matters. Only when director Karyn Kusama selects long shots in some sequences, which is about half the time, a graceful ballet of violence is revealed.

And the movie explains much about the enigmatic cartoon -- why Aeon actually wears such a high-maintenance hairstyle, the rebels' rational for trying to destroy their perfect society, some practical uses behind Aeon's BSDM couture, and why the law of eternal return occurs. This last one was the most confusing for fans, but as the cartoon progressed it became accepted. The film underestimates general audiences by not using that device. If it had, it could have made one of its big revelations with so much more impact. (Yes, I'm being oblique here, but I'm trying very hard not to spoil things for you.)

Cinema can add "Aeon Flux"'s Bregna to its depiction of far future dystopias, like those of "Metropolis", "Dark City", "Logan's Run", and in extremis "1984" & "THX-1138". It's not the best of these predecessors, but it places as the sexiest.

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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 via LinkedIn or G+.

The Rita Fragments.

Note to the Editor: There are a couple redundancies in these entries but you've asked for the fragments as is. I thought of editing the similar statements out, but then leaving them shows the persistence of my holding the idea over time in the separate accounts. I'm not sure which is more important, but if as a reader with the editor's eye you find the repetition more obvious than emphatic, let me know & I'll chop the lesser of them out. This is, of course, if you find this whole thing acceptable.
~ gM4

* * * 

From the bookstore forum:
05.13.05 
"haunted when the minutes drag".
So I'm in the can upstairs minding my own business, when the lights turn off. Fumbling about with my pants I get up and cross the room to discover the lightswitch has been moved down, yet the bathroom door is still locked, and of course I am alone. Or was I?

Hearsay has it that when Grant was but a humble grocery store a young lass named Rita tripped and snapped her neck at the bottom of the stairs. Since then Granties have felt her presence, found the phone music turned on in the empty conference room at the end of the hall, and a lucky handful have even seen her standing near the stairs only to vanish an instant later. And very few days go by where someone doesn't misstep on that same fatal staircase and barely avoids history repeating itself. 

One staffer gives account of a Darke Man suited up 1940s style with a chilling aura appearing & disappearing in the Kids' room as well.
Would like to suggest that we take these two souls with us when the Grant store moves downtown. Transplanting a small chunk of kids' room concrete & our bottom stair should prove enough to rescue them from oblivion.

The living now number as many as the whole host of history's dead. Despite this, the dead still have the advantage. Anything could have happened to me during those moments in that darkened bathroom after all, but I think Rita likes me. May the Phoenix staffers find equal peace & respect with their hauntings. Otherwise I hear salt or spit sometimes work, but don't bet on it.
Memento Mori ~ 
Sñr Guillermo the IVth

"If you stay in the Center 
& embrace Death 
with your whole Heart 
You will endure Forever." 
~ Lao Tzu 
Tao Te Ching 
ch XXXIII

* * *

From the Dark Diary: 
11/23/01 11:17 pm
It comes together while driving to my girlfriend's like Beethoven's roaring silencio at 29: the rabbi's tapes said that the dead are not to be feared (for the most part) unlike the horror movies would have us believe. Since they've passed into a state of permanence some of their characteristics become fixed. Rita can trip people on the stairs, turn on the music in the back room, and sometimes flick off the lights in the bathroom. The old tenant in my apartment can open cupboards. Angie's milkbottle presence can follow people down the hall and make its presence known. But they repeat these instances over and over again like other ghosts because that's all they can do -- it's the only way left they have to manifest, and it's also how they’re bound. That's why people who are at haunted sites see the same things. Their choice to do otherwise has been taken away, as the rabbi says only the living get free will and choices. This idea makes sense, but the reality's not as rigid as all that. The dead can be malign like Angie's winged hallway wraith, and can affect the living adversely even though their means of doing so might be limited. Your free will also might be the answer to the question "Why do the dead hate the living?" in some cases. They resent us because they can no longer choose, or they resent having to watch some of us make the same mistakes they made and they can no longer affect this, or they wish to thwart us in these choices and hate that they cannot.

Take these theorems and apply them to the vampire: a being has passed into a state beyond death into an immortal coil, but because it lasts forever it must perform a certain action -- feed on the living. That is the vampire's repeated manifestation. In this, the Strigoi has no choice.

* * *

[Not Rita, but some other ghost on some other staircase.]

***

From email: 
Subject: the Seen & Unseen 
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:31:03 -0700 
From: Guillermo the IVth 
Organization: Club Golgotha 
To: "A.G." <--@-----.com>

Bearer of the Spirits A---- ~

It's not just the ghosts; there are things above & below us, infernal & divine. It is written that a third of the angels, a rebellious 133,306,668 of them Fell, leaving their stations as intermediaries from us to god, to think for themselves, to serve and pursue their own desires -- & some still cater to ours but in a different fashion.

Also a balance has been struck in terms of population: the current living equal all the world's Dead, and so now for every one of us there is one of them.

"If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible." -- Talmud, Berakhot, 6.

These and the ghosts and angels (or what we've culturally decided to name them) aren't agents of anything so ordered as karma or destiny, but more interested parties of the Blessed & Damned, either to aid or hinder or just watch. Mine provide protections over & under me, and I'm thankful to be within their aegis because I know they want me to be here, and my sense of permanence reflects their intentions.

Everyone at work trips on the stairs, teetering to repeat that moment where Rita lost her life at the bottom. Does Rita want company? Does she just want to know that someone can be as unlucky as she to suffer such an empty and stupid Death? Or is it not even her, just the echo of the moment reaching to the present? (The last is a theory proposed by some physicists who say places retain intense emotional energies [like alpha waves] that influence the now. But Rita's there -- she turned the bathroom lights off on me once, and every so often I'll go to the conference room and the background music will be on at full blast coming from the phone, but the lights will be off and nobody's there at all. She just wants something to listen to, or someone to come in back and be in the dark with her for a moment.)

In my apartment cupboards slowly swing open without aid of my hand, the same shelf has fallen 3 times in the past couple months, and my sugar skull recently split apart for no apparent reason. Maybe the former tenant still doesn't know he had a heart attack here. Maybe he does and he's still angry about it, and this is all he can do. Maybe he just needs some attention from time to time so he can stay.

Poe (the singer) placed samples of her late father's last lectures from tapes that she found in his attic into her songs on her last album, "Haunted", and contrasts them with samples of a little girl's voice that is supposed to be hers. It's clever and creepy at times.

My mother's father, Cippriano, visits her. Alone in bed, she'll feel somebody come to sit down on the mattress but my father's not home. And she has a reoccurring dream that he was buried alive, and is still there in the ground trying to get out. She still dreams this dream after 30 years, and it's something she's learned to live with.

Existence is significantly different for the Dead, with differences in time, thought process, manifestation, need, and these factors as well as our own sensitivity and accessibility determine if and when we can perceive them.

Some metaphysical systems state that our souls suffer a second Astral Death. We stay lost here for a time as ghosts, but post-Death the "silver cord" that binds us to our physicality in life has been severed and in its absence the energy that makes up the Soul, which is now untethered, disperses and we meet a more final oblivion -- unless provisions or circumstances ensure otherwise.

Outside of Chicago there's a small town where lies the tomb of the Massochs, a trio of brothers who were butchers (professional not criminal) early last century. In the 1960s their rest was desecrated when someone broke in and took one of their heads. The culprit was caught and punished, the head returned, but since the event a woman and a decade later a girl were found near the crypt, alive but suffering huge blood loss. Other lesser incidents also occurred: a gang of camping bikers was scared away by someone, a dog was found dead, what appeared to be a gigantic "black worm" flew forth from the keyhole at a ghost hunter.

The property was made private.

In 1998 while visiting Chicago I drove out to Spring Valley near sundown and asked in the town until someone was kind enough to direct me there. Set 30 yards away from a bend in the road sits a group of graves in the wood, the mausoleum being the only above ground gravesite.

Waited two hours until I could barely see in the gloaming darkness.
Near the end of that vigil, the sound of scraping came from inside and for a few breathless seconds my heart stopped. A little later I went back to the car to get some paper and in a slot-like hole in the upper western face of the crypt placed a letter to the Brothers requesting audience, and bloodied the paper so I could later be found.

The pictures I took didn't come out.

These things, the daemons, ghosts, angels, Undead, are inhuman, either more absolute or abstract in existence as we know it, and some possess a supernature and qualities that are transferable. We sense this monstrousness & this is why it's horrifying when we brush up against such things.

Much of post-Death states has to do with power of will, and it is that force, how well one knows themselves and the resulting strength of id that may very well keep us here. Desire to remain lets us remain.

In many ways words, like component in occult ritual, and even as part of creative ritual, lock and capture and embalm the Soul, and the more artful we are in defining ourselves in the medium and Art, the more likely we can endure past Death not only in our works, but even in this life.

We are Touched by Our Dead ~ 
Guillermo 
who courts & is courted 
by the Seen & Unseen

* * * 

Afterword:
10.09.05
Two months ago my co-worker Peter, the man who witnessed the Darke Man in our kids' room so long ago, walked down the back stairs as he has for every workday, six times a day, for 18 years. But that afternoon he fell down from the landing, careening off the handrail, and somehow landed an improbable four feet away from the bottom of the stairs to smack his skull against the corner of a sharp baseboard. When he came to, he cried out for help, and we found him a bloody mess. Disoriented as he was, we called paramedics, but as he slowly collected himself, Peter seemed more embarrassed than anything, even apologizing to the men who came to help him. Something had gone amiss with his knee, and the gash was only superficial. "It was the ghost!" I wrote in his get well card, and after Peter got back a week later, he took a moment to ask me about that when we were alone in the breakroom.

"You really think it was the ghost?!?" 
"Well, no -- I really don't think Rita's that kind of ghost."

Peter laughed, which was what I wanted him to do, but the question was still there for him, scarred into his forehead, marking two moments in time, a piece of misfortune shared, one dead and one spared.

# # #

[Still not Rita, just another haunted staircase.]

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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 via LinkedIn or G+.

strange nights & days have found me.

8/19/00 10:19 pm
My cousin, Michael William Bravo, died this morning. From what my mother knows, he went to Nogales with his friends last night, returning early this morning, probably to get some last minute partying in before his first day of college. When they went to wake him, he didn't get up, they discovered him bleeding from the mouth and nose and took him to the hospital. Whether he died before ever leaving home or at the hospital, I don't know.

If I wasn't writing this down right now, I again be pacing the room gritting my teeth, cursing what feels like a blind idiot world for being so fucked up as to let such things come to pass. It's so egotistical for any of us to think that this has anything to do with themselves, or that there's a moral and meaning to everything.

Sure, we can learn from things, but the only depth in this is a sudden inexplicable vacancy of a young man. It's not good or bad, it just is.

This underlines my anger in a bold red stroke, the madness of it.

Willy's beyond my anger and sadness, and they do him no good, but I still feel them. And I'm sad for us all, for our loss. I imagine his father Dudie's rage as endless, I hope his faith can bear it. His mother, my godmother, Sylvia will endure. But I'm very concerned about Cassie -- I wish I knew how she was.

Unreasoning, unforgiving Death. That's two you've taken near me this year. Only Willy didn't ask you to come for him like Leonard. It was an accident.

Last thing Willy said to me: "Laters."

April and Corey are throwing a party tonight, and I should be getting ready now to go. Again, I know that grief doesn't do the dead any good, and that it seems that since I still am blessed with my life that I should go make the most of it. It's like having the mariachis at my Nana Vicki's funeral. They're weren't really there playing for her, they were playing for us. I just hope after I get dressed tonight that I'm ready to hear them.

8/23/00 11:08 pm
Willy's Rosary.

There were mariachis, all in blue & gray with gold ruffles, the colors of Sunnyside, his high school's troupe. Full house at Santa Cruz with standing room only.

Dudie & Sylvia wailed as though they could never stop. But Sylvia sat in the back. She did not wish to look at her dead son in his coffin.

Frances will get the autopsy results. Sylvia didn't want an autopsy, but the medicals went ahead and did one anyway as they don't need permission since it was drug-related. Sylvia didn't know, still doesn't, and thanks to her older sister, will not.

Cassie this time says, "We need to talk." She tells me that she thinks the Libre killed the 15-year-old dealer who sold Willy the bad chivo, since she saw him face down in his yard on her way back from McDonald's. Part of me wants to say "good" but the other part of me holds its tongue and wonders what Cassandra feels about it. She recites and then shrugs. I can't read her on this one.
Mass tomorrow morning at 10:30 am.

9/1/00 1:21 am
The death of my cousin has cast a pall over the family. Unwilling to sleep in their house, much less return into it for any extended period of time, they sleep in my Nana's livingroom on the couches, large pillows, and bunches of blankets on the floor after moving the coffeetable every night.

"Do you sell a lot of these memorial shirts?" I ask the girl at the mall as she's making mine.

"Yeah. Mostly to Mexican families. Last month we sold at least 125 of them for someone's friends and family."

Again, the fond remembrances and celebration of someone's life manifests itself in decoration: The memorial T-shirt. For $28.50 my cousin's got my back whenever I put it on. It's sad to me, morbid to others, and a uniquely Goth aspect to my culture. Instead of uncomfortably tucking it away with condolence cards in a drawer, we can wear it with pride in memory of he who's passed on.

9/19/00 12:36 am
I walked with Willy's spirit. Maybe it's that I was wearing the T-shirt for the first time.

Tuesday before last. After whupping ass in Dark Tower over Tony, Staci, & Shaula, I took Shaula home and dropped by Coffee Xchange to catch the last 10 minutes of all that before they closed at Midnight. Outside the doors as everyone hugged, Jade comes walking up out of the shadows from Molly's big pink cake of a house. Molly in one of her visits brought the ruby lipped Jade into work one evening. She seemed to be Molly's accessory at the time, but now they wear matching pendants with little red-eyed pewter skulls on them and are as good as blood sisters, though Molly's still the dominant one. Ran into Jade sans Molly at Matt & Miko's wedding reception, where we took more than a few moments to eye each other in interest.

Jade walks up and the interest is there again, at least on my end. It's odd looking at a girl that young and pretty in a more accessible way; you forget that she's 17 until she starts bitching about high school. Molly walks over from the laundromat where they're doing their wash together.

Jewelry and piercings aside, together they're dressed like $20. Tight thrift baseball shirts, raver denim flares and cheap rubber toe capped sneakers, they have contempt for the fashion mores of those around them like the punks of old, but with less ingenuity. Their undeniable girliness frames them, especially Jade's thick lipped smile, and I wonder if it would be possible to get them both into bed.

Patrick is in the rear of a car driving away, looking at me, giving his thumbs up as if reading my thoughts. I wave from the hip and can't help smile back, pausing in whatever I'm asking Jade as they drive away. "Still working at Hot Sam's?" "Yeah," she answers, launching into how she never wants to see a hot pretzel ever again. I laugh, and Molly chimes in that after how she got back from vacation recently she found herself to be the senior staffer as they'd all left or been purged. "Dude, I have to quit and do something that pays more." "Molly, you don't have a degree, and I don't think you can find a hipper job than at the [Hot] Topic, so what do you have in mind?" "I've got connections dude. In sales." "Ahhhhh, I see, my little entrepreneurs." They giggle. "Well, let me accompany you ladies back to the laundromat."

They check on their wash, and we all go sit on the back of Jade beater Chevy fastback that she's dubbed "Ghetto Beast", while Molly goes off on her creepy neighbor who she'd like to kill, and on how disgusted she is with the fat couple in the laundromat. Jade goes into Molly's 'rents to retrieve some Captain Morgan's. "Dude, I don't even like food. You know, there was this fat guy who was so nasty that went he had to go in 'cause he'd had a heart attack that they found maggots growing inbetween the rolls in his stomach."

If someone were to cut skinny little Molly open they'd find nothing but acid & bile in her engine. She goes on to talk about how her and Jade don't even bother going out, don't really hang out with other people, and how they're saving money in a plan to move to San Francisco after they graduate early in December.

We all take slugs of the Captain's, chasing from a can of Pepsi, and then Molly asks Jade, "Dude, where'd you leave that package?" "On the makeup table in your room." 'Right there? Dude are you dumb?" "It's there inbetween all the bottles and stuff so you can't see it." "You and Guillermo get in the car and I'll be back." Molly slides off, I grab the booze and Jade lets me into her ride.

We continue taking slugs and I ask her if there's any music. "All I get is AM, you know like Sinatra." She clicks the Green Valley station on and I realize this girl may have more class than she mistakenly thinks is cool to let on. She also confesses she adores Hole, which one sees just looking at her bleached hair and pronounced lipstick. "Do you date older guys?" "Usually yeah. Right now I'm not with anyone though. It's only me and Molly." The passenger door opens and Molly plops down on the vinyl bench seat, slamming the door behind her. She takes a small ziplock bag out with a jawbreaker-sized chunk of cocaine in it and her driver's license to shave some off the little ball and begins to make lines.

"Do you want?" Jade asks. "It's cool if you don't."
"Yeah G, it's alright if you don't," Molly chimes in.
"I just wish I hadn't been drinking so I could see what it's like alone."
"Well, if you do after drinking it'll be better; it takes the nervous edge off it," Molly says, her expertise showing.
"Really?" I ask, remembering Ron's account of it in college, of how it turned him paranoid and anxious until it wore off.
Molly finishes making three lines and asks if I have a dollar. I pull one out, and roll it tightly, handing it to Jade, who leans over into my lap to inhale her line. Then Molly does the same.

Jade again says I don't have to if I don't want to, that she'll do the third line. "No," I say, "I want to." I grab the dollar from out Molly's hand, and look down realizing that we're doing coke on a high school algebra & trig book. I almost lose it and laugh.
I lay the finger on the side of my left nostril to pinch it, put the dollar up to my right nostril ...
... and inhale, following the line flawlessly from bottom to top. It disappears in space of my eyeblink, and tastes like baking soda with a hint of Bon Ami, and burns a little on the bottom of my brain. What they say about the drip's exaggerated, since it only feels like a little sliding down a minute later. "Here," Molly says, "Take your finger and spread what's left on your gums." They numb up nicely.

We all grin at each other like we're all initiates in a secret society. I realize Willy and his Libre homeboys must've felt like this, must've shared this ritual in the small hours of the morning, except it was chivo, the russian roulette one-chamber injection.

Going back inside to the laundromat, the rush hits and I'm elated. Breathing is the most fucking exciting it's ever been, and very soon after my heart finally matches the desire I always feel -- it literally wants to burst.

Molly gets disgusted again with the fat people, and her laundry finishes, Jade & I taking it to the car, and I'm trying to frame the question of what they're going to do now, when Jade notes the time and says "Molly, it's almost 1:30, and I've gotta be back home by 2 or my mom's going to freak."
"So you're just going abandon me here? Sure you wouldn't mind having me for the rest of the evening?"
"I would Guillermo," Jade says, "but my mother wouldn't be comfortable with anyone else over besides Molly unless I've told her way before, or I would."
"Dude, you'll be okay," Molly counsels again from experience. "It should wear off in about half an hour or so."
We say our byes and hug.
I get in my car and suddenly I don't know what to do with myself. It's like I've bought something and I only got half the instructions -- I'm not sure how to finish.

I drive to the first resource I can think of and end up outside Stacey's since she's the only one I know who's done it all and come out the other end, and I'm deciding whether to go wake her up at 1:30 in the morning or not, but her three barking dogs decide this for me.
"Billy?" she asks from the shadow of her porch.
"Um, yeah," I say embarrassed.
She lets me in through the back, and by now I'm so amped it's maddening.
We lie down and Stacey spoons me, and she asks me what's wrong. I place her hand over my heart.
"Stacey, do you ever just want so much, that even if you were given everything it still wouldn't be enough? That you walk around and behind your eyes and in the pit of your heart there's this greed for beauty that never ever goes away and it burns at your insides so hard it feels like there's nothing else within you but desire?"
"Yes," says the girl who's taken most drugs known to man, who's slept with two people at work, who's gone through rehab, recovered from brain damage, and spends her leisure time dressed up in a stock at fetish shows getting her ass paddled until it hurts to even breathe on it. "I know how you feel."

What she doesn't know, what no one really knows, is that that's what I feel all the time, the desire.

Only right now the drug has somehow managed to make it times 10. I want to buy and drink and fuck and hold and love and write and possess and scream and bleed and bind and flirt and dance and conquer and fight and kiss ALL RIGHT NOW ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

But my primal need to express takes over. I tell her about my dead cousin, about the experience with Molly & Jade (though I mention no names since she would know Molly from the store), about how the death has haunted me these past few weeks.

She voices meaningful sympathies, and talks about how her mother claimed that when she was brought into the ICU the night she ODed, that a demon spoke through her shouting at her mom, "Mother I'm already in Hell!" Allegedly her mom & sister did a laying on of hands and prayed, expelling the demon, after which she went slack and woke a few hours later.
"Do you believe your mom, Stacey? Or you think she's selling you a bag of goods?"
"I was so fucked up I could've said anything, but I don't remember that night at all. I lost that part of my mind with the damage."

I tell her I'm suddenly really more tired than I feel, and climb out of her bed, saying I'm going to walk home. It's a lie but I'm very good at such social necessities.
"Go take a shower & get some rest, 'k'?"
On the way to the car in the cool 3 a.m. air I notice I've got a thin layer of sweat over every inch of my skin and realize that I smell like a beast. Kris always used to say that was her favorite thing about me, my scent.

Driving downtown. It usually centers me, knowing where I am, that I am of the city as it is of me, lord & liege of all I survey.

I want to talk to Wendy. She plays with boys, seemingly to her satisfaction. I almost let her play with me one night four years ago, but I didn't let her. Parking in front of the Congress I go in and talk to the night clerk at the desk. "The pastry chef, Wendy? She quit a few hours ago, actually." I can still see the drama of it in his face.
"Oh my."

I leave and just begin to walk like I did after high school parties when I'd had too many rum and cokes. The bereft, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised lay upon the benches and in the lee of shops in dingy down jackets with stuffing coming out at tears, or somehow mummified in plastic shopping bags, or just curled up like unprotected fetuses wishing for their own unbirth. Can't see such things without realizing how lucky you really are and how trivial your wants are compared to their basic ones. You are blessed. Or they are cursed.

Walking back toward the car, I spot Wendy sitting at The Grill, and she's waving emphatically from the depths of the Red Room. She's seated with some boy, of course.
"You're not okay are you?"
"Is it that obvious?", my head turning away from any deeper scrutiny. "Am I interrupting?"
"Oh Guillermo, you're never interrupting!" She turns to lead me back to the booth, but the boy exits, saying a cursory goodbye, and she replying that he better not do something or she'll have to hunt him down.
"He's my ex from a few months back. He's on heroin and he's all fucked up and wants to kill himself at the end of the week, so I'm trying to make sure he sticks it out."
"I don't talk to my exes. I find things to be much easier that way. But in this case you're being very noble."
"People like to tell their problems 'cause I listen well, that's all. I'm a Sagittarius."
"But don't you find it overwhelming sometimes, so much so that you may at times neglect your own needs?"
"No. I always make time for myself, so that can never happen."
"Wendy, something you said a long time ago sticks in my mind and maybe it's why I'm here talking to you. One night you were going on about an ex and your friend Freeway, and working at Congress, and you summed up by saying 'Me & my sorry little street punk girl life.' Thinking of you saying that makes me smile."
She laughs, ashing her GPC in the porcelain mango ashtray.
"That's so funny! ... So what's wrong?"
I tell of the resulting ennui in the shadow of Willy's death, my unease at the displacement of family and by temporary reflection, my usual sense of perspective.
After the usual condolences, the little white hand snaking out to protect & grip mine, I ask, "Wendy, do you want?"
"What do you mean exactly?"
"Ever feel satisfied with what you get? I mean, you're a seductress of no modest ability. You seem to be able to get most boys with your wiles & guiles. After it all, do you still want?"
"Well I do take 'em home but only to play with them. It's fun. But if its wanting so much that's bothering you, all you have to do is just stop wanting."
"That's it?"
"That's all." She smiles like the Buddha. And provides just as much Zen-ed out profundity.
Sure, it made sense. Just get your heart to stop beating. But perhaps to Wendy this did make sense, to lessen the want, and focus on what's more immediately accessible.

And as I sat there talking to her that's what it felt like was happening, the burning overdrive falling away as the cocaine spent itself out, finishing the run through my system.
"Wendy, I'm exhausted. And I'm sure you still must have cake, pie & pastry to make for this place, so I'm gonna go and leave you to it."
"Well you know where I am, if you want me."
"Thanks. You only get sweeter every time I talk to you."

4:30 am. I finally felt clean enough to go home.
When you look at the tarot card of The Fool even though he's about to walk off the cliff, what you can't tell is that he's happy in his motley finery, face pressed deeply into the aesthete's lily to smell its perfume, and he doesn't have a care in the world since he's enjoying himself so much. Not that he's being wise, mind you.

But I needed to do it, to affirm, and revel in the careless and dizzying moment, the precipice where life is felt most keenly. Later I ask Justin about coke, since Justin's the psych major for life and he'd know about narcotics that affect the mind.

"Cocaine can make you temporarily psychotic and turn you permanently schizophrenic," he rattles off like he's a textbook.
"Wow. But that's gotta be right after repetitive dosages over a period of say a few months, right?"
"No, that can happen right off from one sitting."

Luckily even after 13 years of friendship and 11 years of psychology, he's still unable read me enough to tell why I asked. That's the difference between academics and experience. Though in knowing the experience of cocaine, I'm told it's never as good as the first time, so thus ends my dalliance with such a powdery little horror.

But in all this I've walked in the steps of my cousin. Young & unsophisticated, he'd stroll the gangland streets of South Tucson in the middle of the night with his dog like it was a park, practically inviting death, but also trying to sort himself out. Although whenever anyone asked him what he wanted, what he'd be with his future, he could never give an answer. He knew.

Everyone around me wonders how I can always say "Hello Hello!" and be so happy all the time. Usually I tell them I'm oversexed. But it's that I let myself feel so much, and that I know at any given moment this want I carry, this desire that buoy's my psyche and drives me, can be fulfilled at any given instant. I never plan to leave, so I know that instant is coming in my bones, with joyous inevitability. I know.

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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 via LinkedIn or G+.