"Venus in Retrograde"

All the men in my life have gone mad. Mars is wreaking havoc, and the acrid scent of testosterone is ripe in the air.

My father has grown cold and distant. Middle age has found him an empty shell of a man in his Barkalounger, a remote in each hand, another “yes, dear” falling off on his lips. It’s difficult to fathom he was a prizefighter in the 50s. The fight has drained out of him and pooled at his feet in the form of avocado green carpet.

I lost my brother in a sea of taffeta and cheap perfume. His affinity for Mexican whores and Mezcal poison found him with a bullet in the back and an autopsy brimming with venereal diseases.

I have a junkie for a stepfather, his version of a mid-life crisis. I search the gutters while I drive trying to keep tabs on his track marks, map his whereabouts through piles of refuse and used needles lining the roadways.

Johnny Cash has the audacity to die

The heat has convinced me that the end of the world is fast approaching. I’m beginning to hope the Christian fundamentalists are right. I search for hidden truths in Revelations, in the Fed Ex delivery boy’s bored eyes, in a glass of raspberry iced tea.

I stuff myself on strawberries and whipped cream, French vanilla ice cream, and honey beer. Sweets for the bee farm, fat children, neuroses, and me. It counteracts the poison. My god, I need to get away.

It’s the end of the summer and I spend the last few days sorting through my possessions, my thoughts, my dreams, my life. New Orleans beckons me with languid heat waves, piquant music, and soul food. I know immediately that this place and I, this haunted magical place and I, are perfectly suited. I want to disappear. My plane lands and I can barely breathe.

In the most sinful place in the world, I find salvation. I meet Vivian. After a breakfast of Belgian waffles, we take off on a three-day tumultuous tour of New Orleans. She’s every unrealized dream I never had. She’s both strength and vulnerability rolled up into one beautiful glittery girl. She kicks ass and giggles simultaneously. It’s love at first sight.

It’s summertime in the south, and the psyche of the Crescent City has bled into my glass of sangria.

We watch straight boys perform songs about Turkish cock and dress up like red velvet washed-out tiara princesses. We watch a punk boy with premature salt-and-pepper hair strum his guitar and belt swampy blues with a voice that has laughter peeking around the edges. We listen to an old hippie talk to us about politics and fairy tales, carpentry and termites on his fifty-fifth birthday. We befriend a long-faced blonde sprite with sashaying hips and a confident walk of entitlement. A boy in a Dead Kennedy’s tee shirt flirts with a girl in a filmy blue gown drinking homemade wine from a red Dixie cup. We fill ashtrays, and we empty glasses. Black Flag and the Ramones on the jukebox. We play Mrs. Pac-Man and the girl wins every time. We drink blood-colored Merlot from chipped wine glasses. Stumbing down a road to find a party with front porch concrete gods and goddesses sprawled in rocking chairs.

I fall in love with everyone I meet. Drugged on humidity and bliss while discussing psychotropic drugs with a guy named Carl. Discussing comparative theology and mythology and goddesses of love with simple Andy. Cabs deliver East Coast girls to plush hotel rooms, past the French Quarter, past the nightlife.

Everyone kisses. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys. My lips are swollen and sore by the night’s end.

The sky is lavender at night as shadows come out to play. It is royal purple as porch swings lazily drift. It is the color of a fresh bruise as I read in the courtyard of a coffee shop to new friends. I read a story about a painter of hearts and a poem about a girl who is both everyone and no one, everywhere and no where. I apologize for my tears. No one cares. Vivian’s eyes crinkle as I speak and the couple in front of me, half Taiwanese/half French, takes pictures of my lips, telling me that my words are sexy, that my smile whispers tales of adventures to be had. I meet a writer whose work I admire. We trade addresses in the bathroom of an old Irish pub where everyone ends up and no one seems to go home. She and I spend the rest of the night fucking with our eyes and drinking dirty martinis.

I breathe in the early morning air. I smell murder and mayhem and the lovely potential of each makes my head spin.

The Mississippi River heaves and bends. The soil is black and fertile. The ground smells like the beginning of time. Everything is decrepit, peeling, and old. Spirits beckon from behind cast iron gates, up narrow stairways, beneath dark recesses of oaks where the only light is seen in droplets on the outer leaves. In this fog of tension, in this atmosphere of danger, the body becomes hot and ripe with living and the promise of death. The moonlight hides the boogeyman, carving out dark mysteries behind doorways.

Ten minutes before the sun wakes up over Louisiana, Vivian puts “Brown-eyed Girl” on the jukebox, saunters to my bar stool, takes my hand. She presses her body against mine and we breathe, her body feeling simultaneously hard and soft against mine. Her smile is sloppy, her eyes questioning. She looks through me, past me, into me, beyond me. Within minutes I am in a taxi on the way to the airport, beads of seat in rivulets from my nose to my lips, spiked with the essence of salt and love and life. I fly home.