CHAPTER 34

 

The journey has been about defeating the dark. Dark is evil, unmentionable horrors prowling in the dark. Yet, no matter how frightening the dark was portrayed, the unearthly sounds attributed to it, the senses being overwhelmed into perverse expressions, I considered it God's enemy, my enemy, the arch villain of Light.

Ignorance makes one blind so they stumble in their darkness conjured from word concoctions, images summoned from guilt, denials taking grotesque forms and venerated them as demons.

I am coming into a knowing, I am the dark; I am the light.

This doesn't mean I have absolved myself of past misdeeds in the name of light, in the name of the dark. I've served two masters on their journey of awareness. I have imaged myself as a savior, as a dark lord of the underworld. I've been a whore for the touch of a hand, and the innocence of divine silence that flesh cannot touch. Sometimes I've been everyone's enemy, the serpent in the tree, the avenging warrior goddess, the young virgin light fleeing into a tree or the cavernous black hole consuming all.

I always pushed myself to complete the journey.

Just when I thought I'd reach for that golden apple on the tree or have slain the dragon or walk the waters of my mind and calm the storm, that chapter would end so another would begin.

And I seem to forget what I learned and it seems another comet is racing through the heaven continuously falling.

When I stopped falling, did I become human?

-- Excerpt from "The Underground Letters of a Heretic"

Darkness. Heavy breathing is heard, low groaning, voices of sexual excitement, then the sound of sexual release rains in the darkness like sparks of light. The sound of an irregular heartbeat permeates the air as lights rise slowly on Michael, wearing a towel around his waist is picking up clothes off the floor and his Father is sitting on the bed wearing boxer shorts.

"You didn't have to fail at sports."

"I'm not my brothers."

"You've got the same genes. Don't know why you act like you've been shortchanged."

"At least this I can do better than my brothers."

"That ass is still as good as the first time."

"And another feather falls to the ground."

"We're not here to dissect family values," his father said.

"But I'm the one you fucked."

"You weren't like your brothers. They were men."

"I don't wear a dress."

"You were always sensitive."

"You didn't even show up for me on father and son day at school."

"I had to work. Your mother said she would go."

"You don't get it."

"Your eyes are always an invitation."

"I was a child."

"You were a curious child."

"So curiosity got fucked under the stairs in the basement."

"Everybody was upstairs watching TV. You didn't mind."

"I looked at your…your…"

"Dick…penis…god Michael, sometimes you are an embarrassment to men. You can't even say penis…dick."

"Sometimes I muffle the word when my mouth is full," Michael said staring into his father's eyes.

Silence. The irregular heartbeat fades. "Sometimes when I slip into these alternate realities, I think I am a city. But me, the city, is always so grayish, sometimes like an old black and white movie. No one senses color and I want to be a color, experience a color. It's like I forgot."

He drops the clothes on a chair, the towel slips on the floor. Kicks it aside and walks over to a window and sits on the window sill and looks out over the dark city. "It's like I can't even grasp color anymore except in vague images."

 

His father wipes excesses semen off his penis while watching Michael sitting in the window as he is turned slightly from him, maybe to not remember the moments that just occurred, maybe so they wouldn't have to remind themselves their world was limited, confined to the walls of this hotel room they had rented in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco. "So the speed is the thing in this business deal I'm working on. Murphy will not know what hit him. I'll jump shot that sucker right out of that promotion."

 

"You'd think there was a blood feud going on. Why is it important to prove something to him? He's not even your equal. Yet, you will swim in the mud with him attempting to get your point across," said Michael. "Father, you've wasted too much time on games that only you play. You haven't even won at solitaire."

 

"Your voice sounds like the accusing finger of your mother. I don't need reminders of her now or ever again. Sometimes I think you want to give me guilt by mimicking her words, her gestures after our fuck sessions."

 

He gestured as if he is wiping back hair from his eyes but his hair was short. His mother's hair was long. "At least my mother saw the hopelessness and walked away. But like mother sometimes, sex makes us intoxicated. You should have left me as your son not as your lover."

 

"That ass was too good to let someone else own it."

 

"Being vulgar doesn't make you any more attractive."

 

"You like me hard."

 

"There is only so much nakedness I will allow myself to be around," Michael said.

 

Father stretched and smiled wickedly. For a man of his age, he was physically fit. Years had been kind to him. His stomach was solid, his body firm and muscular. Though he was slightly balding, he was hairy all over.

 

He couldn't brush away the image of his father who was well endowed, swollen with a sweet juice, the strong thrust of hips as his father plunged in him harder and harder and begging ‘go deeper, deeper,' and hearing the names of all the others calling him ‘bitch, whore, slut, tramp, faggot, sugar baby, sword swallower.' Pain and pleasure became the same thing.

He would hear his mother complain to his grandmother about having to let his father do his business. Michael didn't quite measure up physically but he made up for it with imagination.

 

"Guess you're blaming your troubles on the old man, the broken family syndrome. You never seemed to mind our fucking. You could have walked away."

 

"Guess I didn't put enough cities between us."

 

"Consider this a conjugal visit in your exile."

 

Michael wondered how many stars found their way through the darkness to find their point to shine. In his mind, he counted everyone and gave them new names. In reality he was lost from them before he counted to ten. He sighed and shivered as if he was drinking the cold air out of the night. He was still naked. "I'm starting to sober up. Your words are taking up residence in my head. I need a drink. No vacancies."

 

"Goddamn liquor ain't healed no one's hurt. I never needed it. I don't know why you allow yourself to be possessed by it. Told you I don't like it on your breath. I don't like the taste of it when we're fucking. Like it natural, uncomplicated. Don't like it when women perfume their vagina and paint their face. I make them wash that shit off. I want to fuck what god gave you not what you paid some man to camouflage your ass with. Drinking is a damn waste of money."

 

Michael's mouth attempted to carve a frown in the air to annoy his father but he pulled back when he saw how useless that effort was though anger raised its head to spew venom. "We're fucking on my terms now remember."

 

His father laughed.

 

"You'll never be like your old man."

 

"I tried many men to fit some kind of father image in my life. You still aren't the real deal to me. If you were, do you think you'd be lying up in my bed? When you fucked me the first time, daddy became someone lost in a story that hadn't been written."

 

"I let you know how the world was."

 

"You didn't prepare me for you. Strangers are just an extension of you in this mad game my mind has trapped me in. This labyrinth reality seems to have no center that I can find. Maybe you should just fuck me to death. Didn't you say you had the dick of death?"

 

"Why does fucking require a long conversation with you? You always want to analyze shit, go off the deep end, drown in pity, beg for sympathy and then blame it on a goddamn hair day? Being a bottom boy has made you too much woman, too fucked up in the head, and addicted to dealing with emotions?"

 

"You made me a bottom!"

 

"I showed you what you were," his father said loudly.

 

Michael laughed. Michael always wanted to take his laugh and rub it across his body, take his laugh and make it a sexual object to place up his ass to own his fucking instead of relinquishing it to someone else, use his laugh to fill an emptiness in conversations, use his laugh to shield himself from being seen, heard, not troubling anyone.

 

Father continues. "I don't have to be here. I can be anywhere I damn well please. Who is calling who Michael?"

 

"I stay in familiar territory. No matter how many shadows are dancing across walls that I cannot name, figure out, or summoning parts of me to awaken, I feel like there are parasites twisting and turning inside of me; and I can't find any medication for the pain. I can't stop feeling like something is crawling around in my inside. So I run back to something familiar. Something I know. Are you a nightmare or a pleasant dream? You flow in and out of dreams that I can't keep track when sanity is front stage. Your smell father is the air I need to breathe. I want your flesh on me like it's a coat of colors. I want to drink your semen so that I know there is some life flowing in me. I want your dick in me. I need to know daddy cares."

 

The father smiled, owning the moment and maintaining all property rights in this situation.

 

Michael stretched, walked over to the chest drawers and took a bottle of wine, and took a swig.

 

"Don't like you being common."

 

"Don't worry, I will not give you a golden shower to put out your fire." Pause. "You should have never touched me," Michael said with pain scratching his voice. He gulped down more wine. A thought - should take this bottle and crash it upside his father's head. Maybe scream so loud, so high that it would shatter his father into a thousand pieces.

"You were to pretty. You're mother wasn't that pretty."

 

"I'm not the woman you want."

 

"In your madness, you're the woman I need."

 

"I was not created in love. Your dick was doing its usual ‘business.' Unfortunately, you are still my father, for better or worse."

 

"Yeah, well, I ain't one of your lovers, one of your midnight fucks, so don't assume you can't take me through head trips. You can't be your mother. I can't be your lover. But we can fuck until we can't sweat any more between us. It is as simple as that."

 

"How am I supposed to sew back the pieces? I have problems remember. I'm slightly off center. I need support. You expect too much of me. I'm the son here remember. Not just a two hundred dollar whore."

 

"Like that's a mystery to be explored."

 

"What of my salvation father? What have you condemned me to?"

 

"I'm paying for it either way."

 

"Yeah, well the meter is running out on my mind."

 

"I fucked what you gave me to fuck remember that. You didn't stop it."

 

"I didn't know I was supposed to," Michael said tearfully."

 

"Who do you think society is fucking? Media gears the world toward youth. We drink from the fountain of youth whichever way we can."

 

"As always you don't see what I see. In the distance, clouds are parting. There's a tornado coming through. I can already hear the wind wailing. You can't even feel the room trembling. I can. It's headed this way. I am that tornado but the eye of the tornado is me. I'm coming father; with sword, with thunder, with lightning. I will bring an apocalypse to this face on the waters. There will no rooms you will inhabit. I will no longer be your bitch goddess. Can't you hear the clock ticking father? No one will save you not even between the tick and the tock. The tornado is gaining strength. It will soon be here. The window is expanding to accommodate it. Why do you lay there not feeling? Why do I welcome such destruction?"

 

"It's feeding time."

 

"The bottle is empty. The meter is creaking off key notes."

 

"Think I can handle some more."

 

"It's time to go. Reality is always cliffhanger." Michael turned from his father and went and looked out the window. "I read a story the other day. Some say it is a myth. Sometimes I hear the leaves as they are wilting telling me to remember. Once I sat upon a stone and listened to it weeping. They tell me the story of an Old Dragon Goddess who was slain by her grandson and from her carcass created the Heavens and the Earth. Her body had held the winds, the vortexes that became the realm of ancient gods. Unknown to these new gods and goddess, this dismembered goddess was dead but dreaming and would one day rise from her dream….but then, a myth will tell you anything and everything. Death was her beginning."

 

His father got a glazed looked in his eyes. "You haven't figured it out. I've always been in the mind, in the mind."

 

"No," screams Michael.

"You have no power here, just an illusion of being something more than you are. It is so easy to get you humans to play out these dramas. It's supper time and I'm about to fuck you to death."

"No," Michael screamed.

There is a flash of light.

 

As Uthra wrapped its wings around itself, the Great Dragon opened its mouth and Uthra came into awareness and allowed the Great Dragon to consume it. As Uthra felt itself being digested, a thought rang through this terrifying feeling of death, "To know my enemy, I must become my enemy."

 

Michael woke up with a cold sweat. Distorted shadowy figures were moving through the rooms. He cried out in anguish as they covered him like wrappings until he looked like a dark mummy.

To defeat my enemy, I must consume myself

so no man can hold my name in his mouth.

He tries to breathe in my life

hoping he can crown himself with my wings

yet my ka soars like an eagle,

sings in his night like an owl,

and carry his mind on my turtle back

and this black cloud emanating sparks

that are my thousand and one eyes

passes over him as a cloud of Wisdom

so he can sail through my Mystery.

 

And still, no man can hold my name in his mouth.