CHAPTER 31

Roland was out for the evening. Michael was waiting for current trade to call. He had met Nicholas at the Pendulum in the Castro. This was the third week of them being fuck buddies. Roland had been insistent that he get back on the horse so to speak, have a social life; not become routine in being a temp worker. The good thing about working temporary jobs, he didn't have to stay long enough for anyone to know him or get to know them. This way, when things got out of control with psychic stuff, he could disappear for awhile without being noticed, especially as he had started merging with other entities while traveling on the astral plane of San Francisco but that is a story for a different day.

The smell of incense permeated the room. It opened his nose. He was sitting on a couch reading a magazine. The sun was heating up the room. His mind conjured a breeze that never came. The smell curled around his nostrils and he inhaled it like a drug hoping for a fix in the mind department where cracks were starting to appear. Consciously, he was reading a magazine article about another celebrity who wanted to be worshiped while waiting on Nicholas to call him while eating each tick of the clock thinking about the time being wasted waiting on Nicholas again and again. The smell he could feel settling into his hair, his clothes but he wasn't burning incense. He looked up from the magazine, cautiously surveying the room and saw nothing but the smell became stronger and irritated his eyes. Closing them shut as if from a smoke burn, he saw clouds swirling about in his head.

He was in New York. The time period was during the awakening. It's late at night. He didn't want to be there again. He was wandering down a street. Cars moved about him like roaches with headlights. Voices fell from the sky like a torrid rain telling him to rise from the dead. Tears were cutting canals into his face. His left leg throbbed with pain as he was dragging it like he was a kid dragging a tree branch behind in the dirt.

"I don't want to die in an alley again. Why must it always be like this?"

"I'll come for you. I can't enter your world like this?"

"But you promised you'd never leave me."

"I didn't leave you. I've always been close not close enough to touch but I've watched you, waited for you to awaken to remember."

"You promised me I wouldn't have to do this, walk in a body that wasn't mine, and now I'm hungry, the night is cold and bites my skin, I can hardly move in this heaviness they call a body. My breathing is unraveling and I can't speak with this mouth."

"Be patient. We are preparing a new body for you."

"I don't want a new body, I want what is mine."

"You must be patient."

"You promised me the last time, it would be you and me but you sent me here alone. No one wants me in this world of demons. No one wants to hear my light. Now I walk the street like a beggar, looking for shelter. The only one who hears me cry is the wind that cannot shield me, the animals that weep as I pass by, even the trees bow to honor me and man spits upon me, tells me to get a job and turns and walk away if I come close and look in their eyes."

"It will not be much longer."

"I just need a crust of bread."

"You must empty yourself of this world so that we can bring you to the other side. Your new body awaits you. You will be back in feminine form again."

"It's cold my love. I can't walk much further. I can't take another step. It's like something pulls me to the ground. I can barely stand. I feel myself spinning inside and falling down steps. I cannot stand this. Each time I climb a stair something causes me to fall backwards. And the wind gets colder and I hear it laughing at me."

"Soon my love, the Earth Mothers are chanting you a new body."

"I just want to lay down in the comfort of your arms."

Laughter broke through their conversation. Michael was a few feet away from a church. He looked at the doors. I remember what the Reverend said at the end of his sermon. "Let the doors of the church open now." What doors would open for him? He looked at the church doors and thought maybe this would be a good dying place. He sat on the stairs. "I'll never be let into this building again," he mumbled.

He was condemned to wander this world looking for his light. He was attempting to gather enough light to turn the 64 code keys, open the door and ascend. But this physical body was dying. He had given up so much life force to heal and help others into the light. He didn't think he had enough to keep for myself and now his life was ebbing away.

He could barely breathe and hardly saw anything since his vision was going in and out of focus. The voices that kept calling to him were beginning to sing a death chant.

"I don't want to die like this again and again on the street in an alley, smelling of decaying human flesh wrenched with diseases, piss stained clothes covering me like some royal garments, pieces of flesh peeling like someone slicing cheese slices, dirt mixed with sweat covering me like make-up for a Halloween night and stars always winking at me as if this was a cosmic joke that I didn't understand the punch line."

He remembered his face laying in an alley, among the refuse of human greed and desires, listening to roaches crawling about the pavement laughing at his predicament and how soon they would set up housekeeping in his eyes and people screaming into the night for relief as the roaches took someone else's life with their words and their sex drive.

He cringed inside as his body vomited itself inside and consumed itself again and again. And s/he was there, another Death Moth leaning against a wall wearing a leather skirt hiked up enough to show the congregation of skulls laughing from between her thighs.

He wanted another drink of liquor to close his eyes and dream of the house by the beach, the wife that got away with some guy who was his best friend, the baby that died inside her when he told her he couldn't be the man inside her, the family that said he would be quarantined from their life, the friends who paid respect on a Friday night when their pockets are dry and the long endless dark roads he drove to find that place in the road to drive off and pretend he couldn't see because there was no light and his face rubbed against the pavement to peel off the dry blood because fresh blood was oozing from reopened wounds.

A rat scurried by stopping to look and ask him, "Why do you cry when you're know you're crossing over to something better than this cesspool? You're getting your face out the mud. You can stop stretching your legs to Heaven and getting a busy signal? You are no longer in a parade of names in some stranger's mouth. Shut up and die quietly." The rat walked away laughing inside while muttering, "He doesn't know the secret of the eyes."

The Death Moth flipped a finger to him as she purred her passion and played with her nipples.

He thought of all the men who had been inside of him and never knew he was a corridor of endless bathrooms with glory holes to jerk off their mind. He had the bed that kept spinning until someone placed a quarter in the slot to play with his light. His legs left footprints on the ceiling while vines grew around his legs. His fingers grew like roots into the floor as he clawed it for support and for grounding.

Men entered him like a book store, pull back the black curtain, leaned against the walls of his soul and watched his thoughts walking by tantalizing them, offering them sweets between thighs. The strangers saw the look that never saw relief. They saw the semen flowing from his mouth because he wanted all their lies inside him. Movie images of men writhing in pain played on his body because there was no woman inside him to remind him that half of his brain was female and he came, and he came, and he came and drank the waste that crept from him to quench his thirst and he rubbed himself dry from strangers sweat that soaked his mind. His face scratched the pavement one more time and died.

He heard, "Let the doors of the church open." He sat there hoping no one would see the tears hanging from his face like string as he sat on the stairs of the church that had locked doors. People that passed by didn't come close. They only mumbled something and turned from him.

His shoes were hurting his feet. His right foot was starting to lose its shape a bit. It was like bones melting inside. Why must I die in the cold he mumbled? He wanted to open the doors of the church. He wanted to knock and say ‘let me in' but then he remembered the choir director said he couldn't sing that song because it was Etta Mae's song. Etta Mae always sang "He's Sweet I Know." She was a pretty black girl with starched dresses and ribbons in her hair. He wore hand me down suits and had a bowl type hair cut and his parents never lived on the right street so that made his voice incomplete in the church's eyes.

He wasn't like those men with too much ‘sugah' in them that the Reverend despised. He only liked liquor and the presents it would buy when men said he had pretty eyes. But he would have given up the song that made him sing down there behind the zipper if he could have raised his voice instead of his leg and sang "He's Sweet I Know." But he was never sweet. Men always said he was a nasty girl.

He is wandering through New York streets dying because he remembered bits and pieces of someone touching him from a place beyond time and space and the face alludes him, the voice alludes him but the song touches him but now a voice calls to him and says it loves him and he must die to be born in a new body and have the love that he has been looking for. Even the touch of anyone's hand that offered him more than five minutes worth of conversation had potential.

He didn't want to die in body again like this, be shifted around from body to body, constantly moving because the neighborhood changed. He didn't want to be chanted half way in, half way out, his mind placed in compartments because all of him was too much to contain in this human frame.

He wanted to see the voice that says it loves him.

"I've heard so many men say "I love you," in the dark when their coming inside me, when their words are being swallowed by me, when their sweat drips from their body on me, when they are suckling my nipples and whisper ‘mother' when I cover them in the night with my body to protect them from nightmares that walk through them.

In the dark where I can't see, they say ‘I love you' which feels so hollow and I want to put myself in those words to give it a wholeness, sanctity, to bring it forth and place me in the cottage by the sea where I can walk hand in hand with them for the world to see but the morning comes and they must return to a life that doesn't have me in it until after midnight when no one can see them moving this black skin in the dark and they tan themselves with my kisses and I dry their whiteness off my mind because I feel like my thoughts are being bleached, my words are being diluted from rhyme and the sound that I am, gets lost as I am shuffled from hand to hand; and I take station breaks on barstools; barstools that are cracked pedestals and weep for the children of the mind who lay battered, and bruised in boardinghouses abused by the patrons who sponsor charities to cleanse their mind; and they stitched a letter S on my forehead because I'm birthing bastards in my mind."

He stands and walks slow. One foot step forward, the other foot drags behind.

"I must find a place to die. Not in the alley this time, not the steps of the church. I want to be where my mother will find me in time. I want to be next to a tree. I want to lie in the arms of a tree. I want to hear the trees sing to me."

He heard a noise. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. He looked around the room and still could not place the scent of incense. Maybe it was the neighbors; maybe it was coming from the street. He wasn't sure but it gave him a headache, a head trip and he turned back to his article.

And he stretched his body, and purred softly to himself, looked at the telephone wondering when Nicolas would call. He had promised he would get away from his lover for a short time. "It's not the best lay I've ever had, a little lazy in bed, expects you to do all the work while giving an occasional moan but he takes me out in public, buys me an occasional gift."

The night I finally said, "I love you Nicholas. Why don't you leave your lover and let's make a go of it. Nicholas didn't like being black in a black world so he was trying to be the best white/black boy in a white world. To him, I was the brown sugar he needed when he needed black by injection. His white lover gave him status, acceptance, and worth. Nicholas couldn't look at himself in the mirror totally after he did his business with me. He was lamb black and the hair to thick. My sweat raining from his body and our smell perfumed his nostrils that made him think of dry rhythms that called from his soul.

I didn't like the blood flowing from me like a river. There is such an evil that men create from those three little words "I love you." When I called out Nicholas' name, when I tried to baptize myself between his legs, I remembered laying on the bed in a position I'd rather not describe in detail. I was twisting and turning worse than a fish out of water flopping around. I kept saying ‘Nicholas please, I don't want to do this, Nicholas you're rushing it, please Nicholas, it hurts.' If I could have pulled down Heaven into a baseball bat and brained him one I would have. He held me so tight I'd hoped death would release me from the pain, the blood. He kept digging and digging and digging and I kept going deeper and deeper into blackness. I felt like I was in the middle of a tug-of-war and was being pulled apart.

"Nicholas, you are a son-of-a-bitch. I will kill you for this, you dirty bastard. Don't you ever touch me again! Do you hear me you pitiful excuse for something imitating a man. You low life one-ball bastard, I hope your dick rots and you get cancer in the nuts. I'll see you in hell do you hear me. Death won't stop me from getting revenge you bastard. You'll pay the price of raping me."

He made me bleed. Oh, God the blood, I can't stop bleeding. Please! There's so much blood. I wish I was dead. Why don't someone just kill me and be done with it. I can't go like this. I took a piece of glass and cut the sky and watched the sky bleed as I walked home that night from Nicholas' bed. The sky cried red. Death would be my lover.

Now, Nicholas says he loves me when he leaves. He stays an hour and a half. I guess some dick is better than no dick.

And the smell of incense leaves my mind.

"Sometimes angels are born under dire circumstances."

Passage from the lost Michael Memoirs