13:45 Sonja

We got back to her place in its splendid disarray - a still life that could be called "Orchestrated Chaos" - and here you suddenly realize that you've stretched your pheromonal magic to its limits and daily details - diapers, dishes, piles of unwashed clothes, roaches in overflowing ashtrays - if she didn't smoke sheet then whose were all these? - began to impose their quotidienne drudgery.

I wanted to leave before my jealousy could no longer hide behind a kind of affected nonchalant bravado. But just as much, I needed to absorb, process, savor, reconstitute, call Frank Lengel and rhapsodize about Sonja at Place du Calvaire just behind where Frank was squatting the benevolent Natalie's (Frank's ex) apartment, off Rue Calaincourt. Around here we'd hang with the clochards with a view of all Paris as we tapped the bottle of vin ordinaire and I could flake and rhapsodize and not care if he heard every word or even every other word about Sonja. Or Fabienne or ...

“We must continue to avoid running around in the mazes and patterns that civilization has built for us. We study rats because rats are so much like people.” Frank might say leaning over a railing with all of Paris within one deep-breath of a gaze.

"Sonja is so fuggin' perfect. It's like fucking a Rodin that's been standing in the sun all day."

Sonja left food out to rot like an old painter might arrange her still lifes. Her poetry (well, her words strung vertically instead of horizontally certainly looked like poetry when you saw them sitting there so cloyingly on her expensive stationery, and then printed out on her nice HP printer in some squiggly floral font) was inspired by this mold which sat upon her food. The poems were a curious hybrid of her agenda jottings and her odes to the beautiful details of decay.

That I could just scrape some of this mold off the inside of her fridge door and ingest it to activate hallucinatory behavior had not been made clear to me yet. Her other poems detailed the festering sores that sat upon the jaundiced skin of those abused by the very drugs they'd set about to abuse in a bohemian, post-Velvet Underground manner. ["From polo ponies to horse," commented Frank, who was to remain eternally suspicious of Sonja.] I usually left when her “friends” came over to smoke her cigarettes, make phone calls, drink her brandy, pose and beg her to docu-video their inspired denouements. Or, as I soon discovered, if I made no move to leave they'd find the sudden motivation to up and leave first, especially if there was no coffee, no food, no rolling papers, no opium, opium that Sonja would purchase for them because she was soft at heart and wanted to film dissipation ...

That Sonja was being beaten by this Nigel, this sour milk sop, this threadbare English gent, the apparent father of Mobster, was not at first apparent. That he was the father only in genetic terms was not apparent to me either. Nor was it to him. She, in her infinite and naive (maternal) depths still “cared” for him! But my mind wondered if her care for him wasn't merely manufactured around the very flimsy evidence that he was the father. In other words, the father thing was a pretext that allowed her to care for him without having to deal with the criticisms from me and her friends. In other words, the mind is a terrible enemy to mistake for a friend.

Nigel was also a bit of a writer, well, he'd rewritten her script much the same way locusts rearrange fields of wheat or how a mortician might sign off on a corpse. I mean Nigel was a sinister sop with all the writerly affectations and afflictions. I think he actually spent more time rewriting their contract, upping his fee if he so much as added a comma. With his bent wrist and foppy English sarcasm, the clipped syllables emerging from between his shut teeth like he was a man living in a bunker who spoke through the pain of a mysterious knife wound. Anyway, when I would show he'd suddenly blow exasperated smoke, snuff his fag, and be off to some wandering nowhere. Leaving behind his kit, his tray of opium paraphhernalia [that she had purchased for him in a late night bargain hunt at the hip-branché bar Smoke Sang just up the hill further into her Belleville.] There on her coffee table, which rather than cleaning she would just put down another layer of thematic contact paper, was his kit, the long elegant pipe made of bone or ceramic or something, with reservoir, the small oil lamp to heat up the opium, a long needle to help keep the pipe aperture open, an old cigar tin containing the opium paste, a small white scale to weight the dosage, a scraper and small sponge to keep the pipe clean, some extra wicks, an old pair of nails scissors used to trim the wick. And I'd handle the stuff and try to figure her out. Why? Wasn't this kit a little like a mechanic's toolkit or a kid's box of Lego. She'd consistently minimize the investment she made in his "welfare". It was for the film. It was tax-deductible because it was all considered tools of the trade by her creative accountant.

I'd watch her see him to the door and I could hear him asking, like son to mother, when I'd be gone and when it would be safe to come back over. And I could hear her whispers, not the words, but their reassuring and calming tones.

“I get the feeling you could hold your own against him.”

“Ugh, I'm just glad he's outa here.” She said for my benefit. “I mean he's getting so ridiculous, he's like writing himself into my will as beneficiary. I just can't get violent though. Sure I can throw shit, heave a TV or whatever but never AT anyone. He's given me nothing, no money, never even flowers, except a fat lip, bruised cheek, breasts and chest, bloody nose, and look, he scratches like a little girl.” I didn't ask why she continued to put up with him. He's the purported father. Yea, OK but ... do a DNA test or ... She needed him like a bored kid needs a scab on the knee to pick at.

“And your shoulder ...”

“It may all be due to his medication. He's on Zoloft. He has a very rough cycle of depression and ...”

“No wonder, if I had to live inside that dingy skin I'd ...”

“And this squashes his libido - I mean as soon as I hate him I realize I feel sorry for him. I mean it must frustrating to be like half a man of what little there was of the whole anyhow. I mean, before the chemical experiment began taking place in his body, he was a very nice boy. I mean, he's got so many toxins and so many conflicting drugs doing battle inside him that...”

“I wouldn' know. But why do you feed his...?”

“No opium no Nigel no writing. Zee supposedly slows reabsorption of serotonin ...which of course, at first seems like it's a counter-indication but really ends up being a blessing in disguise.”

“...Across each synapse so that the serotonin lingers in the synapse and effectively decreases his libido. I know, I read the article too. Thank Squibb it has this effect!”

Nigel - to show you what kind of man he was - would, down the line about a year, eventually sue her for the rights to her script and thus I never had to say I told you so. It was shortly after she'd received the official papers from his English barrister in the mail that I discovered a gun, a pistol in the half-open drawer of her night table next to her bed, the same one upon which stood the proud handsome photo of her dad in his air force uniform. If you looked just right at this photo late at night, her father's eyes seemed to follow you.

She couldn't let go of this Nigel, this hypothetical father of her son. But it was more than that - she was so absorbed in the processes of how TV created the scenario and dramatic arc of our lives that she became beholden to Nigel to supply her with just the right dramatic elements that she admired in soap operas to sully, complicate and further render her life more complexly fascinating. Her life would eventually run precariously parallel to the dubbed-in American soap operas her and Nigel watched together - her taking copious notes, he offering sarcastic commentary.

Sonja's stereo with its shot and shattered speakers and crackling fuzzy woofers could still be called upon to play at hair-frizzing volumes. I mean post-punk's magic is precisely that it does not sound any worse with good or bad equipment. Inside this feverish buzzing distortion played by her fave bands, bands she knew from labels where she knew people, bands was always on the guest list for at the Gibus or Elysee Montmartre, bands that allowed themselves to be overrun by their own beats per minute, bands she'd clinked beer bottles with and traded sleeveless jean jackets with - she had one from Snag Rabid, lead singer of Beef Jerquey, ["he's really a sweet guy, a kleptomaniac but a sweetheart, really."] if I wanted to see it - inside all this fuzz she'd dredge up a kind of makeshift, if muddled, poésie of inarticulate primal ennui.

They were the bands she'd hire for the soundtrack to this life - er movie. There, go ahead, just get her started and watch her cavort and wriggle in trashy skimpies, stained lingerie; a kind of fallen-woman-elegance in a white trash world, a world so foreign to her own princess-four-poster-bed existence that it could be conjured as exotic or vital or ... well, to her, crass-in-your-face sexiness was just downright revolutionary. Camille Paglia as rock star. And that her mother would be riled and miffed would be all the more reason to find it attractive. [Frank: "PO-girl as POmo, POnies, and POlo."}

She was really the absolute first person I knew with a computer addressbook, aide memoire [ed. predecessor of the Palmtop] with the names of friends - Hollywood stringers, bratpackers, brothers of Andrew McCarthy, and steroidally-deformed punk nuts on Pistain Records, owners of polo horses, venture capitalists with goatees, poolside leftists, men who painted their toe nails as a statement of their otherness, men with tattoos of labia on the bronzed lengths of their penii. Oh Sonja. You just had to laugh (I'd just as soon wait till I got outside, however) the way she could act like she was so full of purpose, so busy, a life full of appointments and extrapolatory interconnectedness. But maybe she was actually onto something. Maybe whatever illusions she created were the illusions others wanted to embrace. Country [bandit] musicians and Hollywood starlets knew this. So did presidential candidates. Look at Lincoln. So you had to give her credit, whenever she walked into some place, usually the Cafe GooGoo, me following in behind her, you could watch the smoke, the din, the attention part for us.

She appeared to be important enough for others to render important. That is mystique, I guess. And I'd be standing there, beer in my paw, wondering how do you get it, this awe, this covetedness? Who knows, but in lieu of substance this does quite well. Maybe it's the pheromonal scent of money. I mean, just watch as she makes her rounds, kissing all the arteests and Algerians and cheek to cheek with the women who knew no nationalities, no propriety, no loyalty. Their bony wrists supporting heavy cigarettes, smoke obscuring the grey eyes, the heavy lids. And if I stood just right I thought I could hear people snickering and if I turned quickly that snickerish whispering would instantly evaporate and the laughers would go stone-faced. And I had to think who was leading whom, who was the muse of whom, who was kidding whom? I suddenly realized the fine line between ridicule and adulation - how the two fed one another. I'd be sitting by myself as she made the magnanimous rounds of "her family" and I'd have to think fast, save face, act like I was in deep thought - the gun, the paraphernalia, was I a main character in her next scene - I'd write random observations, stare up at the ceiling, note the fumée clinging to the neon arteries rose et bleu. I was writing this down. I could jsee myself from various angles in the smudged, smoked and be-postered mirrors, she was a blur and her evening was gathering steam.

And if you ever mentioned anything to her, even hinted at some suspicions, the words would instantly render the suspicion so ridiculous you yourself had to join in on the laughter.

Then some guy, some Moroccan who has a produce store, a gift for singing, an art bent or take your pick, might blow smoke from his cig of hash and tobacco, the sheet, that gives the Paris air nocturne its character into our midst and suddenly he would wave his hands to part the veil of smoke away from her face, in a way sculpting it around my head to obliterate me. Smoke and mirrors, scent and aroma, flirtation and insinuation, rumor, the substance of insubstantiality - this was the Belleville by night. This was the area where the artists and worker revolutionaries gathered outside the spun net of Napoleon III and Hausmann who tried to control revolutionary thought by reinventing the central vectors of movement. The foreigners arrived en masse just before World War One, escaping local wars and conflagrations. And then came the Greeks and Armenians, the Ashkenasie Jews fleeing the pogroms, and then with the next wave, in the 50s, came Tunisian Jews, Muslim Moroccans, Algerians, Central Francophone Africans, Pakistanis... I read with difficulty in some French mag.

The smoke sculpture bit might piss off Manu to the point where he might start something like blowing his own smoke or changing the tunes on the juke to something more abrasive and Nordic or getting Snooty, his mongrel mutt companion, to begin howling. But I'd lunge out to stop him, insisting that it was OK, that I knew what I was doing, that in humiliation lies a redemption, that in their efforts to disappear me I became a bigger and better and ultimately more menacing presence and ultimately that much more attractive to Sonja. Every smoke ring a halo to pinch. The more I refused to react, the more they wondered how and when I would. This is the power of the unknown, anticipation is what kills.

“Like silence can drive yuh crazy.”

“He'd sit back, sip his café and calvados, and re-vent his pent-up energy by altering the Paris Patois poster taped to the wall near the flipper machine, changing “Paris” to “Piss” and “Patois” to “toi” as in something like “piss on you.” Double underline. Then he'd smack his 10-franc piece on the bar and be out of there, not sure whether he was mad at me, himself, or just disappointed in humankind.

Sonja's sixth draft of the script which she pressed in her earnest armpit and took with her to the café [every café, actually] was a not-totally unconvincing attempt to conflate homelessness as a metaphor with the existential isolation of the rich. The soundtrack would somehow blend Jesus and the Mary Chain and Noisecore with Chopin! And when she waved her arms in the ways maybe directors on the set did, you somehow got the feeling that maybe she was right or could pull it off. And, of course, she knew the names of composers (never mind local L.A. trashcore bands) the way I knew the names of candy bars.

The handful of script pages we'd have to go over here in the café before we could make love were the same ones from last week except now some new wrinkles or a few new commas or Nigel intrusions had changed everything. Nigel, hypothetical father of her son, abstruse mirror image of exactly what she wanted him to be. And, oh boy, did he ride this one with bulging pockets of 10-franc pieces.

But it was more than that - she was so absorbed in the processes of how TV created the scenario and dramatic arc of our lives that she became beholden to Nigel to supply her with just the right dramatic elements that she admired in soap operas to sully, complicate, and further render her life more intricately fascinating. If he beat her, well, at least it was something vital, close to blood, passion, something to show off as proof. Her life would eventually run precariously parallel to the dubbed-in American soap operas she and Nigel watched together - Sonja taking copious notes, Nigel offering sarcastic commentary. How do you put it: life imitating the imitation of art that imitates life and, in the end, encourages it down the same cheap sentimental paths. Of course, I was not likely to put it this way [not quite yet] if her pussy was sitting their smiling at me from the other side of her coffeetable.

Nigel had done something to my character. Like let the air out. I was now barely able to keep an erection. I had been arrested for crimes against poetry, or propriety, or something by these self-appointed guardians of hip at the Beaux Arts and the reading organizers at the American University which included Theodore Janes, beatnik poet “friend” of Ginsberg and Corso. Ultimately, the question became: who's the writer and who's the proofreader? I mean, who's the make-up artist and who's the main character? My pride felt like asking. And then, finally, we reached today's end but this end offered no relief. No resolution. So we just kept rehashing these pages as they got marked up more and more... Sonja was going crazy with me rewriting Nigel's character and he mine. Jousting like knights in rusty amour, to the point where she was going crazy and she was just lumping me and Nigel together as two pees at the same urinal. But who the hell cared in the end. I mean once we started fucking it always seemed like the right time, the right kiss, the right gesture of me on my knees in her kitchen, nose in her ticklish muff. Me rubbing her loaves of exquisite sweet meats.

We didn't do it a lot - once a week at best. There were no demands, often nothing said. I've never quite figured out what the precise nature of this "just rightness" was. We fit into one another perfectly, no pain, much feeling, angle of protrusion a cognate of the intrusion. I mean you know the feeling: you look at a pair of kid leather gloves; they look way too small but when you put your hand in somehow, the glove gives, and your hand is perfectly encased in soft leather. That's what I mean. When I moved she moved with me. When she wanted on top we'd flip over without me flopping out. When she went out of her mind fucking it was OK, hyena yelps and all. I wasn't going to beat her up, alter her script or steal money from the change tin she kept in the kitchen, like others before me [Nigel].

Sonja could be tender without being effusive; generosity being a perfect suspension between giving and taking. It was more than mood, more than the slight aromatic squish of arousal that pressed from between our bodies. What kind of depth, breadth, longevity this was meant for I can't tell you... But whenever I thought I'd consciously conjured up that feeling, that spontaneity, that “just rightness” and then tried to consciously apply it, it never worked. The negotiation is that tricky - seismic seance.

This is always where my mind wandered off to as it glazed over with her stage directions and agonies over camera position, diagrams with sweeping arrows. I'd think, just 3 more hours [sometimes it was 3 more days!] of this and I will be home free, in bed with her, the "Mobster" with a bottle of warm milk doctored with a hint of cognac to aid the sleep process...

Now, years later, I'm wondering if there were reasons why I was maybe the only one to “really” see something in this script other than the celluloid emerging from between her splayed legs. I mean, Guy, Frank, and Manu might just sit there with those empty cement bunker stares - like I can't believe it. I'd like to reread this script now just to see if my mind was indeed addled by the prospect of sexual favors. [Am I imagining that one of the only letters I ever received from her detailed her new life as a publicity agent and the lament that she had carelessly deleted the entire manuscript from her hard drive and she was wondering if I maybe had an old copy?!]

Flattery will take you somewhere but not necessarily where you want to go. I was too naïve, too easily cowed, too willing to offer the benefit of my doubtless certitude ... I mean, was I deranged into deep spiritual rut by the scents her various cleaves, junctions, and wishbones gave off? Manu pointed out that there was nothing there “except for the desperate desire for there to be something.” Isn't that something? Wishful desperation. Camaraderie and the like. Maybe most everyone - including me - needed to flatter her to her face because you never knew where the gravytrain was coming from. But then, as soon as no reward seemed forthcoming, most of the others put her down because no woman this beautiful deserved to be so ... clever or successful. Beauty really riles some people up; it makes hatred out of fear, dresses disdain up as reason, scorn as feminism and it makes you agree with arguments like this: she's beautiful, she can get anything she wants, let others less physically endowed make it on their smarts.

And you know, a week later I'd be back at her pad, ready to screw around with some commas and camera angles, ready to give the guy a kind of slick L.A. tan and some soap opera occupation and there I'd catch a whiff of something amiss, like fresh plastic and notice her PC laying there bashed in on her study floor, trashed in a spectacularly cool writer's cramp fit. Strange scratches, gouges on her arms and legs, strange smirk floating around in the magnificent features of her face. If you took your palm and squeezed her face it was so soft and doughy that you could remold it in your own image. “It wasn't behaving.” I swear I heard her say. Yeah, and what about the scratches, my mind was asking. I mean, did the goddamn thing turn on her or what?

And then this computer would somehow mysteriously, in dead of night or sometime in the weird emptiness of a midsummer afternoon, just as easily give birth to another - was this a plot flaw on my part? I think not! - because the next time over, there it'd be, some new laptop thing. I never said anything because this was our no-mans-land. It was not my place. There was no need to know it. I mean I wasn't living with her. Who was I to say what was real? All possessions and their applied possessiveness - you to them, them to you - is all flaky, negotiable, and temporary anyway. But, you see, ultimately it was an ancestral love of possessions akin to that old adage about either opposite sex - you can't live wid'm and you can't live widout'm. She had to have things, expensive things, around even if they were meant to irritate her or serve as her sculptures of despair-disrepair. Having the thing and killing it too was voodoo for her, a cleansing thing. Like a dog you kiss and kick at the same instant.

After hours and hours of this script consultation dance [for visual reference see a male pigeon dancing around a female] she would finally consent to rewarding me by perhaps slyly feigning that she was warm, offering a kind of coy ceremonial unbuttoning of her blouse or turning her gloriously shaped rump ever so slightly into my line of vision to stir the air around more lurid thoughts. Compelling me to lift her up off the bed by her pliant buttocks, turning her over to rip off her exquisite panties (the equation was something like: the more expensive, the more easily they gave way and the more the sound of tearing would thrill her). And without fanfare or prelim I would just insert my rampantly distended plumbing and then not do anything with it, refuse to abide by the rhythms of nature, and we'd just lie there, feel the infinitely small muscles inside our respective genitalia quiver in and around one another. Never before had my thoughts been so syphoned into the twitchings and flexings of muscles, the “abductor longus” [ed. sp. adductor] and “sartorialus splendorus” [ed. sartorius]. All so as not to get it over with but to do it without a lot of winning stares or complicated eyes ... She liked to be done to and, in this precise extensive way, be one away with. After her little labial ballet of butterfly twitches I'd finally (ticktick, an hour or two later) be allowed to totally control the motion, the angle, the arc, the lift, the sighs pressed into whimpers, the glistening bow across the moaning strings of her febrile nerve endings, play the entire orchestra of sighs and stirrings to a pitch, to a volcanic explosion.

And then, in the glee of total abandon to my dominance, I'd pin her legs behind her ears with her head against the grimy hair-greased wall, distended, wide-open, and just rub my delirious length in the entire split cleave from asshole to clitoris, then she would do it, allow it to be done - simultaneously feeling and watching - like a film projected that she imagines she may be directing. If I stuck my forefinger in her cute little puckered fundament that she liked to scent with Poison, an astringent that would pucker it even tighter and give it a bracing bit of sting, then she would accommodate that forefinger. And if that forefinger became my thumb and the thumb became my penis then she would in her wild eyeless head find the wherewithal to say, “be safe” and then allow me to poke it in between her uplifted buttocks and then allow me to set her on the bed so that she was squatting, flat-footed on the mattress of beer-reeking foam and herself inserting it into her little pucker until I could hear the bracing, sucking of air, her cheeks blossoming with irreparable, irreversible orgasm. She'd tumble off and I'd have to enter her glimmering vertical smile (“new condom” she'd whisper) which was so tight that I believed (and her lack of knowledge of what to do manually with a penis corroborated my suspicions) that for a 27-year old woman with an 18 month-old kid she had not had much experience with this kind of gymnastics and had often prefered her men to be, like Nigel, mere eunuchs in her service.

“I have only read about this in Susie Bright's columns in L.A. I mean, like, Nigel, comes in the snap of your fingers.”

“Not mine! ... Still?”

“Nonono, when we used to do it - quote, unquote - cuz we figured we were supposed to be doing it. I mean he is such a bad lover and sometimes he'd lay into me, I mean he didn't really have much of a punch, but still like there was no explanation for it except that he always came prematurely. HA, prematurely means like there was a time frame, this was like instantly. And I didn't laugh but he perceived my silence as like condemnation or something. Or he couldn't get it up at all and somehow me and my physical makeup, or whatever it is, was at fault for not fixing him. I mean he thought I was, I think supposed to be some kinda nurse and fix things. He does not know you know this but when you look at him I am sure he knows. I mean like his technique, not to fixate on this ...”

No, no, I like to hear this. I mean, I like to be of help...”

“I mean, it was like the pleasure of like snuffing out a cigarette in an ashtray.” And with this I could smile and heave my hips again. Come already all over. And I would begin again one more time because after all of the many stories and the many interruptions she would often leave me priapic. Aching, even begging for the erectile tissue to deflate again and so I would just give a sharp jab and this would give her a start.

"How d'yuh let the air outa your ... thing?"

"Gotta cut it off to get it down." And we would begin all over again. The moan of when I would first enter her. I can feel the breath in my neck when I replay the tape. I have a tape.

I run my fingers along her every contour as my finger finds a glorious ski slope around her hips I look up this part in her anatomy book open on her bed to page 634 - ilium, ischium, and pubis.

But then I would not cum, I could not cum again and she would struggle and agonize and pump and spit in her hands and wrap both her hands around my length and pump and pump and pump like a wild woman at a butter churn ...

But then suddenly I'd get that urge to leave, run “home,” and as I was stepping back into my crusty sticky underwear [how to hide them from Sophie] I'd just say I have to go andthat was enough for her. She would let me go. “I love that I can give you so much pleasure.” Is that what I remember her saying? And while I was whisking through the empty streets, my crotch on fire, shirt inside out, tail dragging, I'd look for the right tenor to the right lie for my bedmate, Sophie.

Picture me on the corner But the further I was cast adrift (reference to Odysseus rounding the cape bound to his mast so he can hear the alluring songs of the sirens might be appropriate here) by the revealed magnetic forces of les femmes, the later it got, the more ludicrous the lies became. Until they were so fantastically unbelievable that SHE, Sophie, went from weeks of outrage, to mere irritation, to actual detached bemusement and ultimately, to benevolent pity. Like a pathetic drunk old man telling a bad joke. This is the pity that she had manufactured especially for me, situated somewhere in the craw of her heart which required a survivalist's distance, a feeling that I was, by now, the only one at all convinced of my lies' effectiveness.

Picture me almost "home" near the Tati on Boulevard Rochechouart, heading up the hill toward the Sacré Couer to find a dark entranceway where I can cut away my damning underwear with my Swiss Army Knife from my body and trash them in a box sitting by the curb on rue d'Orsel. Liberation is a most haphazard and conditional operation.

But don't think that this was the end of it. That it just all sort of died out, ground to an unresolved but tranquil halt. Although I was able to manipulate Sophie by prying away at her forgetfullness - I would often claim that I told her this or that, like be home late, whatever, punctuated by the phrase, “don't you reMEMber?!” And this would still effectively cast doubt on her grip on reality. Was she going crazy? Like her grandmother and her mother before her?

You could see her befuddled, staring off, wondering whether there wasn't something congenital about her condition, her mind retracing the blurry steps of life's events. Was her mind working like an eraser taken to the pencilled sketches of the day? Maybe I was right, maybe she owed me an apology. And to see her like this was no fun really. I did not enjoy it. It was a necessary application of desperate techniques in desperate times.

But sometimes she rebounded with amazing inventiveness; one night, for instance - although I'm not entirely sure of this and this may be a compliment to her ability to make her acts of vengeful sabotage look accidental - I was dozing off when I suddenly smelled smoke. I leaped out of bed to see the comforter cover edged in flame. Maybe I was dreaming and Sophie's reaction seemed ambiguous like a fire is no big deal, so that I ultimately didn't know (you neither) for sure whether the candle actually fell out of the holder onto the bed or whether it had had a little help. There was no way to reprimand anyone because it was just something that happened. These moments might even evolve into strange passionate sexual encounters in the bathroom, her holding onto the sink, one foot up on the tub, me making her look at herself in the mirror as I banged my groin into her backside. The sound of slapping skin, the sucking action of her slit, taking my painful length out to run in the crevice of her buttocks. Then maybe we'd climb into the tub with peculiar smiles on our faces. Exhausted sexually, cheeks rosy, hair in a twist, the scent of sex mixed with Tahitian bubblebath, satisfied beyond apprehension. This is how we neutralized everything else that was wrong with us.

I'm wending through the quiet-bloated streets (slight humid mantric hums cling to streetlights the way bees buzz a hive), in the post-coital fever, after-the-rain guided by two constellations, Labia Majora and Labia Minora. The sad sagging branches of heavy dark trees infected by a mysterious blight that had something to do with the emptiness of greed or the air pollution. And there in the kitchen - whatever time it was - I suddenly had the urge to write about Sonja and then reread that section and I am finding myself as aroused as I was just hours ago.

If you could see me now, hunched over the kitchen table, legs wide apart, toilet paper wadded up on the floor (I could send photos) massage oil making my penis glisten a strange type of purple and as I cum I fall to my knees on the kitchen linoleum, the wad of toilet paper perfectly placed to receive it. And just to add salt to a wound I had self-inflicted I flipped further back in my journal and read the rest of the quote that Sighile quoted from by ... here it is, George Steiner, which she was kind enough to send me. I read from her letter: “‘...women know the change in a man's voice, the crowding of cadence, the heightened fluency triggered off by sexual excitement ... In feminine speech-mythology, man is not only an erotic liar; he is an incorrigible braggart ... an eternal miles gloriosus, a self-trumpeter who uses langauge to cover up his sexual or professional fiascos, his infantile needs, his inability to withstand physical pain ...' that's in his book After Babel. I'm not saying anything about you in this. Please believe me. Or don't.”

And there on the same page scawled and etched across the quotation was one of Sophie's furious drawings and explanatory text. She had written "does it really belong to your body or is it a accessory?" with an arrow pointing to a giant hard.

"DO NOT LET ME SEE IT! YOU MAY NEVER SEE IT AGAIN!! I STILL DO LOVE YOU BUT MAYBE BETTER WITHOUT A PENIS! Love, from your woman

-> number 1

-> number 2

-> number ?

fill in the blank. Just think of it as a tight pussy"