In part twenty-one of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers, we find him at the Moon, enjoying a massage night (were you there?)
C-----'s girlfriend is comfortably back from Israel, and D----- bought him a pair of silk boxers from Fanny Wrappers with a chess pattern on them. He's delighted, and so is she. Can't wait to see those off you, she says. I say, "Look out, C-----, there are a bunch of queens all over your butt."
F----- is back from the Rainbow gathering and freshly determined to escape Babylon while at the same time working for an acronym. G-----, too, is back in town. With green hair this time. She doesn't like any of my CDs.
I'm showing off this letter I got. Not the form letter from a couple of days ago where the DA says they're not going to prosecute me for whatever they were investigating me for (a very beg-the-question sort of form letter).
B----- says she really wants to go to Ren Fair but she needs twenty lousy dollars just twenty dollars so she can finish her costume so she can go. If she only had twenty dollars she could finish her costume and then she could go to Ren Fair. D-----: "Do you feel strongly about this?" C-----'s girlfriend hands her a twenty. Big hug.
If D----- is anxious, he doesn't show it. In the room tonight is his lover, also recently returned from a far-off place (her hair is uncharacteristically natural-colored). She's the one who hates me, but tonight we're getting along. She's reading "Pure" magazine, which is supposedly a magazine of erotica designed by women with men as the intended audience. She's critiquing the aesthetic. "I'm wondering if it's just women writing what they think men want, or if it's women writing about what they really want. I mean, none of this 'Oh, I love it when you cum in my hair' stuff, really."
Also in the room is His Grace, a renaissance fair duke from up north whom D----- had a fling with for a while. Potentially explosive, since this happened before H----- began her own adventures in polyandry. But they're getting along okay too.
His Grace is a harmless poohbear queen with enthusiastic laughter and a heart of gold. He loves touching younger men's bodies, and has translated this into the art of unrefusable sensual massage. A real talent, but he uses so much lotion I end up feeling like I've taken a dip in a swimming pool of Crisco. And I feel somewhat guilty that I have absolutely no interest in returning the favor of his more intimate massage techniques.
His Grace likes my Ferdinand the Bull tattoo and sings a Ferdinand the Bull song I'm unfamiliar with: "Ferdinand, Ferdinand, the bull with the jolly good ego; Ferdinand, Ferdinand, his friends all call him amigo..." But the star Tattoo of the evening is a technicolor winged snake wrapped caduceus-style around an alarmingly large abdominal surgical scar of C-----'s. A real gem.
J----- is here with her boyfriend, stripping down to a thong for her rubdown and remarking to her man, "nice robe... is that your samuri sword?" "Put that away, K-----," I say, "You're going to put someone's eye out." He slammed it against a door repeatedly in flaccid masturbation earlier after egging H----- to clench her naked buttocks. She's embarrassed about clenching but offers to wink the eye for him. B----- came in to retrieve her iguana, who is too young to see such things.
B----- is trimming the iguana's toenails, and some end up in the carpet where later this evening they will puncture D-----'s foot.
Of my personalities, the one most likely to make promises that the rest of us can't keep, the one most likely to get into trouble, the one most likely to make the others cringe, is the one a few inches down from my navel. His Grace is summoning this nameless fiend with the same incremental tricky vigor that this nameless fiend employed in the instinctual "A night of heavy petting begins with a single grope" school of reclining 1978 Datsun B210 naive Taiwanese virgin days of old.
The iguana has a thing for plummeting. Whenever it is perched on a shoulder, or a couch, or a shelf or a table, it makes a leap that for a cat in the prime of its life would be a graceful piece of cake. For the iguana, it is a leap, a desperate and loud scratch of iguananails on something and a heavy heavy thump as the iguana impacts with the floor. This happens over and over during the evening.
Someone's moaning in the corner. Maybe they're massaging F-----'s feet again. Or maybe it's an earwich (two people, one on each of a third person's ears, licking exhaling kissing -- reduces even the Charles Atlases among us to six foot two muscular jello).
D-----'s taken the sink apart, or fished around with a coat hanger for the hair ball. A success. And the sulphuric acid didn't get him. The boa, all six feet or so of her, is underneath a desk drawer. L----- shows up for a time, a man of minor notoriety for having gone to court over some sort of obscure computer hacking. Anyone who knows anything about him knows that the case was the equivalent of arresting Jeffrey Dahmer for an unpaid parking ticket.
H----- is excited because a friend bought her a spam tin with a bow-tie, named F-----, for a date ("F-----'s also my brother's name, so it's not just a spam date, it's an incestuous spam date.")
K----- mentions with alarm that women remember every single detail of everything that happens early in a relationship. H----- says, "that's just because you go out with anal type-A people like yourself" then wonders aloud, "D-----, where did we meet."
"I was playing Civilization and you had hot pink hair."
"And hot green pubes," someone else says.
"No, I didn't have my pubes dyed yet," but now it's time for the story of when D----- came stumbling out of the bedroom one morning, ignorant of the fact that his face was green and puzzled at the wide-eyed laughter of his roommates.
I think of when I met M----- but stop before that misty-eyed miasma can start to condense. His Grace is reaching under my flannel boxers to baste my buttocks. "Who's Ishmael's friend," F----- asks. "That's my friend," D----- says, "And he loves it if you call him His Grace." "That's okay. They don't know I'm a Duke," His Grace says.
My cringing personalities are reaching a consensus. They wish I were somewhere else. Boldly they think of a plan. Wait until the erection subsides and then stab Caesar in the back. But the plan never reaches the action stage.
Over the buzz in my head I hear H----- and J----- discussing spanking injuries. "Where's B-----?" She must have vanished. Slipped out with her equipment and her iguana and we didn't even notice. Weird. Now it's just me and His Grace and couples, and it's getting late and the couples are starting to drift off to their coupling places.
And it's the last chance to throw over the despot, but the coup never
arrives. "That's okay. You don't need to do anything. Just relax and
enjoy." A few inches below my navel a voice, "That sounds reasonable."
The sound of a dozen personalities cringing. The taste of blanket between
clenched teeth. The smell of latex ("Latex itself I don't like, but condoms
give me this Pavlovian response" -- this snippet from earlier in the
evening. Did I say it?). Somewhere a disembodied iguana claw waits its
turn on the carpet.
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