The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part twenty-seven


In part twenty-seven of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers, death comes as a beautiful woman, and William S. Burroughs and Ernest Hemingway are alarmed...


22 August 1994

When I went up the coast with B----- after one of our irregular trips to The City we stopped in at Talmage, next door to Ukiah, where the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, a Ch'an Monastery, makes its home on a hillside in buildings that used to be a mental hospital. There's a Buddhist holiday that they celebrate every year by buying small livestock and other animals destined for slaughter and release them on the grounds, so that now you're likely to see a wild peacock dashing around or screaming. The animals are so tame that as I was walking through the parking lot I crossed paths with a squirrel, and it didn't even look up, just kept scurrying forward crossing my path about a foot in front of my feet, I could have bumped it like a field goal.

The nun in the bookstore was loading me up with books with titles ranging from the blandly descriptive "Sutra in Forty-Two Sections" to ones with titles that seemed longer than the books themselves, full of phrases like "flower-adornment," and "water-mirror reflecting heaven" and conforming to the standard of including the who, what, where and why of the sutra in the title, as well as clues to form and formality and intended audience. Translate that from the pictograms and it well nigh takes up the whole cover and has to be put in ten-point on the spine.

And she gives me posters, too, a little postcard of Medicine Buddha, a sort of team photo of dozens of bodhisattvas with buns in their hair and swastikas on their chests and halos. I don't recognize them, but they all have identifying characteristics and I'm sure the staff knows them in Mandarin, Sanskrit and English backwards and forwards. Then a photo- quality painting of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. One of the ones with a zillion names. Originally Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, changing to Kuan Yin, Gannon, and other things spelled similarly as he changed genders as he moved east to cultures that more closely identified compassion with the female. She's serenely standing on the back of a sea serpent on stormy seas.

The nun tells me that when she was escaping Vietnam on a small boat there was a storm and Kuan Yin appeared to her much like in this picture and saved her life. She asks me if B----- and I are married. We say, "no." She says good. Don't get married, whatever you do, she says. It's the last thing B----- wants to hear. She's already paranoid I'm going to leave her and be a monk.

Does Death wear a black cape and do that haloween skeleton thing with the sharp pointy fingers and scythe? I don't think so. I think Death looks like a beautiful woman and that as often as not she comes to visit long before you die. Lots of people flirt with her, you only sleep with her once.

"Now sleeps he with that old whore Death
who yesterday denied her thrice"
wrote Hemingway, who slept with that old whore Death in Italy during the first World War but found himself suddenly impotent he wanted her only to himself I think and ran into her other lovers every day. That's what The Sun Also Rises is really about and it didn't end in the Twenties. It's Jake as Papa, beloved by the old whore Death, the powerful bitch who takes out even the bullfighter, who if you read between the lines of the posters around the plaza is supposed to spurn the old whore Death every time. The fellow's queer. Doesn't even like her. Death's a fag hag, too. She can change `em. She knows it.

He was in bed with Death when the glass plate cut his head; they were arguing on the boat when the gaff broke and he shot himself through both legs; she was the copilot when the plane went down twice in Africa and the second time he had to beat his way out with his head through the flames and smoke. Yeah, he was unfaithful, wouldn't you be? You can't get it up with the one you love, she's sleeping with all your friends, one day you find her lipstick on your father's collar, your mom blames you; gives you the gun.

She's nothing but trouble, they say, but it's like they've never even met her, cause when they do they drop like flies. It's only you, you're all that's left. You take on her role in bed, "you be the girl this time," your mistress says, and you play Death and "did the Earth move?" it opened right up it moved sure it moved it opened right up and you fell falling fell right down into the narrowing chasm ripping open as you fall so it's narrowing but never narrows. How could anyone think that that was all there was, legs like jelly, lying there in her arms, lying there on the hill maybe in the pine needles, Rabbit scurrying away it would hurt her to see you here like this in the arms of that old whore Death.

Catherine betraying you like Ag, you found her sleeping with that old whore Death, no that wouldn't have been the betrayal it was. You could have understood if she'd done that. She makes you think you're the only one, too, isn't that something?

The earth only moves three times, there's the time in Italy when the earth moved hell yes it moved it damn near vaporized and you're sitting in a hole in the ground a few feet below where you were jogging back with the food just a moment ago when she caught your eye your legs like jelly like cranberry sauce coming out through the holes in your boots and she kissed you the first time and lifted you up right out of yourself and pushed you right back and you were a fool to think that she just came in black and tapped you on the shoulder and showed you the door.

And the earth moved in Africa with the impact of the plane and your head swam for months, some would say you never recovered. You say there are three times but most people only get one.

And you saw her once more when you got out of the hospital, maybe you were crazy from electroshock and drugs but you saw her clear as day in the propellor of the plane like a vision of the Virgin in the sky she was there and all was forgiven and she was teasing you, come closer, come here, come here, come closer, let me feel you again. They say you're a flirt, Papa, you flirt with that old whore Death; like hell you were flirting. Death flirts.

"The hole in the back of his head was big enough to put your foot in, even if it was a big foot and even if you didn't want to put it there." -- William S. Burroughs
Don't get cocky, Bill, I read in the papers about that menage a trois with the ball & chain in Tangiers; and who did Death run off with there, Bill? When that hot shot hits, Bill, will she remember your name? When she jumps on your back as you dangle and takes you with a strap-on will the earth move for you then, Uncle Bill? Will you even notice? Leave her in the will, she can take the royalties from the Nike commercials. What is it, Bill, you think you've cornered the market on misogyny and the vile, you think she won't forgive you too in the end, you think you won't beg forgiveness when she shows up in your room, you think she won't say yes all's forgiven there's nothing to forgive just come back and be with me? She's not frustrated; she's just not rushed, she likes it slow.




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