Nine Kinds of Naked (31 page)

Yeah right
, was all Elizabeth could think as she watched one of the other dancers choke on her toke,
as if this is really happening.
The other dancer's chest heaved repeatedly concave as her body desperately tried to cough the burn out of her lung tissue, and Elizabeth resolved right there that she was done smoking pot. There was no way she was going to grow into another one of these kvetching pot hags. There was no derision in her attitude, only an inescapable awareness that her perception of the ongoing con of life had deepened into undiscovered depths. The chatter of existence felt absurdly unreal, and this somehow seemed closer to reality. Enchanted by this
yeah right
metaphysics, she couldn't escape the sensation that there was a man behind the curtain, not one of the poor saps out front, of course, but an entity, a presence that was pulling strings in her life, an angel, a demon, or her very own spirit.

Upon entering the stage and the maroon atmosphere of the club, however, the arched asses and inflated breasts became altogether too preposterous. The flash and dazzle of the girls strutting about the stage, grinding up and down the poles, writhing along the perimeter, tossing their heads back in false
abandon, Elizabeth found herself unable to fathom the circumstance. Holy mother of God, Elizabeth thought to herself, what the christ is
going on
in this place?

Blinking as if someone had just removed a blindfold from her eyes, Elizabeth watched herself move through the motions of her floor routine as a genteel frenzy of twenty-dollar bills hailed her for private table dances. Aiming automatically for the wealthiest-looking gentleman, she began her dance of mutual exploitation as she had so many times before, selling her sincerity and sexuality to another pinstriped lout desperately seeking an encounter with the feminine.

While teasing her mark with the hidden forbidden of her near nudity, Elizabeth observed the club and saw for the first time that every woman in the place—coke whores and boob jobs included—was a muzzled priestess of Aphrodite, and oblivious to her own reduction. Here was the tremendous mystery of female beauty. Here was the noble divinity of sexuality. And here was it enfeebled to these demeaning displays of gaudy gratuity. Elizabeth and Diana had frequently amused themselves by believing that they weren't just tip slaves stamping out plastic simulations of sexuality in a fantasy factory, but that they were performing a vital service. They were the temple harlotry of rites long forgotten, the sacred whores, the sexual healers, the slut goddesses, and their sustained encounter with the erotic was generating immense spiritual energy and thereby raising their kundalini, and whether they were aware of it or not, the men were there to worship the goddess.

Today she saw that while this account was absolutely true, it was not as true as the tragedy that something as sacred as
sexuality had been perverted by puritanical prudery into this pathetic profanity. No sooner had she realized this than the toady voice of the sallow man for whom she was dancing interrupted her revelatory reverie: “You got nice tits, sweetheart,” he croaked. “What's your favorite position?”

His coarse vulgarity dieseled across her dreamscape like a bulldozer, and Elizabeth cringed inwardly. There are really two kinds of men that come into strip clubs, she had discovered, the cowards and the crassfaces. The cowards are those who are too terrified of women to actually interact with a woman, but because they still desire what they fear, they come in simply to purchase the illusion of feminine fellowship. They're interested in conversation, companionship, and connection—pillow talk, essentially, but since they can't manage their own desire it gets mangled into lust and they feel compelled to rely on strippers for the essential connection. Then there are the crassfaces: misogynistic pigs who are all about voyeurism and crude banter. Usually, Elizabeth was able to discern the difference, but today was an unusual day, and now Elizabeth was actually supposed to amuse one of these lard-licking lizard pigs.

She looked down and made eye contact with his lecherous leer, holding her gaze upon him until his false confidence had shriveled like a depleted penis. Then she leaned forward, brushing her breasts against his wan face and grabbing a firm hold of his flaccid crotch before deigning to answer his inquiry. “My favorite position,” she purred, inventing this on the spot, “is the visionary position. Do you know what the visionary position is?” Rapt with attention, the lard-licking lizard
pig shook his head immediately no, and Elizabeth tightened her grip. “The visionary position is any way you like it best, but the trick is this: At the moment of orgasm, you offer a prayer for peace.” The lard-licking lizard pig blinked stupidly, and Elizabeth continued. “This honors the sacredness of the act, and awakens you to the truth that orgasm is not so much a crotch sneeze as it is a reminder of what it feels like to release control over your life.” Letting go of his groin, Elizabeth stood up, towering her femininity over him, certain that fractal mandalas were spiraling golden off her nipples. “That's what the visionary position is. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

Then she left, leaving his twenty-dollar bill behind and heading backstage. She pulled into her street clothes and left, knowing that she would never return. There was neither anger nor disgust in her decision, but rather a lucidity that could not be resisted, anamnesis, a loss of forgetfulness, an overwhelming awareness that there was so much more happening in life than the brainless reenactment of social role. She needed nothing more than the words of a jazz beard poet she passed to assure her that she had made the right decision:

 

The dream world informs us,

while morning deforms us.

 

But Elizabeth was out of earshot by the time he arrived at the next couplet:

 

Or is that a coward's crime,

the fault of a hurried rhyme?

 

81
I
T PROBABLY
would not have mattered even if Elizabeth had heard the second couplet. Much too alive to deny her satisfaction for another second, Elizabeth wasted no energy on rethinking, resentment, or regret. She'd been conned, she knew, she probably conned herself, but now she was
walking away
, and she finally understood what that meant. To walk away is not to drop out or to quit. To walk away is to abandon illusion and to seek after truth, and as far as Elizabeth could see the truth is this: Work should be the source of one's greatest satisfaction. Finding herself employed otherwise was an intolerable circumstance. Elizabeth was not walking away from work, but toward satisfaction, whatever that might turn out to be, and it was once again clear she had made the right decision when she rounded the next corner and happened upon one of Barefoot Barry's impromptu public lectures.

“Let me explain something to you,” Barefoot Barry was booming his baritone voice to a crowd of a couple hundred. “You're not deciding what to do, you're deciding what consequences you're willing to live with. Can you live with uncertainty and adventure? Can you live with security and stagnation? Most of us decide the latter without ever being aware that we even made a decision. And you can't really blame us. Security is the obvious path when we're guaranteed neither food, clean water, medical assistance, nor self-respect from our own social structures. Fear is the background assumption. Anything else is invisible.” He paused. “But if you really want to make a decision unpolluted by fear, let me suggest that you jump off a cliff. Nothing mortally threatening; just high enough to give you the holy shits. Overcome that
fear, make that leap, and you'll emerge from the swimming hole
baptized.
When you crawl out of that swimming hole, shivering with exuberance,
that's
when you cast your decision. Decisions emanating from the gasp of an awakened spirit will put you on the path.”

“The path to uncertainty?” someone called out.

“The path to adventure. There is no adventure without uncertainty. And besides, what do you have to lose? You don't really have security, anyway. Security is the delusion that keeps you working for someone else. Security is the delusion that keeps your spirit shackled. It's like this: Here we are in New Orleans, the black sheep of the Deep South, right? Well, do you know where rock and roll came from? Blues? Jazz? Reggae? Hip-hop? Have you ever noticed that virtually all American music—excepting of course the shit-washed dreck they sling on the teevee—can trace its roots to Africa? Now let me ask you this: Do you really think this is because blacks have more rhythm?” He shook his head. “I think it's because African American culture has more uncertainty. Like it or not, blacks have systemically been denied access to the rat race. That's changing, yak yak yak, but the point is this: While the history of repression has created immense problems for black communities, no one can deny that, it has also given their souls a degree of freedom lacking in white society. If they won't let you on the entrance ramp, you can't get anywhere, true enough, but you also don't have to join the traffic jam. Security's not even a possibility, let alone a delusion. Adventure prevails, the spirit is free to dance, and the music, the music fucking cooks. No suburbanite secure in their two-car garage is ever going to catch
that magic carpet, I don't care what color they are. You need a soul for that, and they sold their souls for salaries.”

That was all Elizabeth needed to hear and she moved on, her mind cartwheeling with blind anticipation as she canvassed the coincidences of the past twenty-four hours. It left her with a conclusion that was as exhilarating as it was unnerving. She had been enjoying the game of it, playing at being in a secret society called m2, the hidden signals, the mystique, the feeling of being in on something, but she had never really believed that it was anything other than a make-believe mystery school, some kind of fantasy revolution, a hip tomfoolery. But now, feeling like she'd just been hazed and initiated into something closer to the inner circle of this secret society, her chuckling skepticism had been vanquished.

For all its absurdity, m2 was for real, and she was positive she knew the mastermind.

 

82
“I
T IS THE SNARLING
conviction of our species that we cannot trust one another,” Diablo explained whenever folks asked him why he always left the front door to his rooftop A-frame ajar. “I am choosing to trust.” Thus it was that Special Agent J. J. Speed's cat, Wilhelmina, happened to discover Diablo's apartment on one of her daily explorations, eventually stopping by daily. Trying to be considerate, Diablo put some cat litter in a box in his bathroom, and Wilhelmina (whom Diablo named Zippy), trying to be considerate, headed for Diablo's house whenever she had to take a crap.

It was an agreeable arrangement, but after a week Diablo couldn't figure out what to do with the used cat litter. It
seemed dreadfully ridiculous to scoop it into a plastic bag, tie the top in a knot, and drop it in the trash, there preserved for some mystified archaeologist of the future to poke through. Neither did it seem like a good idea to flush litter gravel down the toilet. So, until he could figure out what to do with it, he just accumulated it in an old shoebox. As it happened, he would not have to wait for long, for one day soon after, he returned home and found that someone had walked off with his guitar. Vastly disappointed in the trustworthiness of humanity, Diablo went out and bought some expensive gift wrap, using it to meticulously wrap the shoebox of Zippy's used cat litter, going so far as to crumple wrapping paper in the box so that the dry turds and pee clumps wouldn't rattle if the box were shaken. Then, he left it on the front seat of Billy Pronto's truck (which he had avoided driving for the last year), doors unlocked, windows down, sun shining.

He waited for two days for some thief to steal the gift of used cat litter away from him, but the parking lot of his apartment didn't get much foot traffic. With considerable hesitation, he finally decided to go park the truck somewhere more public. But just as he feared, he hadn't come to a complete stop at the first stop sign before he spotted Billy Pronto hitchhiking up ahead. Billy Pronto was no longer limiting himself to haunting the highways. Increasingly, Diablo had seen him hitchhiking on random residential streets, and he swore he once saw him standing behind him in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. Turning on his right turn signal, Diablo thought maybe he could dodge him, but when he looked right, he saw him hitching there as well. And of course, there to his
left was yet another version of Billy Pronto. This one even waved back, beaming all the while.

“Goddamnit,” Diablo cursed. He hadn't driven in over a year, recall, deliberately avoiding Billy Pronto. He'd been foolish enough to hope he'd waited him out, but now it appeared that he'd only succeeded in amping him up. Grumbling, he turned left, gunning the engine and roaring past. He turned and gave him the finger as he passed, but was surprised to see Billy Pronto already giving him the finger in return, still beaming. You can't flip the bird at the impulse, of course. The flipping bird
is
the impulse. And there he was again on the next block, and the next. Christ, Diablo thought, this is worse than the freeway.

Diablo glanced at the present on the seat next to him, wondering where Billy Pronto would sit even if he did pick him up. Would he move it or what? He'd actually never experimented with this before. His curiosity warranted an investigation in any event, and so, against the warnings and admonitions of his ego, Diablo gave Billy Pronto a final ride to the here and now.

As it turned out, Billy Pronto just slid the gift-wrapped box between them when he climbed into the truck, puzzling Diablo. If he's a hallucination, Diablo thought, then how in the hell is he even moving that? He had no answer.