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Then suddenly the music started. I knew
the song immediately: The Doors, LA WOMAN.
I turned to regard its source. There was
a stage at the side of the room.
The curtains parted and she appeared
in basic black looking like some mystic cross between a
leather- licked English spy from some James Bond film and an
underground poster queen for Fetish Wear Daily. Everything
changed around her so suddenly that I understood the miracle
of the loaves and fishes. There is no mere slight of hand
when it comes to transubstantiation. Reality refolds
itself. Charisma tilts the tables of physical reality as
violently as Jesus in the temple.
This dancing woman radically and
profoundly transformed the molecules around her with
the sheer force of her personal magnetism. Her will charged
ions positive or something, but things started happening
very quickly once she started dancing. This spinning
twirling glistening woman was both the sacred heart and the
burning bush of this particular block of the Hollywood
Cosmic Boulevard, the Madonna of Flow(er)ing Lib(er)ations.
And I understood profoundly why these people came here for
this salvation. She was radiating light in long shimmering
strands of gossamer umbilicus that fanned out touching all
around the room. The broken faces of the crowd were now
bright and shinning, whole in the moment. All was fluffy
laughter and tinkling cheers. And everyone seemed to be
flowing into their own best groove because she was dancing.
I knew her name because it bubbled up from the crowd in an
aural effervescence, lifted up like Aphrodite frothing from
the waves. Her name, the whispered mantra of the
moment, Diana.
She moved across the stage like a large
feline, the visible smoothness of her skin rippling with the
undercurrent of her taut muscles. Her dance was something
else beyond description, really beyond words. The curve of
her hips splined time.
I believe that everyone in the room was imagining being
with her.
Surely every eye was upon her as she unwound and
even I imagined our bodies intertwined upon the sands of
some sparkling ethereal moonlit shore. In my vision,
in that liquid moment, I could feel her breathe on my lips, the heat from
her body pouring from her.
And as my eyes circled the room to take it all in, see the effect that she was having on the others, my
vision fell at last upon the two men seated beside me. The
looks of similar beatitude upon their visages made them
appear like brothers. Still locked in their ridged embrace
they seemed fused into one apostolic being.
If I had left that moment no one would
have seen me go. I was invisible. I contemplated the door
and its relative distance from my feet. If I started walking
I could end up anywhere. I looked back up at Diana and saw
with soul searingly clarity that she was looking right into
my eyes, at me. Her eyes double-funneled and telescoped me
into her matrix and we were floating together in the clouds
in a wide vast brilliant sky.
And then it was over and there was a
moment of silence. People clapped. Her remarkable
transformation still hung in the air after her. Laughter.
Clinking, tinkling.
A waitress came over to the table and
Jimmy ordered four Corona's. I was wondering who the fourth
Corona was for when Diane walked up to the table smiling.
She extended her hand to me and
introduced herself. Hello, I am Diana and I took her hand in
mine and said, call me Cora. She smiled even wider. Her eyes
met mine and held them softly for a couple heartbeats and
then her gaze turned to James. And he looked at her with a
heart that was so wide open that you could see
starlight. She lifted her hand to his hair and ran
her fingers through it slowly.
"Your
hair has bleached out in the sun, Jimmy. It looks
nice."
And he tilted his head just a bit and
pressed the side of his head into her
hand the way a cat would. I had not seen this tenderness in
him before. I looked to Creeper to see what he was
seeing and I shuddered at the pits that were now
his eyes. Like the black holes of Astronomy, his eyes were
sucking in all light and shadows seems to be darkening in
sheets under his lids.
Just then the music came on again and
it was another woman dancing now, the usual grind, and it was
easy to see that there was only one Diana. And she sat down
there beside us.
Diane took the Corona to her mouth and
her lips wrapped easily around the head of it and she looked
around at each of us as she took one long draught. She
lifted her feet and placed them into James lap, where he
immediately took off her shoes and started to massage her
feet. Then she lay her right hand in Creeper's lap. She
looked over at me and smiled. Some women might have felt a
wave of jealousy at this point and perhaps there is some
basic flaw in my character that all I could feel was
fascination for what was going to happen next.
James, said, "It sure is really
good to see you, Diana."
And she just smiled and asked,
"Where have you been?"
James said, "I was out of town on
business."
Creeper laughed and Diana nodded and
smiled.
James turned to Creeper and stated out
rightly, "So John, what about all that money you owe
me?"
Creeper (although from that moment on I
could only think of him as John) smiled, "Are you in
need of some money, Jimmy?"
"I just want what is mine,"
said James.
"Jimmy, that is so what we all
want that it hurts, doesn't it?" and as Creeper ne John
laughed and laughed the air around him seemed to
thicken and darken.
I looked over into Diana's eyes to see
the effect this tension was having on her. She was
wearing an expression that was so void of all connection to
this world that it was hard to believe that a human face
could hold the complexity of expressions that wafted across
her face. Then I saw her eyes turn slowly toward me as she
must have felt my eyes on her. For just a moment, before her
eyes refocused back to this world, I saw a look of something
so ancient and alien in her eyes that a rivulet of fear
splintered through me like fractured glass.
Chapter 8 (coming soon)
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