Awash

I come awake with difficulty and reluctance just past noon. The dirty gray cunt of autumnal London sky smears the window. Tree limbs and their leafy gowns are swayed this way and that by fog and wind. A bird flies past the edge of the building beyond this one. Bea is naked, sitting on her chair by the desk. Her black hair overlies the slender butterfly bones of her clavicle. She peaks from above her book and smiles. Her bellybutton is round above her delta. I tell her to come right over and put a little pussy on me. She giggles and rises almost shyly. The wilderness is returning to her crow-black pubic hair—I’ve told her not to manicure it like a picket-fenced suburban lawn. She hasn’t had a Brazilian wax or an anal bleaching in weeks. The dark folds of velvet and coral at the split of her legs are wet with ambergris. I look into her slit for as long as I can. She asks me to touch it in a soft, pleading voice. It looks like a crazed peach pit that’s grown goat horns. It slicks my index finger with snail ooze. I use my fingers like talons to gain hold on her hips and ass. She lies atop me and smothers my nostrils with her oriental breasts. She thrusts and humps and zigzags over me. My cock is a sunbird’s spiked beak drinking from a flower. Her hair becomes snarled in my eyes and mouth. I hold her neck and kiss the corner of her lips. She has been taking antidepressants and they make her slow to orgasm. When she does, she leans back and her bestial tail shudders wetly into me. I draw the tips of my fingers over the down on her forearms. She bites my earlobe and whimpers.

Last night was my third without much sleep. I had tried to climb up the greased pole of the universe again. I had fumigated my neurons with cannabis—huzzah to that mystical incense and the wormholes it shows. Tonight I’ll go to bed early—definitely. Today I’ll go out into the rain and try to retrace my steps through the upscale Borough of Islington. I’ll try to make a forensic study of the way my brain exploded through this labyrinth of bricks and gabled ceilings. Here is a painted fragment of the night lying on Upper Street—which I’ve renamed the Concourse of Vanity. I had put on the airs of a rake when a puff-headed, scruffy-bearded, gray-eyed, hopped-up bum asked me to spare a few pence so he could sweeten his breath with wine. As young as he was, he knew how to beg and wheedle apologetically. He was sorry to ask. I gave him a £ coin, but mischievously said, ‘Render unto Caesar,’ when pressing it into his soiled hands. A lightening grimace seized his face before he faded back into the pretty pageant where one woman was wearing red-sequined shoes.

I was with Bea in the beginning. We’d sat on a hewn stone embankment covered with brambles and lichens and moss and smoked deeply from my blown-glass pipe. She was wearing a black coat cut from seagoing cloth. At one point she laughed and said, ‘Do you want to be an artist whom everyone likes personally, but whose art no one can stand?’ She asked this of me for reasons I can’t remember. We were standing outside of the King of Denmark pub near the police station. We’d just gone by a constable wearing his tall bulbous hat and I’d almost lost myself to laughter. Later she was asking me if the common American expression for commonness was, ‘a dime a dozen’ or ‘a diamond a dozen’. I told her it amounted to the same thing. I said that exclusivity in diamond markets is maintained through a strategic scarcity of supply. There are more diamonds on earth—cut and polished—than there are prostitutes in Thailand. That’s a lot of diamonds, Mama. She made her lips look like a carp’s as a sign of agreement.

The £ coin is a thick and substantial little pseudo-gold disc. You feel its weight in your star-crossed palm. Its obverse side carries the image of a thirsty thistly frond growing up through a crown—the very crown that Queen Victoria wears in disembodied profile on the front side of the money piece. The words PLEIDIOL WYF I’M GWLAD are blazoned around the coin’s side. That means ‘True am I to my country,’ in Welsh. Loyalty to a nation-state is a very curious thing when you inspect the history of it. The bush growing up through the crown simply means Queen Victoria has some kind of botanical-sexual fetish. No one should be poorly judged because they need a little vegetal love every now and again. That’s basic textbook psychology 101. You can tickle my ass with a tuber anytime.

And then I was alone on Liverpool Street making an involved study of the sign at the Islington Tap. It had the name of the pub written in some gold-leafed streamlined modern typography inside of a red octagon. Yes, the shape and color of the signboard were red and octagonal—just like a stop sign. I thought I might go and tell the owner—the publican—that he was subconsciously telling prospective clients they should not enter his establishment. The stop sign is a daunting marker and its instructions are clear: HALT! But maybe it was more subtle than that: maybe it was a queerly militant invitation to stop inside for a merry pint of Shropshire Lad Ale. As I was weighing the possibilities, a man in his mid-twenties passed on the high bank on the other side of the road weeping uncontrollably. It was incredible. He was sobbing and snivelling and wailing and gasping and crying with abandonment amidst the rows of impassive bricks of north London in the mechanized year of our Lord, 2005. I wanted to go and try to comfort him but a police helicopter was buzzing around overhead and I was too stunned at the sight.

The OQO bar is so art-deco fashionable, I can barely believe it. Its interior is a spare desertscape of stained hardwood cubes and riveted geometries of steel. A single succulent plant is placed near the door. The sign at the door shows off a glowing review from a global fashion magazine that will remain unnamed. The copy said, ‘An enticing menu of Chinese-inspired tapas designed to be picked at by the terminally glamorous and the professionally thin.’ It sounds as though they cater to a pleasant crowd and if I ever get my designer boxer shorts out of hock, I’ll patronize the place.

How grand to be strolling and tripping over the Concourse of Vanity and studying signs with demonic intensity—as though every letter, color, angle, element and method of framing has indescribably vast meaning. A band of acid-etched glass in the window of the Slug and Lettuce pub says, ‘nibble nosh chew…sip slurp swallow…’ That’s just what the beaming angelic faces inside are doing. A sign on the side of a light truck quite conversationally says, ‘A load of rubbish, we don’t talk it, we take it’. That’s the friendly jocular manner in which Londoner’s take care of sanitation and waste disposal issues.

A face is a thing for the eyes and cannot be written. The written word must touch our imaginations and appeal to all of our senses simultaneously. You can draw a face or photograph it, but there are no words to show it completely. I have read many great literary descriptions of faces—oval faces with high foreheads. Qualities of nobility or seediness can be added to a chin or a forehead. The light of moral intentions can be colored into peoples eyes. But there is no way I can really show you the face of the woman waiting for her bus in front of the antique shop before the road to the canals. I can say she wore leather boots and guiltily nibbled at a Snickers bar—as though it were the Snickers bar of knowledge of good and evil—but I cannot place her face in your eyes.

And then it was 3 a.m. if you like to count time that way. I found an Indonesian or South Asian coin lying on a reef of dead brown leaves at the bottom step of the promenade. Its front showed a young dictator wearing glasses and its obverse was festooned with moony glyphs. I flipped it a few times for luck and then rolled it up the empty street. North London is a quiet hillock of cobbles in that witching hour, but you can always hear the humming and droning of surveillance cameras mounted on every corner. I made a plan to go and see Paul Gammon at the Spy Shop tomorrow or the following day. I wrote a little note to myself saying I should ‘infiltrate his maniac lair’. I would make him an offering of the Raymond Chandler novel I had just finished. He could tell me more about trade in covert manufactures. Then I breathed more cannabis and wrote, ‘Make a short film in which people all over the world say, “The church bells play jazz riffs in my scenario.” Add church bells to jazz music on the score.’

And then I was standing under a sign that said ‘Malnick and Rance, Solicitors at Law.’ Assuredly I was laughing. Those were good lawyerly names, to say the least. I had just been past the statue of Sir Hugh Myddleton, 1555 - 1631. Cherubim poured water from urns at the flanks of his feet; he wore a magnificent cape and a collar that looked like an air-filter from an old Oldsmobile. A woman was giving a man a blowjob at the side of the fountain nearest the small park on the corner. There is a seamy side to London—it can’t be denied. The woman didn’t even look up in feigned embarrassment as I passed.

‘Is there a God?’ I’ve written that into my notebook as I sit on a bench in the darkness of Islington Park waiting for foxes to appear. Beneath that bold and inquisitive title I write, ‘Maybe the question is something we never really ask. Maybe the question is some supercharged little mystical tidbit placed in the intricate altars of our brains. We unwrap it from its clothing of sacred leaves, rub our thumbs carefully along its contours and then put it slowly away again.’

As you can see, I am trying to make a record of women speaking into cell phones in London. A pregnant black woman wearing a leopard leotard and brown slacks and a long oilcloth raincoat says, ‘You don’t really think so….’ into her blue-lit cell phone as I pass. She is standing under a bus stop shelter and it is almost light. Maybe she is going to work—though the swell of her stomach makes me think she should be on maternity leave. There are berets holding back the coils of her hair. No, I don’t really think so. Let me go sleep.