Princess Mononoke. Collage by Lady.
Photo of Lady by Smith. Scan of Lady by Lady.
“Well we did it,” Smith says. “We went out and read to strangers, we got into a rock scene, and we bought our own dope.?
“Yes, we’re becoming adults now,” I say.
“No, I’ll never become an adult. I can fake it, tho.”
I think that maybe there aren’t any adults. “I tell Smith: There’s like, the ‘myth’ of the adult.”
“And the ‘myth-ter’, too,” he replies. Then, “Do you want more, or have you had enough?”
“I don’t know,” I cry.
“Well, then
you haven’t had enough,”
he says.
“When you don’t know
if you don’t have
enough
“if it’s right
away
you can wait a
while
and see.
“But if it’s after
a while
it’s not
enough.
We’ve been smoke free for five months, until tonight.
“Boy, I can do anything now,” I say. “I can walk up to people I don’t know, I barely speak their language, yet I ask for drugs! I can do anything!”
He asks, “You gonna put that on yr resume?”
Then, “You’re sitting against me, suckin up my heat. I’m your sea lamprey. You’re a heat lamp ray.”
“Would your sea lamb play my he ram lay?” I say.
“Tonight’s shake-down street,” says Smith.
“I’m proud of us. We can do anything.”
“I’m happy,” he says. “We manifested something for ourselves. You see, magic doesn’t have to be potions and potent charms. Magic can be made to happen…. sometimes.”
I get up on my hands and knees, crawl over, dump a warm kiss onto him.
“Hello, Lady,” he says.
“Hello…” I fade.
“Happy South of France.”
Smith tells me a story:
There was an 18 year old artist in my Pockets notebook, his ink drawing of Marilyn Monroe. In the drawing she looks like Jane Russell.
I put it in Pockets as the cover of a double-diptych. The cover was my outlaw face on brown cloth. You open that up, swing that out, and there’s a repro of the Marilyn Monroe nude calendar from the 50s – the famous one – her nude against red satin.
When she got famous, press asked her if she didn’t have anything on. She replied, “the radio was on.”
So I have this notebook. And sitting on the sofa across from me, I have this artist who drew Jane Russell Marilyn Monroe. I was always into speed. He was into downs because he was hyper. Took medicines back then from the doctors, to keep him human.
So one night at the place I had with Robin, we all dropped acid. He got where he had to be taken home. He was too hyper. It wasn’t a problem, but he was just too hyper. He had to go home. So we put him in Robin’s bug, in the back seat, and I started driving him home through the night.
On a divided four lane urban highway next to the Sears shopping center, around midnight, we have to pull over because fire trucks are racing through the night, our way.
So I pull off, and we watch these fire engines slowly leave their side of the road at high speed and come heading straight for our stopped car. Two fire engines.
Fire engine ten feet away, straight at us, when there’s this tight quiet strained desperate voice in the back says Oh my god, they’re coming for us!
Eight feet in front of the car, they keep turning and turn into the Sears parking lot. So it swooshes by and then the next fire truck heads for us.
I never saw that artist again once we took him home.
It makes no sense. Your brain says, This can’t be happening. And it keeps happening! And your brain keeps saying, This is not logical. You don’t have time to start to figure out what you’re going to have to do, not if they don’t stop. You just sit there, saying, This is not logical.
Fortunately, the situation quickly resolves itself, because there’s no way you’re going to resolve it. (Actually, this applies to a lot of life’s situations.)