Youth.

I bow to the demands of my cruel corpse as I am its  slave. I answer to it cowered. There are rules that must be followed … Don’t make eye contact is first and foremost.

And above all ?

Never ever argue.

(“No Massa! Please don’ hit me no more!”)

No matter what lines I toe and what protocol I follow? It beats me like a drum whenever it gets the chance. Sadistic, you do understand don’t you darling? Merciless it draws much pleasure from the act….When it looks at me like that I flinch head-shy, this is a movie that I have seen before, it is three stars tops and that is pushing it way more than it deserves. I know what comes next.

We all do really ,no matter how much we try and kid ourselves. You wrote it baby and you gotta dance with the one that brung you….

To appease it so that it doesn’t try and murder me with a meat axe when my bent back is turned ,I lace it’s Lucky Charms with laudanum and when it becomes pie eyed and all “Yeurr ma’ behst fwriend…” messy I lock it securely in a dark room with all corners diligently padded, gently cover it’s bloodshot lapius-lazuli  thousand yard stare eyes with a soft silk mask, fill it’s ever-ringing-due-to Motorhead-abuse- ears with grey foam plugs. Ruined by a million rehearsal rooms ( “You turn down first and then I might you arrogant fuck!!”)  and thus , deprived of it’s senseless senses and with no consideration to any form, folly or social protocol whatsoever?

I let it rest. I leave it the hell alone. It has teeth. It bites, you dig?

And rest it did. And it dreamt….

From a rain whipped 3am till 5 pm the next afternoon. I read for an hour or so ,attended absent minded to my sparse correspondence  and then had a much needed nap (?! )  which took me up to wanton witching hour of midnight. And here she lies ladies and gentlemen, swaddled like a cartoon Collette in my tomb of a bed with Coltrane weaving his opiate way softly from my speakers, I am pondering the relativity and relevance  of memory. Pinging around like a disjointed pinball of the past. (“Tommy can you hear me?”) 

(*TILT*)

Quite frankly,and  just between us mind, some days? I just don’t know how beasts of the lower field  like me manage to survive…..

But in surround sound retrospect I can see how it can define….How we carry the essence of our youth to some kind of warped conclusion wondering if anyone can see how vulnerable we really are, how deep down we are all still who we were when we were young, just becoming and barely blooming…..

I blew up my patchy attempt at childhood ,such as it wasn’t and ran .(“ Engage in three-two-…..“)

I ever so valiantly attempted to forget every sneering pock marked face, every cruel aside , swift fingered don’t tell assault and wiped every number except my own. (“You, my terrible child, are a nine ,built for strife and combat” she sighed and swept the clever cards from my hungry sight…) I detonated the whole sub-par mess and lit out to Paradise City on a one way non-refundable ticket like a blood hungry banshee with a tenuous maybe of a  modeling contract , an Elvis box set from Readers Digest ,a tattered book of disconnected numbers joined to almost forgotten names divulged in nightclub toilets,high and cheap drunk and possessed by a rapidly blooming and rather vicious drug habit. Look, Most days I didn’t know if  I was meant to wind my ear or scratch my watch.

But can we say chutzpah?

Bless you! Why just bless your soul on the bosom of Abraham! Thank you.

Here’s the fractured fable, pull up a pew and get comfortable honey, this shitty little ditty ( apologies to monsouir Fruiciante mon cheri ) only gets wailed long and loud when the lights are low, good people are in bed and the detritus has no place left to go and no way to get there even if they did .

Check me out and lick it up….A pill pulverized socially retarded adolescent with a huge mostly non- applicable vocabulary and an utterly disgusting attitude. Every medicine cabinet at every house party or toilet stop on the way to the next mess was a smorgasbord of  un -prescribed delights .Heavens very own pharmaceutical pick-and-mix. Oh me, I was every pervert pederasts dream of perfection incarnate, chain-smoking and dancing on the head of a pin to Motown’s finest all the fast foul mouthed way.

Of what I can recall of my small town exile all these moons and miles later ?

Being on the eternal outs and longing moist of eye and granite of resolve for a place where I would be able in my absolute difference and who knew, maybe even rewarded for it. A fear that weighed down my will.

Lost nights driving in circles with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Tight bathtub speed procured from hopped up bikers with rotten teeth running the chemical grand national in my pubescent veins ,energy and bravura to burn, sitting cramped in the back of cars patched primer grey ,chain smoking if you had ’em listening to gloriously smutty Bon Scott era AC/DC barking through tinny migraine inducing speakers while the lights of the cold city below bit jagged icy chunks out of the sub zero stoned darkness.

I fogged the window like a delinquent dragon and wrote my initials on the glass with a slow bitten finger.The condensation rolled lazily to the crumbling rubber seal like a liquid hookers hips. I could feel the metronome of my heartbeat keeping time  in my over pierced ears hung heavy with cheap jewelery tempting immanent green-stained infection and it soothed me.  (“STILL-alive-STILL-alive-STILL-ali….”) Up all night and superbly  reckless…

As I hitchhiked fearlessly propelled by pipe dreams from the sedated suburbs to the joke of a feeble city center to save my precious bus fare for cigarettes and strong black coffee, I kept the knife that my wayward father had had made for my thirteenth birthday by one of his nut-job fringe dwelling survivalist buddies kissing close at all times as the broken men who picked me up tried to get into my only just teen-aged pants. I  stubbed stolen cigarettes out on forearms and jumped nimble from moving vehicles un-besmirched by their curdled mid- life crisis desires.

I strutted ,chin held high, impervious to blatting car horns and abuse spewing drivers to the hole in the wall restaurant buried deep in a dark  turn of the century block wedged between a pawn shop and a peep show where dear Andrew, the smarmy slick oil eyed barman let me take up space and write when I should have been in school.  Un-bothered in the darkest booth by the spring loaded  limb hungry kitchen door and fed straight gut-rot scotch on ice that I would take small wincing sips of all the while trying not to pull a Munch-worthy  face.

I had informed him in lofty tones that if “It’s good enough for Hemingway,its good enough for me!” like the asshole that I am when we first met waiting to score what we had both been promised was “The most amazing hash ever!” in our mutual dealers dirty kitchen where he paid with his hard won tips and I paid by running said dealers devastating deviant delivery’s all over town because he was to baked to do it himself.  He was making me pay for my bullshit bravissimo now as I wished for the candy water of emerald midori and lemonade like the child I was. Smirking he would pour me a heavy handed double knowing that my pathetic pride would never allow me to turn it down.

I loved my hideaway passionately and with great propriety.

My fingertips memorized the intimate braille of the hardened chewing gum deposits left under the table,most of them admittedly by me. The giant chinzano ashtray ,low lights and stale air bearing the elegant echo of grown up ghost laughter from the night before made me feel like the stage was set and Holly Golightly could drop by for a fortifying beverage on her way to visit Sally Tomato in Sing-Sing. Or that Sally Bowles would slink in all big eyes,bowler hat and moss green nails. There I was safe from harm, rejection and ejection as I had charmed the morbidly obese and foul tempered owner months before .Ever rushing to nowhere , surprisingly swift given his impressive jowl draped size ,he had barreled in through the back door, glanced at me in swift passing and upon arriving at the bar commenced yelling at at Andrew.

“What the blue veined throbbing fuck is it that I am paying you to do exactly and who is that fucking jail-bait waif in the back booth!?!” I studiously ignored them both and gently lit a fresh chest kicker off the butt of my last and calmly read on.

“Me? To make sure there is at least one warm body in here in case anyone mistakes it for a morgue and as for her?” he glanced slyly in my direction “Well, that depends which day of the week it is” slurred the irrevocably stoned and unshaken employee  as he  lovingly continued to polish the same heavy highball tumbler that he had been molesting with a grayish wash-worn rag for at least the last twenty minutes

“What is that meant to mean ?!!”  roared the  big boss-man while riffling though the garnish caddy by the sticky post-mix gun and deftly throwing a handful of pearly cocktail onions into his terrifying pie-hole.  “She changes her name all the fucking time, go talk to her!” replied Andrew laconically with a hash aided smirk.

Frank Sinatra informed the empty room of the pleasures of being young at heart hot on Ella’s heels. What a difference a day makes indeed.

He came over like a storm cloud, heart attack, panzer division and I stood up, swaying like a willow, pleasantly buzzed by the charming combination of the single malt whiskey, chalky yellow horse chocking pills of stolen codeine and the penis littered poetry of Allen Ginsburg.  Resplendent in my favorite falling apart, moth bothered 1940s black silk ankle length evening dress that I had appropriated and lovingly mended from the pathetic theater wardrobe of my hateful high-school pre-expultion because, let’s face it,they didn’t deserve it, I extended my nicotine and ink stained hand.

Badly moulting grey rabbit fur Russian fur hat jammed on my blond birds-nest of hair ,dull duct taped combat boots on my feet, all wrapped  in an greasy army great coat acquired from my morally deficient pussy-hound of a fathers disposal and army surplus store ,the lapel dotted with badges featuring beloved Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Elvis and The Sex Pistols and 11000 miles of scratchy lurid badly self- knitted scarf. I looked-like an acid trip by way of an overdose. I figured myself charming. I promoted myself irresistible.  Cigarette clenched twixt my teeth just like I had seen and studied Saint Hunter S Thompson doing on the dust jacket to one of his anthologies that I had procured by way of five finger discount  from Gilliam’s bookshop in the arcade, I snatched and pumped his gold sovereign ring weighted hand like a crooked politician.

“Welcome to bat country son! Buy you a drink?” I said through my shark grin and watering eyes . He cracked like the Liberty Bell and slid into the booth ,his gut uncomfortably bisected by the edge of the table. He shoved it back with a grunt and the amber liquid in my glass did the shimmy and then settled back down to sleep.

Fascinated ,he softened toward my strange pixelated presence in the theater of his failing business. “And just who and what the fuck are you meant to be? Stevie Nicks?” he said kindly after he had finished laughing and Andrew had placed dos coronas in front of us, the cool condensation clotted necks chocked with foam and lime. I took a lusty pull on mine and made a burp laden belated toast  “That was last week ,I’m working on Dora Marr and Lemmy today and here’s to swimming with bow legged women!”  We clinked bottles and I grinned closing my red silk covered notebook.  “What’s for lunch Boss?” I winked “Anything you like princess”  he said and waved impetuously for the lazy wall eyed waiter who was in the habit of spotting heroin off a battered piece of tinfoil behind the huge freezer between shifts to attend to our hunger post haste.

And that is how I met Geoff.

Gluttonous ,generous, gruff Geoff who taught me how to eat caviar on toast points, translucent onion slices as thin as an anorexic supermodels , to drink and enjoy the dust-bowl dry martinis that he favored over our  tres jolie tet-a-tets  (” The tears of F.Scott and Zelda!. Flappers blood!! “ he would roar as I sucked the bitter juniper from the fat olive that swam in my shimmering glass ) and brought me any and every book my bibliophile backwater ass desired on the very strict proviso that I wrote him a report on said tome and read it out loud while he inhaled his complex carbohydrates and early type two diabetes for a late and liquid lashed lunch. Who would yell at me for the benefit of his couldn’t -care -less staff all the while winking and throwing a packet of  heartrendingly elegant gold tipped Sobranie Black Russians into my lap on his way to pillage the till for funds for our next adventure.

Who talked to me like I was grown, relevant and protected me like I was his own.

We would sit ,sedated by the stroppy and surprisingly strong winter sun in the sculpture garden at the gallery and drink splits of Moet-Chandon from brown paper bagged bottles as the cold razor light  made a million diamonds dance on the water and he told me long and involved tawdry tales of artists going mad under the weight of their terminal terrifying gifts. Of the depths that they would recklessly plum to bring back the bounty of beauty everlasting. I would drag him drunkenly into the main hall and stand cross-eyed with reverence in front of the huge Elvis screen print by Andy Warhol awaiting directions or messages. I prayed to the King for a gift all of my very own. He stayed silent and dead in Memphis and I hung my head and wept.

I felt my benofactors kind arm across my bent shoulders as my breath hitched its watery wagon to the sad express. “Your time will come love” he said softly. I looked up into his kind face benevolent above an eternally  food besmirched tie and gave him a small smile. “You know what the problem is my cherubic bad seed? ” No?” I said in a small copper voice as a crocodile of schoolchildren rattled past corralled and shushed by their harried teachers. “We are nowhere near drunk enough” he intoned gravely. I laughed and he bowed.

I told him my real name from the get go as he inspired that kind of confidence but he called me Chiquita Lolita , You renegade shit, Marta Hari, Baby Bowie and all kinds of random shit.When you are that young every adult is older than dirt but he was  only a jaded coronary bound forty eight years old to my Fourteen and a half scant summers. He was my first real friend, my first champion and believer and I miss him still.

Never underestimate the rarity of true chivalry and complete kindness. It comes around so rarely. When it does? Treasure and horde it.

I sent him pilfered postcards for years, the uglier the better.I would panhandle for change outside the post office to purchase the stamps to send them. My tiny obsessive block print chewing up every inch of available space. ( ” Bastard child of Fagin! Dickens thief! Delinquent!!!” he would bellow whenever I presented him with lurid ties and such that I had procured for him by felonious means and wrap me in the safest hug in the world sealed with a giant shit-eating  grin ) and he always reminded me that when he first asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up that  I had answered “Great”.

He never let me forget it, the fat bastard. I still think that his belief is what patched me together till I got steady enough to trust myself and just become. He was my Merlot and lobster fueled training wheels. My cholesterol coddled guardian angel.

At my lowest living in the big shitty city, strung out on loneliness,bad pharmaceuticals and diamond dusted dreams that seemed to be rotting on the vine as I watched helpless, dying , I would call him reverse charges at the restaurant so lonesome for the future that I thought my tinsel tacky heart was going to explode in a shower of shit and syringes and he would tell me there there was always a free meal and a single malt waiting for me if I ever wanted to come back.

He knew that I would not return. You can never go back.

Tears rolling down my half starved Slavic boned face I would wedge my bony ass up onto the graffiti scared shelf in the piss stained phone-box on the corner of Nowhere Street and Shit-Creek Avenue  ,biting my nails to the bleeding quick and waving to the transvestite hookers fishing for tricks ,most of whom resided in my broke-down building and doted on me when the drugs didn’t get them all rancid with meanness. They wobbled knock kneed on scuffed stilettos as big as the boxes that they came in, broad shoulders wrapped in ratty dyed squirrel fur as he told me that one day ,and he was sure of this mind, he reassured me over the jazz stained racket in the background, I would make sure the whole world knew my name “What ever it fucking is that week you fiendish little charlatan !”  I would laugh though the make-up destroying Niagara wash of my teenage tears and feel like I could eat a mountain and shit a highway once again. Every kooky kid should be so lucky to find such angels.

Or to have them find you.

I had never fit ..It was never a hot option, my rare refined kind were not built for it thankfully……He taught me to find solace and strength in the motley shapes of my divine difference.

I had long dreamed of dark places with endless brass clad bars full of dubious and dangerous people with no last names and ink blue prison tattoos bleeding into a blur beneath the skin,desecrating deviant dermis’s while I was life- locked in the pastel purdah of soul suffocating suburbia. The kind of bar where you would wipe your feet on the way out. The tarnished bar clogged with old European men sucking hungrily on port scented hand rolled cigarettes pouring over the form guides and picking every winner while whores with morgue thick makeup shot up in the toilets white knuckling their way to hammer heaven. Of night time amnesty ,hastily loaded and badly concealed Saturday night specials ,boot concealed blades, fake id’s and ghost inhabited boarding houses where one paid weekly and in cash only pour  favor Merci beau coup .

I swore blind on Led Zeppelin’s first four albums that I would not use my own name again until I had made something tangible and epic of myself, until people would sigh it awestruck in my now formidable wake.

I devoured Charles Dickens ,Michael Herr, Hunter.S.Thompson , Jackie Collins, Dostoevsky,Harold Robbins and John Irving in equal measure. Fables of thieves, crooked campaign trails stained with ether , The Tet Offensive laced with phosphorus tipped bullets and rock and roll ,Broadway chock full of neon nepotism ,German girls dressed as bears and limber air hostesses fucking sheiks muddled and merged in my teen-aged brain and I held fervent faith in the healing powers of total and complete reinvention.

In a nest of foam mattresses stolen from the burnt out abandoned hotel across the road ,wrangled down rusty fire escapes while I was drunk off my ass, I fell in larcenous lust with the majestic  music that had happened long before my blighted birth. The specter of thick chemical smoke haunted me every time I shifted on my foul bed as I huddled beneath my poster for Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy -Love Kills” and fell in love with sound. I had great teachers with discerning non-snobby tastes. Queens,queers,bikers and dancers. All of us fatal fuckups who thought that we were in a movie so you know that the soundtrack was always going to be great…

I never relinquished the music that I had loved growing up as so many did.I didn’t know that it was a requirement. I had no idea what was cool,thank God, so I loved what I loved passionately,defensively and with no bias to the stranglehold of hip. The MC5 held hands with Nina Simone while they spoke of liberation. Nikki Sixx painted thick black lines beneath my wide eyes and told me gravely about why Johnny Thunders hair would never die. Patti Smith lurked by the phone waiting for Allen Laneier to call from the road. I hoped it wasn’t a reverse charges deal. The door crashed open and a cheer went up as Iggy and Coral fell onto my Chinese rug while Michale Des Barres pledged his blue-blooded troth to perfect Miss Pamela. ELO made out with Black Sabbath on the sofa while Elvis,Olivia Newton-John and Motorhead did speed huddled around my milk-crate desk and stayed wantonly wired, rapping about Chuck Berry and Little Richard till the sun came up.

A foundling, a mistake to throw away. I came from nothing and no one so my creation was to be my sole responsibility, my mission, my quest. I knew that I was trash and it thrilled me to my distortion seeking core.

And whence upon I found it? When it found me?

It saved my life.

It was everything and more than I ever could have ever imagined. More that I had ever dared to dream for.I fell to my thankful knees like I had been struck by lucidity bearing lightning. .Dipped nubile naked in scented oil and rolled in the gaudiest of glitter. Up all night sealed with secret handshakes and deep velvet kisses. It had no gag reflex and could go for days. Got me slack jawed and moist with one sin soaked glance. Upon recognizing me as one of its own ,a black lamb wandered far from the fecund fold  ,tottering on treasured patchwork platform boots of worn leather and a tissue paper thin New York Dolls tee shirt stolen from a foolish rent boy who ripped me off on a dope deal, it  found me cerulean wide eyed , pinned of pupil wanting, starved of its sordid salutations and it tucked me ever so gently under it’s oily black wing and ushered me past the ruby studded gates and inside…..

Where I would drink parched from unattended glasses sporting umbrellas and spit-sticky to be avoided straws, smudged with criminal fingerprints and dance until the room spun surrounded by the nastiest human specimens on offer. Every door sighed open at my underage presence, I dressed in clothes stolen in midnight raids from the spewing over-stuffed skips behind the charity shops, remade in an afternoon into custom built miracles by the two drag queens who lived in one of the big rooms a floor below my attic lair, who fought like cats then fucked like porn and introduced me to the slow soft joys of 10mg Valium pulverized to careful powder on the cover of the latest impenetrable copy of French Vogue,thick as a bible and just as holy, chalk bitter and sprinkled into honey hued cognac cradled  in blown glass balloons thin as the word of a liar and the crushing viola soaked majesty of The Velvet Underground.

They would dress me up like Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby” by way of Fleetwood Mac and Sex era Kings Road , all sausage curls, safety pins ,Nico languor and frothy layers of white lace and lead me stoned and tottering  in their wicked wake to their deviant subterranean haunts. Upon arrival I would be fed just a pinch of speed wrapped in a ciggerette paper to be swallowed  for fortitude given the long night ahead and cheap petrol scented vodka and grenadine in scratched plastic champagne flutes to be sipped slowly though a striped straw.

Later, much later ,8th birthday party tired and bombed on secretive sedatives fed lovingly to me by the badly painted acne scared boy with tiny milk teeth who manned the coat-check ,I would curl up like a sated smudged kitten and sleep soundly in this bass propelled Sodom and Gomorrah on their cold oily leather jackets as my fairy godfathers butt-fucked randoms in the dim lit toilets upstairs, daisy-chaining their devilish dicks to dust, up to their cop booted ankles in cloudy piss, sniffing Amyl nitrate from tiny brown bottles,  spinning reckless dizzy and delinquent to only the dirtiest disco all night long.

I was finally home sweet home ,a protected child, a mascot if you like. A living lucky charm to horse cocked sodomites, bat-shit crazy cracked cross dressers, minor dealers sporting decaying teeth and slumping in cheap grey zipper sided shoes, perverted pimps sporting fake gold Rolex’s as big as a babies fist, hatchet headed hookers hot wired to handling their heinous hungry habits and slick suited glamorous gangsters dripping with vacuous blonde’s sporting huge bolt-on augmented tits and dead eyes. A howling salacious soaked seraphim choir of sin. And there I go, silk swaddled and fleet of Mercury-Virgo winged ankle delicious, a rabbits foot in the shape of a slightly shop-soiled abused almost infant female.

A sublime silver dollar of a girl.

I languidly let an asexual Asian hairdresser who operated out of a charming turn of the century terrace house on my street wearing a ratty Suicidal Tendencies tee-shirt, cock crushingly tight anthracite leather pants and white high-top Cons like Metallica used to sport with bright blue eyes and pin straight hair to his tiny ass ply me with fat spliffs , shots of aniseed addled ouzo and dye my horsetail hank of hair  jet black as we listened to Stevie Wonder one boring hot Sunday afternoon  in January, both stoned immaculate .

His fingers felt like slow liquid nirvana on my chemically sensitized scalp and I purred beneath his meticulous ministrations. A riot of jasmine snaked through the cast iron balustrade of the crooked balcony and presented itself  fragrantly fetching as bursts of scented stars .I sighed high and listing with it from behind my onyx curtain, my crowing glory as he toked hard on the six paper joint ,lent over kissing close and shotgunned the sacrosanct smoke into my bitten lipped mouth….

I was now veering into my somewhat lamentable Priscilla -Priestley-child-bride-Elvis-come-love-me-daddy-phase. I learned the rules and steady handed regulations of  bat-wing eyeliner and the still practiced faith of the false lash. I would bolt kimono clad down the street bare foot, running well paid errands for reprobates and drag queens who shunned the daylight like sequin shrouded vampires. Supposed gold chains given by eternally rejected  horny johnny-come-lately’s  slavishly longing for my attuned affection and sugar sweet under-aged cunt tuned my neck green.

Finally a fearless fit in my flesh and adored? I soared.

I saw a man shot point blank in the back of the head outside a closed bank one Turkish mooned night as I ran to procure drugs for someone with a six syllable last name who was in the midst of a big money card game that was edging into its methamphetamine assisted third night running .The gunshot sounded wet and flat .A steak dropped onto a kitchen floor. Screams and sirens ensued.  I waved to the blond dread-locked juggler on the corner as he got caviler with flying fire to impress the tourists, he winked at me and threw an extra spin into his danger driven routine that got the yokels gasping, I laughed and flew away. I took the long way around as not to be hindered by the lead-footed law and their yellow crime scene tape upon my triumphant return.

As I made fleet footed way back up dirty dust choked ill lit stairs after the automatic flood light had registered my presence,the camera had checked me and the heavy door buzzed open. Entering the lions den I pulled the small hard packed flat plastic package of  persuasive powder from the warm shadowy recesses of my garnet lace bra and placed in next to a half finished fifth of Johnny Walker Red on the edge of the greasy green felt table,my duty done. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t look up.

The ugly concierge with the port-wine birthmark taking up most of her left cheek bussed me away from the action kindly ,fluffing around me like a hen .She sat me at the tiny table in her crap-choked cubby hole by the triple bolted stainless steel door.  I looked at the tiny black and white monitor that showed the staircase and exterior and was rewarded with the visual of a bum pissing  into the redwood planter in front of the brothel across the road. I was promptly served a piping hot cheese and tomato focaccia from the raucous restaurant downstairs and a crisp fifty dollar note was swiftly folded and went straight into the spot the speed had just vacated. Just like a magic trick.

Little baby Ta-da!

I quickly kissed her besmirched cheek wondering if it would taste of raspberry or red wine and she huffed at me with mock annoyance as I licked my fat lips .I settled in watched over by the gallery of ugly pastel mall portraits of her rat faced grandchildren and ate.

When you are in it? Over abundance of reality and the realest of the real looks like nothing more than a jump cut uncensored movie. Trust me on this one ok? It never once occurred to me that I was on the outside of the regulated loop. That my movie was X-rated and underground from sea to shining sea. That what I and my felonious new found family, that all that I knew and was doing was highly illegal,morally unsound and just plain weird. Truth? I don’t think that it would have made any difference if I did. I was in and I didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. All I knew was that I was home and amongst my own.

This was my life.

I read,wrote and slept curled beneath one of the unused pool tables hidden behind the heavy drop cloth that covered it like a kid in a rainy day fort until I was needed again during the long runs.It was worth staying. The players tipped heavy and well when on a winning streak. One fat Greek would pat my head if he was standing, my ass if he wasn’t as I darted by for luck,the pervert. They pissed in empty wine carafes to avoid leaving the table. I took their food orders downstairs. I got their cigars from the dodgy Chinese importer three blocks away. I prided myself on being necessary. I had a place on the planet at last ,in my once dreamed of and now real world.

I was so fucking happy .

I lived on warm Coca Cola, Marlboro’s,creamed rice eaten straight from dented  tins and the ever amazing red and yellow neon stroked reality of 24 hour Mcdonalds. I was a child without curfew nor restrictions. Unwanted and unmarked by any family heredity I set out to willfully construct myself and invent a bullet proof skin to inhabit. I watched and learned. I sucked it all up and filed it. I sat at the feet of the twilight masters of subterfuge and arctic cool.  Killers are often the sweetest men. Whores tend to want to mother you.  Junkies are easily stood over when they are withdrawing and ice heads with their superhuman strength and serial killer lack of empathy should be avoided at all costs.

Everyone was running towards or away from something. Questions were rarely ever asked and answers were at your discretion.

I was reminded recently that as a kid I would hand out my autograph at school because I was convinced that one day it would be worth something. I spun in high rotation with absolutely no shame to get any attention at all as a very small child. . Until it broke my silver spirit, I shut down and started plotting my escape. I was hated and made to pay for my unintentional differences.

I turned up to my last school dance at thirteen dressed in my treasured vintage lace up boots of tapestry that I had paid off over endless months at a second hand store in the city at five dollars a week, huge silver shoulder skimming earrings ,Liz Taylor Butter-field 8 eyeliner, Sharon Tate white lipstick and a skin tight turtle necked black dress featuring a thick silver zip from chin to hem. I thought I was Edie Sedgwick and not one person asked me to dance the whole night. Not one.

Parsimonious philistines.

I pretended not to care as they laughed and snickered in my Warholian wake as I made my long way to the lawns to sneak a cigarette. I conversed wittily with Andy’s silver-haired ghost and never let them see me bleed and baby? I was hemorrhaging. My hopeful heart shattered for the final humiliating time, I returned home and sat in my haven of a closet chain smoking Kent’s with the micro-lite filters by candlelight listing to nothing but the dirtiest early Rolling Stones on my treasured inherited turntable, a purple vinyl padded remnant from my parents teen-aged courtship.

The bitter smoke curled and sunk into the clothes hanging above my hate hollowed head as I cradled a slack boot in my arms like a dead baby. Taking a bitter swig of cask wine from my Mickey Mouse glass I shuddered and looked out of the half open door into my spooky room.

The moon hewed light set into the side of the console under the molded smoked perspex lid shone across the spinning platter searching for dust and clues and I swore that I could hear redeeming wings beating outside my window, the slow drip of my pirates pulse keeping time with the Glimmer twins….

I didn’t feel cool, not here, not there by their shitty sub-par standards and for some stupid reason, even though in my heart of hollow hearts I knew that I knew better and sickeningly it pained me.There was not one battle I could pick. Not one…. I attempted, away from the legalities of school not to feel much of anything at all. I had a battered bong hidden in the back of my crap choked locker constructed out of a chocolate milk bottle and a few inches of stolen garden hose complete with a soot blackened tinfoil cone as one of my only friends reminded me in a chance meeting on a deserted beach years later.I coughed coca bean and weed. I had forgotten about that. I had tried, alas unsuccessfully, to forget so much…

I wrongly assumed that everyone did, that everyone needed some kind of herbal or pharmaceutical assistance because they too felt like an inconvenience ,a blip ,a acne addled mistake. So check me out with my  cloudy plastic Hello Kitty drink bottle full of pilfered Baileys Irish cream that would provide soft liquid inoculation  from the rabble, that I imbibed daily and slowly .Forever dimly lit, tight and in a world of my own.

I always had a crush on some cruel pockmarked pinched faced juvenile delinquent of little or no distinction. Interchangeable 9th grade boys constructed out of  malevolence, football scores ,dirty laughter,rampaging hormones and sump oil. I would watch him play basketball with his henchmen from the grassy knoll in the afternoons when it was probable that I was meant to be somewhere else. Nervous fingers picking at the dry grass. Tube socks drooping around mosquito mauled calves.

This shit was nowhere.

I would collect his crumpled cigarette butts after he and his pack of goons had left. Precious as his mean mouth had kissed the filters. I slept with them in a white plastic box that had once held my charm bracelet under my pillow, curtains ever open to the midnight moon,tea roses rambling thick and heavy headed around my window, a heroine to no one .Every once in a while he would make fun of me in the  pillbox hat I had constructed out of cardboard and covered in black fabric, net hanging over my eyes as I read thick racy novels stuffed with seasonal mating and migration patterns of nymphomaniac Hollywood wives and rich ruthless tycoons on the 365 school bus .

Besides that?  He never even knew I was alive. He never knew my name.

My other life beckoned…

I like to think that I was a happily anticipated and entertaining distraction the emphysema raddled Hungarian tobacconist  in the city .The clear oxygen lines wedged in the hair choked nostrils of his prominent large pored nose leading to a highly flammable and daily changed canister below the counter. He lovingly smoked a giant hand carved pipe from his homeland and then proceed to blow smoke in deaths cranky slit eyed  face.”Vone day?”  he would cackle and point at the squat grey container of life at his feet faithful like a hound ” BOOM!”he yelled and was then snatched by another round of of wet coughing as I counted out my pilfered small change and laughed with him.

Ah the city!  The mediocre metropolis where I longed to spend all my time watching the boneless whippet thin amphetamine assisted skaters by the chess pit, fearless and catching and kissing the air like a lover and then gravity graced, fleeing its all too temporarily embrace, the plaid-pupil- punks making like ’77 never ended and little old me escaping my suburban shackles. I smoked heavy filter-less french cigarettes in beautiful sky blue boxes that I saved and displayed in my weird room like Russian Orthodox icons.

I smoked like a silent film star, here at this overpriced cafe I could see myself as I wanted others to see me . Greta Garbo,Dee Dee Ramone and I share the same birthday …a copy of a memory of something that had never happened , I picked the blond shards of tobacco off my tongue and read weighty biographies on mean misogynist Picasso as I lingered long over fast cooling bitter coffee and listened to one of the endless mix-tapes that I constructed to provide a soundtrack to my half assed movie of a loitering life, full of my parents music that I got teased over…Wondering if I would ever find a brilliant man to make me suffer.

I still don’t feel cool and yes, eventually we found each other and suffered, you will be happy to note, to the fullest extent.

All those puke inducing perpetually perky pastel kids with their snide secret zit free naturally blond language of catered birthday parties ,18 carat gold signet rings inlaid with enamel blue birds and predictable group designated longings. I tried for all of five unholy minutes at my sainted mothers request to toe their line all the while knowing in my marrow that it was utterly pointless. I didn’t watch TV, nor listen to the Top 40. I always got it wrong.

They wanted things that I could not even fathom let alone begin to understand .They did not know that James Brown was The Godfather of Soul, That Miles Davis live at Carnegie Hall in 1958 was a benchmark, that Joe Cocker danced like a spazmo because he stated out as a drummer and didn’t know what to do with his stick-less hands, that Frank Sinatra had told George Harrison and Patti Boyd one night over dinner that in his humble opinion  that “Something” was the greatest love song ever written… None of them ,that I knew of granted ,had watched “Apocalypse now” in the dark tripping balls on acid with a hunting knife in one sweating hand and a white bread lunch-meat and cheese choked sandwich crushed in the other…well, not that I knew of or could imagine. Did they dream?  Fearing even more ridicule  I never asked  as I knew that my replies would do nothing but invite even more eye rolling derision .Dream?  It was all I did and the sum of my meager worth.

Let me tell you..

If I wasn’t entertaining the troops on a USO tour with Bob Hope in a skin tight purple bugle beaded dress making the marines lose their collective shellshocked  mind?  I was hanging out with swoon inducing Richard Hell, Cyrinda Foxe ,Legs Mc Neil and Debbie Harry, not sure who I wanted to make out with more. Watching the Ramones bicker and occasionally grace us with a blast of distortion masquerading as a song and wishing that Hilly would clean up the dog shit off the sawdust choked floor already ….thinking about heading to Max’s for the free chickpeas .Yours truly and Lester Bangs closing down the bar for another night, Robitussin raiders on a holy crusade storming the golden gates of sonic heaven. Vicodin vikings pillaging the night. Refugees of raw rock and roll forever  loudly arguing over who loved The Stooges more….

Singing ” Gimme shelter” clad in a sequin studded mini dress that turned my high highfalutin ass into a disco ball of manic movement in front of thousands with my beloved Rolling Stones as a rubber rainbow of balloons rained gently from the cavernous ceiling miles above our holy heads. Keef grins as I wail like a horny air raid siren back to back with Mr Jagger and his black tooth is a victory flag..Lost in child-bride fantasies of Priscilla Bellieu with and Elvis of my very own. New Orleans called to me by my soon- to- be- bead bedecked name .Dr John sang to me. He shook the stick and I danced to the Meteors on the point of my 11 twinkling toes on top of his purple piano,gold and green ribbons trailing from my keloid scared tattooed wrists……..

I would come true far ,far from here and they would all hear about it.

Then, as now , I existed in my imagination.

They are all grown up I guess.The bullies and the bitches.Me? Well,I like to think that I chose the more tasteful and self perseveringly tactical option and grew on. Well done Team Me. I guess they defer to their robust breading habits and crippling overdrafts. School runs, Juicy couture tracksuits stretched tight over two years of un-lost-thus far baby weight ,Starbucks and sports days .Ruled by the endless whinging needs of their fuck trophies.

They look like their parents and I look like a fucking Stan Lee sketch.Women of my proportions are usually only found airbrushed on the sides of panel-vans clad in copper bikinis and wrestling polar bears. I still dress like an adolescent that has escaped from Rodney’s  English Disco on the Sunset Strip circa ’72 by way of Bad Company’s road crew. Why not be who you are? If I have a fox tail hanging from my belt  and a trucker cap taming the brunette ponytail that taunts the crack of my ass? It’s all gravy.I have a pile of band tee shirts that reaches my hip and still rock inappropriate shoes every chance that I get.

I still inhabit myself. This is what I chose for better or worse, in sickness and in health ,till death when I depart in a Hello Kitty and Slayer decal bedecked coffin to the strains of  “Tuesdays Gone ” by my adored Lynyard Skynard.

So ,I guess that was who they were meant to be then….It confounds me daily, I mean, they look happy but tight with it you know? So I have my doubts and they are grave .I get to thinking there is more than one silent scream locked behind all that expensive dental work .I think that it goes back to the whole pack mentality thing. Too afraid of what other people will think and say. I never had a pack hence?  I don’t give a shit. Some days I still cannot believe that this part of the puzzle still consumes me as much as it does….

But that’s just life innit?

It gave me a fine line in longing though, rejection. It honed me. Gave me something to dream on. Because I never got any of my fleeting hearts desires I never had to let my bloom fade .I still  fervently believe in the fairytale no matter how throttled or scum soaked. I still believe in rock and roll baby. I have 11 Mickey Mouse tee-shirts, 43 pairs of boots, I play bass and wail like an anti aircraft siren .I love you Dee-Dee. And I still look like a wet dream on parole in skintight jeans. What more could one ask for?

Well,outside of a major lottery win?

Exactly.

I was and am  still primed.

All the girls who were catered to? They have turned into over aerobiced,thin lipped harridans with a platinum grade sense of entitlement better suited to mattress actresses and schoolgirls. Closed legged witches whose husbands sniff around my tail because their wives won’t fuck them anymore. I know this to be a fact as my boyfriends wife hates me… I’m Kidding! We are good friends these days…Joking!!!.

All I can say is that from here? Well, my professional opinion is that it does not look like too much of a good time from where I sit tapping my boot clad foot to The Rezillos and Black Flag, inhaling orange tic-tac’s and writing another song…..

Adam Holloway ,Simon Pill, Tim Greshkie, Christian Kernott…..Oh Lord! A veritable rogues gallery that hardly even knew I was alive.How I burned for these spectacularly unworthy dullards! How I pined… I remember all the names and the hours that I spent wondering why they didn’t even know that I was alive.

Don’t get me wrong though. Not being wanted is good mighty for a girl. It forges an iron heart and a strong yet supple spine. My careless teenaged parents ,bless them, didn’t want me and couldn’t of kept me if they did, my new family didn’t know what to do with me  and Elvis only knows that I didn’t want a bar of myself . So what is a lost girl to do? Aim for perfection and notability and then withhold herself from the whole world that’s what.

If you can? My advice for what its worth? ( A scratched 7″ of  “The Gambler” by Kenny Rodgers, a truckload of books and a sassy way around four strings…) Stay on stage forever. As Sir Henry Rollins once said “Nothing can ever go wrong up there” I know that Curtis Mayfield ,were he still with us would beg to differ after being paralyzed by a rouge lighting rig while playing a show but I do think that Hank has a rather salient point…..

I know that is where so much of my dysmorphia and OCD stems from. To want so desperately to be so resilient and stunning that I get to be the one to reject rather that the forever rejected.

Cute huh?

As Bob Dylan once said to Miss Pamela “You could take you anywhere…”

All you have to do is go.

Machine.

If I don’t?

Then I am not who I thought I was and right now, seeing I am all that I have ? Well then I better make sure that all my ducks are in a row, my last will and my stack of “Hey you fuck ,just because I am dead don’t mean that you are forgiven….” letters are up to date and my burial money is in my shoe.

I need to cut back on every bullshit excuse that I have handed myself .

There is nor shall there ever be any incidence of weakness when I am too hard on myself.

I hate that I did it , bullshitted myself ,that my integrity took an unpaid vacation to Shitsville and came home with a moral tape worm,piebald sunburn and a stack of badly made fake designer handbags.

I have never been off the hook ,methodical mythological creatures like me cannot afford not be. The hook is honey dipped and I call it home. I don’t like it at the start. Starts are always creakily painful and I know that it is the price and penance that I must pay for stopping in the goddamn 1st case.  I know its a shutdown-meltdown-lock down situation. There is nothing else for it. Do what you always did y’all gonna get what you always got. No fucking -thank- you- very-much on that front. There is something really perverse in  me that digs it something rotten when the caul is pealed back and the true nature of all beasts becomes exposed to the naked eye.

I like it because it is true, bloodily raw and buck naked in a world of facades, Facebook, fallibility and utter fiction.

I want that way,no ,I demand it. I want every situation stripped down to its sinews because there is no time to loose and if time wasn’t on Mick and Keef’s side what chance does a mere mortal like myself have?

I will sit here and pour it all out because to me you are not real. You are the one. The priest who didn’t get a hand down my knickers. A clean confession. You know me if you come here as often as I do but I don’t know you.

Yet may I thank you for taking the time….

I have no idea how to deal with people. I have so few in my life.

I am all soft circles right now when I need there to be lines, a grid. A self service cold machine. Fuel alone. To cut the soft indulges to their insidious cores ,drain the wounds. I want symmetry and silence, Solitude and resolutions made of stone.

I do not nor have I ever served myself on half speed. This machine that I find myself inhabiting? It’s not the one that I need. The one that I need is locked inside the mediocrity that I have become and it is unacceptable on every level.

Little Mishey tried to mix with the animals. Bad move. Dumb dog. But I have learned my lesson well….

I’m stupid like a fox my faithful few readers. Sickness has left me and iron calls me back to its cold chest. The only repayment i can make to you is to be what i am and do it as hard as I can.

I’m Home.

Tail.

Now listen up and listen good…..

For as much as I desire contact…filthy,hot,sweating, get-ya-ass-owned-contact?

The thought of being untouchable is pretty fucking alluring.

Untouchable is a mix of Clint Eastwood, Slayer playing at the Warfield in San Fransisco on your birthday,A  1970 Dodge Challenger .385 Hemi and cooler than fuck.

I think that I hold it in such holy high regard because I have never been cool ,caught a whiff a few heady times and I can count on one hand when it has been kissing close but… High functioning retarded? Well that’s a given but cool?

Never.

Come a little closer honey and behold! Beneath this shimming miasma of  high octane energy,a  Frank Franzetta worthy stature , a cloying hot cloud of Bulgari Jasmine noir, body dysmorpia and a sedate manageable eating disorder is naught but a fat chick with moon crater acne, bi-focal glasses,braces and a stunning IQ. High school never ends baby and you  totally know I would have been writing your name on the knee of my jeans with glitter pen….

( you you you/ you temper my tender front lobe with a fuck fury fever/ and to the due south floods my molten desire and takes out all that stands in its path/ you do this to me/ liquid longing batters the deck and i am tied to your mast/ when we are we /this is what happens/your voice crawls sinuous soft on the wire and drips down knowingly into my softest core /home )

Untouchable is how I feel when the my hot pink Hello Kitty strap is ravenously chewing into my tender hide ,the taut skin where the shoulder meets the neck leaving a long bad tempered burn that will sting later in the shower when the soap kisses it, when I can feel my scalp sweating, the physical penance will be paid  in kind ,in full.

,Dug into the low end and hunkered down deep and sunk back dangerous like on my head-kicking higher than heaven heels. Cunt clenched and throat open wailing like a car alarm. I open my diamond cut kohl smudged peepers and there is Marcus across the room with his eyes on fire and that smile. There’s Mal and Nate locked tighter than the gates of San Quentin and we don’t stop.

I can’t stop.

That is untouchable.

I want to be where I can at least tolerate myself and the only place that happens to be at this point in the proceedings without me holding up a 7-11 is surrounded by my amazing compradres. My Brothers.

( or in my imagination with you )

Electricity makes me high, speaks in current,ohm and static tongues, true religion, gets me wet.

( and in dreams /where you claim me/ yours )

I think the one real reassurance in my life is that I get it wrong more than I get it right.

I got it muy wrong last night due to my chronic insomnia. Lack of sleep is the cruelest thing the gods bestow upon me outside of an extra set of hips. Have had about 9 hours sleep in total over the last week and last night I had to play a show. It ended up being more like an AA meeting.

( “A dumpster fire of ad-hock therapy! ” I wrote to you after the fact and when you laughed, Wayne Campbell’s mythical Winged Monkeys took flight from my butt…)

My fingers forgot that they have had a long running relationship with the fretboard and I stopped a few songs stuttering my so-sorry’s half way through.

Just went blank .I forgot my own songs as well. Mortifying.

If you can’t trust your own corpse to do what you want I would say that you are pretty much up shit creek sans paddle .I can hear the dueling banjos now…

My brain is on vacation with no pay in a war zone armed with little more than a sling-shot, migraine inducing counterfeit ray-bans, a half empty bottle of amyl nitrate and a song in it’s dippy heart. Frag grenades of exhaustion explode on the petulant perimeter and a body bag would be four star bliss at this point in the proceedings.

I want the reprieve.I crave it.

( i-you/ want-crave/ i-you )

My brain is gonna end up treading on a landmine and then .. *ka-BLOOEY!* .

Now can you see what I was saying about not cool?

Back behind my bass in a few hours. It will be so good to see my boys.With the condition that my condition is in all I can do is hope that the feeling is mutual. At this point? I’m little more than a car-crash with great tits.

Maybe if I was really -truly untouchable I would then become desirable? Is that how it works?  I tried to peel myself with a linoleum knife once. Hallucinogenic drugs and blades do not mix,take note kids….  All that I desire usually tends to settle for sub par or does not know that I exist…all my super cool female friends are so damn feline and try as I may ? And Elvis only knows, I have tried, I just can’t keep it up.

.( “Sandy?@!$#?…”Tell me about it….stud” )

Admit it! The song just started playing on your internal I-pod.

Me? Aw fuck it ,let’s just call a spade a shovel and be done with it. I am not ashamed. I love my tail! Iggy Pop wrote one of his best and sexiest tracks in ode to the condition, complete with a devastating descending bass line that gets my pink bits in a panic and sleigh bells…….

*woof*

I am canine. My super amazing girlfriends? Feline. They are inside sitting in the window haughty and disdainful getting their every whim catered to while I am in the back yard rolling in my own poop waiting for someone to throw me the ball…

( loyal / i would stop a bullet for you baby/ if you /believe me/ believe in me /  ride or die  / got so much love and its all yours…)

How far is too far? Never far enough for me. I don’t edit,I can’t.It’s not in my wiring and the next moment could be your last so I want you to know, I just want you to know…. (“What?!”) ….

Well….

I don’t just let anyone hold my tail….

 

Unicorn.

( I am ….)

Tonight? Bludgeoned by a migraine and cold? Beaten by my body for careless care taken ? I guess that you could say that I appear to be naught but…

A long delightful series of systematic fuck up’s bound by tattooed flesh with a fast approaching used by date.? Human catnip for nut -jobs and wanna -be’s ?  Yes. I do believe that will be more than sufficient .That should just about cover the waterfront.

“Till there was you” as The Beatles once sang.

*sigh*

( “And what is it that you do exactly dear?” )

Writer,  chronic insomniac, bass player, loner, singer,useless romantic, war, compulsive reader, watcher, grunt, singer,amazon, point walker, confidant, battle-field, remnant, canvas, troubadour……

And I check my head and what is left of my heretic heart at what could all at once be my dick- packing- dooms door.I remove my hand from my neither regions ,lick my fingers and sigh. Try not to look at your picture and panting. Now lighter? I move faster this way. It is the speed that catches the light you see? The light that you first saw when you wanted me…..

I am not actually convinced that you are real…..

And what was it about me (me,me,me…..) that made you think that I would not be receptive to your magnificent gallant and swoon-bringing attention? How could I resist? Did you really think that I would not see so much of myself in you? Us, the narcissists delight. Our twisted glee in questioning the others mere existence because we were nothing but scars ,tattooed and driving fast cars….that we both get tarred by the same brush. I like your level of commitment to what ever it is that you are doing at any given time. I am a map as well you see. You are all right there before me. Forgive me if I am mistaken but on you, I could have sworn that I could see my destination and therefore,a safe harbor, clearly marked….

So, do ya wanna?

( unicorns,mythical things.)

You said that you would come and talk to me had you the gold dipped chance.I reclined into romantic reverie,your ghost arms around me ( “There is no safe word ” she purred into the phone almost malevolent with intent and was satisfied at the deep animal noise this statement elicited in reply….)  And then my hot pink neon heart got to beating again….

To save myself from further embarrassment due to undesired fawning  I shook myself off at your indifference. I respect the tenants of distance and personal space. I am good like that.

I duly logged your reasons,the reasons presented to me. Why? because gee! I dig you and I know that place,that creeping heavy place where the anthracite dark is so thick and spongy that it actually swallows light.

Baby? I own real estate there.

( “And besides” she thought, pondering his epic coolness while floating in her bubble bedecked dim lit 2am bath listening to Buddy Guy wailing his blue blues “Nobody can eat fifty eggs….”)

“He is like me” I thought as I stood naked, dripping wet and cynical in front of the condensation clad mirror in the rainroom critiquing all my faults yet again. My long dark hair sodden snakes curing to meet my tattoos,the drain lustily sucking out the liquid innards of the tub behind me…. “He crawls under the house like a dog and growls at even the friendliest hand..”  

( i am that hand / i am that dog)

( this is the shit that spoonfeed myself so i can actually suspend the bliss of believing that someone that beautiful would want me at all…..)

I shut it down. I don’t seek him. I try not to reach out to him over his disarray. No one likes to be crowded. I don’t.

 

The strength of desire can really fuck you up. The thought of the degenerate shit you would be doing to one another if given the chance,a hotel room and a week unchecked by reality? Oh man….

I shut down.

I will shut myself down.

I feel myself leaking languid towards him and I stop it. I construct a constraint of Hoover Dam proportions of strength around it before it floods all that I am.

If he wants me? (“Please,please,please” moans her panting lingerie clad ego like an old James Brown 45….) He can seek me out again. He started this….

I discipline my time. Carve it up into small easy to digest pieces. I get on with my mission.Stop playing with myself in the shower thinking about the way my mouth floods with saliva when I see his name on my screen. I stop making the 1st contact. I just stop.

I begin to undertake a reconstruction of massive proportions.

As I stood on stage the other night surrounded by the only men that are not completely terrified of me,the electricity spoke to me .It cut through the avalanche of noise that was pouring from the sound-system and went straight for all my mucous membranes. I hung off my mike-stand like an orgasm- soused -sonic- sailor.

Cunt throbbing,nipples chafing,tongue thick and vision blurred. It felt it like the best fuck I had never had. It poleaxed me and I was dumbstruck at how much I had missed it without even really being aware of it having fully left me in disgust due to my lack of reverence at its holy and not oft granted benediction .It entered my every cell and it told me what it wanted.

It re-informed me and in no uncertain terms what exactly it was that I had been built for and I hung my head in shame. Bred for more.More ink,more speed,more defiant deviations,more …. Bones built to demand attention and I had sheathed them in laziness and weight. Shame  born of my denial and lack of discipline. All the dead soldiers spat on me from heaven….to punish myself I went harder than I knew my untrained pathetically soft corpse could handle. I stomped like El toreador,my moth -bothered  red velvet cape pathetically proud. The balls of my feet squealed like unoiled brakes with the pain of brewing autumn hued bruises and spat spiteful sparks every time my Cuban heels hit the wooden floor.

My neck bellowed with every erratic twist.My knees dropped to themselves in an ignored prayer for mercy. I moved to thaw my apathy with pain. Bright pain to melt my mistakes of attrition to my very marrow.

The bitter cold and the car trip home solidified my methods as unsound but my motive and rational as steady and true as a surgeons hand.

I have finally slept. It has been weeks.

And tomorrow it begins again. I begin again. I will curse it until it stops ignoring my floundering first efforts. I will spit at it and plow through piles of  pain for its spare praise ,its approval. My form will return. Epson salt baths and agony for the first week.

Then I will wonder how I ever lived without it.

I would be lying if I said that one of the features on my shimmering mirage like lusted for fantasy fulfillment was not you. You at the show far from here and months from now. There like you said you would be, playing it cool…….

( as if you could be anything but ….)

And henceforth grounded in physical reality and soaring in my filthy imagination?

I return to form.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coolest.

My hands think that they are exclusively for bass playing now.

That’s where they want to be. Mal smiles at me at rehearsal and says “You have been practicing!” I beam at him like a hopped up half wit and blush happily. I play more and more.

A while back……..

My guitar felt abstract ,fingers too fat, calluses too broad across my fingertips. There was no PA but I’m loud enough. So damn tired that my big baby blues were hanging out on my creased cranium  on red licorice stalks of exhaustion. Louis Vuitton trunks of manic welded kissing close beneath.  My amazing brother and I…. Blackie plays forever and I can’t wait to get the fuck off after five songs.

I shut my peepers so I don’t weep with the weight of the words that I write about indifferent people who will never know that this song is about you.

(Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?…)

Apologizes to my fellow big lipped sister in song, Carley Simon.

The coolest little record store on a hot Sunday afternoon…..

My beautiful friends….. Can I tell you that the cracks in my voice are mirroring the cracks on my psyche? That the noises that come out of my pie-hole make my sternum shudder ? That I have to hurt myself back to the start because I cannot end like this. I cannot float with it. It does not sing to me

(White roses arrive at my door with a card signed from the King. They are begging my favor. They are to curry my service. I don’t know if I can do what you ask of me any more….)

I am capable of so little. You thought that I could do so much more.

The more I am pushed the more I withhold. Don’t we all?

So that was then and this?  Well,this is now………

You don’t need a black ankle bracelet to be under house arrest baby. I am self confined to my room and happily keeping only the most antisocial of hours, my Elvis lamp rotating on the shelf above my head creaking like it needs oil, baby food on special this week at the store  keeping my wonky weight right down thank-you-very-much and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t dig it. I find myself cutting tenuous-at -best ties by the day. Nothing to hold on to means nothing to hold me back. The last two weeks have been soaked in fire, disarray, induced comas, beatings and death.

Literally.

I wake up to a barrage of messages that would cripple a weaker woman. After taking the 1st few licks you tend to go numb and it don’t hurt so bad no more. You leave your body and fly away…..

Offers of shows coming through and I am booking almost all of them just so I keep moving. Been playing my beautiful bad tempered 12 string. She only rests easy in one specific tuning but I guess when you are that good looking you can pretty much get away with whatever the hell you damn well please….. But if a wet dream had a soundtrack?

I had not picked her up in forever but that’s what you get for watching the vh1 “Behind the Music- Guns’n’Roses” Of course I am gonna break out the 12 string and mess around. It demands it.

(Oh Izzy Stradlin…je t’ami….)

I have 2 shows coming up ,one with my brother and one opening a night in the city. Two frisky Fridays in a row. It a record launch for The Miss-Made at The Square. Should be peachy. Got offered a gig in Bulli but lord only knows how the hell I would get there. I will give it a red hot shot though.

No one that I want ever wants me so if complete strangers desire my presence and want to pay me for singing I will let my ego be stroked onstage. Fuck it you know? Why not.

Its good today. I am not obsessing (much) I am not caring if it all falls away. The last thing that I was in I sadly ended as I was not able to lift my game to the level required. He told me at the shaky start that if I decided that I could not do it anymore that we would still be friends and that it would be cool. Lip service much? Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids….Its my own fault for believing it. I was an idiot.

It was a fucking mess.

This is what drives me crazy.

If you think that you can not handle something,don’t get involved in it or at the least? Tell the other party that you can’t comply to the conditions. No harm, no foul. You know what leads us into such bitter blind spots? Allow me to school you, not that you don’t know what I am gonna lay down here…….Greed. Pure greed. In my experience men will say anything ,promise you the moon ,say that they will be cool….anything to get the ‘tang.

I fell for it. Thank god he was a nice guy. He just lost his shit when I called a stop to it. I understood,it wasn’t easy but I was not going to be a part of something that I was not honestly invested in. I never meant to hurt him but it was a lesson not to let your mouth write cheques that your ass can’t cash. I am so sick of being painted as the bad guy because I won’t pull my punches. You don’t want to go toe to toe? Don’t get in the fucking ring.

My sleeping pattern is in complete disarray.

But seeing that I have no life it doesn’t really matter all that much. I am enjoying keeping myself to myself. I have always been better off doing so. Lady Thraxx of Harlem still graces Chez Shite a few nights a week so that is all of my social interaction taken care of thank you kindly. I am training light and sweating hard. Running comes next after this period has come and gone. My rock raddled rack is requiring 3 sports bras. If I ran at this point I would have two black eyes so its all bopping around the house with wrist and ankle weights duct taped to my gangly extremities cleaning and dancing like the fat hippo that I am to Down’s “Over the under.”

Peachy.

Cant wait to go and see Jello Biafra at the Metro on Saturday night. Beloved big brother is doing the support. I love seeing him killing it on the big stages….He wrote me from the Queensland shows and said that they went off, all sold out and so on….I  am meant to have a date for the show this weekend with  “The coolest boy I know” (TM)  but I am not holding out real high hopes at this point.I think that he is too cool for my white-trash self. I’m not going to stop digging him , and let’s face it,I couldn’t if I tried and I have tried….*sigh*…. It’s kinda good because it forces my internal teenager to cool the fuck out.

Which is just what I need.

Just got a message from my producer and he asked me if I would be up for interviewing Jello on Sunday. I put on the soundtrack from “Xanadu” and slid up and down the hallway in my pink socks squealing with glee and then composing myself replied cool as a cucumber that I am ever up for the challenge. Nerves keep me running and I rise like raunchy bread ready to be served at the banquet of bad ass. Like a foxy tide to be surfed to the sexy shore.

Or something…..

You do what you do and take aim. At least I show up, dig? I am down with being present in my life when the occasion demands it. I employ an economy that guarantees the best of me in such situations. I can deal with the rest of me later in the privacy of my own home. Show up to your life and make it look good mami. I figure that it is all that I can do.

Thraxx just called me to say that she will be heading over tonight. A glut of salacious gossip and guitar playing shall follow. We have to keep writing for The Squirters.

Booked in to get my hair did on Thursday. It’s the G’n’R thing. I’m thinking Stephine Seymour in the  “November Rain” film-clip. A fetching auburn to keep me warm through the miserable upcoming winter months. Sayonara cash…buh-bye shekels… Rather look good than eat. Just sayin’…..

Oh thank you Elvis!

I just got my period! Great timing! Here was me thinking that I was going to have to wear a caftan on the weekend. Think Shelley Winters in “The Poseidon Adventure” *shudder*…not real sexy huh? Nice work sadly unused genitals! Go Junk! Now all I need to do is rock a juice fast, flick my new mane alluringly while reeking of Bulgari Jasmine Noir and Vanilla body-wash and hope that the object of my erstwhile longings decides to grace me with his presence this weekend…..

Seventeen forever. Duh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twister.

I could see it throwing itself  from heaven to earth and back again in the thick distance,bouncing from trailer to field. Natures own drama queen. It sucked all the sound from my screaming skull as it spun closer. I stumbled into the abandoned house and looked for a place to put myself that the tornado could not touch. Running into a huge open plan living room I tripped over a totally hot couple banging the absolute stuffing out of each other…..

I woke up with my knife wedged under my cheek leaving a deep mark that I proceeded to rub, all the covers on the floor and my Hello Kitty doll in the garroted in the crook of my arm. Lifting my silk sleep mask I was met with the sight of the hydraulic master piece that is a real live fuck machine that I am minding for a friend until she works out where to hide it. With out its, ahem ,attachments and casing it looks like a naked baby alien…..its so damn cute!

I shall name it Henry!

Can you tell that I am losing it? Babysitting a fuck machine and sleeping with a knife ,wait, I have always slept with a knife…never mind, move on please….

I am blaming the advent of high speed Internet here at Chez Shite.

That and the charming combination of a PMS fueled chocolate binge during which I inhaled anything that had come within kissing distance of a coca bean , no sleep the night before because my OCD is going bat-shit and my renewed scholarly-you-do-understand interest in hardcore pornography due to said Internet action.

What a dream!

Carmilla Bing and company fornicated their big titted three input slap happy way all over my fucked up frontal lobe for hours while I tried to avoid a twister by hiding in a dishwasher. (” Paging Dr Freud?….”) I woke up throbbing and unsatisfied.

Sigh.

Not that it matters. Not that it helps.

I am so very tired of being strung along. Of  rocking horse shit rare delectable boys going hot and cold on my fur coat wrapped , caramel skinned, boot bedecked, whiskey voiced, tangle haired awesomeness. Of being nothing but a hot theory. I really have to shut myself down because although I am sure that it is doing wonders for my skin and all ? I am really sick of having egg on my face.

Don’t engage my interest if you are going to waste my time! Manners please!

Games?  What-the-fuck-ever……As Arron Neville would croon ” If you want something to play with? Go and find yourself a toy”.

A-men.

This game is shit. I should remove myself from the pitch before I go all Vinnie Jones on someones ass. My love-life (*pft!*) is yellow carded  yet again.

The worst thing is that I fall / fell for it. No one wants an alpha wench. They talk it up like they do but they don’t. Someone told me that maybe I had a hard time with this shit because ” Maybe they had read your page…” Like I am going to dumb down?!  You have got to be shitting me right? This is it. You take the whole package or you don’t.

I know that women are notorious for it but I have never tried to change anyone that I have been swapping spit with. The way I figure it is that you are there with them because you dig them . Right? People are not like real estate for Christs sake. I don’t want a “A charming fixer upper ,all offers considered!”. I am too busy trying to get myself right!  We should focus on ourselves and realize that much  like a physician ,we have a certain duty of care when we chose to be with someone. Respectfully bring the best of yourself to the other party. It’s common sense is it not?  You say that you love them? Well then be nice to them for the love of Gram Parsons and all that is holy!

This all makes total sense to me but apparently I am alone on this one.

I wish that I  was a …I don’t know? …a botanist?…yeah, that would be kind of cool. Hang around chatting to plants all day. Slicing and cross pollination. Crisp whit lab coat… Wait! I did that when I was growing dope in LA. But wearing a bikini and a smirk.  Ok, maybe a maid at a monastery? A vow of silence, trading charged glances with Leonard Cohen, rising early….Tonight and more frequently I am wishing that I was anything other than this. Anything but a writer is what I am getting at. Writers tend to and keep stupid flames burning that should have gutted themselves out a long-assed time ago.

Writers revolve around the violence of love. Rotten romance. In one way or another I always end up back at some kind of  sick inducing quagmire of longing with one hand down my pants. That’s me alright ,wrapped in an ankle length hooded cloak working my “French lieutenants woman” shtick for all its worth ,collecting kindling on the dark mist shrouded moors of memory to keep something pointless and non illuminating alight. A flame that attracts all the wrong moths. The drunkest of sailors with ships sinking and the cruelest of  predators ever scanning for the lame and loveless.

How to stage a blackout without extinguishing all hope in my nasty neon hot Pink Hello Kitty core?

Not possible and trust me, I have consulted the experts,( Lady Thraxx and My Bandmates ) so I have to temper it ,train it or murder it.

I ask the amazing men that populate my existence what I am meant to do and being the only girl in the rock-pile my dudes are the best.

They are all older than me and married as hell. Some so famous that it would rattle you to your core if I named names and some that you will never know. I am lucky, my dance-card is full when it comes to these magnificent men. So I feel safe with them. I can spill my guts.

As always it is the rhythm section that I am closest to. Poor Mal and Nate. They always cop it sweet and deal with it tres beautifully.

Mal tells me that guys talk up a mess of shit about what they want in a woman but when faced with the reality of it they fuck it up.

“Why!!!???” I sniff all hot-pants, dodgy ink and dejection.

“Because mate, you are not meant to exist!” I look at him eyebrows inching towards my hairline. He sighs and continues ” Look, you are one of the boys and you look like …well…how you look and your not a snob, I mean you are cool, you know, like a good mate!”

He can see that although he is telling the truth that it is not making Queen Snot here real happy.

By this point in the conversation we are both some what exasperated. The jist is that I am a catch supposedly and gee, that’s why all the men that I think are amazing date / marry / fornicate with pie eyed- sub par- bunny boiling- pinch faced- junkie -swat team worthy –whack jobs.

Naturally. Why of course!  *slaps forehead* How stupid of me! Why on earth would you be with someone who supports and accepts you unconditionally, treats you like gold, lets you do your thing and goes off like a roman candle in the sack when you can settle for a pick-and-mix of complete bullshit and drama! What on earth was I thinking??!!!

I express all of this to my fellow brother in bass with a lot more colorful language thrown in and a selection of ribald hand gestures that could get you shot point-blank in broad daylight in Southern Italy.

“Yep,that’s pretty much it.” he says and again I give up.

I quit, well I try and quit because nobody says what they really want.

It’s like when girls say that they want nice guys. Bullshit! Well  ,in part…I do want a nice guy but I don’t want a doormat. I want a bit of fucking friction! ( Pun intended,now stop staring at my rack and keep reading….) A man who knows who he is,alpha prime honey and let’s me let my guard down when I am off the battlefield. Puts me in my place and makes me beg for it dig? I don’t always want to be the one wearing the pants…especially if I have a man who wants to peal them off me with his teeth. And let’s call a spade a spade just to keep with the vague horticultural theme I had going back there…. no nice guys want me.

I get friend-zoned by the hotties who tell me what a stone cold fox I am and ” You are so cool and understanding Michele and any guy would be stoked to have you! ”

Oh yeah buster? Well why not you?

In the name of science and sexual frustration I’m actually having this conversation via txt with a dashing male friend as I bang out this dire high school rubbish. Me and him are good so I am hoping that he will give me an answer that will enable me to commence unraveling all this bullshit. We used to flirt back in the day and he has always been a champion of my various unorthodox charms so…..

Hold on my phone just went off….

“Lol! Of course I find you attractive Michele ( Oh WHAT!!##!?? So sue me! I’m due for my period and I was fishing ok?! ) but I look up to you (” Ruh-roh Shaggy!”…..  This is rapidly turning to shit…..abort! abort!!) You have spoken to me about all my issues ( That would be because I give a shit and I am great !) I guess I see you as my hot second step mum?! Lol! ( Yeah if I had you when I was EIGHT!!!!! )

Ok, so much for that exercise in ego extinguishing futility.

( Commence sexual shut down in T minus 10-9-8………)

And meanwhile,out of my pants and back into the world.

Had a rather magic time on Friday night when Los Hombres played with BRUCE and Beastwars at The Square. The following night found me all dressed up and waiting for Marcus and Tony to swing by and get me as Looking Glass were opening for Unida at The Manning Bar. Fuck Sydney and it’s no right turns! We made it to the show with 8 minutes to spare. I don’t know how Marcus does it but he got up there and threw down one of the most amazing sets I have ever seen.

I can’t wait to play music with that man again!

And here come my boys!

Being in a band is just the best feeling. The more time goose-steps me towards my grave I think that it is the only feeling worth having. Being in more than one is an orgy of the sonic senses. Charmaine,the drummer for the punk band that I am in ,The Squirters, was there too. Heaven! Just missing Nixon who is recording in Melbourne with PC at Goat-sound studios with his band I Exist.

The security treated me like a princess as always and I will always feel like I am tangled up in Indio one way or another. I was leaning on the rail by the speakers,head hanging, lost in the waves of low end washing over me when my phone went of. I smiled when I saw who it was.

Always connected.

Even when he is pouring the pork to dire drug dunked ding-a-lings out on the fatal fault line, swing batter batter swing! Even though we are not together we are always us…And as I stood there watching one of his oldest friends maul the mike with one of the most distinctive voices in rock I wondered if he smiled when he looked at the stitches on his wrists knowing that I would match him till the dizzy dirty end….

See where romance gets you? Rode wet and hung out to swing in the breeze is where.

Meanwhile back on earth…

The crush that I am harboring looks to be crushing itself out of existence. There is a point when aloof becomes enough. I wait for him to contact me and um….hello? …..HELLO?. This does not do a real  lot for my self esteem as you can imagine. I try and keep in mind that he has a life and stuff but is a text gonna fuckin’ kill ya???

Throw me a bone(r) here!

I’m locked down writing and eating baby-food in my acid trip gypsy caravan of a bedroom. Think I am gonna get down with radio silence. Hang with my guitars and notebooks .Dye my hair Stephine Seymour “November Rain” film-clip red. Use all the hot water at 2am.Play dress-ups, do sit ups…..

Sick of extending myself and getting nothing in return. Makes me feel dumber than necessary.Date D-day is this Saturday… I will end up taking myself if worst comes to just that. I guess I will just hang around listlessly draped across my cushion choked chocolate box of a bed listening to Dion and The Belmont’s and see what happens next.

And stay the hell off Porn-hub.

……maybe.

 

 

 

 

 

Nerve.

I mean, I hear the songs.

I’m not Helen fucking Keller.

But tonight? The words? The words that I wrote avoid me. I hunted them and trapped them with ink and they ignore me still….and it is devastating.

I don’t know how to be anything else. Please come back ,I swear that I will be good.

I have the CD that we recorded when we jammed the other night. Before I continue, is it too much to ask for fold-back monitors in rehearsal rooms? Staying in tune is ? Ha! I would have an easier time fitting into Kate Mosses jeans. My boy’s go loud. I would like to join them in sonic intensity,as soon as possible thank you kindly…if I could hear myself that is…..

My short term memory is, sadly, not as resilient as I once thought it was .Spiderwebs snap and retract into nothing. It decides,at whim ,not to serve me. I walk into a room and forget why and what it was that  I wanted.

Every effort is last ditch in its intensity and urgency. Every action a breadcrumb on my terror trail to lead myself back to the ruin of my ruin. Back into my inked arms.

( i will hold you till we die dust to dust .i will never let go.i cant stay.i will never leave.i cant stay but i will remain.as.much as i can and to the best of my limited abilities i will give you everything.let me.i ache to show you that i am capable.will you allow me in? in to show you that I can.i can.i can. i cant not try.i will court you with all that i am broken..)

I beg myself on bent and bruised knee to stay but the truth? I only really like the idea of myself as I am leaving, when I am gone again.

Absent we all become more beautiful. Larger and more precious in the minds of all that we leave behind. I leave myself and go.

I am running, writing, folding,sorting,washing,folding, singing for my life. Boring myself to tears. So horrifyingly far from the perfection that I crave. My corpse, ever the trooper..(.march!.)  The acid in my gut makes it’s dire desperate way into my dry mouth. Stomach twisted like a dirty rag, harmed hands hoping for ever absent moisture,dammed and disappointed by ensuing result. Dry pills stuck in my craw. I try to remember that I need hydration. Rest?  I cannot keep still.

I fidget on the point all night,

Food is a hassle and an afterthought. My periphery is fucking with me.Things move and shift in my twitching wake. I opened up my forehead on the corner of a shelf last night. I saw sounds. The sky descended. I make no effort to mask the corner shaped cut above my left eye. It compliments the bags residing below them nicely.

Compulsion is a wicked master out to entertain himself at your manic clockwork expense. I find myself in front of the bathroom mirror armed with tweezers,with a tooth brush, a razor…. many times over the course of a day. Preen  ,pick ,groom for you are naught but a stupid ape. Bad monkey, grey track pants hanging from your jutting immigrant hips. Period looming ,anvil heavy, breasts heave with volcanic rock, borne on lava. A filthy flesh foundry of blood.

A cathedral of cells and shifting seasick horizons.

Floss ,buff, moisturize,rinse ,buff and repeat.

clean/cleaner/clean/damaged stock/fire sale/reduced to clear/ you are never new again.

Repeat.Repeat.Repeat.re-peat.rep-eat.repe-at.repea-t-r-e-peat-repeat-r-e-pe-eat-rep-e-at.

It sounds like wire tempered by heat and ringing its tight lament into the evening. Pinging and groaning. haunting the tender and sensitive.

My nerves keep me honest and connected. My humanity,the failure of fallibility. My heart is lead. My heart in littered with bones and red neon chambers. Cloistered. Always a saint never a martyr. Never pity. No pity.

Are you trying to kill me?

I compete against the last breath that I took. The last step strode. The last kiss stolen. I became a master thief for your affection. A criminal for your attention. An addict. Did you, do you know that?

Candles are lit. Ashes pulled from flames embrace.

And so it came to pass that I draped it accordingly, this animal that I am and let is loose. And I stick it on a stage. It is to the tripwire detriment of all involved but in Orwellian times of no adrenaline assisted danger don’t you want to see? To watch? Can you smell it beyond the abyss? I can feel you but the lights take my vision so I am running blind and it is all for you.

All for you who paid and stayed. Voyeurs. Rubberneckers. Perverts. Audience most beloved.

And for the object of my erstwhile hunger ? A certain starvation specific to you alone. Lionheart.

And we need this. We desire it. The cleanest want. Neurosis gets high and weaves a crooked home coming crown for its aqua eyed queen out of KISS records, doves tears, the dust of the Sunset Strip ,green opal swans carved by blind sailors and a lock of Bridgette Bardot’s hair .Glass slippers pinch.Shatter.Bring stigmata. Beware that verisimilitude only goes so far young lady.

You have been warned. Grab your hindsight,passion and courage and go. We can make the border by day-break if we are immediate. We cannot be any other way my dear, come near, I want to tell you a story….

Are you in the shadows beyond my line of limited sight? I sing for you.

I dream in braille.

I talk in Morse code.

The press is held. Shadows shelter and  there I belong to you. Soft hand to claim me. Don’t you see? It has to be you.  Please touch me so I know.You illuminate.  Why? Don’t make me say it, I will if I must, but you know why….

I don’t have the nerve.

( It is 3.46 am.)

 

 

Scorpio.

My Bass is looking at me funny.

And not like “Oh Fu-nny haha!” either.

If she had an eyebrow it would be arched. She would tell me ,had she a mouth, that she is not angry with me ,oh no, merely disappointed….

So dignified is she at the end of my bed silently chiding me for lack of application. Ever since the Scorpio  full moon of last week I have felt like King Kong has been using me as a fuck toy.

But my internal compass is true and Elvis has been guiding my intentions and instinct with a steady gold dipped hand.

I / the royal “We” meaning Los Hombres Del Diablo  have a show next week and I/ we are trying valiantly to get all the hermanos  into one spot so that we can get right before we do it all over in public (“Oh-er missus! ) again. I am writing granted, but without the sounds? I need the electricity or I can’t feel it.

Kind of like when I forget to plug my vibrator in…..

Getting back to my bass? She has the vapors because that means that Saint Cecilia is on hold for another week. Marcus will be back up soon as Looking Glass are supporting  John Gracia’s Unida. Looks like me and the desert will always be running side by side somehow….sigh.

Who am I kidding? It’s not just that. I really miss the pleasure of their company.Love being with my band. And flashing my ass at Nathan while he tries and fails not to crack up.

(  “I always know when you have dropped your pants ” said Mal laconically. “Oh yeah how?” I said  “’cause Nathan is grinning like a half wit when I turn around”. “Fair enough. Now who wants a beer?” replies she-who-knows-when-she-is beat “…..)

The magic that sound brings. It’s such an ephemeral thing like most of the sweetest things tend to be. And I am a glutton. And a total putz for not having my shit together. What in  the hell happened to this week anyway?  Feels like I hardly knew ya at all ol’ buddy ,ol’pal…..(*hick!*)

I spoke to Mal tonight for all of a very fraught two minutes as he was wrangling his hyperactive fuck trophies ,of whom I am inordinately and wildly fond, through Rebel Sports in search of soccer paraphernalia. ” I said I will see you tomorrow!” I barked as I heard something large falling over in the background and the connection was abruptly severed . I cannot for the life of me remember any of our songs.

And I wrote the fucking things.

Keep in mind that at the last show when I ran out of lyrics I announced that I was going for a slash mid set, did so and still found time to yell at the sound guy and get my date a bottle of suds on my way back to the stage.

( He told me that he had a half brother. I laughed. Whats so funny? he asked. That I thought of Johhny Eck when you said half I replied. He smiled and I swooned….)

This is why I want to be a little more up to speed this round.

Remind me to go and pick up my boots tomorrow if you would be so kind. I imagine someone asking me what my day consists of and saying “Why ! Going to the cobbler and falconry naturally .” is definitely in my top ten lists of fucking rad answers. Saint Tina tells me that when going shopping with me in my’ hood that she feels like she is with The Godfather….

( Falconry??#4@@$??)

Last I heard that wanton woman was in Boston spending my fast dwindling inheritance. The minx. She skyped me. I don’t even have fucking Skype! I mean honestly?!! She comes over to show me pictures of her beloved grandson and therefore my nephew JT on her I-pad tablet thing. Meanwhile I am still trying to get the bonfire in the backyard started so that I can signal the closer dwelling members of my band my available practice times.

( “Awww…you still used Cd’s! ” he smiled upon spotting the stacks of silver discs littering my Persian rug clad floor. Gah!)

The casualty rate in life when it comes to one’s feelings is heinous .Loyalty is never at a premium. Like duh?  Shocked? No. No I can’t say that I really am. It’s my usual chestnut I guess, going back to having no expectations and therefore never being disappointed. All that they love you for in the beginning they will dispose of you for in the end. Civilians marauding as contenders have always resented my ability to parlay my scant and at times obscure skills to exist and get compensated for being naught but my leggy and fat pouted self. But the loss of such faithfully served folly?

Severance of course.

I guess I have to look at it like Titanic packed with shit remixes sailing into the distance. Pene ante bullshit. Beware of the omega bitches of both genders and know that high school never ends.

Not that I am any kind of expert on the high school experience as we all know.

It was a gas and now I must aim for the green light at the end of the dock once again. Onto bigger and better things. My enemy’s will fail. Not that I will notice as I will be too busy observing myself succeed. Miss Harlem and I call each other “Budgie” when ever we pass a reflective surface. Us big haired babes just can’t waste a free peek.

I can taste the violence before it erupts you know….Smell it. I try and temper mine and succeed more than I fail. ( Somewhere my psychiatrist just got a boner and doesn’t know why…)

The furies are female. War is a girl. Death looks like a pornstar. She sits like a queen on the wind and she wants my allegiance proven once again.

It’s that and my weight that I must battle forever.

(Soundtrack this evening? Only Neil Young can get away with those Kermit the frog notes. Amphibian in Flannel…..)

Thinking about throwing some more Johnny Cash and Mr Young into my set for mine and Blackie’s triumphant return to the tiny front window at the Mars Hill cafe in Parramatta. I think big brother has a solo show on Sunday. I will be in the studio thrashing about with Los Diablos as we have that show next Thursday that I was banging on about a few paragraphs back.

Speaking of shows….I will be picking up my payment for a show that I did at The Standard a week ago tomorrow. Let me tell you a fable…..

Somewhere in the dusty vaults of the inter-webs there is a fantastic picture of your humble scribe *cough* looking like a back lit version of The Predator. All dreadlocks,Nailbomb tee-shirt and lashings of fuck off. It was taken at my most beloved Annandale Hotel many moon’s ago by a young Turk by the name of Nick Bezzina.  As I did what may be the world’s longest and most indulgent sound check in a lofty space high above Oxford St in a building that was once a ritzy funeral home ( Muchos gracias  to Hugh the sound-guy.) Nick informed me as he uncurled a giant transparency and lovingly taped it to a huge light box, that that long ago night was the first show he had ever shot.

Bless.

I finally downed my guitar and offered to help as the doors were due to open shortly.

I hastily blue tacked snapshots to a fake brick wall next to the women’s crapper and maybe slid a few of the doubles into my bag. Who can really say? Oh ok! So I did! What are you gonna do? Call the fucking fun police? Lighten up!

After all…it’s only rock’n’roll but we like it, like,it yes we do……

Three perfect high resolution black and white shots of darling Iggy looking like a leather handbag with a heartbeat. In fact , I am raiding the two dollar shop tomorrow for frames so I can mount *ahem* said pilfered pictures above my bed and offer prayers and promises to them nightly before the pills kick in and the light goes out

He possesses the most amazing eye and work. I lamented that we had never really been in the same place long enough to set up a shoot and that this was his last bacchanal  before leaving for shitty old London.

“Ew! Why London?” asked Queen Snot perched on a silver stool languidly tuning her bodacious blond git-fiddle.

“Two year working visa ” intoned the sage shutter bug.

Fair enough.

Kind enough to let me open the event with my very,shall we say special brand of acoustic butchery, he said that he would pay me with a print.

I pointed to a giant photocopy of Sir Iggy gracing the far wall and said that he could compensate me with that all the while thinking of how fetching it would look plastered to the wall in the kitchen here at Discraceland.

So seven thirty hits,I take to the stage thinking of dear Chrissy Amphlett gone from us far too soon.I ask her to guide me though “I’m on your side “ in homage and tribute to her titan tressed talent and the first words out of my ever high-strung pie-hole are “Lighting man ? please be kind….”

The show felt really good. I just went to that place and did that thing .Not as easy or frequent as people think or I make it look either ,trust me on that…So happily I lucked out and hit the sweet spot. And  after an utterly aching version of Neil Young’s immortal “Helpless” ( One of the top moments on Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz” in my ever bolshy opinion ) I was done and a dopey mere mortal once again. Bugger.

I swear that I could hear Rick Danko and Levon Helm by my shaky side in sweet harmony….

Nick came up to the stage as I was collecting all my crap and was very enthusiastic about my effort. “So” he said “You can take that” and pointed at the kitchen mural ” Or that” he grinned and pointed at the foreboding matt black speaker stack.  “But doesn’t that belong to the venue? ” I replied confused but always up for a new PA. “No!” he laughed “That” and my eyes followed his finger to the 1 x 1 1/2 meter light-box leaning louche against said speaker stack with the same photo of the Stooges as the photocopy but in lurid full eye-fucking color.

“No!” gasped our trucker cap wearing ,Turbonegro patched vet sporting, fox tailed swinging heroine with her tattooed right hand now clutching at one of her erect nippled and rapidly heaving cans.

“Yes.” he ardently replied. “Michele, that was amazing…..”

Hear that! Amazing me!

So me and Guitar Matt will be picking up that little beauty apres jam on Sunday. No hangovers, Sticky purple dusted weed and stellar sex in  abundance for all my indulgent mates with great vans and kind hearts. I think I am going to chuck my bed out and sleep on it. The light box that is…dream on top of the almighty Stooges.

Which ,if you really stop to think about it, I have basically been doing my whole life…….

Bugger this weather sideways .Winter….great….just fucking great…. Sadness falls. No more school uniforms let alone hot pants for tan deficient miserable months. So what is a poor girl to do? (“‘Cept to sing for a rock’n’roll band.” Merci beaucoup mon amours Jagger and Richards xoxoxox .) Tights and mini skirts that’s what!

“How will she survive in the feral face of the evil elements” gasp the peanut gallery…Ah! Rest your minds and ease the strain on the thought taut reins my delinquent darlings .I will be fine due to the knee length cream suede and fur coat that begged, that pleaded for  me to buy in from the cruel shop window that held it captive. I am like Amnesty international for cool clothes ,me. A Saint for the nattily dressed. So then I had to live on chai tea and noodles for a fortnight. Big whoop. It’s not as if I didn’t need to drop more pounds anyway so it was a win-win in my eyes.

I happen to be wrapped in it and not much else as I type actually…..

Hmmmm…what else? Skintight jeans that I am taking in by the week due to more weight falling from my once fecund frame. Boots ,boots and more boots…amen.

I call upon the goddesses. Stevie Nicks,Christine Mac Vie, Penny Lane, Anita Pallenburg.….Hear my plea for heart hitching hotness and cast your spell over my schvartze soul.

( “Did she make you cry? Make you break down? Shatter your illusion of love?”)

Oh yes! You just know that is what I am talking about….

And because everyone loves a segue-way that makes fuck all sense ,it goes over like the gangbusters and trust me on this if you have ever seen Blackie play live….here you are….

….. if one more fucking hipster informs me gravely that they are learning the banjo I am going to insert my treasured vinyl 7″ of “The Rainbow Connection “ square up their ironic schooner sipping- Newtonian- trust fund draining -dour faced asses to be followed by the headstock of the aforementioned instrument.

Which is a waste of a perfectly good instrument,granted, but when a girl has to make a point a girl has to make a point.

I just wish that one of these uptight button down floral shirt sporting- boat shoe bedecked- iron deficient- hacky-sack playing-badly bearded- fire twirling shit stains would tell me that they were learning the tuba…..

.

 

Gland.

They run tests on me.

Sexy fucking lab rat with homicidal tendencies. Three doctors can’t be wrong now can they? I mean what is the law of averages on this crap? We could flip a coin if you dig. I have all the time in the wild world it appears….

More tests. I feel like a perky titted pin cushion. My bones move in my sleep so that the mirror will hand me a surprise in the evening when my bed releases me, paroles me for another nights roaming.

Tests.

I would fail a pelvic examination at this point…

Tests why?

Because I am broken and it is illegal to terminate me. The Catholics,well those degenerate hypocritical cunts say it is a sin to terminate yourself but as they are comprised of kiddie fiddling pederasts weened on boy-cock, guilt and manowitz wine, we don’t give a tinkers cuss what the fuck they think do we now ?

Moving right along .

The plump nurse handled the needle like a ninja. I tried not to focus on the yellow  puss dripping from the puckered wet socket where her left eye once resided. I exhaled as it bit into my fat vein , hungry for answers. The pus ran slowly down her pockmarked cheek as the bluebird on her shoulder recited the Dow Jones index in a strident Russian accent in between trilling lines from some of my favorite Turbonegro songs.

She deftly filled four citron and sapphire studded vials and withdrew the thirsty syringe. I open my Windex blue eyes and grinned, the stars falling from the ceiling making it into a Ziegfeld Follies number. A tetchy lion poked its massive shaggy head around the doorway and sized me up. “Shoo!” I muttered. “Huh?” said the nurse.” Nothing ,It’s cool ,I’m cool” I said sliding down from the stool , gathering up my white tasseled bag and making a break for freedom.

As I made my way down the cool white hall the bulimic giraffe in the X-ray department, with whom I have had unsavory dealings with before, said something snide about my weight as I slunk by. I waited for the tap dancing frogs to march by in their spats and top hats and then  spat a bunch of  typhoid stained violets contemptuously at her ugly hooves and strutted by.

Juice fasts fuck you up for a while.

They bring rabbit-like turds and crystal visions.

I swayed though the sea of sick civilians clogging the faux cheerful waiting room.  I tripped over the rotting and strangely scentless corpses stacked like kindling by the crematorium door and swore. Snow White wept pitifully by the front desk and a pile of out of date Chinese phonebooks not caring who saw her black eye and split lip.Fourteen little fists.Fourteen little feet and the trolls next door finally called the cops. I don’t have time for this shit….

Borne on a low-riding wave of germs, my fox-tail  beating  Greenwich meantime against my chubby thigh ,I hit the street like it had fucked my six year old sister and then sent me the Polaroid’s express post, dizzy with hunger and barely suppressed self loathing. As I stood panting feverishly behind mirrored aviator sunglasses outside the Go-lo discount store trying not to slide down the wall, a giant oil slick black convertible Cadillac drove by slowly. I waved slack jawed and marveled at JFK’s perfect Irish hair and the tweedy nubs on Jackie’s pink Channel jacket. I proceeded to wobble off towards my blighted domestic abode on liquid legs of lithium and other anti-psychotic party favors pour favor  when I heard the gunshot and screaming. I did not turn back.

Zapruder would lovingly fill in the blanks for the rest of time. Pause on frame 137 for the money shot.

My Doctor. Herr Dockter. “It may be your Thyroid fucking you up.”  He says gruffly not for a New York minute taking my shit .No Sir. I scowl at he who ignores my chubby petulance and continues “It may be messing with your weight as well.”  Oh really? Now you have my attention.I will rip it out of my own neck with a pair of nail scissors if that is the case. I buy clothes for who I want to be again. I am set dressing a ghost. I get high on the lack of solids. My knees click. My thighs touch.

I lumber off to a new shrink who finally christens the disarray that I am. And so now I know. Now I know.

I always end up hurting people because I can’t not be who I am. I don’t know how to do all the little dances that make up reassurance in relationships. I warn people but they tell me that they love me just the way I am. (“Don’t go changing,trying to please me…”) Until they don’t. Until it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth it. I told you that,remember? You walk away with my applause following you from the theater of war that I am and it’s ok. The way I am indeed. It’s when they say that I know it is doomed so I hang on and try and enjoy the ride. My being a writer does not help either. I always have to defend or explain what I am writing about. I have lost years because it just wasn’t worth the raft of shit that I knew would befall me “Who was that about?” etc etc.

I will not explain myself ,my motivation and certainly not my inspiration.

See why I should be alone? But I want you so bad…..

I am not a force for good. I end up resenting people who have seen behind my emerald curtain. Trust no motherfucker. I am naked on the bathroom floor listening to the voices that only I can hear. The grout between the tiles is gritty on my tongue. Thank you for helping me up and all but as I am an untamed thing I will surely bite the hand that feeds and attempts to lead me.

I am so not sorry.

I am down from 93kgs to 70kgs. I crap a fruit shop daily but it’s working.10 more kgs to go and I am me again. The depression crept up so low,sinuous and cunning. Slowly,slowly catchee monkey. Cunt. And then there I was no longer able to see my shoes. My left knee does not like me right now. According to x-rays I have a bump on my cartilage which is causing my knee cap to charmingly pop off. In lieu of running one must starve.  And do a lot of slow sit ups.

When I open my eyes under the chlorinated water a school of wafer thin tropical fish glide smugly past me singing Judy Garland songs vacuously .I surface like a whale,un-elegantly and spluttering and spit my snorkel out onto the sun-bleached dry lawn. Diving for gold is a fools game dontcha know?. My tattoos grow lighter as my mongrel skin turns darker as the summer beats on. I thrive, an animal built to survive and prosper in the heat. My hair winds like sodden snakes, nipples pucker beneath the thinnest of bikini tops in the wicked wind. Every pore is open and feeding. I keep baby food in the freezer,I imbibe liters of water.

I stay low and move hard.

Do you want me? Can you pick up my scent ?

The pills take you up drop you down,every pore open and I am up all night. Anti-psychotics you don’t say? I love the way that looks typed on my permanent record.

Could almost make a cowgirl cum. Get’s me chemically wet.

Do you want me baby?

I know you do…scratching at my dirty window.

I listen to Ween and practice my Bass. My falsetto is dating Chris Cornell’s ugly twin brother. My heart is carved from a perfect ruby. I dance on Neil Fallon’s black sand. Cuban heeled and long of sinewy  limb. Asleep under a shroud of red velvet and gardenia soaked  perspiration. I taste your teeth when we kiss. Let me fill your lack, let me straddle your void.

In my brass cage I sit on my swing listless and admire my reflection in the rust warped mirror.

When we fucked I used to push back so hard that it would leave you breathless. You will never find another girl like me. As long as we both live we will be ok. 11 and a half inches slammed  into crying whores and I laugh on the other side of the world.

You licked the aniseed Motorhead tattoo on my little finger. You lay dead flowers at my feet. I weave a million stories into smoke and torn pages. I die every time I close my eyes.

Show me this gland. I will eat it raw.

I take the 5th amendment and craft it into a paper plane. It sails over the dock and as the judge reaches for his gavel the stenographer stifles a giggle behind a cheaply ringed hand.

Court is adorned. Abandoned.

“I heard that you like the bad girls,honey is that true?”-Lana Del Ray.

Till next we meet ? Don’t take any wooden nickles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emerald.

(  just click your heels together three times……)

As we held hands on the train he said to me that there really isn’t that much to him. I watched our long bass mauling fingers make out under the worst lighting known to mankind ,added up the numbers of the carriage and begged to differ. I told him that he hides in plain sight. That there is a bruise around him, like a shroud.

This is not an unappealing quality.

“It takes one to know one “ I sighed and rested my head on his shoulder,the coarse wool of his plaid jacket scratching my cheek and watched the pulse beat in his neck.

I like watching him walk away. The length of him striding up the platform halfway between my house and his. He see’s me halfway home and it touches me that he cares enough to do that. The journey is too short.

I wonder when I am going to see you again. If you wonder the same about me.

( the great and powerful oz…)

I don’t want to scare you away. You are cool with me and for that reason amongst innumerable others I want more. Greedy for you. Time. I want time with you away from everything and everyone but I don’t know how to ask for the pleasure of your company without cramping your style ( the cowardly lion….)

There are songs that make me tingle because they remind me of you.

Teenaged Heart. Poison Heart. Saint Dee-Dee. I know that you would understand…..

If this was a journal entry it would be written in pink glitter pen and yes,there is a high probability that the lower case  “I’s” would be dotted with hearts. (sigh)  .I am hopeless. I tell Lady Thraxx that I am never not going to feel this way about things, I rant that if one does then it is giving up ,blah,blah,blah. She smirks at what she refers to as my  ” Black baptist preacher level enthusiasm”  and sings ” This Magic Moment” and then goes back to hunting for offensive patches on the Internet for our Hesher jackets. My favorite thus far have been ” My boyfriends wife hates me”. “Will fuck for beer.” and the jewel in the crooked crown  “I wouldn’t fuck you for practice.”

It feels so ,god ,I don’t know… swoony ? Yeah… It only ever comes around rarely as I am a rather  fickle creature of very specific and exacting tastes but I swore that I would never give up on desire. On romance. I always knew that I would take long breaks from it due to heartbreak  ,life kicking the snot out of my high stepping ass, the rarity of appropriate creatures to crush on  ( please refer back to the specific taste line above, thank you. ) but if you let it go ? Crappy grown up civilian  life wins. Sucks the color out of your existence and your fragile soul.

Unacceptable on every level. No dice baby. Not on my watch.

Some days I question if  I even have a heart ( the tin man….)  ,that my feelings have no feeling just an absence of space within ,crammed with dust and rogue vortexes searching for unreachable  ledges and tender  prey in that order. But the butterflies the pleasure of your quiet complex company provides and beating off in the shower thinking about you beneath me silent and tight ? Oh honey, that I can do.

And so here I find myself wondering why we always want to see behind the emerald curtain. Why we want to know how it all works, what is on the inside,the mechanics, the machinations, which has been the enfeebled defense of more than one double digit IQ serial killer ( “I take the twinkie defense your honor….”)

Its 4.30 in the morning ,I don’t know if I can do this right now…..’course I can.

( when are you gonna come down? / when are you going to land? / i should have stayed on the farm / i should have listened to my old man……)

So it’s all a Yellow Brick Road. ( Don’t get me started on 70’s Elton John,we will be here all night, je adore….quel sigh…)  We are all heading somewhere and to something. Sometimes someone if we are lucky and able. But we just cant help ourselves can we ? Always rushing always wanting to see what happens next. Rushing our way into forgone conclusions and then asking ” Why? “ when we know the answer ( the scarecrow…..)

The human condition is a real motherfucker.

Thank Elvis I have my ruby slippers. They look rather fetching with my Budweiser bikini and grey Russian rabbit fur hat. I like dressing up on laundry day.

What?

So sue me or take a goddamn picture.

I figure for the 1st time in my life that if you are around? Well that it’s good enough and I don’t need to unravel you. That I can just be. Just happy to think about you stomping all over town in fancy hand tooled boots collecting every eye as you stroll on by. A Rolling Stones riff with a swagger and a smile so sweet it makes my teeth ache.  And I like the shape and weight of your words. I like the measure of your responses when everyone else is talking just to make noise.

Gives me a heart attack. I read that it costs $81.65 in sodium penthanol to kill a prisoner on death row. I tell you things like this and you bet me that you can win me a toy in an arcade game.

I can’t get a read .It’s frustrating and intoxicating in equal measure. You never really make a traditional move ,your eyes are never found on me but you are there. Present. In the dark I feel the weight of your hand on my hip and it makes me weak with desire as we watch the band beat the shit out of the night. Hold my hand tight  right through a show. I want to be where you are. I bounce around like a tattooed satellite and am drawn back into your lanky orbit.

Is that ok?

When we are together I talk too much at first and then I lapse into your sweet stagger time.You feline,I canine. You weave effortless while I run in circles and beat out a tattoo with my tail that gives me away every time ( “Hey! Hey! Hey!!!…)  You slow me down and it’s good. I like your pace. It’s so much cooler than my adhd bullshit. You are opiated with a sense of self and quite confidence. Well that’s how I see I and that’s what I chose to believe. I think that there is plenty to you.  Our steps measure. We keep up. Our corpses fit. I think that I want you around. Do you want me? I think you do….The proof is in your presence.

I hope that I am not wrong.

The air around you shimmers like an oasis.

The cut of your jib I dig. I found myself curled around you and I fit .Rare breed ain’t you?  I fit and I melted into your scent and shape. You reached for me in the dark of the next day cloistered away from the world, in your sleep you searched me out and it set me on fire.

Stuck to me like fuck fueled napalm, When you opened your eyes you saw me with that ocular contact that you grace upon me so rarely. You chilled me to my core. Hair like a brunette storm around our faces, riding you and I drank you, lips under mine. Red lit, our mutual friends new album soft on the stereo to cloak heavy breathing and skin seeking skin with an urgency that I never would have guessed at on your behalf and it flattered me into shocked silence  .I came shaking. I touched your tattoos with my tongue and blacked out, stars falling. The sweat crept the length of the the bent beads of my spine like a cat burglar down a drain pipe.

Got out of bed trying to be cool and almost face planted. So much for cool. Jesus.

Surrender. Do you wanna? Shall we? Could we? We could fuck on the white flag  ,phosphorus staining the the air, bodies on the battlefield and I want you. If your kiss was a song ? A sound? It would be ” When the levee breaks” by Led Zeppelin.

Can I tell you something ?

From the first time you ignored me? Well, I always knew that you were exceptional.