Thursday midmorning: The local stationers finally got in the Uni-ball Micro pens I love and my hand can't stop writing, like my words hit the paper in Nikes.
Yesterday was very rough. I took a huge unexpected blow to the bank account, and that on top of these tax papers demanding my attention sent me down a very dark road. Where all the sacrifices I was making led nowhere but deeper into a hole and all the faith and good spirits I might muster came to nothing in the end and I'd been a superstitious fool to believe otherwise.
And the rough day carried through into a very rough sleep. I awoke repeatedly drenched in sweat. Hot flashes and bone pain.
I dreamed. First I traveled over a lumpy landscape, similar to a topographical map. I stayed with a younger couple and it was very unpleasant. The wife seemed defeated, oppressed, while the husband lavished me with affection and I only wanted to flee. We traveled together for a while. I sat on the roof of their four-wheel-drive vehicle holding tight to the luggage rack. I felt no fear, even though the husband kept leaving the road "accidentally"--from inattention--and heading for the dips and bumps all around. I seemed to watch all this movement from overhead even as we traveled on the ground.
Then I stayed with a woman friend unknown to me in life. She was a kind of receptive blank, a representation of "Friend." I talked and talked, telling her all about my dead relatives, my genetic heritage. I confided my need for a counsellor of some kind to help me cope with all the losses, help me disengage from the grief that confined me like a straitjacket that was only growing tighter.
She knew exactly where to take me--to a friend of hers "who is Indian, too!" And so I went with her to a dirty avenue that resembled Alvarado Street in L.A.--dingy storefronts, hucksters and con artists, hustlers and panhandlers. We entered a shop. The owner had just awakened and was setting up for the day. He was tall and thin, uncombed oily hair and dirty beard. (He was played here, in fact, by the same character actor who played the Eastern high priest who carried the golden bowl that would receive Lily Tomlin's soul in the Steve Martin comedy All of Me.) He wore rumpled second-hand clothes, and if he belonged to any tribe it must have been a tribe of Israel. He bustled around the shop, which was oddly clean and organized, the walls and shelves painted a shiny white. In addition to second-hand goods he sold religious and occult and "magical" trinkets--crosses between voodoo power objects and cheap bordertown souvenirs, bright and colorful and feathered. Bells. He advised people who wanted to curse someone, or defend themselves from a curse or hex, on which objects would best serve their purposes. This confused me; it seemed irresponsible. But he only provided the information they asked for, without judging.
Every time I sat down to begin my "session" with this man we were interrupted by a customer or a phone call or a task. He kept leaping away to take care of things. I never got to unburden myself. Yet he seemed sincerely interested and he believed he could help me. I got the impression that all the sham concealed a very real healer.
While I waited for him I leaned down to inspect some object on a lower shelf and I felt the presence of an old lover next to me. I turned my head and John's face was there. I kissed his mouth impulsively, regretted it immediately. But after that John was very much in the building, walking around the edges of things, inspecting the merchandise--he found a saucepan that would complete a set I have, and he held it up to show me. He was waiting, it seemed, for an outcome. I understood that I would go back to John, that I'd be healed soon. And even though it might feel like giving in or giving up at first, it would be all right.
John waited now in a parked vehicle outside. The disreputable "doctor" took X-ray pictures of my chest. "We need to locate all the scars on your heart," he said, "so we can show them to the real doctors later on."
I liked him very much, and I believed in him even though he was a fraud, and he gave me a precious object he'd inherited from his mother--a small depression-glass thing, purplish pressed glass you pulled on a cord and it rolled over the ground behind you. But as soon as I stepped from the shop the object shattered. I felt so guilty. I tried to explain it all to John as we drove away.
1:25:39 PM 
|
