So why else would this 45 year old lunatic named Ron (rhymes with cracked pecan) be clutching a bottle of rose wine in my mitt, the other fingering my last Camel, hoping Mr. Bik has one last light in his reservoir, the arrowhead in my pocket gouging my thigh as I sit down on Kashmir’s steps, proud of the double-breasted suit coat I’m wearing from 20 years ago (don’t fashions tend to cycle?), unless I’d been truly smitten?  Since childhood.

I who am a failure at most endeavors have been buzzing my blind date’s doorbell.  I who have nothing have been tapping at her door.  I who have received the slap-on label narcissistic prick from my soon to be EXwife am mucking in rivers over my head.  I who am a kayaker and an archer feel I must have already shot my boat full of arrows.  Aren’t women famous for changing their switchback minds?

Is my lady thinking I’m just another Otis, who screwed his plantation negro,–promised her marriage and vacations in Israel, but then realized, yes!, his dragon from inside her Skokie mansion would strip him of his last pair of silk drawers?

Or has Kashmir’s son Roger, whom she said is now a flame-carrying black Muslim, returned from college, and wailed, “Ma, don’t tell me you’re about to date another white devil!”

Maybe I’m feeling low as a night crawler trying to tie the strings in his hiking boot because of my Big Affliction.  Should I have kept that doctor’s appointment Dragon made for me, before she kicked me off HER patio?

Sitting on that stoop, fat ass feeling the cool of the concrete, hands cradling my lead head, I’m wondering if I haven’t gone as Lonny Tunes as my Aunt Myrtle, who drove her nifty coop 2-seater all the way to the golden shores of California, seeking her lost Jim. I imagine her spiraling up the Rockies, singing, “Love is the most important thing there is.”

But look what happened to Myrtle #1.  Last time I visited #2 in Minneapolis, she didn’t recognize her favorite nephew.  Should I have rung her doorbell with the abalone shell pressed to my ear?

Maybe not.  I was with my freshman girlfriend, Kay.  Miss soybean queen’s favorite words were, “Oh golly gee.  I’m in college to broaden my horizons.”  Me explain family history to the most popular cheerleader at Wartburg College? Don’t your DNA spiral contain some faces you’d just as soon hide?  So no sir ree Bob, I said nothen, for I was after the pompoms packed behind Kay’s tight pink sweater.

My hospitable aunt invited us strangers inside anyway, and began to whip us up, in her squeeze tube kitchen, some creamed tuna on toast.

Am still waiting for it to arrive on a blue plate.

So Kay got her first appetizer to a course named Abnormal Psychology 241.  That is to say, what it’s like to live without half your cerebral cortex.  But that was back in the 1950s.  In this modern age, we’re much more sophisticated.  We use, instead, a chemical knife.

The twin cities are still split apart by a river. Can’t help but wonder about the cruelty of that scalpel.

Since we’re dong talk therapy, please remind me of something dear friend.  Should I ever get the chance to meet in the flesh this Ms. Mahogany Kashmir Dubonet Moses, bit off my earlobe, whatever, but remind me to act normal.

Or should I return to my penthouse in the clouds, and lick my mid life wounds?

Hell no! This hippie won’t go!!

What’s keeping me determined to get through Kashmir’s door is the fact if I don’t act now, I never will.  As had happened after my 3 calls to freedom, my dominant right hand will argue his brother out of pursuing further this black pearl of great value.

So, on my knees, I’m pressing my eye to Lady’s Kashmir’s keyhole.  Maybe through snooping I can learn more about this mysterious woman of color.

But one word of apology before I describe the puzzling scene I’m look at.  Others could afford opinions, but not me.  Taught to lay low in the Iowa weeds, cockleburs pricking my rear, mom always lectured me before I stepped out into public, stocking hat pinned to my ears, “Ronnie, whatever you do, don’t talk about politics, religion, or…land a Goshen, sex.”

I am 4 decades later about to break that taboo, and I’m sure I will offend your delicate ears with my gibberish.  The thought of not being nice and bland as a bowl of generic oatmeal is ding dong scary.

Dear friend, I’d rather you revel to me your Chicago interior.  What’s your traffic like, as you stand at the intersection of State and Madison, under the big Carson Perry Scott clock, your thoughts ticking, your emotions sweeping them away, when your lover arrives, saying, “Baby, I missed you.  Gimme some sugar.”

I’m startled by what I see glowing inside Kashmir’s foyer: Lacquered Elephants—three of them—a mama, papa, and baby, tails holding tails, but mama in the lead, are marching purposefully across an inlaid-wood table supported by two huge wheels.

Shinning above this altar is…I guess…a dark version of the Virgin Mary.  She has a compassionate look, which seems to be saying, “I’m glad you’ve come. Calm your fears, for you’ve arrived at right time at the right place.”

Look, I’m no theologian.  Once the gloom and doom grim German Lutherans got through weeping and gnashing my teeth and pitch forking my torn soul with their devils, Ronnie swore off “organ iced” religion forever.  But this Ron sure as hay bales don’t believe in accidents.  And I trust the tugging I feel in my guts.  Isn’t this Ms Dubonet saying something to us by having this altar and Mother of All greet everyone who enters her mansion?  Please help me out here for I’m truly puzzled.

Just as I am about my life-long flirtation with Catholicism.  See, We Grims were taught to hate a trinity of things: Mother Mary worshippers, Jews, and people of suspicious color, but not necessarily in that order.  Whichever crossed our path first would force us to draw from our holsters our machine guns and splatter them with Bible quotes.

So of course in high school, Ron Reb that I still am, I fell in love with a Friday fish eater named Mary.  Devout.  We didn’t French kiss.  We’d sit on the couch at the end of the evening with her kind mother—all the statues lit by candles.  It caused ripples through out our saintless congregation.  I was hoping for excommunication, but that never happened, so at age 12, I did the deed myself, and renamed myself Ron.

In college, having never met the big-nosed satins who murdered Jesus, this Iowa farm boy journeyed to New York City, stayed the summer with the Jews in Far Rockaway, and found there one of the families I left home to discover.

When I graduated from the University of Iowa with an MFA in scribbling nonsense, moved to Chicago, I was hired as an inner-city teacher by Ed Dixon, a devout Catholic back then.  In him I found one of the fathers I had left home to discover.

I became part of a mix of fallen priests and nuns big-footed Ed had gathered around him.  He’d even had the decency to sprinkle in some sweet Jews and a gay or two.  Then with the seasoning of all those Hispanic and black students….  What a delicious stew!

If this fool does step off the cliff again and falls for this Ms. Mahogany Kashmir Dubonet Moses (are each of her names the saints she prays to?), do you think I should blame Uncle Leo?

Reared a strict Presbyterian, he caused a quakeshake in the Waters clan when he married a mackerel snapper named Louise, who hums all the time.  You can hear her commen before she rounds a corner.  We Protestants still suspect she be bee buzzen with those on high.

When Uncle Leo and Louise first invited Ronnie up to their cabins in Minnesota, to square dance and fish at the Dancing Water’s Resort, he was dying to attend their candle-flickering church in the woods.  He’d waited all of his life for this,– to see what those Roman devils were really up to, and he was not disappointed.  Saints and sacraments galore, many he’d never heard of before.  Rituals as mysterious as the ones Ms. Ebony Princess and he had performed in his knotty pine bedroom.

There in the darkness stood a room where you confess your sins, the priest and you separated by a screen which he imagined cast the shadows of your wrongs upon the wall, so that, as in a movie, you could better see how you’d missed the mark.  Uncle Leo whispered about something called Extreme Unction, which was given to you as you lay dying.  He said the saint’s job was to usher you up the stairway to heaven, so that, if you’ve been good, you could glow there with God.

It was all so thrilling.  Each saint was honored by its own candle and stood in its own corner of the church.  A mahogany wood Mother Mary seemed to rein over it all, giving comfort to her suffering son.

The drama reminded Ronnie of the beings who populated his inner world.  And it reminded him sadly of home, where his Madonna mother held her always twitching son.

Jesus agonized for 3 days on the cross.  Terry was going on 33 years when I tried to convince him to come down from his tree.  So far I have not loosened any of our nails.

I confess part of the allure of this Ms. Dubonnet is that she’s Catholic—she told me so our 4^th the phone call.  She and her friend Evelyn Green attend Saint Mary’s Oneness Church at least twice a week.  So I tried to close this elusive fish by saying, “Should I park my 1967 Plymouth Valiant out in front, or will Saint Christopher direct me to the parking lot?”

Am I a closet mackerel snapper?  Is Kashmir’s forbidden allure the Divine’s way of enticing me toward the opening doors of Mother Church?  Is this sexy lady offering me a second chance to enter, since in childhood I found Father Church so empty of love and imagination?  Was Uncle Leo a Presbyterian predestined to marry a fish eater, so I might follow in his footsteps?  Am I fated to stretch tribal consciousness beyond the breaking point and become involved with a rich Catholic of color?

Whatever, I’m not suggesting here which religion is better.  Still ringing in my ears are Friday’s tuna eaters shouting, because I’m not a member of The One And Only True Church, my parents were never married, and thus I’m a bastard.  We organ iced religious folks seem to hate each other in equal measure.  So mark this off as just another childhood recollection.

Uncle Leo was probably about my age when he reveled to me that lakes sometimes flip themselves over.  What’s been hidden at the bottom comes boiling to the surface.  Then you get the chance to see the skeletons of old trees, gar, snakes, autos from old Al Capone robberies, lost selves and other shadowy stuff once secreted in the deeps.

You’re hearing from a man who has little choice about entertaining his opposites in his parlor.  Where once my tongue was silent, now it’s loud.  Where once I liked to hide low in the Iowa weeds, now I’ve taken to the high road and am yammering like a New Yorker about my smoggy interior.  Where once I was an introvert licking my midlife bruises beneath a Chevy with a rusted muffler, now I feel like a frantic moviemaker trying to direct a cast of thousand.

And I have the balls to believe my films will be of interest to you.  I fear I am becoming the bore and the braggart I once so despised.  It’s as if the silent self I’ve been all my life is dying, slipping down into some Minnesota lake like a weighted corpse, and now I’m undergoing some weird life review, which I feel compelled to share with you.

In short, I fear I’m becoming Bega.

Although toward the end of this trial to find a way through my Beloved’s door, you will be amazed at the suggestion my shadow brother made to me.

Father, am I ever motivated to change my colors.  Just this morning, sitting up in penthouse #25, the crows brushing the windows with wings of morning gold, I came upon this last year’s birthday photo.  I immediately titled it Hair Frankenstein and the 3 Graces.

Everyone dressed in blue was born May 2.  See my sister of beautiful colors to your left, kind of propping me up with her left hand?  (Perhaps I’d guzzled a few too many Manhattans the night before.) This Catholic of color was born a bull same as me, in the flowers of May, 1943.

If I were a woman, I’d want to be June Mary Heard.  I’d always be a lady (never use cuss words, as I’m prone to), be so intelligent I can research and teach any subject of my choosing, be sterner than I am with my own wild crowd.  She is firm but gentle, and when she walks into the classroom, all eyes seek hers, and the voices cease, because they know she is The Portrait of a Lady.

Julie Sharpe (far right) and I were hired together 20 years ago, and it was friendship at first sight.  I can never repay the debts I owe to her—helping me move up off the floor when my back went into spasms, championing my art by giving me her honest reactions, always with a gracious sense of humor and smile, –a true daughter of Venus, but alas unlucky at love. (So we have so much in common.)

Julie calls herself calls herself  “a practicing Catholic.”  And I respond by ejaculating, “Right on sister.  And I’m a practicing agnostic.”

Without her, I may never rolled my old black wheel of fortune, and called up Kashmir, as bonk bonk go the swinging steel balls of causation.  Be patient my dear confessor, as the elephants of my memory take me backward, to earlier embarrassments.

So when this know nothing got blown out of Dragon’s house, and I ended up in the Deluxe Motel, the sheets stained with other folks maps of paradise (please forgive them father, for they know not what they do), my own devils started taunting me, demanding equal opportunities.  And employment.

I went through a couple of weeks which I call Libido on the Loose.

First step was a haircut. Formerly, my ex-wife used to cut my kinks with the bowl I used for marinating chickens.  She used a #2 clipper, and the buzz in my ear was ferocious.  I worried I’d loose an ear or three, but always complimented her on the results.  It all falls into the mud puddle of the Naas family motto MAKE DUE WITH WHAT YOU GOT.  The money we saved on my haircuts went to paying off her 3 therapists and X-Mas debts from 5 years ago.

But this Bridgeport barber and I soon became palsy walsy.  Though he’s married, you should hear his sexual adventures my dear confessor.  His story is similar to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, except it’s told from the male’s point of view.  Seems my new head shearer can only get his kinks to drop through trysts with other married women.

When I said I’m not interested in that kind of action, he seemed wounded.  But lightened up when I asked, did he know of any watering holes were any unmarried, lonely women congregate to slug down daiquiris, and he said well of course, there’s a bar in Hickory Hills, where, quote, “You can’t miss.”

There must be something seriously wrong with me, for although I am an excellent archer (really, I’ve won contests and still own a bow, if Dragon hasn’t smashed it around a telephone pole) none of my arrows struck anyone’s heart.  The only women at that bar who would talk to me were….well…if Hickory Hills finest were to pull them over, they’d still be boo hooing in the drunk tank.

So woe is me, I turn into their shrink, and for payment, I’m expected to buy their drinks. All I hear about from the two of them is more UNnews from the Iron Triangle.  Co-dependent A is still in “love” with her former husband, and she performed therapeutic role play on yours truly, alternately slapping my face and then kissing my cheeks.   “Oh darlen, oh darlen, what mistakes we both made,” she moans while neurotic unLady B is a constant blur to the phone in the foyer, calling her Don Amiche, seeing when they can coochie coochie in his house.  “Just tell your bitch wife to leave.  You don’t love her anyways.”

But by the end of our liquid repast, all these soused beauties can do is coo, “Oh Ron, you’re soooo nice.  Come back and talk to us again.”

So I drive my junkyard yellow Plymouth Valiant to this cowboy bar in Worth.  You exit left off Harlem and there’s this long lane jammed with pickup trucks, and the music is reaching me, “Silver threads and golden needles can not mend this heart of mine, though I drowned myself in the warm glow of your wine.”  The favorite western song I used to play till the grooves began to smoke at the Silver Spur, Iowa City.  Seems like a good omen.  Or so I thought.

Don’t I know something about Angus, Herefords, Shorthorn, and Holsteins with big hanging tits?   Don’t I dress in jeans, wear fancy cowboy shirts when I can afford them, got on hiking boots?  Don’t I dream like Shane of riding off into the sunset, leaving 45 years of my wasted life behind?  Don’t that make me a bone knee fide cowboy?

I enter that joint packed with urban cow punchers, and I can’t find a seat, can’t even squeeze in my order for a Miller Heavy, and though there are cowgirls galore, dressed in jeans that display all their watering holes, gaily engaged in chatter with cowpokes, I swear there’s not one lonely heifer in the crowd.  Standing, my fingers twisted through my belt loops, feeling like a cow pie drawing flies, I finally spot one lone cow rustler when the members at her table arise to dance.

I pounce.  I gave her my arm, and a head movement like “This way to the barn.”  (Real cowboys like Jean Autry are decidedly nonverbal.) She looks me over like I’m a Hereford with hoof and mouth disease…but what the hay, gets up reluctantly as though still trying to digest this morning’s caster oil, and followers me on stage where they are doing….  Line dancing!  Shit, what the hell is that?  And they take it seriously, cowboy boots nears trampling me and my gal…she joining them…near trompling and spurring this dumb dork under the stage.

So I did what I do best.  I drove my bonded together Prince Valiant back home to penthouse #25 and began to contemplate the many wrinkles in my navel.

Father, you need to understand how uncomfortable this new state of consciousness was for me.  To desire hotly any woman whose mercury registers above freezing is an awesome responsibility.   They were all potential targets for my quiver of arrows (which apparently need sharpening).  Being a lover with a loose libido is truly hard and demanding work.  Though I suppose it’s a mortal sin, I salute anyone who is.

Step #2.   I decide I’ll gain more confidence if I buy me a new set of underwear.  I dog trot into a store, and there stands The Sears Underwear Saleswoman.   This light-skinned black sister, let’s say 30, cropped hair, not coils like Princess Vicksburg’s, but motherly, full packed body, what the boys back in Junior high would call, “built like a brick shit house” she takes a personal interest into my researches into Jockey shorts—on sale of course, in the oddest of locations, a shopping center in west Oak Lawn.

I remember thinking she’d better get the frick out of this neighborhood before night falls, or the FBI will be looking for her body in the Cook County Forest Preserves, maybe near where I found my first arrowhead.

So I’m pawing around the bins, looking for some extra larges which I hope will hold up my uneven balls, yet not so big they won’t provide any support and I’ll walk around dribbling 2 lopsided basketballs, when I look at her looking at me.  And it dawns on this poor repressed sap, she’s interested in yours truly.  I don’t need a re read of Julius Fast’s Body Language to tell me that thrilling news.  And I recall from ages ago, just one look is all it takes, for the body and the heart—they are incapable of lies.

And as we search the bins together, her voice laced with black magic, I have this instant fantasy: she’s back with me in the heights of my penthouse, and we’re modeling underwear together (I’d had her sneak over to the lady’s department and with my maxed-out credit card, she bought for herself silk so sheer you can see all her….) Need I paint in the picture any further for you, father?

Yes, yes, I ended up scribbled out a note torn from Mr. Meade Memo with my phone number on it.  Pleeeze tell me I didn’t scribble, “Got the hots for you babe.  I live at 7117 West 93rd street, penthouse #25.  Take the elevator up to my pad, and we’ll stretch some elastic together.”

Sometimes its peachy keen to have handwriting can’t nobody read.

So next day I’m sitting at my professor’s desk at Olive-Harvey College, working on a cluster for my journal.  The center circle asks, “What’s next, stupid?”  And as I’m attaching balloons, hoping to tap into my right hemisphere with some really creative thinking, in walks Mary, trailing perfume that must smell like tropical flowers from the beaches of Mexico. She greets me with, “Te me quiero verde.  Verde verde, como te amo verde.”  (That’s the poet Garcia Lorca saying, how much I want you green.  Green, green, I much I want you green.)

Father, you gotta hear her say that in Castilian, the vowels rolling off her tongue like ball bearing coated in 40 weight motor oil.  Mary’s a stickler when it comes to the purity of Spanish, claiming what’s spoken on the streets is gutter talk.  And one she translated one of my poems into this mother language, and wow dude, it was so groovy, I forgot for a minute I’m a failure as a verse a flier.

It’s then I had visions of committing the Unforgivable Sin.

Soon my Mary and me were traveling to Mexico on a train, sharing the upper bunk, my new underwear showing signs of strain from being stretched off so much.  We arrive and I’m immediately welcomed by her tribe, a procession of some Catholic holiday winding through the market-strewn street.  One chico with a brass tuba is blaring in Espanola, “Welcome home to Mother Mary territory.”

So crows, always on the look out for favorable omens, me and my brown love decide to live in Mexico among the flowers, and have regular gloats at a local cantina Mary’s brother Hose knows about.  And as we slug back a few margaritas, and howl as the idiot box shows us Chicago snows and traffic pile ups, we decide the time is ripe for making footprints on the sands of Acapulco.  And instead of smoking its sweet and golden grasses (I don’t do that no mo.  This hippie dippy got head problems enough.), I’d find me at last the warm and accepting family I’d left home to discover.

And sweet Mary’s mother, who grinds corn with her toes, to fill tacos with spiced meats and home-grown cilantro, she no longer calls me a gringo loco as her daughter and me work to get the rest of my poetry translated.  It sounds so ding dong good, each Saturday night at the town square, I read my songs beneath a statue of Che Revera, even the pigeons giving me a break, the audience ooohing and aweing, and filling up my violin case with pesos.

And wasn’t my Mary fair game?  Rule #1 in sacred crow law:  never have sex with a student.  (If you do, karma will rip you a new bunghole.  I got 50 dozen 11 stories to prove that premise.)  But she was graduating, off to a university in the fall.  Why not give this brown-skinned bi-lingual a chance to discover the wild countries that reside beyond the face of Dr. Nash?

I suppose I woke up as that delicious fantasy played itself out. Mary was a virgin.  (I know that from reading her journals and essays from the 4 classes she’d taken from me.)  With my libido on the prowl, what if I did something I’d later regret—my sap face forever the picture she’d wear in the locket around her neck?  What if this 20 year old wanted children?  What if one turned out to be another twitching Terry?

I’d chanced Steffen would be born with the proper number of toes, his spinal cord not twisted, and when I witness him popping out of the womb, though all that blood, his head lopsided, but later turned out to be perfectly healthy, I made a vow.  Thank you Holy Mother for favors granted.  I won’t test your patience again, and ask for another miracle.

So it was onward as this unChristian solder went on his crusade to attach his loose libido to some object—hopefully one who grooves on the Beatles and the Doors, the Rollen Stones, and of course that chameleon—the poet Bob Dylan.

I’d read about singles dances in the Southtown Economist, so off I charged to one in Alsip.  But though I held a dozen women in my arms, or did the jitterbug to such classics as “Can’t get no satisfaction”, I couldn’t seem to crack the code where hundreds of love-hungry people are mingled together.

Perhaps I was too intense.  I wanted to drop the rituals, the pastimes and the games and leap right into intimacy.  I asked questions like, “So what’s your views on romantic love?  Is there just one Mr. Right, or is at all accidental who spreads your toast with creamed tuna in the morning?”  Or, even deadlier, “Carl Jung says, should I become infatuated with you, I’d just be projecting my own anima on to you.   Or should you take a shine to me, the movie you’d see is your own animus cast upon my sour puss.  So what’s your views on this inner theater?”

To say I wasn’t a hit at these dances, me approaching a table of dollies—them all suddenly scurrying off to the power room, to try to pee—is to use understate.  (a rhetorical devise I’m not prone to.)

Permit me one more observation.  With so many of the woman I tried to talk to, I could see wounds in their eyes, and though they were here to Meet Mr. Right, they were also here to prove that I was just another Mr. Wrong.  And with my batch of blemishes, it took them about 2 seconds of instant classification when it came to this woeful Lone Ranger.

Classic approach-avoidance conflict I noted, as I glanced around the lonely ballroom made lonelier because, though there were to my eyes lets say 60 women I yearned to be intimate with, not one would let me through the steel door of her self-fulfilling script.  None were able to encounter who I am in the present moment.  I was two-stepping with ghosts from the past.

Till my eyes spotted Carol.  I wish I were Van Gogh and could do justice to her portrait.  She sat alone, unusual for a woman at a singles rupture, and seemed perfectly content with her own company.  Which was radiant.  Picture this—a fully-developed woman whose almost an albino, hair a shade more blonde than the Honey Girl I married (before she died). To my eye tastefully dressed–no gaud, not too much war paint on her face, everything matching from gold earrings to buckle on her shoes.   Composed—almost bored with what she’s seeing.

Look, you can think I’m just another Aunt Myrtle if you want to, but it’s as though she were waiting for me to sit down in the second chair.

I didn’t presume of course, but asked if she wanted to dance.  She did but to me her smile said, “Let’s get this ritual over with so we can return to this table and really talk.”  Though we did a two-step, my imaginations says it was “Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool,” the experience was….austere.  Though she had the equipment that could melt the wanger of a frozen mule at a thousand paces, her body broadcasted that she was a-sexual.

I suppose on retrospect, I should call her Athena.

So we sit at the table and the communication continues, with words that is.

“This man I’ve been dating for 2 years, he insists he wants to have sex with me,” she says as an opener, her lips forming an oval of disgust, “but I tell him, want some whore, then attend one of these dances, or shag some lost heifer at that Irish bar on Cicero.

“So Carol, I’m not sure why you’re here,” I say.  “Your body language says your bored with this whole non-affair.”

“I’m a Montessori teacher,” she says with pride.  “I believe the brain needs constant stimulation, so I give my students the benefit of great art.” She pauses to glance around.  “But this dance sucks,” she says, crashing out a cigarette, cherry lipstick on the white, totally enticing.  “So what’s your story?”

I give her the generic form: man just separated, headed for a quickie divorce, a Russian whose libido now seems overly stimulated, and can she provide me with the location of that Irish bar she just mentioned?”

We hit it off.  She laughs.  I guess it takes a Montessori teacher to appreciate what passes for my sense of Eros, who’d love to shoot his arrow toward a bull’s eye inside Carol I’d rather not mention.

Then both her hands cover mine, and the sensation is that of dry ice.  “Let me give you some advice,” she says, and suddenly I’m wondering if I’m visiting with the oracle at Delphi.  “You’ve just stepped out of the starting gate.  Beware falling head over hiking boots for the first woman who hooks your heart.”  She makes a face like she’s spitting out a stone into a pit, before she echoes, “Though you may become infatuated, she’s not The One.”

I wasn’t sure how to withdraw from that table. Do I bow Zen style?  Do I do a full prostration on the dance floor, certain I’ve just received cold news from this austere virginal goddess?  I wanted to kiss her on the forehead, and whisper inside an albino ears, “Thanks.”

Do I regret now that I didn’t?  How long am I prepared to camp out at Kashmir’s door?  Honest injun, after I spoke to the Mississippi sparkler named Kashmir on that old rotary phone, I went to Sportmart and bout us 2 zip together sleeping bags.

They weren’t even on sale.

They’re in my Chevy Astro van as we speak.  Along with a backpackers stove, freeze dried food, pots and pans that mate together perfectly, and 2,789 dreams.

Carol may be right.  I’ve fallen and maybe this Kashmir is not my Princess Vicksburg.  Freud says what motivates homo sapiens is the pleasure principle.  Jung a process he calls Individuation.  Frankel—the search for meaning.  Adler, power.  (See Dragon for details.)  Eric Berne—our need to receive strokes and program our time.  But as for this mid life galoot, what I got hid inside my Vasque Sundowner boots is a drive that overcomes them all.  It rhymes with tenacity and hails by the name CURIOSITY.  This crow’s just got to know.  Dig?

So while we’re killing some time peering though the keyhole in my door, let me continue saying my penances.  After those dances with despair, the next week end found me off on another bachelor’s night out on the town.

My eyes were soon caught by some neon on 111^th.  Once Prince Valiant kept re-firing long after I’d pulled out the keys, I entered the door to see…maybe a hundred golden agers doing beer barrel polkas and two stepping  to “I remember the night of the Tennessee waltz, when my best friend stole my sweet heart from me.”

My mother’s favorite song, actually.  How many times had I asked her, sitting at that kitchen island, her flippen pork cutlets or Rocky Mountain oysters (Don’t ask what they are Father, if you’re a trifle squeamish.), “Mom, how will I know if she’s The One.”

Mom, sizzling just cut pig nuts in bacon grease, would always answer, “You just know.”

Wish mom was here now.  I’d ask her, do you gotta get your nuts cut off first, before the The One appears?

I recognized of few of the ancient ones at the dance club—clients I visit every Friday, for I am the Route 2 Meals on Wheels Driver.  Only I had no fish swimming in Styrofoam boxes for them that night, only the desire to….well? well? be touched by another mammal.

Father, how many Hail Marys do I gotta say, but even the dollies over 80 bubbled like vintage Champaign inside the crystal glasses of these blue eyes.

When my son Steffen and I were having nightly sessions at the Deluxe Motel, trying to catch up on the years we lost, because I had sacrificed my only son on the altar of Dragon, just to keep the peace, he’d said, “Dad, you place a high value on woman.”  His face registering disgust, he’d added, “I expect I’ll be seeing ONE OF THEM in your life, soon.”

But really father, I too have my standards.  What kind of example would I be setting for my son, when he opened the door to room #59 at the Deluxe, and says, “Dad, let’s chat,” and I pop out from under the stained sheets, and try to explain to him why I’ve just took up with Gradma Moses?

All in all, I had a busy few weeks.

So the next day after teaching class (making sure I keep on a pair of mule blinders, look no female student anywhere lower than their eyes, avoiding poor Mary like she’s got polio, is contagious, and has been cast inside an iron lung) I approach my colleague and best friend Julie Sharp, and ask if she’d meet me over at her new apartment in Beverly Hills.  There’s something private I want to talk about.

I can’t recall how many years she’s been divorced from her temperamental warlock, but she’s a woman in the know, who’s known my smoggy interior now for 20 years.  We sit around the dinning room table I had given my friend when she moved in as a housewarming gift.  It’s green, square, and when its wings are flipped up, it will seat 4 people.  I like the chairs, sizable enough to fit my “nigger ass” (description compliments of the playground).

Julie says, “Thanks for the loan.  But I’m returning your table and chairs.  I can help you move them into your van once you tell me why you’re here.”

“I’m no Indian giver.  I gave you those—“

“It’s non negotiable Ron.  Don’t deny me the pleasure of you and whomever enjoying this table come thanksgiving.”

“Yeah.  It’s the whomever I’ve come over here to talk to you about,” I say with lost puppy eyes.  “This dating scene is all new to me.  I feel I’m lost in some dark woods, and I haven’t a clue if I should mate with barn owl, or continue on down the path and… and…seek the princess bathing in the moonlight.”  And so I continue on, giving Julie a summary of my painful adventures with a libido so loose (prepare your self father, for I have truly sinned) I’m looking at Julie with a fresh pair of goat eyes.

And I begin to fanaticize.  Hey, would this be the first time a friendship bloomed into something even more intimate?  Two bulls who have a compatible disposition, us both chomping really rich grass—living comfortably in Beverly on 2 professor’s salaries.  Julie loves backpacking, was intrigued by my kayak trip down the Ohio River, to meet the confluence of the mighty Mississippi, etc.  Can’t you buy kayak 2 seaters, or would Mathilda become jealous?

Look at the photo again.  I’ve always though 10 to 15 years in age separate us, but to me I look older than Julie in this picture.  And she being chronologically older than I would work to our advantage.  Julie and June Mary are 2 of the most UNneurotic people I know.  But age and experience has ironed out most of Julie’s wrinkles.  And even when not in this bizarre state of consciousness, I’ve always adored women– young, old, mid level, whatever.

I’ve never met an ugly feminine—and that’s no bull.  And Julie to me is quite an Irish Catholic dish who also loves James Joyce.  Maybe we can read Molly Bloom’s famous “Yes, I said, yes” in bed together.

I felt Julie’s hands on mine as we sat at that green table, and they were warm, but had not a lover’s hotness.  I could tell in her Gaelic eyes she knew what I was thinking, maybe felt honored, but knew it was not our time to…. (You fill in the words Father).

She said, “Ron, I pride myself on knowing you better than any other person.  Maybe right now I know you better than you know yourself.  You’re a one man woman, faithful to a fault.   There’s no escaping that fact.”

I stopped my dalliances immediately.  I kept getting this imago of being a boy back in the swamps of Iowa.  I’ve swum over to the island at Cheever Slough, but I’ve no dry matches to light up the Camels I’ve hidden there in the hollow of Old Grandpa Willow, so I pull out my trusty magnifying glass, and focus the light on the white tip, right next to the naked brown woman on the pack, and in my magination I am Vincent Vango.  His Starry Night glows from the bedroom wall back at my penthouse.  And those stars burn baby burn, as I inhale and whamo everything is made right with my troubled world.   Will be, if I can only find my Princess Vicksburg.

Except no candle is glowing from Miss Mahogan’s balcony window.  Her door is barred to this love seeker.  Am I not older now?  Am I not being brave and daring, sitting here in a neighborhood where gansta Continentals are passing, their speakers booming out, “Kill, kill the MFing man keep us slaves.”  Mean faces are pressed to the glass, and windows are being electrified down.  Could be I’ll be a drive by shooting.

On page 33 of the Chicago Tribune I see a small headline, ”IDIOT PROFESSOR SHOT.  Ron Ass’s last words were, ‘am seeking my beloved,’ before he expired of gunshot wounds.  Neighbors say this odd white egg wanted Extreme Unction performed, but they could see no evidence of a priest in this black neighborhood.  His last wishes were to be rolled off on elephants, to his real home in Africa.  This maniac mention that’s were we all were born, before he breathed his last.”

But the Ganstas are boom booming off down the street, the faces pressed to the widows puzzled.

Same thing happened to me in New York City when I was 20.  I buy into the Crazy Indian theory.  Among the Lakota, if you’re born strange (and faces come out at you, in the rain), your gifts are celebrated.  The elders toss you and your abalone shell into the tepee with the old she man, to further cultivate your talent for hearing ocean whispers, which may be of benefit to the tribe.

Though living on the Bowery, I took uptown buses to Harlem, to haunt the blues and jazz clubs, till Lena Horn could moan no more about her empty bed blues.  No harm came to this tetched seeker.  Brothers were friendly and told me stories when I asked them question about how and when they lost their virginity.

“Crazy motha fucken white boy—what he doen up here?” says a black pool hustler.

“Say he from I-oh-way,” says a sister, sinking the 8 ball.  “They got crazy Indians out West, so leave dis son of Sitting Bull a-lone.”

What I’m gonna leave alone is this dating scene.  This night is my last voyage into the lands of frustration. I’ve got it all planned out Father.  I’ll become one of your black-cloaked clan, a proper raven, and should the image of a fem pass through my fevered brain, my mantra will be, Devil, Devil, Devil.

I’ll become my bachelor Godfather Uncle Walter.  Once upon a time in Whittemore, Iowa, ONE OF THEM climbed into the backseat of his Model T when he was off buying seed corn.  When he climbed back in, he must of smelt her Woolworth perfume, which sent him running back to the farm, not to return till a week later.  Did he fumigate his relic with DDT?  Can’t say for certain.

But my welding rods shall blaze in my garage, hundreds of tips smoking on the concrete, as I fuse together sculptors the world has never seen before.  With no womens to fret me none, my libido shall be so focused, it will be able to burn holes through bank doors.  Since I’m a failed poet, why not try another art form, and allow the lump on my middle finger to grow back to normal?  Frick my stolen silver Cross pen.  Its bad karma.

I’ll join the ranks of Kashmir, who said in our first phone call, “I’m off the market.”  No female dog will be there ever again, to squat and pee on my fire hydrant.  And I’ve already commissioned Reno Amati’s son, a painter, to swirl SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY on the west wall of my penthouse.

What is more complex than the secretive gears of a WOE-MANS?  They don’t know themselves half the time what the frick their doing.  Who needs um?  I’ll give um up for lent.  Just remain friendly with a few, so as to continue my researches in to their psychologies, which is daft as Minnie the Mouse swallowed herself 8 pods of peyote.

I am now Saint Augustine, and I’m telling you my confessions. Once I sinned bad, which I’m forced to tell you about in lurid detail, but boy oh boy am I ever in a state of repentance.

So to close the loop.  (Or should I say noose around my neck?)  It’s after talking to Julie that I decided to go back to penthouse #25, do some Zen walking meditation in a circle through the kitchen and living room, those black birds peeking in the patio window as they ride the thermals up the brick walls.  You won’t believe this, but I’ve no reason to lie.  (We crows tell the truth, on as many levels as we’re able.)

Somehow I’d ended up with the 4-tierd bookcase which was once the altar of Princess Vicksburg and her smirking brother, Bega.  At 9917 S. Hamlin, Evergreen Park (Hades for short) it served as a blockade for separating my basement study from the rest of the wet gloom.  But as I mindfully walked in my penhouse, putting consciousness into naked feet making contact with carpet, which seemed to fill my brain with things electrical, my soul knew exactly what it needed to do.

I called Alan Prophet on that ancient rotary phone, survivor from the blast after the Battle of the Patio.   My index finger was unaccustomed to such friction, but once this Ms. Mahogany Dubonet Moses was named, I rolled again that black wheel of fortune, and had my 12 conversations with this elusive fish.

Did she change her mind?  What in purgatory is going on here, my dear confessor?  There’s only 1 light in the balcony window where my true love may reside.  It’s probably just kept on, to give the impression someone’s up there.  You know, to discourage fish thieves like me.

So the woman in the photo trying to hold up this somber bull with her right hand is Lorraine Helmer  (could have something to do with the gallon of retsina wine I guzzled the night before).   This laughing bull also lives in Beverly Hills, almost next door to the happy hill house were my budding dragon and I used to reside.

That house was happy, at least at first, but not its occupants.  The people who lived there before us were a happy Catholic couple with lots of children.  But though we had only one son who fit perfectly into our steel triangle of co-dependency, with all that iron in our diets, we grew increasingly war like.

Well, that house also has a basement.  I’m skilled with pick axe and shovel.  I can show you what hell is like from a 9914 S. Prospect perspective.  I could do so for 333 more confessions, but that’s not a damned state of consciousness I’d like to leave you with, father.  In Iowa, we pride ourselves on not scaring our visitors witless and shitless.

I figure the saints are a whimsical lot, and we mortals are one source of their vast array of amusements, but for whatever reason imaginable, Lorraine Helmer is tickled pink by my subterranean sense of bad humors.  (Such creatures are rare and valuable.)

Don’t I look happy in this photo on my 45^th birthday party, a man who that morning had just found his first arrowhead on Council Hill?

That was call #3 in case you’re keeping up with my personal mythology, and I confess to you right now, not heeding that summons must represent a mortal sin.  Once you learn of its effect, you’ll most certainly agree and…. I hope take pithy on me, say Extreme Unction to my sinful past, which will then propel me though this door at 1433 North Laurel, so I can say 4 Hail Mary’s and ascend on up to kiss, again, my dear dark lovely.

Oh corn silk (wish I had some, cause I’m out of humps to smoke) I’d thought we’d do some peeking through Kashmir’s keyhole here.  Instead, we’ve been peering though the lock box of this narcissistic prick (my slap on label, courtesy of my soon-to-be-EXwife.)

Though I love the 3 graces in this photo, (Forgive me Father, for I knew not what I was doing back in them daze), I feel lucky to have them surround me at college every day.  Though the table sags with food, though free wine and beer have been provided, that monster face is the best I can manage.

Look closer, and you can almost see the bolt protruding from my neck, and imagine the flickers of electricity entering my brain, as I lie on the white table where I was created from snatched body parts.

Notice how my right hand is gripping my left, as if it has some black cat it can’t let out of the bag just yet.  Look at the intensity of my welding rod eyes, as I grope around seeking my true identity, a Frankenstein with steel lips which, if they could sing, would croak out Simon and Garfunkle’s “Still crazy after all these Russian and Irish years.”

Want more of a laugh my dear confessor?  If you were to ask these three English professors what adjective they would use to describe the mid life crisis in this photo, they would chorus “Nice.”  At the beginnings of semesters, what I hear from my new students is, “We took you Dr. Nash cause we’ve heard you’re soooooooo nice.”

I’m here to tell you, nice is for losers.  Nice people drink the pop that’s flat in the refrigerator, and save the bottles with fizz for others.  Nice gets you a pat on the ass when what you always wanted is a new cherry Corvette.  Nice gets you a chubby white harpy when what you’ve always craved is a chocolate bunny.  Nice gets you run over by a Mack truck called marriage.  Nice buys you a 20 year nightmare, dreamed in a basement, with HER mansion creaking over your head.  Nice buys you balls locked up inside a triangle, when what you need is a break.

Put another way, I’m sick of being passive aggressive.  I wanna be an aggressive aggressive asshole, and get me my creamy dark soul sister.

I want one named Ms. Mahogany Kashmir Dubonet Mosses, who better be my Princess Vicksburg, or I’ll bust.

But to find out, I gotta find a way through her door.