Purple Fantasies by Gary Mielo

Driving along the shore of the gelatinous Hudson, I’m overcome by a choking torment. The blissful, undeniable failure of my life rears its blood-clotted double head in the rearview mirror.

Lyn’s dead tears are still wet on cheeks. Our last contact still lingers—a stone grey embrace, then death. We parted without a single word.

I coast through the rain-slicked streets. Reds, ambers, and greens lay trapped in the black road. I cut into them, leaving thousands of tiny dots.

I’m out for the night, intent on celebrating the collapse of my former life. Most of the evening is wasted looking for a petite brunette with pretty ankles and a certain smell; someone who, at odd angles and in the glaze of my desires, would evoke remembrances of Theresa.

She’s standing on a corner, in the twinkling zaps of a Tenth Avenue pizza parlor, when I spot her. All the mannerisms of a refugee from the suburbs were there as she pranced to my car to talk business.

Her name is Tina and for twenty dollars she agrees to suck me off while riding through the rainy sinews of the village.

We’re at a light. I’m watching the city’s grainy electricity dance on the underbelly of an air inversion. Then I remember. Lyn really isn’t dead—just divorced. We had met in grey halls and court antechambers earlier that day.

After all, it is Friday the Thirteenth.

The rain falls in big, slow motion drops. Everything shines with a waxy black luster. There is a burst of lightening. I see Tina’s face enveloped in a silvery border.

Another flash comes moments later. I see black hair all around my legs. And, for that moment, she is Theresa; her head tilted to one side, her long hair falling over her shoulder. I can almost touch the feeling, almost see her. Then it’s gone.

Tina’s lips and tongue work fervently. Her puckered face smiles as it sucks.

The night of our final argument, I remember how Lyn ran into the bathroom, filled the bathtub with scalding hot water and huddled nervously behind pink exploding bubbles till the swelling veins beneath her skin popped up and spread in purple tracks all over her body.

Tina’s pale cigarette fingers squeeze as she continues her work. My legs begin to quiver anxiously.

Thoughts of Theresa return. I see an image of her body separating to encompass me—her chamber opening like an excited blossom, her voice a deep, quivering moan.

When Tina lifts her head up, she has semen dipping out of her mouth. A wad of it’s also in her hair.

She looks at me. Her pencil-lined arched eyebrows rise like tombstones. Her lips quiver, briefly exposing her spotted teeth.

I smile. A half-smile flourishes and quickly fades from around her mouth.

A few blocks later, I stop by a mail box to drop her off. When I put the twenty in her hand, she tells me her telephone number—an easy one to remember—and invites me to come to her apartment some night.

She says this with such a peculiarly confident smirk that her lips sear into my consciousness—cryptic lips that promise to lure me, with a satin sweep, into her dark bed.

Then she’s gone; absorbed into the fetid sludge that streams around a subway entrance.

I drive further downtown to a club that has good jazz, amber filtered lights, and waitresses with the city’s sensuality moving within their movements.

I sit enveloped in its smoky anonymity.

After a few drinks, I notice that the stool next to me is occupied by an unattached fat blonde. She has a red flower stuck in her head and is holding an unlit cigarette in her chubby fingers. Her thickly painted nails look like big dripping candles.

“Got a light,” she asks, swiveling close by. Her breath smells like rancid liverwurst. I give her the glowing end of my butt and watch her fat jowls suck the butt lit.

Suddenly, with one exhalation, she starts a nervous conversation about her flower. Then she asks me if I thought it looked nice and if she looked all right because she was afraid that people saw her as being fat and funny looking.

I tell her she looks fine and turn back to my Cognac and the music.

“Would you kiss me then,” she asks abruptly.

I look at her as if she is behind the dying glow of some candles. Her flickering, bloated face stares desperately into mine.

"I’ll go home with you for the night, if you kiss me now,” she says. Her cheeks contort into an awkward, marshmallow grimace.

But, when I tell her that I’m not drunk enough, her expectant, half-closed eyes spring open and then, just as quickly, narrow into angry slits.

“Well you’re not my type anyway,” she says. “Your arms aren’t big enough, your dark clothes are morbid, and your haircut doesn’t make it.” She moves back and, with a disdainful toss of her fat head, sends her flower spinning to the floor.

There’s a pause before she slowly rotates off the stool to retrieve the red object. I’m glad that that broke our contact.

When she doesn’t come back, I was happier still. But, more than anything, I’m relieved to know that I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of waking up on a fresh Saturday morning with a neurotic fatty and a psychosexual hangover that would inspire a legion of demons to taunt me for days.

She retreats to a darkened corner of the bar and wedges herself between a cigarette machine and a black telephone booth.

I dissipate the remainder of the evening at the bar, drinking through the last musical set, and then head for the piers, drinking coffee in my car. I watch the mute city around me as it sits suspended from its bridges.

I’ve been roused from a decades’ old stupor. The images, the dreams, the fogs that had comprised my former world dance like formless, melancholy phantoms around me.

I feel vulnerable and alone—peacefully alone. There’s a sense of balance now.

Outside pass pulses of night and headlight.

I look across the Hudson and remember.

“Hav-A-Tampa…God Damn… Hav-A-Tampa,” he said in a thick Texan drawl. His words were drawn out with a slow sure almost musical twang.

We were sitting out a double-lunch in Weehawken’s Hamilton-Burr Memorial, enjoying the Manhattan skyline through clouds of cigar smoke and industrial smog that rose from the Hudson waterfront below.

“Tex” was a kid who appeared in classes one day in late spring at Weehawken’s Junior High School. Characteristically lean, tall, with a shock of blond hair, and possessing a wariness that seemed older than his high school age, Tex and I instantly became friends.

Even though I didn’t pin it down at the time, he conveyed a maturity that seemed confidently indifferent to everything that was going on at school.

I never saw him carry a textbook. Once I thought I glimpsed the handle of a bowie knife in his gym bag.

Here was a kid who enjoyed himself. Unashamedly.

“God Damn… Hav-A-Tampa,” he chanted with deep appreciation while exhaling the thick fumes of his Beachwood tipped cigar.

We didn’t talk much. Just sat there for a quiet half hour watching the skyline shimmer through the haze while boulevard busses and cars incessantly hummed behind us and strident tug boat horns bellowed up the Palisades from the Hudson River below.

“I don’t live in the mainstream of society,” Tex once told me as we stared at the monument of the Hamilton and Burr duel, particularly the rock which Hamilton stained with his dying blood. This was his response to my asking him where he lived.

I was momentarily perplexed. This high school junior possessed an enigmatic self-reliance that I hadn’t encountered in my tamer classmates.

Tex went on, as if speaking from a hypnotic trance, describing his nightly bus rides into the city, the places he’d been, the places he had been thrown out of. From his back pocket, he showed me a battered paperback copy of On the Road.

“It’s all here,” he said, musically shuffling through the pages. “Here.”

On the cover stood the drawing of a defiant, rough young man, standing amid smaller images that promised to “tell all about today’s wild youth and their frantic search for Experience and Sensation.”

I was drawn to the images. As I handed the book back, I knew I’d be spending my lunch money on a copy of that seemingly intoxicating novel.

“Time for another smoke,” Tex asked.

“No. We’re late already.”

“Fuck it,” Tex said. “Let’s grab the next bus for the city.”

Within minutes, we were strolling round NYC’s 42nd Street. We visited some of the seedier haunts that Tex frequented. One place, several steps down toward the subway was a dirty little shop displaying the stained word: Books.

But these were not the kinds of books I had been reading. This was a far cry from anything I had seen in Bill’s Book Shop, near the high school.

Magazines—firmly stapled closed to avoid browsing—showed front cover pictures of people in nudist colonies, couples locked in steamy interracial-embraces, as well as homosexual and lesbian publications. The store owner sat behind a high glass case, alternately puffing and munching excitedly on his cigar.

“Hey guys,” he shouted down at us from his perch. “How about something like this.” He quickly held open and shut the centerfold of one of his select magazines. It showed a naked woman kneeling before something that was blurred by the quickness of the seller’s motions.

Later that night, I realized that the smutty images that ignited me earlier that afternoon were significantly different from the bland men’s magazines in the local candy store. Even more, the quick flash of naked bodies carried more sensation than the stained-glass images that my Catholic parents had forced on me. Church murals of clouds, cherubs , an oversized rendering of a throned, Santa Claus-like God, a life-sized cross with a sorrowful looking plaster Jesus hung suspended near the alter. The Latin mass, the Slovak sermon, and the rote prayers muttered by the congregation became unintelligible.

Once, in catechism class, I felt lucky to be a Catholic. My world was full of mortal sins. I was taught that even thinking could be fatal. A smug security enveloped me. I would be saved from the horrors of an empty death as long as I could maintain the trappings of devoutness. But even as a gullible, chubby, pimply kid, I knew my alleged faith to be a sham, a pretence, an act.

Soon, however, all that remained of my Catholic upbringing was a fondness for candles and incense, and a sexually predatory, Inquisitional fervor.

“I love to fill my body with stimulants and depressants,” Tex said during another one of our double lunch periods. We puffed one of his thickly rolled joints—my first—while stealthily leaning against Hamilton’s bust with our backs to the boulevard.

However, growing up in a time when drugs were looked upon as criminal behavior—a sign of existential weakness, a pariah, even a mortal sin, and seeing my friend Jimmy go from a heroin addiction, to institutional cures, to several attempts at suicide, at which he finally succeeded—I had an initial dread of drugs. This, however, quickly dissipated in the euphoria that swept over me. Experience and sensation annihilated the Babbitt-like struggles of obedience that I saw in school, in church, and coming from my loving but naïve parents.

The echoes from the tugboats sounded like the groaning calls of vaporous sirens.

Summer soon came. I never saw Tex again. When I went back to school that fall, I mourned his absence. It brought back the moment when I was a little kid, no more than four years old, in my backyard, saying goodbye to my next-door neighbor Peter. He and his family were moving away.

We both stood quietly peering at each other through a thin wire fence, both knowing that we would never see each other again, almost eager to be distracted by the beckoning calls of our mothers.

“What’s missing here,” the voice persisted, prior to my stating, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

I spoke these words into a screen that looked like a grotesquely wrought metal cobweb. I was inside a confessional which resembled three coffins standing upright; the middle one was the priest’s domain. It loomed larger than the two end ones.

I confessed my sins and listened to a soft lecture about not thinking smutty thoughts. Instead, he suggested I think about riding a motorcycle or horse.

Later that night, as I lay in the confines of my small bedroom, listening to a stack of Miles’s records I sat up, startled by an unexpected change. The room was dimly lit. I could see the shadows of my desk, my high school textbooks, my record player, and bookcase.

But everything looked different because of the sounds. The jazz riffs of Coltrane and Miles erased the vapid advice given by the priest a few hours earlier. The religious images expired—became meaningless. I felt freed.

The music and its inherent city night images made sense. It was a vague but perceptible feeling. After that, I scraped together every piece of money I could find mainly by spending Saturday mornings sweeping out second floor embroidery shops along the dingier section of Bergenline Avenue in the bowels of Union City, the self-proclaimed embroidery capital of the world. At least sweeping up was a mindless task that allowed me to replay the riffs in my mind, or fantasize about getting laid, which came much later.

The hard cash I received at the end of the day was quickly spent squeezed onto a barstool, listening to Mingus, Monk, or whoever happened to be in town that weekend.

Lyn waits in the car while I stand with my mother in front of my father’s grave. I can feel him staring up at me, a look of ungovernable sadness frozen in his eyes, his lips stitched into a macabre smile. I can feel his cold, lifeless skin stretch across my face like a suffocating mask.

My father’s puns, his lively step on the stairs and whistle at the door as he brought home the Friday night pizza, the nightly rants bout being “in hock.”

I would lie back, listening to my father’s vivid words that he would be “happy to jump into his grave.” The image of my father in his dark blue business suit jumping into a black grave haunted me.

For the remainder of the night, I would lie awake terrified as I tried to imagine what eternity was like. I could only picture a vacant white space endlessly stretching out forever. Sometimes the image was so powerful that I was unable to close my eyes, powerless to articulate the dread I was feeling. This lack of anything lingered in my night thoughts for years. Eternity was a shallow void. The prospect of such a blank, endless future contributed to my palpably felt fall from grace.

Then, finally, sleep.

Bloated clouds hang heavy in the sky. The wind carries a faint smell of the river, or Lyn, of Theresa, of the hospital. The smells of disease and waste.

My thoughts turn to Lyn, the child she so desperately wants, my reluctance, our five years of compromise. A child might help balance the scales—a life for a death.

The first drops of rain hit the back of my neck with a stinging coldness.

My mother and I walk back to the car. The patterns of the rain running down the car windows distort Lyn’s features. Her skin seems to sag and melt. She looks glazed over.

The rain falls harder. It splashes into my eyes. Lyn’s face peers quizzically out at me. Hesitantly, I get into the car and drive off through the towering black wrought-iron gates that form the exit of my father’s everlasting abode.

Lyn is finally asleep. The digital clock on the nightstand dissolves from 5:59 to 6 a.m.

I get up, light a cigarette, and stand in front of our apartment’s picture window. Blue smog embraces the skyline. The only thing visible is a narrow strip of the river. The transition from night to day is slow, reluctant.

How different, how full of everything life would be if Theresa and I were together, I try to convince myself. It would be different. Like someone else’s life.

Strains of Tchaikovsky’s plaintive “Swan Lake” filled the air. The small room, comfortably cushioned by early evening shadows brightened with the television’s opening scenes in Egypt. The clinking of archaeologists’ digging tools in the film merged with the sound of my mother’s kitchen utensils rattling in the far off kitchen.

As the opening sequence of “The Mummy” began, I lit my pipe and settled into the overstuffed chair a few feet away from the dark mahogany Magnavox.

Melting ice clanked in the glass that contained the remnants of a drink. I drained its icy leftovers jangling the tiny pieces of ice against my teeth before swallowing a watery mouthful of my third bourbon. The alcohol spread its soothing tendrils through my body.

My mother and Lyn chatted quietly chattered while preparing a roast beef dinner. My father, who seemed increasingly tired from a day full of errands, rested in the master bedroom.

I luxuriated in the familiarity of the film which I had seen innumerable times on late night TV, and breathed deeply to catch the aroma of cooking meat that my mother lovingly prepared every Sunday when I was a kid. I savored the deceptive self-congratulatory feeling of scoring a job teaching American literature at Mayfair Junior College in the Fall. The meek passiveness of the Mayfair’s suburbs seemed to be a tonic to my cloistered years of graduate study.

This felt like one of the best days in my life.

After all, I had a 2A deferment that teaching English composition and American literature courses at

Mayfair Junior College guaranteed.

So I took on all the trappings—pipe, tweed jackets, a beard, and an increasingly large collection of books—of my seemingly safe, respectable, tame, Babbitt-like existence.

I watched as Karloff’s centuries old face dissolved into a powdery skull. The ancient curse had been dispelled and order was once again restored.

In the kitchen, I could hear plates, glasses, and utensils being arranged on the table. Stretching, I got up from the chair and adjusted the cushions. I tapped the bowl of my pipe into a gaping ashtray. The smells of dinner drifted throughout the house. I shut off the TV. It responded with an electric snap.

I left the room, now fully dark, and headed for the kitchen; little realizing that the slumbering years ahead would soon prefigure death and distrust—corrosive ingredients that would obliterate the smug, tidy certainty I felt that day.

For many of my young colleagues, Mayfair Junior College was a pastoral brothel. Teacher and students indiscriminately, unashamedly, and indifferently fucked one another for grades as well as amusement.

A curly headed southerner, Marjoe, who possessed the soul of Hawthorne’s Chillingsworth, led the pack in his sexual divertimentos. Marjoe screwed his bevy of chippies every night. His oft repeated adage was, “Forget the sex, forget the A.”

His best friend, a bearded, pot-bellied satyr, fucked Marjoe’s leftovers. During hours in the faculty lounge they compared notes, both of their courses and their concubines. The elder members of the faculty seemed ostensibly oblivious to these conversations. Most were middle-age housewives whose husbands had what they called real jobs, as opposed to their wives’ seemingly cushy careers.

Our English Department Chair had the stern but friendly authority of a cub scout Den mother. Smiles, which she must have daily practiced before a mirror to make sure the curves looked authentic, thinly veiled the incoherent demands for more committee reports and an increasingly behavioral-oriented curriculum. Those who disobeyed were excommunicated from the college. Even then, she was all smiles.

“What’s missing here,” a voice would echo through my mind as I sat through innumerable meetings that took place in the funereal confines of the Board Room. Looking around the room, my eyes scanned the faces of my colleagues. Many seemed complacently satisfied with all the minutiae that our Chair, a devotee of education-school game playing, could manufacture. Reports, committees, and even sub-committees were distributed mostly to those who didn’t have tenure, an award given after years of humble servitude.

Doubts gnawed in my bowels. My life felt tame and smug. It was too easy, too snug, too constricting. Options were limited, however. I didn’t care about that.

Fortunately and unfortunately, I got out, leaving behind a tangle of self-righteous professors masquerading as enlightened gurus.

10.

I’m with Theresa in a jazz club in the city. Sullen waitresses stalk the smoke-filled tables and booths like big shadowy cats.

The familiar surroundings, the jazz spinning out from the pianist’s muscular solo, and the magic swirl of intoxicants make the impending touch of Theresa’s body seem all the more exciting, inviting, welcome.

Her head is tilted to one side as if she’s about to ask a question. Layers of fine brown hair fall across her face and down her shoulders. Her dark eyes look into me. Mysterious eyes, narcotic eyes, self-possessed, with a hint of silently offered pleasures.

Of course, I have known such pleasures before—knees bumping into one another in gracious anticipation, loins trembling with strained courtesy, hands gripping air, eyes straining for that one undeniable, intentional nod that will finally signal the beginning, the consummation of all longings, that last, total, complete emptying out of my being—only to be offered the shuttering final instant before everything will split open.

Her fingers glide into mine. The gesture seems to confirm everything: our crawling the stairs out of the bar and landing in bed, moaning together until dawn.

The jazz trio, only a few tables away, appears like an image in the wrong end of a telescope. I move closer to Theresa’s fragrant skin. She curls about me like the wisps of fog that lick the street and traffic signals outside.

We leave after the second set and walk the few blocks to her apartment.

“No strings; OK,” she says.

“No strings.”

I would say or do anything to be with her. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Not my future, my job, not Lyn, nor a thing except being with Theresa. All I know is this woman, this city. All dark reds and blues, and the cool, energetic autumn air, and the rhythms and pulse of people, shops, restaurants, book stores, open stoops, brown apartment buildings, grey alleys, concrete playgrounds, and next to me, smelling like exotic powder, Theresa.

I know that whatever the consequences for this night I am free—the freest I have ever felt, or probably will ever feel, in my life. Nothing exists except this moment, so saturated with the promise of affirmation and annihilation.

Theresa lives on the fifth floor, in the rear of the building. A yellow stairway leads us up into her scantily furnished studio apartment. She begins discarding her clothes as soon as we enter the room.

11.

A shudder passes through me as I adjust my sweater. I look into the hazy sky and scrutinize the vaporous crescent of a moon. I see Theresa sitting on the couch, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap. The red dress she wears makes her skin look darker.

Yet the smile she usually greets me with is absent. A dozen long-stem roses sit unarranged in the center of at the coffee table.

I want to hold her, draw her close, feel her hands against my skin. Instead, I wait.

The words she speaks are soft, barely audible, hardly a whisper. Her black eyes stare coolly, unflinching.

Theresa’s features alternate with those of my father and Lyn. Their dead reflections fill the window. All the possible things we could have done, all the feeling we could have felt together, built up only with time—denied. By the end of the school year, she transferred to another college to study nursing. My moments had expired. The smell of her talcum powder dissolved.

I light another cigarette. The skyline becomes more discernible.

12.

“Hey, Jesus,” I shouted in one of Brooklyn’s more densely debris cluttered alleyway up to the fourth-floor kitchen. With more than $500 tucked away in my book, and aware that I was a blatant outsider in a gang-infested war zone, I always felt relief when I saw his bald head poke out of the window, look down, and nod affirmatively.

I tramped through the garbage, the broken window frames, the yellowing condoms, the bundles of what looked like clothes, to the marble hallway. A long, loud buzz clicked open the door. I felt safe.

Fumes of ammonia from the slippery, yellowed lobby and steps grew stronger with each flight I ascended. Jesus met me in the hallway. He was smiling. I knew he had scored an assortment of drugs by the jittery flicker of his eyes.

A former semi-professional boxer, Jesus was built like a 5’5” gladiator with thick arms bulging from his torn tee-shirt and his left wrist encased in a leather band; the other wrist held back a ferociously barking dog nearly as big as Jesus himself.

“It’s scary calling from the alleyway,” I told him as I entered his apartment.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I put the word out that if anyone fucks with you or your car, I rip his fucking liver out and eat it before his dying eyes.” His words were loud and menacing. Partly because he was nearly deaf from the 55 bouts he endured when a boxer. His wife, Terry, was in the kitchen drinking coffee. She smiled at me as we passed in to the bedroom to view the products. Within minutes I was $500 poorer and hefting nearly a pound of weed, some coke, a handful of ups and an equal batch of downers. Jesus loved to speedball, mixing coke, speed, some ‘ludes, with a Brooklyn specialty, wacky weed, more potent that the most esoteric hashish.

“Look, I’m going to see Jinny,” he said, stuffing the money into his pocket and packing an overnight bag with underwear and drugs. “Stay with Terry for a while, OK?” I wasn’t sure if he was winking or if his eyes were quivering.

Jesus couldn’t stand to be with Terry. They shared an apartment out of economic convenience.

After he left, I sat drinking coffee with Terry and snorting the velvety grains of my coke. “Coke makes me horny,” Terry said without a smile as she grabbed my balls.

Barefoot, wearing thin silk shorts and top, Terry and I went back to the bedroom where Jesus and I had transacted our business.

“Come on man; let’s see what you’ve got,” she said, practically ripping off my jeans and kneeling on the bed as if she were searching for something. “Come on man; in here,” she whispered emphatically as she slid off her shorts. She dug her little toes into the bedspread. “In here,” she repeated, pointing to her ass.

As I entered her impatient ass, she smelt of sweat and fish oil.

13.

The smoke felt like syrup. Unlike hashish, the effect wasn’t immediate. However, after a few more inhales, a hypnotic relaxation climbed through my body. I felt a contentment that I hadn’t experienced since I was a little kid bedridden for several days with flu. My parents gave me an opium-based cough medicine to drink, something that tasted like a spoonful of thick cola, and tea laced with rock and rye.

Colors intensified. Sounds diminished. The world around me receded.

More inhales and then a soft deadening of my senses. Even though I was awake and aware, I felt a buoyancy settle over my inert body. Nothing mattered.

Earlier that evening I had acted as go-between for two drug dealers who were friends of Jesus. One well groomed, well dressed guy, with a pencil-thin moustache and shock of thick black hair produced a foot-long cylinder of the opium from a glass canister. The stuff seemed to have a life of its own as it slowly emerged from its cocoon.

The buyer, a former college professor, whose grubby jeans and sweatshirt ostensibly asserted his non-conformist demeanor, freed a roll of $100-bills the size of Jesus’s fist from his pocket.

For a few minutes, quietness settled over Jesus’s apartment. The transaction began with a small, pebble sized chunk of opium being lit in a hash pipe and handed from dealer to buyer, from buyer to Jesus, from Jesus to Terry, and from Terry to me. Each of us had several drags before the pebble evaporated. A thick mist seemed to have settled over the room.

Terry softly slid her body closer to me. We almost touched. I sensed her hair, her skin, her warm, waiting, always available body.

The professor gave the dealer a few satisfied nods. The exchange was made.

Both soon left. Then Jesus packed a gym bag with downers, coke, and a chunk of opium, his commission for the transaction. He went off to spend the night with a recovering heroin addict, a local from a local bar.

I too received a chunk of the stuff in appreciation of my being the carrier of information among Jesus, the dealer, and the professor.

Terry moaned softly when all were gone. With feline movements, she tapped some coke onto the tip of the blade of her knife and held it up to my nose.

The coke sent a tingling ripple through the soft thick opium-engendered hallucinations. Terry slid closer to me.

14.

I dream. The morgue is bathed in a light blue phosphorescence. I walk toward Theresa’s covered body. One glimpse is enough. I’m not sure whether Theresa or Terry lies on the slab. Her face is contorted into a frozen scream. And her skin already has taken on the discoloration of decay.

My insides feel like they are being sucked out. “There is nothing left for you to enjoy,” I whisper over her corpse.

Through the night images of the unclaimed corpse fill my apartment. Her lips, sweet and expressive; her hair, long and black; her eyes with the mysterious luster of an unpredictable animal—all irretrievably lost.

I sit up with a convulsive start. It is still dark outside. Details of my own face stare back at me on the window. First my eyes, two dark blue hollows, appear. Then my sunken cheeks. But my mouth is the most difficult to look at with lips curved into a grim sneer. I quickly look away.

Suddenly, it is morning.

15.

The churches were all dark, grey, granite, and cold on the outside. Large wrought- iron fences guarded these urban sanctuaries. Massive wooden doors seemed to resist opening. One had to push himself into these stained glass, candle flickering asylums.

My mother and I would traipse through town after town, going from church to church, praying during the symbolic hours of noon to three in the afternoon every Good Friday. Later, after I was too old to care and she too old to walk the countless miles we used to dispatch, she would recite her silent prayers by the kitchen window, looking through the fire escape down into the tiny yard below.

The lines around her eyes would ease, nearly vanish. The sun would stain her hair with golden tints.

16.

Union City, one of the burlesque centers of the east coast, had deteriorated into a hive of grimy bars, oily luncheonettes, faded newsstands, dented taxicabs that was inhabited nightly by prostitutes, pimps, dealers, gamblers, second-rate hustlers, as well as the anonymous dredges of the working class.

In one place, whose posters proclaimed topless dancers, people jostled back and forth as they watched the naked breasts of a Mexican dancer bob rhythmically to the rock and roll that came blaring out of a blue and red pneumatically bubbling juke box.

Anonymous yelps bounced around the pace as Marcy, the featured dancer, swayed with the grubby gyration of a woman who obviously has just passed the cusp of her prime.

The more Cognac I drank, the music grew louder, the crowd rowdier, and Marcy more indifferently provocative. The lines around her eyes and mouth seemed as deep as knife slashes; yet she managed to feign expressions as coy and innocent as Theresa’s.

I hardly noticed the fresh drink that automatically appeared in front of me. The pile of ten and twenty dollar bills shrunk once more.

Marcy produced a long shiny butter knife and a jar of peanut butter from a leather bag that rested on the edge of the stage. She whipped the contents into long curving waves that gushed up like brown custard. Then her tongue began licking the knife, the jar, the globs of peanut butter that dripped from the sides of the jar.

Flashes of a reflected spotlight periodically danced from the knife into my eyes.

When her performance came to an end, she was speedily replaced by another girl, someone nobody paid attention to. As the patrons thinned out, Marcy, clad in a navy jumpsuit, came up to me. The lines that traversed her face didn’t looks as deep or harsh in the subdued lighting at the bar.

I offered her a drink. She ordered rum and Coke, taking in a mouthful of ice cubes and downing the drink in one greedy swallow. A vapor almost as thick as smoke curled from her mouth as she said, “My place or yours?”

17.

Marcy lived in the rear, third-floor apartment of a soon-to-be-condemned walkup.

A narrow hallway led into a studio with a kitchenette against one wall and a large sofa bed against another. Lights filtering through drawn curtains from corner bars outside guided our way.

Except for her brown suede boots, she zipped out of her clothes in seconds. Her olive skin rippled like an unfurling python.

18.

The next morning I awoke with a venomous headache. My heartbeats pulsed in my ears like a bass

tympani. I looked over at Marcy and stared with growing revulsion As she blew out a puff of air, her face looked smaller, puckered. It was toothless.

I sat bolt upright, forgetting all about the repercussion to my hangover. The only thing I wanted to do was get out from underneath those sweaty sheets.

I moved noiselessly down the hallway into the white and black tiled bathroom. As the light flickered on, I searched through the mirrored metal cabinet for some aspirin, noting the various prescription medications that filled the three shelves. Having found a full bottle of generic aspirins, I spilled three into my palm, popped them into my mouth, and bent over the sink to slurp some water. With my lips to the faucet, I was eye level with the blue plastic container the held Marcy’s slumbering dentures.

I dressed in the bathroom. Marcy resumed her gagging snores. I checked my pockets. Everything seemed to be there except for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser. I considered this an insignificant sacrifice as I slithered out of the apartment.

As I looked through the shattered windshield of my car, parked on the rubbish littered street, I could see a grainy orange sun rise over the rusty industrial plants in the background. The transition from dawn to morning was slow, hesitant. I could feel its languid mood.

My foot pressed down on the accelerator. The hum of movement increased in pitch. I settled back into my wrap of metal that sped me through the grey streets. For a while everything was a graceful swirl of debris.

19.

For a few months I took on a new career: that of a bush league purveyor of marijuana to a select handful of friends and associations. I didn’t that carefree, self-absorbed unconcern be a large-scale pusher. A client of mine, gay, would rapturously describe long sex sessions he had with sleazy thugs that filled me with unutterable loathing. Images of being gang raped in a federal jail were enough of a deterrent. As a result, I kept to the misdemeanor side of the law. My dealings melted down to a minimum. Anyway, I was making enough to cover my habit, which was beginning to escalate.

In fact, the drug world opened new, and yet familiar, habitués. How else would I have met Freddy the Beast, a burly Brooklyn Navy Yard worker, whose weekly habit required weekly visits? We spent much of the time reminiscing about growing up in the gangland section of Brooklyn. Having made financial arrangements with one of the foremen who promised to punch out his timecard every night, he routinely drove from Weehawken to Brooklyn every morning at nine to punch in and then drive straight back home to begin a day of smoking weed in his only sanctuary, the garage. He got paid time and half and double time on weekends. “The Beast’s” favorite expression for everything and anything was “Bull Shit,” emphasizing a long bull sound. Politics, entertainment, music, art, books, and particularly emotions like love were all ‘Buuuuul Shit.’

Finally, there were Mercedes and Sonya, two incredibly buxom Cubans, who considered me their “Chico Narco.” Dealing with them meant an evening of drinking rum and Cokes and finally, as a refresher, snorting some strong coke. While we were never sexual, I marveled at their pairs of incredibly robust tits that were immaculately adorned in clothes designed to exploit their ample virtues. Each of their movements undulated in soft currents of sensuality. But we couldn’t touch—ever. That was part of their conditions. I accepted the terms.

With another client, Laquanna, I got a taste of the Creole. Her long, muscular ebony body would curl around me. Her thick Negroid lips would suck at mine. With Laquanna I was no long in Cuba, more like the grey backwater Voodoo swamps of New Orleans. Our lovemaking was part human sacrifice and part benign capitulation.

It didn’t matter then. Nothing mattered then. Only bathing my senses mattered.

Laquanna made her living hosting parties for local politicos. Her piece de resistance occurred when she inserted lemons into her vagina and pumped them out to various members of the audience. This was a big hit. Big enough for her to retire to a cozy condo on the Hudson after a few years of muscular exertion.

Our last night we dropped acid, smoked some hashish and later coke. Notes—licorice harmonies—oozed Mingus’s “Tijuana Moods” from her stereo’s speakers. Our last night: long wailing rhapsodic bursts.

20.

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

Low on cash, unable or rather incapable of re-entering the thwarted/retiring life I left behind with Lyn, I recycled my academic credentials and took a job in an inner-city, college-affiliated Learning Center, helping people learn to read and write. Daily, this storefront operation put me in contact with an ever-changing gang of certifiable down-and-outers—the dispossessed and even the possessed. People blessed with a screwy energy that enabled them to see into one’s psychic entrails.

At the close of each one-hour session, after struggling to learn to read, Ezra, a Black minister who, even though functionally illiterate, managed to memorize key scriptures and all the other religious documents needed to become legitimately ordained, stands up and delivers a rhythmic benediction, and then, like a black ghost, vanishes from sight.

Of course, the center houses more notorious people like The Squirrel, actually a drug-toting mule for more than half the instructors at the center, me included.

During a storm, the roof leaks. We move all the workbooks and files from the shelves and get out rusty coffee tins to collect the raindrops.

I feel at home in this jumble of humanity.

21.

The Jersey palisades are beginning to glow, and with it, the specters I’ve recalled disperse like the fumes of the weed and coffee that I just got from some early-morning vendors a few blocks away.

Requiescat In Pace.

Later tonight, I’ll spend the evening talking with Ezra. We’ll drink thick espresso, smoke a lump of hash, and talk. Sometimes Ezra will enter a trance-like state and begin to express his spiritual, colorful, and colloquial visions—reflections of Mingus’s long wailing rhapsodic bursts.

For now, I look out across the glittering Hudson and remember many years before, when I stopped somewhere along the West Side Highway to study Jersey’s monolithic Maxwell House coffee rooftop sign, affixed to the Palisades, flickering “Good to the last drop” while a huge neon percolator dripped flashes of red and blue light into a yawning white China cup.

Purple Fantasies by Gary Mielo

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