DOMINIQUE BEGINS TO COMPREHEND A MYSTICAL HOLD THE GIRL HAS ON HIM…

At work the next day, Danny Deagon, a co-worker and buddy of mine, tells me he saw me with a girl at the Viet Nam flick.

“You should have come up and talked with me. I wasn’t having the greatest time anyway.”

“I know,” he concurs. “Those movies are getting to be tired; to be all the same. Not for nothing,” he observes anew, “but there was something about that girl with you. I can’t solve her puzzle. I’m not prejudiced or anything, but what do you know about that girl? There’s something dirty about that girl. Something cathouse. I just can’t figure it.”

He upfluffed my fire with his careless, stinking gas. I swept up the walls, then burned back down. I crackled.

“I don’t know about you Mr. Clean, but I have been some places in my life I am glad there were no cameras. I’d imagine you’re no altar boy either,” and cleared out of there without myself.

The next day he was all apologies and compromise.

“Listen Dominique, what I said yesterday was half jealousy. That girl’s beautiful man; beautiful beyond the concept of mass production.”

“Thanks,” I said, unsure if that was a compliment or not, “but don’t make up any other stuff. It’s me who should be sorry.”

…AND SUFFERS A MIDNIGHT DELUSION

At the strangest, yet most correct times it seems she will come to see me; not demanding to own or be owned. She will come to me when no one will dance with me no matter how sexy. When I step up all grimy and tired, but unable to sleep. My mind full of distractions and lying dreams fading oh-so-fast. When I step up from the basements and warehouses and hidden dirty places all closed and without anymore dancing. Or the next endless night of good fortune and perfect spontaneity that none of us can ever count on or plan correctly.

They happen when they happen and she will tell me so, drawing the curtain of my mind closed to smooth my forehead full of solutions to all the world’s big problems. And then…and then…she will tell me with a mouth my own quivers to meet…. “Aspire to be a God.”

A God! I despair and sink in her chest while the sun, all orange and full of history we want to know rises before us. Two hopeless aspiring deities on a filthy balcony of cacophony and scattered cat whiskers.

“Yes! A God!” she will say to me. “One with strong abdomen filled with bile and jealousy for me, only me. What else is there for you to be?” she takes a crack a reason. Any indecision on our part will be the double undoing she cautions, because, “One can only be special for a moment, and you have to snatch that moment for yourself in a vicious way before the cancers that kill everyone makes us modern and kill us, too.” That I must move quickly. “Please!” she screams so full of real fear as to shake coyotes out from their musty hillside lairs…

“Aspire to be a God. Not a student. Not a philosopher. Not an owner of boats, beach houses, or bookcases filled with news of May Days or plays that are better acted out to be understood than simply being red in bed.”

Or when I come up again and alone from those same sewers and basements she is only understanding and whispers in confidence, “Don’t worry. Whoever she was, she loved you. How could it be otherwise?”

What I mean to say is, she gave easily.