Buddy isn't a subscriber at the moment, but reports he'd like to get feedback (and would also, probably, like to get some paid subscriptions to Sensitive Skin, which, as I say, is well worth the price). In any event, he may be reached at bkold@aol.com.

A Visitation

Something really weird happened to me the other night. Actually, it wasn't the other night, more like five years ago, but I wanted to get your attention. I was living in Paris and that was the least of ways in which my life is different from now. I shouldn't say it was 'weird' either, since folks nowadays say stuff like, "Yeah, I was crossing the street the other day, you know, and like, this guy ran the yellow light and almost hit somebody. It was like, really weird." Perhaps epiphanous would be more appropriate. All right, I'll stop beating around the bush and get to the story, a story I didn't have the nerve to tell until now. I was reading a biography of Jack Kerouac, very inspiring stuff, until the end that is - both the book and his life, I mean - when it got very scary. Jack was consumed with paranoid fantasies that the kikes and commies and fairies (the vast majority of his closest friends being at least one of the above) were out to get him, schizophrenic ideation that led him to incredibly self-destructive drinking bouts. It reminded me too much of a friend of mine (I'll call him 'John' for anonymity's sake), whom I consider one of the greatest living poets in America; one time John prefaced a poetry reading by stating that he's never been published because Meir Kahane had it in for him, there was a JDL conspiracy to keep the nigras down on the farm so literary glory would be reserved for Jew boys like myself. What really frightens me is that sometimes I think - other times I'm convinced - that when I'm his age, 20 years from now, I'll be exactly the same way: bitter, rancorous, unknown and very, very drunk. Anyway, one night I was lying in bed after reading this Kerouac book, stoned off my nut, writing in my head. I was wide awake, or so I thought, dreaming up a story about a famous but nonetheless bitter and rancorous writer on the skids. He's alienated all his friends, he's crying out for help by drinking himself to death but nobody cares anymore. One night he's in a bar, plastered out of his mind once again, when he scopes out this girl, a beautiful, radiant young thing, approaches her cocksure slurring, "Hi, I'mx" spouting his celebrated name. Supposedly Kerouac did this all the time after he hit it big, even though he never had much luck with it - he was such a raggedy, drunken bum that nobody believed he was who he said he was. One time he spotted a young girl on the beach reading On the Road so he stumbled over to her and said, "Hey, you like that book, I wrote it." Of course, she didn't believe him and ending up siccing the cops on poor Jack. That anecdote made a big impression on me, because I recently admitted to myself that one of my original motivations for becoming a writer (besides being able to get drunk every night and sleep till noon) was to make people instantly like and respect me, to be able to pick up girls reading and enthralled by my book, suavely saying , "Hey, you like that book? I wrote it, you know." The chicks would be swept off their feet, I wouldn't even have to make an effort, they'd already be in love with me through my sensitive, clever and charming novels, they'd know what a great guy I was and would throw themselves at me left and right. That's what I used to think, and I bet a lot of other writers start out thinking the same way. By the time we figure out what it's really like, it's too late to quit. Anyway, in my story, after the famous drunken writer tells the girl who he is, she very matter-of-factly responds, "I know," not the slightest bit impressed. He starts to chat her up, but she cuts him off and proceeds to tell him stuff about himself that there's no way she could possibly know, she's hip to stuff he's never told anyone or has even forgotten about. He knows there's something strange about her from the get-go, but he doesn't care; she's the first woman who ever really understood him. They start dating. Finally, he figures out who she really is - a manifestation of the goddess, his muse, come down to the mortal plane to save his soul - but he doesn't even care. He treats her like shit, starts loud, screaming public fights, makes her buy him drinks, sleeps with other women and abuses her in every way. Iwas trying to determine if she was really his muse or whether all the alcohol just convinced him he she was, which would amount to the same thing, really, when my left pectoral muscle began twitching like crazy, and me with my history of incredibly high cholesterol and IV-drug-abuse-induced heart murmur, I thought I was having a heart attack and was scared shitless, especially since one of my best friends had died a few days earlier of heart failure at the age of 35 because (so the doctors said) he drank too much milk, which caused a calcium build-up on a congenitally-bum valve. I grasped my breast and the twitching stopped immediately - I didn't know if this was good or bad - but my flesh felt like it was made out of plastic. I touched my hands, my face, and they were completely numb too. I checked my wrist for a pulse. Nothing. Then I realized I wasn't breathing. The ceiling rose up around me (I know that doesn't make any sense but that's what happened) and a colorful series of religious icons, stars and pyramids swam along its surface. Then the whole room spun on its axis so the ceiling became the wall facing me and this beautiful girl with blonde hair and blue eyes (sorry about that; I suppose that if my ancestors had come from Angola instead of the Ukraine and Poland she would have looked like Naomi Campbell) walked out of a doorway in the wall. I floated out of my body so that I stood alongside her, suspended above my corpse. She smiled at me and said, (she didn't really say anything, it was more like I heard it in my head a la EC comics), "So, do you want to stay with me or go back?" Chump that I am, I said, "I guess I'll go back for now," thinking that I'd better finish writing this story I was writing about her, as well as go to work in the morning, vacuum my rug, pick up my dry cleaning and other important stuff like that. I bolted upright in my bed wide awake - not that I was sleeping before, this was not a dream - my head clear as a bell. I took my pulse again; it was sluggish but swiftly returned to its normal rhythm and speed. I looked at the clock; an hour had passed. I thought I'd been lying there maybe five minutes. The next morning Isaw Norman and started to describe my experience in a very vague way (not that Iwas worried he'd think I was crazy - he already knew that - it was just too scary to even admit to myself that it had actually happened) and he looked at me funny and tells me that the exact same thing had happened to him three or four days earlier, but he thought it was just too damn weird (there's that word again) to tell anybody about. I'm still not sure what this all means; am I blessed with a muse? (that's Norman's theory). All I know is that I was thinking about writing about the goddess and the next thing you know I have no pulse. I'm interested in learning more about goddess worship, wiccans and all that stuff, but my friend Darius, who knows about these things, claims their whole church and all its rituals and trappings is just one big glorified excuse for mass orgies. Although that sounds like it's right up my spiritual alley, he's recommended voodoo and says there are some people in New Orleans I should get in touch with. Then he told me about the time he forgot to feed his loas and was woken up in the middle of the night by this giant, 3-foot long slug with two grinning, sharp-toothed heads crawling on the floor next to his bed howling "Chi! Chi! Chi!"; he watched the thing wriggle around for awhile, snuck over to his shrine and saw right away what the problem was. His loas like to eat eclairs and there was this eclair on the shrine all covered in green mold. He'd been lax about feeding his ancestors' ghosts properly and they got pissed off. That's all I need to worry about: "Hey, I'll be out of town for the weekend, can you stop by and feed my loas?" Shit, I have enough problems with houseplants. I figure the best thing to do is to keep telling stories - especially to sit down and finish this particular story, which I've tentatively titled "Jack and the Goddess" - pray to her that way, cast spells only of the purest nature, and make her glad she let me come back that time. One of these days she won't, or else I'll take her up on her offer, stay with her, and then I won't have to write anymore. I should also probably pick up my dry cleaning, vacuum my rug and go to work tomorrow, just to be on the safe side.