America Essay Pt VI - A Slap Of Reality

I met Jodi the next morning at a busy outdoor mall area. She was conservatively dressed because we were attending a Mormon church-service that would include a sermon on 9/11.

Inside the large temple we took seats in the very back. Although the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh, and I was more susceptible to sentimentality than at any other time of my life, the sermon was an absolute bore. The preacher droned on with a voice drained of any sign of passion. Soon I was wishing for just a little speaking-in-tongues, or maybe some snake handling to liven things up. But there wasn’t even a soulful gospel choir to raise the spirit.

At the end we drank a thimbleful of water in a ritual so devoid of visceral meaning that I might as well have been drinking tap water from the men’s room sink. I guess this is the kind of squeaky-clean religion that we can blame for unleashing Donnie & Marie on the world. Perhaps this what happens to the heirs of white Europeans when alcohol content is reduced to a 3.2 per cent and you need a photo ID to purchase soda with caffeine in it. Take away our stimulants and sedatives and we become as vibrant as Wonder Bread.

That evening we went to Christopher’s apartment. I must say, considering that in theory, I was his rival for Jodi’s attention, both he and Jeff were as hospitable as could be. Christopher’s bachelor pad was decked out with Halloween decoration spider webs, medieval weaponry, and assorted sci-fi toys.

By way of entertainment Christopher treated us to a show and tell of his BDSM toy box. As he demonstrated each device he often made spanking motions in the air, and seemed to be imagining using them on Jodi. At one point he took a few playful swats at her, which was greeted with a mild reprimand.

At night’s end he graciously offered to let me stay at his place, but I felt more at home in my usual bed in the back of the Blazer.

I awoke with the morning light, hungry and in need of a men’s room. I had slept along the street of a residential neighborhood lined with pretty white houses. I decided to take a walk and explore Salt Lake City. The city seemed to be set upon the slope of a mountain ridge. As I walked toward the heart of the city I traveled downhill, which provided a panoramic view of the place.

The city was sparkling clean. Not a shrub was out of place. No garbage, no littered streets. Everything was healthy. Everything was good. The city didn’t even appear to be pock-marked with the porn shops, strip clubs, or fetish shops like good ole’ Gotham was. Only private clubs serve alcohol, and even those looked respectfully clean.

The place was also oddly devoid of blacks, Latinos, or any of those other pesky minorities. But I must confess that being around nothing but white people always gives me a bit of the creeps.

Despite the squeaky clean appearance something seemed askew. Nature is made of light and darkness. If you upset that balance the results can be ugly. Repress one side of the balance and it can transform into something evil.

As I walked past picture-perfect homes, immaculately groomed lawns, and sterile looking business fronts, I had the odd feeling that the sidewalks were about to break open and all the pent-up darkness would burst out into the open air.

I have noticed that Puritanism often gives birth to alcoholism, drug addictions, unsafe sexual practices, and criminal behavior of all sorts. There is a Hindu saying that goes, “each extreme creates its opposite.” Nature demands balance. When puritans tell people that they are evil for having natural human instincts, people will begin to believe it, and then play it all out with self-destructive behavior.
The hometown of my youth has been scourged by this dynamic.

Carl Jung had a theory that the visions in the book of Revelations were brought-on by a psychic eruption caused by living in a community of Christians, who in the process of trying to live up to the high ideals of love and goodness that Christ offered, had created a repressed psychic imbalance. The repressed impulses finally broke through with a hallucinogenic vision of death and destruction.

I believe a similar principle might be at work across America. America is a country founded by puritans and criminals. The Puritans were trying to escape religious persecution, the criminals were trying escape prison. This dynamic of extremes still polarizes our culture. In recent years America has been gripped by a wave of religious fundamentalism. What few are aware of is that during that same time there has been a parallel explosion of sexual exploration in urban America. Communities of people interested in alternative lifestyles seem to be crawling out of the woodwork in every city across the country.

Walking the streets of Salt Lake City one could feel that things were out of balance. The questions I kept asking myself was ‘How does all the repressed energy reveal itself?”

Down in the shopping district I went inside a mall where there was a food court with tables and chairs. There were a few large-screen TVs sitting around the court and all were tuned to CNN. I had not seen a newscast in a few days so I took a seat close to one of the screens.

It seemed the horrible images of the towers collapsing were repeated endlessly. For the first time I saw the images of the dust cloud that rolled through the streets when the buildings fell. I kept wondering what I would have done if I had been there.

I always arrived to work early so I definitely would have been in the office. Maybe I would have cowered under my desk? Or perhaps I would have just stayed with my co-workers and followed the herd? On the other hand maybe I would have run to the towers to see if I could be of any help? If so, I might be dead right now. The images on the screen made that much clear.

Although days had passed since 9/11, my mind was still enveloped in a haze. Each moment in the day was weighed down by an undercurrent of mourning, regardless of how light things might appear on the surface.

That afternoon Jodi, Jeff, Christopher and I went to a German festival at a park high in the mountains. We ate sausage and sauerkraut while a polka band played. The musicians were decked out in Robin Hood hats and green shorts held up by suspenders.

The four of us were a strange crew. Given the messy details of the tangled social web, one might have expected it to be far less friendly than it actually was. Perhaps it is a tribute to Mormon goodwill that I was treated, or perhaps tolerated, with such hospitality.

In the center of it all was Jodi, the apple of everyone’s eye, and the reason we were all here together, cheerily eating sausage and bouncing our heads to lively polka rhythms. Then there was Christopher, who seemed to have devoted his life to Jodi, body and soul. And there was Jeff, the long suffering, or maybe not suffering at all, husband of a marriage of convenience. I could never quite make out what his take on it all was. And I, of course, was just here for the sausage and polkas.

Jodi and I left the boys behind and rode to the mountaintop on a sky car suspended on cables. Unfortunately I have an irrational fear of heights. I can control it intellectually, but my body still reacts. Even when I watch TV, high camera angles overlooking drop offs make my stomach turn. As we soared through the air, even though I tried to play it cool, my body tensed up. Jodi put her hand on my arm and whispered, “It’s OK,” in a soothing tone of voice.

At the top of the mountain the air was cold. I stood behind Jodi and put my arms around her as we looked out over the mountains and valleys. The air was crisp and clear. Neither of us were dressed for the cold, making it even more pleasurable to feel the warmth of her body against me. The thin air of the high altitude made my mind go woozy and the beauty of the majestic landscape as I held her made my heart go soft.

I was well past the halfway mark on my journey to the far ocean. Someday I would return to a home that was wounded and mourning, but that was still far in the future. Standing there with her in my arms was a moment onto itself. It was one of those rare moments when you awaken to life as you live it, and realize no events elsewhere in the world, nothing in the future or the past, could take away this moment.

On the way back to town Jodi was driving and I sat in the passenger seat. Christopher and Jeff sat in the back. The highway wound down the mountain, snaking through sharp turns and running along steep cliffs. Jodi drove like a wildcat, pushing the speed limits and following close behind slower drivers.

“Don’t follow so close,” Jeff growled from the back seat.

She pulled back for a while, then began to push it again. It had been a few years since I had rode with another driver and the whole thing had me sitting tensely in my seat.

I always thought it said something about a person’s personality when they drive aggressively, and I was surprised to find that she did so. Although it certainly wasn’t the first time that I met a seemingly demur young lady who pushes everything to the limit when behind the wheel. Between bracing myself on each turn, I tried not to let on how on edge I was.

Having survived our ride down the mountain, we pulled over to get gas. Christopher got out to pump the gas and Jodi went inside to pay. When she came back out she was carrying a small white bag.

“He gave me doughnuts,” she said with thinly disguised satisfaction.

“What?” Jeff asked.

“That guy, I went up to pay for the gas and he gave me doughnuts.”

“Here we go,” Christopher said, shaking his head with a weary laugh. “Jodi lives in a free McNugget world. Everywhere we go people give her free stuff.”

“The guy at McDonalds always gives me a couple extra nuggets,” She explained as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.

Later that evening Jodi, Christopher and I went to an apartment owned by her mother. He mother was away for a few days and offered to let me stay there while she was gone. It was a large apartment decorated with taste appropriate to an elderly Mormon lady. It was immaculately clean and even had a silver Christmas tree in the living room that apparently stood all year long.

Jodi and I sat on the couch and Christopher rested on a lounge on the opposite side of the room. We chatted and joked lazily. The evening had an air of boredom that I rarely experience in New York where there is always some frenetic activity filling one’s time.

Jodi got out a book a family photos and took me on a tour of her past. They looked like an average American family in the 1970’s. She had two sisters and one brother. Her father owned or managed a restaurant, I believe.

“They treated us like little princesses,” she said warmly.

The color in the photos had faded into hazy sepia tones, giving them a slightly haunting appearance. The males wore polyester and shiny silk shirts, the little girls wore Sunday school dresses. As I paged through her past I searched for answers to the mystery of this woman who was both extraordinary and odd.

Although the photos presented the appearance of a happy middle class family, it seemed something must have gone of course. Her father was now out of the picture and estranged from his wife and children. Her brother was a junkie who was hiding out from the law. Her sisters seemed to have strings of failed marriages, and one had ruined Jodi’s credit rating by running up piles of dept in her name, and without her knowledge or permission.

They were a good Mormon family. How could things have turned out as they did? I thought back to the dark undercurrent I felt when walking those pristine streets of Salt Lake, wondering how the repressed energies reveal themselves.

There was a soft warm feeling in the room. Jodi sat beside me, her hand resting gently on my arm as she explained the stories behind each photo. When someone opens up and shares their past with you it is always a moment of vulnerability.

I pulled back a few inches to look at her. She was like a picture I couldn’t quite get into focus. A jigsaw puzzle whose center pieces had been carefully hidden beneath the cushions of the couch. She was intelligent, but acted with naiveté. She was good, kind, pure of heart, but chaos and confusion swirled around her. She was chaste with husband and suitors, yet drawn to salaciousness.

I tried to make sense of the bizarre stories that trickled out from time to time. There was the boy who attempted suicide after she broke up with him. When she went to visit him afterwards, his mother chased her out of the house.

I seemed every man she came in contact with became obsessive, husbands abandoned wives, gentlemen became madmen in her presence. One suitor so completely lost control of his senses that during a quiet conversation he unexpectedly jumped her, penetrated her, and came the instant he touched her skin, and all in about ten seconds time.

Saudi princes offered her the lavish life of a millionaire’s concubine. Suitors showered her with gifts with no expectation of finding her favor. Even women were not immune to her enchantments. One frustrated girl grabbed a knife and cut a gash into Jodi’s forearm in order to “give her something to remember her by.” A few days later the poor girl attempted suicide. Although I never met the woman, somehow I ended up being her suicide counselor over the Yahoo instant messenger.

In casual conversation these stories would slip out. Even in Utah she managed to catch the eye of celebrities. As a teen, a member of the heavy metal band The Scorpions became her frustrated suitor. Artists wanted to draw her. Photographers wanted her as a model. Everyone wanted to possess her. All would fail.

You never knew what was coming next. At any moment she might be torturing herself while studying the disciplines of the geisha. On one visit her skin was slightly burned. It turned out she had taken part in a religious ritual where her skin was coated with a flammable substance and she was lit aflame.

She was kaleidoscopic. A shape-shifter who performed the dance of Kali on the sterile streets of Middle America. She was a shattered house of mirrors that sparkled in the void, hypnotizing all who beheld the spectacle, while concealing a non-existent point of ultimate weight and gravity.

As we paged through the photo album and I pondered the mystery of her, my mind wandered back to her second trip to New York City.

On this trip it was preplanned that she would stay with Heather. Among the fun times on this visit was a disastrous night at Webster Hall, a four-story dance club in the East Village. Although I’m not a big fan of the club scene, I started out the evening with a positive attitude.

As we entered the club I was feeling a bit proud to have two lovely women at my side. We got some overpriced drinks and headed for a side room on the fourth floor. It was around midnight, which is early in the evening for a New York City club, so the place was pretty empty. The room was dark except for a few black lights and some lamps with red shades. The club music echoed in from the main hall that was right outside the door.

The girls were dancing and flirting with each other and I was taking it all in when four club boys came over to our area and made a show of being loud and obnoxious. Immediately I began to feel aggressive. I’m not a tough guy, but when I am angry I become fearless to the point of stupidity. I suppose it’s that nasty mix of Irish, Polish, and Apache blood handed down from my father and which made him such a wild man when in one of his endless barroom brawls.

I just wanted to have a nice evening with my lovely companions without any trouble, so we moved out onto the balcony of the Grand Ballroom. The three of us stood at the balcony’s edge looking down onto the dance-floor. From that lofty vantage point it looked like some kind of hedonistic pagan festival as hundreds of scantily clad bodies twisted and twirled, writhed and rocked underneath the flashing lights. Puffs of fog filled the room with a multicolored haze. At the end of the gigantic ballroom two large pedestals were arranged symmetrically on either side of a giant video screen. On each pedestal a G-string attired goddess did the bump and grind.

I became so taken in with the spectacle that when I turned around I hadn’t noticed that Jodi had left my side. Through the shadows I could see that she was talking to man in the corner. As long as I could keep an eye on her I wasn’t too concerned.

In a place like Webster Hall, if you get separated from someone you might never see them again. In a scene like this, nice young ladies have been known to disappear in a flash, only to turn up years later as crack whores spotted on Cops or as junkie sidekicks on America’s Most Wanted.

In public Jodi could be a challenge. She had an innocence about her that made me feel like I had to protect her. (I once put her on the wrong subway train that left her lost in a bad neighborhood, and about went out of my mind till I found her.)

On the other hand, that innocent demeanor seems to bring out the lecher in men. She would naively insist that the world was simply full of very friendly people. (All of who just happened to have erections, I might add.) It was a deadly dynamic to get tangled up in.

But this wasn’t Salt Lake City, and it sure as hell wasn’t Kansas. In Webster Hall men are aggressive, and they will push the boundaries until a woman stops them forcefully. Some women know how to limit such behavior without much effort. Jodi didn’t seem to possess those skills.

I went to the bar to get a drink and when I returned she was nowhere to be found. Heather and I hung out for a bit, assuming she would return. Once some time passed I decided I better go look for her.

Webster Hall is a huge place with multiple dance-floors and endless side rooms and hallways. Trying to find someone in this maze was almost impossible. As I wandered from room to room, trying to see through the darkness and colored lights, I became increasingly annoyed to be spending the evening this way. After lapping the place a couple times I returned to the balcony to find that Heather had gotten sick of waiting and went off on her own.

The place was beginning to get crowded. I stood watching the people all around me. This was definitely not my scene. Club culture always seemed shallow to me. Perhaps the dull look in everyone’s eyes came from too much time spent listening to the soulless music that blasted through the place. With inhuman precision, a giant electronic bass drum thumped flat on every quarter note. It was the same mind-numbing beat in every song, and so oversimplified that even the stiffest white folks could find it. None of those confusing syncopated rhythms found in funk music, which require you to actually feel the groove before you can move your body to the music.

To look at the men it seemed that John Travolta’s turn as king of the guidos in Saturday Night Fever still echoed through their fashion sense. The men were all about easy pussy and the women were all about men with money. It was the human mating ritual distilled to its basest elements. The men were trying to get it for free and then flee the scene, the women were hoping the product was so good that it would seal the deal on along-term partnership.

As I stood alone in the midst of the growing crowd I wondered how I allowed myself to get stuck in this place. With my temperature starting to rise I decided to take another tour of the place looking for the girls. Heather had been through this scene and knew how to take care of herself, but I still wanted to find her since the plan was to spend an evening with friends. As I strode through dark hallways, up and down endless flights of stairs, past crowded bars, and weaved in and out of dancing couples, I became increasingly angry to be wasting my time with such nonsense.

In one room a man walked through the crowd perched on ten-foot high stilts. Couples made out on couches, and go-go dancers shimmied on every bar. On an average night this place made Fellini’s Satyricon look like an Avon party.

Finally I found Jodi in the basement rap room with a large black guy whose body was pressed tight against her from behind as they danced. The rap room was a small room with red walls that was always packed tight with wall-to-wall people. I’d been in that room many times and it was always thick with sex and violence. The men were there to fight or fuck. The line between a club dance and a lap dance did not exist there.

I lead Jodi out of the room to a lobby outside the women’s bathroom.

“I’m not one of your boys, treat me with some respect,” I yelled angrily.

As I grabbed Jodi’s arm to lead her out of the basement, she responded with a hearty slap across the face. And it wasn’t just a little slap. She delivered a full force whack that left me stupefied. Stars swirled around my head, and people stood staring at the spectacle with bemused looks on their faces.

“You don’t even know me!” she replied, her eyes filling with tears.

I have to confess that the shock of the slap pacified me a bit. Somehow we made our way up the stairs just as Heather was passing by. I lead them out the back door into the fresh air. The three of us stood leaning against the velvet ropes while I tried to get my wits about me. After some conciliatory conversation we decided to go back in and try to have a good time.

Jodi smooth-talked the bouncer into letting us slip in the back door. This time we chose a smaller disco room and settled into a soft couch in a quiet corner. As I nursed my vodka the girls decided they wanted to dance. Jodi ask if I would hold her purse while she danced.

Once you find yourself holding a woman’s purse, somehow you immediately feel like a eunuch. So here I was sitting alone on the couch as the girl’s danced to some long-forgotten 70’s disco hit. Usually I am not a jealous guy, and I am definitely not a violent person, just the opposite. Unfortunately this night seemed to bring out the worst in me.

Many times during my youth I watched in horror as dear old Dad exploded into a violent rage over some slight from a drunken lout in one of the beer joints he frequented. Barely over five foot in height, he was a barroom-brawler who could go from calm to ballistic at the drop of a hat. Because of this, it has been a lifelong project to control such impulses within myself.

In my younger days I had a tendency to let people walk all over me without a word of complaint. As I became older and supposedly wiser, I have been careful not to allow myself to be in situations where I felt disrespected or became entangled in people’s dramas. Despite this I seemed to be regressing into behavior I thought I’d outgrown long ago.

On the disco floor a large muscular black man began to dance with the girls. He focused on Jodi as the dancing became increasingly dirty. What was pissing me off was that he was completely ignoring Heather. It seemed to me that the etiquette of dirty dancing should prescribe that it is rude to ignore one woman when invading a pair of dancers.

In her high school days Heather was the ugly duckling who never had a date. Now that she had bloomed and those days were long gone, she always showed complete confidence. Still I felt protective of her feelings and it seemed insulting that she should be so obviously ignored.

As the dancing steadily became more erotic between Jodi and this African Adonis, my blood began to boil. Completely losing my composure, I walked over to him and although he stood a good six inches taller than me, I grabbed him by the back of his neck and pulled his ear down to my mouth.

“Dance with her, don’t fuck her,” I shouted, “and give the other one some attention!”

I must say he took it all with a mild temperament. I strode back to mind Jodi’s purse while things cooled off with the dancers.
I felt like a fool. An image came to my mind of a nature documentary I once watched where an alpha male mountain goat was running around in a frenzy trying to protect his harem of nannies when another goat wandered into his territory.

Back in Salt Lake City Jodi turned the page in the photo album and laid her head on my shoulder. On the page I looked at the photo of a smiling little girl. With my index finger I traced the line of her face through the thin sheet of plastic that covered the photos. Wondering who this person truly is, her words after she slapped my face in the basement of Webster Hall, echoed in the recesses of my mind, “You don’t even know me.”

In my youth I had the arrogance to imagine I knew a lot about women. I theorized that being an artist opened me up to my own feminine side and allowed me to have more insight into their souls. Plus I had two older sisters, and growing up, I was always surrounded by female friends, making the ways of women familiar to my mind.

But the older I get the more I realize I know nothing of women. And perhaps it is this unfathomable mystery that enchants me so.

The Goddess Kali is the creator and destroyer, she is nature itself, she is the dark moist earth from which all of creation grows. Further she is the wheel of life around which man’s ceaseless activity swirls. Need we mention that man, born from the womb, spends his life trying to conquer that from which he came?

There was a time when I believed there was one woman and life without that one woman seemed unimaginable to me. I lost my self within her. I died and was reborn mired in her chaos. The flavor of her womb was still on my tongue as I shed the tears of separation.

It was she who asked me to reveal my wounds. She opened those wounds with the intent to apply a soothing ointment, but upon seeing how deep they went, drew her own dagger, concluding it was better to just complete the job. And I testify that she succeeded where all others had failed.

But as I look back over life, what I see is that people come and people go. The knowledge of love’s impermanence helps me to savor every moment, every smile, every act of kindness or beauty, every sweat soaked kiss or impassioned moan. The acceptance of that impermanence allows me to savor every drop of life’s essence and yet approach it with a sense of detachment. Possession is a fragile illusion, and people desire that which they cannot possess.

But also I cannot forget that through women I have traveled to foreign lands, eaten exotic foods, lived among strange cultures, and yet never left the shores of America. Through women I have danced to music in foreign tongues, bowed my head to strange gods, and breathed-in the odors of incense and spices unknown in the house of my humble beginnings. Every lover has been a teacher who taught new words, new ideas, and new customs with which to live day-to-day life.

In my secret mind I believe every one of them are with me at all times, that no matter what twisted paths their lives may take, we are wedded in spirit and will remain so until we settle into dust and our atoms mingle in the invisible electric dance that underlies the material world and upholds all of existence.