Morning Star, My Father, Mine

Every soul has its peculiar intelligence. Sometimes the brain, sometimes the body, sometimes both. Sometimes just the second toe of the left foot inching like a worm. The strong man in the freak show knows how to heft, brilliant placing his feet precisely there, knowing precisely where to breathe now and how deeply, knowing too his limit, when to stop lest his inadequate brain and leopard-skin thong get crushed beneath his body’s stupidity. Or the autistic child who speaks only through screams knows who knows what his silences mean and thus with them is silent. The fire that burns, the water that floods, the wind that bends, the girl that loves.

 •••••

The mother’s intelligence was her beautiful body walking, bending, twisting, reaching, waving, posing – living doll selling stuff, nuff said. The father’s too: Clark Gable once saw him stroll into a Hollywood restaurant and exclaimed,startled into truth, “Isn’t it a sin to be that damn good looking?”

If in fact a sin, then the father was the devil himself. Girls and women suspected him of being a movie star, stared trying to place the face with a name they didn’t know, couldn’t, never would. And he could’ve been in movies save for his dim-witted arrogance. Pissed off all the powersthatbe with his scratchy-wool blanket statements:

“Nobody in charge knows a damn thing about making movies.”

“A monkey could do a better job of acting/directing/writing.”

“Give me a million bucks and I’ll be in your little movie.”

“I wouldn’t give him/her the time of day if my life depended on it, and it doesn’t, so there you have it in a nutshell, how ‘bout them apples, sport.”

Said to agents, producers, directors who raised one eyebrow, paused to stare at the sinfully handsome man, thinking, What a goddamn waste of meat, sighed through the nose, said, “Thanks, we’ll call you.” Didn’t. And he didn’t get it so much he didn’t even give a shit.

 “What a bunch of dummies,” he’d laugh, stick a Lucky Strike between his amazing lips, flame a match against a manicured thumbnail, think about lunch, a drink, the satisfactory ass of the secretary who slipped him her phone number before he walk-strutted out the door. Peacock. Cock o’ the walk. Cocksure. Cock and bull and bull’s cock between his legs so there was no doubt ever, no way no shame, no vengeance, no how. His unwavering belief in himself.  In he.  In being.

 Simple.

 The devil himself he was on plenty occasions – incubus between the damp dreaming creaming thighs of pretty girls who wanted: the house, the car, the kids, the knight-in-shining husband bringing home the Wonderbread and homogenized milk to their homogenized neighborhood, and on those forever-spring years of the Fifties of having-getting-owning, waving to Mrs. Jones envying across the white picket fence, I’m a real woman, honey, see what I got, the swellest of the swell!  Yet nowhere in that postwar equation fine fucking and lots of it for fucking’s dirty-bad like the letters S-E-X pressed tight and rubbing up against each other – SEX – spelling what’s really just a way to get/have/keep the stuff, ain’t it? No matter if they wanted S-E-X they pretended to not, learned to blush and giggle at the mention, tease the cock, be the virgin liar, Holy Mary Mother of Girls-in-Denial, denied by their own mothers who taught them, The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach: unspoken: cholesterol and saturated fats: make him a meat-and-potatoes-hot-buttered rolls kinda guy who’ll die at 50 of a heart attack while you’re still young enough to feel free and good about widowhood and never by God-in-His-SEXless-Heaven ever have to spread your legs, avail your cunt, knock your skull on the headboard, inhale the sweat, suffer the wet, close your eyes and think of England.

 • • • • •

 But see:  The father knight-in-shining-skin loved to fuck and vowed he’d never marry a gal who didn’t want/do/like the same cause life was short, shorter, shortened, he already saw the curve up ahead and nothing beyond but nothing.

 • • • • • 

And sex’s another color altogether. Colors altogether, that’s creation. To create. To make. Make love. Marvelous. Marvel at these colors beyond your unextraordinary range. You can’t imagine how you can’t imagine these colors nameless except to me in my Language of Right Eye. Synesthetic seeing-sound. Shuhkkht, for example, color of rage. Ahyai, color of sorrow. Kkih! color of the moment the eye catches sight of the rarest bird, the last of its kind, hovering above a new-spring sprung flower. Just that moment. Before the words come to dissect it, splay it with genus and species, categorical classification, stick-on-label box-around-it flatsquishing of the mass that is life, not the idea of life. 

 • • • • •

And fucking’s another word altogether. The cock as knife, as sword, as spear, missile, bomb. Penetrating, stabbing, impaling, exploding, wounding, killing. Gonna fuck her till she can’t walk. Fuck her brains out. Fuck her to death. Fuck the hell out of her – hell evidently a place of infernal internal denial: O what hell he did to me I didn’t like it and liked less my body craving the memory of it: It: IT: S-E-X: my sin I know cause The Bible tells me so. 

Taste of destruction in the creational stew of his-and-her fluids, that’s fucking. Amazing. In its own fashion. Sometimes that pretty girl in the modest skirt and blouse just wanted to watch the world blow up. Feel it detonate right in the center of her wet creation.

But.

In the Victorian era, era of Icky Queen Vicki, era that never ended merely waned then ebbed via the verbal ejaculations of pinched-tweezer dicks of the inconoscenti fanatical fools hiding-shivering in church pews thinking, believing S-E-X’ll go away if they pray long enough, hard enough: Go away hardness between my legs my devil-desire like a leper’s suppurating sores waiting for St. Francis on Jesus’s road to Damascus to kiss me on my pus-pore lips, my piss-poor cock that wants what it wants when it wants, embrace me what repulses you, oh Lord – is it really the Twenty-First Century?

• • • • •

 O how the fashionable father fucked! Took from the givers, the eye-closers, the If this is what I have to do to get the house and car and good-looking kids and oh the television! and oh the color-coordinated appliances! then I will. Determined, those gals. Like the pioneer women rolling across the prairie. Big storms, they were, thundering across history to labor hard pumping out babies and well water, they did. Lifting, hauling, sweeping, hoeing, sewing, cooking, cleaning, feeling . . . something not quite right in their raging river of frontier life over too soon and where/when was it not hard: life, the husband’s cock: I’m tired, Lord, of being torn by him goin in and babies comin out, going and comin and goin so many of those babies dead before their time, before they may say, Momma!

Some young closeted queer (was the Fifties, after all, gay still a mainstream mood) advertising exec on vacation from New York spotted the father single on a beach in Malibu. Dressed barely, the father, touching his toes, jumping jacks, running dry into the surf, running out wet and shining and packed, thin baby blue trunks he’d had tailor-made clinging to his massive cock-and-balls. The ad exec saw what everybody saw: that everybody saw: men, women and children could not stop seeing, gawking, absorbing, savoring, committing to memory the fine way light fell on/around the handsome black-haired blue-eyed man just out of his teens, how he seemed lit from inside – sun going nova – while their ordinary spent-comet faces gazed fearless of being burned, rather aching for burn, burning to memory every devilish devil-may-care inch of him they would later and frequently dredge to clean their plate of so much banality it hurt, hurt to look at him, really, though they could not not, indulging themselves nevertheless, never to forget, the moment the father was there there there in all his glory and their seeing what it was to see beyond flat-imagination live myriad dimensions of possibility.

Do you remember that guy on the beach in Malibu way back in, what was it, 1951? who was so . . . oh! Well he took your breath away, that’s what. Remember? On that sunny beach in California? Wonder whatever happened to him?

Whatever: Became an underwear model. The too-handsome-for-words guy in the tightie-whities. Copywriters need not apply! Skin and bumps said it all, man. 

That day at the beach the ad exec summoned his courage and gave the father his card:  “Call me, I’ll make you rich.”

The father bit the card between his smiling teeth, shook the exec’s hand, held it longer than etiquette demanded – until the exec flushed red down to his nipples.

Rich, thought the father, nodding. Now that’s more like it!

• • • • •

Narcissus. Such an old improbable tale, you’d think it would’ve vanished in the mythological past where gods and goddesses toyed with humans as if humans were ants under a magnifying glass on a hot-sunny day. But no. Myths are forever. Earthbound gods and goddesses do toy with ordinary humans. Narcissus reborn every generation to gloomily gaze gaga into the water at his unembraceable reflection dissolving to ripples when kissed. Narcissus the manifestation of the universe’s amore de profundis that keeps the planet spinning, black holes devouring, gas clouds spitting out new stars to light new planets spinning toward a new genesis, new beauty to come to new love. And if not love, then what? And if not beauty, then why love?

 • • • • •

That amazing graced face grinning above tan pecs and overstuffed genitals stuffed in snuggies posed for some of the advertising industry’s first photos of a near-naked man, crotch intact, ballsy magazines printing full-page brazen blazing-color ads instead of simple illustrations of men neutered by an artist’s brush or pen keeping it clean, they thought, IT, cleanliness next to godliness, godliness next to emasculinity. “Tarzan of the Cosmopolitan Jungle,” wrote a gossip columnist who made the father famous, eventually, briefly (ha ha) in queer circles and later sewing circles where the only thing sewn were seeds of sexual desire, undomesticated housewives basting themselves in martinis and putting each other in stitches over catty remarks, nasty rumors, sexual confessions and lascivious declarations of lust for “Captain Kielbasa,” they called him, “Sergeant Salami,” they said, “Root Toot Tootie,” they giggled. They and a hundred others stole posters of him from every underwear section of every department store in L.A. until one Pentecostal mother caught her son jacking off to “The Jack of Jewels” and formed a coalition of sexually repressed mothers (metaphorical clitoridectomies complete) coalesced to ban images of the father everywhere and eternally lest their children all go wart-handed and blind.

So much for rich.

His career lasted three photo shoots for which he was paid fifty dollars each. The advertising industry caved to conservatives, tucking its tail – and cock – between its legs, reverting to watercolors and pencil drawings of button-nosed guys with pubis mons smooth and sexless as a flatworm.  And the Pentecostal snake handlers saw that it was good: The serpent had been squish-squash-quashed, Satan had surrendered once again to immaculate intercourse, and the father was out of a job.

• • • • •

Lucifer was not Satan was not the Devil. He was the bringer of light, Phosphor, the lump on the end of a matchstick, morning star, planet Venus, escort of each dawn. Stolen by Christians from the Romans, Lucifer came to [mis]represent the descending demise of the most shimmering angel of all, all asparkle, for beauty of course must be punished, damned to eternal hell: Do not shine too brightly or we shall douse you with our bitter piss and smother. The world full of dark-ugly so big it swallows light-pretty whole.

O my bringer of sunrise and life, my morning star, my father! 

Later years those sphincter-lips-they would say my real father was Lucifer, my name Lucy eponymous, that I was born of the loins of the most magnificent fallen angel fornicating with the daughters of men on his way down, just stopping by for a sex-snack, said they, so to speak, to sow his seed, wild oat hybrid me rockinrollin among the cultivated tame.

And sure I’d be the antichrist if I’d been born a boy: girls evidently incapable of attaining such eminent evil.

So then.

Debra DiBlasi can be contacted through her web site: www.debradiblasi.com

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto