Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more
Alfred Tennyson, Tears, Idle Tears
Juliet, song of my heart, flame of my groin. My crime, my ghost. Jewl-’E-Et: three syllables like a hungry diamond thief. Juuuul-Eee-Et.
She was rough, plain rough at four am, kneeling three foot two with her head beneath my tum. She was Candy when we ripped off a bankroll. She was beotch when I beat on her for cheating. She was Clarice, Suzie, Petra, and Alex on the welfare cheques. But, face down on my pillow, she was always Juliet.
Was there one before her? Perhaps. I might not have picked her from the road side, meth mouthed and raving, had I not loved, one June, a little Chickatee on the Vineyard, off the coast of Mass. That was? Well as long before Juliet as Happy Days persisted after the Fonze leapt the great white, multiplied by the amount of times I’ve puked whilst accidentally flicking over to Gilmore Girls. Trust a TV critic to pen with high falutin’ grandiloquence.
Mr. Prosecutor, your honour, let me present my evidence; that which Abaddon, wise and dark, and inevitably envious, sought. Gaze upon the razor wire of memory, like the Japanese chick in Eli Roth’s acclaimed gorno ‘Hostel’ (yes it was a blow torch, but allow me a little poetic licence with my oratory).
2
I seeped out of my mother in 1960, on Rhode Island. Pop was a lazy pig, girlish and unable to stand up to my mothers psychological and occasionally physical abuse, a puggish swill of ethnicities: a New York Jew, the son of an Irish tinker and a Virginian Jewess, Vifil yor er iz gegangn oyf di fis zol er geyn af di hent un di iberike zol er zikh sharn oyf di hintn. Observe, I have taped to this journal a few dirty polariods. His shop was a jewellery store on 47th street, later put out of business by Hasidic members of the Diamond Dealers Club, and institution his mixed heritage kept him out of for twenty years. My fathers family had always been entrepreneurial, their varied businesses a fragile history of American bankruptcy - from the 19th century kosher butcher whose experiments with roach meat poisoned half of Brooklyn, to the aeronautical company driven under by an uncles bizarre obsession with building the first submersible Zeppelin. Legend has it the family had been cursed by midgets in the old country, for our habit of capturing the little peoples diminutive steeds, for our use in over-literal radish recipes. My father met my mother, then a Spanish fishwife, gutting haddock at a market in Hell’s kitchen. They married, but too quick she died, when her ex-husband, a cliché I can’t be bothered to make up, reeked a revenge on her cheating heart with a broken tequila bottle. To this day I retain a taste for the yellow stuff. Little of my mother remains in the scraped and blackened cavity a childhood glue addiction has left where my memory should be. Ah to dally under the bridge of youth, with a flick knife and an horizontal immature erection; with a copy of Sports Illustrated, not the swimsuit issue, the magazine itself was erotic enough, and a splash of channel number five on a kerchief, sparking visions of divinity itself.
My aunt Alona had been a professional wrestler in Czechoslovakia. A woman with a proud moustache and fearsome pug, who’d once defeated Henry Kissinger in a street brawl; she watched us children, as a vegetarian may watch a veal farm. Much later, when I attended father at his bedside, he confessed she’d taken advantage of him when she first arrived in America, pining him to the ground and manipulating his mouth like a car vacuum. He told me the taste had never left him. I, of course, secretly loved her, despite–or perhaps because–of her tremendous masculine athleticism. Ah, to think, she could have had me, taken from me willingly, what had been most reluctantly won from my pater. Alona possessed the Amazonian physique and pineapple head of an R.Crumb illustration. She hefted oversize truck tires for her calisthenics. She believed that chewing asbestos would grant her eternal life, and was wrong. Her husband, a small man with a face like chewed bubble gum and eyes like suitcases, persisted in attempting to escape. Finally, he was to die in the attempt, frozen to the undercarriage of a transatlantic jet, like some primordial asylum seeker.
My childhood, dear reader, was a time of boundless opportunity and sweet experience. TV dinners, Mr Rodgers, Mr Ed, endless walks without pants on the streets of the lower East side. Holidays in Marthas Vineyard, where our little family would decamp to South Beach, in a tent; and father would teach me to pee on the discarded garments of the Kennedy children as they swam out to glorious yachts in the golden evening light. Whether it be visiting magnates or local carrion, I was despised by all, and referred to by hideous anti-semitic / Irish compound insults like Paddy Goldfinger, which confused and stunted me in countless ways, mostly sexual. My father usually ignored me, obsessed as he was with finding a cure for the ingrowing toenail, a puzzle which had fascinated him since childhood. To secure his love I collected discarded clippings, sometimes reluctantly removed from their possessors, sweet slivers of nail, which my father would taste and sometimes add to a jar outside our tent, an object that he referred to as ‘his research.’ Women detested his petulant advances, and many on the island carried sticks, fearing his approach. I loathed him.
I learnt to read and write from graffiti, regularly updated in spray paint on my fathers store front. This left me oddly narcissistic, and with an unusual fondness for calligraphy. I had few friends, none human, but a rich and vivid life of the mind. My sexual experiences were stolen moments, sweet and brief preludes to the escape of whatever beast I had mounted: my education in this regard was based upon the vile rumors of the street, and an illustrated biography of the Christine Jorgensen, gifted from my aunt on the occasion of my third birthday. My phylum quivered at the presentation of all such stimuli, and many of the illustrations in the book became irrevocably worn. Finally, shaking and hollow eyed, under instructions from my aunt, who prompted him with powerful shoulder squeezes, my father related to me the fundamentals of procreation, leaving me curiously ill prepared for a later partner, a far from gentle convict known as Gnash Mouth, who became enchanted by my loquaciousness in juvie hall.
3
The Stray too, was of confused ethnicity: one part Puerto Rican maid, the other I believe, one of the lithe Kennedy boys, who’d caught her mother in a bear trap he’d established in a dusty basement. Oh how her features blur with the infinity of the departed years! There are a couple of methods by which one can recall appearance - the dim futility of sense memory, which brings forth the fine, down pillowed softness of her nest of facial moles, or the glittering cruelty of her Latin eye (one only remained, after a struggle with a flock of carnivorous pelicans) - or the bright photo realistic recall of a large tattoo, like the one imprinted upside down on my stomach, of Juliet, which though distended with age and the passing of beers, may still be wiggled to erotic dance.
I shall restrict my description of The Stray to the words ‘trash’ and ‘canny’. Her mother having discharged her to perish upon the shores of South Beach, she grew up resourceful, subsisting primarily on crabs and washed up running shoes. Our initial encounter, all too momentary, occurred when she attempted the robbery of our tent. Beaten back by my aunts vigorous pummelling, she later recruited me, through the medium of ankle biting and kidney punches, and something else, of which I’ll write of later; to reconnoitre for additional attacks. Oh! When Alona discovered my part in the plot to plunder our picnic, she purpled. The remainder of that Summer, my growing lust for The Stray would be constrained by a chain which affixed me to a corner of our tent, like an untrusted pet. She, mindful of my aunts fist hams and my fathers ancient blunderbuss, would not approach. Over a gap of dunes we exchanged our secret imbrications. We shared an outcast sensibility, peculiar to our common isolation, our mean little minds both infinitely bitter and distrustful. I told her of my ambition to criticise things professionally, and she pelted me with stones. She yelled of her desire to make millions from the juicy deliciousness of her organs - and I informed her that an economically viable black market in body bits would not emerge till at least the mid eighties.
Suddenly, we were ferociously, mindlessly, tortuously connected. Our perpetual distance became an infinite torment, the unassailable separation of mere tens of feet seeming as oceans. So near and yet so far, unable to figuratively (or literally, for we were often hungry) consume one another, we substituted grotesque little strip teases for physical entanglement; causing the gulls to dive bomb us in outraged hordes. Among the precious collectable I lost when that arsehole Carson Daly fire-bombed my condominium - after I’d likened him, in a review of Spring Break ‘04, to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s piteous elucidation of Mahler’s third - was a jar containing, in the sweet drunk of formaldehyde, a finger plucked from my beloved by one ferocious bird - old black beak - whom I slew on the wing with a tent peg as she screamed amongst the sand dunes.
That finger, a purpled bony thing, with a fearsome ragged nail, I would occasionally draw forth from it’s juices for many years, and string on a chain about my neck for a good luck charm on dates. A fond remembrance of my first love. Two month after I returned to Manhattan, word reached me that she had choked on a jar of nail clippings and been torn apart by land sharks.
4
I rip open these memories like Rosanna Arquette’s leg scar in Cronenberg’s atrocious Crash; and they pump a hideous crud of puss and semen out upon the metaphorical linoleum of my decency. Was this it, this bleak summation of unfulfilled passion, on the sun bleached island of my childhood summer? The moment when an itchy pimple of misogyny, grew to a canker of murderous perversity? Or was I always broken, born wrong as my father told me, not wrong as in bad, but wrong as in badly, out of the wrong cavity? When I attempt to probe the juicy orifice of my desires I am beset by the vagina denta of self delusion. I submit to an editorialized vision of my history, which convinces me that I was strengthened and made real by such experiences, like a futile clump of mud and piss, baked into a David by the oven of disdain and humiliation. Of one thing I am certain, that somehow in her one eyed; three toothed, nine fingered way, The Stray begat Juliet.
I am certain also that the suddenness of her consumption, built of my loneliness a palace, with a tower from which I spit upon the women of my youth - so much less vivid and essential than that little beach bum. The fiery mental of our love nothing is of its nature incomparable to the skin rubs and tongue pokes of common bod jiggles. Years after her death I heard her shrill croaks echo across the beaches of my mind. Before we met we received the same beatings, we compared the scars, found oddly matching broken parts. One August in 1965, a bad plum had given me such severe stomach flu that an apothecary had had to secure my posterior against prolapse by means of an elaborate plug. That same month, on a far away shore, she’d eaten a septic pigeon, and been forced to gum her arse with oyster shells, lest she be drained.
I have kept for the end of this recollection, the tale of my one successful coupling with The Stray. Upon our second meeting, as she attempted to convince me to assist her raid upon my family, mainly by knuckling the boiled onions of my pupils, it dawned on her to try a softer method. There, in a hollow of sand, under a knot of scrub, out of sight of my aunt or the be-clubbed patrols of local Kennedys, I trembled and twittered as she tongued the marbles of my tonsils. A tuft of nettle, a plant to which I am allergic, stung the back of my neck hideously as she dragged me down amongst the burrowing things. Her single wild eye crossed oddly as she freed me from the captivity of ensnaring trouser. Her hair a dreaded rats nest of leaves and sticks, caught my fingers tight as her head dipped betwixt my bleached and sweating thighs. Far away, the susurrous ocean matched the rise and crest of my tumescence, as a mountain range of teeth and scaled tongue did their work upon the gear stick of my love truck.
The heady scent of her unwashed body, I remember. The hook of her nails into the wells of my knee sockets. As my cup prepared to overflow in that vigorous swell of first passion, anaphylactic shock from the nettle stings set in, and I lost my hard, and set to flapping like a frightened skipping rope. Shocked, she hooked my love under the razors of her cooked teeth, and ripped back hurriedly. The island’s doctor, fortunately a microsurgeon, was able to remove the toxins with a pump, and half successfully to reattach my member (though it never grew an inch after that day). But the stink and sting, and the ache remained with me, and that little beast with her odd pocks and burning saliva, haunted me - until finally, thirty two years later, I found her again in the blood caked mouth of another.
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