The Televisionary Oracle (39 page)

During my reverie, Jumbler had opened the food containers and filled our plates. The spread was dominated by what looked like a miniature
octopus, though I knew it was
pacaya
, or date palm. Shreds of
nopalitos
, tender cactus, lay in a soggy heap nearby, as well as two pieces of
olluco
, the “ancient Andean tuber.” The
pièce de résistance
was a flat strip of Pulparindo brand candy, a hot and salted tamarind pulp the size of an extra-wide piece of gum.

I hadn’t eaten much all day, but as I gazed upon the feast Jumbler had prepared I was filled with a perfectly equal mix of hunger and repulsion.

“As we begin our cruel feast, my dear,” Jumbler said, “I will ask you to feel empathy for every person in the world who is addicted to his or her signature form of suffering. This unique pain is comfortably familiar. It keeps them from being bored. It makes them feel special, and is in fact the lynchpin of their identity.”

“It would be cruel to take away their anguish,” I replied.

“It would be cruel to eat the cruelty they cling to,” he agreed.

“You might have to resort to sneaky tricks in order to divest them of the feeling they love to hate.”

“They might even despise you if they found out you were trying to steal their beloved suffering.”

“Healing would be a dangerous act, both for the healer and the healed.”

“You would have to be radical but discreet.”

“Ferocious but friendly.”

“Relentlessly tender and wildly disciplined.”

“A living whirlwind that devours the darkness.”

I picked up the yellowish white octopus, alias the date palm. It smelled like a cross between corn and lima beans. How the hell to eat it? Maybe twenty to twenty-five beaded, four-inch tentacles hung down from a short stalk. I gripped a few with my teeth and bit.

A chalky bitterness struck the roof of my mouth, followed by the taste of sour and rancid vinegar. With all my heart I wanted to spit it out but forced myself to press on. The texture of the tentacles was crunchy at first, but quickly turned into a crumbly mess of soggy granules. The acrid assault on all the tissues of my mouth intensified until out of self-defense I swallowed.

I immediately felt as if I were going to throw up. In an attempt to
staunch the aftertaste, I took a bite out of the Pulparindo candy. It obliterated the previous imprint with a burst of unbearable flavor that was simultaneously salty and sweet and spicy hot and sour and chewy. It hurt my mouth too, but blocked the emetic urge. I swallowed it.

My face was puckered, my tongue sore, and I felt exhilarated.

“Bless you, my dear,” Jumbler said as he took my hand. “You are indeed the tantric master I imagined.” His touch was tender. It had a woman’s suppleness. As he stroked my palm, I felt an impossible mix: sweet trust and a hot sexual rush.

“I
want to paint fat, pimply guys in muscle cars with as much panache as Leonardo da Vinci painted his Madonnas,” mused our friend
Romney in describing her aspirations as an artist. “I want to invoke the elegance of Rembrandt,” she continued, “as I create canvases depicting toxic landfills where pagan angels play catch with burning televisions as they scavenge for Pez candy dispensers.” This is the spirit we’d like you to emulate in the coming months and years, beauty and truth fans. Be eager to find and even create beauty everywhere you go, no matter how little you have to work with.

I
am not a rockstar. I have never been a rockstar. I will never be a rockstar.

Repeat a thousand times a day for the next thirty years. Get tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Tell everyone I know to greet me with the chant “You are not a rockstar. You have never been a rockstar. You will never be a rockstar.”

But now I return to the present. Release the weight of the past. Spiral back here to the dressing room bathroom at the Catalyst, and prepare to hit the stage for our big show.

In a few minutes I will stand under hot lights, amidst deafening sound, before nine hundred people. I will do this gladly. I will do this with devotion and gratitude, understanding that it is why I have come to Earth. I will not be a brooding, intellectual introvert but an animated, bright-faced extrovert brimming over with joy and exuberance. So help me Goddess. Amen.

I check my face in the mirror to ensure I’ve wiped away all signs of self-pity. Then I bound out of the bathroom, announcing “Time for the group hug.”

George and Amy and Squint and Daniel and Darby gather. We form a circle, like in my old Little League pre-game rituals, and drape our arms around each other.

“What’s the secret password?”

“WEW.”

“And what’s that mean?!” I bark.

“World Entertainment War!” the others chant.

“What’s that mean?” I press on.

“Weave Extravagant Wobbles!” they cry.

“What’s that mean?”

“Wild Epic Weddings!”

“And what’s our ally?”

“Witches’ Elegant Webs!”

“What’s our war cry?”

“Wish Evolution Well!”

“What’s our job?”

“Wash Every Window!”

“How do we get in?”

“Weird Entry Ways!”

As we perform our pep rally, we bend our heads down so that eventually the tops of all of them are touching. Meanwhile, our voices rise in volume until the final reply, when the force of the group sound flings our heads back and causes us to erupt in laughter. The rule is, everyone has to achieve an extended bellylaugh whether or not they’re genuinely amused. Tonight, though, no one has to strain to reach the hallowed goal of total hilarity. All of us are feeling some version of the painful deflation and happy release that I feel, the result of declaring our independence from CBS and Will Boehm Management and returning to our scraggly roots.

“OK,” I say, “let’s go strap me in.” All of us leave the dressing room. Amy and Darby head directly for the stage, while Daniel, Squint, George, Marijka, and I take the back way from the dressing room to the lighting booth, which is high above the back of the dance floor. Leaning against the wall outside the booth is an eight-foot black wooden crucifix: another exquisite piece of work by the multi-talented Marijka.

George informs our lighting director Manny and our video projectionist Gray that we’re about to launch the show. Gray heads backstage to flick the switches that’ll unleash the flood of images which will flow across the big-screen TV we’ve mounted behind the drums, as well as
the other videos that’ll appear on the five smaller on-stage TVs.

Marijka goes to the sound technician’s booth, where she informs him we’ll soon be ready, meaning that in a couple of minutes he’ll turn down the taped music that has been playing over the house speakers since the opening band finished a half hour ago. Marijka also grabs my cordless headset microphone and returns to wrap it around my head without interfering with my Pan horns.

Glancing at the stage, I see Gray has already done his job. The giant TV screen is ablaze, through the magic of computer animation, with a scene of Eleanor Roosevelt being crucified on a cross composed entirely of thousands of Barbie dolls that have been glued together into a gnarled mass. Hundreds of pink Cadillac convertibles are parked around the cross, as if at a drive-in movie. Inside each car are moving human skeletons with televisions for heads. Most are talking on cellular phones while they engage in a variety of sex acts.

Daniel, Squint, George, Marijka, and I lug our crucifix down the stairway to the anteroom at the back of the dance floor. There we part the crowd and set the cross horizontally down on the ground. Ceremoniously, I lie on top of it. George secures my wrists to the horizontal arms of the cross with expertly knotted rope.

A gang of onlookers gathers to admire our spectacle. Though I make it a point to remain almost totally in character, keeping a serious, trance-like expression, at the last moment I wink at a cute girljock wearing a yellow jogging bra and mini-skirt.

My four helpers lift me and the cross up to their shoulder level, then carry their load like a coffin across the dance floor towards the stage. The spotlight is on us as we travel.

The titter and laughter of the audience subsides as soon as I declaim through my microphone:

I unleash a giddy yowl, attempting to imitate the ecstatic exclamation I once heard a six-year-old girl named Allegra make as she leaped into a plastic swimming pool on a ninety-five-degree afternoon. The crowd is slow to join me, but eventually the shriek spreads. Finally, hundreds of different styles of scream coalesce in an apocalyptic caterwaul that raises goosebumps and makes me feel like I’m about to levitate through the sheer force of the room’s vibration.

My butterflies have given way to endorphins. I’m feeling beatifically electrified and preternaturally relaxed. All eyes and ears in the place, maybe nine hundred people, are turned towards me, and I’m so excitedly at peace with what I’m going to do that I feel no pressure at all. A Buddhist might say I’m aligned with my dharma. An athlete would recognize that I’m in the Zone. In this state I can do no wrong, and yet it’s the exact opposite of arrogant confidence. On the contrary, I’m empty. Humble. A big fat zero poised to do nothing more than what I was made to do. All the skills I’ve been programmed to develop since childhood—poetry, dance, song, jokes, making people love me—conspire now to weave themselves together into a single event.

Soon I’ll be in the heart of a fuming maelstrom. The martial surge of one hundred decibels of electronically amplified music will be scouring away the accumulated dross of my monkey mind’s infernal conversations like a month’s worth of zen meditation. I’ll be so happily given to the enormity of my assignment that I’ll almost forget to breathe, yet I won’t be able to afford that luxury because in the heat of the ritual, breath is the most crucial fuel.

Best of all, I’ll be executing the appallingly arduous yet fun task of summoning for public consumption the same libidinous blasts I unveil in the private act of making love. It will embarrass and invigorate me at the same time. The expectations and longings of my nine hundred companions will swarm in upon me like a forest fire in a hurricane, commanding, “Be the million-year-old snakegod!” And I will obey. For two hours and forty-five minutes my collaborators will feed me squeals and shouts from their jiggle centers, operating me like a magic puppet, rousing me to dance across the stage in gestures I’ve never felt myself make before and may never feel again.

In one way I’ll be the center of attention, and in another I’ll be in a perfect position to be the biggest voyeur of all. No one would ever
suspect that I’d have enough attention left over from my duties to spy on the people staring at me. But the forcefully expansive blessing of the revelry forces me to hold a hundred times more perceptions in my organism than usual.

I adore peering down from the stage, my entire body glazed from the exertion and the searing lights, and watching the uncensored faces of the crowd as they use the excuse of the spectacle to unshackle every repressed thought, every tortured question in their hearts. Bursts of telepathy spurt my way, as from a downed power line, and I love it. Right there in the midst of the pandemonium, a wide swath of raw data pouring into and out of me, I will sometimes home in on a specific broadcast radiating from a specific creature in the audience.